Uru Island, South America

This post is being simultaneously posted here and as the feature article in Roleplaying Tips issue #433. Subscribe to the e-zine here if you haven’t already, and check out some of the GMing Articles (including three by yours truly: ‘Dragon Characters For Eberron’, ‘Putting The Fear Back Into Disease’, and ‘On Feats’) while you’re there.

It’s relatively easy to create a new culture for your game. Creating one that makes sense is more work, but also more worthwhile. Expressing the difference is a lot more work, and apt to be boring as hell unless you enjoy lecturing our players and they are in love with the sound of your voice. Bringing the culture to life in your player’s minds WITHOUT droning on or giving your players all the answers from the back of the book is harder still – unless you know how to cheat! That’s where this blog series comes in.

Step 1: Point Of Distinction

The first step is to create the new culture. In order to do that, you have to pick a point of substantial difference between this culture and the usual one within your game. Write it down at the top of a very long list, which you’ll spend some time adding to. Put a big “1” next to it.

Step 2: Causation

The second step is somewhat trickier: explain WHY the culture is the way it is, in a new paragraph labelled “2”. If the difference is a form of behavior, explain how and when and why this behavior arose. If the difference is a philosophical one, who first articulated the difference in philosophy, what events in his life equipped him to conceive of it, how did this philosophy become dominant in society, what did it replace, are there those who still follow the old ways, and so on and so forth.

Step 3: Consequence

The third step is more difficult still: with one numbered sentence each (from “3” to “whatever”) to explain the difference, identify as many areas of everyday life as you can in which the difference in culture makes a difference to the manner in which the ordinary action is carried out. What are the ordinary things that happen to ordinary people on an ordinary day? They rise, they bathe, they dress, they eat, they travel, they work, they purchase goods and services, they play games, they come of age, they marry, they bear children, they raise children, they celebrate, they mourn, they show respect, they show disrespect, they argue, they are arrested, they are tried, they are convicted, they are punished. One or all of these may be affected by the change in society. Once you’ve finished, you can put a tick next to “1” and “2”.

Step 4: Ramifications

The fourth step is even more arduous: identify the ripple effects. Each of the sentences numbered “3” and higher might itself affect one or more of the others. So for each one, go through this list again, looking for secondary effects. Number these “something-A” “-B” or whatever, where “something” is the original sentence number. When you’ve finished with a sentence, put a tick next to it (so that you can always tell where you are up to). If the ripple effect stems from sentence four on your list, the first of the ripple sentences will be “4a”, the second one will be “4b” and so on. DON’T REPEAT SOMETHING THAT’S ALREADY ON THE LIST. You will find that there are far less of these than there were original sentences. You’ll also discover that your concept of the new culture is ‘gelling’ in your mind as you go.

Repeat step 4 until every sentence on your list has a tick next to it. Don’t neglect the original topic, either: one difference in the way the members of this society eat may inspire a different one on the same subject. don’t be afraid to add to the list either – “they dress” implies laundering of clothes, and clothes for different occasions, and the farming of whatever the clothes are made from, and so on.

You may also discover the need for extraordinary capabilities, or perhaps that was the initial difference that you came up with. A society in which guilt or innocence is automatically and infallibly recognized in its members through some form of mental link would be very different from anything else out there.

Step 5: Compilation

Step 5 is to take all of these notes and rewrite them, forming a paragraph on each of the ordinary activities (and any extraordinary abilities). By numbering the sentences in the way that you have, you will find that all the “Threes” relate to a single topic, all the “fours” naturally group together, etc. In essence, you are using these notes as guides and reminders to help you articulate what you have in your head as briefly and succinctly as possible.

Along the way, you will often find that you identify a different “key difference” as the one responsible for everything, or may add further differences to explain and justify it. Make a note of these, highlight them, but don’t start over! These really are the key – starting from these core concepts, you should be able to recreate the society even if all the other notes you have made get lost. Reading these back to yourself should be enough for you to ‘place’ yourself, mentally, within the new society – a handy trick when the time comes to GM them!

Step 6: First Reactions

Step 6 is append a key paragraph describing how this culture reacts to strangers of different types and reputations. In other words, to the PCs. This has been left to the very end of the process because that’s when the new culture is clearest in your mind.

Step 7: GMs Primer Notes

Finally, step 7 is to take the highlighted sentences and write a one-paragraph introduction/summary of the society that you’ve created. This is your primer, designed to remind you of the ideas behind the society, so that when something comes up that you havn’t translated into the cultural idiom of that society, you will have the tools you need in order to do so.

This article will continue in parts 2, 3 and 4.

GullSide City - for game use - thanks to Cartographers Guild

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools.

My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. For example, locations > NPCs > personalities; session notes > open loops, consequences, ideas > campaign elements.

FreeMind for RPGs Introduction

Go read the FreeMind for Roleplayers article by TheLemming for an overview. You might also want to check out epic preparation – p7 – politics by the same author for more mindmapping examples.

The beauty of FreeMind versus paper is you can brainstorm or document, and then change the structure – move things around – as you write. When I plan for game sessions, I’ll leap from one idea to the next, in no particular order once I get going. Sure, I could use a list or spreadsheet, but FreeMind lets me drag ideas around and connect them to other ideas, like one of those free form-word fridge magnet sets. After a bit of reorganization when I’m catching a breath or done with ideas mode, I can clearly follow relationships, which makes ongoing reference easy, even during game sessions. In addition, any new ideas or developments are quick to append or insert.

FreeMind Tips

TheLemming has covered some great instructions and tips for using FreeMind. Here are a few more gleaned from use:

• Use the direction keys (or ESDF) to move around. You could mouse around, and maybe I’m old school, but my vote is don’t make my hands leave the keyboard until necessary. ESC key takes you to the root node.
• Use INSERT key to create a child node. Use ENTER to create a peer node. Fast and easy. Don’t let mousing slow your flow of ideas. Just keep creating new nodes as required and then organize them later. Capture those thoughts.
• Use the Notes feature. There’s no shortcut for this unfortunately. Go to Insert > Note. Paste or write all the details you want here.
• Use node background colours to communicate more at a glance. For example, give NPCs red, blue, and yellow bg colours for evil, good, and neutral alignments. This simplifies your mindmap (one less node for each NPC, one less word per NPC). It also creates a neat metric: what is the balance of alignments in your cast of NPCs. I found with my Carnus campaign that I had more blue than yellow, more yellow than red. I need more bad guys in my game.
• Get friendly with Export. A great method is to export your maps to HTML for posting on your blog, website, or wiki. Other options include image maps, JPG, SVG, and PDF!
• Link like crazy. Use the linking feature to hook two related nodes together (click on one and get taken to the other – great for huge maps), link to files, link to your campaign website, link to DDI and other online references, and so on.
• Toggle nodes on and off (open / close) to make the view simpler to look at and digest. For example, only open the node you are working in and leave the others closed. Use SPACE to toggle nodes on and off quick.
• Change selection method preference to By Click. FreeMind installed by default for me with node selection via mouseover. I found it difficult to work this way and prefer, when not using the keyboard, to select nodes with a mouse click. As maps grew I found I had to weave in and out with my mouse carefully or accidentally select nodes, but choosing By Click fixed this. Go to Preferences > Behavior > Selection Method.

What about you? Do you use mindmapping? Have any FreeMind tips?

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“We can make it better than it was before – better, stronger, faster.”

(Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad)

Well, it’s done. Almost 6½ hours of effort.

That’s what it took to completely remove and replace every category and tag, and then reassign them according to a new and comprehensive scheme of organisation that Johnn & I have been working on for over a month. The Categories should now be more consistant and – for the first time – have actually been defined in terms of the content they will contain. The tags have been re-organised, and often re-named, to make them – and the tag cloud they generate – more user-freindly both to the flesh-and-blood readers of this blog posts (AIs can take care of themselves!) and to the categorisation schemes of other blog networks.

Hopefilly, all this effort has been worthwhile, that our readers find the blog a more user-friendly environment, and that no-one in our readership has been inconvenienced in any way. (If they have, I apologise on behalf of us both). Normal service has now been resumed!

“Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus”— conventional wisdom in the popular music industry, also used as the title of Roxette’s Greatest Hits compilation album.

I’ve blogged before about my Seeds Of Empire campaign. Following our last session over the New Year’s holiday, a problem arose that I had not had to deal with before, in all my 25+ years as a DM. I obviously gave the issue a lot of thought over the next few days, as I had only a couple of weeks to resolve it and get ready for our next session.

Over the last two years (we normally only play once a month), the PCs had been running through what was effectively a dungeon in which each of the levels was based on impure derivatives of the different elemental planes (and the last two on the negative and positive energy planes, respectively). While these had been revealed to be significant to the overall campaign, the players took a lot longer to get through them than I (or they) expected. The idea was excellent and quite original, emphasising different challenges throughout; and I thought that I had anticipated the need for an acceleration, with the longest time being allocated to the early levels (air, earth), getting progressively quicker. The last two levels (positive energy and prime material planes) took only 6 and 5 hours of play, respectively, to complete; the one before it, only 2 eight-hour sessions; and the one before that, only 3 eight-hour sessions. And, while there was some frustration over the pace of progress, that was now in the past, forgotten (at the time) as that significance – shedding light on the backgrounds of some key NPCs and evolving the relationships between them and the PCs – came to light and a lot of seekingly-unconnected plot threads started coming together to form a bigger picture.

In the final scenario, all these microplanes were united to form a new Prime Material plane alongside the original. The next stage of the campaign was to involve a tour through this new plane, discovering what was there and how the populations of the microplane had emerged from the most singular act of creation ever experienced by the PCs, and how they had adapted to their new reality. (Sorry if the language is a bit florid, I’ve just been watching a DVD of The West Wing. It rubs off after a while!)

So here’s the problem. The original concept was great, the encounters (all original, never-before-encountered lifeforms) were entertaining and challenging, and the resolution of the “dungeon tour” had been interesting and even Worth The Wait (according to the players themselves) – but they were all micro-planed out, I could tell. (That’s an essential skill in a GM’s repetoire, the ability to read his players). They needed a change of pace, and instead, they were to be confronted by the biggest planar exploration mission of them all. The ideas had sounded terrific when I first drafted them, but had persisted for too long.

This was not the result of anything I had done, or done wrongly, but because new players had dropped into the campaign, with new PCs and promises to stick around for the long term, had stayed just long enough for the campaign to be expanded to introduce and include them and give their characters their own plot arcs within the overall scheme of things, and had then dropped out (or were dropped out, in one case). No matter how good the idea had been to start with, it had overstayed its welcome as a result.

The issue at hand was how to compress and compact this New World into something that could be dealt with in only a couple of game sessions, and yet still captured all the themes and subthemes that it was supposed to contain, and still conveyed the sense of wonder that the PCs should experience when travelling within it. Originally intended to be four sessions of play, the PCs would only tolerate one or two, in my estimation. How do you do that?

Being a GM involves a lot of different disciplines. There are rules, interpersonal skills, ethics, genre knowledge, simulation dynamics, tactics & strategy, mapmaking, illustration & graphic art, politics, science, history, story structure, narrative composition, and the list just keeps on growing from there. But one of the most fundamental arts to the DMs craft is Communications. The players in a game occupy a unique position in a campaign as both participants and audiance, and it’s easy for the latter role to overshadow the first with bad refereeing, leading to plot trains and other abuses – so much so that these problems are considered a sure sign of bad GMing. But oftentimes, DMs are so busy shying away from any suggestion of a trend towards the problem that the role of the players as audiance is ignored, or forgotten altogether.

It was in this Communications discipline that the solution could be found to my problem, or so it seemed to me. Writers for TV have been developing ways of compressing information to fit stories into arbitrary but fixed parameters ever since the medium began – and that’s an exact parallel with the situation that needs a solution. Most (if not all) of the tenets of media writing adapt readily to a gaming context, one way or another, and a number of them provided the essential tools to solve the problem.

Before you can communicate something, you first have to know what you want to communicate – that’s simple common sense. So, before I could look at how to apply these tools to solve my problem, I had to work out what the information actually WAS that I needed to convey.

1. A sense of scale
2. A sense of wonder and grandeur
3. A seemingly untouched world – a paradise
4. A sense of how the nature of the world changed during the merge
5. Show that the new world is derivative of the planes absorbed in its creation
6. Show how the transition has affected the inhabitants of the microplanes
7. Explore the Political, Social, Religious, and Scientific ramifications
8. Show that the new world is still a dangerous place
9. Clarify the role of the new world in the divine Master Plan

In addition to all of these, I knew that I had certain fixed scenes that were already “written in” to occur, either because they were logically necessary, or because the party were already intending to do them:

a. Entry to the new world
b. Consecrate the world to the gods (erect a temple)
c. Meet the inhabitants / reunite the party
d. First Corruption / First sin
e. Departure, closing the portal

With the problem now defined in specifics, I could get to work on a solution by considering how to apply the tools of communications:

• condensation – make each scene serve more than one purpose.
• illustration – a picture is worth a thousand words. A photograph of some natural wilderness from my collection of clip art, perhaps photoshopped to include some features that the PCs will recognise, will confer 1, 2, 3, and 5. This should be part of scene (a).
• example – one combat, carefully chosen, can make item 5 even clearer and demonstrate 8 at the same time. This could be in any of the scenes, but it makes the most sense if it occurs during the first extended travel – so in between scenes (b) and (c) is the most logical point.
• narration & scene transitions – fade in, fade out, etc – if, immediatly after that one combat, I use narrative to describe the rest of the trip and simply mention other battles briefly, I can describe the entire trip in a paragraph or so of narrative. I can then ‘fade in’ on the next significant scene. The players won’t object if they still get the XP that they would have recieved from those otherwise meaningless battles, in fact they’ll appreciate the brevity. That one combat, if well chosen, can represent a half-dozen encounters. This is therefore part of the introduction to scene (c).
• narrative flashbacks – when the party reach the populated centre (scene c), one of the locals can describe what they experienced during and after the coalescance. That deals with 4, 6, and (partially), 7. But since scene (c) already has a lot of work to do, rolling it into scene (d) makes even better sense.
• analagy, symbolism & metaphor – these are all forms of shorthand to include additional meaning, layered on top of more overt statements. Using these, I can hint at more of 7, and at 9; the former in scene (c), and the latter in scenes (b), (d), and (e).

Using the tools of communication and script-writing, nine plot objectives had now been rolled into 6 scenes, of which 5 were already scheduled to be played through anyway. Each scene now had a set job to do, which would guide me in crafting content for the scene. They were still loose enough that there was no suggestion of a plot train. The sequence is driven by logic, the only possible variation being whether (b) follows (a) or (c) – that’s up to the PCs, but it’s my expectation that it will be early on. So long as I was flexible on that point, everything else was straightforward roleplay.

It was now completely clear exactly what needed to be done in prep work before the next session of play. And all the things that had been giving me major headaches – the need to integrate six seperate geographies, each with their own ecologies and physical laws – had gone away. The scenario had gone from being a mountain of work to being the labour of just one evening.

Never forget the dual roles of the players in a game. They are participants, yes – of equal measure to the DM – but they are also an audiance, and sometimes it can be in the game’s best interests to treat them like one. So long as you don’t pre-empt a decision by them, it can be more rewarding.

For more information on the tricks of the trade when it comes to writing for television, check out DVD extras that feature writers and producers (“The Lord Of The Rings” commentaries and “Babylon 5” commentaries are excellent), read books on the “making of” TV series and movies (there’s a lot of stuff on Star Trek in this regard, for example), and so on.

I started to write this as a comment to Johnn’s post “Undead Are Taking Over. What Happens?”, but realised that my comments were so extensive as to require a post of their own. Note that this is an extra post, my usual blog entry for the week will follow in a day or two. Here’s my analysis of the situation in Johnn’s Carnus campaign:

This is now the Defining Event of the campaign. It will affect everything and everyone in some way. Many of the suggestions other readers have made are excellent, but present an incomplete picture. In terms of the populace, there are 4 different relationships with the event, between them defining many sub-populations, each with its own reactions to the event.

1. Religious orientation:

Individuals of strong religious orientations will react in one of four ways: offensively, defensively, altruistically, and corruptly.

• Offensively: Religious bodies that are so inclined will ignore the upheaval generated by the arrival of the undead and strike at the heart of the problem – the undead themselves, and the Shadowfell opening that is spewing them forth. On the other side of the equation, there will be the occasional undead of greater ability and sentience and evil that has his own plans – be they for revenge, or conquest, or even redemption!

• Defensively: Others will seek to strengthen protections against evil in general. That includes blessing a lot of city walls, and preparing seige-engine sized vats of Holy Water to rain down on approaching undead, and so on. But human nature has always been a little dark at times like this; some will blame the PCs (quite rightly), some will blame their patron (who was fool enough to trust a mission of this importance to such imbeciles), some will blame adventurers in general, but most importantly, some will blame whoever they already have an axe to grind against. Witch-hunts will be commonplace, and puritans and holier-than-thou religious zealots will be coming out of the woodwork. It is quite likely that Wizards and strangers will be amongst the first to be singled out, followed by the old and infirm, the diseased, the criminal, the morally ambigious, and only then, the evil and corrupt. All in total sincerity, of course! These include C Rader’s marvellous Death Cults.

• Altruistically: A third subgroup will want to protect and shelter and rescue the victims and those displaced by the on-rushing hordes. There will be safe corridors set up and maintained, way-houses, checkpoints, etc.

• Corruptly: And then there will be those who will seek to take advantage of the situation – to settle old scores, to elevate their personal power, to drive people back to the church, to fleece the flock, and so on. Johnn’s Con Men also fall into this category. I can also foresee a number of Devils and Demons popping into local throne rooms promising to protect the city or Kingdom in exchange for a tythe of souls – a trifling one in four… (whether they can or not!) And a bunch of lesser devils and demons offering personal protection. Especially with so many of the religion-oriented heavyweights who would normally oppose them being busy elsewhere.

2. Political orientation:

Individuals of strong political orientations will react in one of four ways: offensively, defensively, altruistically, and corruptly. This group includes traders and professionals of all kinds, who are usually bound together in guilds (ie political bodies), and other special interest groups. Of course, at least initially, ignorance and disbelief will be the order of the day. Then, there will be considerable debate amongst the advisors and members of each political body about how to react. Coordinated efforts will arise only slowly, and probably long after the magnitude of the disaster becomes fully aparrant (more on this later). At least one kingdom/barony/whatever will probably declare war against another that has been overrun, thinking that the flood of refugees constitutes an invading army.

Mundane authority reactions will parallel those of the religious types. Laws will be passed. Armies will be moved into strategic positions to redirect the flow of undead into an enemy nation just as a dam can redirect the flow of a river. Defensive civil works will suddenly become top priority, just as everyone gets conscripted to build walls of sandbags when a town is threatened by floods. Unproductive labour will be banned. Minor criminal offenses will result in the equivalent of being sent to ‘the russian front’. At the same time, some kingdoms will prepare shelters to protect their leading citizens – the equivalent reactions from all those “something from space is coming” movies, from Armageddon to Independance Day – they are all analagous to the situation.

More militant kingdoms might mandate a state religion, or attempt to nationalise the churches (and churchMEN). Long-forgotten treaties will be reactivated, and negotiations will commence aimed at forging new ones, even with old enemies. All the old power balances will be disrupted.

At the same time, you can consider the flood of refugees as something akin to a horde of locusts. Some kingdoms will open their borders, some will close them. At least one will probably be more generous than they can afford to be and will experience mass starvation from drastic and sudden overpopulation. At least one will turn away all but the able-bodied and will build itself an army the likes of which no-one has ever seen before, ready to emerge once everyone else has exhausted themselves, but ultimately won the day against the undead. A major war of conquest will inevitably follow victory in the Undead Wars.

Ultimately, you will have the same four operative reactions as the church. All four will be given some weight, but each will be a different priority in different locations. Strategic position relative to the undead horde will be a decisive factor here.

3. The general public:

Individuals who do not fit either of the previous groups will react in one of four ways: heroically, fearfully, fervently, and dispassionately.

• Heroism: Natural disasters bring out extraordinary heroes and heroism in the most unlikely places, and this is pretty much the ultimate natural disaster! Ordinary people will be placed in extraordinary circumstances, and some will rise to the challenge. At the same time, adventurers – those accustomed to heroic action – will flock to the challenge, probably underestimating the difficulties to be faced. As a result, characters like the PCs will abruptly decline in number, giving the GM licence to involve them in just about everything else that is going on. “You’re Fifth Level!? We are saved, a hero has come to rescue us!” (Everyone looks at the PC expectantly)…

• Fearfully: At the same time, there will be wholesale fear. People will panic – a la HG Well’s War Of The Worlds. Rumours will be enough to depopulate whole villages. Mobs will form spontaniously, creating civil disruptions on top of everything else.

• Fervently: The churches will experience a wave of newly devout citizens. At the same time, some will feel that the established religions have failed them, and will turn to heresies and form strange cults (this explains how the Devils and Demons get involved).

• Dispassionately: Finally, there will be a few who will keep their heads where others lose them. These will tend to attract supporters and followers. In some Kingdoms, the ruler will be amongst the panickers, and there will be an abrupt change of leadership soon afterwards. Banana Republics will have stable political systems in comparison – at least one area should experience 15 coups in only a fourty weeks!

Of course, the ultimate level of dispassion will be reserved for the dead, and the undead. Don’t forget that they don’t have to rest – they may or may not have to hide during the day, but come sunset, they will be on the move…

Final Advice

If I were running Johnn’s campaign, I would try to map each of these reactions onto a timeline. That in itself gives the foundations for what is happening at any given time; the PCs can then be sent on “tour” as it were, always finding themselves in an appropriate position to be in the middle of an appropriate reaction.

To bring home the full scope of the disaster, nothing beats a completely displaced population. The percieved threat is proportionate to the capabilities of the population that has been overrun. Turning an entire kingdom Halflings or Gnomes into vagabonds might arouse sympathies, but doesn’t really scare anyone. Doing the same to Dwarves is more threatening, but less likely to arouse sympathy. Driving the entire Elvish Race from their forests, on the other hand, is closer to the mark. Follow it up by disposessing the Drow from their tunnels, and not only do you elevate the political problem of refugees to new heights, but you should strike terror into the hearts of anyone with two brain cells to rub together!

Of course, it goes without saying that closing the portal should be WAY beyond the PCs current abilities, and anyone elses, for that matter. That should be reserved for the big finish to the campaign. To be followed, of course, by a sequel campaign dealing with the aftermath…

Help! In my Carnus D&D 4E campaign the PCs failed to stop a permanent rift to the Shadowfell opening. Now undead are pouring out like hallelujahs at a Pelor rave. So, what are the consequences? Got any ideas?

Here are a few I’ve thought of:

• Wildlife flee in the path of undead. Most animals will sense the danger and make haste. They won’t migrate or permanently move out though. Not yet, at least. This means I can use fleeing flocks, herds, and swarms to add creepy drama, create sudden danger, or warn the PCs that something nasty is coming.
• Shake up the ecosystem. The new danger will dislodge powerful creatures from their lairs and territories. This gives me a good way to bump the PCs up against critters too powerful for them. If the characters choose wisely they can avoid conflict. I’ll leave it up to them.
• Disease. Where the undead travel or congregate I can introduce interesting diseases to the region and to afflict PCs with.
• Patches of mist and darkness and magical evil. The rift might be warping reality a bit, which is slowly spreading. This is an opportunity to make combats interesting with various hazards.
• Villages are freaking out. Garlic and silver sells out at the markets. Churches fill up. Con men start selling false blessings and protections.

So, have any other ideas?

Continent - click for large version - courtesy of Cartographers Guild

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life.

Bi-Weekly Game Sessions

We play every other Thursday night, from 6:30 until 10:30. My players have families, jobs, friends, and other hobbies, so gaming every 14 days is a great compromise. I say compromise because I could game master every day, if given the opportunity.) GMing daily would actually reduce my preparation needs!

Game mastering every other week lets me split my planning time into two phases: gathering ideas and thoughts, and design.

Week 1: Gathering Ideas and Thoughts

The first week involves mulling over previous session events, NPCs, plots, the campaign arc, and the game world.

Unless the entire session was spent in a small cardboard box at the bottom of a lake, there will be consequences to character actions from the last session and earlier sessions. Even if, for some weird reason, the whole game was spent hacking wandering monsters, that activity at the least would change the ecosystem in the region, providing fodder for new encounter and plot ideas.

Did the PCs change the attitude or behaviour of any important NPCs? (Let’s say death is a form of behaviour change, lol.) Did they knock out the top layer of the food chain, the bottom layer, or any important layer in between? Did something new get introduced into the mix, such as a disease, powerful magic item, or important knowledge?

For a week I’ll noodle over what the PCs have done and how that makes an impact. This is a great opportunity to do blue sky thinking about consequences, unshackled with having to make decisions or designs at this stage. This is a great time to introduce new elements just so they can react to the PCs, or to loop in old elements for a surprise, or to connect two elements to stir things up. By element, I mean NPC, plot, location, treasure – any noun in your game.

What author said the most important part of writing fiction is the question What if? Was it Ray Bradbury? I can’t remember. For anything that comes to mind about any aspect of the campaign while I’m driving, or watching TV, or doing email, I’ll ask What if? Why? So what?

This interrogation is a great way to chew on ideas to see what sticks, what reveals holes, what needs more noodling. For a whole week, without any pressure, I’ll just think and imagine the campaign, adventure, and game world, letting everything slowly circle the bowl until week two comes around.

Week 2: Design

By the time week two arrives I’ll have several leading ideas. I will have thoughts burning away and many ideas jotted out on paper or in my Getting Things Done RPG email organization system. It’s time to create stuff for consumption in the next game session.

Design is one of my favourite parts of game mastering but it’s easy to procrastinate. I’ll get busy with other priority stuff or I’ll come home tired and not feeling creative. I’ll have an e-zine to publish, or a family thing, or….a thousand excuses.

It’s rare now that I get a large block of time that I can either devote to design or last the entire way through without interruption or distraction.

My solution is to craft an encounter a day. Seven days, seven encounters. Sessions, on average, consume four or five encounters. This gives me a buffer of two. Sometimes I won’t make seven, so I need to draw on my buffer. Sometimes I’ll take an old, outdated, and unused encounter and update it for current campaign power level and situation. During game sessions, the PCs will do something unexpected, and an unused encounter is perfect to stall with or to drop in and make new game progress.

Mike Bourke made a comment about just writing 1-3 lines for game elements until they are needed, and then he’ll flesh them out in greater detail. This is an excellent tip. I’ll have several encounter seeds like this written down by the end of week 2 as well. These will be for ideas whose time has not come, for encounters currently relevant but I’ve run out of design time, or they were given low priority because they weren’t likely to trigger.

As for world design, that’s trickier and I’m behind the curve on that right now. My top priority is prepping encounters for use next game. That usually leaves me few cycles to do world creation. However, I’m always thinking about the game world, and it’s being fleshed out in the ol ‘noggin. Soon I’ll have enough of an encounter buffer from extra designs or from dropping in one of the published modules I’d like to try out in my current campaign – or a session will be cancelled – and I can spend a couple weeks on world design and documentation instead of session prep.

You Gotta Enjoy Campaign Design

A final word on this is you need to enjoy creating stuff for your campaign. This is different than feeling lassitude or being too busy or frazzled to get into the right frame of mind for creation. If designing stuff is not your thing then this approach will not work for you. The second week will be hell and full of avoidance, guilt, and bad feelings because you are avoiding something you set out for yourself to do. That path leads to burnout and eventual departure from game mastering. Look for other preparation methods, game systems, or game master styles to make up for a role that traditionally has required a lot of design work.

That’s my campaign planning cycle. What’s yours?

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The Google Problem

Has anyone noticed Google becoming less user-friendly lately? It started with the heavy domination of blogs in search results, and worsened with the loss of numbered results recently. It worsened further when Google started failing to find results that you KNOW are there because you had found the pages searching Google for other terms. At the same time, Google’s image search changed from searching for images with the search term in the description or name to showing a subset of images from any web page which contains the search term, and the image results bar changed in structure to occupy more of the screen real estate. (NB: I detected these changes and imperfections because Google is still my first choice search engine, so take the criticism with a grain of salt; I’m not saying it’s hopeless, just worse than it was).

Sometime during or around these changes, Google’s ‘about us’ pages were redesigned or restructured to remove any capacity for feedback direct to the company – the best you can do is post to a number of google groups that are about google, and which may or may not receive any attention from the company itself. [I’m told that the staff do monitor at least some of these fairly closely, but their website makes no guarantees in that regard].

Google has begin to look like just another faceless corporation, keeping its customers at something greater than arm’s length. I guess that’s the bad news. The good news is that if you are searching for blog content, you have a high chance of finding something relevant; and if you are searching for a particular image, you have a fair chance of finding something interesting that has little or nothing to do with the original subject of your inquiry.

Not all the changes have been bad, either – the ability to view a subset of the images found by size can be very useful, though that had been around for a while – it’s simply expanded from three size categories to four.

I would have been far happier if you could turn search result numbering on or off in your preferances, and if you could include or exclude blog results with the click of a radio button, and if your image search could be restricted to a literal search (the way it used to be) by the click of another radio button. And if it still found everything!

The effect of these changes is that it is far harder for DMs – or the general public – to use Google as a resource to find what you are looking for. You have to know the operations of the search engine to a degree that was never previously the case. Trying to find what you want is more and more a question of wading through mountains of irrellevancy and bloat – with less to visibly differentiate one screenfull of links from the next.

The RPG Problem

The same thing often happens with rule systems. When the core rules come out, it’s relatively easy to find most of the things you are looking for (though something is usually placed in a strange position somewhere!) The indexes are usually less than helpful, but that’s not surprising – I know from experience that an index takes at least as long to generate as the text being indexed did to write, and if I have to choose between an auther spending time compiling a perfect index and the author polishing content until the last possible second, I’ll pick the second choice every time.

But as new expansions and supplements come out, both official and third-party, it gets harder and harder to know where to find what you want. I have six D&D supplements on planes, planar travel, planar gates, etc – I have to go through them all each time I’m looking for something in particular within the subject. And since they are by at least three different publishers, their indexing schemas are all different, as well.

By the time you factor in hundreds of mini-supplements downloaded from various websites, and saved web pages and extracts from web pages, and my own writings on any given subject, and the content of webzines like Roleplaying Tips, and my various magazine collections of relevance, there may as well not be an index. The best you can hope for when searching by keyword – the desktop equivalent of an internet search – is that you’ll find something vaguely related to the specific subject you are looking for.

Just like Google.

I can see no reason why there can’t be a solution to the rules indexing problem, though – or in fact to compiling a complete index to all printed works in anyone’s collection. I can even envisage the design of such a solution.

The RPG Solution?

It starts with each publisher compiling the indexes to their various rules supplements into a single, downloadable, database, and making that download free from their website. This is not as difficult as it sounds: most indexes are generated by “tagging” key words and phrases as ‘index entries’ within the document while it is being written; these then automatically generate the page number that the referance appears on in the index, updating it when content is moved or rearranged. Adding an option to export the index – or coming up with an additional piece of software to extract them – would not be a major headache. These would need to be in some industry-wide fixed format.

That’s so that a dedicated piece of software can read in all the index entries for all the supplements that the user has indicated in the software’s settings that they own, compile them all into a single BIG index, sort it alphabetically, and generate a virtual index – one that can be printed out if that’s what’s desired, or saved as an ordinary document file. It would give the title of the source document and the page number.

A second piece of software could be used to generate index entries for the thousands of files on the computer that have been downloaded from places like RPGNow. The software only has to ignore certain common words like “a” and “the”, and to have a list of other words that need to be associated with another word to form a complete term – so that “silver” is not an index entry, but the software adds the next word to get “silver shield”, “silver bullet”, and so on. If the next word is one of the first group of common words, then “silver” stands alone as a meaningful index entry. Search engines – like Google – have been able to do this for ten years now. The result is an index of all the content on the user’s hard disk in the same format as the official indexes provided by the Game Publishers, and which can be read in by the first piece of software just like any other index.

Why might the game companies do this? Perhaps because it can be set up to generate sales. If you can compile an index of ALL the rpg supplements out there, then you can query that index, telling the software to ignore the supplements you already own – and quickly discover which volumes from which publishers you should add to your collection to get information on “Fey weapons” or “The Dreamtime” or “Moon Rockets” or whatever it is that you are looking for. It’s a new service, and a new form of advertising at the same time.

This software would not be all that difficult to create. Rudimentary database and programming skills would be enough. If my understanding of it is correct, there’s even a piece of software already in existance – Tablesmith – that could be used to perform most of these tasks, given the input databases.

Will it ever happen? It’s not out of the question – but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe some gamer could write it as freeware…. Wouldn’t it be great?

The Correlation Gap

I once read that human knowledge is expanding at ten times the rate at which information can be compiled and correlated and indexed, and that the sum total of human knowledge is still doubling every five years, something that it’s been doing since the 1990s [that’s the amount of information that there is for anyone TO know, not the amount that they DO know). I’ve also read that the internet is expanding at roughly twice the speed that search engines like Google can find and index the pages – and that was about ten years ago, before the whole Blogging phenomenon exploded, and before Myspace and Youtube. To solve this Correlation Gap, we need new and better tools for associating multiple sources of information with their content and relating multiple sources of information to each other, generating concordances as we need them.

In the meantime, it’s just going to get harder to find the information you need, as it is perpetually drowned out by an increasing overhead of semi-related and claims-to-be-relevent information. It used to be that the hardest taks was in filtering out results that were unreliable, but that’s no longer the case. It’s in trying to cut out the irrelevant that Google has come unstuck; it’s a difficult problem with no easy solutions, but they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

What good is information if you can’t find it?

City of Meerzicht - courtesy of Cartographers Guild, click for full size.

Imagine a spectrum of planning effort. On one end you have every possible detail worked out, including complete world development, all the adventures until campaign end, a complete cast of NPCs, everything. Let’s call this end 10.

On the other end of the spectrum you have nothing planned. You show up to the table and ask the players what they want to play. Hopefully you have the game rules players picked on hand. You have no plot, villains, setting, or campaign climax in mind. Further, as each session passes you still don’t plan ahead. Facts and details get nailed down as you play. Let’s call this end 1.

What’s Your Campaign Prep Sweet Spot?

1. Where are you on this spectrum for most of your campaigns?
2. Think back on your best campaigns. Where were you on the spectrum for those?
3. What about your worst campaigns, from 1-10?

7 is Just Right

I find I do best on a 7. I like to know my world first before layering on my adventures. I also like to have two or three adventures lined up before play starts. If the character deviate from my plans that’s ok. However, knowing a lot of details about the setting, villains, NPCs, adventure sites, and upcoming encounters often lets me shift things to suit changes in the situation.

Some might call this railroading. However, I find all this preparation beforehand gives me more freedom to have the world react to the PCs as well as act upon the PCs.

My current campaign suffers from a lack of preparation right now. I’m slowly catching up, but right now I’m at 4 out of 10. It’s tempting to switch from world building and adventure crafting to pure published fare, but I’ve been running published stuff for past two campaigns and I’m eager to design as well as run game sessions.

What about you? In addition to your answers to the questions above, where is your current campaign in terms of preparation level?

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(Too many GMs, not enough players!)

NB: This is an extra post outside the normal schedule. My usual post will take place in a day or two.

One of the duties I have reluctantly taken on for my fellow gamers is the organisation of the timetable. When I started playing with the eclectic collection of individuals I know as my fellow players, each GM amongst our group ran a game every week, week after week, and there were enough players to go around unless one became so popular that it sucked people out from other campaigns – usually a strictly temporary situation – and there was no need for a schedule. The average campaign ran for between six months and a year.

I was persuaded to launch a teen-group spinoff campaign from my primary superheros campaign, but that wasn’t an issue; We played one in the afternoon and one in the evenings, since the venue we used at that time permitted gaming from noon until about 10PM. Then two more spinoff campaigns began, largely because of demand, and there simply weren’t enough seats in the primary superhero campaign, which had been going for an unprecedented 5 years at the time. Other GMs began complaining that they never knew who was going to be available at any given time. Thus, the timetable was born; a simple affair of fortnightly rotation, giving every campaign equal time.

Over the 20+ years since then, the timetable has grown, as more and more GMs and would-be GMs insisted on being given a game session. It is now a calander covering the whole year, showing what we’re expecting to play, and when, and now operates on a monthly cycle, with every week planned for. If a session can’t take place, it’s normally up to the GM and players to make their own arrangements in terms of what to do, and often a player without a game simply won’t turn up – it used to be the practice to be there every week, and if you didn’t have a game to go to, there were enough other people in a similar situation that something could be organised.

The graphic at the top of the page shows what a typical month looks like these days (I’m presenting it to show off my pretty graphics as much as anything. These have been reduced in size, the full-sized versions (1985×222 glorious pixels!) are available at the timetable website).

Perhaps I should start with a rundown on the various campaigns.

“The Adventurer’s Club” is a Pulp Genre game run using Champions 5th Edition. I co-referee with another guy named Blair. Adventures are globe-trotting affairs and have included everything from Ghost Ships, to an attempted coup in Haiti, to infiltrating Nazi Germany in persuit of forbidden knowledge captured by the Nazis, to political games by the KKK, to a heist caper in the Vatican’s Secret Library, to a secret society in England equivalent to the Spanish Inquisition, to Vampire Knights protecting mankind against Things We Were Not Meant To Know from a hidden location under a Nazi high-tech weaponry research establishment that was building supersoldiers and prototyping earthquake rays and transatlantic supersonic zeppelin missiles!

“Ars Margica: Triamore” is a new game that’s about to start, refereed by Graham M. It’s taking a couple of players from Pulp.

“Cyberpunk” is run after our current gaming venue shuts down for the night (at 6PM) by Bill K.

“Fumanor: One Faith” is one of a pair of Sequel campaigns to one of my D&D 3.5 Campaign, which was known as “Fumanor” after the Kingdom that was the central setting. One Faith is the story of a Drow recruit to the Inquisition against a church that is under assault from Cthulhuan “Chaos Powers” but has become arrogant, inflexible, corrupt, and greedy, and deals with the political, religious, and social ramifications of the many plot threads left hanging, or dealt with, by the party in the previous campaign. Note that I’ve scheduled a couple of extra sessions on Sundays when I’m not doing anything. The “One Faith” campaign is all over the place for the last 4 months of the year.

“Fumanor: The Seeds Of Empire” largely deals with events external to the Central Kingdom (which has now been divided into three), but which still influance events within the Kingdoms. Like an invading Empire of Undead, or the conquest (in the original campaign) of the Elves by a resurgant Lolth, who was believed to have been destroyed in the original campaign’s backstory. This campaign takes the Fumanor time-slot for part of the year (actually, in the real timetable, this is another ‘One Faith’ session; The “Seeds” campaign dominates Saturday Week 2s for the first 8 months of the year.)

“7th Sea,” quite obviously, is a swashbuckling campaign run by Ian M. He would have preferred to be a player, but no-one else was both available and willing to invest the time in refereeing the campaign. I’ve offered to take it over when the current Fumanor campaigns are completed (I never intended to run two spinoff campaigns simultaniously anyway).

“Shards Of Divinity” is another of my D&D 3.5 Campaigns which started last year. A Novice Wizard witnessed the creation of everything in a world where magic is dying, and now seeks to take advantage of the situation while attempting to understand what he witnessed. This is a world where self-interest rules, and everyone is evil.

‘Phil’s Game’ is whatever game is being run by Phil MacGregor, one of the authors of Space Opera, and our Club President for more than twenty years while we needed one. Currently he’s running Fading Suns (I think that’s right) but is reportedly thinking about switching to something new soon. I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, so I created the generic Tag for him.

“Champions: Zenith Three” is the current incarnation of my superhero campaign, which has been running (with a few extended breaks) since 1982. In 27-odd years, I don’t think there’s a variety of threat that the heroes HAVN’T faced. The PCs are superheros in training in an off-dimension field office of the main organisation, and are due to move to a different dimension soon – going from a 1960s world in which Joseph McCarthy became president and Organised Crime virtually took over the country to a futuristic world of the 2050s in which the British Empire not only never broke up, it has come to rule half the world – with other half seemingly conquered by Magic-wielding Space Aliens called the Mao. But there’s just been a disaster at Base Prime and most of the senior team has been wiped out, so the PCs are going to have to spend half their time dealing with Emergencies on a larger front.

Not shown is “Warcry”, a space-opera/polical/superhero campaign that spun off the Zenith-Three game because the title character was too powerful for the main team at the time, simply because the player did a better job in character creation. Technically, the PC in question is now a wanted criminal, but that’s because of politics – with Morgaine Le Faye having conquered half of England, The Fourth Reich reigning supreme in Germany, and the Fifth Reich in South America, and this character not respecting the diplomatic immunity that was extended when they joined the UN. The Warcry campaign dominates Sundays for the first 8 months of the year.

‘Mike W’s Game’ is another case of campaigns in flux. For much of the last two years, Mike W has been running a campaign using an original setting, called “The Long Night”, but a few months ago he started doing something different – which is now winding down. He’s now talking about maybe rejigging the “Long Night” campaign, but wasn’t sure what he would be running next at the time the schedule was being prepared.

“Ars Magica: The Novgorod Tribunal” is the second of two new Ars Magical Campaigns being started up by a relatively new GM (who has been a player amongst us for 20-odd years) named Michael P, but better known as “Wolfie” because we had too many people named ‘Mike’ – a nickname that he dislikes but has become used to. (One year, four of the five committee people were named Mike – we decided to make the fifth an “Honorary Mike” in celebration. We though it was amusing, but apparantly his players gave him hell all year. Sorry.)

It’s these last two campaigns that are the actual subject of this blog entry (I knew we’d get there eventually), because they illustrate the occasional need for a skill set that most gamers never think to develop – that of Politician. Mike P had advised me that his campaign was going to take place every second Week 4, plus any Week 5s that cropped up (there are 2-5 occasions in any given year in which a calandar month has five saturdays). The usual thing for week 5 is “by arrangement” (and because I do the timetable, I get to make my arrangements before anyone else). But that was fine, I knew that the calandar was cramped already. Mike P had been a player in Mike W’s “Long Night” campaign in its previous incarnation, but since Mike W had wound it up and started something else that was also winding up, Mike P decided to claim the timeslot.

Unfortunately, he didn’t inform Mike W of his plans, or the prospective players; he just assumed that they would be available. As a result, Mike W was able to lay claim to everyone that Mike P wanted as a player in his campaign. So far as I am concerned, I only arrange the timetable according to the information I’m given, it’s up to each individual GM to organise his own campaign. The most that I can promise is to minimise any conflicts that occur (which makes it incredibly hard to change, but that’s another story).

Mike P’s problem is that the only other potential slot open to him, Week 1, has been claimed by Graham for HIS Ars Magica campaign, in which he had signed up to play. They were even talking about a shared world. He’s also a player in both the 7th Sea campaign and in Phil’s campaign, as are almost all the other players that he wanted. Week 4 was the only regular slot open for him, it’s that simple.

As a result, it looks as though The Novgorod Tribunal is dead before it began, unless something can be salvaged. Now, it’s not my place to referee these intra-GM brawls when they occur; but here’s what I would have done, if I had been Mike P.

I’d have started by being very dissappointed that Mike W was not going to be available for the Novgorod Tribunal campaign as I had been ‘really counting on him’. I would then have asked whether or not there was a compromise possible? Between Week 4s and Week 5s in 2009, there are 15 days, and there would have been 16 if Boxing Day (Dec 26) was not a Saturday. So 8 sessions each is fair, especially since Mike P had forgotten that he had specified Week 5s, and was only expecting 6 sessions a year. A compromise of that nature would have cost Mike W three of his game sessions (from eleven to eight) – but Mike P could have sweetened the deal and just taken the 6 sessions he was expecting anyway, throwing another 2 to Mike W. For the price of missing just one session, plus the Boxing Day session that he would have lost anyway – Both GMs get what they want, and everyone is happy.

Compromises are never ideal, and rarely give us everything we want – but the political art of being able to negotiate a fair compromise is an essential part of any DMs arsenal. And that’s the lesson to take from this story of too many campaigns and not enough players.

Lilium, Halfling Village - Courtesy Cartographers Guild

Of all the board games I could raid for props and DM tools, Scrabble tops my list, especially for D&D 4E. Enhance battlemats, track minis, and make combat easier with those crazy, square lettered tiles.

Use Scrabble Tiles for the Monsters

Wizards of the Coast uses letter identification in its modules for monsters. For example, a Hobgoblin Torturer would be designated (T) in its stat block and on the battlemat for initial placement. Goblin Sharpshooters = (S), Goblin Warriors = (W), and so on. You can do the same for your homebrew encounters.

Scrabble tiles make a natural fit as pre-labelled minis. Next combat, place your S, T, and W tiles down and use them as monster minis. Clear and simple.

To further distinguish monsters during combat, place a poker chip or coloured tile beneath the Scrabble tile. For example, if you have four Goblin Sharpshooters fighting the PCs, one would be S tile + green chip, one would be S tile + blue chip, etc. This makes tracking damage, status, and initiative easy. Green S is dazed? No problem to note that now.

Use Scrabble Tiles for Cool Terrain

So, you’ve got a fancy printed battlemat or a gnarly one sketched out for your combat encounter. Enhance these further with Scrabble tiles. Design special terrain with special effects that will make combat more dangerous, dramatic, and exciting. Use tiles to mark these special squares on your battlemat. Use letter codes to track what each type of terrain does.

For example, you beef up your combat encounter design with three additional terrain types: unexpectedly deep puddles (P), a wasp nest (N), and razor thistles (R).

You Can Turn Tiles Face Down

The designers of Scrabble were incredibly cunning. They only put the letters on one side of the tiles! Diabolical.

Use this to your advantage by placing some tiles face down to increase the mystery and drama of combat.

For example, you might locate all visible monsters on the battlemat with tiles, but the ones far away are placed face down until the PCs get a better look through Perception checks or by getting closer.

Same with hazards. Leave hazards as a surprise. The players will know there’s something interesting in a square with a tile on it, but they’ll need to investigate to learn more.

If you make sure some tiles are beneficial during combat, then PCs will be motivated to investigate the terrain during battle – more opportunities for meaningful tactics and options.

Example beneficial tiles might be dropped treasure, hazards the PCs can use against their foes, and clues (that get scooped up before the enemy can grab and destroy them).

Buy Used Sets

An obvious tip, but keep an eye out for used Scrabble games. Build up your collection of tiles. They have more uses as DM tools and for minis and battlemats than what I’ve listed here.

If you have tiles set aside just for RPGs, then you can paint or mark them as you please, giving you more use possibilities, including puzzles, coinage, clues, status markers, condition tracking, and more.

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Special effects in TV and Movies these days can sell just about anything, in the context of making it look real, and do it for less money than was dreamed possible only a few decades ago. But this morning, a couple of stray neurons in my brain happened to fire at the same time and a new thought wafted through my mind; I found myself considering whether or not this new-found facility with the art of illusion was killing Hollywood, and taking gaming along with it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the believability. I love that I can watch a completely artificial creation acted out on set by a live-action person, and that every nuance of that live performance can be incorporated and tweaked until Gollum looks as real as Frodo – who is half Gandalf’s height, and LOOKS it. I love that CGI made a series like Babylon 5 financially viable – even if it took 3 (or was it 4?) television networks to see the whole thing through to completion. I love the otherworldlyness of “The Matrix” and bullet time, and the walking undead of Pirates Of The Carribbean (which look as real as I always wished the ride did).

When I was younger, I had to work much harder to suspend my disbelief and accept the implausible for the sake of story or character. Nevertheless, I was able to lose myself in Spiderman (the comic) and never once question that changes in musculature towards a more fit human would enable him to mimic, proportionately, the feats of this or that member of the arachnid family. My imagination was getting plenty of exercise, so I found it easy.

These days, I find it much harder. Just as seeing the seams in matting green-screen to CGI jar me momentarily out of immersion in the story and remind me that what I’m looking at is faked, so I find that I have a lower tolerance for implausibility in my gaming. If something happens, I need to be able to look at the underlying mechanics and be convinced that – given the right assumptions – it would be plausible. Those mechanics need to be present throughout the world in which these things take place in order to fully sell the realism.

Take magic for example. In the olden days, it was enough for the wizard to state “I cast Magic Missile at —” and my mind would conjure up an image of the character waving his hands and diamond-shaped streaks of light erupting from his fingertips to arrow unhesitatingly towards the target. These days, I have to convince myself of the plausibility of the underlying mechanics – the wizard focussing on the target, the power welling up inside him (from where?), being shaped by his hand motions and the patterns within his mind (how do they interact?), erupting from the fingertips, still linked to the Wizards thoughts as he sends them flying between obstacles and around corners as though they were cruise missiles being remotely piloted – all before I can describe the action taking place with any conviction. What’s more, this underlying metaphysics has to be consistant across the entire gamut of arcane spellcasting.

Just as Hollywood benefits from the increased plausibility of its special effects, able to integrate the real and unreal in an ever-more seamless blend, able to tell stories that would simply not have been possible to depict, so my campaign world benefits from all this looking below the surface. It becomes easier for others to suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the world when I – or someone else – has already done the heavy lifting for them, and the game environment itself becomes more realised and better-executed.

But this plausibility comes with a price tag. In Hollywood, it’s ever-increasing budgets, which demand ever-growing audiances with the motivation, the desire, and the disposable income to spend on a night’s entertainment – something that might be harder to come by in the modern economic reality. In the game, it’s more work for me as a GM, and has caused the gradual loss of players who find the effort involved becoming harder work and less entertaining. Ten or fifteen years ago, the gaming club where I play had weekly attendances of 40-60 players, week in and week out. Now there are about twelve of us – and two of those have been gaming for less than a decade.

Where are the new playes coming in to replace those who have moved aside, moved on, or moved away? They seem to be either busy playing CCGs like Yuh-gi-oh or computer-based games like World Of Warcraft – either sacrificing the entire need for suspension of disbelief in persuit of gameplay, or letting someone else do ALL the heavy lifting. Few from either group seem all that interested in tabletop RPGs.

And yet, there is hope – a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if the current economic climate does not force a retreat from big-budget blockbuster special-effects-driven movies on the part of Hollywood, even if the ever-mushrooming budgets do not force the entertainment industry to implode (something that has been predicted several times before without ever occurring), as the special effects become ever more seamless, audiances will stop being aware of them AS special effects and start focussing on the stories being told. The game-players will ultimately grow tired of shallow plots and start looking for depths and subtleties and a level of immersion that can’t be faked or glossed over with smoother 3D rendering. The WOW players will want to go beyond what the programmers have made possible, the card players will ultimately want something with a bit more depth than just another meaningless round.

One of my greatest dislikes about D&D 4th Ed is that it seems to be pandering to these non-gaming groups at the expense of the old school. But, by offering a conduit to the old school of gaming, it might just end up being the salvation of gaming in general. And that’s food for thought for the harshest critic of 4E, isn’t it?