Everything that I’ve ever read on the subject has defined archetypes for RPGs either in terms of the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character. Filling out a team roster is often a case of players selecting from a chinese menu – “let’s see, we need a fighter, a mage, a rogue, a cleric, and once those are filled, anyone else can take a something else,” or “okay, we’ve got a brooding loner, a perky teenager, a faded party girl, and a holier-than-though type with a shady past”.

There’s nothing wrong with either method of ensuring that a party in your campaign has both a spread of personalities and a comprehensive set of capabilities. In fact, I used the power-based character archetype structure to fill out the roster in my Superhero campaign, and that has worked out fairly well, especially since there weren’t enough characters to fill all the available archetype choices, so there was always something that the team was going to struggle with.

A little while ago, I thought of a different classification approach, based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but of how the characters fitted into the team. With a bit of thought, I came up with a list of 24 archetypes based on that concept (and there are undoubtedly more). A single character may fill just one of these roles within the party or may fill multiple roles, either willingly or reluctantly. In some teams, all members of the party will have one of these roles in common, although this is unusual; but everyone needs to have at least one role from this list that is unique to them alone.

These arechetypes are as much a function of the personality of the player as they are the abilities and personality of the character in conjunction and in comparison with the rest of the party.

Why is this perspective valuable? Because it permits the GM to tailor scenes in a game based on those roles – either showing off the role, or using the role to complicate the parties’ lives, or simply as a another avenue for making sure that everyone at the table has something to do in each adventure.

The list has grown so large, and I have so much to say about some of the entries, that this article has needed to be broken into multiple parts, which will be appearing at irregular intervals over the next few months, as there are other posts that I will want to make in between each portion of the series.

So, without further ado, let’s get started…

1. The Heart Of The Team:

This is the person who keeps the team going, who those characters who are polar opposites link to in order to cooperate (or simply cooexist). Without this character, or someone in this role, the team begins to flounder. This is not necessarily a mothering role, though often the mother in a TV show provides this function, such as “Marion Cunningham” in Happy Days. In Numbers, for example, it’s the father who fills this role; in the X-men comics, the role was shuffled around from Prof X to Marvel Girl to Cyclops, until settling down on the unlikeliest of shoulders – those of Wolverine. In The Avengers, this has usually been either Hawkeye or Captain America.

Plots which revolve around questions of committment, or of why the party do what they do, should focus on the Heart Of The Team. Plots which remove or neutralise this character focus on what they bring to the team, and should prominantly bring to the surface differences in opinions between the characters to highlight this character’s role as the peacemaker.

This archetype is all about the passion and determination and drive of the team, the character that inspires individual personalities to work together in common cause; it is the central unifying force of the party. Without them, the party should drift off in different directions, even working in support of causes or objectives that are ultimately at odds. Some characters, those with less drive in the makeup, should simply drift, lazily, while outside events pull them this way and that, and everything surrounding the party gets out of hand, until it seems overwhelming, and futile to oppose.

2. The Tactician

There’s always someone who leaps in ahead of the others with a plan, who stage-manages (however competantly or otherwise) the party when they are challenged. If this character is not run by the player with this role, strange things can happen within the team – the character who is supposed to be coming up with the plans can be percieved as not pulling their weight, for example, when there are others contributing no more, or even less, to the groups’ success.

There are a couple of strategies for managing this situation, which is one that every GM will encounter at some point, but they all have flaws and imperfections. One is to permit the player who is good at this sort of thing to speak for the character even though it isn’t theirs; if the two players have gotten together and come to an agreement in this respect, this strategy can be successful, but otherwise it can feel like a perpetual criticism of the player of the character in the tactician’s role.

A second option is for the GM to deliberately feed solutions to the player in question, possibly as a result of appropriate die rolls. While this preserves the simulation of reality and the dignity of the player in question, I hate this approach because it sacrifices too much of the interactivity of the game and leaves the GM open to accusations of plot trains.

Another tactic is for the GM to bias his handling of the results, putting additional impediments in the path of any plan not suggested by the tactician characters’ player, no matter how logical they may be, while smoothing the path of the plans offered by The Tactician character’s player, no matter how ridiculous or shortsighted they may be. This robs the overall campaign of verisimilitude in order to make the character’s supposed role in the team seem more believable – and, like all plans that rob peter to pay paul, will eventually come unstuck. It also leaves the GM open to charges of favoritism that are pretty well justified. To be completely honest, until recently, this would have been my best answer to the problem, but I’ve recently become disenchanted with it.

The best approach that I have been able to think of – and which I have yet to actually trial – is to implement a new type of game scene, inspired by the “Charlie-visions” in Numb3rs. In this game scene, the players are no longer playing their characters; instead, they are participating in a round-robbin style collaboration inside the head of the tactician. When the players, as a group, come up with a plan and agree on it, they document it, and we resume normal roleplay – with the outcome from this planning session emerging from the lips of the ‘tactician’ character.

The biggest advantage to this approach, the one that has sold me on it, is that there is no longer a need to take time out, or one-on-one time away from the gaming table, in order to brief the character and give his player the time needed to plan a strategy.

Scenarios revolving around this character are usually fish-out-of-water in nature, where the character is put into a situation that can’t be solved with tactical acumen, and this frequently plays to the strengths of a player who is not a tactician himself. The other form of scenario that revolves around this type of character are situations in which the obvious tactical solutions are blocked by moral or other considerations, which can be reflected in internal or even intra-party squabbling and debate.

If this character goes missing for whatever reason, the team are likely to make tactically poor decisions which may provide short-term success at the cost of greater difficulties in the long run, or which incur greater costs, either of a personal or financial nature. In short, their absence should create a mess that they will have to clean up when they return. The kidnapping or holding as hostage this character is an event that should be sure to complicate the lives of the entire party for some time to come, especially if the remainder of the party have to make some tricky decisions or beg favours from untrustworthy outsiders – metaphoric deals with the devil – in order to achieve the rescue.

3. The Moral Guardian

Another key function within the team is the person with the moral compass, who decides what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what is crossing some invisible line of morality. It can be said that so long as a party knows that what they have done is right, it doesn’t matter how the rest of the campaign world percieves their actions; and while that is not going to be universally true, it’s great territory for a campaign to explore.

Quite obviously, questions of morality will play to this character’s strengths, as will the far more subtle scenarios in which the party do what seems to be the right thing only to discover that the situation was not as clear-cut as it seemed. A character in this role will often conflict with the tactician over matters of expediency, which in turn gives other archetypes a situation to play off.

As with the tactician, this team member’s absence should expose the team to errors within this archetype’s province. If that situation was capable of leading to metaphoric deals with the devil, this situation gives a literal interpretation to that outcome. Once again, the true cost of these deals should not become aparrant for some time to come, and even when the debt is repayed, it should seem to be in some innocuous, even trivial, manner. It should be the first domino in a long chain, the butterfly flapping its wings in Peking that ultimately creates a blizzard over Cairo.

4. The Rock

The last of the archetypes that I’ll examine in today’s post is The Rock, the character that everyone can lean on for support, the character that can stand firm against any assault, the character that puts the backbone into the team. Frequently portrayed as “staunch” or “indomitable”, this arechetype can be far more interesting when united with some other personality profile. It might be a character who is so innocent and without guile that the stand against the most overwhelming opposition through naivity and faith; it might be a character who is so passionate for a cause or belief that they will make any sacrifice in its name; ir might be a character who is so hate-filled and obsessed that nothing but their cause matters. It can even be a character like a mafia Don who is so corrupt and despicable that they can withstand any opposition by using someone else as a meat shield – but who is forgiven for this because he always has the best interests of ‘the family’ foremost in his mind!

Losing this character archetype can be extremely disruptive to a party. Losing the Heart of the team may cost them their drive and commitment, their passion, if you will; losing The Rock destroys the team’s self confidence. Unless they find someone else around whom to rally, they will quickly and permanently go their different ways. Should the Heart and the Rock ever have a falling out, the same result will occur. At the same time, should anything ever threaten The Rock, this is the one person in whose defence the whole team will reunite and rally, regardless of past disagreements.

Sometimes, it can be the loss of The Rock that makes them the rallying point of the group; this was the premise of the personality dynamic in the third season of Blake’s 7, in which the character for which the series was named was lost; it was the untarnished and idealised reflection of the goals that the character represented that became the unifying force amongst the survivors, and goals that they sought to fulfill. Blake was percieved by them to be a martyr to the cause, and martyrs have always been rallying points for their followers. They are always idealised, and any feet of clay are lost or ignored in the rush to embrace that idealised image.

The important thing about Blake’s 7 as an example for RPGs is that the creators took the time to solidly embed the character in the viewer – two full seasons, in face – so that the viewer also became swept up in the martyrdom ferver. If the series had started with the first episode of season three, with the Blake character never being seen, the series would have failed to engage the passion of the audiance for the cause that kept viewers coming back, as the martyr would have been seen at arm’s length. This would have resulted in a paradygm shift for the whole series, leaving no balancing force for the focus on obsession that was one of its subtextual themes, and encouraging characters into far more one-dimensional patterns; it was the dichotomies of the drives and objectives of the originals that gave the writers such a broad palette for character interactions.

Still to come

Future installments of this series will study the following archetypes:

5. The Mother Hen
6. The Intellectual
7. The Faithful
8. The Air-head
9. The Wild Card / Rebel / Scoundrel
10. The Flashing Genius
11. The Strange Uncle
12. The Romantic
13. The Comedian
14. The Egotist
15. The Drama Queen
16. The Panicker
17. The Messy One
18. The Clean / Neat Freak
19. The Hot-Head
20. The Wannabe
21. The Father-Figure
22. The Greedy / Power-hungry
23. The Troublemaker
24. The Jealous One

While comment is welcome on the subject in general, especially the suggestion of any archetypes that I havn’t thought of yet, or in respect of the archetypes that I have focussed on in this part of the series, I would hope to avoid making future installments anticlimactic as a result of the premature discussion of any of these still-to-be-detailed archetypes. While I will happily read (and possibly incorporate into the article body) any comments you have on the list above, I may edit or even remove any comments aimed at the rest of the list. I promise, if I don’t publish your comment, I will have paid close attention to it, and will give credit where it’s due when the time comes!

Studying character roles in terms of the team dynamic is a whole new way of looking at the way characters interact, and offers a new tool for the creation of plots focussed on those interactions. I hope you’re all as excited by that as I am!

How to tell compelling stories about your campaign to non-gamers.

This month’s RPG carnival, held at Mad Brew Labs, covers the topic of growing the hobby.

Topics of new player recruitment and teaching come to mind. We might also consider the industry’s image, how game companies market their products, which companies get shelf space in book stores and what the media says about RPGs. We can also muse about generating more exposure through playing RPGs in school, gaming conventions and local comic and game stores.

However, these things are big new project opportunities that take time and commitment you probably do not have. I commend all the people who create and publish games, organize cons, start up RPG clubs and grow the hobby in those ways. Thanks very much, your hard work is appreciated!

But what about people like us who just try to eke out enough time to keep a regular campaign going? You already have a group of friends you game with, so you do not need to be recruiting and teaching new players all the time. You can game with your kids as well, but again that does not constitute an ongoing recruitment effort.

My solution, to add to this mix, is for you to become a great game master. You already run a campaign, so no extra time must be carved out of your week. The other solutions need you to spend a lot of time away from the game, organizing, running a business or designing. You just want to GM. If there is a solution that lets you continue to game and grow the hobby at the same time, we then have a structure in place likely to succeed. The growth takes care of itself while you carry on having fun. That’s a recipe we should all cook.

Each time you play, get better. Read this blog, subscribe to Roleplaying Tips, and think about how you want to improve. Figure out what techniques or ideas you want to try out. Picture the success you want to achieve as a GM. Research the areas where you want to improve. Most importantly, keep your campaign going. Run games as often as your life and your group permits. Each session improve in one little area. After a year or two or five, the results will be amazing.

A great GM runs a great game. This will get you and your group talking about your hobby to others. This is how you can grow the hobby without even trying. It just comes from applying yourself and focusing on reaching the next level of GMing.

Do you talk about your campaign to friends, family and co-workers? Probably not. Do your players? Nope, but if they do and you are in hearing distance, you might wince. “Then I rolled another 20 and I critted the lich for 103 points of damage. Man, that was a crazy fight.”

But become a great GM, and with a bit of coaching for your group, you can and will spread great stories about your hobby to others. If we all try to become great GMs, and those stories spread, the hobby grows at a grassroot level by making connections with non-gamers and capturing their interest and then their imagination. You get them curious and wanting to play. A world filled with great GMs generating interest in others to try RPGs out is a powerful force.

A great GM generates momentum to play more often, which creates a positive feedback loop. You and your group will take more time out to game more often if everyone is having a blast.

A great GM is a confident GM. This confidence becomes a subconscious message in the stories you tell others about your campaign. People are attracted to confident people and will listen more attentively.

A great GM gets everyone excited about the game. This excitement generates more conversation outside the game. If you see a great movie you tell others about it. So it goes if your players have an awesome game session they will tell others about it. Make this happen by running those awesome games.

Help players represent the game better

The Achilles heel of RPGs is how we talk about our games to others. Even if we are excited and confident, we tend to push non-gamers away with our terrible re-tellings of campaigns, sessions and memorable moments. It’s our curse. But we can lift it, and you can help your players lift it, with just a bit of coaching.

Think how you tell others about great movies, TV shows and books. Treat your game just like those things when you go to tell others about it. Learn how to communicate to non-gamers in compelling ways about your campaign, then teach your group how to do the same by example and with a bit of coaching.

Imagine one of your players is at a comic store picking up his monthly stack. He talks to the dude at the cash register about the awesome game he was in last night. He’s seen how you talk about games successfully outside the game session, and he uses a couple tips you’ve given him. And lo and behold, out comes a funny story. The guy at the cash register laughs appreciatively. On the way out, a customer asks him what game he was playing. Your player strikes up a short conversation. Afterward, the customer asks Mr. Cash Register if he can order a book called “GURPS” or “Mongoose Traveller Core Rules.” Hobby +1. Then +1d4 as that customer recruits a couple friends to try the game out.

How to tell great game stories

Here are the keys to telling great stories about awesome games you GM to non-gamers.

First, a couple things to avoid:

No jargon. If you use words specific to RPGs you will push away your audience. This is difficult, but persevere. Do not mention character classes, monster names, rules, dice or anything that comes out of a rulebook. You are not hiding something here or ashamed to be playing a game, but when communicating to someone unfamiliar with the jargon, they will lose interest immediately if you employ it. It does not matter if you are talking about games, computers, sports or even (especially?) your work. Avoid jargon and insider language.

No numbers. The numbers have no meaning in a good story. In a game sense, the numbers drive the results. But you are not in game mode now, you are in story telling mode. Do not mention ranks in skill, ability scores, dice rolls, total damage done. No numbers.

Next, some things to focus on and practice:

What is the story? Tell that. I define plot as your pre-game plans for the campaign, adventure and session. I define gameplay as all the things that happen during the game session including character actions and results. And I define story as what comes out of gameplay, minus the jargon and numbers.

Tell the story, not the plot or the gameplay. What actually happened in-game?

Great stories have a bit of structure. RPGs are interactive though, so you cannot guarantee this structure will emerge from gameplay. So how is a good story possible?

Consider how people tell good stories about interesting things that happen in their lives. People have stories about their kids and pets, stories of strange or funny incidents, or just anecdotes about things going on in their lives. These stories also have no guarantee of great story structure before the events occur. So it is with RPG. Make do with what you’ve got, it’ll be just fine.

A good, everyday storyteller actually does use a simple structure you can follow to change your RPG stories into compelling ones for non-gamers.

The hook captures listener interest. Often this is a segue in the middle of a conversation so the conversation flows naturally. “Speaking of being bitten by a dog, I was playing a game the other night and….” That’s a great hook (assuming you and the others were already chatting about dog bites).

The introduction sets the scene. Orient the listener to the elements of the story. Who and what is involved in the story, and why?

Conflict covers the meat of your story. What is at stake? What were the struggles? Who did what? Because you are describing some kind of conflict, the story becomes interesting. Talking about paint drying will drive your audience away. Talking about paint drying on a park bench just before your boss sits on it will keep your audience hanging on what happens next.

Resolution provides details about how things ended up. It is the pay-off to the story and reward for listening. Do not put pressure on yourself to provide the ultimate twist or most amazing resolution ever. It just needs to be interesting.

When you tell a gaming story, consider the resolution first. Only pick stories that have interesting endings. A boring ending, one that makes no sense or one that is obvious, kills your story.

“So what happened to the kid?”

“Oh, they let him go with enough food and water for a week and a warning to find a new job. He seemed grateful and I think he might actually part ways with his family. I mean, what kind of father makes his son hunt people down to collect their bad debts?”

Cliffhangers make great endings and lend themselves particularly well to gaming stories as campaigns and adventures are ongoing things.

“So what happened to the kid?”

“Oh, they let him go with enough food and water for a week and a warning to find a new job. He seemed grateful and I think he might actually part ways with his family. I mean, what kind of father makes his son hunt people down to collect their bad debts?

But, just as the group turned to go back inside, a carriage rolled up and hands seized the kid, hauled him inside and the carriage raced off before anyone could react. I guess we’ll have to wait to find out what that was all about.”

Talk about character and relationships and conflicts. A good story involves interesting people. Though ironic, a good gaming story is not about the game. It’s about what happens to the PCs and NPCs in the game. You can talk about crazy explosions, bizarre places and weird events, but they lose all meaning because they never really happened. It’s all make-believe. Who cares if a house blew up if the event did not happen in real life?

Instead, people get hooked on characters and what happens to them. PCs and NPCs are just characters in a story to your non-gamer listeners. Work this to your advantage and tell the story accordingly. Focus on who, first, then what happens to them.

Again, pretend you are talking about a great movie or book.

“The game we played last week was about five people in a fantasy world on a quest. They have to discover a cure to save a small village from a plague that turns your skin black and kills you inside a week. It’s a terrible thing and a lot of people are suffering.

So, this group of people travels to a nearby village. They have to go on foot because it’s a fantasy world and there are no cars or planes or anything like that.

Well, one of the group members, who is supposed to be a hero on this heroic quest, right? He disturbs a monstrous creature from a deep sleep and attacks it. The thing has scaly skin, teeth the length of a baseball bat, and a tail with spikes on the end, that if they puncture your skin, they poison and kill you almost immediately.

The group fights this creature and wins, but several group members were wounded. When they asked the guy who woke the creature up why he attacked it, he said he wanted the thing’s treasure. Paul, you know him? He plays the game with us. Paul asks if the creature has pockets!

Anyway, they make it to the neighbouring village and learn the cure for the plague is blood from the creature they whacked en route. D’oh! Some heroes they are. They teased Paul about it the whole night.”

Talk about actions. Describe what the characters do. Focus on the action. Tell things as a sequence of events. Character A does something and then XYZ happens. That’s a great recipe. Repeat several times until you reach the conclusion and you’ve just told a story in a great way.

Things often happen to characters. Avoid getting caught in the trap where you only describe forces that act upon the characters in your story. You need to have characters do something in your story, else the story comes out disjointed or weak. A mix is fine, where action and reaction take place, but include a lot of character action at the minimum.

Tell a funny story. Make people laugh and they like you and what you are talking about. Not every gaming story needs to be funny, but if you have a knack for humour, use it. Look for ironic and funny angles in events that happen during games to make your stories accessible to non-gamers. Tell your stories through this lens.

For example, for the people who know Paul in the plague story above, even if they do not like fantasy or do not understand the game, they will appreciate him getting teased by friends about something he did. If nothing else, your story would connect with others and speak to others in this way.

Be quick. Long stories fall flat. Tell your stories fast and efficiently. Get to the punch line or resolution in short order, else you lose your audience’s interest and attention.

I have another motive for advising you tell to quick stories. As GMs we track a lot of details about our games. It becomes tempting to dive into detail when telling gaming stories, because we know them and think they might be fun or important for the story. It never works out that way. Lift your head out of the game aspect and look at just the story angle, and you’ll find the extra details hamper your story, not help it.

Force yourself to summarize encounters, game sessions and even whole adventures into short stories without jargon. Your audience will appreciate it. More importantly, they’ll listen to your next story, and they might become interested in the game you are talking about.

Practice on your players

Practicing on a friendly audience helps when you go to tell others about interesting game moments. A dry run or two hones your story. The more often you tell a story, the better your delivery.

In addition, telling stories in the way advised above to your players gives them real examples of how they should relate their game to others. You become a living example. You also give them great stories to repeat. Perhaps they start to dig up stories of their own that they tell at the game table for *you* to re-tell!

Telling great stories about your game is also a great game mastering technique. What better way to engage your group than with awesome storytelling?

Here are some ways to put this to use:

Reminisce. During downtime or between sessions, tell stories about past campaigns. This keeps the game feeling alive and well when you’re not playing. It keeps the group excited about gaming. It creates a social atmosphere about gaming that sometimes gets lost if you tend to be all about getting down to business while gaming. Reminiscing also helps new players learn about the group, start sharing common knowledge, and fit in faster.

Recap. Start each session with the story so far. This is an awesome tool for getting everybody in the zone fast and kicking off serious gameplay soon after a session begins. You can also funnel in missed clues and hooks to give them another chance. You might ask a different player each session to recap instead, following the storytelling tips above, to help them practice, and also test their knowledge of what has happened in the game to date.

Roleplay. Have your NPCs tell great stories. If you can tell a short and entertaining story as an NPC, you can do it away from the game table as well. As a campaign tool, have NPCs recount parts of the campaign’s story from their point of view. Use this to distribute new hooks and clues, lay down false rumours, or encourage more roleplay in a combat-focused group.

Game log. Writing and speaking are two different skills, and you want to hone your oral storytelling. I recommend creating a video or audio game log in story format. Break sessions down into a few short stories. Record these and post them on your campaign site, email them to your players, and keep them on your computer for later replay. Recording your stories gives you an excellent tool for critiquing your storytelling!

Use these tips to start sharing awesome stories about your hobby with non-gamers. You will find great stories are universally enjoyed, so talking about RPGs to non-gamers becomes a non-issue for you after awhile and your confidence grows. Coach your players to develop these skills as well.

It all starts with great game mastering. Provide a super game and you generate super story potential. Learning to be a great GM requires little to no extra time, so you can just make it part of your hobby without hassle or cost. Being a great GM requires a desire to become one first. Actions will follow.

So, please, try to become a great game master. Enjoy the path this will take you on. Help the hobby grow as a result.

Why have different languages in an RPG? How can they be used to enhance a story? And what’s wrong with Universal Translators, anyway?

I have a question about using languages in fantasy RPGs. There are numerous articles and advice out there on how to create fictitious languages and make them sound realistic or add verisimilitude to the campaign setting, but that’s not my question. My question is, what’s the point? Why (other than verisimilitude) include languages at all, or have rules for them? From a narrative or game-play standpoint, why have multiple languages, or why not allow PCs to speak every language? My question is prompted by a low-level magic item in D&D 4e called The Reading Glasses, which allow the wearer to read any language. My players grabbed this item immediately, but I felt that the game somehow lost something. But I wasn’t sure exactly what. If the players can understand every language, you can’t have a plot line involving translating an ancient inscription, nor can the one player who speaks Goblinoid translate for the party. Are languages in RPGs just another plot device, or are they something more? There’s a lot of advice out there for how to make languages seem realistic and sound good, but not much advice on how to actually use them in the game to enhance the story.

Mike’s answer:

What a great question! In fact, it’s three great questions in one: “Why have different languages?”, “What’s wrong with Universal Translators?”, and “How can Languages be used to enhance a game?”. Hopefully, answering the first two will provide most of the answers to the third along the way.

Verisimilitude

So let’s start with the obvious: People speak different languages and any game with any pretensions to believability has to acknowledge that in some way within the rules system. It can often be inconvenient and hard work for the GM and the players, but there it is.

Something a lot of people don’t realise is that languages are impure – some moreso than others. English is infamous, linguistically, for stealing words from other languages. Sometime when you’ve got a spare couple of hours, grab a cheap dictionary and go through crossing out all the words that have derived from other languages and see how little you are left with! I have seen estimates that 70% of basic English are words stolen from elsewhere.

This is because a Language grows to encompass ideas for which the root has no conception, or which express concepts more eloquently or succinctly, whenever a speaker of that language rubs shoulders with someone who uses a different lingo. The Hero System contains a language chart that attempts to codify the relatedness of one language to another. It’s notoriously flawed, but still one of the most ingenious approaches that I’ve seen.

Here’s a bit of fun to contemplate: the origins of particular words can be different in a fantasy game to those in real life. If “English” is how “common” is represented, then it would derive its vocabulary from a number of different lingual sources. These can’t be French, or German, or any other real-world language, so there must have been some other source. You can represent that by applying different accents to appropriate words, just for a bit of extra colour. Let’s assume that most of the words relating to brutal violence derive from Orcish, for example – then you could pronounce “Crunch” as “K’runch” (a slight hesitation after the initial “K” sound) to give your delivery a little more colour.

In my Shards Of Divinity campaign, I have actually mapped out how each language developed and derived and contaminated its neighbours, and in what order, so that if a character knows Orcish, I can tell how easily he can understand Giant, or vice versa. Why? Verisimilitude, more precious in a campaign than pearls. (You can download the chart from here as a PDF. To use it, all you have to know is that “Kingdom” is the name of the Common Tongue in the campaign, “Pious” is a Church language used for Holy Scriptures and Religious Services, and that you don’t have to worry about the different line weights and colours – they’re a leftover from the analysis. The entire history of the campaign world is hinted at and synopsised by this chart.

Colour

Beyond verisimilitude, and implied by the “Orcish pronunciation” suggestion, the use of other languages by the GM is a way of immediately giving flavour and colour to a population. This is something I wrote about in “The Floi Af Loft and Ryk Bolti”, where the Dwarvlings had their own language and place names, and the PCs were outsiders, and the selective use of non-English was a perpetual reminder to them of that.

In Shards Of Divinity, I have created “rules” for simulating each language as necessary. For example:

Elvish

• Use French translations and search-and-replace as specified below.
• The elvish alphabet contains no equivalent letters to ‘C’, ‘CH’, ‘G’, ‘P’, ‘Q’, ‘T’ (but does have ‘TH’), ‘V’, ‘X’, and ‘Z’.
• Use ‘S’ for ‘TT’ and ‘FL’ for ‘J’.
• Any ‘S’ followed by a consonant is doubled unless it is followed by a double consonant.
• Use ‘Fe’ for ‘The’ and remove spaces between words (replace with hyphens).
• Then tweak the result for a flowing pronunciation, converting some hyphens back into spaces.

Dwarvish

• Use German, Hungarian or Russian translations and search-and-replace as specified below. If the resulting language uses a different typeface, convert the unicode to standard.
• Dwarvish words emphasise A’s, K’s and Z’s. replace ‘A’ with ‘AA’, ‘CH’ with ‘K’, ‘S’ with ‘Z’, and ‘E’ to ‘U’. Also replace any sibilant ‘C’ with ‘Z’ (eg ‘sincere’ to ‘zinzuru’.)
• Replace all R’s with H’s. (e.g. ‘zinzuru’ to ‘zinzuhu’)
• The syllable “Kha” often figures prominently and means ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ or ‘valuable’ or ‘important’ depending on the phrasing and pronunciation, much of which is inaudible to the human ear. Insert it using copy and paste before the most important adjective(s) or nouns in any sentence. (so ‘sincere’ would be ‘zinzuru’ but ‘really truly sincere’ in the ‘you can trust me’ sense would be ‘khazin-zuru’ – note that I have inserted a hyphen to make the result phonetically easier to pronounce).

I translate selected nouns-and-adjectives using these techniques to give each race its own lingual flavour.

The Shape Of Thinking

Languages both shape, and are shaped by, the attitudes and values and philosophies of the races that speak them. In a warlike or paranoid culture, the literal translation of their word for ‘stranger’ is ‘enemy’. In a neutral culture, it might be ‘outsider’. In an arrogant culture, it might be ‘barbarian’. In a sociable society, it might be ‘guest’. The words you put in a character’s mouth can be deliberately ‘loaded’ to reflect that culture.

At the same time, the language spoken from birth colours the attitude of the individual, creating unrecognised and frequently unspoken assumptions that define commonalities of personality. This is less a factor in modern times, with improvements to communications technology exposing even the very young to foreign languages and cultures to some extent, but in any less-advanced culture, it would be far more prevalent. This is why a generic personality profile can be used to describe a ‘typical dwarf’ or a ‘typical elf’.

If something is truly unthinkable, there will be no word for it in the language. This shows up most clearly when translating text from one language into another and then back again. The technical term for this is Semantic Content, and the study of meaning is Semantics. It can be argued that English-speaking nations are more multi-cultural than non-English nations because English incorporates so much content from other languages, though I think that’s taking things too far and assuming causative connections that are unproven, to say the least.

This can be utilised by GMs – often without even thinking about it – simply by choosing phrasing appropriate to the culture when describing or speaking for them. But spelling it out in black-and-white enables players representing the cultures in question to further add to it.

I use this technique to ensure that even when I am speaking straightforward English to the players, what I am saying communicates, almost subliminally, something of the nature of the speaker. We all do – it’s part of the process of characterisation. Consider the following pair of statements, which mean essentially the same thing:

• “Welcome, welcome, come in, sit down, make yourself comfortable, tea will be ready in just a moment, you will stay for dinner of course…”
• “Go into Nag-luk’s home. In! Sit on floor in dirt. Put down weapons, take off armour, Nag-luk not attack. I kill food for you, keep you strong. Nag-luk say you stay here.”

A Vehicle for Prejudice

The incorporation of ill-defined and often submerged attitudes within a language makes it a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of prejudice. Political Correctness has led to changes in the usage of English to remove many of these prejudices against women and other social minorities – there are those who say it has gone too far, but that’s not relevant to us at the moment.

Game environments rarely have the same prejudices against women, and so the language should not have the same prejudiced content and semantics. On the other hand, there are many other targets for prejudice that should take its place. Frankly, this is one of the hardest aspects of language to simulate in any way; in general, we are reduced to using the subject of the prejudice as an insult when applied to non-members of the species. Referring to a foul-mouthed shopkeeper as a “Dirty Orc”, for example.

Dynamic Linguistics

Another aspect of Language GMs can take advantage of is it naturally evolves in usage. “Gay” used to be a complimentary adjective used to refer to someone who was happy-go-lucky or light-hearted. Then it became a derogatory adjective used to refer to a homosexual or (to a lesser extent) a lesbian, when that was socially unacceptable; and, in more modern times, with the legitimisation of that sexual orientation, it has lost its negative connotations, without losing its newer meaning.

If you read some of the newspaper stories and fiction from late in the 19th century – HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle – you can see how the usage of ordinary language has changed in just a short span of time; I’m not talking about the advent of new terminology to describe new technologies, I mean everyday basic language. You can look even further afield to Shakespeare for more extreme examples.

I’ve seen newsreel footage, documentary features, and interviews from 60-70 years ago, and I can state explicitly that they have similar but even more pronounced shifts in spoken language in the same span of time. In fact, the Australian dialect has gone through at least four significant evolutions in that period of time, identifiable changes that are instantly recognisable and distinctive. I can’t speak for other countries, but I find that rate of change to be both notable and significant. Language reflects and embodies the history of a society, changing in response to changes in society and culture.

While it is difficult to do so, this can be sometimes used as a tool by the GM. It “merely” requires a detailed understanding of the history of the culture of the in-game speaker and some notion of how the language evolved in consequence of that history. Evolution of language might be slower in a fantasy game, because the social structure is developing less rapidly, but nevertheless there would be appreciable shifts in the language over time – meaning that Elves and other long-lived races probably don’t speak quite the same “common” as everyone else.

In an early Fumanor scenario, I used this phenomenon to offer the first hints that a high-ranking member of the town guard in Fort Sharpfang was in fact a Drow spy. The players couldn’t quite put their finger on what was wrong with Captain Winter, but they knew that there was something odd in the way he spoke. Instead of hitting them over the head with this information by means of exposition, I was able to implant it almost subliminally, shaping the players’ (and hence the characters’) reactions without their even being aware of it.

Something’s missing

So let’s start to transition from the discussion of language to a discussion of what can be lost when the distinctions of language are removed from the game by means of a spell or a magic device. Much of what’s been written above focuses on the spoken language, but the same principles apply to the written tongue.

What are the ways in which language is used that are no longer available to the GM under these circumstances?

Diplomatic Impact

Well, to start, Diplomatic Lag is no longer a factor. It is often the case that when two leaders communicate, the process introduces a delay into each exchange as statements are translated first one way and then the next. World leaders are often educated men who may well speak the language in question quite well, rendering the translator unnecessary; and it has long been an accepted diplomatic tactic to ignore the translator and use the delay to put a little more thought into the reply. That means in turn that diplomats and leaders have less to shield them from hasty and ill-advised decisions, and that prejudices will have an even greater impact on treaties and the like.

The consequence, in turn, is that there is a greater risk of offending the other party in any sort of negotiations – and not just diplomatic ones – leading to a breakdown of relations. Deals go south more abruptly, little wars and attitudes of belligerence will be more frequent – even if only a little.

The PCs should experience the impact in their negotiations – one makes what seems like an innocuous comment while trying to sell some leftover armour and the reply is for them to “get out of my tent/store before I call the Watch and have you arrested!” Wars should still be infrequent impediments but lesser expressions of anger – taxes on products from certain sources or whatever – should be more frequent.

Reputations will also be more fragile, more easily undermined. Remember when whats-his-name from Seinfeld got into trouble for shooting his mouth off at a drunken critic while doing a stand-up routine? Even politicians would not be immune – but there would be (as a result) slightly more tolerance for the occasional gaffe, which might well mean that a political figure could get away with something that they shouldn’t, at least for a longer span of time.

This innocuous piece of technology undermines social stability everywhere it is introduced. More perspicacious leaders might prefer to ban them, judging that to have a lower social cost than having a ubiquitous translation service available to one and all.

Mistranslation Plots

Any plot that revolves around mis-translations would become impossible (or do they? Keep reading…). Probably the most famous example is “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight, which was adopted into a classic Twilight Zone episode of the same title, which in turn was lampooned by The Simpsons in the first “Treehouse Of Horror” episode.

Even if the translators are banned, as proposed above, the mere fact of the banning would make people more aware of the possibility of a mistranslation and more cautious, undermining these plots.

Riddles and Word Games

These actually become either easier OR more difficult with the implementation of such technology. Consider the entrance to the Mines Of Moria in The Lord Of The Rings. What is the likelihood of being able to speak the Elvish word for “Friend” when you rely on magical translation services instead of actually learning the ‘foreign’ language? Consider also the riddles in Dream Park by Larry Niven in this context.

Precision in language, essential to such contests, is lost because most such devices would have a limited vocabulary, or would translate literally. Double-meanings and puns become impossible because either the translation is imperfect (drowning the intended double-meaning in a flood of unintended ones) or because it is so perfect that it makes clear one specific meaning, losing the ambiguity of language these games rely on.

In fact, accidental humour is more-or-less reduced to the pratfall; and when I picture the resulting society, it seems just a little grey and colourless. A subtle source of life has been drained from the social palette.

There are those who would argue that this is the inevitable end-product of any advance of technology. But this is a game, and the purpose and intent is to have fun – so I would counter that this is a level of realism that is counter-productive.

The Reading Glasses – NOT a minor item?

Our Enquiring GM describes The Reading Glasses as a minor item within the 4e canon, and technically it is possible that they are just that – but the level of impact that they have is far more significant than that. The ubiquity that is implied is such that this technology would radically reshape the game environment in all manner of subtle ways, as the preceding paragraphs attest. The same problem exists in D&D 3.x, where a first-level spell, “Comprehend Languages” permits characters to “understand all spoken and written languages”.

This sort of problem is inevitable in any campaign. It is the nature of GMs to pose impediments and challenges to players – a key contributing element of the entertainment of the game derives from overcoming those problems. And it is the nature of players to seek a universal solution to what they perceive as inconveniences, especially if the GM overuses a tactic or gets the party into enough trouble with it. I have not read the full description of The Reading Glasses – I searched online without success and don’t own a copy of the 4e manuals – but my first thought on reading what our Enquiring GM has written about them was ‘this sounds like something a player came up with’.

Why? Because, while it’s good for the players (as evidenced by the Enquiring GM’s party rushing to obtain a set), I think that it’s bad for most campaigns and for the game in general to make things so easy for the PCs. The positive virtues resulting from the presence of such a magic item are not outweighed by the negatives.

So, on the assumption that these are indeed a minor wondrous item, the only way to make the impact that they pose representative of a minor item and not something of unwarranted significance, the remainder of this answer will focus on ways of limiting the benefits that they offer to something more appropriate for a minor item. Even Comprehend Languages is restricted in duration (barely) and in effect to a literal translation.

These are all restrictions that I normally apply to Comprehend Languages in my campaigns (the alternative being to raise the level of the spell to something more appropriate), though I’ve never had to actually codify them before. They all stem from, and are exploitations of, the ‘literal translation’ restriction inherent in the spell. I call them ‘reasonable limits’.

Reasonable Limit: Dynamic Languages

Key words in the text may have changed in meaning, as demonstrated regarding the word “gay” in the English of the last century or so. The GM is quite within his rights to exploit such changes in language to mislead the party. Tone and context should be appropriate to offer the players a clue – other Victorian turns of phrase, for example, and a lack of contractions, and a slightly stiff tonal quality.

Furthermore, the GM is fully entitled to state that such-and-such a word meant something else historically within the campaign, and to use that word in a deceptive manner in this way – so long as there is a reasonable means for the PCs to grasp the significance in advance. Give them fair warning (perhaps by means of a trivial example) and then let the chips fall where they may if they ignore the warning.

Reasonable Limit: Codes and Double Meanings

The description of Comprehend Languages for 3.x states outright that it will not solve codes. Context suggests that whoever wrote the spell description didn’t know the difference between a code and a cypher (look them up on Wikipedia if you don’t, either). Taking the description literally gives the GM another weapon in his arsenal, because the best codes sound like natural speech. A phrase like “Good Morning,” could mean what it seems to mean, or it could mean “Run for your life” or it could mean “buy 1000 ale-kegs” or anything else that the parties have agreed for it to mean. So far as the spell is concerned, it just says “Good Morning”.

Reasonable Limit: Invented Languages

An extension to that argument leads us into the grey area of Invented Languages like Esperanto, where individual syllable groups mean things that are defined by the inventor of the language. The GM has to rule on this for themselves, as it could be argued either way – but my read is that an Invented Language is just another type of code, one that is more comprehensive than the less obvious ones.

While a Sage might be able to explain why the spell fails to render a comprehensible translation, all the PCs should know is that the writing they are attempting to read is beyond the limits of the spell’s power – just how much do they expect a first-level spell or minor magic item to be able to do, anyway?

Reasonable Limit: “The Ensigns Of Command”

Another limitation is made evident by this episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, in which Picard must negotiate with “The Shelliak Corporate” (my spelling may be suspect). The Shelliak refuse (or fail) to understand anything which is not phrased in corporate policy-style language, as it does not fit their psychology. Similarly, you may be able to translate it, but the arrangement of the words may make no sense because the magic item is unable to cope with the psychology of some of the more bizarre creatures in existence.

While this is not a technique that can be used all the time, it can be devastatingly effective if employed at the right time. Consider a race in which action is more important than anything else: their language structure might be verb 1, verb 2, verb 3, etc, then adjective 1, 2, and 3, and then noun 1, noun 2, noun 3, etc., then terms that link those. So “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” might translate, literally, to “Jump quick-brown lazy fox dog over”. This example phrase is so well known that it is easy to guess at the meaning – but take that advantage away, and watch the look of confusion wash over your players!

Reasonable Limit: Caster Prejudice

If the spell gets its vocabulary from the owner, there will never be a word used that he does not know, so that’s not an issue. Put that spell in a magic item and this can suddenly be a serious consideration. Mages tend to have a high intelligence, and therefore have a bigger vocabulary than others – so there is nothing to stop the magic item from providing a literal translation of “pococurante” when it means “indifferent”. While most people will know what the second word means, few would have the first within their vocabularies.

But, even beyond that, there is the question of subliminal caster prejudice. If the caster is prejudiced against Orcs, the “literal” translation of anything Orcish or relating to Orcs may well be tainted with his attitude. The instruction “be friendly” to an Orc, under this circumstance, might be translated as “pretend to friendship” or “feign friendship” or “ACT friendly”. The last is the most subtle and hence the most likely to generate trouble for the PCs!

Reasonable Limit: Emotional Nuance

And yet, at the same time, plain text rarely contains the same ability to communicate emotional nuance, and this limitation can only be enhanced when the translation is furnished by an emotionless thing. Modern languages have evolved punctuation and emoticons to convey an emotional content in a technically emotionless medium. The translations by spells and magic items should lack these crutches to comprehension, except where they explicitly alter the meaning.

That’s why the GM should never read such a translation aloud, but should provide a copy of the translated text, void of such supports, to the players, and let them punctuate where they will.

More than nine times out of ten, this will make no difference whatsoever. But on rare occasions, misplaced punctuation can completely alter the meaning of a sentence; and with a little practice, the GM can exploit this to their own ends. This can be especially, devastatingly, effective, in combination with the Caster Prejudice item above, and the Inferred Emotional Content item that follows.

Reasonable Limit: Inferred Emotional Context

Anyone who has used email for anything more than business or technical discussions can attest to the occasional misunderstanding that occurs where the reader infers an emotional context to the statement that was never intended by the author. It’s happened to just about everyone at some point. It is a natural human impulse to impart an emotional context into a void, and the most innocuous of comments can be transformed thereby into something the author can barely recognise. Sarcasm and rhetoric are the worst offenders.

If the translation technology – be it spells or magic item or supercomputer – strips emotional nuance out of the communication being translated, as was suggested earlier, then it is only natural the readers of that translated text will infer their own emotional context, guided by the few clues that remain. This can be deliberately exploited by the GM by planting a couple of emotionally-loaded terms early in the translation that are at odds with the true context of the overall message and letting the PCs make more soup out of the bones than is warranted.

Reasonable Limit: The Skill Of The Caster

When it comes to technical documents, there are three caveats that have to be within the mind of the GM. The first is that in a choice between a technical interpretation of a term of reference and a plain-language interpretation, the plain-English will always be chosen by the technology – rightly or wrongly. The second is that if the vocabulary is that of the caster of the spell, and a technical concept is beyond his understanding, it will probably be described poorly or not translated at all – in other words, if it is beyond the skills of the caster, it will not come out translated properly, one way or another. And the third is that technical concepts suffer in translation at the best of times; notoriously in the case of Asian-language operating or assembly instructions to English.

All of these problems should afflict technical documentation translated by magical or technological means, just as they would if translated any other way.

Reasonable Limit: One At A Time!

Coming to the end of the list of Reasonable Limits: the spell description for Comprehend Language in 3.x continually refers to language, singular, not languages, plural. There is no suggestion, not even a hint, that multiple languages can be translated at the same time, or even by a single casting. That might have changed with 4th ed., but everything suggests that this is an application of a First-Level Spell. Don’t expect Miracles.

Using Language to enhance your game

I hope that this discussion has pointed out a number of ways in which multilingual campaigns are, or can be, enhanced through the use of different languages, even in the face of technology or magics intended to neutralise the distinctiveness they contain. It might be suggested that the limitations proposed above are intended to make the magic item worthless, or worse than worthless. I would dispute that; the intent is to reintroduce the challenge of different languages without negating the basic utility of the magic item in question.

It might also be suggested that the above represents a counter-attack in the GM-vs-players contest that I hinted at in the section introducing the subject of The Reading Glasses. If, by that, it is meant that I am trying to keep an over-the-top magic item from being all-powerful, I would agree. The GM is the custodian of the larger campaign, and it is sometimes his job to deny the players an easy answer, no matter how much it might appeal to them in the short term.

Lastly, it might be suggested that by proposing these restrictions, I am attempting to leave room for language to enhance the campaign despite the presence of a magic item that – at face value – destroys that potential; to that charge, I would happily plead Guilty. It’s called being a good GM.

Some references that might be useful

• Wikipedia’s article on Etymologyand the Wikipedia article on Semantics: the studies of words, their origins and history, and their meanings
• WordOrigins dot org: An excellent online etymology reference source
• Behind the Name: The Etymology and History of First Names
• Online Etymology Dictionary: An English etymology dictionary
• My Etymology dot com: A more universal etymology dictionary
• Wikipedia’s article on Universal Translators: chock-full of useful references and sources of inspiration

And now, it’s over to Johnn for his take on the issue….

Johnn’s answer:

Sweet Orcus, Mike, that’s an awesome and thorough answer. All I can say is this: Johnn think language gud. Johnn think language fun. Johnn think language help game.

The glasses might translate written text, but not verbal. If the item is low level, it might be common, in which case foes would take advantage instead of non-word forms of communication to get the message out to minions and others. Examples: Spoken-only – Who goes there? Flags. Smoke signals. Symbols. Maps. Puzzles. Therefore, the item is not a terrible plot foiler.

You asked why use language in your game. I encourage you to get your players speaking your fantasy languages as much as possible. Speaking other languages gets a whole different part of the brain going than the areas that calculate dice rolls, speak English, roleplay, or ponder what munchies bag to open next. Speaking new languages – fake or otherwise – literally changes the way your players think during the game. It’s a ton of fun.

I experienced this when a GM years ago had us using more and more quasi-fictional French as our PCs were in a region based on medieval France. It was fun learning, remembering and using the new words in-character. It changed the texture and ambiance of the whole game. I was surprised at its powerful effects.

For my current game I have a to-be-deployed plan of getting players to speak in the language common to Riddleport. To do that, I’ll be offering rewards and penalties. I identify two new words each game and put them on index cards clipped player-side to my GM screen. Each time a player uses one of the new words, they get a check mark. Each time they slip and use the English word, they lose three check marks. At the end of the session, the check marks earn them a bonus, if in the positive.

I’ve used this trick before when I was in Vancouver, and it’s a super way to help players learn the names for all the currencies, days of the week, months, and other pronouns. I do not know about you, but I’m tired of hearing the word gold piece in my campaigns.

Anyway, I’m off to re-read Mike’s reply as he lists a lot of techniques that I need to mull over and think about how to apply in my game.

Mike, perhaps as a follow-up post, I’d love to hear more examples of any of the techniques and ideas you’ve employed in your games. For example, how did the Drow you mentioned speak, exactly, to tip off the players? And more examples of the human vs. other race greetings in a wider variety of situations would be great. I only speak English, so when I try to roleplay another culture’s speech, I tend to either speak like a child or a pirate. Heh.

Mike’s answer continued:

Okay, Johnn, you want more? You’ve got more.

How did the Drow speak?

This required thought and practice, so be warned. There were three things that were notable about the Drow’s speech patterns.

1. Archaisms: I carefully avoided employing contractions or other lingual shortcuts, and dropped the occasional deliberate archaism into the character’s speech. These were achieved by looking at 19th century english, especially HG Wells’ “War Of The Worlds”, and deliberately mimicking the narrative. The Right Word At The Right Time helped by mapping out the changes in modern language in that time. “Lay up your Scaramanche, cease ye and desist your violence, with despatch” instead of “Put down your weapons, stop fighting, right now!“. Since the Drow had been isolated for about a century, contemporary language had evolved, and his had not.
2. Inappropiate Culural Attitudes: I made sure that the character didn’t care about things that a Drow wouldn’t care about, such as the mistreatment of prisoners, the fate of slaves, the opinions of subordinates, the use of excessive force, and so on, while caring too much about the wrong things, such as a fear of Clerics, care of Spiders, and so on. Initially, this came across as nothing but a somewhat exotic characterisation, but at the first hint of suspicion, the pattern became far more obvious. On the other hand, he was not afraid of things that he should have been afraid of, under the circumstances, like allegations of the use of Arcane Magic (forbidden), maintaining order, following the law, etc.
3. Misplaced Emphasis: this is one of the most subtle of tools. Do it once and it just sounds like you have misread the prepared dialogue; do it consistanrly and repeatedly, and it starts sounding like an accent. Then make sure that no-one else has anything even close to the same accent. Keep it subtle, and you will slowly build up the impression of someone who comes from somewhere else. “Did you really think that you could evade the ever-watchful gaze of the law?” sounds quite different depending on where you place the emphasis by raising the tone of your voice – try it emphasing the first “you”, then “really”, then “think”, then “evade” and they will all sound different and suggest a different attitude on the part of the speaker, but all reasonable. Now try it emphasising “could” instead – and it just sounds wrong.

Suspicion did not flower all at once, but repeated interactions – sometimes being strict and harsh when it comes to the Laws and sometimes blase, and incorrectly given the different situations – and it creeps in, and never goes away. This was a character who would eviscerate a pet dog as punishment for disrespect, but who was perfunctory in his investigation of the violent murder of a wealthy merchant and the incineration of a grocer by local criminals, and eventually, this behaviour was connected with a chance comment by one of the players, and the pattern became suddenly obvious to everyone.

More Greetings Examples

In all cases, the objective is to give some personality or expression to the greeting. Keeping the cultural values expressed consistant, even when used by another member of the same race, makes it clear that this expression is common to the race or class or society in question.

• “Ring the bells, summon ale, and all down tools, for Word of your coming echos through the deeps!”
• “The insecurities of the ignorant notwithstanding, you would do well to watch your tone in my presence, for I have not fed in weeks and one or two of you would appear to be most toothsome.”
• “Though comets may crash to the ground and mountains take to the sky like birds, you are safe here.”
• “Seek the shaded glade within and be at peace with your place in the world for however long you dwell here.”
• “I would strip the meat from your bones and use your flesh as carpet were you not under the protection of the Chieftan.”
• “Surely this is a miracle to echo throughout the ages; for whoever could have foreseen that such mighty warriors would deign to abide with so lowly a worm as I?”
• “The phases of the moon align with the shadows of destiny as the bluebells sing of your presence.”
• “In this place, may your roots rest and drink deep of the waters of renewal.”

Add an accent to ramp them up a notch.

Roleplaying Another Culture’s Speech:

The following speeches rely on “Selected Translations From Dwarvling” which was written for the scenario that I published here as “The Floi Af Loft and Ryk Bolti”. Without that document, which you can download as a PDF from here, they won’t make much sense.

• “Greetings, Leif unkinden Eirifkenn. You and the Ókunnur Maður Handan Frá are welcome here. Follow the passage marked by Blue Tile to reach the Höfðingi, who awaits your presence as we speak.”
• “In the name of the Dreki Tönn, I bid you welcome, Ókunnur Maður. You are especially welcome here, Leif unkinden Eirifkenn. Welcome home… Great-Uncle.”
• “My father — where is my father? Where is Höfðingi Eirifkenn?”

There are a couple of observations to be made about the above. As you can see, I made myself a Cheat Sheet of key translations. When I wote them for use in the scenario, I bolded all the non-english words to forewarn me of them. Where the information was important to the players understanding, I used the normal english term – hence “blue tile” and “great-uncle” and even “father” are untranslated. And lastly, I practiced a couple of times so that I could rattle them off at a normal speaking pace. Try it yourself – just pronounce things phonetically a couple of times until your tongue wraps around the strange words naturally.

I also use the same tricks when I have to deliver an accent – spell it out phonetically and emphasise. To finish, here’s an example of doing that, and a PDF of Some Key Italian Phrases:

• Mike (Bella Lugosi voice at high speed): Qualcosa ha torto? Tutto il bagaglio dal suo volo è stato con-segnato. (English: Is something wrong? All the luggage from your flight has been delivered.) Lei parla l’italiano? Lei me capisce? C’è nessuno più bagaglio essere ispez-ionato! (English: Do you speak Italian? Do you understand me? There is no more luggage to be inspected.)
• Mike (Bella Lugosi voice at high speed): “Ifa you luggage isa missing, you muzt report it to the lozt property officer. Room Fifve. Thisa way.”

Note that an exaggerated accent has been specified that I can immediatly call to mind and imitate (even if it’s not Italian). That makes a big difference to the pronunciation of the Italian and in keeping the “mediocre english” consistantly characterised and immediately recognisable as being the same person speaking. If I were to use a Ronald Reagan “voice”, it would sound completely different. And note that the only language I actually speak is English, Johnn – but with these tricks and techniques, I certainly don’t sound like a Pirate, or a child! They don’t let me speak Italian (and I apologise to anyone who does), but they at least let me sound like I’m speaking Italian – and it impresses the hell out of the players!

I love the idea of Dungeonaday.com. I use a laptop at the game table, Personal Brain software to organize my campaign, email to organize my group, and an iPad to generate content. I’m all about digital. Yet, I still have book cases filled with beloved RPG books, box sets, modules and maps. I have a large pile of books I use for my Riddleport campaign, in fact, so I like to think I enjoy the best of both worlds.

But a dungeon as a website? Awesome. Love it. Links, graphics, resources, blog, community – finally we can celebrate a dungeon together and tap into using the bennies of being digital to make it more than a series of maps and keyed encounters. Dungeonaday.com moves the progress bar towards maximum potential for dungeons and gaming. I think the idea is so good that I did a case study of it for my Gamer Lifestyle RPG publishing program.

I am thrilled that Monte and his Dungeonaday.com are sponsoring Campaign Mastery. I’m proud that he feels our content, including your comments and Ask the GM requests dear readers, is good enough to put his name beside it. Recently we celebrated 100,000 visitors, and now let’s celebrate this new friendship with the internet’s biggest dungeon.

As an active GM, I’m always looking to hone my craft. So while I had Monte’s ear about the sponsorship, I weaseled in some GM advice questions in an email interview format. Here is a polished up version of the email conversation we had:

Campaign Mastery: Dungeonaday.com releases a new room every weekday. And none are crummy empty rooms – each has extensive details and some are actually multi-room areas. What is your advice on how GMs can flesh out their dungeon designs so they do not have boring, empty areas?

Monte: I think part of the trick is defining empty. Just because a room doesn’t have a monster or trap doesn’t mean it’s empty. A big part of dungeon adventures is exploring, and all kinds of cool things can be found while exploring a dungeon that don’t involve fighting or making saves.

You might find some old inscription on a stone that contains some interesting or maybe even valuable information. You might find the skeletal remains of another adventurer. You might find the source of a stream imbued with natural magical energies. Or whatever.

Campaign Mastery: Roleplaying Tips readers recently read about creating encounter backstories so players can peel things back to discover a villain, plot or world behind a seemingly one-off encounter. Does Dungeonaday.com and its encounters have backstories? Do you have a couple tips on how to create interesting backstories?

Monte: Absolutely. Fighting a bunch of orcs can be kinda fun, but it gets old pretty fast if the orcs don’t have motives for doing what they’re doing. Likewise, it’s easier for PCs to make informed decisions if they can try to learn why there’s a bunch of rooms with weird magical effects all clustered together. Weird is good, but weird with a (weird) backstory tying it together is better.

Backstories are as simple as human nature. Don’t just think about adventure-related ideas when it comes to backstories. Romantic love, honor, family, entertainment, creativity, depression…these are the seeds of all kinds of interesting backstories.

Campaign Mastery: I am a member of Dungeonaday.com and was surprised by the variety of locations. Old schoolers will be delighted with the tesseract. There is also a mysterious island to explore and a link to another dimension. As a planes geek myself, I love dungeons that take players out of Kansas. Can you give us a few details about the dimensional link and what kind of encounters await in it? Also, got a tip or two on how to hook dungeons to other planes in interesting ways?

Monte: In the oldest of the old school dungeons, dungeons linked to and included all sorts of locations, many of which were not underground at all. I’m trying to capture that with Dungeonaday.com. In Level 7, we have a portion of the dungeon that’s slowly slipping into the Abyss because of a long-open gate. But later on in the campaign, there is an as-yet-unrevealed other gate that will send the PCs to a sort of demi-plane (I call it a half-world) where the laws of physics work a little differently.

Campaign Mastery: I could not imagine being a dungeon dweller. No internet (wi-fi must be a bitch down there), enemies on all sides, a struggle for food each day, and no good books to read. Tell us about your favourite NPC that you’ve created in Dragon’s Delve, and why they are your fave.

Monte: That’s probably going to be Erralak. He’s a new monster, an “ocular tyrant” that’s pretty similar to an old monster. The cool thing about Erralak is that he has access to this shaft that allows him to fly up and spy on many different levels of the dungeon, but there’s a magical glass that keeps him from being able to affect (or be affected by) what’s going on in the locations he spies on.

So starting with Level 1, the PCs run into this big floating orb with a lot of eyes, and they’re of course terrified. But slowly they get used to seeing him. Finally, on Level 10, they get to encounter him face to face, and he’s really tough. It’s an encounter that’s foreshadowed over and over in this strange way for 10 levels, which I think is pretty fun.

Campaign Mastery: Realism vs. imagination. I feel many Roleplaying Tips readers get writer’s block for their dungeons because they set expectations too high for realism. They aim for accurate simulation. On the other end of the spectrum, you have pure fantasy where things get unbelievable and even trite. Players disengage because it’s too weird and unbelievable. There seems to be a sweet spot where you can have fun unleashing your creativity while serving up an adventure the players can lean into and suspend belief for.

When I read Dungeonaday.com I don’t get jarred back to reality. I do not experience any walk-out-the-threatre moments. That’s awesome, especially for a megadungeon. How do you handle this balance between realism and imagination? Do you feel much pressure trying to get dungeon design right, in the simulation sense? What advice do you give to a GM staring at a blank sheet of graph paper, afraid to draw a room because of the need to make the design realistic?

Monte: I think there’s some pressure to walk that fine line between fun and realism. But for me, the simulation is part of the fun. I like to put crazy encounters into the dungeon and then figure out a halfway plausible idea for why that area of the dungeon works that way. It’s a fun, two-step creative exercise for me, actually.

So I guess my advice would be to create something that’s going to be a fun, exciting encounter first and then worry about the verisimilitude later. Players, in my experience, will give you a lot of leeway with reality if you throw them a bone now and again that seems like an explanation AND if they’re having a good time.

I think in one of my blogs on this topic found at the site I describe it this way: as long as you don’t FORCE your players into a corner where they simply can’t find your adventure plausible, giving them something that simply makes no sense or can’t possibly work the way you’ve set it up, most will go along with whatever you give them.

That’s the summary of our conversation. Some interesting nuggets in there. Thanks to Monte again, for the tips and the sponsorship.

There is a cooking show in Australia (it actually started in the UK, and a US version was recently announced) called Masterchef Australia. The goal of the series is to identify and winnow through the best amateur cooks in the country until they are left with the one best cook of the bunch, who gets $100,000 and a book deal. Along the way, they are expected to go toe-to-toe and head-to-head with the best chefs in the world. For the last two seasons, this show has been slaying everything programmed up against it, to the point where one of the hosts – an internationally-famous food critic, Matt Preston – was recently awarded as the best new talent in the Australian TV industry.

One of the regular challenges on the show is called the mystery box, in which the contestants are presented with a number of ingredients covered by a wooden box until The Big Reveal, and have to create the best dish they can using one or all of the ingredients.

Eureka! is reminiscent of the Mystery Box challenge of Masterchef. It represents a pantry full of ingredients, from which you are to create the best dish – or, in this case, adventure – that you possibly can.

Eureka 501 Plots

A reader, looking at the subtitle of the e-book, or simply glancing through the contents, might be forgiven for thinking that the heart of the product are the adventure hooks. It’s not. If you look a little deeper, you find that the heart of the content is the framework and structure surrounding those hooks, which has the capacity to transform your game prep, and that’s what Johnn focused on in his review of the product, Plot Stat Block For The Organized Game Master, a couple of weeks ago.

But there are some other innovative notions in there as well, and they merit some attention, suggesting the possibility of a deeper revolution. These are the ligaments and sinews that connect the plot structures of Eureka! together – the advice on how to customize the adventure hooks, and the indices that organize and connect the ideas.

So here’s what’s on tonight’s menu, here at Campaign Mastery. As an appetizer, I’m taking a look at that GM advice, and how it is applicable beyond the confines of the product itself. For a side dish, I’m going to compare the handling of plot ideas in Eureka as compared to simple plot hooks, and how you can take Johnn’s Plot Stat Blocks and use them in a way that goes beyond what he proposed. The main course will then look at using Blog Technology to refine ideas from anywhere you find them (including your own imagination), using The Eureka System and the refinement of Johnn’s Stat Blocks, to push your plot structures even further while reducing your workload as a GM. And for dessert, I present yet another way of using Eureka ideas to give characters in your campaigns depth.

The GM Advice

Eureka!’s GM Advice starts off by looking at the structure of the plot stat block they’ve used, and more specifically what they haven’t done and have left up to the GM to complete.

Casting

First up, there’s characters, in which they discuss the fact that as far as possible, they’ve left character names and details out of the plot descriptions. While that means that there’s more work for the GM to do in getting a plot from Eureka ready-to-run, it also makes the plots more broadly compatible. Instead of talking about NPCs within the plots as individual characters, it treats them as ciphers fulfilling a specific role within the adventure, and then poses three questions for the GM to consider in casting those roles. The three questions – Would the NPC be involved in a plot like this? Does the NPC have the abilities/powers/skills to do what’s required? and Am I comfortable with what might happen to the NPC as a result of how this adventure plays out? – represent the casting process for filling these empty roles within the scenarios.

What’s missing from Eureka: some categorization scheme for these unfilled roles, and an index of them. Some of the tags cover this territory very generally, but don’t go far enough.

When you cast your adventures, do you normally look at the plot and ask how a given NPC might fit into a given role in the adventure? Or do you look at the NPC and ask how they can be fitted into the adventure? In practice, you should do both: first cast the key roles within the adventure, and then look at all the other NPCs associated with the campaign and try to integrate them. A casting syntax and associated index would make both parts of the equation simpler, by enabling the GM to pick out an NPC and locate plots that can use that character.

Re-Skinning, Remaking, and Replacing Plot Elements

This section is absolute gold as a summation of how to adapt any existing plot from anywhere else into your specific campaign. Along the way, it defines the three terms given above for specific aspects of the process.

Those sections are followed by one on adapting plots to other genres, which gives you the key techniques for determining exactly which plot elements need to be reskinned, remade, or replaced. After giving the how, they give you the when. But the advice can be applied far more broadly and generously than Gnome Stew themselves have done, simply by treating your own campaign as a genre unto itself.

Approaching the advice in this way permits this whole section to become solid advice on how to make each plot a key element of your specific campaign.

Modern Elements for a Modern Age

And then there’s a subsection on Modern Elements, which starts off talking about the fact that there will be modern elements in the plots because they are being written by modern people. Once again, the advice can and should be applied beyond the text, because it misses the point that every game has to be played by modern people – which means that if a modern element is inappropriate to a specific campaign, the difference becomes a keynote of that campaign’s uniqueness that needs to be propagated through every scenario and the players specifically educated in the difference. This hearkens back to my first Lesson From The West Wing, about finding the uniqueness of your specific campaign and making it a key element to be emphasized throughout, giving your campaign a unique flavor that is distinct from each of your other campaigns, and even more distinct from the campaigns of your neighbor down the street.

Think, for example, of the relatively care-free 50’s (though they didn’t seem that way at the time, I’m sure) to the political cynicism post-Watergate and post-Vietnam, twenty years and a generation later. Those two contrasting eras alone offer four unique flavors: a politically cynical perspective on 1950s culture, a care-free and optimistic antidote set in the 1970s, and the two eras as they are generally perceived by a modern audience. Looking beyond that – what happened in, say Brazil – who never had a Watergate, but had events of their own? Australia didn’t have a Watergate either, but we did have the events of The Dismissal, and our own share of Vietnam; both of which occurred in the 1970s. As a result, many aspects of 1960s Australia are more like the US of the 1950s than they resemble the US that was contemporary – but with cultural elements from the more modern era thrown into the pot for good measure, such as the Beatles.

Every GM’s past experience and national history filters through into their campaign assumptions, whether they recognize those influences or not. Learning to recognize that influence, and manipulate it at need, would represent a major advance in most GM’s techniques.

Themes

This whole section, once again, is ostensibly about the organisation of material within the game supplement, but has an applicability that ranges beyond that limited context. The concept of their being a limited number of thematic plot structures is not a new one, but using Eureka as a guideline to taking those plot structures and manipulating them to form your own variations makes the whole supplement a masterclass in advanced plot creation. If anything, more details on how they performed this in generating the plots contained in Eureka, with one or two specific examples, would have been welcome for this very reason; but Gnome Press don’t seem to have fully grasped how valuable that would have been, so we are left in the position of inferring the curriculum from the teaching aides.

Summary

It’s often enlightening to observe the differences in reaction to the same material of two different people, with different perspectives. Johnn commented in an email to me about the GM Advice in Eureka that it seemed to be all about the product itself and not to represent general advice to GMs; he felt it misrepresented “About This Product” and “How To Use This Product” as general GM advice. However, he was also wise enough to add, “from you on other books I disliked in the past (I like Eureka, just not the advice portion) made me consider those books in a new light, and sometimes I’ve been able to get fresh new value or interest out of them,” which is why he raised the question in the first place.

My psychology means that every time I read something, I’m looking at how the underlying mechanics work, and how to extend what’s there to cover situations or content or context that the original author never dreamed of. In this case, what might seem at face value to be fairly vapid ‘GM Advice’ immediately presented to me as being extremely useful, if fundamental and occasionally elementary, advice. So, my conclusions to Johnn, and to anyone else who reads this product (or even just the free preview of the GM Advice chapter), is to look beyond the immediate context of the advice and you will find a wealth of material that can be a springboard to a better understanding of the craft of being a GM, and can specifically improve the structure and content of your adventures, and beyond that, to the campaigns that are comprised of those adventures. And that makes the GM advice seem pretty solid to me – if overlaid with a veneer that submerges its true value somewhat.

That said, the content of these sections in its current form also does the job of making what was perceived by Gnome Stew as the central content – the plots themselves – more useful, so there is an avoidance of redundancy. What’s there is great, but it could have been (and maybe will be in future) so much more.

Plot Hooks to Plot Blocks

I’m going to avoid simply echoing Johnn’s excellent take on this subject a couple of weeks ago (which I referenced at the start of this article) and look at a way of taking it further.

I’m in the habit of jotting down ideas, including adventure ideas, as a simple list in a dedicated RTF file. These are frequently barren of details, and can come from any source. It’s been a long-standing joke in my campaigns that I can get a scenario out of anything if I look at it hard enough.

For example, I might be inspired by a Coke advert on the TV. Lots of bikini-clad girls playing with a ball on the beach. In the context of my superhero campaign, I might come up with a list of ideas (not all of which are to be used) like this:

121. St Barbara (one of the PCs) is invited to participate in a Coke Commercial. A villain disrupts the shoot.
122. A beach party is threatened when the sun suddenly seems to grow hotter, but nowhere else is affected; an extra-dimensional (alien?) is spying on earth, and his invisible portal is acting as a gravitational lens, a magnifying glass focusing the sun’s heat on this particular spot.

These ideas could be combined into one, or they could be entirely separate. It’s a quick way of getting ideas down in some lasting format, and cut, copy, and paste makes the ideas quick to import into separate documents for fuller development, so it’s convenient.

I employ a ratings-and-classification system that I’ve blogged about before (Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow) to put these ideas into a coherent order with contrasts and variety.

But there’s an intermediate step that has to take place somewhere along the way, in which ideas are matched to slots in the campaign flow, and it’s a bit of a mess – a long list of scenarios that have to be visually inspected. I’ve thought in the past of importing the list into a table and sorting by different columns to ease things, but the variable length of the text has made that a bit of a nightmare to contemplate – it’s really a job for relational database software and that tends to be very complicated and frequently expensive, and I’ve never had the money to get into it seriously. (If I had free choice, I would choose a programming language called FOCUS, which I used professionally for many years. But it’s not available for Windows-based systems any more, and was WAY out of my price range even when it was available).

Sure, there are free RDB systems and programming languages out there, and I’ve even downloaded a few – but I’ve never had time to study them, let alone to master them, a new programming language is just too big a time investment. Heck, I’ve never had the time just to master more than the absolute basics of Excel, and how long has that been around!?

All that means that there is a hole in my processes, and one that I’ve never found an efficient way to fill. The combination of Eureka and Johnn’s Plot Stat Blocks have given me an answer.

Plot Blocks for unfinished plot ideas

That answer arrived in the form of a question: If you were to employ a plot ‘stat block’ approach to your unfinished, unpolished, and incomplete plot ideas, what could you do with the results?

A standard format structures the information, so that holes can be discovered and filled. For example, you could have a cell for each PC, to ensure that each has a connection with the plot. You could have a slot for each of the major NPCs that are with the PCs, to ensure that no plot holes appear because you’ve forgotten a resource that the PCs have available to them. You could connect scenarios by means of NPCs who don’t stay the same but evolve from one appearance to the next, by deducing the transition required in-between one appearance and the next and integrating news of that transition (if necessary) as a subplot in an intermediate adventure. You can into your campaign small touches like planned rewards for success followed by scenarios in which those rewards make a difference, just by looking at the requirements for future scenarios and making sure that the characters get those as booty.

And those are just my first thoughts on the subject!

Once you’ve finished plugging the holes, and have decided where in your campaign continuity you want the adventure to take place, you can simply transfer the information into one of Johnn’s plot stat blocks.

In short, instead of storing your rough and unfinished ideas in a layout that is optimized for game prep, you store them in a format optimized for campaign plotting until the time actually comes for game prep, then cut-and-paste as necessary.

Taking It Further: Blog Software

Assuming that you start by cherry-picking plots from Eureka! that sound like fun and placing them into such a plotting structure, you soon start encountering more advanced applications for the concept. And they all stem from taking something from Eureka that, at first glance, I didn’t think very much of: the tags.

You see, the problem is that there aren’t enough of them provided in Eureka to discriminate between the different plots that have been provided, and those that are provided are not specific enough. The tags for the first plot offered, for example, are “(MR) Investigative, politics, stealth, villain” – where (MR) refers to the author of this particular plot idea. So, what’s the plot all about? One of the PC’s friends is arrested and charged with a crime for which he has been framed, and he will be executed if the PCs don’t clear him. The plot is revolves around a group of bandits. There are local complications like a centaur tribe, and the bandits themselves. And the whole thing takes place in a heavily-forested region, where timber – woodcutting – is the dominant industry (I’m trying to avoid giving too much of the plot away to any players who may happen to read this, it’s devilishly tricky). There are some good ideas there, and also a fairly obvious plot hole, but I can’t talk about that without revealing too much; there’s obviously a lot more in the half-page of text dedicated to this plot than my summation!

If I were to synopsize the plot into key words, those tags would be “Investigative, frame, bandits, forest, centaurs,” and – again for reasons that I can’t go into without giving too much away – “smart antagonist, politics”.

It’s only a short step from wanting to change or add to the tags, to realizing that if you post your plot summary to a private blog, you can do so with ease.

And then you start to think about the ability to change or edit tags as you need to, and the fact that there are also categories to use as a means of grouping related plots together, and suddenly the simple premise of posting each plot idea on a blog completely eliminates the need for expensive – and time-consuming to learn – database software.

Blogger or WordPress or blog-dot-com or thoughts.com or ClockingIT or many many others are available to choose from. The big trick will be picking one that will last as long as your campaign, and whose features suggest refinements and extensions in technique!

The first three are probably the pick of the bunch at first glance, but it would be worth your effort to look more closely at just what you get from each.

Immediately, refinements start suggesting themselves. Using abbreviations and hyphens in a standardized tag format to form compound tags, for example. Or using categories to define the different stages of a plot development lifestyle – taking advantage of the fact that you can nest categories into a hierarchy, and simply tick and untick the relevant category entries.

That, in a nutshell, is the huge advantage of this approach: you can, with just a click or two, take a posted plot idea out of one category and into another, or remove any existing tag. It takes only a little more work to add a new tag or a new category.

You can even boilerplate a dummy entry to copy-and-paste into each post to ensure a consistent format – that’s the way Johnn and I do Ask-The-GMs, and there is no reason why you couldn’t do the same thing to replicate something like Johnn’s Plot Blocks.

Finally, with a minimal amount of editing, you could take a “private” blog entry and make it a public record of the events that actually transpired within the game – an ideal forum for players to ask questions, post ideas, etc as comments. You can even change the tags and categories completely when you do so.

Picture the utility to your players of using the names of every NPC who has ever appeared in the game as a tag in such a blog. In effect, one click would give them a complete history of their interactions with that NPC – a seriously useful reference tool during play!

And it all starts with blogging – in a way and in a location not accessible by the players – your ideas for the campaign, and using the standard blogging tools to manipulate and sort that information. That’s a “Eureka!” moment if ever I’ve heard one!

Eureka! as a background seed

The final thought that I want to throw out there is a different way of using Eureka. If you’re the type of GM who always has plenty of plots on hand, or have players who also GM and might have copies of Eureka for their own campaign usage, consider using it as a foundation for players to develop incidents from a PCs background.

You might specify, for example, that all characters start out with three “adventures” in their past. Let each player pick a plot each from the e-book, and flesh it out appropriately. The GM can then revise and edit these “adventures” to reflect any campaign background that’s different to that assumed by the characters, and can even estimate how much experience the events are worth to give players an incentive. The result is that from the first minute of scenario one, the players have a taste of the world, and there is a cast of NPCs with whom the PCs are connected. The GM can even get creative and crosslink one player’s background adventure with that of another!

Using Eureka! in this way, it doesn’t matter if your players have read it. Or if you’ve already used it up for every plot that you can get out of it. And, through the power of Re-skinning, Re-making, and Replacing plot elements, it’s extremely unlikely that even if two players chose the same adventure, the details would match up. One might have replaced the forest in the first plot, for example, with a swamp, and the bandits with Orcs, while the other does not. The result would be two superficially similar backgrounds with quite different details, and it would be easy to carry those differences through to a different means of resolving the plot. Those differences, in turn, give different perspectives and personalities to the PCs.

That alone makes Eureka! worth having.

Johnn and I would like to thank each and every one of the visitors to this site, especially the more than 10,000 visitors who come back here every month! We hope that you have gotten as much fun out of reading what we’ve had to say as we’ve had sharing it with you!

A special thank-you to everyone who’s taken the time to comment on one of our articles. We appreciate it!

Roll on, the 200,000! Wah-HAAAY!!! “Cel-e-brate Good Times, Come On!”…

Thanks to all the bloggers and commentators who participated in June’s carnival about what non-game media have most inspired your games and how. I was surprised by the variety of answers. I think there’s an idea or three here for any GM’s tastes. Good job everyone!

Lizard Games was inspired by the clone wars, which were not explained in the first series and offered a tantalizing link to a whole world behind the story. This and Jack Kirby spurred him to become an insatiable world-maker. In a second post, Mr. Lizard also talks about being inspired by Kipling and Larry Niven.

Fame & Fortune lists the top five books and comics that shaped his gaming. It’s quite a range too, from a serial killer to a famous playwright’s tragedies to an ancient Sanskrit epic.

Allgeektout quotes Doctor Who’s plotting technique as teaching him about episodic storytelling, which links episodes into a seasonal story arc that culminates into an annual grand finale.

In his comment James S says video games inspire him because of the challenge of bringing the flavour of a video game into the tabletop realm.

The Seven-Sided Die reveals that pictures speak to him. Images communicate what he’s got in his noggin to his players, plus they accomplish ye old story advice of show, don’t tell. Lots of interesting images and sources sprinkled through this post – good job.

Held Action cites paranormal podcasts among other suggestions that include Doctor Who and Kenneth Hite’s Suppressed Transmission columns. Podcasts? Super idea!

Late to the Party lists obscure 70s horror films and Appendix N (sweet sweet ref there my friend), along with advice about lifting story from other sources.

The Resurrectionist plumbs our own world’s history as having the most depth and shocking events to inspire your GMing. Quote of the day: “History is nuts.”

Creatively Anomalous riffs off movie trailers. This is a super idea, for all the reasons Will lists. He also reveals several soundtracks that have inspired him.

Apathy Games says TV Tropes and blog posts from sites like Lifehacker and Mashable provide Tyson his ideas.

Cody at Kingdom of Geeks narrows his wide array of inspiration to several intellectual properties. I like the anime references, which I have seen few others mention.

Worlds in a Handful of Dice offers Babylon 5 (Mike @ Campaign Mastery will agree with you, Jukka), the Lovecraftian One and an interesting Finnish movie, Raja 1918, which he says inspires world building.

Exchange of Realities gives us a trilogy of posts involving the novel idea of military reading lists, anime and anime soundtracks, and advice on how to let music inspire you.

Mythopoeia offers advice on assessing your game requirements first, then drawing from inspirational sources.

Tower of the Archmage quotes Greek myths, Conan, Narnia, Saturday afternoon movies (nice!) and art as his sources.

Finally, Mike Bourke of this blog offers a wide variety of sources ranging from reference books to TV series to comics and more. Lots of interesting ideas there.

What a great list. Thanks again to all the RPG bloggers who participated.

Hopefully, this will wrap up the article on Time Travel! Part 1 looked at the problems of Time Travel in RPGs, and reached the conclusion that the GM had to have some understanding of the nature of time in his campaign before he could adjudicate the complexities that could result.

Part Two comprised excerpts relating to the Nature of Time from the Campaign Physics I employ in my Superhero campaign, and produced some very interesting feedback.

Now comes the fun part: looking at the implications and applications and complications that derive from this system, posing a couple of questions for consideration, and generally playing around with Time Travel as a viable plot vehicle in RPGs…

The ‘Key Event’ Principle of Alternate History

Whenever you assess the impact on history of a time-traveller, you’re talking about generating an Alternate History. I use two principles in forming Alternate histories in my campaign, regardless of the cause of the divergance. The first of these is the “Key Event” principle, which states,

The greater the element of chance in determing the outcome of an event, the more susceptable that event’s outcome is to variation.

That means that if an outcome is a near-certainty, there won’t be many significant branches on the timeline from that point, and it would be very hard to change that outcome. But it also means the converse: where outcomes are equally balanced in likelyhood, minor changes can be amplified to the point of making a big difference.

An implication of this is that the results of natural forces are more likely to remain fixed, while the works of man are far more susceptable to alteration. It’s very hard to stop Mount St Helens from erupting, for example. The continents will tend to have the same shape, because the forces that created that shape won’t change very much.

But a more subtle implication is that there are key moments in history where things can be radically changed with comparatively little effort, but once they have passed, events will tend to remain the same overall. Once Adolf Hitler comes to power, World War II is a near-certainty; it might be possible to change the shape of that conflict by killing him at that point, but some sort of conflict is more or less inevitable, due to the social, political, and economic forces of the time. You might be able to change some detail outcome within the broader context, such as whether or not a particular soldier lived or died, but most of the time, that won’t even change the outcome of the battle in which he was killed.

Key Events tend to be decisions and moments of inspiration. Churchill’s knowledge of the bombing of Coventry, thanks to the breaking of the Enigma code by the British, led to a decision not to forewarn and evacuate the city – so that the German High Command would not suspect that their code had been compromised. That decision could easily have changed the entire outcome of the War.

Another implication is that the greater the number of people involved in an event, the smaller any individual’s role is, and the less susceptable to change the outcome. It’s very hard to change the outcome of a popular election, for example; while you might alter one person’s vote, that won’t often change the overall outcome.

The Big Bang: An interesting Key Event

It is generally believed that much of the physical properties of the universe were not fixed for the first 10 exp -30th of a second following the big bang. When you think about the state of chaos that was unfolding in the instants prior to that moment, it MUST qualify as a “Key Event”. While the forces are probably the same, their relative strengths could easily vary.

The first phases of the superhero campaign for which this physics was derived took place in a world much like our own, at least so far as the physics was concerned. The most recent phases, which have occupied the last nine years or so of play, have taken place primarily in an alternate dimension in which the Weak nuclear force was just a little weaker, making fusion reactions more likely, and making stars a little hotter and a fraction more short-lived. This in turn had effects on the climate and geography of the Earth, and that influanced the sociology, and that influanced the history. And yet, despite a variant history and politics and even an additional habitable landmass, and sentient dinosaurs running around South America, it was still very recognisably an alternate earth with recognisable elements. In terms of technology, they were ahead of the standard in some areas, and behind in others (for reasons that I’ll go into in the next section).

Far stranger worlds become possible. It’s simply a matter of deciding what change you want, identifying what might cause that change, and backtracking, as described in Part 2 of the Pursuit Of Perfection series, then working forwards to discover the other ramifications of that change.

The next phase of the campaign is set in “Dimension Regency”, in which the British Empire is the Dominant Superpower, far moreso than the US is in ours. It has conquered most of the western world, and has never fallen; only the Far East and parts of the Middle East are not part of the Empire. When I set about analyzing the changes that I wanted to make in the sociology and history of the world, I eventually backtracked my way to the signing of the Magna Carta and the circumstances of the time. A minor change there, making the King a little more inspired in his perceptions and approach to the problems, and the outcome became subtly different. And that subtle difference became a significant difference, and then a major difference, and then a sweeping global change. And yet, for all the changes, some things remained constant; there was still a World War II, there was still a Napoleon Boneparte and a French Revolution, there was still a Michael Jackson and a Princess Diana and a Live Aid.

Why is this so important? Why is it such an advantage? Because, it creates a recognisable world for the PCs to live in while preserving the mystery and allure of the unknown. The shape of history may be unchanged, but the all-important context and detail are radically different. The Players can easily grasp the changes and their consequences, but at the same time things are similar enough in many ways for them to just play.

The ‘Key Man’ Principle of Alternate History

I operate on the principle that a genius is always a genius, and will make whatever the next breakthroughs are in their chosen field of study. If Isaac Newton doesn’t invent calculus because the algebraic tools are not in existance for him to do so, he will come up with those tools so that the genius who made the next mathematical breakthrough in our world can do so. Similarly, in any world in which he is born, Napolean Boneparte will play a key role in history – whether it be as the leader of a failed revoltion or as a great General in the service of the British Empire, or whatever.

Key Men (and women) remain Key Men (and women).

If someone has the drive and charisma to become a leading political figure, they will still become a leading political figure in some way. In Dimension-Halo, where the recent superhero campaign has been set, that led to President Joseph McCarthy and a specialised law-enforcement division, the S.I.D., whose mandate was to seek out and eliminate unamerican activities.

Again, this serves to make the alternate world accessable to the players. They know from our own history who to look at.

Free Will

These two principles, in turn, dictate how free will relates to the force labelled “Will” in the previous part of this article. In fact, Will can be defined as the sum of individuals’ intents multiplied by the opportunities to express those intents. Which means what exactly? Well, it means that one person with enough intent, and the opportunity to act on that intent, can change history, or a lot of people with intent but less opportunity can have the same effect.

The Key Man principle is an expression of the first part of that statement, and the Key Event principle is an implication of the second.

Uncertainty & Randomness

Chaos Theory came along after the original draft of this physics was written, but did not violate it, because there was always a mechanism by which random chance operated to create uncertainty.

Edwin Hubble was the first to derive , which states that galactic objects are receding from earth at a speed proportionate to the distance from the Earth. When combined with the theory of relativity, which forbids objects with mass from travelling faster than the speed of light, Hubbles’ Law defines a volume of space around a point beyond which no information is observable – so far as physics is concerned, nothing can exist outside of the .

Now, as it happens, I have a couple of serious bones to pick with both of these theories. First, Hubble’s law is just plain WRONG, as quoted, because it takes time for the information concerning these objects to reach us. To be accurate, it should read, “Galactic objects appear to be receding from earth at a speed proportionate to their distance from the Earth”. In fact, the closer to the edge of the hubble sphere you look, the closer to the big bang you are looking. In effect, the hubble volume appears to define the wave front of the big bang – which in turn means that there can be nothing physically beyond it, because that wave front defines the edge, in physical space, of the universe. And therefore, nothing from beyond the hubble limit can affect anything within it – because there IS nothing beyond it.

But there CAN be something beyond the hubble limit – it’s just that whatever IS beyond it can’t be directly physically percieved, because it lies OUTSIDE THIS UNIVERSE. Consider the diagram:

It’s clear that there is an overlap. Certainly, anything within that overlap can be physically affected by an object or force that is both within the Extreme Point’s Hubble Volume but outside our Hubble Volume. And certainly, something from outside our Hubble Volume can enter it, aparrantly created spontaniously at the edge of our observable universe and moving inwards.

So the hubble volume does NOT define the totality of the universe – just the part that can be observed directly by means of anything that is limited to the speed of light in a vacuum.

Changing The Speed Of Light?

Prior to the big bang, the universe was a lot smaller than it is now. For the sake of convenience, let’s say it was one light-minute across. Then the big bang takes place, and the wave-front of that explosion expands outwards at the speed of light. So, one second after the big bang, the universe is 62 light-seconds in diameter. If the hubble volume were what it has been popularly assumed to be, that would mean that the observable limit of the universe at that instant was 62 light-seconds away from the centre-point of the explosion. But that immediatly contradicts the basic premise of the hubble law, which would put the hubble volume as the volume defined by a radius of 1 light-second. Once again, the universe is a lot bigger than previously supposed; nothing else makes sense. The only alternative is for the speed of light to be sixty-two times what it is now – but that also increases the expansion rate of the wave-front, so the universe is STILL larger than the observable limit.

It just doesn’t add up. The only conclusion to be reached is that the speed of light is not as meaningful a limit as popular perception would have it – something that I’ll come back to in a little while.

The Size Of The Universe

So, defining the universe as the volume contained within the wave-front of the big bang leads to it being bigger than we can possibly observe. But it IS finite. And any event within its totality can affect the whole – gravitation, charge, etc. So, how precise is that wave front? Can anything affect it? What if the surrounding ‘other-space’ isn’t empty?

If a particle is within a quantum black hole, and quantum uncertainty states that the location of that particle can only be expressed as a probability until we interact with it to measure it’s actual location (collapsing the probability into a discrete value for that instant of time), then there must be a percentage of locations for that particle that lie outside the event horizon of that black hole. The particle is both within and outside the black hole at the same time. And that, in turn, alters the mass and size of the Black Hole in question, ie alters the gravitational slope of the shape of space in that region. Which means that past a certain limit, a quantum limit, gravitation is also fuzzy – it might be this or it might be that.

And that it turn means that quantum uncertainty demands a fuzzyness on the size of the universe – because otherwise there would need to be some sort of mechanism operating to ensure that a plus-quiver at this point is exactly balanced by a minus-quiver somewhere else. The only alternative to this improbable arrangement is for the dimensional boundary – the limits of space itself – to be quivering like a very stiff jelly. And that in turn yeilds Heisenburg’s uncertainty limit as a true universal constant.

If the universe gets bigger, it contains more space, and vice-versa. Another way for this to occur would be for discrete ‘packets’ of space to spontaniously enter our universe from the outside and for other discrete ‘packets’ to spontaniously dissappear into the outside. To and from where? What lies outside the universe?

Anything that is not on our temporal vector, that’s what.

Heisenburg Uncertainty, under the space-time model described in the second part of this series, derives from the expansion and shrinkage of space as individual quanta enter or pass through our time-line’s temporal vector. And if quanta can arrive from outside, then quanta in a particular arrangement can arrive from outside, and that means that travel from one time-line to another, or to a different point on that time-line, is possible. The structure of the 3-time-dimension 3-space-dimension model inherantly contains the potential for time travel. (And you wondered where I was going with this, didn’t you?)

Many Butterflies

The arrival of a time-traveller would increase quantum uncertainty by the ratio of the mass of the universe plus him over the mass of the universe without him. An increase that small is virtually undetectable, but it would be there.

But all sorts of quantum effects can cascade into macro-scale events – the butterfly effect, in other words. The probability of any given quantum event escelating to the point where it has larger, more noticeable, effects is very small – but there are so MANY quantum events poised right on the edge of falling one way or another that some of them will inevitably be changed in outcome by the arrival of a time-traveller.

The mere departure or arrival of a time-traveller at a sufficiently delicate critical event can be enough to change the outcome of that event.

Advanced electronic equipment frequently has to take into account Heisenburg Uncertainty and other quantum effects, eg in the design of the powerful CPUs in modern computers. That means that hi-tech electronics might be susceptable to interferance as a result of time-travel; the more time-travellers present, the more likely this is to occur, and the more severe the disruption. In theory, it would be possible to design a system of multiple processors constantly generating checksums or other complex numbers; from time to time, one of them will hiccough and give a wrong answer; in extremely rare cases, or in the case of poor design or outside interferance, it might even be possible for two or more to give wrong answers. But the more of them that go wrong at once, the more likely it is that a time-traveller has just arrived or departed from the local vicinity in space and time. The better you can shield this equipment from other sources of disruption, the more sensitive it can be made.

Relative Time Rates

Two timelines will never be in synch; time will always be flowing at a faster or slower rate in one relative to the other. Below is a simplified 2-D diagram illustrating the reasons:

The first diagram shows two timelines with different relative vectors, of equal internal time, ie the same length. Because of the relative angle, time actually passes faster in the green timeline than it does in the red, as shown in the second timeline, where the frame of referance has been rotated to set the red timeline on a baseline. Simple trigonometry can calculate the difference based on the relative angle – it comes to 1 / cos (a).

But wait a moment: if we again rotate the axes of our diagram, so that the green timeline is now the baseline, we would find that time was now passing faster in the red timeline than in the green! In fact, the rule of thumb is that everywhere is moving faster than you are! How can we make sense of this?

The answer is that in order to percieve the differences in time rates, you have to transit between the two, and that also takes percieved time within your base timeline- in effect, travelling along the timeline angled relative to the baseline AND THEN around the arc to the equivalent point in time.

That means that you can’t cheat time that easily. If you want to turn tonight’s last-minute cram session into two weeks of intensive srudy on a near-vertical timeline, you can – but by the time you have come and gone from the divergent time-vector, between two and four weeks will have passed on the base timeline, and you have missed the exam.

Sure, you could compensate for that by aiming for an arrival point after your field trip in time that was earlier on the base timeline – in effect, travelling from up and right to down and left on the second diagram – but that gets complicated too, because you are then spending even more time in transit, requiring a target time even earlier on the base timeline.

Of course, this is a vastly simplified diagram – real timelines would not be straight lines, they would twist and bend in three dimensions like snakes, and may even run in opposite directions for periods of time. So the actual relative time rate would very much be an average, and a short-term one at that.

Then throw in the fact that uncertainty means that the actual targets are just a little fuzzy around the edges, and it becomes impossible to precisely target a jump through time. There are ways around that, using the temporal equivalent of homing beacons – but there is still an element of unpredictability.

The more similar two timelines are, the closer together their relative angles will be, and the closer their time rates will match, and the more precisely a transition can be targetted; the more different they are, the greater the relative temporal vectors, and the harder it is. Think of a spear being hurled; would it be easier to hit a spot a precise distance behind the head if it were travelling at right angles to you, across your field of vision, or almost straight at you? The second spear is easier to hit but harder to be precise about where on it’s length the hit will occur.

In other words, the harder you try to exploit the system, the harder it is to succeed.

Relativity & Motion

A really good question to contemplate is whether or not there is a relativistic limit to the transmission of consequences down a timeline. I’ve seen – and employed, in different campaigns – both the no and yes cases, and have yet to see any reasonably convincing arguement either way. The difference between the two cases becomes interesting when a time traveller introduces a divergance from the recorded outcome of an event. Let’s look at each case seperately and see where the consequences take us:

Instantanious Development Of Consequences

This relies on all changes in temporal vector (ie outcome of events) starting small and accumulating with Development, ie with internal time. Taking a simple case as an example for our thought experiment, let’s say that our time traveller goes back in time one year and starts an object moving at half the speed of light – so that it is half a light-year away from where it was at the time of his departure. That all makes perfect sense, but now consider what an observer within that timeline would see: one instant, the object would be in it’s expected position, and the next, it would be half a light-year away, and the observer would have no memory of it NOT travelling away from its starting position over the last year. So far as the conditions within the timeline are concerned, the object has to instantly move half a light-year and acquire a velocity of half the speed of light – violating relativity in the process. An instant of discontinuity transforms the old timeline into the new.

And yet, there is uncertainty involved here. and the fuzzyness of quantum limits. That fuzzyness also aplies to the propogation of change down the timeline, and it means that the transition would NOT be instantanious – it would take a measureable interval of time within the timeline being altered, proportionate to the uncertainty limit multiplied by the period of time since the change. Using the reccommended value for the Planck constant (0.00000005) and the number of seconds in a year (aprox 3,1557,600) gives a 1.577 second transition effect – just long enough to percieve something happening before the universe settled into it’s new timeline. At ten years after the change, we’re talking 15.77 seconds, a seriously noticeable time – that is (of course) instantly forgotten as soon as the transition is complete. 100 years after the change, and the transition interval is 157.7 seconds – more than 2-and-a-half minutes.

And, here again is where things get interesting: If an individual were to decouple himself from his native time vector, ie start travelling in time, during that interval state, he would not be subject to the revision. He would remember the way things were, and remember the period of transformation.

This is the specific model that my superhero campaign uses. There are technological developments to delay or even isolate the characters from temporal divergance, but before these were developed by the characters, they had these sort of time-scales in which to react to the change in history.

Relativistic Limit to the Development of Consequences

But this is not the only possibility. What if there is a measurable propogation rate? What if it is faster, or slower? Or even non-linear? Well, for a start, if the propogation rate requires objects in 3D space to travel faster than the speed of light, there will still be a transition experience, just as there is in the instantanious model. This transition may be faster or slower than the instantanious model, but will usually be percieved for less time, making it less useful for warning that someone is manipulating the past. This is because some or all of the process will take place concurrent with the Development of the consequences – you don’t see the whole process, just the final crescendo.

Fortunately, there are alternatives if you can monitor the fixed location of a point from within the Time dimensions; when someone triggers a change, a wave of discontinuity will sweep down the Development event stream from the point of interferance. Usually, if you were to map the changes, it would look like this:

The point where our time-traveller has skewed the timeline is obvious; the orange timeline represents the outcome of his manipulations. It is also fairly clear that instead of doing something, he has prevented someone from doing something; the new timeline does not have as great a change in temporal vector. Nevertheless, the differences are subtle and not easy to spot; the change appears to have had minimal repercussions. It is only when looking at the second last points of divergance, where a radical outcome takes place, that the difference between the two timelines begins to look significant; the shape of the timeline at that point is somewhat different. Further ahead in time, both of those differences are accumulating development, and compounding apon each other, so there will be more changes as a consequence, until the shape of the timeline is completely different.

But, while this illustration is best for showing the actual change that has taken place, comprising a ‘before’ and ‘after’ superimposed, it does not really show the process very clearly. For that, a series of images showing the progression of the change is best:

Close to the point of divergance, the wave-front is small and the difference minor. In the second image, the wave-front of the change in history is larger and more substantial; and in the third, it is much larger and quite radical. But in each, there is a period of discontinuity, lasting zero time within the confines of the timeline – which experiences duration parallel to the timeline at that point – but which is quite obvious when viewed from the outside – and yet, if you weren’t monitoring that specific timeline for change, it would be very hard to spot it at all because of all the other timelines in the way.

Yes, believe it or not, the same basic timeline is depicted within this illustration. But it’s not in the foreground, it’s buried under 120,000 other timelines. I KNOW it’s there, because I put it into the picture, but even I would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly WHERE.

The consequences of this submodel are that within a timeline, you cannot do anything to undo a change in history, because it is effectively instantanious; to protect yourself, you have to actually posess an independant frame of referance, insulating you from the change to history.

But, of course, your absence will cause other changes to history – so the only safe agents to recruit would be those who are about to die. I actually designed a campaign called The Timekeepers based on this premise, some years back.

Relativity Is Not Sacrosanct

Of course, Relativity is something that can be ignored within a game at need. But I actually have a couple of doubts about relativity being interpreted correctly in the real world that bear mentioning at this point.

One of the cornerstones of Einsteinian relativity is that “there are no priviliged frames of referance”. You can’t look at a situation without interacting with that situation, you can’t be on the outside looking in. This theory of time enlarges the scope of where a frame of referance can be located, but the bottom line remains.

So, let’s postulate a quick thought experiment to reveal the flaws in the interpretation of the General Relativity of Relativity, using one of the most famous implications, Time Dilation.

A spacecraft leaves earth and accellerates to a speed not far short of the speed of light, travels at that speed for a while, then decelerates to a stop relative to the Earth. Time compresses for the pilot, so that where ten or a hundred or a thousand years may have passed on earth, perhaps only a year or two have passed for the pilot. So says the conventional interpretation.

How does the universe know who is accellerating?

Surely it is just as valid to say that the spacecraft is standing still relative to the earth, and that it’s the rest of the universe that is accellerating away from it, then maintaining a speed relative to the spacecraft of just under the speed of light, and then decelerating to a rest state relative to the spacecraft?

In which case, it is the Earth which experiences compressed time, and whose clocks run more slowly, and in which only a year or two passes, and the spacecraft which experiences decades or more!

But hold on a moment – how do we Know how much time the other party experiences? Answer we don’t – we only know what the other part of the mind experiment appears to experience, while it is happening.

If time is aparrantly shortened for one, it is aparrantly shortened for both – and if you divide the distance travelled by the aparrant time taken according to both sides you end up with a velocity faster than the speed of light.

It is my contention that all the aparrant paradoxes that emerge from General Relativity derive from the false assumption that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and that it is those paradoxes that demonstrate that the assumption is false.

Einstein himself said that he came up with that limit because anything else led him into paradox. But you get similar answers if you take the analagy of mail being carried across the ocean by ship as being the limiting speed of communications – if nothing can travel faster than the ship, then any method of conveying information faster than that produces paradoxes of the same type that Einstein described as justifying the absolute limit to speed.

And yet, testing seems to show that the time and mass effects of travelling at high speed are real – these equations have to work or particle accellerators would not function. This conundrum seems like a paradox until you realise that, once again, the equations aren’t telling us anything about how the world looks from the point of view of the particle being accellerated.

The Lorentz transformations are all about the apparant effects on one of the parties as percieved by the other – not about what really happens. If this were not true, it would be easy to accellerate subatomic particles to the point where there apparant mass would crush them into black holes – and even if these decayed almost immediatly through pair production, what emerged would bear no resemblance to what was there before, which would be obvious when examining the artifacts that result from firing these accellerated particles – and it just doesn’t happen.

So the reality would seem to be that the “light barrier” is no barrier at all – if we just knew how to get there.

Transfers of Energy

The ability to forge ‘connections’ between two different timelines is implicit in the concept of a time-traveller leaving his timeline and entering another one. The likelyhood that these two timelines would be at exactly the same energy potential is extraordinary low; almost certainly, one will be at a higher entropy level than the other.

In our space-time, at the current moment, there are compact clumps of energy surrounded by a relative desert. If one end of the ‘time-tunnel’ were placed in space – a suitable location for travel along it – then energy would tend to flow from the higher potential to the lower. Stick the other end in a timeline that has reached heat death, and you can start pumping energy out of that timeline. This would lower the energy potential in the region immediatly around the far end of this ‘energy tap’; in effect, entropy has been reversed in that world, however briefly.

On the other hand, if a world that was facing imminant heat-death were to stick the far end of such an energy tap into the core of a star in our timeline, the local energy levels in the star would be far higher than that of the heat-death-world; energy would flow into the heat-dead world that was not there previously. Of course, this might well have adverse affects on the star in question!

The fact that thermodynamically, these concepts mean that the universe is no longer a closed system makes many things possible that would otherwise be unimaginable.

What Lies Between

If time consists of 1-dimensional strings vibrating in three dimensions of time and fraying into an infinite number of other 1-dimensional strings, the question has to be asked: what lies in between?

It would be a strange realm, where motion exists without time. And yet, any interruption to the biochemical and bioelectric processes of life would be lethal, and without time, there would be no opportunity for perception, let alone for reaction or interaction.

But can matter exist without time? Matter without motion is matter at absolute zero, and that is not possible according to the best theory going. The only solution that makes sense – aside from the whole thing being impossible – is for any matter removed from a particular space to retain the temporal vector that the space of origin had at the moment of departure from it. Carrying your own internal frame of referance, you can percieve what’s out there, you can react and interact.

So what can someone do without motion that takes time? Because “taking time” is the equivalent of moving, within this strange realm.

The answer is that you can think. The same forces that were indentified in the previous part of this series are in play; and that means that Development tries to wash you downstream, while Will permits you to ‘swim’ across, or even against, the current.

Adopting A Popular Model

The model of time travel that has been presented here glosses over a lot of nuts and bolts, in the interest of making the concepts more universally accesable, but there is enough meat there that it can be adapted to any system.

But there are other models out there that can be used, or to which these concepts can be adapted. These are works that have been formative in my thinking about time travel, and about how to use it in RPG plots, and I commend them to anyone who’s interested in doing so.

And in presenting this list, this series comes full circle; it started off as intended for the June 2010 Blog Carnival, about which media had proven inspirational, and so it ends. It’s especially appropriate that be the case when we’re talking about time travel…!

Print Referance & Inspiration

Three books stand out for me as especially valuable. There are others that could also be mentioned, but these are the cream of the crop.

• Thrice Apon A Time – James P Hogan
• The Proteus Operation – James P Hogan
• The End Of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Movie Referance & Inspiration

Some of these are better than others, but they can all serve as the springboards for ideas. As with books, there are others that could be mentioned, but these are the pick of the litter.

• ‘Groundhog Day’
• ‘The Final Countdown’
• ‘The Philadelphia Experiment’
• ‘Time After Time’
• The ‘Terminator’ trilogy – Movie I, Movie II (Judgement Day), III (Rise Of The Machines)
• The ‘Back To The Future’ trilogy
• ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’
• ‘Freejack’
• ‘Timecop’
• ‘Twelve Monkeys’

TV Referance & Inspiration

Most of these are available in one form or another on DVD, but you may need to buy multiple sets.

• Dr Who
• The Time Tunnel
• Catweazle
• Quantum Leap
• Seven Days
• Star Trek (selected episodes)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (selected episodes)

Referance & Links to more

Finally, a couple of stops that should be useful to anyone interested in this topic:

New prize added - copies of the Left Hand of God

To celebrate upcoming Issue #500 for Roleplaying Tips we’re holding a contest.

RPT reader Daniel at www.steamcrow.com said we should do 500 of something, such as 500 random city encounters. That’s pretty ambitious, but it sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it.

I’ve got some prizes lined up, as well, to further celebrate.

How We’ll Get to 500

Send in city encounters 1-3 sentences long. Any genre is welcome, no game rules required. Each encounter should contain some conflict to make it interesting to play.

For example:

• A poisonous animal has slipped into a potter’s store and the owner hires the PCs to kill or capture it without breaking any of his wares that line walls and shelves.
• A shadow demon is summoned to assassinate a bard during a performance. The bard sings of the mistakes, ineptness and evil deeds of the PCs. Do they intervene when the attack happens?
• A nervous merchant hires the PCs to escort him and a wagon load of goods to the port where his customer waits. Thieves wait until mid-way through the exchange to take advantage of the chaos of port crowds and potential argument of whose gold was just stolen – did the exchange take place before the attack or not?

Prizes

The theme for prizes this time is “take your pick.”

• NBOS software. Winners pick which product they receive.
• Kobold Guide to Game Design. Winners decide if they want volume 1, 2, or the just released volume 3. (PDF)
• GM Mastery books. Take your pick of Inn Essentials, Holiday Essentials or NPC Essentials. (PDF)
• Penguin Books has also contacted me and are offering copies of the new fantasy novel, Left Hand of God. How cool is that?

The contest closes July 20. Multiple entries give you more chances to be randomly drawn for a prize. Plus, if 100 RPT fans submit just 5 entries each, 500 entries should be a snap! Let’s try to hit 500 random city encounters to celebrate RPT #500.

Email your entries now.

Eureka 501 Plots

How do you organize your plot notes so you are on top of the details? In my Riddleport campaign, I have several plots hatching, and I would find tracking them difficult without using my plot stat block. It does not matter if you use Obsidian Portal, another wiki, a notebook or Post-Its; you must find a way to outline your plots to keep yourself sane. A short stat block is my recipe for sanity.

I have recently updated my plot stat block. Engine Publishing sent me a copy of Eureka 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters. The book has plots for fantasy, sci-fi and horror. It is a great book. Each plot listing follows a template. This consistency lets you scan, compare and assess plots for your games nicely. Using a plot stat block for yourself gives you the same benefits.

Eureka adds a Tag feature to plots. These are keywords that describe properties of the plots so you can quickly find the type of plot you need, as all tags are indexed at the back of the 300+ page book. For example, dungeon crawl, city, intrigue. I did not have a keyword feature in my plot stat block before I read Eureka, but I do now. Thanks to the digital tools I use to help me GM, tagging is a natural and valuable add-on.

I am happy to change the stat block to accommodate more useful properties. So I look forward to your comments about what might be missing from the stat block, or what could be improved.

The plot stat block

• Plot name
• Synopsis
• Why is this plot fun?
• Truths and lies
• Adversaries
  • Adversary name
  • Adversary goals
  • Adversary resources
• Notable NPCs
• Notable locations
• Notable items
  • PC wish list
• Critical path
  • End conditions
  • Grand finale
• Plot twists
• Detailed description
• Plot hooks
• Keywords
• Plot log

Overview

The stat block makes some assumptions to keep it focused on managing your plots. Your game system, campaign and global setting already exist. Each plot works within these pre-established game elements. It also assumes you have more than one plot, be it character-based plots, side quests, back-up plots or what have you. If you have just a single plot, it then becomes your campaign, but the stat block is missing some items that I would add for campaign level planning. The block pays off most when multiple plots work beside each other at different stages.

Block elements are ordered based on best ongoing reference. You can fill elements out in any order as you plan and design and play. Too often tools of this nature get optimized for the design stage instead of the operating stage when you need to use it in-game or during planning time. For example, plot hooks are near the bottom because once the players are hooked, you will not need those again.

The block also does not go into design detail for each element. Read the archives here for help on designing specific game elements, and our other website, roleplayingtips.com, has more even tutorials and tips. Plus, stay tuned for future posts that delve into more help on fleshing out specific items within the plot block.

Plot stat block details

Plot name: Give it a compelling name you can use publicly so your group gets excited about it as well.

Synopsis: 1-2 sentences describing what the plot is about. When juggling multiple threads, this will remind you what the plot is about. If you make the synopsis inpsirational, it will also put you in the right frame of mind when GMing or planning it.

For example: “Three-way drow civil war gives topside an opportunity to vaquish their ancient foe once and for all. But Lloth is merely thinning the herd and will wield the victorious side against Riddleport once its wounds have been licked.”

Why is this plot fun? It is easy to get lost in the details and planning and execution, and to forget the big purpose of the plot, which is to entertain you and your players. Write a note here about why this plot thread will be fun to play so you can refer back to it often and remind yourself of what’s most important.

Truths and lies: This can be a fun and simple random rumours table (with T and F noted per entry) or a more complex listing of facts followed up by washed information and disinformation.

Adversaries: I prefer the term adversary over villain because opponents in your plots can break out of the typical villain mould. For example, the PCs might learn their opponent the whole time has been the paladin PC’s parents who were (over) protecting their beloved son. Another example is a volcano; just a non-intelligent force the PCs must contain in a man-against-nature plot.

Where applicable, provide basic information about each foe:

Adversary name

Adversary goals

Adversary resources: What does the foe have at his disposal to achieve his aims? Money, gangs, sensitive information?

The stat block assumes you have full write-ups about key NPCs elsewhere. Listing who they are, what they want and how they can get it here gives you a nice overview of options at any given time.

Notable NPCs: Other than PCs and adversaries. Name + Role is sufficient. For example, Early – neighbourhood blacksmith, potential ally, has exotic item contacts.

Notable locations: Some regions are mandatory adventure areas, such as a villain’s home base. Other locations are notable because they make awesome potential encounter areas or are related to important plot details.

Notable items: Magic items, relics, exotic items, and anything that has a name. For example, the first time the PCs fought sahuagin, which launched that plot, they took several of their tridents as loot and then flashed them around town. Word of the Sea Devil Forks spread and these became a notable item I added to my stat block.

PC wish list: I ask players what treasure and rewards they would love to get their hands on. Answers are usually types of magic items, but I occasionally get requests for rare spell components, exotic equipment, pets and followers. If a player ever requests you deliver a feeling, emotion, certain scene or character personality-based encounter, praise them heartily. Normally everyone is all about the bling.

Critical path: Before you unleash your plot, you at least need to know if the PCs can solve it or resolve it. Lay out the steps, phases, acts, chapters or whatever method you use to plan plots here. For example, if using the three act structure, list the acts and their scenes. The path should not straightjacket you or the PCs. Use it to ensure a great finish is possible, but expect to react to gameplay and change plans as you go.

Also use the critical path for a sanity check when too many details float in your head and you cannot think how to keep the plot moving forward or cannot keep the plot straight.

How many campaigns have you run? How many have reached a conclusion? Your critical path should have two sub-items to help you improve your chances of finishing more campaigns – end conditions and grand finale. You can hang your hat on completed campaigns, they give you more GM confidence and they increase player interest in gaming long-term.

End conditions: How can the plot end? Include successes and failures.

Grand finale: Use this just to store ideas for awesome climactic encounters. Avoid scripting the final encounter until it becomes a for sure thing, then do extra planning to make it powerful and memorable. Until that time though, note potential ways the plot could end in epic fashion. Use these ideas to gently steer things to increase the odds of one of your cool ideas triggering.

Plot twists: Put surprises here whether they are a for sure thing or just an idea. Also good to note: red herrings and misdirections.

Detailed description: List out all the gory details here including background and story so far. Use this to help you with consistency. I GM myself into a corner by add-libbing details then realize between sessions I have logic errors with the game played to date, or I have created a knot of details that have to be reconciled somehow. Figuring out the facts and truth ahead of time gives you more power when GMing.

Plot hooks: At least three ways the PCs will get attracted to this plot and then actively engaged with it.

Keywords: Tags that let you reference plots for filtering, sorting, triggering and re-use. More useful if you put your stat blocks in software with a keyword or tagging feature.

Plot log: Notable facts and events that relate to the plot. I list session # and in-game date, then describe the event. Often this covers faction actions in response to PC activities. I did not log much in the past, but since reading Mike’s posts I have come to see the value in tracking factions and plot-related details. Plus Riddleport has many plots and factions, so the logs help me refresh what is going on. Updating the logs also help me plan for the future in a lightweight way.

Download the plot stat block as a template

PDF RTF

.| Spiral |. by Clix

The first part of this article looked at two simplistic solutions to the question of how to handle time travel in RPGs, and found that as they stood, neither was satisfactory. A number of readers were kind enough to write in, suggesting additions that could be made to these two solutions to make them more practical for game purposes. This second part will start to examine the metaphysics that I developed for use in my superhero campaign back in the early 1980s, extracting the general requirements of a good solution to the initial problem; when collected, these can be used as a road map to take the work out of creating an interpretation of time travel that is unique to each campaign.

We start by looking at what Time actually IS.

Physical Forces Equivalents

I started out by thinking of time as ‘the fourth dimension,’ and of events as points in motion within that fourth dimension. That let me think about time by way of a more familiar analagy, that of the forces and phenomenta that operate on objects in the physical world – momentum, inertia, accelleration, velocity, etc.

This approach proved very useful as a starting point, so much so that I went further and postulated that time was actually a three-dimensional environment with changes taking place along a given axis of space. This made the analagy even more one-to-one. I named these dimensions Time, Duration, and Extent, though I was never completely satisfied with those names.

What we, in the normal dimensions of space, experience as the passage of time is simply motion along a vector within this three-dimensional time. In the physical universe, energy maifests primarily as matter; in the temporal realm, energy manifests as ‘Events’.

This also made describing the temporal realm far easier – a timeline wasn’t just a convenient graphic device, it was a literal cartoonist’s-sketch of the reality, a diagram representation of what would actually be “percieved” by an observer.

So, that leads to the first requirement: a good time-travel system will make it easy for the GM to visualise and describe the environment, and especially the relationship between events. And to the second: it will provide a metaphor for changes in the succession of events that can be easily understood.

The list of equivalent forces that I derived are:

• Development is analagous to Entropy
• Pull is analagous to Gravity
• Will is analagous to Charge
• Selection is analagous to the Strong Nuclear Force
• Affinity is analagous to the Weak Nuclear Force
• Persistance is analagous to Inertia
• Option is analagous to Polarity

Development

This ‘force’ parallels Entropy; it is the temporal force that leads to the occurance of all events that can possibly occur at a given instant. As an event is influanced by increasing Development, it becomes possible to alter the configuration of the outcome of the event with greater control and precision, but it becomes harder to make broad, sweeping changes. This is the force that gives different timelines their different histories, and like the Heat-death that is associated with Entropy, eventually, the scope of possible change will become so small that even at a quantum level, nothing is uncertain.

Another way of looking at development is to see it as analagous to time in a physical description of events – you’ll see what I mean a little later.

Pull

Gravity holds large chunks of matter together; this force holds clusters of events together. The more closely-related two timelines are, the more Pull holds them together, eventually reaching the point where it becomes more or less meaningless to divide them – for example two timelines in one of which a specific radioactive atom decayed at a given instant and in the other, another within the same chunk of matter. To all intents and purposes, they are identical.

Will

Will provides an uncertainty about the outcome of an event experienced by any specific timeline. Just as Heisenburg’s Uncertainty shows that we can never be sure of exactly where any given subatomic particle actually is – just where it is most likely to be – so we can never be sure of the outcome of any event that is small enough to be subject to Will. And, just as the charge of a single electron is miniscule in the macroscopic world around us, but a lot of them can add up, so Will can accumulate. There’s be more to say later on this subject, under the heading of Free Will.

Selection

Selection is a sorting mechanism. Like the strong nuclear force, which arranges subatomic particles into atomic structures, this force sorts small events into chains of compound events, linking outcomes to preceeding events. It is Selection that permits minor events, which are subject to will, to accumulate into larger changes.

Affinity

Just as selection links changes in the probable outcomes of events, affinity links conditional events. Affinity manifests as Destiny – so, once again, there will be a lot more to say on the subject, later.

Will causes an unlikely outcome to manifest. Affinity forces that cause to have the appropriate effect. Selection links that effect with several others to form a macroscopic event, a Decision. Pull connects that Decision with many other outcomes to make timeline X distinct from timeline Y, in which a Different Decision was made. These will diverge in temporal dimension, ie have different temporal vectors, from the Event as an origin point – in other words, they will slowly spread out with increasing Development of the ramifications and consequences.

Persistance

While Will defies probability, occasionally selecting for a low-probability result, one small change doesn’t make a very big difference close to the initial event influanced by will. It takes Development for the ripples caused by that event to compound into a more significant change. The tendancy for a timeline to resist change is its Persistance.

Option

Like its equivalent, polarity, this phenomena has little effect except in extremes. Unless a great deal of Option is exerted, the effects are hard to detect. Also like its equivalent, it is probably the hardest to explain.

At its simplest, option is the force that rejects events from outside the space-time continuum, the safeguard of natural law. While that has multiple manifestations in a psuedo-science environment like a superhero campaign, or even in a ‘hard fantasy’ campaign, for the purposes of our discussion, another of its manifestations is more important: it is the force that resists time travel, trying to keep everything in its naturally-allotted temporal place.

This diagram illustrates everything. From condition (1), event A is 100% likely to happen. At event A, there are two possible outcomes, B and C, and both are equally likely. Outcome B inevitably leads to event F, while there is an analagous event, G on the C timeline, because the cause of those events lies before decision A. At event F/G, another cause-and-effect chain, DE interacts with the outcome of decision A to produce three possible outcomes; H and I are the most likely, respectively, but there is a slim chance in both cases that the interaction will result in outcome J. With further development, H becomes L, J becomes M, and I becomes N.

To take a more concrete example, F/G is a meeting, and A is a decision about who will attend to represent one faction.

K represents some external manipulation of the outcomes – enough that J might suddenly become the most likely result. If J represents the possibility of a spontanious explosion during the meeting, killing the participants, K might represent the planting of a bomb by a time-traveller – so that what was a 1% or less chance is suddenly a 99.9% near-certainty.

This diagram also depicts the temporal forces that have been discussed earlier. At A, a condition is set up by Will, that condition being the choice between options B and C. Affinity links events B/C to cause A. Selection keeps them apart. Pull combines cause-effect chain DE with events B & C to produce outcomes F and G, respectively. Persistance keeps the differences between F & G minimal; but those small differences interact with DE to expand those differences, widening the rift in outcomes as events are subject to Development. Exterior influance K can make the unlikely outcome J the most probable outcome, but only by overcoming the force of Option which states that without outside intervention, F will almost certainly become H, which in turn will almost certainly become L, and G will almost certainly become I, which in turn will almost certainly become N.

This model of time permits a rational discussion of time-travel by defining the “landscape” and the way events combine and interact.

The propagation of Consequences

A key question is how consequences progress down the timeline. There are a number of models that can be used as the basis of your description of time, and this criterion is one of the great distinguishing differences between them.

The many-worlds theory of time, in which every possible outcome is equally real, and those outcomes not experienced in a particular world are experienced in a parallel world, is one of the most popular, and it’s the one that I used back in the 80s. There are others – the serial model, which I have to admit I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around, for example, or the “threaded” one-timeline model of Thrice Apon A Time by James P. Hogan.

When you introduce a change in history, the timeline bends in a new direction. The bigger the change, the bigger the change in direction. It’s simple impact mechanics, the transfer of momentum. You can even see it at work in the diagram above – F&G are virtually indistinguishable because the Decision at A has not yet made any real impact. As soon as it does, the timelines start to diverge.

The same mechanisms also exists within the timeline, and be responsible for the propagation of consequences to events. Think of a timeline as a whole bunch of smaller timelines bouncing around inside a larger hollow tube; most of them will have no effect, but every now and then a whole bunch of them will be pushing in more or less the same direction at the same time, and the direction of the timeline will shift in response. This is the same mechanism that in the physical world translates quantum effects into large-scale effects.

The supposed ‘unified path of history’ is, on closer examination, a large number of possible paths, held together by the force of Persistance, which overcomes the weaker force of Selection which tries to push them apart, just as matter is held together despite atomic structure being basically a set of positively-charged clumps floating in a sea of negatively-charged electrons. You would expect the charges to prevent atoms from forming molecules, but it turns out that molecules are formed by relationships between electrons. You would expect molecules to repel each other (and they do) but gravity is enough to hold a bunch of them together.

So each supposed “Timeline” actually consists of a virtually-infinite number of virtually-identical timelines, distinguished by differences at the quantum level.

Application To Time Travel

So, with our model in place, let’s postulate a theoretical time-traveller from point L. He goes back in time and changes the outcome of event A, so that instead of it being a 50/50 proposition between choices B and C, a third option, D, suddenly results. As soon as he arrives prior to A, his existance creates a new set of alternatives – he’s either there, or he’s not. There can’t be as many time-travellers as there are timelines, because not all timelines will result in his discovery of a mechanism for time-travel.

Immediatly, the timeline at the point of his arrival will do a B/C-style division, between those timelines in which he arrives back in time and those in which he does not. From that point on, he can make any change he likes in the outcome of events and there will be No Paradox that results because his origins will always lie apon the set of otherwise-identical timelines in which he did NOT travel back in time. There is no grandfather paradox because the consequences of killing your own grandfather lie in an alternate world.

That’s not to say that some Other time-traveller can’t go back and change the outcome of events that are experienced by a particular world – the one in which the PCs lie. It does not prevent the PCs from travelling back in time in an attempt to undo that change. And each of these creates a new set of timelines – worlds in which the villain did not change history, worlds in which he did but was stopped by time-travelling PCs, worlds in which he did and the PCs failed to stop him, worlds in which the PCs never found an opportunity to stop him, worlds in which they didn’t try. You can have total ignorance of the outcome of events and still have a deterministic history.

The key to maintaining player satisfaction with the outcome of such time-travel is to ensure that a parallel-world version of the PCs is always at work in the PCs timeline, undoing any change. You pick and choose between these possible worlds as suits the needs of the campaign, and as provides the emotional fulfillment of the PCs. While you could have them go back in time, succeed in their mission to correct history, and return to find that nothing had changed because they weren’t operating in their timeline but in a parallel world, this would be unsatisfying to the players, so we don’t choose that world – it’s fully populated by NPCs. Choose The World That Works for your campaign.

Whenever the PCs attempt to rort the system using time travel, simply have them return not to the world they left, but to one in which the details of their situation are different, possibly worse.

What’s more, since you can switch between parallel worlds at the drop of a hat, this permits any retconning necessary within the campaign – you simply switch the timeline from the pre-retcon background to the post-retcon background.

Next Time: the next (and final) part of this article will expand on some of the implications of this model of time, and on a couple of variations that can be useful as tools for the GM.

Treasure your confidence

Confidence is key to having fun long term as a game master. Last week we covered several tips on how to become a confident GM, and this week we deliver more.

Collaborate

Say yes whenever possible. Get into the habit of building on player input and ideas instead of overwriting them. Pass ideas around so others can add to them. Be open minded, which means give ideas the benefit of the doubt, be objective, and do not let an initial negative emotional reaction stomp on the contributions of others.

That last one is most important. You are always allowed your emotions. Do not suppress them. We all have biases. Our brains are designed to assess, compartmentalize and categorize. “I like this. I do not like this.”

But do not let an initial emotional reaction rule you, either. “Is he challenging my authority? What a jerk. I’ll show him.” That is a legitimate reaction, but experience it and then let it pass. Get objective. Probe deeper. Your assumption is likely wrong. (If it is not, you have discovered an opportunity to work with that player to improve relations and get a better game out of it.)

Player feedback

Opinions are a double-edged sword. Great feedback buoys you. Negative feedback can be devastating as it gnaws away. Long term, your best bet is to acknowledge all feedback, consider all opinions as constructive criticism, but distance yourself from feeling one way or another about it. Be a scientist, and do not let others dictate your emotions.

There is a notable exception. Your players often have fun even during those sessions you think bombed. It is funny how that works, but consider how each of us lives in our own heads and imaginations. While you fret over logistics, balance, pacing, rules and a dozen other things, your players are roleplaying their characters (often with each other, do not forget), taking actions, exploring the unknown. They evaluate games differently than you. They have no knowledge of what is ahead, like you do. This sense of mystery and the unknown, without a feeling of responsibility for the game overall, completely re-frames the game’s experience for them. So do not superimpose your impression of session quality onto them.

For this reason, go ahead and get feedback when you think a session bombed. If your players do not surprise you by saying the session was great, they will at least never feel a session was as bad as it seemed behind the screen. In this case, getting feedback and feeling better about yourself is a great lift and confidence boost.

Fairness

Be fair with players, the game and yourself. A fair GM earns respect. Being fair and handling situations fairly gives you confidence about getting through tricky situations again in the future.

It is easy to say, be fair. But what does that mean? In my mind, it means:

• Manage expectations. Unrealistic expectations are unfair because they can never be met. It is an always-fail.For example, even the simple mistake of over-scheduling erodes confidence. You plot out a weekly or bi-weekly game that ends up happening monthly due to group schedules. It seems like there are more canceled games than played ones. A simple reset to a monthly schedule removes all the guilt and feelings of failure.
• Listen. You always learn more by listening instead of talking. Being fair means understanding all sides of an issue, and you need to learn from your players what their perspectives are before making judgment calls. Do not make assumptions. If the players are talking, listen, do not talk over them. If players are not talking then ask questions to get them talking.
• Be objective and avoid personal agendas. Not only do we all have biases as people and GMs, but those biases shift depending on if we are fresh or tired, alert or sugar crashed, neutral or parsing feedback. Catch yourself being selfish so you can stop. Put your players’ needs first, then serve your own. Be a referee.If you ever find yourself in a punishment mindset, stop immediately. Pinch yourself. Getting revenge, abusing authority and being petty kill fairness and confidence. When has punishment created a fun, happy, collaborative game environment?
• Do not favor one player or character over the others. I love wizards and barbarians, but I cannot neglect other PC types in planning or gameplay. New players should not be given less attention because I am not as familiar or comfortable with them.

Consistency

Another type of fairness, this item deserves its own tip. If you do something one way one time, keep doing it that way until you have good reason to change. If you change, communicate what is new to players before the situation comes up again, lest it feel arbitrary and unfair (in cases of bad news).

GM a lot so you develop your own style. Then stick with and hone that style as you enter a new phase of GMing. Similar to how a writer learns to find his own voice, which consequently draws readers to him who demand ever more wonderful content, GMs with a personal style conducive to fun gaming are popular and celebrated. The power of this comes in part from the consistent experience a style provides.

Admit mistakes, fix mistakes

If you cannot admit to making mistakes, you fear making them. Then a mistake becomes something to hide, a secret, a potential shame.

Instead, adopt an attitude of being an ever-improving game master who constantly tries and learns new things. Your art lies in the process, not the final result. You can admit to a mistake easily if you know it will get you closer to your goal. It stops becoming about you and instead is just a part of the process of great GMing. The mistake becomes a thing out in the middle of the table for everyone to ponder, talk about and benefit from instead of making it all about you.

When players know their GM makes mistakes gracefully, they in turn relax about their own foibles. Being on guard often means being on the attack or on the defensive to deflect all those bad feelings that come with blame and embarrassment. Graceful errors that are learning opportunities bring down everyone’s guard and the bad behaviours that come with it.

Use player input. For significant mistakes, put them out there for everybody to chew on and ask for comments. The scientist will learn from shared input. The student will learn from collective wisdom. The storyteller will get new ideas.

Have a rules plan

How will you approach game rules during the session? Figure this out, perhaps with player feedback, and communicate to the whole group to set their expectations – and your own. You will get confidence from knowing how this tricky aspect of the game will get handled.

You have several options you can mix and match:

• Be an expert. Option one: set expectations that everybody should look to you for rulings, first and final. Explain your thought processes to gain player understanding and trust. Being the expert offers faster gameplay due to fewer discussions, but when arguments do occur they tend to be polarized. Transparency in decision-making should help work things out amicably, though.
• Seek an expert. Option two: enlist one or more players knowledgeable with the rules to be your consultants. You can defer to them but reserve final ruling for yourself, like a benevolent dictator. A little slower because of the feedback gathering, I prefer this option. It engages those players with rules knowledge, rewards them and encourages them to stay on top of new rules and errata, and makes the process feel collaborative.
• Decide now, look up later. Option three: make a decision fast and verify or correct rulings between sessions to improve future gameplay. I also employ this one to keep the game moving instead bogging it down with research.For rulings with high stakes, we pause briefly, get opinions and give experts a chance to find the needed rules fast. If we cannot get a reference within thirty seconds or so, I make a ruling and ask for objections. Minor objections are either allowed to modify my ruling or are declined with an explanation of how I reached my decision. Last, we note this ruling in the session log and agree to rule future situations similarly until an official ruling becomes available.

  Whew. It sounds like a tricky process, but it takes us just moments now. Thanks to my ongoing attempts at fairness and consistency, even players who disagree with a ruling are not upset because they know rulings are not a science, that I aim to be fair, it is not personal, and they can research between sessions to fix things, if possible.

• Reference now, get it right. Option four: put in the time to learn the right decision for more consistent gaming. Landing on a ruling by personal decision or group consensus represents a new house rule. This opens up the possibility of rule conflicts and further discussions. It requires documenting the new rules as well, which for some groups is an issue.Avoid all this with due diligence during games. Play stops until you find the ruling or piece all the factors together to get to an official rule (i.e. figuring out a final bonus taking into account all the numbers, stacking rules, errata and exceptions). Rulings are generally solid, and there is no need to create a corpus of house rules to also factor into future rulings.

Create a small number of specific goals

My final bit of advice on how to be a confident GM. Many game masters sabotage themselves by pursuing an unachievable objective. “Be a great storyteller.” That is a common one. The mistake lies in not knowing when you finally achieve that goal. You never feel like you arrive, so you grow frustrated, then despair, then give up.

Create several small objectives for yourself. Then pick one or two to work on each session. This makes improvement manageable. You cannot focus on more than a couple improvement items at a time, so pick two and work on them, perhaps for several sessions or even a whole campaign.

Make each of these objectives specific. You need to know when you have achieved success. This means figuring out what success looks like before you even decide to tackle the goal. Envision what GMing will be like with your goal achieved. What will be different? Make notes on what will change and how.

Use SMART as a simple planning template

Specific – What exactly will success look like?

Measurable – Try to quantify the goal. Count a certain type of error, time an event or process, or personally rate how something went. For example, run a whole combat without forgetting to use any planned foe tactics.

Actionable – You need to be able to take specific actions to reach your objectives. If you cannot do anything about the goal, it does not make sense to place your hopes and confidence on luck. For example, make a player less tired. You cannot control their rest and health, though perhaps you can affect this with snack choice in sessions.

Realistic – The goal must be within the realm of possibility. Be realistic about constraints. GMing every day might be compelling, but unrealistic for you. :)

Time – Give yourself a deadline. Goals without an end date tend to dissipate. Worthwhile goals will have a period I call The Grind in them. The excitement of starting has worn off and the light at the end of the tunnel has yet to appear. A deadline helps you get through this period by motivating you to keep at it, even though it does not feel like you are making progress.

Start with a couple of small, easy goals. Complete them quick to build momentum. This gives you confidence to try more ambitious wishes (always try to break big goals down into small and achievable ones, for these reasons).

Perhaps goal one is to create an encounter hook the actually PCs grab onto. Goal two is an encounter with a successful hook and where the PCs choose to parley, at least for a round. Goal three is an encounter with a successful hook and that resolves entirely through parley, as designed.

Becoming a confident GM is a SMART goal, but a tricky one because the achievement is a feeling. It is hard to measure. I can see the deadline day arriving for you and you ask, am I confident yet? How about now? Now?

Instead, I would pick and choose from the tips in this article and turns those into SMART goals. Focus on the steps of the process and let the ultimate objective take care of itself.

Confidence is a strange beast. You see professional athletes lose their confidence all the time. Confidence comes and goes. Enjoy it while it is here. Hang onto for as long as possible. And when it goes, return to this article and do the basics again. Confidence will come back.