Extract from 'The Persistence Of Memory' by Salvadore Dali

When writing my submission to the June 2010 Blog Carnival, A Medley Of Inspiring Media, I said that Time Travel was a special case. This article started off as just another section of that Blog Post, but quickly showed signs of growing into another of those monster subjects requiring a multiple-part post to completely contain the discussion. Rather than obscure the message of the first post, I have chosen to excerpt the subject completely. The subject title I’ve chosen anticipates that, in fact, this discussion is going to grow beyond any reasonable limits.

We don’t usually tell players, but we GMs know that a lot of the time we can decide the basics of a subject and fill in the blanks as we go along without it making a lot of difference. Combat, plot, characterisation, politics – this is true of all of them to at least some extent. The more experience we have, the more easily we can create a lot of soup from some fairly bare bones. Naturally, it’s not the best way to go about our craft, just as a great cook will do even better with some top-quality ingredients – but if we were able to take as much time as we wanted/needed in game prep, we might only play once or twice a year! Possibly less often.

Inherantly, game prep is a compromise between the ideal preperation and no preperation at all, usually dictated by external factors (which dictate how much time we have available to use) and the remorseless approach of a deadline. Something has to give, in such a situation; the artistry of Gming comes in making sure the cracks don’t become evident to the players.

Time Travel is not like that – at all. There are so many questions of a critical nature that the subject raises immediatly to which the GM needs answers – so much so that the temptation is always to fall back on a prepared set of stock answers and fudge around with the inevitable compatability issues some other time, unless Time Travel is central to the game itself.

Questions like: Can you travel into the past? Can you travel into the future? Can you come back again? Can you change the outcome of events? Can you come back again? Will you remember anything that you learned? How does random chance operate at a cosmic level? How does free will work? Is there any such thing as destiny? What does it feel like when someone changes the past? How can you be protected from the event? Can you undo the change? Can you use time-travel to evade inconvenient facts of real-world physics like the speed-of-light limit? How can your answers provide challenge and plot for the PCs? And how can they avoid the PCs rorting the system ahem exploiting time travel to gain a game-wrecking advantage?

If you are going to rely on stock answers, having a broad repetoire of them at hand is always a good thing – and that’s where the connection to the Blog Carnival comes in. But having those answers on-hand also provides a short-cut to creating your own unique set of answers, and that can be invaluable.

Why Do It?

Why would you do it? Why permit time travel in the first place?

There are a lot of good reasons. First, it gives the GM another source of interesting challenges for the PCs to overcome, and permits a different type of scenario, always good for breaking up a monotony. It gives a repetoire of interesting characters for the PCs to interact with. It’s frequently a staple ingredient of a genre. It permits a ‘holiday’ in a different environment, enabling the GM to utilise plotlines that simply don’t fit the mood of the contemporary game. By providing a contrast, it can enable the GM to shed expository light on key aspects of that contemporary game without a lot of exposition. And, lastly, it’s just plain fun a lot of the time!

Simplistic Answers: The Superman Solution

This stock answer stems from DC Comic’s Superman in the Golden and Silver Age. It states that the past is immutable, and a time-traveller is essentially a disembodied spirit who can only observe events and never interact with them. On the face of it, this is a solution that marks a lot of those difficult questions as ‘out of bounds’ and hence makes the GM’s life easier. If the past can never be changed, the GM never has to work out the consequences of those changes, there can never be any paradoxes for him to unravel, and he can just get on with the main plot.

It won’t take long for the shortcomings of the solution to manifest themeselves. There’s no drama, no conflict, no story. That’s a massive negative all on its own. But wait – it gets worse. It provides an easy way for the PCs to gather information at no risk to themselves, undermining one of the central sources of adventure in the PCs contemporary era.

Adopting this answer brings other unwanted baggage. It implies that it is possible to go into the future and interact with events, and DC had Superboy doing just that, by becoming a member of the Legion Of Superheros – even learning the outcome of events in the future of the contemporary era. But no member of that future era can ever come back and change events, according to the basic answer – and that means that the PCs can never go home again.

Unless the PCs are somehow priviliged – perhaps they carry their own temporal framework with them. But that logic, in effect, undoes the entire premise of the basic solution because every time traveller is coming from their contemporary era.

The longer you think about this particular solution, the more holes and problems become aparrant with it; this is not a simple answer, it’s a simplistic answer that will eventually leave the GM up a creek without a paddle. For example, think about the free-will-vs-destiny debate in this context for a moment. Since the past is always past for someone, there can be no such thing as free will, and everything is predestined. Nothing sucks the life out of a game faster than making the whole thing an immutable plot train. Even stating that everything that happens is predestined to happen, and neither you nor the PCs know what is predestined – which avoids the plot train problems – is less than satisfactory.

In fact, every possible permutation of exceptions to the basic restriction ends up raising the question of why this person or these persons gets an exception.

Ultimately, in the interests of taking all the hard work out of Time Travel for the GM, this saddles him with all the problems of time travel and none of the benefits. It’s not just a Simplistic solution, it’s a Bad Solution.

Simplistic Answers: The Marvel Answer

The first refuge of GMs who confront the shortcomings of the early DC solution is to go to the opposite extreme, and adopt the Marvel Answer – which (in essence) states that History is fluid, the past can be changed by anyone with both the ability and the will to do so, but which provides no physics to describe the capability.

That works to some extent in a comic book, because the writers can simply not have the primary characters exploit the advantages that time travel offers, filing it under ‘things man was not meant to know’, ‘knowledge too dangerous to use’, or ‘didn’t think of it at the time’. In fact, it works so well that DC have virtually adopted a variation of it themselves, in more modern times. This was also used, in a slightly more sophisticated way, in the Back To The Future trilogy.

Can you really picture PCs exercising such self-restraint? I can’t.

Before you know it, you will have PCs dropping off to some other point in the time stream to put in a few extra days/weeks/months/years of study and planning. This answer completely negates the tension of the game; any PC who is caught unprepared for anything has not been doing enough time travel! The moment a PC feels a need to know how to do something, he putters off to some past era and a safe location to put in a few day’s hard study – and then expects this to be reflected in his character’s skill levels.

If the GM doesn’t meet that expectation, the ability of the players to suspend disbelief is massively undermined. If the GM does, it sucks the challenge out of the campaign.

And it still leaves the GM with those hard questions to consider. In virtually any modern-day campaign that enables time travel, one of the first questions is ‘Why don’t we go kill Hitler before WWII’?

How about the introduction of modern technology into the past? This issue has been at the heart of many time-travel stories, starting with A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, to such an extent that the time travel capability itself is just a vehicle to enable the story to take place!

What happens if the PCs change their personal histories? Do their abilities instantly change as a result? Can you see PCs – heck anyone – not taking advantage of that?

Unfettered time travel is just as big a curse as the first Simplistic Solution. It evades the questions by not asking them, not by providing solutions.

Wanted: A Game Metaphysics

Clearly, what’s needed is something in between. Time travel needs inherant consequences that limit its usefulness and its impact on the campaign. We need some sort of metaphysics that is at least rigorous enough to answer some of those tricky questions, because it will ultimately be more work not having one.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll start to discuss – in detail – the game metaphysics that I came up with for my superhero campaign, Zenith-3, back in the early 80’s, and which has been robust enough that it’s still in use today. As I do so, I will extract the requirements of any good solution to the general problem, and suggest some alternatives. Ultimately, the goal will be to develop a ‘road map’ for GMs to follow that will take most of the work out of creating their own solutions to the questions of time travel, unique to their campaigns.

Treasure your confidence

Gnome Stew recently posted an article about running on minimal prep game. One of the points was to GM with confidence, and that got me wondering about how exactly do you be a confident GM? Following are a few ingredients to that recipe. I look forward to your comments about what you do to bolster your confidence.

GMing is 80% confidence. Once you get through your first handful of sessions so you learn the mechanics of running encounters and handling a group of players and characters, it becomes about your ability to:

• Thrive in the spotlight because you have more spotlight than everyone else combined each session)
• Make decisions because you will make more decisions than everyone else added up, plus your decisions have more consequences, and so more responsibility
• Think in multiple dimensions because you need to handle the meta-game too
• Argue, or perhaps a better word is persuade, which means backing your opinions and decisions up when players push back a bit
• Be creative, because that is ultimately what separates you from an MMO server

Doing those things well stems from confidence. Mastering the mechanics of GMing is critical, but having confidence lets you execute those mechanics with panache.

Shore up your weaknesses

First thing I would do is get my worst fears under control. Knowing the worst that can happen, and preparing for that, gives you a strong base you know you can rely on and can push forward from.

Define your fears

Take a moment to write out what your worst GMing fears are.

My top three:

• Complete mind blank. I am like a deer in the headlights, with no ideas or answers and I just sit there and struggle to be creative while squirming as my players watch.
• Making a critical logical error that derails a major game element, like a plot thread, villain or encounter. “But the villain could not have cast that spell three rounds ago, Johnn. He used that spell against us in the first round. We have to redo the whole combat. And now we know the villain’s powers!”
• Being boring. Players yawn as turns take forever, the content sinks like a rock, and people start preparing excuses to leave early.

Stop reading and write out your fears. In a rush? Then just note your biggest fear, or the first fear that comes to mind. Go back when you do have time and write your other GMing fears.

Analyse your fears

Now that you have your top fears on paper, check them out. Distance yourself from them. Pretend your friend has just told you those were his fears. De-personalize and be objective about them.

They are not so bad, are they? It is not life and death. It is just a game. Never aim for perfection. Just try to be better and have more fun than last game. Some sessions will rock, others will not.

For each fear, note the worst things that could happen. What could realistically result? For example, your players all quit, someone flips the table, you get embarrassed, you feel ashamed because of mistakes, gameplay rewinds, secrets are mistakenly revealed, you have a bad night.

If this is the worst stuff, you are doing great. It is all temporary. If you game with friends, this stuff becomes water under the bridge. Usually pretty fast, too. If you game with strangers, such as at a game convention, situations and emotions are even more transient.

I had two readers write in with truly serious situations. One GMed her boss, and the boss was a disruptive and selfish player. Another GMed her landlord, who was also a terrible egomaniac. Ok, if it is a real possibility you could lose your job or get evicted over RPG, you win this post. Those are serious stakes. Run!

But the rest of us – are our fears, whether realistic or not, going to mean we lose our friends, family, life savings, health, job or home? Put in this perspective, while I do not mean to say you cannot fear or should not have GM fears, they cannot let you stop playing because they grow so out of proportion that they become weaknesses. Do not let small fears with small and temporary consequences grow into real weaknesses and loss of confidence.

If you can adopt this attitude, then mitigating your fears is possible.

Crit your fears

Think up a solution for each fear. If a solution cannot be “solved,” come up with a mitigation strategy so potential consequences are reduced to as close to nothing as possible. Create a GM aid or Plan B so you have a safety net going into each session. Just knowing a net is there to catch you seems to magically give you confidence, which is the main benefit of this exercise. Once in awhile I need my safety net, but the irony is creating the net makes it unlikely I will need it.

Here are my safety nets:

Complete mind blank – For this I prepare cheat sheets in my GM binder.

• Charts
• Generators
• Hooks
• Seeds

You might only need this support for certain game elements. For example, you might want to bookmark links to NPC generators and create a list of 10 random encounter seeds. Treasure, conflicts, locations and other game elements give you no problems. You only worry about NPCs and encounters, and now you are covered.

What is great about this approach is you can carry this bit of preparation forward from session to session, adventure to adventure, and even campaign to campaign.

Going through my GM binder recently for a new campaign, I realized some of the emergency materials I keep handy were created in the 1990s!

Logic errors. I have a plan should this happen. I blogged about retcon rightly. Just having options available and knowing what they are gives me confidence to forge ahead regardless of potential problems.

Being boring. I have a list of five encounter seeds I categorize as “break down the door.” If things get dull, the game bogs down, the party seems lost, I am ready to immediately trigger a fun action encounter.

If you can find peace with backup plans and solutions, go for it. Who cares if the plans are never needed? Their purpose is to give you confidence.

Give and get respect

With mutual respect, you realize your players are your safety net. When I royally screw up, and I do something embarrassing, I feel confident about admitting my mistake and talking about it in the open with my group. We pause the game, I reveal the situation if it is not already obvious, and we talk it out. I might wait until between sessions to do this, instead, if it keeps the game flowing better. Either way, we chat.

Having respect gives you extra leeway, too. You build up a bit of credit with your group, who will give you the benefit of the doubt or stretch their sense of disbelief to accommodate you.

Trust your players, and give them the benefit of the doubt as well. Assume they always mean well. Assume they want you succeed. Assume they want everyone to have fun. Nothing erases respect faster than suspicion, ego and assuming the worst in others.

To earn respect you also need to put your time in as GM. It is a catch-22, but know that as you strive the become a great GM and you get more gaming in you, the respect will come as part of the doing.

Next week, I discuss more solutions for how you can become a confident GM. Stay tuned.

This is not the post that I expected to make this week. I simply ran out of time and could not finish either the article I had intended to post this week [about time travel] or the one for next week [the long-awaited followup to last year’s Pillars of Architecture article], in time. Instead, I have had to reach into my list of possible future blog topics to extract one for which I had already done most of the hard work. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

Most roleplaying games rely on the concept of rolling one or more dice to generate a random result. Die rolls imply extreme results; on a d20, those are ‘1’ and ’20’, but every roll has (by definition) a minimum and a maximum. The question under consideration is whether or not those rolls should have an interpretation beyond the literal one of the result, ie a ‘1’ being 1 removed from a ‘2’ and a ’19’ being 1 removed from a ’20’.

Let’s start by looking at some of the ways that these extremes might be interpreted in a game context.

Simple Failure/Success

This is the most obvious interpretation of them all – it says there are no such things as critical hits or misses. At the GMs discretion, he might allow a minor enhancement of effect or severity of failure on a maximum/minimum result, but a result of three on 3d6 has, officially, no significance beyond being one worse than a result of four.

We use this approach in the The Adventurer’s Club Campaign, where the characters may be exceptional but they are still, essentially, human, for all the reasons listed in the ‘No’ arguement below.

Success/Failure that would otherwise not be permitted

This is the interpretation built into the standard d20 system. By stating that a “20 always succeeds” and a “1 always fails”, the system ensures that eventually characters can succeed at anything, no matter how ridiculously impossible it seems, and will eventually fail at any task (no matter how simple it appears to be) – provided that repeated rolls are either permitted or manditory.

A first-level dweeb will eventually hit the Invulnerably Exquisite Muckamuck, Most Skilled Swordsman In All The Universe – and the Muckamuck will eventually fail to snot that first-level dweeb between the eyes.

Of course, these possibilities do not rule out the likelyhood of consequences in the interrim – the Muchamuck will react to the dweeb’s feeble attempts (by striking back, or by rolling on the floor, laughing, or whatever else seems appropriate), and the dweeb is unlikely to survive long enough for his lucky number to come up.

In theory, the GM can apply these facts to his own advantage by employing mass attacks, knowing that about 5% of them will succeed, no matter how lop-sided a one-on-one contest would be (I say “in theory” because I remember attacking two PCs with 630 giant phasing fire ants, each needing an 18 or better to hit, but with the PCs unlikely to survive more than two or three such hits; rolling all 630 attacks; and missing with each and every one. The PCs were able to use area-effect spells to take the ants out before they got another shot at the brass ring. Nor is this the most extreme ‘improbable roll set’ that I have witnessed – I’ll tell the story of two Ians in Seventh Sea some other time).

This system has a couple of drawbacks. It provides a disincentive to improve chances of success beyond a certain margin, because you can never get better than a 95% chance of success (using a d20). It marginalises the effects of setting high difficulty numbers – because there is never less than a 5% chance of failure. It should, in theory, have an impact on the psychology of combatants.

Levels of Success/Failure beyond the normal

This is the interpretation that features in my superhero campaign, Zenith-3, and the spin-off Warcry campaign, and which used to feature in my AD&D campaigns. It is also the system utilised in Rolemaster. Instead of saying that there is always a chance of success or failure, this approach states that the results will be more effective IF the action succeeds.

Like the previous system, this has a couple of drawbacks. It demands that the GM be a little less casual about setting difficulty levels (or difficulty modifiers, or whatever the mechanism is), because they can have genuine effects on the outcome of the game. It encourages players to become rules lawyers, seeking to obtain every last bonus that they can wring from the system – which in turn mandates that the GM be equally pedantic. This, in turn, can slow the resolution of game actions down, especially in critical situations – exactly when the GM wants to keep the tension level high. And it can encourage players to to obsessively persue improvements in skills that they deem as system-critical rather than developing more rounded, broadly-capable characters.

Standard d20 also uses this system, by means of the critical hit multiplier, making some extreme results even more valuable – but there is no equivalent ‘critical miss’ threshold. The system is only fair because the opposition gets the same capability.

Cascading/Imploding Rolls

Once again, I can draw apon one of my existing campaigns as illustration – this is the interpretation that is utilised with non-combat rolls in my Fumanor campaigns (for reasons I can no longer recall, I was persuaded to keep the standard system for combat). If you roll a 20, you roll again and add twenty to the result – and keep going for as long as you keep rolling 20s. Equally, if you roll a 1, you subtract 20 from the result and (again) keep going for as long as you roll ‘1’s.

eg1: roll 20. roll 20. roll 14. 20+20+14 = a result of 54.
eg2: roll 1. roll 1. roll 14. 14-20-20 = -26.

This system has one big advantage over the standard system: it means that even if a dweeb attempting an almost-impossible task rolls a 20, he still has to get phenomenally lucky to succeed – it preserves the relative difficulty, while still giving a chance of achieving the impossible. Similarly, at the low end, the extremely skilled character has to roll phenomenally poorly to fail at a simple task.

It’s not perfect – in fact, it effectively replaces the drawbacks of the standard system with the drawbacks of the ‘success/failure beyond the normal’ alternative.

Cascading/Imploding Rolls Version 2

A variation on the concept is to add or subtract the next smaller die size on a critical result.

For example, on a ‘critical success’ skill check made on a d20, you would roll a d12 and add the result to the critical result; on a combat check where the effects are d6’s of damage, you would add 1d4 extra damage; if the effects are a d8, you would add a d6; and so on. On a ‘critical failure’, you would roll 1d12 and subtract it from the result, and if the character’s skill was still high enough to succeed, if the effect dice were d6s then you would subtract 1d4 from the result, and so on.

Cascading/Imploding Rolls Version 3

A further variation on the effects side would be to roll a number of extra dice (1 size smaller) equal to the number of maximum/minimum results on the effect rolls – so, for a critical hit, rolling 4d6 damage and getting two sixes amongst the results would add 2d4 to the damage total. On a critical failure that succeeds despite the low result, if the effect was rolled on 4d8, and the result roll included two ones, the total effect would be reduced by 2d6.

That can be quite significant in terms of impact: 4d8s, two of them coming up ones, give a range of results of 6-18 [average 11], while 2d6 have a result range of 2-12 [average 7] – so the total after subtracting one from the other ranges from is -6 to 16, with an average of 4. Compare that with the results of a standard 4d8 roll: 4-32, average 18. The normal minimum result is the typical result of the modified roll in the example.

This raises the question of how effect results of less than 0 are handled, which offers two further sub-variations for consideration.

Version 3a

This quite straightforward approach simply sets a minimum effect level of 0. If the effect total is less than zero, it is treated as having no effect.

Version 3b

But, given that we’re talking about combat effects, why can’t the attacker injure themselves instead of the target on a negative? Surely it’s possible to strike someone awkwardly and sprain a wrist, or stumble and twist an ankle?

Version 4

And here’s yet another variation to consider: basing the number of additional dice on a critical success on the number of minimum results on individual dice, and vice-versa. That means that a critical failure tends to transform good effect results into mediocre-to-poor ones, and vice-versa. This waters down the extremes of impact on the effect totals by the system, and eliminates the risk of a ‘less than zero’ total.

Overall analysis of Variations 2, 3a, 3b, and 4

The variations offer a number of beneficial effects over the base version. The severity of impact that comes with a critical is moderated, because there is only a single ‘cascade level’ on success/failure rolls.

Both forms of Variation 3 and Variation 4 permit success or failure results to have an impact on effect results, potentially significantly, but to varying degrees. Because they apply a modifier to effect results based on the success/failure result, levels of effect are at least partly commensurate with that success/failure result instead of being completely independant. A great hit will have more effect than the average dictates, and a poor one will make a blow less effective than the average. These adjustments can be minor or can be extreme, depending on the variation chosen.

I have never seen these ideas used in a game system – but I like them so much that I am going to ask the players in my Fumanor campaign to try them out!

Free Actions

This is an option that I’ve never seen utilised, possibly because it can lead to one character getting a disproportionate share of the ‘air time’ in a game, but in theory it should work. Most game systems have some sort of limitation placed on what the character can do in a given slice of game time, especially in combat – D&D uses the “free” and “move” action types for the purposes. What this option suggests is that on a ‘critical success’, that action is downgraded in time requirement 1 step, while on a critical failure, it is upgraded one step.

In other words, in D&D: on a ’20’, a ‘move’ action would be considered a ‘free’ action, permitting the character to make a second move action in the combat round, or a ‘free’ action would be considered a trivial action.

On a ‘1’, a ‘move’ action would be considered a ‘whole turn’ action, a ‘free’ action would be considered a ‘move’ action, and so on.

The biggest downfall of this system that I can see – not having actually tried it – is that it would encourage the DM to make players roll for everything.

Reroll minimum/maximum results

Another option that I haven’t actually seen employed, this will only work for combat and other situations where there is a seperate die roll for ‘level of effect’ to the roll for success or failure. On a critical success, you would get to reroll (once) any effect result die that came up the minimum, making it more likely that your success would actually have an impact on the outcome; on a critical failure, you would be forced to reroll (once) any effect dice showing a maximum result, making it less likely that your roll would achieve anything worthwhile.

I don’t think this option is one that will ever be utilised in a real game, simply because a ‘critical failure’ is still a failure, and therefore has no effect dice attached to the result that has to be rolled. But, in theory, it would still work.

The downside is that it doesn’t make a huge degree of difference, and therefore reduces the impact of critical successes and failures – so much so that they simply become “better successer” and “worse failures”. They aren’t criticals any more. And I’m not entirely convinced, given that fact, that the results would justify the extra time consumed by the system.

Skill Improvement On A Critical

This was the approach taken by a friend of mine in his Traveller campaign back in the 80s and 90s (was it really that long ago?). The basic idea is that on a critical success, you are presumed to have learned something, and can increase the relevant skill; on a critical failure, you are also presumed to have learned something, and so can increase the relevant skill. Over time, you will get better at the skills that you actually use, and remain static in those you don’t.

A variation requires the character to make a second (successful) roll against the same skill after a critical success in order to gain the improvement, while it remains automatic on a critical failure. This weights the benefits according to the premise that you learn more from a failure than you do from a success – sometimes you succeed because you ‘get lucky’ and learn nothing because it was accidental.

A further variation requires the character to make a second (successful) roll against the same skill after a critical failure in order to gain a second improvement.

Limits can be placed on the number of skills that the character can upgrade in a given game session if they still seem to progress too fast.

The same GM also takes the attitude that a critical success or failure always produces especially spectacular consequences, without necessarily impacting the level of effect that results from the game mechanics.

Taking Longer To Succeed

I came up with a new take on the notion of critical failures for my Shards Of Divinity campaign which also replaces the ‘take 10’ and ‘take 20’ system in the standard d&d 3.5 rules. The assumption is that with many tasks, the character can and will keep trying until they either succeed (and know they have succeeded) or give up. Since eventual success is therefore inevitable in a situation in which a 20 always succeeds – it’s merely a question of how many rolls it takes – it seemed to be more efficient to combine all these rolls into a single one, and to use the result to determine how much more time than normal the task takes.

Once the system was in place, further reflection showed that even with skill checks that are normally ‘success or failure’, ‘all or nothing’, most rolls could be interpreted using this paradigm. Searching an area for traps or secret doors? Normally a ‘you find it or you don’t’ roll, there’s no reason not to say ‘it’s been 1/2/3/whatever minutes and you havn’t found anything yet’. Certainty and confidence are suddenly replaced with uncertainty and doubt. Even when something has been found, the characters can often be left unsure that this was all there was to find! Instead of racing through challenges, the players feel under far more pressure, and are generally a touch more cautious.

Further, by not announcing the DC for success, the players can make openly all the rolls that the GM would normally make in secret, so they feel even more in command of their characters. And the GM can inspire paranoia simply by asking for a check on a whim.

It works for Spot, too. Eventually, a character will succeed in spotting whatever is in front of their nose – but will it be in time? It only requires a single spot roll, at whatever DC the GM considers appropriate, and a determination of how long it takes the characters to become aware of the potential danger or object of interest. All the GM then has to do is keep track of what the characters do until that time is reached for someone. IF the item to be spotted is still there, AND if the PCs havn’t been attacked by it, the first to succeed will then spot the painfully obvious.

Here’s the table that I use:

+1 = +10 sec, +2=+30 sec, +3=+1 min, +4=+5 mins, +5=+10 mins, +6=+15 mins, +7=+20 mins, +8=+30 mins, +9=+45 mins, +10=+1 hour, +11=+1½ hrs, +12=+2 hrs, +13=+4 hrs, +14=+5 hrs, +15=+8 hrs, +16=+12 hrs, +17=+24 hrs, +18=+1 week, +19=+2 weeks, +20=+1 month

the “+1” and so on is the difference needed to turn a failure into a success. For each failure above +20, double the number of months.

The table assumes a 1-round action – if the GM thinks the basic task will take longer, simply multiply the extra time accordingly.

Arguements for the ‘Yes’ case:

Okay, so there are a whole gamut of alternatives, and the fact that I use so many of them in my campaigns suggests that I’m predisposed towards the ‘yes’ case. So why?

Added colour

One of the big reasons to say yes: spectacular achievements give a campaign a more epic, sweeping, and dramatic flavour. It’s going too far to suggest that this is the only difference between high and low fantasy, but criticals of some sort are an essential componant of the first. The four-colour antics of superheros practically demand a criticals system (which only makes it more surprising that the official Hero system doesn’t have one). Catastrophic failures and Cataclysmic successes come with the territory, so why shouldn’t they be inherantly built into the game rules?

Nothing is impossible, no-one is invulnerable

And yet, at the same time, criticals can be viewed as “the great equalizer”. This too, is a staple ingredient of epic campaigns and stories, whether it’s Smaug being layed low by a single well-placed arrow or Spider-man taking down Juggernaut after a truly epic battle in Amazing Spider-man Issue #230.

Conveys a sense of the fantastic being possible

While it’s possible to add colour through narrative alone, there is a deeper effect when the potential for achieving the fantastic is built right into the game rules, a sense of the fantastic being the reality of the characters. This can sometimes be hard for GMs to wrap their heads around, because it means that every plot, and every encounter, carries an inherant risk that it will escape the laboritory and run amuck.

Because the potential for extraordinary results is built into the rules, there is an added weight of verisimilute that is almost impossible to attach to the fantastic any other way – at least without sucking all the life and vibrancy from the scene with tiresome justifications! A critical hits system tells the players, and hence their characters, “the incredible is reality – deal with it.”

Permits a more relaxed attitude

Because there is always a chance, referees have to stress a lot less about whether this DC is too high, or that task is too difficult, or that AC is too extreme, and so on. The same thing is also true of the players – they also relax a bit, and take greater risks. Sometimes that can get out of hand, leading to players taking foolhardy risks – which is generally a signal to amp up the opposition a little, or spend more time preparing them and their tactics.

Arguements for the ‘No’ case:

Equally, there are some compelling reasons to consider the ‘no’ case. And, in many cases, these are the flip sides of the ‘yes’ arguements already presented.

Added realism

Perhaps the most obvious justification for not having a system for criticals is the added realism that results. Adding colour and making the fantastic inherantly more plausible is all well and good, but you should never lose sight of the fact that all games are an imperfect suimulation, already replete with compromises for the sake of playability. The grittier you want the campaign to feel, the more plausible you want it to be, the more you have to control the element of the fantastic; added realism is a clear advantage that can be achieved by junking the notion of a criticals subsystem.

Results are always merited

Then, too, if there are no wild-card successes built into the system, it forces characters to earn every success. If that means taking the extra time to stack conditions in your favour, or to evade the most significant negatives to your chances, that’s what it means. Results are always merited according to the expertise of the character making the attempt if there are no criticals, and that has knock-on effects that emphasise the tactical aspects of the game, which in turn can further add to the realism of the campaign.

Forces GMs to keep tighter control of challenge difficulties

It’s easy for GMs to get lazy, adopting a ‘near enough is good enough’ attitude, when the potential for criticals can always get them out of trouble. When there are no escape clauses, the GM has to look at the actual chances of success and failure far more critically. “+1 to the difficulty” can become significantly important, making it impossible for character A to hit target B. The downside of increased realism is that the GM has to work that much harder at getting the challenge levels exactly right. That also spins off into a need for greater control of rewards and treasure, as “+1” becomes more significant on that side of the ledger as well.

Better for maintaining tension

Greater uncertainty means greater tension. The players will never be sure that they aren’t in over their heads, that the enemy they are about to confront doesn’t have something up his sleeve. This can make players a little overcautious, especially when it comes to making plans for their characters, but if not taken to extremes, this provides yet another layer of interaction between the characters. Start by insisting that all such planning be done in character!

Conclusions

It’s clear that in this debate, there is no clear winner! Both arguemnts present advantages and potential drawbacks in equal measure. Overall, both options have more advantages than liabilities, which is a good thing; it means that there is ample scope for benefits to compensate for quirks and penalties that are associated with the different systems of interpretation for criticals.

If no general conclusion can be reached, then the next obvious thing is to consider the question seperately for each campaign. What is the tone of the campaign to be? Where is it lacking, and what could use shoring up – the fantasty or the realism? The gung-ho or the cautious planning? And further, with their varying subtexts and implications, if you do choose to have extreme rolls make a difference, which is the best system for this particular campaign?

My personal preferances vary amongst my different campaigns. The choices have been made to compliment the unique flavour that I wanted to endow to each campaign, exactly as I reccomended in the five-part first Lesson From The West Wing. There is no One Right Answer, and no One Wrong Answer. Each choice has consequences, and those can add to, or detract from, the flavour of the campaign you happen to be running.

So instead of blindly following the rules in this respect, think carefully of which approach most enhances your campaign, and don’t be afraid to mix-and-match as necessary. One system for skill checks and another for attack rolls? Fine. One system for critical hits in combat and a different one for critical misses? No problem. A different system in the Palace Of Dreams to the one in use everywhere else in the world? Why not?

Have you given any thought as to the critical success/failure choice you use, its suitability to and impact on your campaign, its pro’s and con’s? Do you know of any other interpretations that I’ve missed? Then I’d like to hear from you! The broader the palette of choices, the greater the chance we all have of finding the perfect fit!

Google Calendar as Campaign Calendar

I’m using Google Calendar as the in-game calendar for my Riddleport Pathfinder campaign. It started as an experiment, but it’s worked so well I’m making it a permanent addition to how I run the campaign. Perhaps you can do this too.

Riddleport is set in Paizo’s world of Golarion, and the calendar in that world is so close to Earth’s Gregorian calendar that I opted to change a few bits of the Golarion calendar. That lets me use modern calendaring tools without any conversion headaches. I also switched my campaign year to 4710 AR and declared that it synched to our 2010 calendar for even easier tracking.

In Google Calendar I just created a new calendar and called it Riddleport. Done.

Use the calendar to track sessions

I make a new event entry on the in-game day each session starts and ends. This lets me know the current date, how much game time has passed for any given session and for the whole campaign, and gives me a place to put session notes (in Event Details) if I choose.

Track events

It’s easy now managing future events. I make an entry in Google Calendar and it’s there, waiting to show up as the campaign date progresses.

With this system, you can track:

• Crafting and future deliveries of goods and services (players in my game tend to commission magic items, special services like taxidermy of cool critters killed, and specialized equipment).
• Meetings. We book a lot of future meetings with NPCs and factions.
• PC birthdays. I’ll explain a little birthday boon system I cooked up in a future blog post. Whether you give birthday bonuses or not, it’s fun tracking these special days for the characters.
• Holidays and festivals. Golarion has its fair share of holidays. Riddleport does too. Plotting these into the calendar as annual repeating events makes tracking these a snap. Write up descriptions in the Event Details section to save time in-game.
• Events. Do you have things that will happen regardless of PC actions? Place those in your calendar. Even events whose timelines are contingent on other events are easy to move via drag and drop in the calendar. Don’t want that event to trigger today? Drag it forward a week.

Customising for Golarion

I do not have the month and day names memorized yet. To help me out, I created repeat events so the names would be displayed for easy reference.

Months:

• Create a new event
• Name it as your Golarion month name
• Set the range for the start and end days of the equivalent Earth month
• Check the All day box if you prefer, as I do, to have the months appear as solid bars in your calendar
• Set the event to repeat annually
• Do this 12 times, once for each month

Days:

• Create a new event
• Name it as your Golarion weekday name
• Set the date as the same Earth weekday
• Check the All day box to have the days appear as solid bars in your calendar
• Set the event to repeat weekly
• Do this 7 times, once for each day

That’s it. A couple other perks, like custom background and sharing make Google Calendar a sweet tool.

We also use PBWiki for tracking the players’ side of the campaign. Google Calendar can be embedded in PBWiki, so we have the campaign calendar right there, in our notes and campaign wiki.

If you are using Golarion, or if you can mirror your game calendar to Earth’s Gregorian structure, then I highly recommend Google Calendar and its features.

This month’s RPG Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is delighted to host, poses the question:

What non-game media have most inspired your games and how?

A doozy of a topic, this. Sure, there are the obvious genre-related materials – you can’t talk about Fantasy in this context without mentioning The Lord Of The Rings, first the book, and then the movie, but beyond the obvious, it gets rather murkier.

GMing

‘Through Dungeons Deep” by Robert Plamondon

I’ve previously written of the friend who introduced me to RPGs as a player, Chris, in Player Peers and how he taught me the basics of how to GM when the time came in Gamemaster Mentors. I credit Through Dungeons Deep, and especially what it had to say on the personalities of AD&D Dragons, with starting me down the road to being a good GM. It taught me how to infuse depth into my games beyond the basic dungeon-bash and characterisation, how to bring rationality to the gears that were working below the surface.

I was persuaded, many years later, to lend someone my copy. I never saw it, or them, again. Unfortunately, it was out of print for a long time, but a couple of years ago, it was republished. I still havn’t gotten around to replacing the lost copy, but one of these days I’ll have enough coin of the realm to do so.

The Right Word At The Right Time

A friend gave me a copy of Right Word at the Right Time: A Guide to the English Language and How to Use it (Readers Digest) for Christmas many years back and it immediatly became an invaluable referance – not for spelling and grammar, the purposes for which it was ostensibly provided, but for the sections detailing the differences in writing styles of various usages of English – speeches vs newspaper reports vs articles vs… well, you get the idea.

Other ‘How To Write’ Books

…too many to list here. Writing rules systems is like writing a textbook, so any guide to the latter is useful referance for achieving clarity in the former. Writing adventures is a lot like writing a play, so any guide to doing that is useful referance for creating better scenarios. It’s also a bit like writing a novel or a screenplay. And of course, characterisation is common to all of them – I’ve recommended The Writer’s Guide To Character Traits by Dr Linda N Edelstein many times in these pages and will continue to do so at any and every opportunity.

Some of these are brilliant, some of them are not. None of them have been completely devoid of merit.

Storytelling

Much of my storytelling style has developed from massive exposure to comics in my youth.

The Silver Age DC Comics of Gardner Fox

These were pivotal. There was a reason for the way everything happened, and it was rooted in the physics and chemistry of the real world, no matter how stretched out of shape and distorted it might have been to accommodate super-powers. Most of these were presented in Australia in the form of cheap black-and-white reprints, years after the originals had been published in the US.

Silver Age Marvel Comics

These did for character behaviour what Fox’s writing did for the world around the characters. Everyone was different in personality, and their choices and actions stemmed from those characterisations. The DC characters with which I was acquanted were far more interchangeable in terms of personality; it was Marvel who taught me the basics of characterisation.

But they had one other element that has formed part of my storytelling makeup ever since, and that’s worth commenting on: They had a flow of narrative from one issue to the next. Individual plotlines would come and go, but there was a tapestry in the background of threads that spanned from one plot to the next. Foreshadowing, Subplots, Flashbacks – Continuity.

This not only provided a motivation to read the next issue, they helped make the world feel more real. Each issue was like a day of school – the main action was self-contained but outside of that there was an ongoing reality that lasted all week, and outside of those discrete time-intervals there were school terms and years. These are lessons and techniques that I have integrated into my GMing style ever since – not only in terms of deepening the verasimilitude of my campaigns, but of making the players want to come back for the next session.

Babylon-5

Babylon 5 was remarkable for the way it translated these same elements into a television medium, but even more, it added a new layer of sophistication to my thinking on the subject. Look at just about any of the major characters (Dr Franklin being the notable exception) – each underwent massive change in the course of the series. Follow Garabaldi’s story through the five years – or Londo’s – or Vir’s – or Sheridan’s – or… well, the point is made.

Prior to B5, character development in my campaigns was achieved by asking ‘what can I do to make life interesting for character X’? There was no overall plan, no direction. As a result, sometimes these worked and sometimes they didn’t. The scenario sequencing technique that I now use, and which I blogged about in Structuring Campaign Flow was, in part, the end result of what I learned from B5.

The Amazing Spider-Man (Issue #97?)

I’m singling this out (and diverging from the subject at hand slightly) because I taught myself to read at the age of 2-and-a-half using a Spider-man comic! My Uncle had bought them shortly before shipping out to the Vietnam War, and they had been left behind at my Great-Grandmother’s unit. When I visited, there was no-one available to read them to me, so I started sounding out the syllables for myself, putting them together into words, putting the words together into sentences. I’m not sure now which issue it was, but I think it may have been issue #97 – it was a double-digit number, for certain, and John Romita did the artwork. There were a couple of others as well, but that’s the one that I remember.

And, by reading, I don’t mean at a kindergarten level – I skipped over that and went straight to a teenage level, because that’s the market for which the stories were pitched. Two years later, and I was reading at a High School level, and pushing myself further; I was the first person to borrow a non-fiction book from the new Munical Library when opened (a book on Nuclear Physics) and by 3rd Grade was tested as having college-level comprehension skills, so I certainly didn’t squander that early lead.

I relate these events not to big-note myself but because there is a clear line of development from that starting point through to today: simply put, I had time to read all sorts of things years before I was supposed to, and that in turn gave me the raw information that I drew apon to become a GM. Most good GMs have had years of experience as a player before they first get behind the screen; I’d had three or four sessions. The only reason I was able to achieve that transition so quickly and with any level of success was the wide range of books that I had read – and that was only possible because of the head start that Marvel had given me.

Understanding a world and communicating that understanding

If you don’t understand the way your world works, how can you explain it to your players?

The New Intelligent Man’s Guide To Science by Isaac Asimov

The obvious starting point for understanding how your game world works is by understanding the real world. And for that, I have never found a better referance than this massive volume by Asimov. The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science explains things in a clear and succinct and above all, readable style, building from one topic to the next. This volume has directly influanced my superhero campaign and its underlying game physics, and has indirectly influanced every other game universe that I have created.

The short stories of Robert Heinlein

Heinlein was a master at integrating background information into narrative flow without the need for huge blocks of exposition. I’ve never read anyone better at it than he was. While it’s impossible to completely avoid exposition in an RPG because the players need an understanding of the circumstances and surrounding world apon which to base their choices, Heinlein’s techniques – which I have yet to completely assimilate, I have to admit, despite years of trying – helps keep it to a minimum.

Party Structure

When I first started GMing, I was quite happy to let each player have whatever they wanted in the way of character class or – in a classless system – character niche. I felt it was my job to work around what the players wanted – and if that meant that there were four point-and-shoot types and no front-line fighters, that was the party’s bad luck.

The Avengers (Marvel Comics)

This structure was very directly influanced by one of my favorite comic books, The Avengers, which I had initially discovered in the midst of the Kree-Skrull War (this comic, together with the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, also developed a love for epic, sweeping dramas that have been part of my style ever since I started as a GM). The notion was that anyone was able to fill any position, however imperfectly, and it was not my job to hand-hold, manage, or coordinate the players – that was up to them to figure out.

UNSUB

It was the TV series UNSUB – an abbreviation of “unknown subject” – that started changing my thinking on the subject. This show, starring David Soul post-Starsky & Hutch lasted only a single season, and was shown late at night on Australian TV, but it was very much a forerunner for later successes, anticipating things like the CSI franchise by more than a decade. Alas, it’s never been released on DVD, but it was well-written, very entertaining, and is still fondly remembered. This was a team of specialist forensic investigators, each of whom brought a different skill-set to the problems; the combination was far more potent than any of them could possibly have been on their own. When I re-booted my superhero campaign, I very deliberately listed a number of specific character archetypes and permitted the players to choose one for their characters on a first-come-first-served basis. I also deliberately restricted the number of characters to one LESS than the total number of archetypes available, so that there would always be an area of vulnerability that the team would have to work around.

This approach worked so well that it was subsequently adopted in my D&D campaigns, though a little less rigorously enforced; the rule is that no character should step on another’s feet.

The Law

While I enjoyed the occasional cop show on TV like Ironside and Perry Mason, it wasn’t until much later that I came to appreciate the role that the law has in shaping the society around it (better late than never I suppose). The law regulates and controls who can do what, and what the consequences are for stepping outside those boundaries. It is also an imperfect reflection of the ideals and cultural values of the society that makes the laws – imperfect because at it’s heart it is a human enterprise and therefore vulnerable to all the frailties of the human condition – it can be swayed by wealth, political interest, or inherant corruption; and even when it gets it ‘right’, it requires a compromise between many differing opinions, very few of whom can be satisfied by compromise.

The inadequacies of law when it comes to dealing with the pace of technological and social development were aparrant to me long before issues such as Napster brought them to public attention, and the television programme that opened my eyes to all this was LA Law.

LA Law

With LA Law, what always impressed me was the ability of both sides to articulate their arguement so convincingly. While I had a sense of morals prior to encountering the programme, it was only afterwards that I became socially and politically aware in any mature sense. More, it taught me to question my assumptions and think logically concerning social phenomena. Articles like the Distilled Cultural Essence series would have been quite impossible without exposure to this TV series. Courtroom Drama has been a favorite genre ever since.

Perry Mason

I started with the TV series and then discovered the books. While the former has not dated all that well, and was only marginally interesting at the time, the books by Earle Stanley Gardner – which are increasingly difficult to find – are as fresh and interesting today as they were back when they were published. What I didn’t appreciate until I started reading them was that Gardner was very much the forerunner of forensics and the law, without which series such as UNSUB and CSI and Crossing Jordan and NCIS would have been impossible.

Government

You can’t get interested in anything of much substance without getting involved in some aspect of government. If you’re a collector of fiction, copyright and publishing law becomes relevant. If you’re interested in the law, the manner in which those laws are created becomes of interest. If you’re interested in civil rights, government is a central concern. If you’re interested in Archeology, the governments of the eras of concern are vital subjects to understand. If you’re interested in particle physics, government patronage and grants become subjects of which you should at least have some understanding.

Government touches everything.

Applying that premise to an RPG is a very interesting exercise in the completeness of your understanding of your game world. Unless you can look at any given character class and describe how government impacts that specific class, with no preperation, your understanding is incomplete.

That’s not to say that this level of understanding is necessary; it’s not. But it does point out the importance of having clear understanding of both sides of political issues (regardless of your personal opinions) so that you can identify an analagous situation to any circumstance to which you might be confronted, in-game, enabling an extrapolation of that topical knowledge to the in-game situation sufficient to roleplay the adherants of each possible perspective convincingly.

The West Wing

As long-time readers of this blog know, I have a series of occasional articles underway describing the RPG lessons that I have learned from The West Wing (and yes, there’ll be another one sometime soon. I just needed to take a break after the first one turned into a five-part monster!) What’s interesting is that NONE of the planned posts in that series talk about Government or Politics other than indirectly!

The discussion of government above could almost be framed as a “Lesson From The West Wing”: If you don’t understand both sides of an issue, you don’t understand the issue, and can’t debate that issue intelligently; all you can do is recite or rephrase your position, dogmatically.

The West Wing remains one of the most influental series on my gaming, simply because it makes me think.

‘Yes, Minister’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ (BBC TV Series)

I can’t talk about politics for any length of time – in character or in seriousness – without referancing these series, at least mentally. Outstanding dry british humour at its best. Yes Minister tells the story of a rather naive and idealistic Minister, Jim Hacker, and his confrontations and catastrophes as head of the Department Of Administrative Affairs.

The sequel, Yes, Prime Minister, tells the story of how Hacker fails upwards to become the Prime Minister of Britain. While it is utterly hilarious as a TV series, there is a lot of meat under the surface.

I can never do a bureaucrat without contemplating how much like Sir Humphry Appleby to make that character. Even if the goal is to make an efficient and functional administration, I always need to ask how this differs from the ‘administration’ in the YM/YPM series, and how it came to be that way.

History

Only two items really stand out in this area. The first is a book, and the second a TV series.

The Writer’s Guide To Everyday Life In The Middle Ages by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Subtitled “The British Isles from 500 to 1500”, The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages is an invaluable referance for gamers tired of the “all eras into the melting pot” approach of D&D, or who simply want to capture a little more of a medieval flavour in their games.

We’re so used to thinking of past eras like “The Middle Ages” as all being the same, each year lumped together with all the others, a static and unchanging picture. That’s not the way it was at all; fashion still changed, year on year, and technology developed, and society evolved. History is a dynamic process; if this book does nothing more than get people thinking about their game settings as a snapshot of an evolving society (and one that’s not necessarily all that accurate), this book is worth having.

Time Team

Time Team is a BBC-TV series that started in 1994 (!) and is still running. Although there have been a few “best of” collections and specials released on DVD, there has never been a season box set from the show, and the BBC evades any enquiries about the possible release of such – I know, I’ve tried!! Like the American knock-off series (“Time Team America”), the series basically takes a crack archeological team somewhere and performs an archeological dig, normally in three days. This is no made-for-TV psuedo-science, these are genuine professionals (with the exception of the host, who brings a layman’s perspective to each investigation).

You cannot watch this show for very long without gaining a new appreciation for the different societies and cultures apon which our game environments are based. While individual episodes have inspired a number of adventures in my campaigns, still more valuable are the general insights that the show engenders, from the architecture and lifestyles of different eras to the re-creations that are part of most episodes, this is a must-see for any GM if it’s available.

In General

Earlier I made the point that crafting an adventure is not dissimilar to plotting a movie. But, in fact, whole rafts of information about TV and movie production are relevant to gaming; from the tricks that writers use to be able to deliver a new episode on a regular time-crunching back-breaking schedule to the nuances of costuming to the use of lighting to convey mood, to the structuring of story. I ALWAYS listen to any commentary track and watch any DVD-extras and have a genuine fondness for “making of” shows, because they are so darned useful to me as a GM.

The best craftsmen in the business are taking the time to tell you how they do their jobs, and whether the information is directly or indirectly relevant is moot. Take the time to listen and watch and keep a notepad handy; you will be astonished at how much you can glean.

Obviously, genre films/series are the most directly useful. D&D players and GMs should start with the 4-disk versions of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy; Superhero GMs should start with the mountain of extras on The Incredibles, Spiderman 1, 2 & 3, the X-men movies, and so on. But look beyond the genre and you will discover a wealth of tips and tricks to help your campaigns – I have!

Time Travel: A Special Case

I was going to include this discussion within this post, but it started growing and sprouting some unexpected branches. So I’ve excerpted it completely from this discussion; look for it to appear in a week or two as a seperate article. If it will fit in just one….

This month’s RPG Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is delighted to host, poses the question:

What non-game media have most inspired your games and how?

The answer for me is Saturday morning cartoons, which I grew up on and still watch today.

Anything is possible in a cartoon. It’s pure imagination at work in every genre.

• Plots tend to be simple and suitable to gaming. Easy to study, easy to emulate.
• Characters tend to be iconic, two dimensional, fun, simple and easy to model. They are also memorable. I’d gladly take a memorable NPC over a muddy and complex one in my games anytime.
• Environments are easy to visualize, recall and describe.

I think cartoons are awesome GM inspiration.

Here are some of my favourite cartoons growing up that I still watch today either on DVD or YouTube:

Scooby Doo is great for GM inspiration. Simple plots, lots of action, great fun.

• Scooby Doo. The first series is my favourite, but I’ll watch any of the dozen other variations. Great villains and foes. Always interesting NPCs. A variety of settings and memorable locations, such as an aircraft graveyard, theme park, ski resort, Scottish castle, and dozens more.
• The Smurfs. In a world where everybody is blue and three apples high, how do you stand out? A fantastic (dare I say smurfy?) example of how to make NPCs distinct.

• Super Friends. Great villains and super action! (Pun mightily intended.) I especially liked the epic scope of some of the episodes. Save the planet, rescue the galaxy, repair the dimension.

• Thundarr the Barbarian. Post-apocalyptic fantasy. This was just a fun show. I remember looking at all the old artifacts of our age in the introduction and episodes and thinking, perhaps for the first time, how nothing is permanent, not even the mighty New York.

• Spider Man. Awesome bad guys, small scope plots in general, a seedy city. The funky animation was a bonus, as was the theme song. The variety of creatures, villains and hazards is always inspiring.

• Looney Tunes. Is there any plot variation left untouched with this epic run of slapstick cartoons? Even opera was covered. Opera. I think I liked the political aspect of many of the cartoons best. Seeing leaders parodied gave me a bit of insight into that realm. I remember asking nearly everyone where my hossenfeffer was. Still do.

So, old school 80s cartoons have inspired much of my gaming (and my personality, if you ask my wife). How about you? What non-game media inspires your games?

If you are an RPG blogger participating in the carnival, add your links below as well.

While watching the special features from Numb3rs season 3 on DVD, I got to thinking about one of the phenomena of TV shows – that some episodes you really like, and some you don’t, and some episodes are really popular and some are not (and these categories never completely coincide. This is true even of my favorite TV series.

At the same time, I was turning over in my head various ideas for blog posts, and one of them was about the efficiencies of improvement, and how they could be taken into account in planning your game prep to give the greatest bang (ie overall improvement) for your buck (in this case, for your development effort).

I’m not an expert in time-and-motion studies, I should state that up-front. In fact, I firmly believe that people are different enough that such studies (however appliccable in general) are not always 100% on the mark in individual cases. That’s why real elections never perfectly follow the predictions of polls, and why no-one ever agrees completely with the ratings of anything – be they TV shows, movies, or whatever. Statistics are great at overall situations, not so hot in dealing with individual situations. So everything I’m about to write should be taken with not a grain of salt, but a pillar. On the other hand, sometimes an amateur who’s not afraid to experiment can see the forest more clearly than the expert who starts by focussing on the species of tree!

Another ‘fair warning’ while I’m giving caveats: I don’t really know exactly where this blog is going to go, this is very much a case of thinking out loud. I have some ideas as to approach, but what conclusions I will reach – if any – are a complete mystery at this point. That’s the exciting thing about this particular post!

The Objective

The Goal of the process that I’m hoping to develop is to increase the amount of fun that everyone has at the game table. The methodology of achieving that goal is what this blog post aims to develop, by determining some means of specifying which areas of game prep can benefit most from a little extra attention on the part of the GM, and which areas should be shortchanged to get the time required. But at the same time, I want to increase the GM’s fun as well, to make game prep less of a chore and more of a hobby.

That means that two seperate qualitative factors will have to be taken into account: how much the GM enjoys doing it (or, more specifically, how much work it is for the GM), and how big a benefit the campaign will recieve from extra attention. The first is analagous to the rating you as an individual would give to the various elements of game prep, if you were measuring how much you enjoy doing them. The second is analagous to the ratings your players would give at the end of a day’s play – how much fun everyone collectively has at the table.

A Working Taxonomy

Everyone divides up their tasks into subtasks, and everyone does it differently. As Johnn and I have found while working on another project, creating a unified and comprehensive taxonomy for everything that goes into a roleplaying game is incredibly difficult and full of hard choices.

To try and keep this post on-topic, I’m going to simplify the stages of game prep into a small number of substages which are necessarily less detailed and less comprehensive than would be used in a real life situation. Those substages are:

1. Story – what is going to happen in the course of the day’s play, or the adventure overall
2. Metaplot – how things fit into the big picture, any external limitations or complications that the PCs will have to take into account, and the long-term significance of the adventure
3. Background – the origins of the current situation, anything needed to make the plot more challenging by limiting or restricting the PCs scope for choices, and anything else that is needed to justify the in-story events.
4. Locations – maps, blueprints, and location descriptions
5. Encounters – who or what gets encountered (in generic terms), and what that encounter adds to the developing awareness of the plot by the PCs
6. Personalities – the roleplaying elements necessary to take that generic encounter and make it unique and individual
7. Character Mechanics – the game mechanics used to describe the character in-play
8. Script – snatches of prewritten dialogue, bullet points of information that NPCs are to relate to the PCs, and any narrative that the GM is to provide ex-cathedra
9. Support – props, miniatures, any game supplements that should be on-hand, and anything else that can add to the playability of the adventure but that might not be strictly necessary

Okay, the list is longer than I originally thought it was going to be – I kept thinking of ‘one more thing’ to add. It has holes: where do rewards fit into it? Should they be their own category, or under Character Mechanics, or Encounters? But it’s sufficiently functional for today’s purposes, it just means that any examples might need to be bigger than I was expecting.

Developing Your Own Taxonomy

I should emphasise that each GM should develop their own taxonomy to describe what they do in game prep – because not every GM will do all these things, and certainly not every time. Some GMs might not sperate Personalities from Character Mechanics, or Metaplot from Story, or Metaplot and Background. The next time you’re doing game prep, you should generate your own, unique, taxonomy – the discriminating factor being whether or not you think of it as a seperate task, something you can do at another time.

Dependancies

Quite often, a GM will consider one of these tasks to be dependant apon the outcome of another. Some GMs will define the personality of an NPC first, and use them to derive the game mechanics; some will generate the NPC’s stats first and build the personality as a reflection of those characteristics. Still other GMs won’t seperate the two into seperate tasks at all – they might start with a general idea of personality, develop the character stats, refine the personality to accommodate the game mechanics, then tweak the character. Or it might be as simple as getting the personality down on paper while the game mechanics are fresh in the GMs mind or vice-versa – this is another way of linking the two into a single task.

A similar relationship exists between Metagame and Story, and between Metagame and Background, and between Story and Background. How much does the location influance the nature of the encounter that is to occur there – and which comes first?

The rule of thumb to use in developing your own taxonomy is that if a step is completely dependant on the results of another step, those two should be combined into a single step in the GM’s thinking.

How Much Fun?

Having established the categories, the next step is for the GM to rate how much fun he has actually doing them. A one-to-five scale is fine, where zero = ‘I have to be forced to do this at gunpoint’, and five = ‘I would do this every day if I could’. We’ll label this “R” and use it to determine how much the GM tries to avoid doing the task. The illustration is a rough indicator of how I would rate the elements of the taxonomy I derived as an example.

How Easy?

The next step is to determine how easy the task is for the GM. Every one of us has strengths and weaknesses. This value will also be used to rate how much return the GM gets on his efforts. I could have the GMs rate it, but it should be more enlightening to determine it by comparing the time spent on the task with the number of pages of output. This method also takes into account the actual tools that the GM uses, whether it be a fractal mapper or character generation software.

Data Capture

The first step is to gather the data. For two, four, or five prep sessions, track how long you spend on a task, and the number of pages of information that you produce. Don’t worry about filtering out diversions and time lost to things like phone calls – those represent the inevitable overhead that will come from interruptions with any longer-duration effort. All we care about is the start time and end time and the difference in minutes.

Becoming more aware of how you work is a by-product of this information that can yield it’s own benefits. For example, you might find that you had clear ideas of the NPCs that you had to create, but that by the time you had finished doing the maps for an encounter, that information had become vague and hard to remember – meaning that you can make an immediate gain in efficiency by generating the NPCs before you start work on the maps.

The example above shows some fictitious results based very loosely on my own work practices, spread over four different game sessions. The first session totals exactly 4 hours of prep time, the second totals 5 minutes more than that, and the other two total less. All told, exactly 900 minutes of prep time have been divided up – an average of exactly three-and-three-quarters hours per game session. It can instantly be seen that I spend most of my time on the story, on the metaplot, and on scripting narrative and dialogue – over 60% in fact – leaving less time for anything else.

Data Conversion

Once you have a reasonable basis for your calculations – the work done over several game sessions – you can get the totals in each category of your taxonomy and perform a simple division to get the number of pages per minute. Don’t be surprised if the results seem alarmingly low – it can take an hour or more to write a page of text, and that would translate to 0.016 pages per minute. The next step is to adjust these to fit the same 1-to-5 scale that we used for fun, and will also use in later steps.

To make the conversion, subtract the lowest value result from the total of each step. Multiply the result by 4 and divide by the highest of the individual results. Then just add 1. The example to the right shows this being done in two stages: the subtraction and then the rest of the calculation. The result rates the efficiency of the GM’s work on the 1-5 scale that we need.

The first thing to notice is that all the activities that the GM has rated as enjoyable are in fact his least efficient – if the R is 4 or 5, the efficiency is ranked as 1, 1.2, or 1.3. The area in which I show the greatest efficiency is the one on which I spend the least time, and the one that I enjoy the least (and so would tend to avoid), character mechanics. So that’s already really interesting information. Even though the page count for the things I enjoy doing is high, so is the amount of time that I’m investing in them – probably because I enjoy it!

The question we can now begin to examine, having been armed with this information, is whether or not that degree of effort is really justified, or should I improvise more plot and spend more time on the things that I enjoy less? How much could I improve the game – and how much would I detract from it?

Extreme Session Post-Mortems

The next step is to do some session post-mortems. Pick two sessions that stand out in your mind – one for being more successful than most, and one for being as close to an absolute disaster as you can remember. In each, attempt to categorise how effective each prep element was at contributing to the enjoyment, based on comments at the table, your own observations, and any feedback that you remember.

What we are really interested in here are the totals, and the differences, between the two. Presumably, in the one that everyone enjoyed, everything would rate high – but there can be surprises.

I have two particular sessions in mind – one where I lost track of where we were in the plot, which limped a bit to begin with, and in which I got the abilities of a couple of characters confused. Even in this absolute disaster, there were a couple of things that people enjoyed, and a few areas that were complete messess. I can also remember a session in which everyone had a LOT of fun, everyone was laughing at the table and participating – but there were a few moments when things faltered, when things didn’t work as well as they should, and in which I had to scramble to keep things on some sort of sensible track.

The totals rank the strengths of the campaign in the perception of the players – the things that you are doing right. The higher the total out of ten, the better. The differences rank the differences between the two sessions – in other words, the reasons why one was a disaster and the other was not.

Above are the ratings I have assigned to the two sessions I have in mind, together with their totals and differences. And right away, a number of conclusions leap out at me. Metaplot is my strong point, that’s no surprise; but second most important is story, and that was also one of the big differences between the two. Ranking only marginally behind story in importance are background and scripted elements, the first of them being ranked the same between the two sessions, but the second being only just a little bit less critical than story in letting the second scenario down. Only less important again are Personalities and Character Mechanics, and here is where things really start getting interesting: Personalities ranked as the equal biggest difference, while character mechanics actually ranked higher in the disaster than it did in the success. Right away that tells me that less time spent on the game mechanics of the NPCs and more time spent working up their personalities or story might have made the difference between a mediocre session (at worst) and the disaster that it proved in hindsight to be.

Putting The Picture Together

In a perfect world, the last set of results would be all that mattered, because a GM could spend as much time on each element as it needed; it would only be a question of establishing a minimum standard in each for play, and you would have a winner every time.

Unfortunately, we all live in the real world, where time is limited and we absolutely have to take efficiency into consideration. (And now we get into the section of the article where I’m not really sure of my technique. But let’s dive in, anyway).

To start with, the activities that I enjoy doing are obviously a part of my GMing style, and so these will obviously bias both the rating of importance, and the priority that I should give to additional efforts. We need to take that bias out of the importance to get an true picture of the priority that should be placed on changes, and we need to take that bias into consideration in determining how much value the overall game could achieve from more attention to a given area. In effect, we need to take the bias out of the sum column and add it to the difference column.

That means we’re calculating Sum – R and Diff + R, and the results come out as shown. The higher the Sum-R, the more valuable the activity is to my GMing style, regardless of how much I do or don’t enjoy it; this is a road map to how my priorities should be adjusted, in an ideal world, to play to my personal strengths and GMing style. While the heavy focus on metaplot is not a surprise, the next highest score is assigned to Character Mechanics, which is a bit of a surprise, then background and encounters – both of which are only mediocre on my radar.

The higher Diff+R, the more benefit will be achieved overall by more pages of work, again in an ideal world. Here, story is king, followed by personality development and script, then metaplot – and then a number of items of comparatively low value. Again, none of these are universally applicable, these are values specific to my style of campaigns.

Clearly, we need to put these two values together. Simply adding them won’t do it: some values will cancel out. While a more complicated operation might be needed, my intuition says to multiply the two together and take the square root. The result should by a priority weighted by benefit. Finally, we need to adjust for efficiency, by multiplying by the value derived earlier.

The ideal game prep

So what does it all mean? Well, ultimately, there are three groups of values in the final column above: A couple that are 9’s, or close enough to it; a number that are between 4 and 5, near enough; and a couple that are ranked 0. But those are my results, and are unlikely to corrospond to anyone else’s.

What the results add up to is a priority table for dividing up extra prep time. So, to get the ideal prep time, let’s divide the standard prep into two componants: the fundamental and the extra. According to the statistics gathered early on, the average prep time I use is about 4 hours. So let’s reduce that in half-hour increments and allocate the time thus made available according to this priority.

That sort of allocation is easy, it’s something that most GMs learn how to do from compiling tables: you simply convert the results to a percentage of the total and split the allocated resource – be it a die roll range of results, or, as in this case, a quantity of time – into that percentage of the total.

So here are the results (I’ve only shown the calculations for the first couple of coulns). Four plans, each progressively shifting the balance from the current time spent (on average) to a 50:50 balance with the new scheme. Which one is best? Well, my gut instinct tells me that Plan 3 is the way to go. There really isn’t all that much change between plans 1 and 2 and the current balance – we’re talking 7 minutes less spent on the story, 2 minutes less on the metaplot, and so on. The differences are actually fairly negligable.

But that’s the point: these numbers are reflective of an already-successful ongoing campaign, which means that it has to have more hits than misses. If the campaign were in trouble, I might be tempted to make more radical changes, and that’s what the results would indicate. I would round off the odd values – the 33 minutes would go up to 35, and the 29 minutes to 30. If you can find 4 hours, you can find 4 hours and ten minutes – even if the last ten minutes are at the gaming table; if there is a discernable improvement in the adventures, the players won’t begrudge an extra couple of minutes.

Any of these plans would retain the elements of my GM style that work; the differences are in those parts that I occasionally struggle with, and how high a priority they should be. And, of course, having made the recommended changes to my usage of prep time, I can always repeat the calculations using new values to assess the results. Improvement should be an ongoing process, not a one-time event.

Conclusions

One thing that struck me while I was playing around with numbers here was that there were relatively few surprises. In most cases, these were trends that I had already detected in my game prep. I was going to say that this was perhaps the most surprising outcome of the lot – but then I realised that it makes sense. As a GM, you tend to pick up on things that don’t work quite as well as you had hoped or expected, and tend to perform session post-mortems in your head anyway (especially when preparing for the next session). The more experience you have, the more adept you will usually become at detecting these hints and signs. None of us ever gets perfect at it, but we make corrections to our approach all the time, based on experience of what works and what doesn’t.

But there have been a few genuine surprises along the way. Some of the relative efficiencies were unexpected, and the emergance of more work on the NPCs as the most useful thing to prioritise for overall gain was a surprise. That’s useful information.

Postscript: Where to from here?

Okay, I’ll reiterate that I don’t really know what I’m doing here. The ideas seem sound to me, and the results appear sensible, but that’s not necessarily any indication, and I have absolutely zero evidence that this works. But, assuming that it’s all correct (by some miracle), the next step would be to rate individual sessions and link them with the actual prep time done. Get some hard statistical data for what works and whether there is a consistant pattern to the failures. Lose the assumption that the differences between a mediocre game session and a flop are the same as the differences between a success and mediocrity – or at least get some hard data. I would like to compare an average session with a failure with a success, instead of a success with a failure, and develop two different plans – one to avoid the clunkers and one to excel more frequently – because they might prioritise different activities.

I’ve done all I can (and more) – I guess it’s now over to someone with greater expertise in statistics and time-and-motion studies…

How do you fix it when inconsistent roleplay or interpersonal conflicts are killing the campaign? The more restrictions on gameplay you have, and the more expectations on play style you have, the more you need to talk about this with everyone in the group and reach consensus. Assumptions kill groups faster than monsters.

Campaign Mastery was asked, Hi GMs! I’ve had an issue lately with my regular gaming session being regularly canceled. Needless to say, I’m a bit antsy about it. I spoke to my GM about why he hasn’t held a gaming session in the past few months and got an answer that had me feeling angry. While my trusty GM has had some issues at work (heck, he’s a doctor so it follows that work is hectic), he pointed out that one player in particular has been getting on his bad side with her character’s mutable persona. This player has done a few things that have been very much out of character, and as such, caused a few of us to wonder if she is trying too hard to be viewed as ‘fun’ or ‘cool’ in character and maybe even outside her role-playing character. The ironic thing I have noticed is that Miss Wishy-Washy Cleric has created more exasperated sighs and grievances with her efforts to ‘fit in’ with a more chaotic good aligned party than sticking to her assigned neutral good ways. The issue now is, until our GM finds a way to resolve his annoyance with this problem player, I doubt we’ll be gaming again soon. So, I ask, how can we encourage Miss Inconsistent Personality to play a cleric with a more consistent personality and still satisfy a need for fun role-playing? Thanks! Angii

Johnn’s Answer:

Hi Angii, thanks for the question. I once told a former boss that a project was delayed because a programmer was doing things all wrong. My boss asked me if I had given the person our coding style guide and gone through it with him. Oh. Shoot. Not only did I feel foolish, squirming around in my chair while the company’s co-owner pinned me with that question, but it was at that point in my career I learned people are not mind-readers. I’m a slow learner, heh.

I carried this lesson to the game table. I try to not assume anything about expectations. From what you have explained, I think your gaming group has a communication problem. I encourage you to have a group coffee meeting, make a phone conference, or send a group email (in order of preference) to get a conversation started about everyone’s thoughts on the game.

In my mind, the cleric player is being subjected to, and judged by, expectations that have never been communicated to her. And she’s not a mind-reader either. At least, not out of character.

In the back of my brain, I knew I had not given my team member the style guide and gone through it with them. The guide contained more than just our indenting and commenting rules. It also covered our code libraries, variable naming conventions, and preferred solutions to certain programmatical problems. Guide was a poor choice of words – it was actually our how-to manual for the shop at the time.

However, the programmer and I did not get along. So, while I subconsciously knew I needed to go through the guide with the guy, I was avoiding meeting with him for personal reasons. As they say though, the difficult conversations are the ones most worth having. By working things out with my boss, I had committed to a meeting. Perhaps that was my sneaky brain at work putting me in a position to overcome my fears.

The meeting ended up poorly. The guy worked hard at pushing my buttons. He was angry at me, or the company, or something, but there was no middle-ground to find peace. I believe it takes two to tango, so I felt partially responsible for the hostility, but I could not mend the ill-will. We both left frustrated. But the project continued on with compliance to the guide.

I feel you need a conversation with your GM. And with the player. Preferably with the whole group to start. It might be a difficult situation, but from a gaming perspective, it cannot get worse because the group has stopped gaming.

First, validate all your assumptions. Why has the GM stopped calling games? What is it about the cleric’s play style that frustrates him. What play style is he expecting? Get specific. Generalities are horrible feedback because you cannot act on them. The player – and the group – needs specifics so everything is laid out and crystal clear – especially alignment, play style and personal style expectations as those seem to be hot buttons.

It will be a tricky conversation. But one worth having.

Some tips to help facilitate the healing process via communication within your group:

• Do not state what others’ feelings should be. State things from your point of view about your feelings and expectations. Ask others to do the same.
• Do not tolerate personal attacks, personal assessments of others, pejorative words about others. As soon as the conversation gets personal you dig yourself into a hole you might not get out of. People will get emotional, defensive, upset. As soon as someone goes on the attack, interrupt and remind them not to make things personal about others. It’s no different than being in-game and not taking control of another’s PC or attacking another’s PC.
• Instead of focusing on what one player might be doing wrong, work instead on reaching group consensus about what the game is expected to be, alignment and behaviour expectations, play style expectations and GM style expectations. Work towards common agreement on how everyone can enjoy the game instead of finding fault in others.
• Remind everyone it’s a game. It’s supposed to be fun. Use this to break up fights. It’s non-judgmental, allowing aggressors to back-off gracefully, and helps everyone focus on the true purpose of gaming, which gets lost sometimes when emotions bubble up.

During the conversation, take notes. Afterward, draw up a document listing the things the group agreed on and the items that were left unresolved. This document will become your group’s social contract. It should lay out clearly what the expectations are.

For unresolved items, keep at it. Hold another meeting or do one-on-ones until you get to the heart of the issues. Your group can only mend itself once these issues have been resolved. Else, you will play again, people will leave more frustrated, and the desire to resume play dwindles further, and possibly even the desire and ability to talk things out dwindles as well.

Mike’s Answer:

I have to admit that I’ve struggled to find the right answer this question. This will be the eighth or ninth time that I’ve wiped the slate clean and started over. So, if I’m having so much trouble despite all my years of experience, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the GM in question is also frustrated to the point of avoiding sessions.

Part of the difficulty has been that the question hasn’t been raised by one of the parties who are having the problem – perhaps if we had heard from the others, things might have been more straightforward. Another complicating factor is that we have to make so many assumptions to get to an answer. And a third hurdle has been that Johnn’s answer is right on the money, absolutely perfect – IF his interpretations and assumptions as to the cause of the problem are correct.

Nine-tenths of Wisdom is asking the right question

I have seen it suggested, many times and in many places, that if you have a problem that seems too big and complicated, you should do any part of the problem that you DO understand and then reexamine the remainder of the problem. I don’t necessarily ascribe to that philosophy; if you don’t fully understand the problem, then you can miss contextual elements and make assumptions that may mean that much of the work done in answering the part of the question that you thought you understood actually leads down a blind alley. This particular question is a great example of that problem, which is further complicated by the writer’s belief as to the cause of the problems, and the ‘magic bullet’ that will solve them.

I prefer to dismember the analysis of the situation and identify all the assumptions – break a big problem into smaller problems, then each can be addressed.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a fresh look at the narrative and problem at hand, tearing it apart into assumptions and smaller questions.

• Game Sessions are being canceled by the GM.
• The GM has had some issues at work.
• He also states that he’s been having a problem with one particular character being inconsistently roleplayed, which has been damaging his enjoyment of the game.
• Angii suggests that the other players have also noticed this inconsistency of roleplaying, and have speculated as to the reasons.
• Angii then gives her own assessment of the problem, which is subtly different to that described in the previous paragraph.
• Angii states that until the problem is resolved, the GM will continue to cancel sessions.
• She concludes by asking our advice on how to encourage a more consistent personality for the character whose player is being blamed for the situation.

Working through this summary, let’s analyze the situation, looking at the assumptions and questions that arise.

1. Suggestion: The inconsistency is arising because the player wants to be viewed as “fun” or “cool”.
2. Question: Is inexperience the problem?
3. Question: Is the player stepping out of character to have fun?
4. Assumption: The right way to play is to stick to an arbitrary alignment standard.
5. Question: Is this assumption correct?
6. Observation: The character in question has a different alignment to that of the rest of the party.
7. Suggestion: The inconsistency is arising because the player is trying to “fit in”.
8. Suggestion: The inconsistency, when it occurs, is excessive in the direction of the overall party alignment.
9. Suggestion: This excess is creating grievances amongst the other players.
10. Question: Is the GM’s problem with the player’s roleplay, or with the reactions of the other players?
11. Question: Will answering the question of how to roleplay more consistently actually solve the problem?

Johnn’s answer has focused on the theory that the real problem is the expectation of adherence to the arbitrary alignment standard – items 4 and 5. on the above list. If he’s correct, then his answer is the right answer. But the accuracy of this focus is very much an assumption on Johnn’s part, no doubt backed by his personal experience.

So I’m going to start by assuming that his assumption is wrong, and that one of the other interpretations suggested by the analysis is the problem that needs to be solved.

Inexperience

Whenever I read that a player steps out of character to do something that they perceive as being “fun” or “cool”, I am reminded of a number of young teen players that I’ve encountered. And of one or two profoundly juvenile older players that I’ve gamed with. They eventually grew out of the habit – even (with peer pressure) the older players.

I was able to encourage such maturing by taking the player aside each time he stepped out of character and asking him to justify the character’s actions. We usually found that putting a slightly different spin on the actions or justification enabled the character to do most of what the player wanted to do, without breaking character. As their experience grew, they became more adept at this and the game was interrupted less and less frequently.

If you think that inexperience or immaturity might be a factor, Angii,, I suggest that everyone at the table read a copy of one of my previous blog posts, “Player Peers”. Johnn’s answer is partially applicable to this interpretation, as well.

A Fish Out Of Water

This section arises from the question, “Is the player stepping out of character to have fun?”

Players can be left feeling left out of the fun when everyone else has a different code of conduct to that of their character. Even if the GM is fair, and gives each player equal attention when it comes to roleplaying encounters, the rest of the table will usually be able to share in the fun due to the similarity of their character’s world-view, while the ‘exception’ is viewed as a wet blanket. This is a problem that can arise – and is usually worse – with experienced roleplayers. This engenders frustration on the part of the ‘exception’ which can build up until it explodes in something quite uncharacteristic.

The solution to this particular problem is two-fold; first, the personality of the ‘exception’ character has to be tweaked slightly to give them leanings in the direction of the majority; and the second is for the GM to recognise that because of the ‘shared participation’ of the other characters in encounters fitting the majority perspective, he needs to overcompensate slightly and give the exception a slightly bigger share of the roleplaying action. Giving all the characters equal playing time can actually be unfair.

An Arbitrary Standard

Forcing characters to stick to a given “alignment”, or expecting them to do so, is always a mistake, in any event. Characters should be created as individuals, with individual motivations and quirks and beliefs and behaviours, and not as cookie-cutter products wearing different classes like you might wear a different suit of clothes.

Since I’ve had rather a lot to say on the subject, rather than trying to synopsise it here, I suggest you point your GM and fellow players at the series of “Focusing On Alignment” articles. If you need assistance in taking the generic guidelines for alignment and creating an individual and unique personality within them, one which both permits and allows for the occasional excursion into the moderately crazy, check out my series “The Characterisation Puzzle”.

Between these two series – both 5 parts long I’m afraid, which is why I haven’t tried to synopsise them – you should find the answers you need, if this is where the problem lies.

A more consistent characterisation

These articles are also the solution to the question you actually asked. The problem is that the personality of the character has been confined to a narrow “alignment box”, and the player is struggling to break out of those restraints. By giving the character a better-defined personality, the player achieves a greater level of ownership of the character, is better able to roleplay it, and will build in ways of having fun or being cool or fitting in with the party – regardless of which of these is the problem.

The only problem to which this is not the solution is the question of expectations on the part of the GM and other players. And that brings us back to Johnn’s excellent answer, which crystallised my own thinking on this question; regardless of which of my solutions (if any) that you employ, they should be utilised in harmony with Johnn’s advice.

The attitude to take is not one of “this is the problem and this is the solution and it’s all your fault”, it is “this might be the problem and this is something that we can try that might solve it – but we’ll all have to take part.”

Ultimately, as the very fact that Angii asked for our advice proves, the problem (“No Game”) affects everyone at the table, and hence everyone has a stake in the solution and should participate in the solution. You’ve all shared in the pain of the problem, you’ve all shared in the pain of the consequences, you should all share in the solution, just as you would all expect to share in the rewards that will follow.

Best wishes to all involved – and may all your crits be successes.

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.| Network |. by Clix

Introduction

This is not the post I was originally going to write for today, but a paragraph in one of the books I am reading brought to mind the game that seemed to be everywhere just a few years ago, “Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon”, and social networking in general, and I suddenly saw applicability to RPGs. It won’t come as a surprise to long-time readers of Campaign Mastery that I like to relate to complex phenomena through Analagies; it lets me get an overall ‘take’ on the phenomenon and its relevance that otherwise awaits a “Eureka!” flash of insight.

The “Six Degrees” game is a manifestation of a theory of social networking, and states that Person A will know someone (designated person B) who knows someone (person C) who knows someone (person D) who knows someone (person E), and that one of these five people will know Kevin Bacon. The broader theory suggests that this is true of any two individuals – no matter how far apart they seem to be, a finite and remarkably small number of links can connect them. Several experiments have confirmed the hypothesis and a number of social networking sites have found ways to take advantage of it; you can find more information on the subject at this Wikipedia page.

The thought that intrigued me, the “Eureka! moment” that changed the subject of today’s discussion, is this: How does this concept manifest itself in terms of the relationships between characters in RPGs, and how can the GM take advantage of it?

One Degree Of Seperation

This is obviously a situtation in which everyone that the characters meet is directly relevant to the campaign. It doesn’t take players long to recognise it, either, which is why this is a common characteristic of new-GM campaigns – though, to be fair, experienced GMs often fall into this trap as well (and I include myself in that number). Immediately a new NPC is encountered, under this model, the players begin trying to fit them into a pigeonhole – “this character is here for this reason”.

Prior to this realisation, all my thinking had been about ways to obfuscate the relevance of an NPC character from the PCs – making them seem important to situation “A” instead of “B” – and of finding ways to connect characters (especially PCs) more immediately to the scenario’s action – in effect, shortening the degrees of seperation between PCs and the events of the Campaign, so that it feels more personal, and more important, to the characters.

While that work is not invalidated by this new perspective, it now becomes a relatively small componant of a much larger vista of possibilities.

Two Degrees Of Seperation

The first of these is possibilities emerges through the use of two degrees of seperation. Instead of everyone the PCs meet being directly relevant to events in the campaign, we’re now talking about the majority of them merely knowing someone who is directly relevant. Social networking and character interaction immediately become more important as the communications channels for reaching those relevant individuals. Suddenly, there is a new depth and sophistication to the campaign, and a far greater complexity – mathematically, the campiagn is expanded geometrically in all social respects.

I had briefly touched on this concept, without recognising it, while working on the “Contacts” rules for my superhero campaign, whose rules derive from the Hero System. The notion was implicit that who an NPC could call apon for information or action was directly relevant to the value they offered when that NPC was taken as a contact, and some efforts were made to quantify these secondary values.

More Degrees Of Seperation

In the real world, the sophistication of social networks extend many layers deeper than this, but, in an RPG, I would suggest that the best way of counting degrees of seperation should be one, two, three, many. Consider the situation in which a PC calls apon one of the contacts that I described above and asks him to use his influance over others to cause a certain action to take place; what the character is actually asking the NPC to do is to direct a third party to act apon a fourth, establishing a three-degrees-of-seperation relationship between the PC and the target of the action, regardless of how many degrees of seperation had previously seperated that third party and the target, as shown by the illustration below.

The PCs contact A, who arranges for B to act against H, a target they have virtually no relationship with, otherwise. For the sake of the example, I have deliberately placed six degrees of seperation between B and H.

This is obvously intended to achieve some goal of the PCs, indicating that there must be a relationship between them and H of no more than three degrees – either he is their enemy, or he is the enemy of someone they are directly connected with, or the consequence of the action against H will impact their real target, J (not shown) in some way.

• If H is the PCs’ enemy, that’s one degree of seperation.
• If H is the enemy of someone the PCs know, that’s two degrees of seperation.
• If J is the PC’s enemy, that’s also two degrees of seperation – PCs to J to H.
• If J is the enemy of someone the PCs know, that’s three degrees of seperation (or less, if H is that someone).

One, Two, Three, Many. That’s all that a Campaign needs.

RPG Usage with Information Dynamics

Of course, I couldn’t leave the general concept there. What if the degrees of seperation referred not to characters, but to pieces of information and the relationship between them? Could it be possible to catalogue all known information using some system of N links between them? Would this permit a faster method of indexing them, and of searching that index?

Or fields of knowledge – is this a way to map out the way they connect and relate to each other, and might such a map reveal the degree to which one contributes to an understanding of another?

Multistep Problems

In RPG terms, the first can be likened to performing an internet search to locate a website that’s relevant to the enquiry, then searching that website’s pages for mention of the subject, determining that the website doesn’t hold the answer directly (or doesn’t have the whole answer), but does have a link to a different web page either on the same site or on a different site – in other words, to good old-fashioned internet browsing? One relatively complicated task – finding a piece of needed obscure information – has been broken into smaller tasks which have a relatively quantifiable degree of difficulty. Each task must be successful in order for the next to become possible.

TORG used just such a mechanism for resolving difficult tasks (like defusing a bomb) that would otherwise be anticlimactic. Sure, there are often occasions when this would be overkill – but there are times when a straight die roll takes all the excitement out of the task – just one of several concepts in that game system that I considered brilliant ideas, and that have shaped my thinking ever since.

Skill Synergies

The second idea has also been used in RPGs before. The first example that comes to mind is the Language Chart from the Hero System, which uses the degree of relatedness between a known language and an unknown language to determine how many points it costs to learn the unknown language. It is also used, in the first degree of seperation only, by D&D 3.x, in the form of synergy bonuses. I’ve used another variation on the concept for determining the costs of “driving” certain kinds of vehicles – because while it’s trivial learning to use an automatic gearbox vehicle if you learned to drive a manual, the opposite is very definitly not true.

The concept of the relatedness of information keeps recurring in RPG systems; it is even (to stretch the applicability almost to breaking point) analagous to Roleplaying Tips’ famous “Five Room Dungeons” – five challenges to be overcome to complete the mini-scenario.

Why not use this as a tool to think about how to structure your scenarios? Clue number 1 leads to clues 2 and 3; clue 2 leads to action, but ends in a dead end; clue 3 leads to action, which yields clue 4; clue 4 leads to action, which leads to identifying the specific target or objective; and that leads to the action needed to complete the scenario. Or perhaps the chain is 1 to 2 to 3 and 4, with 3 being a dead end, and 4 leading to 5, which leads to resolution of the original problem. This sort of breakdown: introduction, progress, setback, resolution – is used in dramatic writing all the time – try analysing any self-contained episodic TV show or movie, and you will find that most of them have a basic structure modelled along these lines.

RPG Usage with Repetitious Tasks

The same principles can also be extended to cover tasks that are repetitious to the point of tedium. For example, the number of climb rolls needed to climb a cliff (either up or down) can be truly stultifying – I once had a situation in which each PC had to make thirty rolls. How much better would it be to break the total task into 3 or 4 rolls, each dealing with the descent to, and resolution of, a specific sub-problem. The reduction in the number of rolls can easily be allowed for by increasing the difficulty target to be overcome, using the product rule.

For those that don’t know it: If a character has to make three rolls with a 60% chance of success at each, then the chance of his making all three rolls is 60/100 x 60/100 x 60/100, or 21.6%. You get that number by multiplying the three chances (as decimels or fractions) together, and then multiplying by 100 to convert the result to a percentage. 0.6 x 0.6 = 0.36; 0.36 x 0.6 = 0.216; so that’s 21.6%.

All you have to do is work out what the chance of success for each PC is for ONE step, and then multiply it by itself the right number of times. As a general rule, I don’t reccomend combining more than 5 rolls at a time in this way – so those 30 rolls could have been combined quite reasonably into 6 specific tasks.

You can even build additional difficulty into one or more steps along the way, just by converting the additional difficulty into a reduced chance of success on that roll.

RPG Usage with Authority Networks & Politics

Having gotten this far, I asked myself what else can be described meaningfully in terms of degrees of seperation? The first thought that came to mind was the heirarchy of power, from the very top to the very bottom of the rung. This is a complex issue, because people can have different levels of power in different spheres of authority, and some people have leverage that permits hidden power to be exerted indirectly. There are reasons why “the halls of power” are often described as a web, or as a labyrinth!

And yet, with further musings, it became clear to me that by expanding the simple linear model of degrees of seperation to incorporate a spacial axis – in effect, taking a linear chart and making it two-dimensional – quite complex relationships of authority could be expressed graphically by two numbers: one, the distance to the ultimate authority figure (ie the degrees of seperation from the ultimate authority) and two, a number designating the nature of the power.

The more I contemplated this particular model, the more it became aparrant that complexities could be rendered quite clear using this format that other forms of representation would struggle with. Consider, for example, the example below:

This shows the lines of authority for a particular character – let’s call him Bud. It’s been simplified to only have 4 degrees of seperation, ie 5 levels of authority from top to bottom. Bud is the most powerful man in industry, a position which gives him clout at the mid-level in politics, at a junior level in religion, at a low level in Legal circles, an intermediate level in Finance, and a senior level in the civil service. However, he also has “back-door” access to a senior level of both politics and finance, and has a second route to the religion junior level through his legal connections.

It has sometimes been said that policy made at the highest level becomes instructions at the senior level, strong suggestions at the intermediate level, suggestions at the the supervisory level, and a passing consideration at the most junior level. (It has also been said in the reverse direction!).

So, if each degree of seperation represents a reduction in direct authority, and that cross-field traffic only occurs perfectly horizontally except when otherwise noted, the level of direct authority over any other individual can be determined from the chart. In his own field, Bud is number 1, with a clear line of authority all the way down to the rank and file. He is (officially) three degrees of seperation removed from the top authority he holds in the political area, six removed from his authority in religious affairs, five from the legal field, four from finances, and two from a senior level of the civil service. Each step up or down from these represents an additional degree of seperation. However, he also has a backchannel that makes him only two degrees from the top political power, and another that makes him only two removed from the top financial power. Budd is the head of the civil service union – someone who can tell even senior politicians what to do, even though he is not supposed to be able to do so.

Why is such a chart useful? Because whenever Budd wants to exert his authority, the GM can count the layers of bureacracy through which Budds power must travel; the total gives some estimate of the authority carried by the instructions Budd gives, and the length of time it takes for his influance to be felt.

The example is not necessarily the most useful means of representing the lines of authority (in fact, it almost certainly isn’t, simply because it was the first one that I thought of), but it’s enough to demonstrate the validity of the concept. By changing the labels at the bottom of the chart, more specific and useful results can be obtained; for example, what if the labels had read “Arts department”, “Physics Department”, “Gym Team”, “Medical School”, “Administration”, and “Maths Department”? Then the same diagram might represent the lines of authority posessed by the Dean of the Physics department at a university.

It is the back-door paths that are most significant. Each represents a relationship that is beyond the boundaries that come with the position itself. Perhaps the Dean is married to one of the Arts Professors, and is a drinking buddy of the Dean Of Admissions, for example, while the junior professor of the Medical School also acts as the assistant coach of the Swim Team. It doesn’t take much more effort to completely map the lines of authority within the university.

RPG Usage with Social Networks

Of course, the real power of the concept lies in Social Networking, just as it does in the real world. Who knows who?

It’s not necessary for the GM to map out the entire social network in advance; but, with the assistance of the players concerned, he should map out the degrees of seperation that interconnect the PCs. Each time an NPC enters the campaign for the first time, he can add that NPC to the social network, determining who knows who, who is allied with who, and so on.

Consider this example. The Six PCs are at the centre of the network, and the links that connect each of them to the others are shown in blue. Links between the people on the network and the Crown are shown in Red. Links between NPCs are in black. Right away, the primary villain stands revealed to the GM (at the far right), and the fact that many of his lieutenants have associations, direct or indirect, with people connected socially to half the party, as well as to the King and the King’s #2 man. It is also clear that thus far, the PCs have only had one direct contact with the enemy.

The nature of that contact suggests that they will probably assume that the villain is the King’s #2 man, and will deal with the upper 3 NPC enemies and think the problem solved. At a later point, they will come into contact with one of the other NPCs, and assume that what they face is a seperate situation to the first, and will only discover otherwise quite late in the piece.

Conclusion

I’ve only spent an hour or two thinking about this, and I’m quite sure that I have only scratched the surface. How else might these ideas be useful? What other complex situations can this simplify through analogy? What else can we DO with this idea? What else can we abbreviate?

My Book of Dead Characters from 1985

A friend I once gamed with was awesome at celebrating gaming. He made sessions into special events. He had props. He talked about games in a special way, like a sports fan does about when their team won the championship that year. He celebrated the details and told stories about special session moments. It was infectious and made gaming special.

I need to do a better job at this. Today, I’m wiping the dust off my Book of Dead Characters (BoDC) and am adding to it once again. This little game prop had huge value back in the day for me, and helped PCs seem special, even after they’d fallen to never rise again.

I’m not going to use the same BoDC though, as my tastes have changed a bit. I think you need a BoDC for your gaming as well. In this blog post, I’m going reveal my original BoDC, and then show you what my new BoDC will entail. I hope you get inspired to create your own, and also I hope you add your ideas about what a BoDC should contain and could look like in the comments section at the end.

My original BoDC is filled with PCs fallen in the line of duty. I started it May 25, 1985. This was during my high school years, and characters were falling in huge numbers to my solo gaming via the random dungeon tables in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, and to the daily gaming my friend Chris and I got up to. (We sometimes played three times a day! Lunch, after school and in the evening.)

A long list of character kills

It has an index of dead PCs at the front. Each time I opened the binder to add another PC to the graveyard, I’d record his vital statistics like some crazy fantasy memorial. Name, class, level, hit points, armor class, ability scores, notable magic items and possessions, and cause of death.

On the first page of the index, I see nine PCs whacked by basilisk gaze. Names include Frashen Barake, Thundarr, Awry and Sly. I don’t remember these PCs, but likely I rolled up a basilisk encounter, the initial group of PCs got whacked, a survivor recruited new fellows and came back, and those PCs lost too. The first group was level one, and the second were levels 5-9. So it seems a group of experienced adventurers heard about the deadly monster killings and decided to try it on themselves. A third wave of level 1s perished after that to the foul beast. I imagine the lizard ate large that month.

Eventually I had so many entries in the BoDC I added tabs and sorted dead PCs by level, lol!

Dead PC ceremonies

Flipping through the binder, I see the process was the write dead in big letters across the character sheet. Kinda like a void cheque. Just in case I ever tried to cheat and un-deadify a character, I guess.

A dead PC

Then I’d enter his key features in the index and file the character under the correct tab.

Look at this poor bastard. Not only did he die, but when his friends tried to resurrect him, he rolled so poorly that he failed his resurrect saving throw. You know it’s a tough game when the afterlife can make an attack on you.

Before the BoDC, I remember we would have special BBQ ceremonies. We’d get a lighter, have three seconds of silence, and then torch the character sheet in my dad’s BBQ. It was probably more a fascination with fire than a ceremony of remembrance, but maybe a bit of both.

Other character death ceremonies I’ve witnessed:

This poor bastard never had a chance

• Crumpled paper ball
• Crumpled paper ball thrown at the GM
• Death of a thousand dice: character sheet pinned to a dart board and dice are thrown at it until it’s shredded
• Silently filed in the back of a player’s binder
• Fist slammed down on it and player storms away from the table
• Ripped up and tossed in the garbage
• Standing around a garbage can as a group and floating the sheet into it as we waved goodbye
• Erased and refilled
• Ye old paper airplane

Good times.

Re-use and recycle

I used the BoDC for fast PC creation. I’d look at favourite dead PCs and copy their character sheet onto a new one for fast play. I’d roll new stats and give him a new name, but otherwise equipment, spells, and other things were the same.

In later years, before D&D 3E, I’d go back and crib dead PCs for fast NPC creation. A nice tool because I had a lot of dead PCs from levels 1-15 to choose from.

The New Book of Dead Characters

Dead PCs piled 2d30 high

I’m going to create a new BoDC as a fun way to celebrate a unique part of RPG. When we lose at a board game, the game ends and a new one starts with a clean slate. Computer games churn away with new lives. Card games just get reshuffled. RPGs, though, are different. You likely spent a lot of hours in that character’s shoes, so the impact of his death is much greater than losing a life in another type of game.

If you are campaigning, then you will roll up a new PC, but the dead one can have lasting story impact. The new PC might be a relative of the old one. The dead PC might be used for evil purposes by a villain. The dead PC might have a legacy, such as bard songs sung about him, a string of great deeds performed, or a list of enemies disappointed they did not deliver the killing blow.

Characters do not fall often anymore in my campaigns. Certainly not enough to fill a binder. But for the PCs that have fallen in the past decade, I regret not having them stored in a book or binder. It would be great to leaf through them to recall old campaigns, players who have moved on, and even old encounters and plots for inspiration.

Hopefully I will not look back 10 years from now with the same regret. So, it’s time to craft a new Book of Dead Characters.

This time, I’m making some improvements over my old blue binder.

• Plastic sleeves. We don’t use 3 hole punched lined school paper anymore. Putting dead PCs in some cheap plastic sleeves keeps them intact.
• His story. I’ll ask the player of the dead PC to write a paragraph or two about the character. His best and worst moments in the game. A bit about his personality. His most prized possession, perhaps.
• Summary sheet. I’ll include a separate page to record the date of death, campaign name, player name, GM name, how the character died, and his legacy, if any. On this sheet is where the player-written story will go as well.
• Group condolences. I’ll pass around another sheet of paper and have players record a sentence or two of their thoughts about the PC. Jokes, fond memories, or just a quick goodbye – whatever each player wishes. I’ll ask players to sign with their name and their character’s name, and comments can be in character or out of character.
• Picture. I’ll take a digital pic and either print it out or save it to my Campaigns folder and make a reference note on the Summary sheet. The pics will be anything that helps recall the PC. It could be a picture of the battlemat that depicts the scene of his death, or just a snapshot of the group of us, perhaps holding the character sheet up.

This time it’s for NPCs too

The biggest difference this time around is my BoDC will include notable NPCs. These would be recurring NPCs who made an impact on the campaign, or NPCs who left a significant impression on the players or myself as DM.

The NPCs can be allies or enemies.

This will help NPCs live larger. As the players write their condolences for the NPC, the importance, uniqueness and presence of living NPCs will be valued more. In theory, at least.

It will also motivate me to bring my A game when playing NPCs. Player comments in the dead book will serve as a grade of sorts. Villains should hopefully get hateful and vengeful comments. Allies should be mourned. Ambivalence means I’ve failed to bring the non-player character to life through roleplaying or tactics.

Those are my plans for my new Book of Dead Characters. What do you think? Anything I can add to make it a treasured campaign and group enhancement?

Campaign Mastery was asked, GM Brian: “I’m trying to run a D&D 3.5 Eberron campaign that will mostly be a solo campaign for my friend. I’m just looking for tips on how I can run a well balanced solo campaign that can still have a good amount of combat.”

Johnn’s Answer:

This is a great question, because not all of us can fill an entire table up with gaming friends. Some of my best gaming was done with just one friend over the course of five years (hi Chris, if you’re reading this).

You asked about combat. There are non-combat challenges and opportunities when GMing a single character, but here are a few tips specifically about GMing fights.

Be generous with healing

Methods I’ve used are:

• Lots of healing potions with treasure.
• Cheap healing potions (due to alliance with a faction).
• Common mundane healing (blood honey was a favourite – if the PC could bring back the honey from a certain type of giant wasp, an alchemist would create blood honey for him for free if he could keep half of each batch).
• Membership to a religious order gave low rates on 1st to 3rd level divine spells.
• Cleric NPC tags along.
• Healing rods and wondrous items usable by the PC. I broke the rules on class usage (we were playing D&D 1E at the time) but explained it in-game with a story, and it worked out quite well.

Create a cast of companions

I almost always have one or more NPCs accompany solo PCs. This not only reduces risk of inadvertent PC death, but it gives me an ever-present voice in-game to give feedback, act as a foil, drop clues, and give ideas.

I play to each NPC’s personality and motives (sorry about the assassin “guide”, that time, Chris, but you did insult the King) so these characters are not cardboard cutouts there to serve the PC hand and foot.

Companions are often healers, but not always. A favourite companion type of mine is a barbarian. Loads of hit points and combat skills to believably save the game if TPK looms, but also great fun when the NPC rages on NPCs and gets the player character in all kinds of trouble. I play dumb barbarian companions, so the PC doesn’t come to rely on the NPC for clues, solutions and things the PC should do for himself.

Example of companions:

• Employer. The NPC is hands-on and wants a piece of the action, or perhaps he just doesn’t trust the PCs.
• Apprentice. Even non-magic users can attract followers. The leadership feat in D&D 3.5 especially makes this plausible and accessible.
• Bumbler. Can aid in combat, but like the raging barbarian, sometimes he seems like more trouble then he’s worth.
• Traitor. Avoid over-use, else you make the player so paranoid he refuses the company of all future companions.
• Master. Typically, I just make a mentor two levels or so higher than the PC. This keeps ability levels close so the NPC doesn’t steal the spotlight much.
• Dependant. Perhaps the PC is a single parent, has a slave or has been assigned to protect an NPC for the duration of several encounters, an adventure, or a whole campaign.

Start with weak foes

Until you master the dynamics of DMing a single PC, create several encounters with foes a lot weaker than the PC. Commoners are a great way to start out. So are diseased, venerable or wounded monsters who are low on hit points or do not have a full range of abilities to bring to a fight.

Strike to subdue

Create opponents whose motives are not to kill. City guards, for example, will just want to bring an unruly citizen back in line and be well-behaved, not put him in the graveyard.

Monstrous foes might want to keep food fresh.

Others might be equipped with non-lethal weapons. In a thieves guild style campaign I ran for Chris, the rogues mostly used saps. They always wanted to interrogate beaten foes, plus they were under orders to bring prisoners back to the bosses. Beaten foes sometimes make the best recruits, or at the latest, are more controllable.

Avoid out-numbering

Even weak foes can bring down solo PCs quick. Surrounded, a PC can’t escape easily (not without so many attacks of opportunity that the PC is a dead man), plus any movement abilities get nerfed, which isn’t fun if it happens often.

Add personality

Get some roleplaying done during battles. Trade insults, add flair and style to NPC manoeuvres, avoid going toe-to-toe and experiment with grapplers, bull rushers, and other interesting types. Watch Princess Bride for inspiration.

Get a pet

A pet could be considered a companion, but I wanted to call it out as a special case. Even if the PC is an arcane caster with a familiar, a pet is a boon.

Pets are cheap. You can get a nasty fighting dog without much burden.

Pets don’t speak. Unless the PC has speak with animals, or you conjure a situation so pet and master can communicate (1 hoof means yes, two means no), then you won’t have to carry on a conversation while managing the other aspects of the game, including other NPC companions.

Pets are disposable. While a PC can get quite attached to a pet, especially if they start kitting it out, you can often target the animal in combat without much drama. The more attacks you can spread around instead of focusing on the PC, the longer and healthier life the PC will have.

Get a mount

This gives the PC fast movement, a source of defense (sounding the alarm, for example) and a potential ally in combat.

Though it wasn’t in a solo PC game, a horse ended up saving an unconscious PC to prevent a TPK. It was a trained animal, so not too far-fetched.

Play up monster intelligence

This applies to groups with several PCs as well. Dumb foes will make mistakes in combat. This adds realism and fun to the game. Do not consider it a loss of face, poor game mastering, or being easy on the PC. Roleplay the monster.

Most critters will have natural cunning and basic combat tactics and reactions. They’ve survived this long as an individual and as a species.

However, encourage the player to use his PC’s intelligence and try to trick foes or induce them into making mistakes. This is where great gaming can take place.

Be generous with equipment

Give the PC more options by offering up generous amounts of mundane and magical equipment. Not all of it needs to be treasure, if that starts getting repetitive. You can have the PC befriend merchants, learn of black markets, become a crafter. A smith or bowyer might help upgrade weapons. Wizards could be paid to upgrade magic items or enchant items.

Encourage intelligence gathering

A character operating alone should learn quick not to charge headlong into the darkness.

Encourage the PC to do investigation, scouting and intelligence gathering at every opportunity.

Let him discover foe weaknesses. This doesn’t mean he throw kryptonite and the fight is over in one round. It doesn’t create wimpy adversaries, either. Instead, it gives the PC advantages that he’ll need to press during the combat. This closes the gap a little, but there will still be a lot of drama.

For example, a PC might learn about a foe’s resistance to one particular type of energy. Or a foe might take the same path to head quarters all the time, giving the character an opportunity to lay a trap or stage an ambush.

Use hirelings

NPCs for hire are often under-utilized by larger groups who don’t want the complications of more bodies to track and govern.

For the single PC, though, hirelings are a boon. Be sure to give the character enough cash flow so paying others to help is an option.

Potential hirelings are:

• Guards. Guard home base, camp or valuables.
• Mercenaries. The PC leads a band of red shirts into adventure.
• Sages. To help with intel.
• Haulers. Somebody’s gotta carry those 10,000 copper pieces back to town.
• Demolitions.
• A cook. True story – the cook saved a TPK during an Ars Magica game, once.

Mike’s Answer:

Johnn’s answer does a brilliant job of handling the combat side of solo adventuring, so I thought that I would quickly cover a range of twenty other points to be especially mindful of when it comes to solo games – though some of them can be useful tips for any GM.

Reduced Skill Set

With only one PC, your adventuring “party” will generally lack the variety of skill that you would normally expect. This can be compensated for with a reduction in ability and a more liberal spreading-around of skill points, but that in turn means that the character will be less capable within it’s niche than would be the case. To compensate for this, it can be worth considering releasing some “custom” magic items into the game that give the posessor extra skill points each character level.

Reduced Resources

The character will generally have reduced resources to draw apon in comparison to the standard party – fewer healing potions, less carrying capacity, less money in general, and so on. While only the one character will be drawing apon these resources, the rate of reduction in resource availability is greater than this offset factor. Be more generous with the salting of hoards with potions and other low-level items, and be prepared to be a little more generous in your GM calls than you might otherwise be – holy water might be an effective weapon against undead in a solo campaign where you would rule it less effective or even ineffective in a more typical camapaign, for example.

Restricted Spacial Capability

It’s a lot easier for a group to be in several places at once. While a group taking advantage of this ability can be a real pain for the GM, the absence of that capability can really hinder a solo adventurer. Consider setting up a network of street urchins for hire (Baker street irregulars) that you can give the character access to – for a fee – to help get around these difficulties.

Purity Of Allegiance

With multiple characters, the potential exists for individuals to make the acquantance of members of several rival factions. This provides the group with greater Intelligence (in the military sense) than can be achieved by a lone wolf. Expect the character to know only one side of any given debate within the campaign; this can often require greater exposition by NPCs to “fill in the blanks”.

Reduced Variety Of Ability

Magic, Nimbleness, Healing, Battle Prowess – at least one of these will be shortchanged because the character has access to only one class level per character level. That generally means that for any given character level, three of these will be reduced relative to the capabilities of the typical party. This can severly impact the variety of adventures that you offer – you can’t have one that focusses on magic and then another on the issue of faith vs religion and then a gladatorial combat and then a jewel heist, because the character simply won’t be good at all these things.

It can be tempting to pad the character out with NPC companions to restore some of these imbalances – but doing so can generate as many problems as it solves, as it inevitably moves the campaign closer to duex-ex-machinas and plot trains by taking self-determination away from the character on which the game should be focussed. There’s a fine line between NPCs who can support the PC and NPCs who take over 3/4 of the campaign.

Prestige Class assessment

A consequence of that last point is that character requests for a given prestige class should be assessed a little less stringently than would be the case in a normal campaign, especially if it brings a whole new area of expertise into the character’s grasp. There are Mage prestige classes that confer clerical magics apon a character, for example; I tend to discourage the taking of these in a normal campaign, especially if there is already a cleric in the party, so that each character continues to have a unique niche to occupy. In a solo campaign, I would reverse this policy 180° and even commend the prestige class to the player’s attention. Similarly, there are classes that I consider just plain broken, inherantly unbalanced, available on the net and in sourcebooks; I would be less concerned about these in a solo campaign. Always keep the bigger picture in mind when assessing these player requests.

Variety not intensity

Another consequence of the reduced variety of intensity and the need to focus on prestige classes that broaden a character’s horizons is that the character will tend to be less focussed on their primary schtickh than they would be as a member of a party in a typical campaign. This is worth bearing in mind. As a rule of thumb, I would assess a cleric in a solo campaign to be effectively two levels down on a cleric of the same class level in an adventuring party.

Magic Items should be valued on a different scale

Some magic items give broader capabilites to the character, others make them better at one specific thing. Fighters like Ogre Strength and the like, for example, Rogues like Gloves of Dexterity, and so on. In a solo campaign, these “focussed” items are a little less desireable than items which broaden capabilities. A Dancing Sword, for example, is far more valuable in a solo campaign (where it doubles the number of combatants on the PC’s side) than it is in a 4-character party (a 20% increase in the number of combatants). Summon spells become far more useful in the solo game. These are things that should be borne in mind when placing treasures.

Greater scope for experimentation

A solo campaign typically offers both player and GM greater opportunities to experiment, to try things that they would not otherwise consider. That’s because the necessary preperation and infrastructure requirements are so much less when you only have one PC to worry about, so there is less time and effort involved, and hence a smaller downside if the experiment goes pear-shaped. You don’t necessarily have to experiment if you don’t want to – but you should be aware of the opportunity, at least.

Puzzles & Mysteries are harder to solve

Quite often, in order to solve a puzzle or mystery, a character will need to bounce ideas off someone else. Discussion and different perspectives can often yield clues and insights that set the character on the path to unravelling the challenge before them. In a solo campaign, this “outside source of ideas” is absent, and as a result, any puzzle or mystery becomes harder to solve. The temptations are either to drop hints (which cheapens the whole experience for the player), to have an NPC solve it (in which case why bother putting it into the game in the first place?) or to permit the character to solve it by die roll instead of having the player do so – which is really unsatisfying to all concerned. The better answer is to take the absence of this resource into consideration when designing the puzzle in the first place – and be prepared to let the character take longer to solve it.

CR rises faster than character level

The temptation is always there to simply crack open the monster manual and create an encounter with the same CR as the character has levels. Avoid succumbing to this temptation. One character alone is effectively a party with a CR of 4 less than the character levels (that’s how the math works out) – so the right scale encounter for a character of level 10 is one with an EL of 6. That’s one creature of CR 6 in opposition, or two of CR 4, or four of CR 2, or eight of CR 1. An encounter with the same EL as a solo character has levels is one where they have a fair chance of being killed – even if they start the fight in pristine condition. Bear this in mind.

Be more XP-Generous

Another way of restating the last couple of points is that the character has done better than normal when they succeed in dealing with problems appropriate for a party of equivalent level. You can’t even compare apples with apples, because the solo character is required to spread themselves more thinly over a broader range of abilities, as discussed earlier. In a solo campaign, I would increase the XP rewards given out for success by 10%, 20%, or even 25%.

Assumptions and mistakes

This is a similar point to that made regarding mysteries and puzzles. Because the solo character has no-one to challenge his assumptions (other than the GM), assumptions and mistakes of logic are more likely to be regarded as certainties. That means that the character will make mistakes more often in a solo campaign. Cut the player some slack.

Faster Pacing

With every extra player in a group, the number of interactions between members of the group incease exponentially, while the amount of attention the GM can give to any one player or PC is reduced. The number of combinations taken 2 at a time is the math of the interaction, but in practical terms it means that the fewer the players, the faster the pacing will inevitably be in the campaign. There’s less discussion of plans and alternatives (no-one to discuss them with), there’s less side-chatter (ditto) and the GM is exclusively dedicated to the one player and his character. Expect the game to run at between five and ten times the pace that would be normal, on average. Sometimes it will be even more, sometimes less. One solo game that I ran disposed of three MONTHS of game-time activities in a single afternoon, when the regular campaign (four players) would have trouble getting through three DAYS of game time in a similar real-time window – a 30-to-1 pacing increase. You should prepare accordingly – you will need more material ready to go. (As a rule of thumb, each additional player halves the rate of progress of a campaign, or more – which gives a figure of 8 times faster pacing).

Greater Focus

An additional consequence is that there is much greater focus on the desires, ambitions, and actions of the one PC. The campaign will focus more on the playing style of that lone player, and of the GM – both good and bad will be amplified by this greater focus. In effect, both will be put under the microscope. Be prepared for this effect, and check your egos at the door.

Greater Flexibility

It’s not all downside. The campaign can have far greater flexibility, changing directions more quickly; each additional player also brings the plot equivalent of inertia to the campaign, because they all need to get their share of the attention. With no need to compromise, the campaign can change gears far more quickly. In addition, the more intimate association can often permit the participants to explore themes and social areas that they would be uncomfortable discussing in a more public forum. If your usual games are PG-13, don’t be surprised if you discover the solo campaign treading R-rated territory.

Take more frequent breaks

A more frantic pace, at a higher level of intensity – by now, this hint should be pretty self-evident. Because there’s a lower stress level involved, I would suggest breaking twice as frequently as you would with a four-player group, just to give you time to catch your breath and clear your head.

More can be hand-waved

Because there are fewer PCs to interact with the world, you will find that more can be hand-waved than is the case in the typical campaign. This is another of the factors that leads to faster pacing described previously. More frequently than usual, you will find yourself skipping straight from announcement of action to execution, where in a typical campaign there might have been side encounters and discussions and other plot threads to deal with.

Tactics will change

This is just about the only specifically combat-oriented tip that I’m including, but the principle also applies more generally. Because the character will more frequently be outnumbered, certain tactics become inaccessable to the character and more routine for the opposition to employ. And because there is no-one else to sit in moral judgement of the player, the temptation to employ more… dubious… tactics is ever-present. In a nutshell, as stated under the “Greater Flexibility” heading, approaches that would not normally be considered reasonable will be employed more frequently, even if the PC is a “good guy”. Be prepared for more left-field and/or morally ambiguous approaches to problems, and the accompanying need to think more quickly on your feet in response.

Less need to compromise

The last is an outgrowth of something that I discussed in part 2 of my series on “The Pursuit Of Perfection”: the more players there are in a campaign, the more it needs to compromise in the direction of a common denomenator. With just one player, there will never be less need to compromise your campaign ideas. While this can be a good thing, it is also possible for a GM to get a little silly, effectively drunk on the freedom. I cringe at the memory of some of the things that I pulled off the top of my head the first time I GM’d a solo campaign. (The transvestite bunny in the darth vader costume selling used lightsabres for outrageous prices, for example – it seemed funny at the time). Enjoy the freedom, but keep a stronger grip on your wilder ideas than normal – with so much less time between concept and execution, you can find yourself through the looking-glass faster than you would dream possible.

In conclusion, I would offer the following:

Have fun! Take advantage of the opportunities presented by a solo game, and work hard to minimise the weaknesses that come with such a campaign, and it can become something that you will both remember fondly for many years to come.

An Update Of Sorts

Readers of this article should be aware that Mike has recently revisited the subject of single-player games in a four-part series,
‘One Player Is Enough’, allowing him a lot more room to explore the subject.

Ask The GMs is a service to you offered by Campaign Mastery. Check out what’s coming next, or ask us a question you have about GMing. Ask The GMs >

Via Rosa Vecchia by ~Nurkhular

Architecture is often an afterthought in campaigns, so it under performs as a GM tool. I’ve set about to fix that for my Riddleport campaign. Here are a few of the ways I’m using building architecture to enhance the campaign, and I describe my thought processes so you can do the same for yours.

The PCs start off as new owners of an inn. They are a mercenary group who will use the inn as a home base. A couple PCs want to start side businesses that can be administered between sessions, as well. Put everything together and the sandbox style campaign is a hook generating machine.

My first action was to surf around for inspirational pictures or art. After a few minutes I eventually came across something great by ~Nurkhular in the landscapes section of the DeviantArt website as pictured in this post.

I thought ~Nurkhular’s picture was perfect for the PCs’ inn. With that in place as a cornerstone (pun!), many ideas started to come together:

(If you are a player in my campaign, please stop reading. :)

• As a city of crime lords constantly vying for power, stone architecture would be preferred due to its strength and durability.
• Salt water from the sea deteriorates everything. Add in a deficiency in rock from the local quarry and we have constantly crumbling buildings and architecture. This offers several gaming options:
  • Combat hazards: as difficult terrain, falling bricks, and collapsing structures
  • Skill hazard: climbing is dangerous as are rooftop excursions
  • A new faction: masons can be a significant faction due to demand for their services and expertise
• A wet city with predominantly stone buildings protects me from fireballs. Just as I dislike urban campaigns where chaotic characters constantly run afoul of the law, I also worried about magic users torching my plans. Now I have a good defense against pyrotechnics ruining the campaign with a single spark.
• At first glance the art looked dark and misty to me, so I decided the climate in winter, spring and fall is mostly wet, cold, and foggy. Perfect for pirates, perfect for encounters and perfect for a stealth-based party of PCs (which I’ve been warned the group is creating).
• Mapping became a bit easier. Square stone corners except for expensive buildings. Easy to map, if desired.

Consistent style

Now that I have one picture or vision of the building style in the city, I can search for more online to help inspire various locations. The key was finding the first pic to help me decide the base architecture.

Location and plot hooks: where does the source material come from?

With architectural themes picked, I next considered where all the building materials come from. Using great advice from Dragon’s old Dungeoncraft column, I tried to add in many secrets and hooks to the trivia I created:

• A nearby quarry is the source of 90% of building materials. It is owned by the Mason’s Guild and guarded well because the stone is valuable and crime lords in the past have tried bullying their own crews into the place.
• For protection, the mason’s dug two secret passages from the quarry to the guildhall so workers can safely travel to and from work.
• Workers camp at the quarry for 26 days and receive four days off. Off-duty crews then descend upon Riddleport to blow their month’s earnings on vices and get into all sorts of trouble, such as bar brawls, gambling debts, lover spats and the occasional murder. Standard fantasy fare here, and lots of possibilities why mercenary PCs might be hired to fix a situation.
• The stone from this quarry is flawed and deteriorates quickly. Constant repairs, rebuilding and new building goes on in the city. A special mason, known as an Assayer, is responsible for quality control of every batch sold to a customer. This person has a lot of political clout as he can hold up shipments, and therefore construction projects, as well as assign better or poor quality stone to various clients. There are three Assayers; one is a member of a dark cult, one is corrupt, and one is a spy for another crime lord.
• In truth, the stone from the quarry is perfectly fine. As per instructions, the Assayers add a special alchemical concoction prior to shipment from the quarry that results in the stone crumbling after only a few years.
• The alchemical mixture is sold to the masons in secret by agents of the Cypher Guild. A resupply occurs monthly, as required by the Cypher Guild. The masons have rogue mages currently researching the mixture in the hopes of unlocking the recipe. One of those mages secretly reports to Syzzinar, head of the Cypher Guild.
• The rich can import superior stone and exotic building materials from other parts of the world. The masons have their own secret gangs and pirates that try to disrupt this trade and its supply lines.

All this started with a single picture. If you seek inspiration for your game, head over to DeviantArt and find a cool piece of art and let the ideas flow.