Riddleport and the Cypher Gate

How does a mere mage survive in the world’s most infamous pirate’s den? And how does a leader of mages protect himself from the incredible powers his followers might weild against him?

Here are a few of my thought processes behind a faction in my new D&D campaign. I thought you might be interested in some of the ideas. Comments and ideas of your own are welcome in the comments section.

A note to my players: spoilers follow, please stop reading.

My group soon begins playing the Pathfinder RPG in a new campaign with first level characters. The campaign is still in the early stages of planning – it doesn’t even have a name yet – but a few things are developing.

Order of Cyphers

One such thing is the local mage’s guild, The Order of Cyphers. I’m using Riddleport as the primary setting: a pirate town being slowly gentrified by an influx of scholars and merchants. I’m changing a lot of Paizo’s Riddleport, and that includes the mage’s guild.

The Order of Cyphers is named after a massive stone arch that spans the entrance to the city’s harbour. The arch is covered in ancient glyphs that no one can decode. Many think great and possibly terrible knowledge lies behind the glyphs, thus attracting magi from around the world to study and try to understand the tantalizing runes.

Syzzinar the Schemer

The enigmatic Syzzinar leads the guild and he is the most powerful of the eight crime lords who rule Riddleport, under the Overlord. None of the other faction bosses realize Syzzinar’s power, which is the way the near-epic magus wants it.

Syzzinar came to Riddleport as a prisoner nearly 100 years ago. His useful magic skills kept him in chains for a decade. Finally he gained the acumen necessary to slay his captain and sink his boat. He did this just as the ship was out of the harbour and out of sight of Riddleport. He flew back to the town under disguise and started a new life.

Crowdsourcing research

He began by studying the runes on the arch, certain some magical revelation lay behind the strange shapes. After 20 years he gave up and developed a new strategy. 100 heads are better than one, right?

Syzzinar started spreading rumours of wild and incredible knowledge that lay encoded in the runes. Riddleport at that time was infamous for being purely a pirate haven and a deadly place if you did not follow the way of the sea. Woven into his rumours was news of a new scholar’s guild that offered food, lodging, and most important, protection to all who came to study the arch. Even the name of the guild was designed to lure mages – the Order of Cyphers.

As magi warily trickled in from nearby cities, Syzzinar met each visitor with an invitation to join the Order, the only safe place in the city for the learned. The annual dues were steep, but magi come by coin easily.

Handling the Overlord like a frog in hot water

The crafty mage guild leader approached the Overlord in those long-gone days with hefty portions of guild fees collected to keep the guild safe from powerful pirate captains and their crews. Syzzinar knew the guild’s power would grow over time, and indeed it did, which allowed him to slowly cut back payments and keep more for himself. Overlords over the years were hesitant to anger a guild of wizards and settled for a slight reduction every couple of years. Just as a frog in slowly heated water will not hop out and will boil to death, so too did Overlords back away from confrontation and let Syzzinar gain ever increasing power and boons.

Keeping the mages distracted and under his control

With the problem of protection from pirates dealt with, Syzzinar set about tackling another tricky issue. How does one keep control of a group of mages, who if they joined together could easily wrest control from him at any time? Even in those early days, the leader recognized this grave threat to his position.

His solution was the Cypher Gate – the stone arch with the glyphs. By attracting only those magi interested in peaceful study and investigation he could keep them protected – and distracted. Alpha types were rooted out and their bodies thrown into the harbour. Syzzinar successfully deflected blame of these murders to one pirate captain or another, and in more recent years, to one crime lord or another. This further kept his flock docile and appreciative of The Order’s protection.

A quiet life of crime and politics

During the past eighty years, Syzzinar has followed all research very carefully. Spies make certain members do not keep secrets for long. He sits back and lets his members do all the pondering, reading, experimentation, and theorizing. He knows his unwitting 100+ member research group will soon unlock the riddle of the Cyphergate, and he’ll be there to seize the answer and get all its power for himself.

Meantime, he leads a quiet life of crime, leveraging the magic abiliites of guild members to offer services to Riddleport’s citizens as well as extort information and wealth from the minions of the other seven crime lords.

The Overlord bides and plots

The Overlord is scared of The Order, but he does not have enough power to intervene directly, nor can he coerce any of the other crime lords to act against the smug magi leader. Something must be done though, and soon, before Syzzinar is in such a position to sieze the title of Overlord for himself.

Thoughts? Comments? One thing I’m noodling on is that aside from his troublesome start, Syzzinar has not had much conflict in the past 80 years. His story needs some setbacks, and perhaps an arch nemesis.

In part one of this 5-part examination, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. In Part two, “A Neccessary Evil?”, I discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the historical precedent for oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse attributable to the judgemental and morally-extremist labels that had been used. In this part of the series, I examine the other side of the coin, then re-examine whether or not alignment really should be part of the game. I’ll then offer alternative ways of using the Mechanics of Alignment to satisfy both sides of the question, and transform alignment into a tool for characterisation, for the generation of scenarios, and even of whole campaigns. In Parts 4 and 5, I’ll share some ways to use those mechanics to enhance your games by giving some examples from my own campaigns.

Counterpoint: Complex Morality oversimplified

In touching on the historical foundations of an alignment system, I showed that oversimplified moral positions are more historically accurate than a complex moral code better suited to modern times. There are good reasons for this; first, moral behaviour was often linked to acceptance and protection of authority, and second, the lack of education required a simplification of the issues.

If it is accepted that Monarchs rule by Divine Right, then it must be accepted that moral behaviour requires obediance and loyalty to the Monarch. It was therefore in the interests of the authorities to simplify moral questions – in theory, the Monarch shoulders the burdons of deciding what is right and proper. Since no confusion can be permitted, lest the authority of the Monarch be called into question, definitions of what is moral must be simplified to the point of absurdity to ensure that they can be unhesitatingly applied in all situations.

Similarly, much of what little education existed in the Middle Ages was in the hands of the clergy, because they were the most learned people available to teach. Of course, as the moral guides and guardians of society, they were hardly going to instill doubts about the status quo in people, or encourage indeoendant thinking! On the contrary, doctrine was inherantly simplistic, and has stayed so ever since – so much so that many now feel that the churches have lost touch with modern thinking.

Nor are these the only forces at work that will tend, even in a fantasy campaign, to oversimplify complicated moral questions, just as they have throughout history. War has already been identified as a common cause of such oversimplification; another which has been a factor throughout human history has been religious intolerance.

There are differences between an authentic medieval society and that of a game, but enough of the fundamentals remain consistant between the two that it must be expected that at least some of the authority figures, if not all of them, will oversimplify complex moral issues.

Extremist Morality in a Gaming context

None of this is necessarily a bad thing within a game. An oversimplified moral structure makes the campaign background more accessable, and more relevant, to the Players, who will often find it easier to identify with. In games with children, as discussed last time, these things should be kept fairly simple; but in adult games, an excessively-simplified moral structure is an open invitation to explore moral questions and issues that would otherwise be too serious or potentially offensive.

There are some issues that, historically, have been moral according to the accepted morals of the time and place, but have since become moral anathema according to accepted wisdom. I sometimes call these issues Moral Chameleons. By linking a fantasy race or subculture to one of the key roles in these issues, the questions can be asked in a whole new context. Below, I’ve listed seven of these evergreen Moral Chameleons, but to some extent, any moral question can be used in this way.

Moral chameleon issue #1: Slavery
An old favorite with so many possibilities that not even in 29 years gaming have I explored them all. Is it wrong to enslave Machines? How about zombies? Demons? Is it wrong to liberate enslaved demons? Where does slavery end and social symbiosis start? These suggestions just scratch the surface…

Moral chameleon issue #2: The Crusades
If you accept the moral authority of a religion – any religion – then you are honour-bound to support that church’s attempts to educate the heathens – no matter what it takes… is the same true of an economic principle? How about polluting industries which harm a neighbouring country – is the victim entitled to invade the offender? Even the US-Soviet cold war can be interpreted as falling into this category, as can the Korean and Vietnam wars – none of which ever caused any controversy, did they?

Moral chameleon issue #3: The Inquisition
This evergreen could be considered the internal equivalent of the Crusades. How far is an organisation – be it religious, civil, or social – entitled to go to protect itself from internal corruption? When ‘real’ demons and devils are involved? If the Inquisition is merely searching out human fallability and doubt, you get a very different answer to that which results if they are engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a real enemy.

Moral chameleon issue #4: Loki
Norse mythology describes Loki as a mischief-maker, playing pranks with no regard for the consequences; when the chips are down, he usually comes up with some way to atone. Yet, during Ragnerok, he is counted amongst the enemies of the Aesir – without explanation. Stephen Brust explored a similar issue in his novel, ‘To Reign In Hell’, which contains the wonderful quote from the author in it’s back cover blurb, “From all of my readings on the revolt of the Angels, two things are clear: God is omnipotent, and Satan is not a fool. There seems to be a contradiction here…” Any anti-hero can be considered in the same light, and raises many of the same questions about the fundamental nature of evil, and evil acts.

Moral chameleon issue #5: Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Many countries have accused the US of hypocrasy over it’s political position on Weapons of Mass Destruction. The existance – or even the possibility – of such weapons always brings moral questions with it in an overhead compartment. “Are we justified in having these weapons? Are we justified in using them? How much is a victory worth, not just in the short-term, but centuries or millennia from now?”

Moral chameleon issue #6: Freedom Fighters
It has often been said that one man’s revolutionary is another man’s Freedom Fighter, and the questions of justification, and indirect warfare, always bear inspection. Is a violent and murderous campaign of liberation justifiable against an oppressive conqueror? How about a flawed but well-meaning government? Or one intent on acts of Genocide for what it considers the greater good? Robin Hood, the French Resistance, the IRA, Al Quida? Are there moral differences, and if so, what are they?

Moral chameleon issue #7: Prejudice (Racial or Class)
And, of course, there is this old favorite. Every case of opposition to racial or class prejudice rests on the assumption of equality – but in a fantasy campaign, that is not necessarily the case. Is prejudice justifiable against a superior species that would otherwise assume a position of dominance? How about against a species that considers your species as a food source, or that does not consider your species to be sentient?

Philosophers can spend decades wrestling with these thorny issues. Expecting to resolve them in a roleplaying game is going too far – but putting PCs into a position where they have to decide for themselves what is right, then justify that decision and wear the consequences, can be interesting, entertaining, and enlightening, for all concerned.

Alignment: Unneccessary?

And so we come to the crux of the matter: no matter how necessary it is for it to be part of the rules, is alignment really necessary in a campaign?

The answer is clearly no; Garry’s Campaigns stand as demonstration that D&D can be run without alignment, and in comparison to a campaign in which Alignment is misused, that might even be a beneficial step. I can agree with Garry that much, at least.

But I have to ask: is getting rid of Alignment a better solution than adapting the game mechanisms to benefit the campaign instead of harming it? You certainly couldn’t call Garry’s solution taking the easy way out; he describes very clearly the depth to which it is integrated within the system. I remain unconvinced, especially since the alternative is relatively easy and is profoundly beneficial to the campaign.

Absolutism: Alignment is not an excuse

I want to digress for a moment, at this point, to agree with something that Garry implied in one of his reasons for removing Alignment, and which I have described as an abuse of the Alignment subsystem.

One of the most common fallacies is that alignment dictates what actions are acceptable roleplay for a character who has been labelled and categorised into one of the nine defined archetypes. I consider that putting the cart well and truly ahead of the horse. Alignments should be a tool to help classify what attitudes the character will find acceptable – a subtle but profound difference.

The first mandates strict accordance with the most absolute and extremist interpretation of behavioural norms; the other treats alignment as an overall summary of the type of person the character wants to be, or tries to be. The reasons for that objective, and how well the character lives up to it, and where he fails to measure up, and where he perceives that he fails to measure up, are the things that distinguish one person from another.

Some classes have alignment requirements, not to enforce some narrow-minded zealotry that constricts and constrains and stultifies roleplay, but because that group likes their members to have a particular perspective or attitude, because that is what they perceive the Class as representing – an ideal, not a recruiting parameter. It’s all in-game, not a subjective reality. Within those limits, anything is fair game. The man who will help a friend in trouble, who hates lying because he’s bad at it, who hates being lied to because he’s paranoid, who attacks those he considers direct threats to his race and way of life, the Klansman – he’s Lawful Good. And so is the man who works hard, gives to charity, goes to church on Sundays, obeys every law and every commandment, and tries to arrest the first man if that’s the responsibility he has accepted.

Because Absolutism is unrealistic. Angels and Devils might be absolutes, but people are… “fuzzy”, when it comes to alignment. Worse, absolutism limits the amount of fun and interest that a game can contain. That’s not to say that there aren’t good people and bad people and generous people and greedy people – there are. But good people are just as capable of committing atrocities if they are convinced that it serves the greater good.

Alignment should NEVER be a straightjacket to characterisation. I prefer to treat it as a tool, like a sharp knife – useful, but dangerous if mishandled.

So how should it be employed, in my opinion? Pay attention, folks, because this is what this whole article has been building towards…

Alignment as a Campaign Tool

The first thing that has to be done is to recognise that the labels given to the existing alignments are prejudicial and biased, and that they will need to be replaced. That sweeps away all the fluff and endless debate and gets down to brass tacks. The second step is to determine exactly what it means to “have” or “be” a particular alignment.

By adopting this position, however, we gain an additional benefit: it means that the interpretation of alignment can be tailored to fit, and contribute to, each individual campaign, reinforcing key conceptual elements. These definitions then flow through to the different means of scaling alignment – to governments, and to races, and so on – to individually tailor every encounter, in a subtle but sometimes profound manner, to that campaign. They define exactly what it means when a character casts “Detect Evil”.

My early interpretation: The Legislative (In-Game) Approach
My first campaign was very much created from a pro-Lawful-Good approach (I had not yet realised the need to alter the alignment labels), making it very traditional in many ways. Where it differed from the abusive approaches I had seen other GMs adopt was that I stated up front that these measured attitudes to authority and civic responsibility and, in general, to the laws of the land. Immediatly, this transformed the alignment definitions from absolutes to relative values, and permitted conflicts between characters who felt equally passionately that different approaches to the Kingdom’s problems were in “the people’s best interests”. By instinct or luck, I had managed to avoid the alignment quagmire.

What’s more, I also specified that Paladins did not see the world as relative values, but as extremes – though they were able to tolerate, to a personal degree, the foibles of others; while absolutism was a purity of purpose that clerics aspired to but rarely achieved. The players in question had great fun taking these cues and integrating them into their roleplay – arguing with each other about minitia, the priest talking a hard line about abstemption but being the first to persuade the Paladin to forgive the foibles of the weak every time one of the other characters did something to offend his delicate sensibilities. At the same time, the Paladin was the backbone and stiff upper lip of the party, the glue that held them together anytime things became difficult – even when everybody and everything that he respected was revealed to be a sham, a corrupt shell; that only fueled his zeal to restore what he percieved as the tarnished honor of his Order.

The Third Axis: Intensity Of Belief
The other thing that I did was to postulate that an extreme position on the alignment chart reflected extremity of objectives, not strength of convictions. Most alignment maps equate the two; I put intensity of belief on a third axis, at right angles to the other two. That meant that a character could be Lawful Good in his convictions, but extremely morally weak, forever failing and repenting. The overall shape was that of an inverted cone (following the logic that the weaker a character’s morality was, the more ‘beige neutral’ they were; alignment boundaries descended vertically, and simple 3D geometry defined relationship strengths in terms of alliance and antagonism.

It also meant that the closer one came to neutral, the easier it was to slip off the peak to one side or another and incur an alignment shift.

All this proved to be more work than necessary, but it remains an elementary example of the type of Alignment treatment that I am advocating. Complex morality and moral questions and rich characterisation are not excluded by a correctly-utilised alignment system.

Alignment as motivation not control
None of this works if alignments represent totally dogmatic perspectives, in other words if they are used to control or restrict the PCs interpretation of their character’s behaviour under the circumstances present within the campaign. This usage of the alignment infrastructure of the rules requires that the PCs (and NPCs from the available player-races) have free will; this is about the character’s philosophy and personal ambitions of self-improvement, not about telling characters how they should or would act. When the third axis was included, this could be taken as read, especially if the real extremes were restricted to specific NPC archetypes – Gods and Devils and other supernatural creatures; but without it, it needs to be spelt out.

A character’s ideals are described by their alignment; how closely they live according to those ideals is an entirely seperate question. But deviate from your ideals too much or too often, and your ideals themselves become compromised – and the result is an alignment shift.

Reinventing the Labels

So, let’s take a look at reinventing the alignment labels and how that can work. I’m providing two examples for each alignment axis, but thought I’d talk about some general principles first.

One axis will always point toward some behavioural trait that is considered moral, while the other will point towards the opposite trait. The first will be the group that includes celestials and other angelic beings, while the latter will include demons and devils.

The complimentary axis will point toward a different behavioural trait that is usually considered desirable by some and the opposite end will point toward its antithesis. The difference between these two behavioural traits will define the “racial” personality differences between “Demons” and “Devils”.

The position along either axis will define the ratios of one quality to the other in the personality of the being, but not the intensity or reliability of those personality traits, which will differ from character to character.

Reinventing the Labels – “Good Vs Evil”: Altruism vs Selfishness
These are my standard substitutions for these inherantly biased and judgemental labels. Altriusm implies a level of generosity, willingness to put others ahead of yourself, etc, while it’s opposite places the individual ahead of the group. One interesting campaign premise inverts these with respect to reality but not with respect to social beliefs. The result is a situation in which the “beautiful” have seduced society for their own benefit, while those who want to liberate society (and themselves) are the downtrodden exiles of the angels, cursed and corrupted to render them abhorrent to “civilized” people. PCs will start off with the normal social beliefs, but questions will start to add up, eg an angel incinerating a helpless cult leader captured by the PCs just as he was about to start answering questions about his recent activities.

Reinventing the Labels – “Good Vs Evil”: Honour vs Expediency
Another option that I’m saving for a future campaign. This one is interesting because the two extremes don’t quite mean the same thing, and imply different aspects of their extreme opposite; Honour vs Dishonour, and the long view as opposed to a short-term advantage. These in turn offer differently-flavoured interpretations of Intelligence – Logic vs Intuition. The result is a blending of Star Wars (‘The quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side’) and Star Trek. It also means that these are not necessarily antagonistic qualities; if a combination of the two can be focussed on a problem, it could prove more effective than either on their own – or, if the two compete and interfere, it could conceivably be worse. The campaign, if and when it eventually happens, will also reflect these disparate principles – every time someone of the Honour Alignment goes for the Quick solution instead of the long view, things will start going wrong for them (using rules for bad luck), and vice-versa for the Expedient. The bad guys will be about instinct and inflicting maximum damage Right Now to the opposition, and will probably start of in the superior position – The Empire is in charge, not the Rebellion. There are still many details to be worked out, but I have years!

Reinventing the Labels – “Law vs Chaos”: Pattern & Ritual (aka ‘Order’) vs Intuition & Instinct (aka Chaos)
If it weren’t for the overlap in implied meanings, I might very well have used this combination for the complimentary alignment axis of the “Evil Empire” campaign discussed in the previous paragraph. I might still use it, but that implies a trend on the extremes of this axis to coincide with those of the previous axis – Expediant characters would trend toward Intuition and Instinct and away from Pattern and Ritual – it’s as though the two weren’t at right angles, or perhaps that these axes aren’t straight lines. But I’m not convinced that, as a combination of complimentary axes, these will accommodate satisfactory play well.

Taking this axis on it’s own merits, it suggests a dichotomy of the arcane – the difference between Wizardry and Sorcery. It also suggests a more regimented government and social structure (Guilds, Nobility, etc) vs a more anarchic state (Democratic?) This would work well as a conflict not between Heaven and Hell, but between D&D Devils and Demons. Or perhaps between Dragons and Demons, that would be fun! With the PCs, of course, opposing both, and caught in the middle.

Reinventing the Labels – “Law vs Chaos”: Protectionism vs Independance
I was going to use “Socially-acceptable Faith vs Agnosticism & Heathen Beleifs”, which is the Law/Chaos axis used in my Fumanor campaigns, and which is dominant over the Altruism vs Selfishness axis, but instead I decided at the last minute to illustrate a point by taking a completely different moral dichotomy, one that is only vaguely related to “Law vs Chaos”. Protectionism is about taking the weight of the world from the shoulders of those not prepared to bear it – wrapping the mortals in cotton wool and never letting them get hurt too badly, save for the occasional demonstration of ‘tough love’, while it’s counterpart is about pushing the kiddies out of the nest and forcing them to stand on their own two feet as quickly as possible, regardless of how harsh and callous the results might be. You could even describe them as Maternal vs Paternal, in some respects. To make matters interesting, the absence of free will implied by Protectionism makes it suitable for a repressive, controlled, and manipulative society – Fascism or the old Soviet political system. This would make the Demons the good guys and the Devils the bad – which is so similar in concept that this might even be complimentary if these replaced the “Good/Evil” axis.

Alignment as a tool for characterisation & scenario development

Just as Alignment can be used as a tool for the generation of campaigns, or for the translation of abstract campaign concepts into behavioural influances, so it can be used as a tool for characterisation. The GM should be able to pick a topic, any topic, of importance to the characters, and lay out an alignment axis between the two extreme perspectives. The characters each then have a choice: their position on that axis can either be informed by their previously-defined alignment, or can be in contrast to it. Whenever I do this, I like to put some variation on the question on the other axis. Deciding these issues helps form a more concrete picture of the character and his personality.

Instead of generating cardboard cutouts, alignment is suddenly transformed into a tool for the generation of complex personalities!

Greed: Debts and Promises
For example, let’s look at one of the question of Greed. As I described earlier, I use Selfishness instead of the term “Evil” (though Altruistic Characters may describe the actions of extremely Selfish characters as “Evil,” reflecting a values judgement by their characters). One aspect of Selfishness that the PCs are sure to encounter is the phenomenon of Greed, which can be examined from two perspectives: How the character reacts to debts he owes, and how he reacts to debts owed him, each of which makes a perfectly acceptable Issue Axis for characterisation purposes.

The Issues Axes might look like this:

Now, it might be that an Altruistic character – “Lawful Good” in the judgemental base system – would automatically trend towards the top point, indicating a balanced perspective in terms of chasing what is owed and letting those who claim not to be able to pay have “more time” endlessly – but, apon closer inspection, and operating under the theory that any character can be flawed and imperfect, absolutely ANY of these are compatable with an Altruistic perspective. If the player simply puts an “X” somewhere on the Issue Axis for where the character is – and a circle for where he thinks the character WANTS to be, or thinks he should be – suddenly, we have an interesting character that’s got a story to tell, with opinions that the GM can play on with future encounters, and a direction of growth. What’s more, there can be various links formed between the two axes as ’cause and effect’ – for example, the character might wish to pay his debts promptly, but because he’s an ‘Easy Touch’, he never has the money to do so. That places two of the character’s ideals in conflict – always meaty for roleplaying purposes. Does he really have to put that widow who can’t pay the rent out on the street?

At the same time, the opposite alignment – Selfish – can apply equally to a hard-nosed businessman, who agressively chases what he is owed and always pays his debts promptly – or to a slumlord, who chases what’s coming to him but pays out as little as possible, as infrequently as possible. A Selfish character can even justify being an “Easy Touch” if he then goes looking for ways to exploit the situation to his own advantage – one token of generosity makes a formidible excuse for total ruthlessness in other aspects of his life. Remember the MASH episode where Charles (the blueblood) gives a gift of expensive food to the Orphanage – a family tradition – only to be distressed when they sell it for blankets?

Make a new Issue map every time a new issue is encountered
A series of issue maps is a great way of summarising personality aspects. They can make it easier for the player to get in character, to be consistant, to formulate character goals and idiosyncrosies. They can also be a source of inter-party friction between characters that’s both fun and interesting to roleplay, and the GM can use them as a guage to the character’s involvement in the scenarios he runs; if a character can go a full level without adding one, or altering an existing one, it’s a pretty good sign that the character would be pretty blase about the adventures he’s been on lately – an attitude that might also be reflected in how much the player is enjoying himself.

I’ve generated a free 1-page PDF suitable for characters to log issue maps for their characters, or you can devise your own. You can download the colour version or a black-and-white version. To use the issue map, give a copy to each of the PCs (and any key NPCs that are with them) as an adjunct to their character sheets. Each time they confront a moral or social issue, the operator of the character decides whether or not the character cares about the issue, chooses labels accordingly, marks on the resulting alignment chart where his character stands and where he thinks he should stand, and makes any explanatory notes that are needed. It takes only ten or fifteen seconds unless the character (or the operator) is “undecided” – in which case he can play it that way, and discuss the issue from his character’s point of view either later, or even in character within the game. It’s certainly a more productive use of time than the usual sort of side chatter that occurs when play slows down, and it’s even fairly reasonable that the subject would come up around the campfire.

Alignment Scaling

At long last, we’re on the home straight and sprinting for the finish line. The next item on my topic list is the question of scaling. Garry contends that alignment doesn’t scale; I concede that if any sort of absolutist interpretation is used, there are too many disparate componants to a complex definition, and too many individuals with non-conformist opinions, for it scale properly – but that only makes alignment more valuable as a tool when the asolutist, all-inclusive interpretations are rejected.

Once the labels provided by the system have been replaced with something more appropriate and more useful, the issues sheet can be used by the GM as a worksheet to define a more complex, realistic, and satisfying system that absolutely scales from the individual up to the collective – and back down again.

Take an issues sheet, label the first alignment box according to the standard alignment definitions you have defined for within the campaign and call it “overall attitudes”. You can then use the others to define the stances of specific subsectors of the population, where these are different from the “accepted standard”; you can use them to define attitudes on specific issues confronting the society; you can even define, seperately and side-by-side for comparison, “official policy”, “public opinion”, and even specific population segments with a different attitude.

To scale up from an individual, you simply define how that individual stands out from the general society in opinions and character, and that specifies which of the general attitudes that the individual reflects and which attitudes are different – the referee then can specify the prevailing opinions, and then summarise the bottom line.

To scale down from a society, the operator makes the same decisions: On what subjects does he disagree? On what subjects does he agree, but fails to live up to the ideal?

The same technique applies when scaling up from a local society to a racial profile, or vice-versa. It turned a lot of heads when I defined Orcs as being essentially altruistic in nature in Fumanor, but from their racial perspective, they were; the ‘objectionable’ things that the race had done within the game were all acts committed in furtherance of their race’s collective survival and prosperity. But they did not respect the common social opinion, and the common social opinion did not respect their opinion – they were a counterculture with a different set of values to the mainstream, but the typical Orc was no more “evil” than the typical Paladin. Individuals, of course, were a completely different question.

Detection and Alignment Languages

Detection was always a thorny issue, dependant on the definitions employed for the different axial traits of the alignment system, until a few distinctions were made. Arcane Magic, for example, detects alignment in terms of recent actions in my campaigns, while Clerical Magic is more about fundamental attitudes. With the liberation of the system from the straightjacket of alignment controlling behaviour instead of reflecting it, and the rejection of the inherantly biased and judgemental labels and definitions provided by the core rules, the detection systems are also liberated to reflect the natures of the techniques and purposes being employed to detect the alignment.

At the same time, the protection spells, and all other aspects of alignment interaction with the rules, also assume subtly-different flavours. If you use the label “Altruism” instead of the judgemental “Good”, then an attack does “+2 vs altruism” instead of “+2 vs good”; a magic circle might be a “protection vs altruism” instead of a “protection vs good”. The use and desireability of these effects by characters changes, as does the implications of casting them, and the dangers of using them as a guide to intentions or actions that can be expected. Instead of telling characters what the subjects are going to do, they give clues – but characters remain individuals. That means that only the characters most prone to extremist perspectives are likely to actually utilise these spells except under unusual circumstances.

Conclusion – for now

So there it is – a method of transforming alignment from a binding restriction to a tool that is so valuable that you will wonder where it’s been all this time.

In part 4 of this series, to be posted next week, I will discuss a more advanced technique to give an even more robust political infrastructure to any organisation in “Flavours Of Neutrality”, while part 5 (to be posted at the same time) will offer for consideration an opposing perspective to the traditional D&D labels in “Dark Shadows”.

Garry’s Article, The Conundrum Of Alignment, which appears as part one of this series, raised some excellent points. I agree with many of them, and felt that further discussion – and an alternative point of view – was merited, since I had reached radically different conclusions from much the same foundations. In parts 2 & 3 of this series, I’ll offer a rebuttal of sorts; and in parts 4 and 5, I’ll share with you some new ways to use alignment to enhance your games that I have derived from the arguements and logic of the earlier parts.

Alignment – A much-abused Tool

Alignment must be one of the most abused and misunderstood tools in the armoury of any campaign.

To some extent, that’s the fault of the game authors, who describe alignments For PCs in terms of fundamentalist absolutism – the “Fischer-Price” of ethical systems, as Garry puts it – and then broaden these definitions to ascribe the same absolutist perspectives to governments, nations, races, and organisations of all kinds. Clearly, absolutism and alignment scaling are subjects that we’ll need to examine.

And to some extent, this is the fault of GMs who want to read too much into alignment, oversimplifying complex moral and ethical questions into cliches, and teaching bad habits to their players; interpretation is another topic that has to be touched on, however boring it may be to those who have read endless debates on the subject in the past (sorry, Johnn).

And, in part, it’s the fault of hack-and-slash players who use alignment as an excuse for antisocial and amoral behaviour on the part of their characters. And it’s partly the fault of roleplayers who use their character’s alignment as an unlimited behavioral credit card and consider it good roleplaying, and GMs who applaud and reward this behaviour. Absolutely, the use of alignment as a characterisation and roleplaying tool are topics that need to be examined.

But mostly, the responsible parties are audiance-targetted marketing and paternalistic attitudes.

It is my contention that Garry’s article does an excellent job of enunciating many of the abuses that are possible with the D&D morals system called “Alignment”, but it blames the tools and not the workmen abusing those tools. I’ll start this reply by looking at why Alignment should be in the game at all.

All audiances are not the same

Adult games can contain adult concepts, deep and profound questions of morality and ambiguities of characterisation and discussions of Spirituality vs Doctrine; they can be ethically, intellectually, culturally, spiritually, and philosophically stimulating and challenging. Some people (and I’m one of them) find this use of the gaming vehicle to be fascinating and loads of fun.

Other people don’t enjoy this sort of thing, or aren’t sufficiently mature to be able to comprehend the issues, or oppose, for personal reasons, challenges to their beliefs in some of these arenas. I refer the reader to the discussion on Good People in the comments to
“Networks Of NPCs”, and to my post from earlier this year, “Moral Qualms On The Richter Scale”.

D&D, like any roleplaying game, has to appeal to all of these people; it has to be as capable of over-simplistic moral generalisation as any kids’ comic book in order to be considered acceptable to a juvenile market. And it has to be capable of supporting deep philosophical debates and moral conundrums in order to appeal to people like Garry and I. And it has to be capable of all the levels in between.

Alignment and Children
Children pose a special problem for RPGs, as intimated above. Would you run a game for children with the same moral complexities as one intended for adult participation? How about a game run to appeal to a beer-and-pretzels (I think that may misspelt, sorry) football crowd?

While RPGs can be used as an educational tool, introducing a child to concepts such as “a good person who has made a mistake” and “a bad person pretending to be a good person”, that sort of decision should be in the hands of the parents, and these ideas should be presented slowly and one at a time, with explanations, and the child given time to assimilate them. I’m talking about ages 6-10 here; with increasing age, you can get more sophisticated. Which is another way of saying that the younger your audiance, the more black-and-white you need your morality to be.

Now, D&D wasn’t designed with this target audiance in mind; it’s too complicated. The target demographic is everyone from 13 to 1300. So, with that wide a target audiance, how do you write your game?

Well, you can assume that the younger members will skip the bits that are too complicated; or you can assume that an older audiance can add as much nuance as they find necessary or desireable, and adopt the youngest target demographic as the default. This is a no-brainer, folks; any publisher will pick the latter course every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

The target demographic at which the game is aimed makes a simplistic moral structure manditory, if you’re going to have one at all – and the themes of “Good Guys against Bad Guys” are far too ingrained in our cultural landscape to ignore, so there has to be SOME sort of moral structure included.

Alignment and Religion-based Intolerance
In the late 1970s and 1980s, RPGs came in for some serious attention from religious organisations who saw them as promoting witchcraft and devil worship and pagan gods and violence and heaven knows what else. Granting that most of these groups had the very best of intentions (at least until proven otherwise), RPGs (and D&D in particular, as the most popular game) had to defend themselves. One of the most potent weapons in our hobby’s arsenal was Alignment, which stressed and emphasised that there were moral absolutes, that Good was Good and Evil was Bad, and that there was no compromise possible between the two.

The forces of religion-based intolerance for RPGs made it inevitable that the morals system called alignment would not only be fundamental to the game, but that it would be extremely simplistic and generalised.

Alignment and The Media
And then there’s the sensationalist media, which climbed onto the bandwagon. If I’m cynical towards the mass media these days, it’s because I saw what passed for “balanced reporting” twenty-five years ago, and extrapolated from that example of sensationalist distortion, through others, to a general perception. It takes serious journalistic credibility to win my unvarnished respect these days (there have been a few who have done so), and there have been a number of media sources that still have not regained their credibility in my eyes.

Defusing the sensationalist media mandated that D&D, in particular, had an intrinsic but simplistic moral code built into the system. The alternative was the draconian self-censorship that was forced on the comics industry earlier in the twentieth century (The Comics Code Authority) – you can get a quick introduction to the subject at Wikipedia. More details can be obtained from various books on the subject available through Amazon, such as The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America.

What would you rather have: Alignment restrictions that GMs can ignore at will, or even remove completely (as Garry has done) or a Game with no Gods (disrespectful, pagan), undead, devils, demons, etc?

Alignment and Public Acceptability
Of course, the real targets of both sensationalist media and misinformed/intolerant religious organisations weren’t the gamers themselves, it was the general public. Little Johnny needed something with which to calm the anxieties of nervous parents and teachers who became concerned about all this talk of strange creatures and stranger rituals, or who bought the line that people were psychologically harmed to the point of being unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, and some fantasies are inherantly dangerous anyway… (don’t laugh – I heard those sentiments expressed on more than one occasion – about Rock & Roll, about Heavy Metal, about R-Rated movies, about Monster Movies, about Computer Games, and yes, about roleplaying, D&D in particular.

Once again, an alignment system becomes inevitable, and the more extremist it is, the better it suits application to these purposes.

So Alignment Is Inevitable?
Okay, so that’s all well-and-good for AD&D and original D&D before it, and maybe even Basic D&D after. But that was all thirty years ago, near enough as makes no difference; we live in a more enlightened age, right? Well, maybe not. Conspiracy Theories, Intelligent Design, Global Warming? The forces that assaulted the very concept of RPGs are still around, they’ve just found other targets – for now. Maybe some of the conspiracy theories are correct – there are conspiracies in the real world, after all. And maybe the theory of Intelligent Design is correct, but it’s not a science and shouldn’t be taught as one. And maybe global warming / climate change is real, but I’m not convinced – it all sounds too Chicken-Little-“The sky is falling” to me, and I’ve seen too many pronouncements about doom and gloom to take another without careful consideration. I don’t doubt anyone’s sincerity, but I’m certainly NOT convinced that the need for Alignment, as a defence, has gone away.

The Roots Of Alignment

So where did the alignment concept come from, anyway? The various factions and special interests and concerned citizens against which RPGs had to contend weren’t the reason it was created, they are merely the reasons why it should still be there.

Extremist Morality: Black Hats vs White Hats
I think that Alignment comes from the experiences and popular world-view that surrounded the creators as children, filtered through some fiction, and were originally included to define a morals system that didn’t fall in a heap over someone running someone else through with a sword. It was, in other words, a technique for describing an essentially medieval moral standard to a modern audiance.

Movies: Westerns & Cop Shows & Horror Movies
The earliest D&D rules essentially reflect a 1950s morality of absolute black hats and absolute white hats – a morality that persisted in most mass media throughout the 70s. Think back to the Westerns of the era – the stranger riding into town and being deputised? That’s the prototypical PC. Remember the Cop Shows on TV at the time? The bad guys always got caught and the good guys always won. Again, those are the PCs. And lastly, think of all those B-grade Horror/Monster flicks – with a very few exceptions, the same pattern repeats once again.

The reason is quite simple: the audiance identifies with the heroes, and wants them to win, because when they do, the audiance vicariously shares in the victory. This is exactly what the original D&D experience offered its players.

Society changes only slowly, but the representations of social attitudes are reflected in the mass media even more slowly (for the most part – there are exceptions). That’s the case purely because to have a mass market appeal, these representations generally have to target the lowest common denomenator, and that necessarily includes people whose attitudes are considered old-fashioned or behind-the-times.

D&D may not initially have been designed to appeal to a mass market (though AD&D certainly was designed to appeal to a niche within a mass market), but the contemporary mass media that the authors were exposed to nevertheless reflected the mass market’s attitudes, and these inevitably served as sources of inspiration to the creators.

Terrorism
You don’t have to look very far even in the modern world to find real-life examples of oversimplified morality standards. The most blatant such example over the last few years has been terrorism – which I am absolutely NOT going to defend. Despite that absolute, it must be acknowledged that there are genuine grievances and historical antagonisms that were the ultimate triggers for much of the hatred that finds expression through terrorism, and that some responses to terrorist behaviour can only be considered to have been as barbaric as the acts against which they are supposed to defend.

The Cold War & The War On Drugs
Before terrorism as the “ultimate evil”, the role of the archvillains of real life for much of Western Society were reserved for Communists and Drug Dealers. Both of these oversimplifed moral questions, and a lot of government policy was then grounded in those generalisations, both good and bad. Some of it we’re still dealing with. I’m not pro-communist; their system failed for a reason, it simply couldn’t compete over the long haul, and they did some pretty atrocious things (especially to their own citizens) along the way. Nor am I a defender of the drug Barons – but manditory minimum sentences are a lot more complicated subject of discussion – a discussion that you can’t have if you are painted as being “soft on crime” the minute you raise the subject.

WWII
And before the Communists were the Axis Powers. The fascist regimes committed acts that fully justified the role in which they were cast, but take a look at the newsreels and government statements of the era, such as the “Why We Fight” propaganda movies by Frank Capra that were shown to every soldier, and tell me they don’t oversimplify the question. Indeed, it wasn’t until Schindler’s List that there was any hint of a suggestion that some of the supposed Nazis could be heroic. That’s how ingrained that particular “Good Guys against Bad Guys” moral standard became – it lasted, unchallenged, long after the western world stopped applying it to the German, Italian, and Japanese peoples.

WWI
And before the Fascists were the Germans, once again, this time in the guise of Kaiser William II and his allies. As you can see, there is something of a theme developing here: enemies in War are usually the subjects of Moral Oversimplification in the real world, but there’s always someone, and you can keep listing them, one after another, until you reach the point where the American Revolutionaries fought “the hated redcoats” and beyond. What, then, is the likelyhood that the same practices will not be in force in whatever psuedo-historical era in which the D&D game is set?

Myth And Legend
The same is true for many of the myths and legends on which the game is founded. Consider, for example, the myriad versions of the tales of King Arthur and the round table. Can anyone deny that King Arthur is not the achetype apon which the Lawful Good Paladin is founded, and his arch-enemy, Morgaine Le Faye, is therefore the prototype of Evil? It’s the same old good-guys-vs-bad-‘guys’ plot foundation all over again.

Bibilical Influances
In fact, you can trace the concept of moral absolutism all the way back to the Bible. In comparison, most of the other early belief systems and associated mythologies – the Greek, Roman, and Norse, for example – did not have absolute good and evil.

I would suggest that far from being ‘unrealistic’, any game that did not posess an oversimplified moral structure is the game that is unrealistic, while games that DO have such a structure are more realistic – provided that these are explained properly and used properly by the GMs of the games in question.

‘Realism’ For A Modern Audiance

In fact, what Garry has labelled ‘realism’ is the imposition of a modern perspective on a game situation (and I do the same thing, so no criticism is intended). The oversimplified moral structures implied by the alignment system is, if anything, a compromise between a truly realistic depiction and a more realistic (by modern standards) morality analysis.

This is not a unique dilemna – any movie or television show or novel set in a ‘simpler age’ has to struggle with the same contradiction between the prevalant attitudes of the era and the lessons of sophistication and hindsight and cultural enlightenment that need to be respected in order to engage a modern audiance.

Take, for example, the profound changes with respect to racial equality that have entered the modern psyche over the last hundred years. In 1909, people would have been lynched for suggesting that a Black man could ever be US President – I don’t even think they had the Vote at that time in American history. Similarly, Gender equality was an issue which had barely taken central stage – Women had only recently been given the right to vote, and equality in the workplace wasn’t even an issue. That’s not to say that the attitudes of the era were right, just that those were were the attitudes of the era.

All this comes to a head when you consider roleplaying games designed to appeal to a modern audiance. AD&D, for example, gave female characters a lower Strength score than males, eventually sparking considerable debate, no matter how realistic it might have been. Perhaps if it gave them a commensurate increase in Charisma and Wisdom, this rules element would still be part of the game. D&D 3.0 was the first version of the game to do away with that institution, in a deliberate gesture towards sexual equality at the expense of the hard truth that females, in general, do not have the same physical strength as males.

Similarly, the respect with which Elves & Dwarves are treated by Humans (and have been in just about every edition that I can think of) is a modern attitude manifesting itself in contradiction to prevelant attitudes of the historical realities of the eras apon which the game setting was modelled.

Having conceded historical accuracy in favour of a more modern ‘realism’ in so many areas, the debate shifts to whether or not the game should abandon all pretence of historical referance and become wholly a modern expression of a fantasy world, or should some elements of historical accuracy be retained purely to make the game more ‘realistic’?

So profound is inherant contradiction that it is, in truth, the heart and soul of those endless debates about the signficance of this alignment or that alignment. It is the difficult choice between realistic characterisation vs a realistic historical basis – calling one solution more ‘realistic’ than the other is oversimplifying the arguement in exactly the same way that Alignment oversimplifies personal morality.

Labels are the tools of Bias

I have just one more point to make (before moving on to contradict myself in the next post of this series)!

Garry makes the point that “no sane person identifies themselves as ‘evil’.” I completely agree, but would ask exactly who it is that is indentifying themselves as ‘evil’? At worst, characters of evil alignment are stating that “narrow and blinkered minds, locked into biased perspectives, may label what I do as ‘evil'”. The rules system, and associated text, inherantly assume that the PCs will be “good guys” and not evil would-be world conquerers.

So much trouble has arisen – such as the debates that Garry seeks to avoid, and Johnn is tired of, over ‘evil’ vs ‘Evil’ – because the labels applied are absolutist and biased towards one particular side of the alignment equation. They aren’t couched in behavioural or characterisation terms, they are described in terms of moral judgement. This one fact, more than any other, is (in my opinion) responsible for more of the abuse and misuse of Alignment, and for Garry’s reasons for rejecting the system, and for the endless debates over trivia that miss the real point, than any other. It’s those labels that I do away with, and (where necessary), the descriptions that go with them.

The result is a system that makes complex characterisation easier and faster, and yet it still permits oversimplification back into a propaganda-oriented terminology by both sides of the moral question.

In part III of this massive multi-part series, I take another perspective on the whole issue, and discuss whether or not Alignment really IS unneccessary.

Johnn received this article submission for Roleplaying Tips, but it’s not a fit for the e-zine, which tries to be systemless as much as possible. He “didn’t read much of it because 30 years of alignment discussions puts this on my topics blacklist, even for personal reading (smiley).” So he asked me to take a look at it and consider whether or not it was suitable for the blog.

So here’s the result: A monster multi-part blog post on the subject of alignment in D&D. Starting with:

The Conundrum of Alignment

A guest article by Garry Stahl

I don’t like alignment, it bears repeating. What I don’t generally do is explain is why. I usually do not explain why because I use an authoritative tone of voice and peoples’ heads explode. If your head is so prone, wrap it in duct tape, here I go.

Forward

Yes, I understand the D&D alignment system. I have used it, I have read up on it and read many an article for and against. I have pursued an understanding of the alignment section in every edition of D&D from Zero to Fourth. To be perfectly clear, I do not speak from a point of ignorance. Understanding something does not require agreement with it as well.

One: Alignment causes contention in interpretation

The alignment system has been debated to death. The books can clarify and explain until the damn bovines are dust, never mind come home, it changes not in the least the fact that people will argue the meaning those nine little phrases, and argue and argue. In part, I drop alignment because it unhinges those expectations. By not using the loaded phrases to describe anything, I remove them from contention, and hopefully open people up to looking at my game as it is, not with the baggage they bring to it.

To clarify a point that has been brought up a number of times. Dropping alignment in total is not the job of the lazy DM. It requires a good deal of work to extract alignment from the rules of the game. First you have to replace it with something, an ethical and moral code or several. Second you have to remove it from spell effects and magic items, character classes and any other place it pops up. This was not done because I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of it. On the contrary. Doing nothing and leaving alignment in would have been less work, much less work.

Two: Alignment oversimplifies & confuses

Alignment is the Fisher-Price ethics system. Big blocks for little hands. Simple (except it is not, see above) and bright colors. But using alignment to make a more advanced moral and ethical system is like laying out a highly detailed model with those self-same Fisher-Price toys; you cannot do it. Sure those toys have their place, but it is not in a detailed model.

I have read article after article about how to make “real” politics work under alignment. Or how to inject “real” morals (“real” in quotes because we are discussing a game). How it IS possible to have conflict between two “Lawful Good” characters and not break alignment. Why is this even coming up? Anyone who has ever stood between a Baptist and a Catholic, or a Sunni and an Shiite, understands that conflict among even so closely related beliefs can arise. Conflict to the point of violence. Only the artificial construction of alignment makes this a question in the first place.

Alignment gets taken further into races and even entire nations. This does not work. While an inadequate Fisher-Price system for individuals, it just cracks into little pieces when you try to wrap an entire society around it. Alignment does not scale, either to finer and more detailed ethics or to larger social units. So you either have to work around it, awkwardly, like a dead elephant at a party, or ignore it at different scales. So why do you have it?

Then we have the issue of identification. I won’t even get into the First Edition bad idea of the decade of alignment languages. Which incidentally were too impolite to use, but you still had them – Cant for use at the local Lawful Evil club no doubt. Let us be frank – no sane person identifies themselves as ‘evil’. Everyone is right or justified in their own minds; even the worst of mass murderers has a rationalization for their deeds. Therefore a brotherhood of evil, or even good, is laughable. People will join the Rotary Club or a gang, but for the reasons of society or mutual protection, not to “do evil”. They might indeed be doing evil, but they will justify it to themselves and won’t by default cooperate with the next group of “evil doers” down the road.

The average person in the kind of subsistence society that D&D usually describes as the default are not interested in the finer points of some universal philosophy. They are concerned with how many sheep they have, or how good the crop is going to be; real issues that affect their lives.

Three: Alignment as a behavioural sledgehammer

Long ago (some two decades) I created detailed ethical and moral systems for my game. I came to the point of adding alignment, and realized it was putting lips on a chicken. You didn’t need it. I had just explained in black and white the ethics of the entire religion. I didn’t need the alignment.

By removing alignment wholesale We don’t get into fine debates about the true nature of “evil” verses “Evil”. (This is exactly the kind of argument I was talking about in point one.) You can’t detect alignment, there isn’t one. NPCs have to be dealt with on an “as we meet you” basis. The justifcation for razing an entire town because it was “evil” is gone.

Social consequences replace alignment deviation. If you walk through town kicking puppies you will become known as a puppy-kicker. Mothers will pull children off the street. Adult dogs will bark at you. Merchants will not serve you. Get bad enough and the law takes a hand. Ever wonder what happens to retired epic level adventurers? Why, they get a job as the town constable, that’s what. It keeps rowdy puppy-kicking, punk adventurers in line.

Alignment is not required “to keep players in line”. Frankly if that is what you are using it for, either find a new set of players or quit. Alignment as a behavioral hammer is one of the worst uses for this tool of dubious uses. It stifles role-play and character development. Forcing characters into their alignment mold and punishing any deviation is one of the prime causes for its elimination from my game.

Four: Theological Classes and the Detection of Alignment

What about Clerics and Paladins? Well, they get a gloss of their religion, its beliefs, commandments, and special rules for the order. Much better than a two word descriptive. Deviation as described is punished by the God in question.

Good and Evil? They exist, they can even be detected, but not unless they are very strong. Most mortal creatures will never detect as evil or good. They have choices. The teetotaling saint can become a wife-beater and thief. the wife-beater and thief can turn a new leaf and seek redemption, even become a saint. Choices. Simon McGee is not evil by the detects. He can mend his ways.

Those creatures that do show as good or evil are those without the choice to change. Devils, angels, those creatures that are what they are by nature. In addition those mortals that are strongly tied to a power that is one or the other will detect as such. Sell your soul to the Devil, yes you will detect as evil. Are you a sainted monk that can heal without spells? You will detect as good. These are mortals that have made their choice so definitely that change is impossible or at best highly unlikely.

So in my game anyone that detects as “evil”, really is. There is no “Lawful” or “Chaotic”. Those are philosophical statements, not a property of the universe.

For the last twenty years alignment has not been part of my game. The game has improved, not suffered.

Afterword: 4e

I read that Fourth Edition was going to change the alignment system. Indeed they did, for the slightly better, slightly. Fourth Edition alignment is, well stupider than every other version I have seen in anything labeled D&D. It is like taking one wheel off a car and declaring the new “design” “better”. Mind you, that is without redesigning the car to be a trike. I haven’t heard anyone that likes it from people that like alignment. Come on guys, if you going to remove the Law/Chaos axis, remove it, don’t cripple it and leave the beast to die. Never mind making it meaningless, but keeping it around. No one is held to anything anymore.

My rebuttal/discussion of Garry’s Article will commence in Part 2 of the series.

Session reminders increase game attendance

I realized recently my game announcements and reminders are underwhelming. I’m leaving opportunities to improve the game unfulfilled.

We play every other Thursday night. Games start at 6:30, we’re usually full-on by 7pm, then we wrap up between 11 and 11:30. We confirm the week of the game by email though, just in case schedules change.

Maintaining bi-weekly Thursdays makes things nice and predictable. I think when we all schedule things now there’s a reminder in the back of our heads to check if it’s a D&D Thursday before committing to another activity. That’s helps clear a lot of schedules and prevents double-bookings, which are two banes of getting regular games happening.

Following are a few tips on how to improve session reminders to get more attendees each game.

1. What changes from session to session?

Game sessions share a number of common traits. Note which traits tend to change for your group from session to session. Communicate all the changing session parameters well each time to avoid confusion, frustration, and worst of all, missing players.

Here’s an example list of what you might need to tell everyone before each game to get everything sorted out quick and easy:

• Session date:
• Start time:
• End time:
• Location:
• Commuting arrangements:
• Food/snack duties:
• Game played:

The last one, game played, is for groups who don’t lock in the game or campaign being played. Sometimes a group plays with multiple GMs, each with his own campaign, so game played would also tell people who’s GMing and what characters are needed.

My group plays my D&D game every session at my place. Except under the most unusual circumstances, these items don’t need to be in my game reminder emails. If something rarely changes, leave it out of your email. This makes the information smaller and easier to scan. If the rare thing does change, everyone will spot the new item in the list and take notice.

2. Reminders

This is the perfect time for callouts. Does a player forget his character sheet often? Are there special parking arrangements this time? Was there homework to do? Did PCs need leveling up?

Add any reminders to your session announcement emails – it’s a great service to your group.

3. Announcements

Got any news, updates or special announcements? You might not have these often, but asking yourself each time if there are any is a good exercise.

For example, last session reminder I had news that a preferred pizza place now offered delivery to the usual game location.

Another example is player birthdays or special occasions. Noting these might encourage things like congrats emails, bringing the group closer together.

4. Add Session Notes

You might want to include info about what happened last session. Best case for busy GMs is to paste in notes from another source. You don’t want to turn these session notice emails into newsletters here, as my experience is it’s not a sustainable activity. You’ll be pressed for time, and some emails will get notes while others don’t, and inconsistency tends to create apathy.

(If you want to do campaign newsletters, that’s awesome and I heartily recommend it. This is beyond the scope of these tips, but RolepalyingTips.com has a few campaign newsletter articles and tips: Save Time & Get More Planning Done Through Campaign Newsletters, Campaign Newsletter Advice, Campaign Newsletter Example, Lessons Learned from behind the GM Screen.)

Another gotcha is many players do not have the time or inclination to read long campaign summaries.

A great format is 5 Bullets. If you had to condense last session into five points, what would they be? This forces you to be brief, and it serves your group well by reminding them what happened last game so they’ll be ready when the next session starts without a lot of reading required. Use the 5 Bullets method – it’s sustainable.

5. Talk About Open Loops

A great service to your group. Remind everyone about what hooks are still open and what issues are still unresolved. This can help guide focus discussion between sessions too. And add bonus is such reminders keep gamers interested in the campaign.

6. Take Care of Administration

Any admin you can take care of between games gives everyone more session time to roleplay.

• Bookkeeping
• Statistics
• Q&A about rules
• Gathering Information skill checks
• Leveling up questions
• Experience points and other awards
• Skill checks involving appraisals
• Item creation checks

7. Figure out the best timing

When do players make decisions about showing up to your game? Be sure to get your session email reminder in there at just the right time so the game session is top of mind. Sneaky, but effective.

For example, a player might have his work schedule chat with his boss once a month on the 1st. Get your game session email to that player on the last day of each month.

8. Use a distribution list

Use a system that ensures you contact every player for every game every time. Typing in player names in the email To: field each time is going to end up in occasional forgotten players. If they don’t contact you saying they didn’t receive a game notice email, they might not show up to next game because they don’t know it’s on!

Get a foolproof system. I use a Yahoo! Group. My players have all signed up as members. When I email the group, I know everyone is being sent my messages.

Another option is to create an email shortcut on your desktop. For Windows, this is just a normal shortcut you create by right-clicking on your desktop and choosing New > Shortcut. The location will be:

mailto:player 1 email; player 2 email; player 3 email;

A third method is to create a distribution list in your email software.

9. Use A Template

Give your reminder emails a distinctive style that stays consistent with each mailout. This helps everyone identify it’s a game session organization email, and worth spotting and reading every time.

Plus, players will learn where to find the information they need each time rather than trying to figure out a new layout each message.

First, use a consistent subject line that supplies your primary message, usually game date confirmation. “Game session: Aug 15”. If your players only ever read the subject line, then they’ll at least know the game is on and when.

Second, put the session logistics into a template that goes at the top of the email, so players can scan for the information they need, just like a stat block makes NPC and monster reading efficient.

• Session date:
• Start time:
• End time:
• Food/snack duties:

Third, for each other section you have (e.g. session notes, reminders, contact info) create a clear header. This makes your email easy to skim, and if a player only quests for certain information they can find it fast.

So, this is our 100th post to CM. It’s also just a couple of weeks short of our first anniversary. It’s been a great year at CM, full of positive experiences. So Johnn and I thought we might take this chance to reminisce…

Mike’s Memories

It’s been a fantastic year.

CM’s articles have set the bar for articles very high – far higher than we really expected when we first started. While we were groping around a bit for the first post or two, we found our feet really quickly.

The site has gotten some great reviews, which has been absolutely fantastic. I appreciate the recognition we’ve recieved more than I can express in words, and at the same time I am constantly aware of the responsibility that such positive words carry to live up to them in future.

I’ve especially enjoyed the times I’ve been able to write about my philosophy of gaming, and of world creation, and of campaign creation. There have been some very rewarding discussions concerning house rules, as well. And the compliments and comments on the posts relating to material from my own campaigns have been really gratifying.

I am especially proud of the great participation we’ve had with our readers. Even when dealing with hot topics, we’ve been able to walk the fine line between expounding our own views and respecting the views of others. The end result has been great discussion that has never degenerated into flame wars – not even once. My congratulations and appreciation to everyone who has posted a comment! You’re a bigger part of CM than perhaps you realise.

Another success has been Ask The GMs, which was an idea that neither Johnn nor I had even thought of when we started CM. It’s really great to have been able to help so many GMs.

You may have noticed that we recently added a new panel to our RHS navigation on the site, listing our favorite posts for the year. These are the posts that we’re proudest of, so if you havn’t read them already, go ahead and check them out. Hopefully, you’ll find them as useful and interesting to read as they were to write.

Well, that’s about all I’ve got; so I’ll throw the metaphoric spotlight over to Johnn. Thanks for joining us for our first hundred posts, and we look forward to sharing another hundred with you!

— Mike

Johnn’s Reflections

Time flies when you are having fun. It seems like yesterday Mike and I were planning out Campaign Mastery and discussing what kinds of posts we’d create, how often we’d post, and how we’d organise the website.

It has been great getting into a regular posting rhythm. I was worried whether I could fit a regular blog into my life, but as I learned from Roleplaying Tips, consistency creates habits that always seem to find a way to fit into busy lives. Oh, and Mike has been an awesome blogging partner and he covered my carcass several times this year when I became too swamped to post. Hehe.

The Ask The GMs column was a great surprise. When publishing, you never know for sure if what you’re rambling on about is going to be useful to gamers. By answering a question, though, you are guaranteed to at least be helping one person! Plus, it’s great learning what specific issues game masters have these days with their camapigns, and your help requests let us know what we should be writing more about in the future.

If you have any GMing questions for Ask the GMs, drop us a line.

All your comments have been great. Several have helped my campaigns, and I apprectate the time and thought you put into your replies. I’ve seen many blogs with long lists of comments that are just one-liner me too responses. But your comments here are full of wonderful details and game master advice. This not only inspires Mike and I, but you are keeping the RPG community thriving by helping other game masters run their campaigns.

I think Mike feels the same as I do that we are getting better at this blogging thing with each and every post. My enthusiasm for Campaign Mastery continues to grow and grow. Every week I keep adding post ideas to my planning wiki – there will never be a shortage, lol.

Looking forward to the next year, we’re going to keep up with our twice-weekly updates, I have my Combat Hazards series to continue, plus a couple other series I’m mulling over.  Requests are always welcome. Mike and I continue to plan posts to help inspire your campaigns and keep them running.

I’ll be looking forward to all your comments in the next 100 posts!

How can you make the players feel like their actions have an impact on the world?

Sometimes, the simplest questions have the most complicated or profound answers. So it was with some trepidation that we’ve approached this question, which was asked virtually exactly as it’s quoted at the head of this article. The short answer is, you can’t. You can’t make anyone feel anything, and you can’t get people to feel like their actions have an impact on the world unless those actions actually do make a difference. So the real questions are far more complicated: How can the players impact the game world? How are the consequences of PC actions determined? How do the PCs become aware of these consequences? How can the GM ensure that the Players recognise the connection between action and consequences? And how can the administration of these changes be kept practical? These are all big, beefy, questions, with answers both complicated and profound…

Mike’s Answer: Every stone makes ripples in the pond

The title of this answer says it all very succinctly – everything the PCs do ultimately has an impact on the game world, or it should. Nothing occurs in isolation; it always has a context, and it is impossible to observe an event without interacting with it – and that interaction has consequences that the context defines.

Even if your campaign is nothing but a series of dungeon crawls in which the party invades some collection of lairs and kills or drives off the inhabitants, it does not exist in isolation. The (intelligent) escapees are far more likely to get out, and will spread word of the prowess of the party; when they enter a subsequent dungeon, they will be recognised and NPCs/intelligent creatures will react – either with stronger and more determined attacks that are targeted against the PCs known or imagined vulnerabilities, or by setting up traps to delay the party while the monsters sneak out the back door – with their loot, thank you very much – and go somewhere else.

Eventually, alliances will be forged with the sole purpose of curbing this danger, and acts will become more desperate and dangerous; kobolds will summon devils and pledge themselves to dark service if the devils will only deal with this terrible threat.

The next step up in campaign sophistication is to have the PCs interact with someone outside the dungeon in some limited way – they might stay at inns, buy products and services, sell unwanted goodies, and so on. The people they trade with will do their best to operate at a profit, so some of them will grow rich, and some of those who do will start doing things with their money.

Other businesses of the type the PCs are dealing with will spring up in competition with those already established; established businesses will trade hands; businessmen will start dabbling with political ambitions; others will oppose these newcomers, and may even target the PCs that are the source of all this wealth (since money equals power); some traders will get greedy, and try to gouge the PCs. There will be people who want a share of the wealth, earned or otherwise, either as an act of charity, or from an act of deception. Initially, these will be local effects, but in time they will grow.

A further step in sophistication, and dungeons begin to fade or even vanish as a source of adventures. The PCs get involved in local politics and whole scenarios take place above ground. Instead of being sources of great wealth per se, the PCs become the world’s problem solvers, dealing with Orc Raiding Parties and Thieves Guilds and Corrupt Nobles and so on.

Always, the trend here is for bigger campaign worlds and more involvement with the bigger picture – and that means bigger and splashier consequences. Ultimately, at higher levels, a careless word can influence commodity markets and political systems. Some people will become self-appointed champions of the ’causes’ the PCs espouse, and some of them will go too far. The PCs will be treated like rock stars, and everybody knows that they never have problems!

Determining the consequences

Every action has someone beyond the PCs who benefits, and someone who is disadvantaged. There will be those who agree with what the PCs have done and those who don’t. There will be those who want to take advantage of what the PCs have done, and those who want to stop them, and those who want to take revenge for past acts. And always, there will be the growing reputation and wealth to consider.

Identify all of these, decide how they would go about trying to achieve those goals, and then look at how these NPC actions will impact the PCs. Because nothing shows players that their characters are having an impact on the world better than the world having an impact on the PCs.

Revealing the consequences

Not all of the consequences will have a direct affect on the PCs. Not all of them will make an immediate difference. Sometimes, the relationship between cause and effect will be distant and obscure.

The most immediate impacts should be fairly obvious, and might even be mundane or trivial. If a character buys a meal from a particular trader on their way to the dungeon and tips well, there might be two or three traders offering the same meal when he emerges. The following trip, there are half-a-dozen traders, and they start elbowing each other and fighting amongst themselves to be in the best position.

The time after that, the trader that the PC has bought from most often has a sign up describing his wares as the PC’s favorites. The time after that, and that business has expanded, and put on more staff, and people start going to that establishment to meet the PC. The time after that, and a number of rival businesses have closed, and one that’s struggling has hired someone to burn down the ‘favored business’.

The time after that, and security guards have been added and the PC has a ‘reserved section’ just for him. A bard tries to curry favour by forcible serenading the character with a song he’s written about his favorite food. The time after that, and a rival ambushes the PC. The time after that, a punk kid looking to make a reputation shows up to challenge the PC. The time after that, and the businessman is complaining about all the tax increases that have been aimed at his business since it has become so prosperous. The time after that, perhaps some ‘businessmen’ are insisting that the merchant join their ‘insurance’ scam. The time after that, and a young female shows up, insisting that the PC is the father of her child. And on and on and on….

You might have to spell it out the first time for the PC, but it will soon become a running gag within the campaign, and something that the players will even look forward to – especially if you (usually) play it as not-quite-deadly-serious, or even outright as light relief.

The more distant and obscure the relationship between action and reaction, the more the GM has to sell the relationship to the PCs. If that means that the NPC involved has to spell it out (“You didn’t really think that you could interfere with the Brewer’s Alliance and get away with it, did you? Selling the Flask Of Never-ending Amber Fluid was the last straw…”), then that’s what he should do.

It only takes a couple of running gags and a persistent background ‘hum’ of other consequences, and the players will have absolutely no doubt that they are having an impact. With more experience and practice at it, you will start seeing these consequences as ‘blatantly obvious’ and start linking them together to form a more substantial structure:

• Act 1
• Consequence 1 of Act 1
• Consequence 2 of Act 1, plus Reaction 1 to Consequence 1…

… and so on, while at the same time, you also have

• –
• Act 2
• Consequence 1 of Act 2

… and so on again, each act adding ripples of consequence and reaction until the accumulated effects completely alter the campaign.

Keeping It Practical

The easiest way to keep all this practical is to let those consequences and reactions that don’t offer the GM interesting opportunities to affect the campaign fade away into insignificance. Limit the scope of the effects according to their level of interest to you, in other words.

The more groups you have predefined, the easier it is to run down the list and pick out those that are most likely to have an interest in any given PC act; if you also keep that list fairly generic but pick out one or two specific example(s) to take action, you start populating the world with specific groups with the potential to interact with the PCs.

Some of these groups will appear, do their thing, and then vanish, never to be heard from again; but the outcome of that confrontation will start its own ripples. Other groups might become a persistent thorn in the PCs sides, or a piece of omnipresent campaign colour, if more ideas about how to use them come to mind. I’ll generally put any group to one side once I’m finished with it, but every now and then I’ll run over the list of such groups to see if any new ideas for using them occur to me.

The Effect On Campaign Design

When most GMs first start to design campaigns, they set up a magnificent structure with everything predefined and predestined and packaged and labelled and in it’s place. They then can’t bear to see their grand plans fail to come to fruition, and the result is a series of plot trains.

With more experience at consequences, and a little more thought, A GM can learn to design campaigns that are like supersaturated solutions – campaigns that consist of nothing but opportunities for the PCs to cause someone to react in an interesting manner, to cause something to crystallise out. The campaign itself becomes an environmental landscape, a backdrop against which the choices of the players and the characters that they control define the adventures that will take place. Every action, and every failure to act, simply defines a future scenario. And every such scenario brings with it new opportunities to act, or fail to act…

Johnn’s Answer

How can you make the players feel like their actions have an impact on the world?

Whew, that’s a big question. As Mike alluded to, I would decide right now if you are a hard core world builder. If you have the time and passion for extensive world design, then I would take a simulation approach to this question.

Build a detailed world

To know what impact the PCs will have you need to know what there is to impact. In the simulation approach, you need to build up the details of your world to create an inventory of potential consequences for PC actions.

Go play the Civilization video game for several hours. Get a feel for the rhythms of change and what types of things change. See how the physical, political, and economic worlds change. Watch how cities change. Look at the impact of technology and world wonders.

After playing Civ for awhile, look at your own world through the same lens. Get out your maps of civilized areas and see how they might interact. Look at your pantheons and see how they interact. Get a grasp of the economics and resources of your world and determine how things are currently balanced.

With the big picture stuff out of the way (I brushed over a lot of stuff there – quest for more world building advice online) focus on the adventuring area. Put detail into the power structure: authority, resources and wealth, military and muscle, the leaders and power brokers.

Then use a local area world building process to flesh out the adventuring area so you will know what is in play and at stake when the PCs start to create their ripples and waves.

You should also check out resources such as A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe to help build the pond the PCs are in.

Stick with what is in the spotlight

If you are not a hard core world builder, because it does not interest you or you do not have time, then you should narrow planning down to the pond the PCs are playing in. Forget the ocean.

Pick two notable events and one minor event

After each session note the events that occurred in the game. Key in on events that involve the outside world – NPCs, locations, items.

For example, last session the PCs in my game had some intra-party conflict. A cursed sword and barbaric code is causing one PC to descend into madness, and the savage warrior and civilized wizard nearly came to blows. However, all events were contained within the party. So, the world does not need to react to this. Perhaps if an NPC was spying on the PCs and he reported back to his master, then the world might indeed react to this information. But that wasn’t the case.

With a list of events in hand, pick two significant ones and a seemingly insignificant one. Figure out cause and effect for just these three events. If you have time you could tangle with more events the PCs were involved in, but three gives you a nice number.

Use the 5 Ws

As discussed in a recent issue of Roleplaying Tips, take each event and run it through a series of questions using Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Write down ideas that come to mind.

Use encounters to broadcast changes

Interacting with repercussions is the best way to show the PCs how they are having an effect in the game world. Turn answers to your 5 W questions into encounter seeds. Run encounters as they trigger.

If encounters do not trigger then let some expire (see Close loops quickly, below). Let others merge into new encounter seeds (i.e. the situations evolve and develop without further PC interference).

Use NPCs to broadcast changes

Within encounters, the best way to communicate how the PCs have changed the world is through NPCs. Through NPC interactions you can bring the full range of consequences, emotions, and gameplay options into effect. NPCs, by their nature, are interactive.

For example, if the PCs cause a fire you could certainly use that location for future encounters. First encounter you describe the ruins. Second encounter there you describe early repairs. Third encounter a month later you describe the new building and the new warning sign.

However, those situations become much more interesting if PCs meet the victim(s) of the fire and interact with them. In the second encounter PCs could meet onlookers and repairmen. Third encounter PCs meet the victims again plus the new bouncer or guard or city watch. Each of these NPC interactions can illuminate the suffering and cost of the fire the PCs caused, where conversation, combat, and puzzles are all possible encounter elements.

Use NPCs to show players the effect they are having on the setting.

Use reputation

An easy technique for creating a reactive world is reputation. Have word of PC actions and descriptions precede them in encounters. Have NPCs call them by name before introductions are made. Have NPCs act based on gossip, news and opinion received before ever meeting the PCs.

Generate sycophants, rivals and enemies

Bring in new NPCs – or even better, have known NPCs change their relationship with the PCs – to be rivals, enemies, and people who seek to gain personal advantage from their relationship to the player characters. Generate these relationships because of events and PC actions. Be sure to illustrate this via roleplay and encounters.

Close loops quickly

If you are using the spotlight method, keep changes happening quickly and be done with their effects just as quickly. If you want extended repercussions, and layered consequences, then I advise moving toward more of a world building approach.

The PCs will be doing so many things each session, on average, that you will not be able to keep up with all the causes and effects, especially if you carry over a lot from previous situations. Resolve things quick and move on to the next three actions you choose to act upon between sessions.

Those are a few tips for making players feel like they are making an impact on the world. Hopefully they help.

Ask The GMs to get help with your game master and campaign issues. More info >

A few years ago, one of my players asked me why I had the Guinness Book Of Records amongst my RPG referance materials, and I told him that it was an essential source of colour for my campaigns. This puzzled him somewhat, because while he could see the applicability to a modern-day campaign, he knew that most of the campaigns that I was running were (and still are) fantasy campaigns.

Because we didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend discussing the subject, I gave him a quick-and-dirty example, which from memory, ran something like: Which of the following is better: ‘The target is too far away for bowshot,’ or, ‘Not even the legendary Halwein, holder of the record for longest bowshot at 2,192 yards, would dare attempt such a shot…’?”

The question was so obviously rhetorical he didn’t bother answering, merely nodding to indicate his satisfaction at the answer before returning to the task at hand. Well, we’re not quite so rushed at the moment, so I thought I would go into a bit more detail.

Record Achievements add to your campaign’s uniqueness

You can never have too many sources of colour text, also known as flavour text, to tie your campaign together, and records can be a memorable and distinct source. However, if stated baldly, they are dry, dull, not especially memorable, and can actually make it harder to distinguish one campaign from another. The key to using records as touchstones for your campaign is to wrap each in a metaphor or anecdote that tells (in very succinct manner) the story of the achievement and connects it back to some other unique aspect of the campaign. That connection associates the story with the specific campaign, and the story itself makes the record more memorable.

The off-the-top-of-my-head example that I gave my friend is a good example – if a GM were to mention ‘The Legendary Halwein’ in this fashion in a campaign that I was playing in, I would immediatly and briefly be diverted from the in-game task at hand to asking about this Halwein character and what made him so legendary?

Every session of play will have a certain number of diversions from the game-play. As a rule of thumb, I expect one, plus up to one for every 2nd player, every hour, and a minimum of 1 every 20 minutes or so. There seems to be a psychological need to switch focus, and relax the concentration, even briefly, at regular intervals (one of my friends thinks that we’ve become accustomed to it from TV commercials). Deny the players this break and play starts to get sloppy, people lose focus and start to miss key pieces of information, and the attention begins to wander. A diversion for a minute or so gives people time to assimilate and digest what’s happened since the last break and permits renewed focus on the game situation at hand.

There’s an art to establishing a rythm of such diversions that could theoretically be manipulated so that the GM can conceal key information ‘in plain sight’ from the players, but I can honestly admit that I havn’t mastered it. Environmental factors play a big part in the timing, especially conditions that make it harder to focus on what someone is saying (noise from other conversations, for example) or that make the mind naturally tend to wander (high temperatures and humidity, lack of sleep, etc). And not everyone has the same tolerances to these factors. Nevertheless, while the timing can be hard to predict, the fact remains – there will be digressions and diversions and occasional bursts of side-chatter.

My experience has been that if you can make some of those diversions and side-conversations relevant to the campaign, they still satisfy people’s itches for something else to talk about, and can be used to spoon-feed elements of the campaign to the players that would bore the pants off them if delivered in thick, heavy, doses.

Legendary athletic prowess for colourful comparisons

These are the most obvious types of achievement, and the most obvious means of inserting the anecdotes into your narrative. Who is the strongest man ever to live? Who is the tallest man ever? Who is the shortest? Who is the fastest runner? Going beyond the hard-and-fast records, you can often find children’s stories and fairy tales that in turn provide an endless series of metaphors for use in the campaign. Hercules is still synonymous with strength, many thousands of years since the fall of the Greek Empire. In the minds of many, Michael Jordan is renowned for his height, but so is the Giant in Jack And The Beanstalk. Tom Thumb is an obvious candidate for the shortest man, and as for who the fastest man alive is…

But, if you were to ask a Viking Warrior, he would have very different answers to these: Thor; a fire or frost giant; a Dwarf; and Loki (who was fast enough to outrun his own shadow) come to mind.

Prepare specific information packets for each PC and major NPC

In many ways, there is never anything new under the sun; everything has an analagous antecedant, a figure who serves as legend and inspiration and prototype. Writing up a short information burst – just a brief paragraph, or a single anecdote – for each character, based on their class and/or race, gives them a window onto the unique perspective of the world that their class and/or race enjoys.

Take a character who is an Archer for example. In our modern world, we would immediatly call to mind the achievements (however apocryphal) of William Tell and Robin Hood. So why not steal some of these tales and give them to a historical figure in your campaign? And why not take the opportunity to drop in some information about the sociology and history of the world? Even with little or no context, the result becomes a touchstone, a “corner piece” of the jigsaw puzzle that is your world. Informing characters as to the legendary achievements and iconic figures in their ‘field’ or ‘profession’ connects the character to the campaign.

Legendary Achievements as historical touchstones

Who is the most learned wizard? Who is the most foolish? Who is the most renouned tracker of fact or fiction? Who is the most daring thief? Who is the most despised betrayer? Whose names are synonimous with star-crossed love? Who fought the longest battle, and who the shortest war? Who is the most renouned military leader, the wisest ruler, the greatest detective? Who were the greatest explorers? Who is “the fairest in all the land”, and whose beauty is now legendary?

I’m sure that for each and every one of these questions, a name leaped to mind – whether fictional or historical. Merlin, Mickey Mouse, Aragorn, Ali Baba, Judas, Romeo & Juliet, the trenches of World War I, the 6-day-war, Julius Caesar, Solomon, Sherlock Holmes, Columbus, and Cleopatra are the names & events that these labels conjured for me – though there were others which crowded in hot on their heels in some cases.

The equivalent names should leap to the minds of your characters. Of course, if you dumped the whole lot onto your players in one go, they would drown each other out; but dropping in one every game session, in an appropriate context within the scenario, helps bring the campaign to life. And it doesn’t stop there.

Legendary natural wonders to bring the geography to life

Every geographic feature should have some unique tale to tell. Don’t tell your players that they “cross the line of hills and enter a broad valley” if the place is known to their characters, or they have a local guide; construct a myth or two. “A line of hills, known as the bootlaces, leads to a depression with fairly sheer, rocky sides; local legend has it that a Giant once stopped here to repair a broken lace on his boot. While standing on one foot to replace the lace, his weight carved out the valley, and the discarded bootlace formed the line of hills.” Is it true? Is it Myth? Either way, the characters will better remember and relate to the terrain because of the anecdote.

Even if you don’t relate the story to the Players at the time, having it up your sleeve makes the local geography come to life for you, making it easier to describe vividly and easier to remember.

Beyond the local geography, what is the tallest mountain (and has it ever been climbed)? Where is the most impassable range, and what is it called? Where is the tallest cliff? The longest river? The widest bay? The hottest desert? The thickest forest? The most treacherous swamp? You can use these as comparisons to the local geography, and give your players a glimpse of the wider world beyond their current horizon.

Exploring New Ground

Everything I’ve talked about so far has been relatively obvious, extrapolations of the original example. But it doesn’t take a deep examination of records before wider issues get raised, either directly or by implication; all of which have analagies within your campaign world. These questions can provide a pathway for the exploration of aspects of the background that you havn’t even thought of, as well as a means of communicating your results to the players.

Consider, for example, the recent fuss over the South African woman and her world record time. This raises questions about the handling of issues of gender and race in sports that can be reflective of wider attitudes in society. Are Ogres permitted to participate in wrestling matches – or is that considered cheating? How about Elves in archery contests? Do Halflings compete as adults, or as children – and aren’t both choices unfair on someone? How about Mermen and swimming contests? Are flying creatures at an unfair advantage playing tennis – or an unfair disadvantage? How about Titans playing Basketball?

Babylon 5 raised the question of how baseball would cope with a Martian team – due to the inherant assumption of normal gravity in the game’s rules, the standard field layout made it easier for them to hit a home run, making it almost inevitable that they would reach the finals of the World Series. The ball didn’t drop as much (easier to hit – once you get used to the gravity) and travelled further and faster when struck. In fact, the more you look into the implications, the trickier the question raised becomes – you could make the field bigger, but that means that it gets harder for fielders to reach the ball. The simplest solution to that is to enable more players to be in the field. Before you know it, just to make the contest a fair one, you have completely different rules of the game. And that wouldn’t lead to endless debate in bars, would it?

What sporting events would arise from the presence of magic? Clay Pigeons using Lightning Bolts? Weightlifting using Tensor’s Floating Disk? Harry Potter‘s Quiddich is just the tip of the iceberg!

What happens when cybernetic enhancements produce athletes that are the equal of the best non-enhanced athletes – will the Paralympics merge with the Olympics? And what happens when technology takes them further? The fracas over “supersuits” in recent years will seem trivial in comparison.

It doesn’t matter what your campaign genre is – sports will exist, in some fashion, and so will gambling. Issues of racial equality, race relations, and gender equality will all play out in those spheres. The arena of sporting competition can drive progressive attitudes, or reflect conservative attitudes, giving glimpses of local politics and society.

I used to write SF short stories, and a lot of them were created by trying to imagine how a mundane item would change in the future, extrapolating outwards from the trivial to a broader picture of the ramifications. Generating the sort of information that I’ve discussed in this section is the opposite – looking at the big picture and extrapolating to the trivial consequences of everyday life, then using those trivial consequences to lead the players to an appreciation of the bigger picture.

Legendary Performances outlast Records

The achievement of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in the 1930s is still remembered today – not because his record still stands (it doesn’t), but because of the contradiction between his performance and the ‘Aryan Supermen’ claim of the Nazi government. A discussion of some analagous feat, starting with the sporting performance in question, would provide the ideal springboard for informing your players about some repressive society in your game world.

Performing-Enhancing Magics

Here’s another curly one to think about – would magic be considered the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs? How about paranormal abilities in a superhero campaign? The similarities seem obvious on their face.

How does this affect the facilities for audiance participation? How does it affect the rules? How can teams attempt to cheat, and how will the authorities try to stop them from doing so? Which teams have a reputation for exploiting the grey areas?

On such questions are the common man’s attitude towards these abilities founded in a society.

Drawing Inspiration from Records

Finally, the next time you’re designing an encounter, try flipping open the Guinness Book Of Records to a random page and selecting an item at random – then finding a way to require the PCs to perform an analagous feat in the course of the encounter. Perhaps they have to leap across a gap or chasm, or have to squeeze themselves into a space too small for easy passage, or have to endure an endless speech. Sometimes you can’t find a suitable way to use the item; but a lot of them will provide inspiration and uniqueness.

Sports, and records in general, can be considered a microcosm of a society, and a painless path towards introducing cultural attitudes and natural colour into a campaign. And that’s the longer answer that I didn’t have time to discuss with my friend.

Moral: Concerned with right & wrong conduct or duty to one’s neighbours; conforming to, or required, or justified by, conscience if not law.

Etihcs: The science of, or a system of, morals.

I don’t know why, but I always had the sense of there being a bigger difference between the two terms. Morals was always about right vs wrong, no question there, but ethics was always more about professional responsibilities. And I was all set to write a blog post contrasting the two in terms of the ‘professions’ of being the GM of, or a player in, an RPG.

Guess that plan’s been blown out of the water, at least in terms of using the definitions as I understood them. So instead, let’s just talk for a bit about the moral responsibilities that players and GMs have to both themselves, and to their characters, and their fellow players, and to the game itself.

Responsibilities to yourself

For players, this is fairly straightforward: Don’t do anything that you would consider immoral in any other sphere of your life. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, etc. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a character do any or all of these things, but a firm line should be drawn between the character’s actions and those of the player controlling the character.

For GMs

Things are a little more complicated for GMs. Not only do they have to place falsehoods into the mouths of NPCs on a regular basis, they also have to conceal the truth that lies behind NPC actions until the PCs discover it for themselves. They have to both lie and be consistantly faithful to the truth of the in-game situation at the same time.

Here’s how I draw the line: Anything said concerning the rules is always true. Anything said ex-cathedra, ie in the impartial voice of the moderator, is also true – but always reflects the player’s understanding of events and their causes; I never give alternative explanations in this mode of interaction, though I may point out errors of logic or established events that don’t fit the player’s theories if the PCs are smart enough to recognise them. I make no guarantees whatsoever when speaking in the character of an NPC.

The only exception to this rule of thumb is when a party is subjected to some mind-altering or distorting effect; the altered consciousness will always be reflected in my ex-cathedra statements.

Surprisingly, I am able to be truthful (excluding lies of omission) a surprisingly high percentage of the time, regardless of the mode I am using. Give the impression that an NPC is a liar and you can mix an astonishing amount of truthful statements into their dialogue; I simply twist the manner of delivery to put the “spin” on the statements that is appropriate.

Nevertheless, the morally right thing for the DM to do is to decieve his players at times.

Responsibilities to your characters

There are two conflicting and competing drives at play in considering a player or DM’s fidelity towards any given character they are running. The first is to be faithful to the personality of the character, regardless of the extent to which it might interfere with the progress of the game; the second is to sacrifice that fidelity in the interests of furthering the plot.

I have often seen it written that these drives are opposing, but that is not actually the case; in truth, they are complimentary. The first, the accurate roleplay of the character’s personality, is an expression of that personality as it now stands; the second represents a growth of that personality beyond the restrictions and boundaries placed on the character by his past experience – it is the mechanism by which the personality, which is to be faithfully rendered, evolves. That, in turn, defines how to maintain the fidelity of characterisation of the character.

There are big advantages to placing this evolution at a metagame level in this way. The most obvious is that it ceases to be a random set of spontanious reactions to events and can be directed, but there are others. For example, the GM and Player can ‘conspire’ to ‘prod’ the character’s personality growth in a particular direction. This in turn enables the GM to develop plots and subplots that both derive from the character, and which further develop the character in a direction that the player wants him to go. And this in turn ties the character to the campaign in a miriad of ways; in theory, you could have the same character in two different campaigns, and they would both be different.

The only requirement to this approach is that the GM has to understand the character almost as well, if not better, than the player who is operating him, and both have to be in agreement over that understanding.

Example: The Blackwing Evolution

There is a character in my Superhero game, Blackwing, who has had three different players. The first player was Nick; who played the character as a fairly happy-go-lucky ex-cop; sort of a Magnum PI with super-strength. At this point in time, Blackwing was named Knight, and was basically an ex-cop who had appropriated a suit of magical armour that enhanced his strength and resiliance from Demon.

Knight was Nick’s first attempt at creating a character-background-generated character, and his origin was full of holes, requiring a good cop to behave inexplicably corruptly at key moments. Nor had Nick really thought about exactly how the character’s powers worked in-game; he gave me carte-blanche to develop this aspect of the character, since I knew and understood the game physics and he didn’t, and to plug any holes in the character background.

As a consequence of this, there came a time when Knight was accidentally transformed into a Gargoyle shape (because someone tried to take the armour off him and it reacted by completely enveloping him). This transformation was intended to be temporary, occurring just to shed light on some of the dark and unexplained corners of the character.

At the same time, Nick was experiencing a personal conflict with one of the other players that ultimately led him to decide to drop out of the campaign, as this real-world situation was interfering with his enjoyment of the game. As a result, immediatly after the transformation, the Character was taken over by a new player to the campaign named Jonathon.

Jonathon quite liked the gargoyle idea and wanted to keep it. He also recognised that the character was a lot darker in tone beneath the surface and decided that these aspects of the character would be drawn to the surface by the change, which gave the character the licence to act on those darker impulses. He changed the character’s name to Blackwing, and made him more of a shapeshifter with enhanced strength, a mischevious sense of humour, and a dark, brooding personality. He also started to come to terms with the game-physics explanation of how the powers worked. Over time, the character became increasingly brutal and feral in combat. In a nutshell, he went wild with the character, but he also knew that sooner or later there would be consequences in the game for his character’s actions.

Events were just reaching that point when Jonathon had to leave the campaign for real-life reasons (a non-gamer girlfriend who objected to his hobby and then a job that saw him working at the time the game was played, most weekends).

As one door closes, another opens. The player who had created Knight had rejoined with a new character, and now another ex-player from the campaign decided that the time was right to increase his gaming involvement.

We went over the character with a fine-tooth comb, redesigned it from the ground up to reflect the game-physics explanation of the powers, found logical psychological reasons for his behaviour and mapped out a major character-development arc that would take the character to his lowest ebb, becoming everything that he hated, before letting him claw his way back to a position of emotional stability. We’re part-way through that story arc (a long series of subplots) as I write this.

The new Blackwing is a tortured soul, permanently altered by exposure to fell magics of an addictive nature (very one-ring), with some very dark shadows in his character’s past whose impact he spent far too long denying even to himself. There is some very deep characterisation in place, but it is a unified whole. At the same time, the character’s nature as a “dimensional interface boundary” (that game-physics explanation) has made him more of a cosmic figure than a simple shape-changer with enhanced strength.

Three different players, three very different interpretations of the same character – all different, but all Blackwing.

Player’s Responsibilities to their fellow players

This area actually relates more to my (incorrect) interpretation of Ethics than it does Morals. I view being a player as a professional occupation; the best players take the time to understand their characters, and what drives them, and what they can do, and to think about how to develop those characters within the campaign. The game isn’t just something that happens around the character, they interact with it, changing it by virtue of their involvement, and being changed as a consequence of this interaction. They study the relevant rules, they look at how the rules shape and interact with their character, and are always ready to roll the required dice when the time comes.

I never run a PC without getting inside his head and working out how he thinks and why, developing a backstory to justify those traits, and working out how best the character can participate in the game. Sometimes this can go too far… but I’d rather write an 80-page background to give to the GM than short-change him; I have too much respect for the amount of effort it takes to be a good GM!

What I percieve as a player’s moral responsibilities to his fellow players stem from this philosophy. Some are simple politeness – not treading on other player’s toes in terms of character abilities, not hogging the limelight, not trying to make your character more important than any other, not trying to sabotage another player’s enjoyment, and so on. Others are more impersonal – being ready to play on time, having the required dice on hand, making notes as necessary, and so on.

Player’s Responsibilities to the GM

Some of the player-to-player responsibilties overlap with a player’s responsibilities to his GM. Key attributes like preperation, participation, and respect are common to both. The GM almost always works harder than the players, both at the table and in preperations away from it, and players should always bear that in mind. They should listen when the GM speaks, always have their characters up to date, and be willing to trust the GM if something’s not quite clear.

GM’s Responsibilties to his players

The GM also has moral responsibilities to his players, and ultimately most of those come down to respect of some sort. He should respect the contribution that they make, he should respect their opinions, he should respect the sort of adventures that they want to go on and do his best to accommodate them. The game world is shared between Players and GM, and neither is complete without the other.

The GM should also ensure that he doesn’t cheat the characters. If they’ve earned some kind of reward then he should make sure that they receive it – just as, if they earn some kind of punishment or difficulty, he should ensure that thet get what’s coming to them.

GM’s Responsibilties to other GMs

And now we come to a subject that a lot of GMs never even think about. Most games, after all, are played in someone’s home, where there are no other games going on. My situation is a little different; most of the games that I run take place at a Friendly Local Game Store (to use the euphamism that has become famous through KODT) in company with two, three, or sometimes even four other games, plus the occasional boardgame, plus a CCG tournament or two. It’s perhaps more analagous to attending a gaming convention at the same place, and with the same people, every week.

There are always more games with seats available than there are players to fill those seats. The result forces us into a closely regulated monthly timetable. Moral behaviour for a GM in this situation, once again, is a question of respect: respect the other GMs and their games, respect the fact that players will sometimes drift from one game to another and don’t take it personally, and don’t deliberately poach another GM’s players. There’s a lot of ambient noise in such an environment; try to keep your game contained. If there’s not enough table space, you can even end up with two games running at opposite ends of the same table, though that’s rare.

Responsibilities to the Game

A player has a duty beyond the campaign to the game itself. That duty is to respect the conventions of whatever genre or genres to which the game belongs. This is one of the most neglected and unrecognised aspects of moral behaviour in roleplaying games. In an SF campaign, technobabble is meaningful. In a hard SF campaign, expect maths and engineering to matter. In a fantasy campaign, don’t expect everyone to be able to read and write. Don’t crack jokes (except possibly gallows humour) in a horror campaign. In a pulp campaign, don’t insist on detailed plans before you jump in with both boots. The GM has the same responsibilities as well, and it can be easy for players to take advantage of a GM trying to keep his game “in character”.

Summary

The golden rules when it comes to moral behaviour in roleplaying games are to always to treat the (other) players as you would like to be treated; to always treat campaigns as though they were your own; and to always respect the genre, the GM, and those around you. And expect the same of others. Always treat the game you are playing, whatever your role in it might be, as though this was what you did for a living, and do it as well as you possibly can. Your game will be better, more rewarding, and more enjoyable as a result.

How do you handle PCs who seem to be immune to magic?

A recent inquiry in Ask The GMs asked us, Hi! I’ve just started an AD&D campaign where the all the PCs have got really good saving throws. Less than 50% of any spells I cast on them will work on the Dwarfs and Halfling Priests (3 of them). That’s too good for first level characters. How should I deal with that in a high magic setting like Forgotten Realms? What about when they reach high levels; they will be pretty much immune to magic?

Mike’s Answer

I no longer have access to most of my AD&D sources, so I’m unsure just how much help I can be to our hapless DM in resolving this particular conundrum. About the best that I can do is to offer some generic and systemless suggestions, seasoned here and there with a couple of ideas from D&D 3.5, and hope they can be translated into AD&D terms by our enquiring DM (and anyone else who’s interested).

If anyone has any more specific advice relating to AD&D, I would encourage you to help out by posting your thoughts to the comments for this post.

I want to start by suggesting that I detect a strong odour of collusion amongst your players, who are probably reacting to a demonstrated preference for a specific mode of targeting them in your campaigns. If you’ve been hitting them too hard in the past with attacks that require saving throws, this sort of reaction is a natural evolution, but even so it seems to be a remarkable coincidence that all your PCs have this characteristic in common.

At first glance, this is tantamount to a declaration of war against the GM, and much of the advice I am about to offer can be viewed as an escalation of hostilities. While it might come to that, I am sure Johnn will offer some more diplomatic avenues for consideration; these should definitely be employed before the more extreme suggestions that I am going to make. It might be that it is all a coincidence, or simply a case of convergent evolution in response to a previously-experienced GMing style. If that’s the circumstance, you should moderate the degree to which you implement the following advice.

I note you mention a high-magic game setting; it’s quite possible that your players have had a paranoid overreaction. Consider this an opportunity, not a burden!

Target The PC’s Deficiencies

In all forms of D&D, high Saving Throws derive from specific characteristics having high values. In AD&D, as I recall, the problem is somewhat exacerbated by racial bonuses, but setting that aside, the first technique for handling this problem is that having one thing high implies another is low – which means the characters have weak spots that can be targeted, especially at lower levels.

The attributes that are going to be vulnerable in 3.x, (and, if memory serves, in AD&D as well) are Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma:

• Strength can be targeted by confining or restraining the characters with nets, lassos, and the like. Wrestling matches are another means. Swimming is strength dependant in 3.x, I’m not sure about AD&D. Outside the combat arena, you can manouver them by making selected doors to heavy to move, weights too heavy to lift, etc. You should strictly enforce carrying capacities and make sure that every scrap of weight is accounted for. If they attempt to get around this weakness with beasts of burden, steal or kill the beasts and the goods that they are carrying, which WON’T have unusually high saving rolls.
• Intelligence can be targeted through deceptions, lies, and outright fraud. You don’t think that word will quickly get around that these people are thick as posts? Psionics is another option, and one that I have a personal dislike for; if you don’t share that position, feel free to exploit it. Puzzles and conundrums should become featured elements of the campaign. Of course, your players might  be smart enough to see through the flimsy lines of argument – but either they are not roleplaying their characters properly (which should be penalised), or they will be forced into making intelligence rolls for their characters.
• Charisma means they are vulnerable to non-magical charms and seductions, and should quickly acquire a reputation for being soft touches, easy prey for a sob story – again, unless they are roleplaying especially badly, in which case penalties may be called for. Between this and the Intelligence factor, several people should have the PCs wrapped around their little fingers in short order. Admittedly, this is an extreme reaction; I dislike taking control of their characters away from the players, but if they are actively trying to take advantage of that dislike, they’ve asked for it!

Player: “I’m suspicious of the old dude with the pointed teeth – he’s trying too hard to be charming, I think he’s a Vampire.”

GM, rolling dice: “No, you don’t think of that, and you trust him implicitly. You are captivated by his charm, grace, and wit, and are sure he can invest your wealth far more effectively than you can.”

Player: “Why on earth would I think that?”

GM: “What’s your INT and CHAR again?”

Player: “Oh…”

NB: It should go without saying that the LAST thing you should permit is for the characters to get their hands on magic items that make up for these deficiencies. No way, no how.

Keep The Switch Flipped

Okay, so the characters are relatively immune to magic. That’s not just enemy magic, that’s ALL magic. Bless. Cure Light Wounds. Protection from evil. Resurrection. Wish. Potions. You name it.

A more typical interpretation is that the characters are only immune to spells that have a saving throw, and they can forgo that saving throw if they wish (i.e. for spells that are cast by an ally). In the middle of a fight, they are going to stop and think about whose spell it is that’s about to affect them? Not likely!

If they permit ANY magic to affect them, ALL magic should affect them until the start of their next action. Maybe they should even have to concentrate (make an INT roll?) to change their magic-vulnerability status while in battle – unless they forgo a round of attacks.

Sauce For The Goose

Another point to make is that you should never ignore the potential of NPCs who are just as resistant as the PCs!

Always remember that you are both playing by the same rules. Anything they use against you, you should be able to use against them, and vice versa!

Indirect Applications Of Magic

Consider the following: don’t cast fireballs at resistant foes, cast them at the strategically-placed barrels of gunpowder. If a spell creates an acid rain, who’s to say that it’s the RAIN that’s magical? Maybe it’s the clouds. A Dig spell doesn’t have to hit the characters to open a pit beneath their feet. Look for INDIRECT applications of magic that can partially or completely bypass their immunities.

Smart enemies will deliberately avoid wasting attacks on strong defences; once the characters get a reputation for being resistant to magic, they will find other ways.

One of the most obvious is having your NPC spellcasters cast spells that augment a strike force instead of harming the PCs.

Reverse Your Roles

Put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Assume you are a player designing a character, and the GM has a habit of giving his NPCs really good saving throws that make them virtually immune to magic. How would you deal with the problem?

Target the source of their resistance

Finally, consider the potential for attacks that drain the characteristics that are giving them these high saves in the first place. Then strike while they are vulnerable!

Hopefully, these solutions will point you in the right direction. Now, it’s over to my co-author for his input…

Johnn’s Answer

I like Mike’s answer of having the world react to the PCs. Unless you are doing pure dungeon crawls and each situation can never have foreknowledge via word of mouth, reputation, scouts, villain planning and whatnot, then have NPCs update their tactics once the PCs make their magic immunities known.

Curses

A curse is a great way to reduce abilities, and they spawn quests for removal – a double win. Random curses would be unfair, but curses caused by adversaries looking for advantage is great gameplay. Perhaps foes drop a cursed sword down the monster hole, which the critter greedily adds to his horde just as the PCs are about to crawl in. A mysterious gift, when opened, sprays unwary PCs with curses. An ambush is specifically designed to get curses successfully placed on the PCs. Do sleeping PCs get full magic saves in 1st edition? I can’t remember.

Critters

With rust monsters, disenchanters and other creatures designed for meta-gaming reasons, how about creating a magic saving throw eating creature? Let the PCs hear about this beast in gossip and rumours first. Then have victims start appearing with horrible stories. If the PCs do not investigate, provide them incentive, such as a bounty or quest.

Do not force a meeting through a random encounter or pre-determined collision. If the PCs avoid the creature then let it lay low for a bit. Then look for ways to bring the PCs to that area for other reasons, at which time encounters with the creature for any reason are fair game. By then, hopefully it has had time to breed.

Getting young sucks

In 1st edition I think there are negative age modifiers on INT and WIS for young folk. Hit the PCs with an anti-ghost. Each time a PC is hit he gets younger. This makes more sense in a way as killing PCs this way is faster than making them get older. Perhaps the god of undead sees this flaw in the ghosts he’s created and starts pumping out anti-ghosts instead.

Create trade-offs

If the PCs are stacked up for magic immunity they might be tricked into disadvantageous trade-offs. Since the characters are already immune to magic, give them treasure that further increases their magic saving throws but makes them weaker in other areas (what have you got to lose?).

Conversely, offer treasure that boosts other abilities in exchange for magic saving throw reduction.

In either case, it’s all PC choice and your group will be ok with that.

Use more anti-magic fields

If the PCs are immune to magic then get rid of magic altogether for awhile. Put in anti-magic fields and null magic zones. This means the flora and fauna will need to resort to other defenses and abilities. Do this to provide in-game reasons why fewer attacks are using magic these days so it doesn’t seem as arbitrary to the players. Yes, the anti-magic zones are arbitrary, but if you forewarn the PCs or create an anti-magic villain then you address things at the campaign level.

Check for house rules

Those are a few GM vs. PCs ideas. I’d also take a look at the campaign setup just to make sure you are not sabotaging yourself. Do you have any house rules in effect that impact magic saving throws? For example, do you allow the monty haul stat rolling method from Unearthed Arcana? That’ll generate some great PC ability scores. Remove this as an option and revert back to 3d6.

Any other house rules that have crept into your campaigns over the years and are no longer questioned? If so, revert back to the official rules.

Check for optional supplements

Are you using any books whose rules are boosting saving throws? Remove these from the campaign next time. Be careful of suddenly removing them mid-campaign. That’s going to anger your group unless you have a great in-game reason for it.

Long-term – target other saving throws to create group balance

I like Mike’s line of thinking that your players are reacting to previous campaigns that exposed too much magic saving throw weakness. Create a long term strategy to expose other areas of weakness for which the players should design good defenses or attacks into their PCs. This won’t help your campaign today, but if you are playing with the same group for a long time then take this long-term approach in parallel with other short term reactions.

Ask The GMs is a service being offered by Campaign Mastery. More info >

For a long time, I’ve been dissatisfied with the way some games handle wild, improbable, luck.

D&D, for example, has no luck mechanism per se; only the critical hits subsystem comes close, where if you roll well enough, you score multiple damage, and in the skills subsection, whereby rolling a 20 on a skill check permits a success even if the raw total is not theoretically enough.

This is especially true of my Shards Of Divinity campaign, where a house rule disposes of the latter ruling in favour of an “it takes longer” approach. This is, in reality, just a shorthand version of the published rules, since it only applies when multiple attempts at the skill check are permitted; eventually, the character will roll a success under the normal rules, this merely replaces all the necessary die rolling with a time frame.

I wanted a mechanism in which luck could behave as luck is reputed to behave – it should give an edge or an advantage, but should not dominate results, and it should be fickle. But for a very long time, inspiration has been in short supply.

The Origins Of The Concept

Recently, though, an idea came to me – while watching, of all things, a TV documentary on Mandelbrot and the rise of Chaos as a mathematical and physical principle. The key to Mandelbrot’s mathematical functions, and to chaos mathematics in general, is the concept of iterative functions, something that had fascinated me ever since I had read that an iterative function had been developed that output decimal places of pi – if you fed in the first N digits, you got another N digits out, feed those in and you got the next N digits and so on.

The idea occurred to me that using the results of some sort of luck roll not only to determine how much luck a character had a given time, but also the scale of the next luck roll, would inherantly act to keep luck points from piling up until they became some overwhelming monster that totally dominated play.

Seventh Sea uses a similar idea, and part of the inspiration came from that source as well. In Seventh Sea, there is only one pool of a luck ‘equivalent’; The GM has an unlimited supply, but each time he uses one, he has to give one to the players. Unused luck generates additional XP, in other words the stroke of luck is that the characters learned more than they normally would from a series of encounters.

The value of Luck

So, what did I want characters to be able to do with a luck point? What was a luck point going to represent?

Champions uses a system whereby you roll however many dice of luck you have bought for your character, and count the number of sixes; each 6 represents an escelation of luck, from minor advantage to minor miracles. The normal Hero system restricts characters to three dice of luck, and I could not see why that was the case; I thought that characters who were willing and able to pay for the privilige should be able to buy more, to better their chances of getting at least one point of luck on a regular basis. Many years ago, when first considering this, I calculated that 14 such dice represented a critical threshold, where the chance of a miracle (3 points of luck) was higher than the chance of only getting a minor advantage. To avoid Deux Ex Machinas at every turn, I employed the simple tactic of capping the number of dice that could be bought at 13. Over the years, the interpretation of luck points has evolved, so that allies found that an exceptionally lucky character was lucky for them to have around, and we’ve since found the luck mechanism to be a useful metagame shorthand for all sorts of powers that were otherwise quite difficult to interpret into game mechanics.

I didn’t want luck in D&D to be anywhere near this powerful; my intention was that it be something that everyone had, in varying degrees, and that gave an advantage that had to be employed tactically. I wanted it to give the players more options, and the NPC opposition more options.

The ability to change the results of a die roll by one step sounded about right at first – so that a character who rolled a ’19’ in battle could use a luck point to change the result to a ’20’. A character who just missed a skill roll that they would normally succeed on could do the same thing. A character who was being mauled by the opposition could use a luck point to reduce the enemy’s attack roll and get some breathing space. And, of course, two could play at that game; if I had underestimated the effectiveness of an important encounter, I could give them a tactical advantage to make up the difference, and make the encounter more thrilling and suspenseful – at the expense of giving the PCs more experience when they eventually won.

But, when I looked at the luck generation system I had come up with, it potentially gave away too many luck points for that. So I settled on a five-point scale for certain specialised meanings:

• changing a critical failure into a simple failure costs 5 luck points;
• changing a failure into a success costs the difference in luck points;
• changing a success into a critical success costs 5 luck points;
• increasing the critical multiplier of a weapon for one attack only costs 5 luck points for each step;
• increasing the damage rolled by an attack by one point, up to the maximum that can be rolled, costs one point of luck;
• changing a failure into a critical failure costs 5 luck points;
• changing a success into a failure costs the difference in luck points;
• changing a critical success into a normal success costs 5 luck points;
• decreasing the critical multiplier of a weapon for one attack only costs 5 luck points for each step;
• decreasing the damage rolled by an attack by one point, to the minimum that can be rolled, costs one point of luck;
• an extra 5′ step of movement costs 5 luck points;
• an extra dice of luck (to a maximum total of 10 dice) for the next game session costs 10 points.

This would mean that a lucky character would be more likely to blindly pick the right answer, be in exactly the right place to make the difference in battle, be more likely to come through failures and mistakes unscathed, and so on, but their capacity for doing so would be limited.

Rolling Luck

At the start of each session of play, each PC rolls the specified number of luck dice. The first time the system is used, the character rolls d10-1 for the number of dice of luck they have from “last time”.

The total rolled, Ignoring the 10s place, is the base number of dice of luck for next session.

The total rolled is also the number of points of luck the charater has available for use in this game session.

Characters must decide immediatly whether or not to expend any of these luck points for additional dice of luck next session.

The GM supervises these rolls for each character and notes the number of dice each character has coming to them next time. The players should also note this number for redundancy.

Analysis Of The Luck Rolling System

Characters can end up with anywhere from 0 to 10 dice of luck for a session. That gives them anywhere from 0 to 60 points of luck to use.

Because the total is a random value on a probability curve, characters can predict within rough guidelines how many points of luck they will have next session, enabling an informed decision as to how many dice of luck to buy.

The more dice of luck you have, the closer the result will probably be to the average of 3.5 per die, but there is always a strong element of chance, because the more stable tens place is ignored. This means that the more dice of luck you have at the start of a session, the more secure you can be that you will have a reasonable amount of luck points next session. However, the more dice you have at the start of a session, the more variable the number of luck dice that you will have available for next session becomes.

There is NEVER a good excuse for not having at least one dice of luck next session. If a character rolls a luck point total that ends in a zero, they will have at least 10 points of luck, permitting them to buy at least one dice for next time – at the expense of having no luck this session.

Players can use their luck points at any time, for any roll that they make. They can also use their luck points at any time, for any roll that the GM makes. Each time that they do, the GM should reduce the XP awarded for the encounter by 10 per PC.

Side note: I thought about basing the number of dice of luck on the amount of unused luck this session, but quickly realised that it enabled players to manipulate the system too readily so that they always had a high number of dice of luck, simply by controlling their expenditure of luck in a session. This would have ensured that they always had an edge when they needed it, which runs contrary to the objective of these rules.

Unused Luck

Luck does not accumulate. At the end of a session, unused luck is redeemed by the GM at a rate of 10xp per point unused.

With a maximum of 60 points of luck, a character can potentially gain as much as 600xp from unused luck in a game session, but this is unlikely to occur. A more likely value is 180-360 xp, which is a reasonable amount that doesn’t overwhelm the game system.

GM use of Luck

The GM has an unlimited amount of luck to draw on. However, he starts with exactly the same amount that the characters have AFTER they have bought additional dice of luck for next session. Every point of luck that he uses beyond that limit awards EACH PC 10 additional xp at the end of the encounter, so most uses of luck will cost him an extra 50xp at least.

Furthermore, every 6xN points of luck (where N is the number of PCs) that he uses beyond this limit also gives characters an extra dice of luck for the next session, even if this violates the 10-dice maximum that normally applies. Characters can never start with more than 60 points of luck, but if the DM gives the players too many dice to draw on, achieving that 60 becomes more likely. It also increases the likelyhood that the PCs will have unused luck next session, in effect giving the players a double advantage.

Since PCs with zero luck in a session also reduce the number of luck points that the GM has to draw on, it becomes more likely that he will need to award extra dice of luck, so getting that character off the zero mark for next session.

Note that the GM has to use his luck reserves for ALL characters that he controls, both enemies and NPCs allied to the party. He should use Luck as a tool to enhance his storytelling, ramping up the usage by the opposition when the PCs get close to a significant victory so that they, in turn, have a lot of luck points available for the ultimate encounter.

Lucky – The Feat

A character can also take the Feat “Lucky”, which gives the character a minimum of 1 dice of luck at all times. This does not add to the number of dice of luck the character can have, it simply increases the minimum. This feat can be taken multiple times, but no more than five times is permitted.

Luck Wars

It should be obvious that with both PCs and GM having the same total luck points to draw on in a session, luck points can be used to cancel each other out, and some players may opt to do so. This is ultimately shortsighted; better to husband your luck points for the moments that really matter and make a difference to the character.

In general, it should be considered bad form for luck to travel both ways on a single roll; it’s far more satisfying to let luck ebb and flow, letting the GM get the players into tight spots and then using luck to ensure that the PCs can battle their way out.

To enforce this behaviour, if a PC uses luck to counter the GM’s use of luck, the luck that the GM had allocated to the action returns to the GM’s pool, unused, while the PCs luck is expended. Instead of using a luck point to counter the GM’s luck, the players expend their luck to block the GM form using his luck on that attack or roll.

Similarly, if the GM uses his luck to block a PC usage of luck, the luck points are returned to the PC for use later, while the GM’s are expended on the roll, in the manner specified, as though the Player had not used luck at all. The result is that the PCs can force the GM to use up his luck – at the price of the GM being more effective in the short term – be it inflicting more damage, hitting when he otherwise would not, or whatever.

Consequences & Ramifications

In effect, the more players rely on “forced luck” to achieve their results, the less XP they earn for the day; the more GMs rely on “forced luck” to make the PCs lives more difficult, the more XP the players get.

In any given session, neither side of the screen gains an advantage, but the use of luck should enhance the dramatic tension of an encounter or battle as fate swings to the advantage of first one side and then the other. It should permit the GM to enhance the play within his campaign, making it more spectacular and thrilling.

That’s the goal – now to see if it works in play…