(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?

I agree with Uncle Bear that New Years is an opportunity to make goals, not wishes, for another 12 months. The Christmas holidays provide downtime and renewal time to clear your head of the daily treadmill and get back to values and priorities. In addition, the calendar year provides a convenient crucible for measuring progress.

Last year I wanted to game more often and to try out several different systems. I overreached. This year I’m setting moderate goals that still fulfill my value of game play as part of a balanced life (which is different than game play as part of a balanced breakfast). Here are my RPG goals for 2009:

DM my D&D campaign every other week

Last year my group missed many sessions due to the DM not being available or ready. It’s in my control to change that, so I will. 52 weeks minus December, July and August leaves 40 . Allow for 2 other bad weeks and that leaves 38. So, my goal is to DM 19 D&D sessions this year. Hey, that’s a potential 19 TPKs. Life is good.

Run a sci-fi game a few times

I gotta keep trying new things in RPGland. This year I want to focus on learning a new game system and GMing a genre I have little experience in – sci-fi.

I’ve polled readers of Roleplaying Tips for game ideas and I’ve got a shortlist now, including one entry that surprised me. Once the D&D campaign gets into a rhythm again I’ll start work on death by laser.

Build a world

It’s been over a decade since I last created a fantasy game world. It’s time to dust off the brain and create. The world will be crafted mid-campaign, so some retrofitting will be required, but my players are cool about whimsical DMing.

Blog and E-zine

Roleplaying Tips turns 10 in November. It’s a lot of fun putting each issue together and benefitting from the wisdom of its readers. I look forward to another year of game mastering tips and learning to be a better GM along with subscribers.

In 2009 I’ll be posting to this blog as well. I like the conversations I see taking place on other RPG blogs, and I want to be able to comment and ponder in my sandbox with Mike Bourke here. Some posts will see their way into the e-zine as well.

Fun? What is this fun you speak of?

Finally, having more fun at every game is always my goal, regardless of what year it is.

How about you?

So, what do you see is in store for you and RPGs in 2009?

The DMG II for D&D 3.5 defines Prestige Classes as representing organisations; Taking a prestige class is synonymous with joining the organisation that the Prestige Class represents. At least, that was the original theory. The fact is that it was only ever partially true in D&D 3.5, and D&D 4 has a completely different paradigm in place.

Be that as it may, it’s also a rather extreme perspective. Not every assemblage of like-thinking folk is worthy of a Prestige Class – the Garbageman’s Union, for example. In any game, there is an entire spectrum of organisations that runs from the Chess Club (show up and play) to the Professional Organisation With An Agenda (Prestige Class or equivalent). But there’s no real way of simulating these in game mechanics, leaving the poor DM to cobble something together for each different group each time the situation arises – a solution that yields little-to-no consistency, and leaves the DM with lots of work and little-to-no ongoing control. Whereas a proper solution would do both these things and offer the opportunity for scenarios and subplots to boot!

My collaborator on this blog was asking about this very subject earlier today. He had only vague ideas of what he wanted, just that it be a simple game mechanic that addressed interaction between character and organisation. I’m pretty good at working up house rules on the fly, so I thought I’d rush in where sensible GMs fear to tread, and see what I could come up with. Hence this blog post, even though another isn’t due for a few days.

Organisation Type

Organisations need to be characterised in some fashion. The most obvious characteristic lies in the type and level of obligation of a member to the organisation, so let’s give that a try and see how we go:

Type Description

1. Just show up if and when you want to
2. Periodic or one-off membership fee or other obligation
3. Ongoing Tithes or Dues, Restricted Membership
4. Substantial Ongoing Tithes or Dues, + other obligations, Restricted Membership

Type 1 represents the “chess clubs”. Type 2 represents most political parties, more organised and expensive social clubs, and so on. It can also cover most types of professional employment! Type 3 covers most Trade Guilds and Professional Societies. Type 4 covers the most exclusive bodies, including Church Affiliations, Feudal Nobility, Thieves and Assassins Guilds, Secret Societies, and the like. It could also include Orders of Paladins and Knights. For the record, “Substantial” is usually 25% of what you get, or more.

Obligations

Every month, game time, a d6 roll can check for an obligation deriving from membership in the Organisation. If you roll the Organisation Type or less, you have an obligation. What they are is up to the DM, based on the type and description of the organisation. If the character carries out the obligation, he is rewarded with a Privilege Point (I’ll get to them in a minute).

Additional Services

If the DM feels that the character has contributed something noteworthy to achieving the goals of the organisation, he should also reward the member with a Privilege Point.

Personal Attributes

If the character has in some way displayed loyalty to the organisation throughout the month, or has been an iconic representation of the archetypical club member for the month, the character may roll a die. This may be a d6, d8, d10, or d12, depending on the degree of political affiliation or definition of an ideal archetype for members. The larger the die size, the less well-connected the organisation is and the more rigid the membership requirements. The size of die will be the same every month for any given organisation. If the player rolls less than or equal to the organisation type, he earns a Privilege Point. Otherwise, his behaviour has simply gone unnoticed that month; bad luck.

GMs may wish to define some key personality attribute that is considered fundamental to the organisation – Honour, Loyalty, Reputation, Wealth, Social Standing, whatever – to use as the determining factor as to whether or not the character gets a die roll each month, or he can leave it loose; that’s up to him.

Privilige Points

These are the foundation of this game mechanic. Each represents doing something for the organisation that it considers exemplary AND having it noticed by the organisation. The lower the organisation type, the easier it is to claim membership – and the fewer the privilege points you get for it, each month. These can be redeemed for various benefits of membership, as described below – again, in general, the lower the organisation type, the less you will get for a privilege point. Privilege Points don’t last forever. They expire a year after you earn them, if they have not been redeemed.

Expending Privilege Points

Each organisation will have various rewards that can be bestowed in exchange for privilege points. What these are is up to the DM, and should be described as part of the writeup of any organisation, but the following are suggestions that should be considered:

1. +1 on all interpersonal skill rolls with fellow members for a month
2. 5% discount on goods or services offered by the organisation or a brother group
3. 1 favour
4. 1 service on the member’s behalf by the organisation
5. +1 on an appropriate interpersonal skill roll with a non-member, once only
6. +1 on another type of skill roll related to organisation activities, once only
7. a month’s wages

Example#1: Weekly Chess Club: Category 1. A member gets a privilege point for hosting the club one week, or perhaps by winning a game against a famous opponent. He may use this for a 5% discount on a new chess set, or a +1 in all chess games (the members go easy on the host), or +1 in a chess game with a non-member (the benefits of recent practice), or a favour from a fellow member, or first choice of opponent.

Example#2: Duelling Club: Category 2. Members earn privilege points for paying their monthly dues, Winning outside duels, Enforcing moral behaviour, etc. Points may be redeemed for social or political favours, discounts on equipment, healing services, personal reputation (+1 to an appropriate roll), etc.

Example#3: Church Sect: Category 3. Members earn privilege points for tithing 50% of their income, for making the Church more socially acceptable, for public acknowledgement by a leading political or social figure, for defending the faith from attack, for sustained personal piety, etc. Points may be redeemed to get an appointment/audience with an otherwise inaccessible person, for a spell cast on his behalf by another member (1 point per spell level), for a 5% discount on goods purchased from a parishioner, for +1 on a knowledge (religion) check, for +1 on an interpersonal skill roll with a non-member of the parish (church’s reputation), etc.

Potential Flaws

Particularly anal players may hoard their points in case they need them until the last possible minute before they expire before redeeming them. If this starts happening, the DM should first warn the players and then become more ‘flexible’ regarding the expiry date of privilige points.

Scenarios

Privilege Points give players an additional incentive to do things appropriate to the organisations of which they are a member, and may even be reason enough to perform certain actions. Members of an organisation may redeem their privilege points to get a ‘favour’ from the character. The organisation may require the character to do something on its behalf, whether he wants to or not. Opposed and rival organisations may target the character. The character may fall victim to “Tall Poppy Syndrome’ if he accrues too many privilege points. The DM can set a price in privilege points from specific organisation(s) for achieving something (getting a corrupt official replaced, earning a Title Of Nobility, Persuading the Exchequer to lower taxes or repair the roads) etc etc; this tells the players what they have to do in broad terms, but leaves the specifics up to them.

Other impacts

Players will be less cautious about taking on big jobs if they have privilege points to help them over the rough patches. Games will become a little more swashbuckling in style as a result, but the characters will be harder to reign in with difficult skill rolls.

One final suggestion

Making chits out of heavy cardboard for privilige points lets you write the expiry date on them.

A couple of years ago, I was approached by a player who was considering getting back into roleplaying after an extended hiatus from the activity. It transpired that he had dropped out because he found himself objecting to the concept of magic on religious grounds – the idea itself was blasphemous to him, and he had been wrestling with his moral objections for an extremely long time following a particular bad experience that had left deep psychological and moral/ethical scars. He didn’t give any details about the incident, just its effects on him.

I don’t intend to discuss the rightness or wrongness of his beliefs or his attitude. I respect that HE believes in his faith, and neither saw nor see any need to debate it. He was an extremely intelligent and creative, and we had a long discussion about philosophy and ethics and morality and religion. He made a number of contributions to the campaign in question that will shape it for years to come. I was really looking forward to his participation.

Ultimately, he decided that his faith would make him too uncomfortable if he were to play, to the point of hindering his potential enjoyment of the game. And that’s what this particular blog is all about.

For all its depth, its capacity to inspire and to motivate people to educate themselves on a vast array of subjects, its capability to examine deep issues of morality and philosophy, ultimately an RPG is a GAME first and foremost, and the reason you play a game is for enjoyment. If you happen to find such debates and explorations entertaining, that’s fine; but you always have to afford people the right to believe what THEY believe, regardless of your own opinion on the subject.

That means that some subjects should always be taboo within your game, and that these restrictions will change with every player that comes and goes. The minute that you transgress against one of them, at least one person at your table will stop having fun. And if they stop having fun for too long, they will find something else to do that is more satisfying to them, which damages not only your game, but every game that the affected player might have participated in for decades to come.

I’m not angry or upset that this particular person chose not to play; while it’s my personal belief that we would both have benefitted from his participation, the choice was his, and it was his right to make it as he saw fit. What’s more, I believe that if one person at the table is not having fun, the ‘wet blanket’ factor drags down everyone else just a little. Sometimes, that’s necessary in order to keep others satisfied, but it’s still something to avoid when possible.

No, my ire is for a person whose identity I don’t know – the person who so transgressed apon this player’s personal beliefs that they drove him out of gaming for a decade. Whenever I think of this subject, even tangentally, I mourn the lost contributions that this player could have made. So think about that the next time you decide that it would be fun to push the your player’s boundaries, and make sure that you aren’t pushing too far or too hard.

Oh, as a postscript: It’s my understanding that the player in question has found himself a game elsewhere and is enjoying himself greatly, having made his peace with the moral qualms that prevented him from joining my campaign at the time. More power to him!

And so 2009 begins, and with it the countdown to the third most popular date in Science Fiction (behind 2000 and 2001). Funny, it doesn’t look all that different to the tail end of 2008.

That shouldn’t be surpising, since it takes the passage of several years and quite a bit of hindsight to be able to characterise a given decade.

Again, this is not surprising; decades are accidental groupings of years dictated by our calander, it should be no surprise that it takes a substantial period of time before the human habit of recognising patterns (and imposing them if there aren’t any) can isolate a common theme in a particular random grouping of years.

In some ways, it used to be easier. The pace of technological change was slower, and that meant that a single technology could be isolated and identified as characteristic of the era. The 1990s have to be characterised as the “internet boom”, as a related series of technologies came together to forge a social tsunami that affected almost every aspect of the human condition. Perhaps the 2000s can be characterised as the “Blog Era”, or the “YouTube era”, or even “The Hubble Era” – but my preferance is “The Google Era”, in which information became easier to find then ever before. But they are all artificial summations of an artificially-defined period of time.

And yet, in many respects, I can’t help feeling just a little cheated. The future those science-fiction writers promised us simply hasn’t materialised. The Concorde has gone, we still don’t have commercial space flights, flying cars and personal rocket packs don’t exist, we can’t debate philosophy with sentient computers, and where are the Lunar Colonies?

In 2000, this feeling was everywhere. We were entering the “age of tomorrow” but it looked just the same as what had come immediately before. The news just seemed so trivial and mundane in comparison to our hopes and expectations. Even giving reality an extra decade to get its act together hasn’t helped – the sense of wonder just isn’t there.

It strikes me that this expectation is one last, lurking, perspective of the Victorian Era. They must have held similar perspectives on the turn of the century in 1900, but their hopes of a new era were perverted into the First World War. Nevertheless, the 20th century was an age of wonders. Mass Transportation, Air Travel, Space Flight, Instant Communications, Atomic Energy, Thinking Machines, even Mobile Telephones, the list of wonders goes on and on and on. Have we become jaded?

A DM experiences similar feelings whenever an RPG comes to a premature demise. There is a sense of unfulfilled potential; the plot threads carefully cultured and grafted by the DM will never bloom to reveal the beauty and wonder as everything comes together into a big finish, as the hidden secrets are revealed.

In 1998, I ran an asteroids-exploration camapaign which quite deliberately had an Indiana-Jones-ish pulp rollercoaster feel to it. The campaign background was made up on the spur of the moment, as was the rules system. The first session brought the PCs together on earth, filled in a fairly colourless political background lifted largely from Alien, as it might have looked in the 2050s, and got the PCs as far as the Lunar Base from which they were supposed to get their ship. The context flavour was very Twilight Zone meets the X-files, full of misunderstood phenomena that were not “officially recognised”. Originally intended to be a fill-in campaign that would last only for the day, the players were full of enthusiasm and insisted that it continue – after all, they hadn’t even reached the Asteroids yet!

And so the game went to a second session, in which the PCs discovered that aliens had inflitrated the Lunar Base, emerging from great eggs that had been brought back by a previous asteroid mining expedition. Meanwhile, rumblings in the Middle East were slowly escelating towards Nuclear War; with officialdom having more urgent concerns, the PCs couldn’t interest anyone in “luridly paranoid fantasies”. In desperation, they managed to set the self-destruct on the Lunar Base (or, more to the point, cobbled one together), took the best of the asteroid mining ships on the launchpad and got the heck out of there.

And then came the third session. One of the eggs was discovered on-board – one that had hatched. A game of hide-and-seek ensued, as the alien sought to sabotage the ship and rebuild its systems to suit itself in response to a ‘homing call’ that only it could feel (grafted in from John Carpentier’s “The Thing”). NPCs were killed off, one by one, and the PCs had a couple of close calls; in at least one case, was seemingly killed (but could have been rescued) – the player had to leave early. Everything was proceeding splendidly. And then one of the PCs blew up the ship.

I did my best – I rewrote the operating principles of the ship on-the-fly to change an immediate explosion into a countdown to disaster. I managed to get one PC into a space-suit and headed towards the engines while the others played games with ET. Tension mounted as he reached the engineering compartment, only to discover that there wasn’t one alien, there were two – and he wasn’t alone. Combat ensued, as the clock continued its relentless countdown. Finally, he reached the controls – and turned them the wrong way. Assuming that he had misunderstood how these things (theoretically) worked, I went over it with him again, slowly, and then asked again if he was sure this was what he wanted to do. I had the other PCs get the radio working to enable them all to contribute. I gave him skill rolls to figure out what “didn’t seem right”. I dropped hint after hint.

The Player proved impervious to it all, and stubbornly insisted on taking his action as he described it. I even gave him a DEX roll to set the controls “incorrectly”, but he had decided it was better to blow up the ship and everyone on board than to take the chance of these things getting loose, and that is exactly what he did.

And so the campaign came to a premature conclusion. The PCs never discovered that the ETs were actually survivors from Minerva (a world that had been blown up to create the Asteroids) who had colonised a Jovian Moon, and Phobos & Deimos, had a primitive star drive, had been using earthly cattle as breeding stock for centuries (cattle mutilations), had a ship shot down at Roswell, had experiemented with Humans for decades to determine whether or not a more effective hybrid could be developed, that those hybrids were behind the nuclear war that was about to begin and sputter out, and so on and on and on. As the PCs learned to fight back, they would have exposed the aliens and ultimately driven them from the planet.

All I can do now, over a decade after the fact, is look back and mourn the missed opportunity. It’s one thing for a game to be terminated through mutual consent because no-one’s having fun any more; it’s quite another for a game being enjoyed by all to come to a crashing halt because one player decided to be “noble” and “self-sacrificing”. What do you do when this happens?

You dust yourself off and start another campaign, that’s what. And for some time to come, you ask yourself if there was something more that you should have done or could have done.

Which brings us back to the beginning of 2009. In many ways, it feels like 2008 has finished prematurely. Too many of the problems of the last year have not been resolved – we have conflict in the Middle East, we’re still entangled in Iraq, we still have an economic crisis to manage, oil supplies continue to shrink because we havn’t started exploiting the pools of petrochemicals in the Jovian Atmosphere. But all we can do is dust ourselves off and tackle the new year, with its’ new opportunites and hopes and dreams. Happy New Year, everyone.

The eyes are the window to the soul

What exactly is the soul? No, I’m not getting all existential and metaphysical on you, I’m asking the question objectively and literally. You see, one of my D&D campaigns has this question of the nature of the soul as one of its key themes. More, it states that the answer is different for each race, and that this is the fundamental distinction between Elves and Humans and Dwarves and the other sentient species that inhabit the game world.

The question is one that’s always implicit – and usually ignored – in D&D. There are a number of spells that let you speak with the dead, there are ghosts and undead and other such creatures, and so on. That’s the very reason why I made this theme such a prominant element of the “Seeds Of Empire” campaign.

The campaign premise – so far as the PCs were concerned at the start – was fairly straightforward. The previous campaign set in this Game World established that there had been a mass killing off of the Gods at the hands of their enemies (a cross between the Greek Titans and Cthulhu’s Old Ones, called the Chaos Powers). That previous campaign dealt with the process of Divine damage control, in which the mortal races (personified by the PCs) were ‘invited’ to step up and seize the reigns of their destiny. They got to reassign Divine portfolios, alter the way that magic interacted with the world, and tweak various other aspects of the campaign world. Some of their choices were aimed at the big picture (with little thought as to what the short- and medium-term effects would be), and some were aimed specifically at establishing a new status quo in the here-and-now, with scant consideration of the long-term consequences of the decision – and none at all on how these various secondary and tertiary effects would interact with each other. Ostensibly, the second half of that campaign was about the transition and immediate consequences – only at the grand finale did it emerge that it was actually about how things got to this point in the first place (the PCs thought they knew, but didn’t). So, when the sequel campaigns started (and there are two of them running concurrently), the central concept was to explore the consequences of the decisions made by the previous generation of PCs.

One of the Deities that were killed off was the deity of Death. As a result, there was no-one to judge the dead, or to transport the souls of the dead to their final reward or punishment. It became, as a consequence, far easier to rise again as an undead. This was something that the players overlooked when rearranging the campaign mythos; they established the entire mechanism necessary for dealing with the newly-dead, but overlooked those caught in transit, who fell through the cracks.

At the time the Gods were being killed, they stopped answering prayers (the survivors were too busy surviving). The fringes of the Empire that was around at the time included an oriental society that had been partially converted, who believed in reincarnation. When the God of death was lost, their priests immediately discovered that the spirits of the dead were not ascending to judgement the way they should have been; and, in order to preserve the souls of their dead citizens, they began ‘storing’ them as undead.

Other groups did not have the same perspective, and reactions to the circumstances varied. Some went nuts, some tried to establish their own empires, some despaired. The kingdom of the undead were forced to call apon the resiliance of their undead to defend themselves. Having become adept at ‘returning’ people as undead, they then reanimated the bodies of their defeated foes for use as shock troops to protect their own, infinitely more valuable, undead.

Fast-forward a century to the current time of the campaign. Their faith has become corrupted by the ease of conquest with undead armies. I did an analysis of the impact on a medieval economy and society of having a vast number of workers who do not need to eat, who do not need to be paid, who can work for 24 hours a day, and who retain the mind and spirit of the original spirits, and (even allowing for reduced effectiveness) calculated it conservatively as making the resulting society equivalent to one of ten times the productive area, with 100 times the manpower to draw apon. The living now lead lives of absolute luxury, with no need to perform work of any kind; once they die, they begin earning the sybaritic life that they have enjoyed. Their society has evolved to consider what began as temporary measure as normality.

Enter the PCs, whose homelands have now come under threat from this incredibly powerful Empire. They have to defeat an enemy that cannot be overcome by force or arcane skill, and are now in the process of discovering what tools they have at their disposal for doing so. Success or failure will depend on their ability to argue with the Empire on the Empire’s terms – they will have to understand the religious and social philosophy that has made the Empire what it is today, and what those things were, and how the latter evolved into the former. Only by proving that the Empire has lost its way can they hope to undermine it internally to the point of collapse, and that is their only hope of victory.

Which brings me back to the question that was posed at the start of this essay. Before the Players can attempt to even dimly grope toward an answer, I – as DM – have to have gone before them, to pave the road with clues and an internally-consistant concept of the Empire and its theology that their characters can observe and interact with.

GMs should never be afraid of exploring the big questions in their games – but they have to first explore those questions in their own minds, both in terms of their personal philosophy (and what they are comfortable with in terms of game play – a subject I’ll discuss more fully another time), and in terms of what is inherantly implied by the game system and setting that they have already established. You can look to the rulebooks for the questions, but they are lacking (and sometimes contradictory) when it comes to the answers.

It’s these big-issue choices that ultimately distinguish one campaign setting from another, both directly and through the implications and consequences and trickle-down effects on smaller, day-to-day issues. Questions like “What is the soul?” and “How does magic work?” and “Does modern physics apply?” and “What is the nature of time?” and “How was the universe/multiverse created?” and “Are there other planes / other dimensions, and if so where did they come from and what keeps them apart?”. Collectively, these can be considered the Cosmology of the campaign, although what is usually considered a cosmology is only a small part of the scope of these questions.

These are the questions that natural philosophers (and the curious and learned) will grapple with, within the campaign. They may not get the right answers – they may not even find the right questions to ask – but their questions and discoveries will inform the rest of the society within the campaign, either directly or indirectly. Five minutes spent deciding these can provide the GM with years worth of adventure as the consequences and implications are explored.

PCs, by the nature, tend to be superior specimens. Why can’t the reason for that (in the long run) be a greater understanding of the way the world really works? It’s at least as good an answer as any other that I’ve found. So don’t be afraid to ask yourself the Big Questions; your game will be the better for it.

Fur and a heavy beard in 100° heat - that's Christmas down under

As I write this, the Holiday Season is fast approaching. Johnn, my collaborator on this blog (and vice-versa) has written an excellent book on holidays in rpgs, but I thought it worth exploring some of the options for drawing inspiration from real holidays. (Obviously, since many are religious in nature, some people may be offended. I apologise in advance if you are one of them).

The first and most obvious option is to insert an equivalent holiday into your campaign. The denizens of your fictitious world might not celebrate Christmnas, but they might well have a celebration of the winter solstice (which is what Christmas started out as). Or they might have a Holiday in which everyone exchanges gifts. The more you know about the history and origins of a particular festival, the more source material you have to draw apon. Most nations celebrate the date of their independance, or the birthday of their monarch, or both. Most have some equivalent of Remembrance Day, and some have two – my native Australia celebrates Anzac Day on April 25th each year, but also commemorates Remembrance Day (the 11th day of the 11th month) with a minute’s silence at 11AM. And so on. None of this is treading waters too far removed from Johnn’s book.

But there are a number of alternative approaches to this source material, plus a combination, which can combine to produce a completely different holiday festival. For example, you can invert the mood, then interpret the holiday history accordingly. Take Easter, for example: A four-day holiday which brings fear, dread, and superstition (when the mood is inverted, that’s all about the dead rising. So for four days every year, the dead are permitted to rise from their graves in an effort to complete unfinished business. Homes would be locked, stores laid in, and no-one would go out if they had any choice in the matter. Where people had a choice, they might try to be so far away from the locale of their birth that the undead could not reach them in time. Others might believe that performing an act of atonement on the first day or night would protect them. From this springboard, many ideas can flow.

You can also invert the meaning of the holiday, as necessary. Instead of commemorating independance, why not a national day of mourning for the day they were conquered – but a ‘holiday’ with an undefined undercurrent of hope, as each year that passes brings them one year closer to their eventual overthrow of the conquerers. This might then persist as a festival of Hope (that appears to be anything but) long after the population has been liberated.

Another example derives from the gift-giving at Christmas time. Perhaps an annual moratorium on charging criminals with theft imposed by some past nobleman who believed in sharing the wealth, or perhaps in response to some noble being unjustly accused of theft years earlier?

Seek out the meaning and history behind what’s going on around you whenever you can – it will always prove beneficial to your game sooner or later. And it gives you something non-gaming to talk about at parties!

I’m in a strange sort of mood as I write this. I don’t feel like doing anything in particular, but can’t stand to do nothing; I can’t work up any sort of enthusiasm even for the things that I enjoy doing, and nothing in my video/dvd/cd collection holds any appeal. And the only thing that I can point towards as being the cause of this particular lassitude – which many would (incorrectly) describe as burnout – is the fact that I havn’t had my gaming fix lately. Over the last couple of weeks, my regular games havn’t happened for one reason or another – one-off anomalies, road bumps on the street of life. And without the vicarious thrill of interacting with my friends, without the stimulation that they provide (and which is one of the many reasons I Gamemaster more than I play), I’m feeling rather adrift at the moment.

There are all sorts of things I could be doing, and any number of things that I could be doing, but instead I’m just sort of…. drifting.

I likened this state to burnout a few moments ago, which implies that others might also make the same mistake. So what do I do when I get into this sort of mood?

I watch something that replicates the feeling and mood of GMing. It might be a courtroom drama (The Firm, A Few Good Men, etc), or a heist movie (Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, The Italian Job), or even one of the Bud Spenser / Terrance Hill classic comedies. Something that has enough detail to capture my attention, with being so demanding of my concentration that it feels like work – and something with an exuberant attitude. And I usually find that the right stimulation fixes the problem and gears me up for whatever comes next, even if I didn’t particularly feel like watching it when I started. Something that someone else out there might find useful.

I had my spring cleaning just the other day (living in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are the reverse of what most readers would consider normal), and it reminded me of something that should be an annual tradition with gamers – spring cleaning of their games.

For Players, that means looking at any long-standing character goals and assessing whether they have moved any closer to achieving them in the past year, or have discarded them in favor of other, more immediate objectives. Are there any mysteries that have been presented on which the events since the last spring cleaning can shed any light? Have new questions been raised, and how do they relate to the old ones? Are you still playing the character with the same personality that he had a year ago, or have you slipped away from the purity of concept that you once had – and is the result an improvement? Have you told the GM what you like about the campaign he’s running? Is there something you would like to see more of? (I assume that if there was some cause of unhappiness that this would be communicated).

For GMs, its time to look at the loose plot threads – are there any that have been forgotten, or neglected? How about the NPCs, do they still have realistic goals and reasons for staying with the party, or are they due to strike out on their own at the first (in)convenient opportunity? Have the villains done anything to advance their own agendas? Has there been political and economic evolution within the campaign, or has it slipped into a perpetually-stagnant never-never land?

When should Spring Cleaning take place in a campaign? I would vote for the anniversary of commencement, that’s the date that I usually use…

How does each race in your game make a difference? Put another way, if any of race disappeared, how would the setting be different? How would gameplay be different?

• Remaining races might venture into unexpected niches, creating interesting twists. Elven smiths, orcish druids, gnomish sailors.
• The world might be poorer because no race or culture has filled the void left by the missing race. Perhaps metal is scarce, so armour and weapons remain primitve. Maybe medicine has not advanced, and the Heal skill is unavailable or the DCs are increased.
• Wars might be fought for reasons different than the norm, such as over unusual scarcities or rivalries.

Even though your game rules or settings supply races, give their descriptions a read over, and make tweaks so each race has a noticeable footprint in the world.

Look for ways to make the precence of each race felt during game sessions, such as roleplaying, architecture, mannerisms, fashion, conflict types and sources, art, and community quirks.