Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games.

I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable.

More interesting AND more realistic at the same time? That certainly bears further investigation!

And so, here we are…

Physical measurement of Time

Let’s try to start this discussion with a level of objectivity, by looking at how we measure time.

To start with, let’s agree that there are three scales in use, and perhaps should be more.

There’s the Planetary scale, that have always been measured by observations of objective phenomena – everything from a day up falls into this category.

There’s the human scale, which is used for everyday events, actions, and perceptions – human reaction time at it’s best is about 1/4 of a second, but if we play on the safe side, we can say that anything from 1/10th of a second up to a day falls into this category (with the longer entries a little more vague and approximate in meaning and measurement).

There’s the atomic, which can only really be handled in a lab, often with expensive apparatus, but which we have bent to our wills to more precisely measure the human scale.

I would argue that there should also be the Cosmic, used to lop off seemingly-endless repetitions of zeros in measuring events like stellar lifetimes and galactic interactions and planetary histories. But this doesn’t seem to have caught on, at least not yet. Maybe when such phenomena are reported daily in the newspapers…

It’s entirely possible that when we start grouping clusters of related events together at the Cosmic Scale that we need to break it in two or even three different scales just to keep things comprehensible in relative terms. That’s beyond the remit of this very broad examination of what is ultimately, a side-issue – at best, a foundation..

We know how each of these scales relates to each other. We can convert one into another with relative aplomb. No-one would ever do so for practical purposes, but if we had to, we could estimate the lifetime of stars in terms of frequencies of light.

Make no mistake, each of these scales exists (or doesn’t yet exist) purely as a human convenience. Within them, various measurements are employed by humans, and have been for a very long time in most cases.

Seasons

Let us start with the seasons. These are obvious objective phenomena that recur every year, but whose start and end points are fuzzy, and ill-defined until you start getting into astronomical observation.

Then someone links the winter solstice with the season whose name it bears, and the summer solstice likewise, and you have ‘pinned down’ (with an artificial definition) two of the four fuzzy markers.

The relationship these markers have with the objective reality experienced on the ground is illustrated vividly by the fact that Groundhog Day persists, year-on-year.

Sidebar: An improvement? A perspective.

It might be possible, and even better from a human perspective, to define the start of a season as the first time in a cycle that one or more certain objective measurements being recorded. It might be the first night where the temperature dips below a certain level, or the first time snow falls, or whatever.

These would be functional and practical definitions that would correlate with the experiences of the growers of crops, making them useful, too.

But they completely lack the color of an event like Groundhog day, which transforms the passage of time into something to be celebrated – and we humans love any excuse for a good party.

Non-humans of more sober mind-set might well opt for the more practical approach described – something to keep in mind. In fact, since military success is often tied to the impact of the seasons, we could probably include those of a more martial mind-set on that list!

Months

Whew, I waffled on about seasons far longer than I intended! So let’s try and redress the balance a bit over the next few categories.

Months come in two varieties – there are Lunar Months, which are tied to an objective physical phenomenon, and there are calendar months, which are a convenient abstraction, dividing the year into 12 roughly equal units and the seasons into a beginning, middle, and end.

Sidebar notes

It’s perhaps worth observing in passing that it is the extreme circularity of the Lunar Orbit that makes Lunar Months sensible. Were the orbit more elongated, they would not be even close to the same length in more objective counts – some might last for 60 days, and some for 15. If orbital eccentricity on that scale were the case, I’m not sure the concept would even evolve.

Things would also grow more complicated if there were two visible moons up in the sky, because we now have three visible phenomena – the periods of each moon and the subdivisions provided by the relative frequency of their interactions.

I employed both of these in my very first fantasy campaign, in ways that are far too complicated to go into here. Suffice it to say that I ended up with 36 “Months” and ten “seasons” in a “calendar year”.

Days

Another obvious objective phenomenon is the rising and setting of the sun. Never mind that it happens at a different time every day, and that the period of daylight is also variable over the course of a year – daybreak-to-dusk plus the night is a reasonable definition to work from.

Sidebar: Starting each day at zero

Humans (these days) use an objectively-set artificial zero, sometimes called “Midnight”, as the boundary from one day to another. This is a very modern perspective that shouldn’t necessarily apply in a fantasy culture.

A lot of it comes from a fixed and precise notion of the length of human-scale time units, which are next on my to-examine list. Take that away and replace it with arbitrary or approximate measurements, like the length of a candle burning down, and incorporate the practicalities of rural life as the locally-dominant feature, and you can end up with a quite different answer, and one that can add functionality to fantasy campaigns:

Each day starts at zero, and is divided into 10, 12, or 16 arbitrary units of approximately equal span until dusk. Any leftover is a god-given time to relax, or to squeeze in one extra (unscheduled) chore. But what the gods may give in the warmer months, they steal back in the winter. At night, the same-sized arbitrary unit is used to approximate divisions, but there will usually be either more of them or less of them, depending on the season.

In the Zenith-3 campaign, on the current campaign date, at their new base of operations in Arkansas, dawn currently arrives at 6:01 AM and lasts 14 hours and 20 minutes.

As the height of summer approaches, dawn will come earlier, and the day will last longer. These two changes are not equal, but the differences are measured in a rate of change of seconds per day. Come winter, and the day will be down to around 10 hours (I haven’t looked it up, I’m just subtracting from 24).

So, if Dawn is zero each day, and we’re using divisions of 12, then each ‘division of labor’ is 1 hour and 21.75 minutes long – call it 80 minutes for convenience. This permits a farmer or laborer to divide his ‘day’ into functional units by which to estimate the progress of tasks and the scheduling of activity.

The night is 24-14h21m = 9h39m in length; divide this by 80m, and you get a night of 7.2375 ‘divisions’. Call it 7 1/4 for convenience. So, for night-time tasks, 2 divisions on and 5+ off is equitable for four – so long as the ‘2 divisions’ that are short (only 1 1/4 in length) are rotated around.

You can already see this having an impact on social and logistical patterns, on the ‘real world’ around the characters, and this is just the starting point. But it all stems from using arbitrary-but-meaningful units instead of absolute-and-measurable ones.

Avoid using the terms ‘hours’ and ‘minutes’ – reserve those for the real-world objective measurements, or you’ll eventually get yourself in a hopeless tangle. “Divisions” works for comprehension (and comes naturally with “subdivisions” for a smaller unit), but is fairly flavorless.

But once again, I’m getting off-track.

Portions Of A Day

Another fairly basic objectively-observable phenomenon is ‘noon’, when the sun is at it’s highest point in the sky. This, in fact, is where ‘midnight’ comes from, when the sun is at it’s (theoretical) ‘lowest point’.

Humans have found it convenient to abstract the daylight spans on either side of this non-arbitrary point into “morning’ and ‘afternoon’, and then to subdivide those (‘early morning’, ‘mid-afternoon’, and so on) – generally into subdivisions of three for no good reason that I can come up with without arbitrarily defining a day as 12 hours long, in which ‘into thirds’ becomes a natural subdivision.

In practical terms, no-one has the time to stand around watching the shadow of a stick (or equivalent), so “noon” becomes fuzzy, and the divisions equally so. I would suggest that this fuzziness is the reason these concepts can survive differing lengths of day – they are approximations of convenience.

Sidebar: More speculations, plus Dwarves

Again, those who want to make their cultures a little more alien, take note! Dwarves, with their underground lifestyles, might have an entirely different sense of ‘convenience’ in such matters – ‘start-shift, mid-shift, short-shift, and ‘end-shift’ (a division into four) might be more appropriate – with ‘short-shift’ called that because it’s interrupted by,. and begins with, a mid-shift meal.

Weeks & Fortnights

From whence does the concept a week come from? And a fortnight, whose bright idea was that?

I have always held the (uninformed) opinion that these started as subdivisions of a ‘month’ (one quarter and one-half, respectively) and then got codified into a fixed number of days because it permitted sufficient worship on the seventh day to retain religious indoctrination without compromising the productivity of the laborer too much – a compromise between religion and secular power, in other words, and so far back in history that the origins have been lost.

But that might be just my fanciful imagination.

Taking the ‘fancy’ and the implied criticism of theology out of it, what I am left with is that these are arbitrary subdivisions defined in terms of shorter time periods (days) that have proven useful in defining satisfactory levels of work-‘life’ balance.

Factor in recurring market days and the like and social patterns quickly shape themselves around these intervals. It’s debatable whether longer groupings (eight days a week, anyone?) with their more complex patterns, are too much for people to tolerate, or if this is simply a human artifice to marry these periods into some semblance of integration with the longer time-units.

Still more speculation

I have occasionally wondered why we humans don’t use a 360-day year, with recurring days that ‘aren’t counted’ as holidays spaced throughout in order to make up the ‘natural year’ of 365 days.

You can even add in an extra ‘non-counted day’ on leap years, except when the year ends in ’00’ but doesn’t end in ‘000’ to make this system every bit as accurate as the one we do use.

And the convenience! Months that are exactly 30 days long. Weeks that are either 5 or 10 days long. An exact number of weeks in every month.

Species of a more ‘precise’ or analytic bent might employ such a system, but I think it more likely to find favor amongst species that are even less mathematically-inclined than we are. Like Halflings. Something about the notion of sweeping those days of the calendar that don’t fit to one side and using them as an excuse for a feast resonates, for some reason.

Years, Decades, Centuries, Millennia

Until we get astronomy locked down to a reasonably high standard, ‘years’ are semi-arbitrarily defined by the rotation of the seasons. Decades, centuries, and millennia are simple base-10 groupings of years.

That’s an important point that anyone involved in computers in the early days should appreciate.

“10” in binary, =2 in ‘real-world’ (base-10) numbers.
“10” in octal (base 8) = 8 in base-10 numbers.
“10” in hexadecimal = 16 in base-10 numbers.

Computers ‘think’ in binary, but usually in groups that form ‘words’ of code. Octal has largely fallen out of fashion, replaced by hexadecimal codes, and these are still in use today. If you write in ‘machine language’, you are coding in hexadecimal.

The implication is that if a species uses base some-thing-other-than-10, these arbitrary compilations of years will represent different tallies.

Beyond years, these are simply units of convenience.

Seconds, Minutes, & Hours

We need to talk about the convenience of 12, and of 30, 60, and 90. I’ll try to keep it brief.

12 is evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4. When it comes to measuring angles, though, 12 subdivisions of a circle yields units that are too large, and that quickly become inconvenient.

Logically, then, we extend by 5 to get 30 – the first number to be evenly divisible by the first 5 digits, and we get the sixth as a bonus.

So, why aren’t angles measured in degrees of 30ths of a circle?

My best guess – and I don’t know for certain – is that the resulting margins of error were too large to make the subdivisions useful. 1 thirtieth of a circle is 12 traditional degrees, and that’s a big enough interval that dwelling measured to that standard would be in constant danger of collapse. “Level, plus-or-minus six degrees?” Not going to work.

Navigation – if your course is correct to within a margin of six degrees to either side, over a distance of 100 miles, you could be as much as 10½ miles away from your intended destination – that’s MORE than 10%, and enough that you might completely miss your target.

So someone decided to double it, to sixty and then increase that six-fold to 360° because being accurate to within 1° is a heck of a lot better in everything from carpentry to home construction to navigation.

But the earlier unit of sixty remained for sub-subdivisions of degrees and of sub-sub-subdivisions – still known as minutes and seconds, respectively – and because these angular measurements predate accurate timekeeping, hours were subdivided the same way when clocks were invented.

The term ‘second’ was first used in the year 1000 by a Persian scholar named al-Biruni, basing the measurement on a fraction of the time between New Moons of certain specific weeks relative to the preceding Sunday.

That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it until some better explanation comes along.

Minutes and seconds are, therefore, arbitrary divisions of a basic time unit (hours) that have been chosen because they can be subdivided evenly in many convenient ways – one half, one third, one quarter, one fifth, one tenth, one sixtieth.

Attempts to change units of angular measurement have been tried over the years – look up Gradians – and have foundered. Radians (there are pi of them in a circle) have survived because they are mathematically convenient in some contexts beyond the everyday.

Because the mathematical utility of these sub-divisions remains true, even if they are arbitrary, I would expect most civilizations to adopt them – but the precise interval of time represented with them will vary with the definition of an ‘hour’. I have posited at least one alien civilization in which the hours are divided into 100 minutes, however – even though I don’t think it would actually ever happen in real life.

Heartbeats

Okay, now we’re getting into intense territory. The human heartbeat varies in beats per minute quite considerably, depending on what we’re doing and on our emotional state. It also varies massively from individual to individual as does the variability. To some extent, this is due to physical training, but that’s far from the whole story.

It’s a documented fact that formula one drivers have a far lower resting heartbeat than most people would consider normal, and a far higher heartbeat when under stress, which they are able to sustain for longer periods than almost any other type of athlete (from 40 to 200+ bpm, for up to 2 hours). The same is also documented in other forms of motor-sports, though to a lesser extent perhaps.

Take away the sustained nature of this pattern, and you get Test Pilots and Astronauts, who can operate at absolute peak efficiency for minutes at a time. Lower the peak from there and you get other elite sportsmen and elite combat troops, and so on.

When our hearts are pounding, though, this remains the most important timekeeper, at least subjectively. Everything else fades into insignificance in comparison.

And that’s where I think subjective time comes into the picture, something I’ll discuss more fully a little further down the track.

(English?) Railroads

I’ve been informed that there was very little precision in timekeeping until national railroads began running, especially in England. Suddenly, it because vital for all the clocks in all the railway stations to read the same thing at the same time so that arrival and departure times could be precise. Anything less would soon lead to one train colliding with another, and even sooner lead to a horde of angry customers.

From that beginning, it spread – radio broadcasts and hours of labor and television and so on. The whole concept of being punctual was fuzzy prior to this – you arrived when you got there, and so long as you didn’t waste any time or get delayed en route, that was as punctual as it got.

Not sure of the relevance, but I’m throwing it in here, anyway.

Crystal Oscillations

Precision started mechanical, but became electronic, when electrical oscillations in particular types of pure crystals became precise radio wavelengths and the corresponding frequencies, and were then adapted into clocks.

Not that most such clocks and watches were very precise, at first. The vibrations seemed sensitive to all sorts of environmental variations that such digital clocks and watches were known to gain or lose time, all the time.

In a good one, that might be a minute or two a month; in a more typical one, that much per week; and in a bad one it could be that much in a day. The good ones therefore needed resetting every 6 months or so, the typical ones every couple of months or less, and the bad ones, weekly.

Precision did improve somewhat over the years, but became increasingly expensive. You can get digital watches now that are guaranteed to be accurate to within one second per century – but they cost thousands of dollars.

Sports and sporting prowess has remained one of the major drivers of precision in a relatively everyday setting. The time was when it was sufficient to measure lap times to within a tenth of a second – and then it became necessary to do so to the nearest hundredth in order to split competitors, and then to the nearest thousandth, and now to the nearest ten-thousandth.

You can see the same thing happening in other areas, too, like human sprint races, and swimming races. Those are eternally compromised by the need to actuate the timers with mechanical triggers, though, so there is a hard limit to the accuracy with which these things are measured, and the ‘dead heat’ still happens.

Beats Of Atomic Light

In physics, greater precision was needed. It came, first, in the same crystal technologies described earlier, and then in atomic clocks, and then in the counting of frequency ‘beats’ of particular wavelengths of particular atoms, under extremely controlled conditions, which is where the ultimate in precision stands now.

The current definition of one second is 9 192 631 770 vibrations of the ‘unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency’ of the Caesium-133 atom, measured in Hertz (i.e. cycles per second). Other atomic ‘vibrations’ have been defined as secondary ways of measuring the unit of time, some of them with greater stability and hence greater practicality, but the Caesium isotope is still the standard.

Wikipedia’s article on ‘second’ (the SI standard unit) adds,

A set of atomic clocks around the world keep time by consensus by “voting’ on the correct time and steering the voting clocks to the consensus, which is called International Atomic Time.

Civil Time is defined to agree with the rotation of the Earth. The international standard for timekeeping is the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This time scale “ticks” the same atomic seconds as TAI, but inserts or omits leap seconds as necessary to correct for variables in the rate of rotation of the Earth.

Einstein

It seems likely that future standards will have to specify that the measurements be taken at a specific speed of motion relative to the observer (zero within tolerances) because Einstein complicated everything with his theory of General Relativity.

This showed that as the relative speed of motion increases, time is perceived to stretch, and that gravitational fields, by distorting the space and hence the distance through which a beam of light must pass, do likewise.

One of the first accepted ‘proofs’ of the theory was the solution to a problem in which the orbital period of Mercury was wrong in predicting when it would become visible from around the far side of the sun. This proved both the principle of Gravitational Lensing and solved a problem that had been vexing astronomers for some time.

But it also means that with motion, time stops being fixed and becomes flexible. At low speeds, the effect is trivial, even negligible – but even jet aircraft have been shown to exceed the minimum reasonable threshold for ‘trivial, even negligible’.

They did this by sticking an atomic clock on just such a jet; the clock that had been perfectly synchronized with another on the ground. They then flew the jet around the world and compared the two clocks, finding that they no longer agreed.

Precision timekeeping is needed for GPS to work, for one example, and this source of error would completely disrupt the service if it hadn’t been taken into account.

So speed of motion creates a hard limit to the accuracy of timekeeping, and it’s not just a perception of time that it is inherently variable.

Or is it? Before falling down that rabbit hole, lets switch to the second line of discussion – perceptions of time.

The Perception Of Time

I’ve occasionally gotten into arguments by suggesting that all time is perceived, and that we have no direct functional sense of time, and that seems like a good place to start.

We measure time using clocks and the like by observing changes over time. We have agreed that a specific such amount of mechanical change represents an hour, or a minute, or a second (to refer to the hands of a clock).

Other techniques involve electrical currents and the electrochemical reactions that produce them. But we don’t see these electrical impulses, vibrations, or the reactions that create them; we see a counter change when a threshold count is exceeded. That counter is the readout on a digital clock, it could be in the hours, minutes, or seconds position.

Inferred time

We can infer time based on a standard speed of movement or even one that changes consistently, such as the acceleration due to gravity over a fixed distance. but, just like the swinging of a pendulum, this relies on perception of a visual change in a system.

We might be able to infer time by the period that it takes certain chemical or physical reactions to proceed. This may be a fairly fuzzy choice, but water clocks use this principle.

Every external measurement of time gets perceived as such a change. That doesn’t mean that it’s not an objective standard; just that we have to perceive time indirectly by the changes that occur.

Internal perceptions

What about our internal perceptions of time? Well, there are inherently variable phenomena like heartbeats – and persistent stories of people who can control them sufficiently to use them as timepieces. I’ve never seen any of these claims proven empirically, though.

Beyond that and similar biochemical reactions of which we have no direct perception (since they occur at a cellular level), we have reaction times and a subjective sense of the passage of time, sometimes pegged to theoretical circadian rhythms.

I’m not arguing that these are inherently inaccurate or accurate to a certain standard; just that they are subjective, and rely on a perceived interval of time having passed.

Internal Alarm Clocks

Most of us have an internal alarm clock that wakes us up to whatever degree of reliability or unreliability. It might do so at the same time every day, or at the same condition of natural light, or at the first rooster-crow, or some combination.

There’s a psychological element to these ‘clocks in our heads’, too – if I set my (external) alarm clock and really need or want to wake up then, I will often awaken five or ten minutes before the actual alarm sounds. If I don’t feel such a burning need, or don’t synchronize my internal chronometer to the time shown on the alarm clock by setting the alarm, it doesn’t happen.

But there have been occasions when the power failed, killing the external clock – and the internal one still worked. Once, as a prank, the digital clock was reset while I slept – I still woke up at about the right time (ten minutes late, as I recall). And there have been a number of occasions when I have mis-set the alarm to PM instead of AM – but because I had perceived the applicable time as AM, I awoke at around the right time.

This isn’t just a matter of going to bed at the right time, or of awaking after a consistent period of sleep; it would be a lot more predictable were that the case. So far as I am concerned, this is an objectively-real if unreliable phenomenon – one that most people share to some extent, and with differing reliability levels.

But it’s still subjectively observed and interpreted, no matter how objectively real it may be.

Other biological functions

And the same is true of every other biological or biochemical or neurological or neurochemical process that I can think of. These are undeniably objectively real, but none of them are perceived directly, so they are all subject to subjective interpretation and the time intervals they ‘measure’ are subjective in length..

Two subjects

That means that there are two fascinating subjects to be analyzed in thinking about these phenomena and how to reflect them in game mechanics on behalf of the PCs and NPCs who may experience them.

There’s the phenomenon of time perception, also known as chronoperception, itself; and there’s the relationship, if any, between this and ‘objective time’, which would define things like the reliability and accuracy of the perceptions.

To me, the more I thought about it, the more inextricably-linked these became, because I couldn’t think about the perceived passage of time without referring to some external perception or objective time interval.

I could subjectively perceive that ‘morning’ has become ‘afternoon’ but those terms don’t have any meaning without the perception of external reality itself.

I could perceive that it’s been about an hour since I last checked the time – but to do so, I have to have noted the time an hour ago, and have a concept of ‘an hour’ against which my subjective interpretations are compared.

The subjective perception has no meaning without the objective reality, and so everything said on the subject relates to the relationship between the two – and that leads me back to the earlier point about our only ever perceiving time indirectly, and therefore subjectively.

So, let’s talk about different subjective interpretations of time, since that’s all we’ve got.

Past Time

When I think back over the years, some events seem more remote than others.

I’ve lived in two different places totaling more than thirty years in both – but that doesn’t ‘feel’ like half my lifetime. A third, tops. That could be interpreted as my feeling 90 years old (and I do, sometimes), so let me be clear – I mean that 30+ years feels more like 20-or-so at most.

I can still remember clearly, events from my childhood (just fewer of them) – but some events that are far more recent are also far more clouded in clarity and specificity.

There are two primary theories of time perception that could apply, according to Wikipedia:

The strength model of time memory. This posits a memory trace that persists over time, by which one might judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. This conflicts with the fact that memories of recent events may fade more quickly than more distant memories.

The inference model suggests the time of an event is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.

I think that both of these are probably correct to some degree, and the perception of recency lies in the first, while the ease of recall and perception of detail lies in the second. Thus, soldiers suffering from what used to called PTSD can experience flashbacks to events that seem contemporary and immediate and completely visceral (and will then act and react accordingly), while knowing and feeling that these are long-past events the rest of the time.

It also seems likely that the frequency of recollection makes recollection easier and hence the memory, more immediate. Time spent without a traumatic past event being triggered helps encrust that memory with distance, creating greater resistance to it being triggered in the future, even by stimuli that would have immediately induced a full flashback.

These mechanisms would also limit the impact of such traumatic re-visitations, so that a flashback might be a passing emotional flash and not a full reliving of the trauma – combat veterans from the Vietnam war have often said that a helicopter being heard or seen overhead or the snap of a twig often brings a flash of emotion deriving from their time of service. In some cases, these pass almost immediately, in others they last significantly longer and are far more intense and immediate because of it.

Science has determined that different ranges of duration are processed by different areas of the brain; to me, this directly relates to the storage, processing, and recall of memories.

Wikipedia (my primary reference source for this article, and not even consulted until I got to the modern definition of a second) lists a number of temporal illusions, or distortions in the perception of time.

I’ll touch on some of these as they become relevant. So far, the major ones to be applicable appear to be

• Time Telescoping, in which events are recalled as nearer or further back in time than they really occurred, referred to as Forward and Backward telescoping, respectively;
• Auditory stimuli may appear to last longer than visual stimuli, which suggests differences in how the brain handles those stimuli;
• and one that Wikipedia doesn’t mention, that different senses may cause stronger or weaker memory accesses than others. Scent is often a much stronger stimulus than sight or sound, for example, if one that has fewer significant events ‘tagged’ by it.

But we’re not really talking about memory here, other than perhaps indirectly. So let’s move on.

Slow Time

“Events seemed to unfold in slow motion”. I’ve heard and read that any number of times, both from sportsmen who were in the zone, or who were about to experience a traumatic event that they could see coming, and from those experiencing violence of some kind like soldiers and police officers.

To some extent, this is all about the brain going into hyper-drive due to adrenaline, focusing more of its resources into analyzing a situation perceived as survival-critical; it is often accompanied by a form of tunnel vision, as ‘irrelevancies’ are discarded or ignored.

In past articles about optical illusions, I’ve talked about the Gorilla paradox, in which a brain concentrating on one task (counting the number of passes of a basketball by one team) can fail to observe a guy in a gorilla suit wandering through the field of vision, waving at the person, and leaving. Magicians use it for misdirection, getting the audience to focus so intently on one thing that they don’t notice another.

Slow time gives the perceiver greater time to react, and to choose between different reaction options.

Endless Time

“A watched pot never boils” is another aphorism, and one that describes a different mental phenomenon – that, in response to boredom, a brain can either wander off (which cuts short the time perceived to pass) or can simply shut down and rest (which prolongs the perceived passage of time without any events to trigger a sense of Slow Time.

When I’m writing – be it an article or an adventure or whatever – and the words are flowing smoothly, they just continue to stream from thoughts into words on the page. Sometimes, it can be hard to keep up, because I can’t simply let misspellings and missed punctuation go, I have to correct those I perceive immediately.

If ever the words stop flowing, and I have to stop and think about what to say next, or if I’ve left anything out, or should this be moved there instead of appearing here. it’s easy to start writing in my head than on the page. I can rough-compose whole pages in my mind this way – and, if I’m lucky, remember them when I resume putting down actual words.

This can encourage that smooth flow, when it occurs, but it can also mean that a snap decision turns into five minutes of reverie with nothing to show for it.

Long Time

When you are focused on one thing, like writing, time outside of that focus can slow or stretch. I can compose words for what seems like a few minutes, only to find that a substantial portion of an hour has passed – or I can struggle through a difficult passage for what seems to be hours, only to discover that only a few minutes have passed.

Both of these are examples of different phenomena of Long Time – either the perceived duration of time interval lying outside the point of focus is longer than objective measurements, or the perceived duration of focus is stretched relative to objective measurements.

Intensity of focus vs distraction tends to shift perception from one to the other. Frustration of any sort pushes perception toward stretched duration of focus. There’s also a rebound effect, as perceived time shifts first one way and then the other. Intensity of concentration is a factor in both.

Subjective awareness of the passage of time is inherently sloppy, it seems. But that brings me to Vierordt’s Law: Shorter intervals tend to be overestimated while longer periods tend to be underestimated.

Clearly, there is a threshold in between these two perceptions, but I would contend that there is often a threshold outside the ‘longer periods’ range at which longer periods again become overestimated.

A really long movie, for example, can seem even longer than it was. Adding ten minutes to the running time can cause a movie to seem twenty or more minutes longer. Stimulation and boredom both play a part in this, as does exhaustion – you can’t stay at 11 for the whole movie, you need to occasionally dial things down and let people catch their breaths.

That was one of the key principles in my article on emotional pacing in RPGs (Part 1, and Part 2).

Heinlein

One of the key tenets of at least one of Robert A Heinlein’s stories lay in the perception of time by characters in the story, and was summarized as “the duration of an interval is proportional to the number of learning events experienced” – more or less.

Three of the temporal illusions referenced by Wikipedia apply to this:

• Time intervals associated with more changes may be perceived as longer than intervals with fewer changes;
• The perceived temporal length of a given task may shorten with greater motivation; and
• The perceived temporal length of a given task may increase when broken up or interrupted.

I’d actually broaden these to some extent, again by bringing the concept of focus.

Revised Temporal Perception propositions

A) When you are focused (higher motivation), interruptions and distractions are (1) more easily tuned out, but (2) have a disproportionate impact on the perception of duration when they are not.

B) When you are not focused so strongly, the perceived passage of time is more strongly measured by events that could be considered distractions and interruptions than on progress in the task at hand.

Music In The Background

Let’s say that I have music playing in the background while I write. This not only cues me to take regular breaks – I’ll come back to that in a moment – but it helps me monitor the passage of time, except when I’m intensely focused, when I simply tune it out and don’t hear it at all.

The more familiar the music is, the easier it is for that tuning-out to occur. What’s interesting is that the more easily I can tune out the music, the more successful I am at tuning out other forms of environmental distraction, including awareness of the passage of time.

I mentioned those periods of protracted reverie a little while back? They don’t derail the process of writing as frequently or for as long if there’s music playing. Note, not music videos or TV shows – it’s too easy to get distracted by the visual stimuli. I need to save that for the page, where I really need it.

Perceived Productivity

The other thing that plays into this perception is perceived productivity.

We often imply the length of a time interval by considering the achievements within that interval together with an impression of the ease and efficiency with which they occurred. That’s just human nature.

I can look at a graphic representation of the length of this article and guesstimate it as being significantly longer than average, about 7000 words so far maybe, and that since it has mostly flowed freely, I’ve been writing it for about 6 hours. So, reality check: as of THIS word, it’s 6,850 words (close enough) and I started writing it (aside from some headings and subheadings and the opening paragraph) at 10:30AM this morning, 6 1/2 hours ago.

Notice that I overestimated the work product slightly and underestimated the time interval slightly.

There is the perception that regular short breaks waste time. Testing has shown that this is not the case unless you are operating at the highest level – when the words are flowing freely, for example. Most of the time, though, I write at about half the pace indicated by those actual measurements, and taking regular breaks increases the productivity without increasing the perception of productivity.

And that skews those mental assessments. In fact, it can skew them dramatically. So, unless I’m in the zone, those prompts to take a short break at semi-regular intervals can more than make up for any time lost due to the distraction factor.

The other benefit is that it prompts me to save my work regularly – something that I haven’t done since I started. So let’s take care of that, right away!

Quick Time

There’s a very thin line between being in slow time and being so overwhelmed by events to which you have to pay attention that you are overwhelmed.

When that happens, the natural response, as I indicated earlier, is to develop tunnel vision. You can focus only on the enemy or task in front of you, and everything else gets shunted to one side.

Intelligence: Is More, Better?

Clearly, a high intelligence helps you have clarity, helps you analyze situations on the fly, and helps you develop and modify clear tactics to achieve your current objectives.

All of those sound like good things in terms of situational awareness and are easily thought of in terms of slow time.

But consider that high intelligence frequently means high awareness or perception (for exactly the same reasons) and that means that there are more things for you to keep track of, and more possibilities for each, and more possible responses on your part to things that they might do – so it would actually be a lot easier to suffer from a monomaniacal focus.. Arguably, high INT/PERC should help until suddenly it doesn’t – when it becomes a liability.

The Mechanics Of Temporal Mis-perception

At this point, you should have a pretty good handle on what we want to modify the game mechanics in order to simulate.

But it’s probably worth a nutshell review of Initiative systems before we go there, though.

In lots of game systems, initiative can be thought of as a numeric value that expresses who acts first. So it starts low (1st character to act) and rises to N (last character to act). These values are often determined by some sort of roll or draw, which may or may not be modified by a stat value or by some sort of character ranking like class level.

In the Hero games system, it’s a little more complicated than that, because characters get a different number of actions in a given 12-second turn, depending on their character’s speed. These are distributed unevenly across the 12-second span – everyone acts in segment 12, and any remaining actions are evenly distributed over the remaining 11 segments (each lasting one second).

One of the first changes I made to the standard Hero System was to rewrite the actions table to evenly distribute actions across all 12 segments, eliminating the “Segment-12-everyone-acts” because typical combat segments could last a couple of minutes while Segment 12 took over an hour. Even distribution eliminated that problem.

In the D&D 3.x system, initiative is a numeric value that indicates in relative terms when a character acts, counting down from the highest to the lowest. This system is so much faster than the Hero Games model that it has largely replaced the superhero subsystem in my campaigns. I’m still thinking about a “last character acts then everyone recovers” model. It’s slightly complicated by the capacity to hold actions until a trigger of some sort, but by and large it works extremely well.

Between them, these are representative of most of the initiative systems that are out there, so those are what I’ll be looking to modify.

Injecting Some Variability

The two types of systems can be treated as belonging to two classifications: High sooner, or Low sooner.

To inject some variability, we simply need each character, after they act, to roll a d6 and add it to their previous initiative value to get their next round value..

If you’re in slow time, that means that you have either rolled low (in a low-sooner model) or rolled high (in a high-sooner model). It’s as simple as that.

Variability Modifiers

Anything else that we want to factor in can largely be treated as a modifier to that die roll – with limits on how much it can change, so that you don’t waste a lot of time dealing with lots of modifiers.

In low-faster systems, anything that makes your perception of time better, that aids your comprehension, subtracts 1 from your die roll. That’s anything and everything – and not one each item, it’s one for anything at all.

In high-faster systems, you add 1 instead.

That includes things like a simplification of the tactical situation, being a lot more capable than the enemy, outnumbering the enemy, and so on.

More robust alternatives make it plus-or-minus 1 for each of the named factors – but you can’t get an initiative adjustment of less than 0, anything more than that simply goes to waste.

The point here isn’t to have a big adjustment in a given combat round, but a steady accumulation of them as different advantages add up.

The GM can also decide that a tactical situation has worsened – the enemy get reinforcements or whatever – and impose a modifier on everyone except selected characters as a one-time thing. This covers situations in which a character is flanked and has to try to focus in more than one direction, and so on. These assessments should take place, with immediate effect, after the last character acts in a round.

Tactical Focus Vs Tactical Myopia

Finally, we have the problem in which characters become overwhelmed, causing tunnel vision. Once this happens, the GM should impose a modifier based on the character’s intelligence score and use it to move the initiative value in the direction of ‘go slower’. If they ever reach the point of trying to take initiative points off a score of zero, these should be applied as a ‘go faster’ to everyone else – it’s all relative values.

Once tunnel vision occurs, the character fails to be aware of anyone else doing damage to them. All attacks against the character get the usual ‘surprise’ bonus or ‘from behind’ bonus, whichever is greater.

Trigger

So, how does this happen? In low=slower systems, i.e. high-sooner it’s easy – any modifier that would push the character’s initiative value below zero instead puts the character into this condition.

It’s a little bit trickier in a high-slower system; we need to establish a triggering threshold. As a general rule, 5 + low init + high init should be a reasonable threshold. If the status appears to be triggered too often, raise this by another 5.

Exit

Any change in condition that moves the character away from the threshold gives the character the chance to refocus – but note that the character is in a tunnel-vision state in which only the enemy right in front of them exists. In practical terms, that means that the enemy in question has to go down, or get flanked by an ally of the overloaded PC. The character can then take a round to clear their head and generate a new, unmodified, initiative score.

Finally, it would be extremely irresponsible of me not to offer up such a set of game mechanics house rules without considering the potential impacts.

Opening New Possibilities

Before I go there, though, I’d like to point out that this proposal offers more than just what you’ve seen on the face of it, a yin to the downside’s yang..

Feats To Manipulate Initiative.

This opens up a whole new class of combat feats – you could have feats that negate a certain category of negative modifiers, feats that let you impose a negative feat on an enemy, feats that let you add a positive modifier to an ally, feats that modify the die size, feats that force the other side to modify their dice size…

Classes That Manipulate Time

Similarly, you can have classes or class abilities that do some or all of these things. In fact, you could have an entire class or subclass built around the concept of combat-awareness, or of creating combat confusion in their enemies.

Spells/Magic items That Manipulate Temporal Perception

And, of course, there can be spells that temporarily, and magic items that permanently confer these effects on those who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them.

This analysis doesn’t quite answer all the possible questions. “Is a barbarian who is Raging more susceptible to Tunnel Vision”, for example. I like to leave some such issues open for individual GMs to resolve, because that enables them to make the concepts their own.

The Inevitable Question

Is it worth it?

That’s a difficult question to answer. Despite efforts to minimize it, there can be no doubt that these modifications will add some overheads to the system that determines who goes first – that, after all, is what it’s designed to do.

A Warning From The Past

No matter how straightforward it appears on the surface, any recurring modification to the mechanics has to be approached with an air of trepidation. If you don’t know why that should be the case, take a look at My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic, most especially, the first of those subjects. I assure you that it remains an object lesson to this day, not only to myself, but to everyone who played in the affected campaign. Okay, so that’s just one surviving player these days, but still…

An Act Of Balance

There are a lot of benefits promised for this set of house rules – and they would all serve to bind this modification more tightly to the campaign.

My personal opinion – well, I have several of them.

• There are very few combat systems that modify the mental state of the combatants, discounting the Sanity mechanics of Call Of Cthulhu. So this would immediately be a point of distinction for any campaign.
• I think there’s more than enough analysis offered to show that the results would be more realistic in ways that most game systems don’t even recognize.
• The game mechanics are designed to be as far from onerous as possible. Even so, without considering fringe benefits, it’s problematic whether or not they are worth implementing on blind faith and optimism – but they are worth trialing.
• Those fringe benefits are huge, but come with a downside to match. If the basic modifications have passed a successful trial period, that limitation goes away and the goal-posts move.

Ultimately, these leech a little of the abstractness from an initiative system and make it a little more simulationist. That could be seen as good, or bad, depending on your perspective; you need a balance between both for a system to be practical.

If you try them and like them, you may find it necessary to further abstract some other element of the combat system to compensate.

All I can do is provide food for thought and some guidance. The rest is up to you!

This image composites two sleuths, one and the other, both from Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay, against an original background by Mike

I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs.

There was

• The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one),
• The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article,
• Delving Deeper Into Mystery, which revisits and expands on techniques and plot structures for creating and resolving satisfactory Mystery adventures,
• Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery deals with the fundamental issue of writer’s block when it comes to mystery plotlines, but also has some general advice and links to more.
• Boundaries Of The Fantastic, which has some good general advice and expands the principles of ‘The Butler Did It’ to more specifically cover Fantasy games;
• Taking everyman skills to the next level: The Absence of an Alibi takes apart a truism of mysteries that is often overlooked – if you are going to commit a crime, you are probably going to try to appear to have an alibi. That alibi is often the greatest point of weakness in the whole crime, and breaking it down can be tantamount to proof of guilt. Logically, that means that anyone who doesn’t have an alibi is the least likely to commit a premeditated crime, and the stronger a purported alibi, the more suspicious it should be.
• Of, perhaps, less immediate value will be
  Ghosts Of Blogs Past: An Air Of Mystery – Using an RPG to write mystery fiction.

Today (referring to when this article was first drafted), seemingly from nowhere, a stray thought suggested another, and that’s what today’s article is going to deliver.

Big Mysteries

I was reading something the other day about an extremely corrupt politician getting caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, and how he had brought his political party into disrepute, potentially costing them the next election or even more, and how some members of that party hated him even more than the members of the opposition did because they took what he had done so personally.

At the same time, this politician was refusing to lie down and go quietly, and the balance of voting was such that his party leadership didn’t really want him to go

And this morning, I thought to myself, it’s a good thing no-one killed him because there would be so many suspects that it might be almost impossible to get a guilty verdict.

We’re talking enemies and friends and victims and fruitcakes, all with good reason to want this joker six feet under. We could be dealing with a lone gunman or a massive conspiracy.

How would you go about investigating such a major case?

Means, Motive, And Opportunity

Detectives like to work from Motive because its the best way of identifying suspects and immediately points the investigation of those suspects in a direction that could lead to their quick exoneration through the other two factors. Starting with motive quickly narrows the focus of the investigation – at least, it does under normal circumstances.

With such a large suspect pool, that approach won’t work.

The only choice, then, is to focus on one of the other elements of guilt. The nature of the assault and the inferred means is probably as good a way of winnowing through the options as any, but this is far less precise than motive; there is always the possibility of someone acquiring the means through coincidence, accident, or opportunity, and none of those can be ruled out.

That means that you need to also approach the problem from the standpoint of opportunity, looking for where means and opportunity intersect.

Once you have a narrowed pool of suspects, you can look for corroborating evidence and circumstantial indicators that support the motive and how the suspect reacted to that motive, and so close in on the killer.

Be prepared for the fact that some people will never be convinced, one way or the other, by this evidence. It’s entirely possible that the case will never be solved to an evidentiary standard that would satisfy a court of law.

But the real value of such a sweeping mystery lies in the exposure and exposition of the background, and the level of nuance that can be imparted to the social and political fault lines it contains. This is a big-picture, broad-sweeping scenario, and it requires a commensurate effort in game prep.

That also makes it an ideal start-of-campaign adventure.

The Small Mystery

But that brought to mind a number of episodes of Columbo, and the way each shone a spotlight on a single small aspect of the world that he inhabited.

You start with the victim, and their interests and the social circles in which they moved as a result, including the immediate family with whom he was in contact; that is your initial suspect pool.

From this starting point, you seek to eliminate those suspects using one or more of the three elements. That means getting to know the social circle in question, what binds them together and what they do together, and the role that the deceased played in that society.

In some ways, this requires even more prep than the big mystery. Depiction of the society in question can’t be superficial, or the whole plot will ring hollow; so you need to do your research and understand that social circle clearly and in depth. Through exemplars and ‘guide characters’, often themselves suspects, you then need to communicate that research.

The fun comes when you contrast the game world with the real one within which you have conducted your research – how do those differences manifest in the activities of the social circle?

This makes the small mystery a doorway into the consequences of the (possibly) hidden history and assumptions that underpin the game world. A magnifying glass with a singularly useful focus, as it were.

The smaller mystery

Murder, is – pretty much by definition – an extremely intensely-focussed mystery. The consequences are so extreme that a substantial passion is required to justify the act, and often those strong feelings are one of the first clues as to the guilty party.

Take that passion away, take that crime away, and you are left with smaller passions and motives, and ‘smaller’ crimes. Fraud, theft, deception, embezzlement…

These mysteries are almost always about relationships – be it between people, between employer and employee, family members, or whatever – and about some form of betrayal of that relationship.

Even a seemingly random theft puts pressure on all the relationships of those affected as they come under suspicion of involvement; even if that suspicion proves unfounded, the consequences of that pressure will remain.

Value

The smaller mystery is ideal for taking an even smaller element of society and shining a spotlight on it. Instead of factories of type X or businesses of type Y, the focus is on this specific example and on the relationships of the individuals who comprise it.

For example, let’s say we’re talking about a payroll robbery. The first thing the GM needs to do is make it distinctive enough to attract the attention of the PCs (and, more importantly, the players).

“Two men, calling each other ‘H’ and ‘C’ respectively, wearing ski masks, robbed the payroll of Dwight Pemberton and Co. as it was being delivered to the personnel office. Despite the payroll consisting of more than 15,000 Lucarnos, the thieves only took 1, 424 Lucarnos – and ‘H’ handed back 68 sublucarnos in change.”

So L 1423.32 were stolen, when the thieves could have taken 15,000? And one even went to the effort of giving change to reach that exact amount? How bizarre – and right away, you have the audience hooked.

From that beginning, you then need to sustain the interest. There are two methods of doing so: one is to pile improbability on unlikelihood, perpetuating the strange nature of the crime; this rarely works well, and needs to be handled expertly to succeed. It’s a pity, then, that this is often the first resort.

The alternative is to work hard at making the characters encountered interesting and compelling. This erects a framework around the mystery that holds it together when additional equally-bizarre information comes to light about the original crime.

Distinctive characterization, eccentricities, strong opinions, angels and demons and those who seem a mixture of both – those are what the GM should focus on when dealing with a Smaller Mystery (once the hook is in place, of course).

From the GM’s perspective, the benefit of the smallest mysteries is the way it takes the big picture and zooms in to show the impact on specific individuals. It’s one thing to say that “there has been a shift in the political winds, and the city has been quietly gearing up for war” – and quite another to actually make that political ‘reality’ come to life.

The Inflating Mystery

Finally, let’s turn our attention to a fourth class of mystery that we GMs can rarely do without. This category are mysteries that start small and grow to reveal themselves as but the tip of an enormous iceberg.

The prototypical example of this is the Watergate scandal. A break-in at the political headquarters of the opposition party as the country heads toward an election is undoubtedly news, but it’s not very important news. The editor assigns the story to a couple of relatively junior reporters because if that’s all their is to it, it’s not worth the time of anyone more seasoned. They write their story and that’s the end of it.

But wait, there’s an added human-interest dimension – it seems the would-be burgers were fairly inept, so a followup for a laugh or two seems worth the effort. And then there comes to light an additional political dimension when it is revealed that the apparent motivation was the planting of microphones in order to spy on that opposition.

And so it goes, revelation leading to denial leading to cover-up leading to investigation leading to hearings leading to recordings and supreme court hearings and the Senate at odds with the White House and – two years later, after the election itself is history – to the shock resignation of a President.

The story just kept getting bigger, better, and juicier, until the ultimate head was rolled because of it..And those junior reporters went from unknowns to two of the most prominent journalists on the planet – everyone (at the time) knew who Woodward and Burnstein were.

So much for the archetype. This sort of mystery starts small and grows, usually involving either a scandal, or a conspiracy, or both. They tend to have long fuses, taking a long time to explode, and that’s the GM’s first problem right there – games don’t have the playing time to take all that long, it’s usually necessary to compress such time spans.

Technique

One of the best approaches is for much of the early (slow) action to have happened off-camera, possibly completely unnoticed by the PCs. They then become one of the multitudes who get caught up in the plot as the mystery grows.

1. Someone [NPC] sees something they shouldn’t, at work. They think nothing of it, simply route it to where it was supposed to go in the first place.

8+: And so on.

Analysis

Accidental discovery (1) leads to investigation (2) and an attempt to downplay the significance. When that doesn’t work because it’s clumsily done, (3) it leads to fear, and an initial attempt to damage the credibility of the discoverer while clumsy attempts are made to remove the discoverer. Things escalate in (4), leading to a more expert cover-up / distraction (5) and more serious attempts to silence the discoverer (6) and destroy any credibility they might have. There’s no smoke without fire, and (7) fills the room the PCs are in with (metaphoric) smoke, and bring about a new escalation in seriousness. This backstory can be told – with details – in only a few minutes, but there is clearly something rotten in the state of Denmark, as the saying goes.

More than simply exposing or examining some facet of the game society in which the PCs exist, this casts shadows (where there may have been none) and ultimately instigates change within that society. It can thrust the PCs into the spotlight of public awareness or provide more limited exposure as other people become the public face of the consequent investigation.

Another example of this is The Pelican Brief. But that’s a relatively slow build-up – in a movie, you can take that time. For a more suitable example for the pacing of a game version, there’s an episode of Scorpion that comes to mind, in which the ex-wife of their government handler is the sacrificial lamb in a plot fairly reminiscent of what I’ve described above (Season 1, episode 9, “Rogue Element”).

Mysteries, Big and Small

Because they can be difficult to do well, GMs sometimes avoid mystery plotlines. In doing so, they fail to see the value that can be added to a campaign using a mystery as a vehicle.

In the Star Trek: Next Generation episode, “Clues, {Season 4, Episode 14), the Enterprise crew awaken after an event that has a serious but trivial explanation. But clues begin to accumulate that all is not as it seems, creating a mystery – and, as Captain Picard later explains, human beings often find a mystery to be irresistible. We love to find, manufacture, or discover explanations for such events, be they big, small, or even trivial.

Your players are human beings, too – and just as susceptible to this allure. Harness it, and put it to work in the service of your campaigns – or, if you’re doing so already, use this article to sharpen your focus and improve your techniques.

The right mystery is out there, somewhere, waiting to illuminate some aspect or element of your campaign world while thrusting your players deep into immersion within your invented reality!

And now for something completely unrelated: A contest!

Evil Genius games are inviting the gaming community to participate in a contest relating to a planned reboot of Urban Arcana.

Participants are to pitch a magic setting for the Everyday Heroes core rules system, using 100 words* to explore “how magic exists in the modern world, the role of goodly races in society, and the state of monsters in this new world”.

*

The documents detailing the contest list a 200-word submission guideline. I’m not sure which one is correct, but 200 seems a lot better suited to the breadth of concept required than 100.

I can add that the 100-word limit comes from an early announcement, and the official web-page for the contest uses the 200-word limit.

So I would feel safe in advising you to do so, too.

UPDATE: I have been informed by Dave of Evil Genius that the initial limit was 100 but they decided to increase it before the contest began. So the 200-word limit is golden.

The winning pitch will be developed into a fully realized setting that will be included in the Everyday Arcana supplement, with the contest winner receiving full pay and credit for their contributions (my emphasis).

If you want to break into the ranks of the published gaming professionals, this could be your big break (but don’t expect to get rich off it alone, or even earn enough to give up your day job – it’s a starting point, not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow).

Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below – I’m not judging this contest / opportunity, I’m just telling you about it!

Submissions are open now, and will close on April 20th, 2023.

Everyday Heroes, the core

In February 2022, just over a year ago, at the conclusion of the main text of Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, I promoted the Kickstarter campaign for the core rules around which this contest is to be oriented. This should serve as a quick introduction to the context and system core. It’s your starting point, in other words, if you’ve never read the rules themselves.

And, of course, it has a link to that Kickstarter page, even though the project came to fruition long ago, which will deepen your knowledge of the core concepts embedded within.

Urban Arcana, the setting

The Urban Arcana setting is “a magical world set in modern times, complete with the origin of magic and the fate of elder races such as elves, dwarves, and halflings.

“Imagine a world where magic is real, and the impossible becomes possible. But how did this magic come into existence? Was it a gift from the gods, or the result of a long-forgotten experiment that went awry? Your proposal should delve into the origins of magic and how it has shaped the world we know today, as well as explore its effects on the modern world and its people.

“The elder races, with their centuries-old wisdom and knowledge, have their own story to tell. How have they adapted to a world that has changed beyond recognition, and what role do they play in the present day? Your proposal should explore the struggles and triumphs of these ancient beings and their relationship with the world they now live in.”

Even with 200 words, there’s barely enough space to posit a general concept. Submissions are going to have to be lean and efficient.

Semi-finals

Ten semi-finalists will be invited to write a 1,000-word proposal expanding on their pitch. The semi-finalists will be announced on May 5, 2023.

These 1,000 word submissions will be accepted from May 8th to June 9th, at midnight EST.

Semi-finalists will be paid for this submission.

Finalists

From the submitted semi-finalists, three finalists will be chosen. These will be announced on June 26th, 2023.

These will then be judged in a public vote, which will run from June 26th through to Midnight EST of July 14th.

Winner!

The winner will be announced on August 3rd, 2023. That winner will be hired by Evil Genius to transform their 1,000 word submission into a 50,000-word history of the magical world of Everyday Heroes.

Restrictions, Terms, and Conditions

Anyone who wants to enter should read Section 9 of Evil Genius Gaming’s Terms and Conditions page.

Most of it should be obvious, but it needs to be pointed out anyway.

Content

The intention is for this to be a serious reboot, with no constraints deriving from older versions. “We are looking for someone with an inspiration for what direction to take the world in. We don’t have many preconceptions other than the general notion of fantasy content in a modern setting.”

Your Rivals

So far, over 300 interested parties have made contact with Evil Genius. So there will be plenty of competition. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s bad if you get dispirited, decide that you have no chance of winning, and give up without even trying.

It’s good if this spurs you on, knowing that if you do get the nod as a semi-finalist, your creation will have earned serious credibility – and some of that glory will be reflected back onto you.

Campaign Mastery’s Advice on your best chance of success

Some of this is going to be mutually contradictory. Make of it what you will, this is strictly my personal opinions.

You have to impress whoever is judging the contest at Evil Genius Games. That means your entry has to be original, interesting, innovative, and easily-grasped – not necessarily in that order. It has to fit the overall core concepts of the Everyday Heroes system.

You also have to impress, and appeal to, and interest, the voting public. That means it has to be original, interesting, innovative, enticing, distinctive, and possessing of vision and scope, while still having traditional values and scope (and you thought the first part was hard!) – again, not necessarily in that order.

On top of that, you will need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with minimal wasted verbiage (which probably puts me out of the running, ha ha). Conveying color will be vital, but never at the expense of clarity – or even delaying that clarity.

Don’t waste a single word of your 200 words. Don’t waste a single word of your 1,000 words, if you get that far!

Very, very few will be able to tick all of those boxes. That means that most of the rival submissions won’t do so, either.

Finally, inconsistencies and logical holes can always be papered over – but only if you get the chance. Better by far to weed these out before anyone else gets to read word one of your concept. Not that you have a lot of words to waste on them to start with!

More Information

Evil Genius will make more details available for those that sign up to get info.

To do so, head for this web page and scroll down to the big red button. Or you can click on the image at the start of this announcement.

And yes, I have an idea for an entry of my own…

The best of luck to anyone who enters! Again, though:

Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below!

Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Most people – and I include many players and GMs in that grouping – have no idea how tiring it can be to run a game, and try to do it well.

For many years, I didn’t notice it, either; my reserves of stamina were sufficient that I could happily GM for 5 hrs, take a break, GM for another 4 1/2 hours, take another break, and be good to go for 5 hours more.

I can’t do that any more, and I recently realized that there was a point somewhere in between having that capacity and now when I might have been semi-capable of such longevity but should not try to exercise it.

There is also likely to be some truth in the statement that doing that sort of thing regularly helps you do that sort of thing regularly. It’s like any other form of exercise, right?

The GMing Crash

These days, in theory, we start play at around 1PM and wrap up at about 4:45, giving players time to pack and catch the 5:04 Bus. In practice, it’s often about 1:30, and the last minutes are a mad scramble with play overlapping with packing up until around 4:55. And there’s usually a five- or ten-minute break somewhere in the middle, sometimes two.

GMIng is an incredible adrenaline rush; you’re operating at the highest level you can manage, especially if you have a significant group of players.

• You’re keeping track of multiple conversational threads (including a couple only in your head),
• multiple story lines (at least one for each character),
• employing a laser-like focus on the immediate situation….
• ….in a fantastic and utterly non-existent reality that only fully exists in your mind,
• deciding how best to manifest that reality in the minds of your players (frequently using nothing but your voice and descriptive prowess)
• …and never losing sight of the big picture and the broader narrative.
• In complex campaign structures, you may be keeping track of half-a-dozen intertwining plot threads at the same time.
• You’re also keeping the identities, motivations, intentions, actions, and capabilities of as many as a dozen individuals in your head at the same time,
• ….and remaining aware of how those personalities interact with those plot lines, reacting to developments and pivoting the course of any or all of them on a dime.

Sounds impossible, right? It’s easier than it sounds, but that doesn’t make it easy. It’s like a sporting achievement for all that it’s intellectual in nature.

Good prep makes it easier. What ‘good prep’ means varies from campaign to campaign, and one of the things that we get better at with experience is intentionally designing that definition into the campaign so that it better fits our circumstances – initially, as those circumstances are, and later, as we expect them to be going forward.

“Sustainability” has a double-meaning when it comes to GMing.

As soon as play stops and the goodbye-see-you-next-time-hope-you-had-fun-today’s begin, the adrenaline begins to wear off. About half and hour after it’s all said and done, I absolutely crash; I feel like I’ve run a marathon, at least mentally. Those few hours feel like a full day’s work at the highest intensity possible, and they leave me utterly exhausted.

Collaboration

For the Adventurer’s Club campaign, I collaborate with the original creator of the campaign. We get together once or twice a week for about 10 hours in total; half that time is spent socializing, and about half is devoted to writing the next, or a future, adventure.

Currently, we are playing the 32nd adventure in the campaign (not counting a couple of last-minute off-the-cuff fill-ins), “The Hidden City”; Number 33. “Lucifer Rising” is almost in the can and ready to go (I have one illustration to finish); and Number 34, “The Kindness Of Strangers” is coming along nicely. Work on numbers 35 through 38 is at an early stage, and we have outlines for at least ten more beyond that.

Those collaborative sessions are as intense and busy with problem-solving (sometimes through a haze of mental myopia) as running a game.

Which only makes sense, when you think about it a bit – when planning and writing an adventure, you have almost all the things in your head that actually go into the running of that adventure, and all the alternative ways that things could go – and you are constantly trying to winnow things down to the best choices, even if the differences that result won’t be noticed until game sessions later.

Always, we try to be guided by five questions (in sequence of priority high to low):

1. What is best for the campaign?
2. What is best for the adventure?
3. What will be the most fun for the players?
4. What is the most campaign-appropriate?
5. What is the most genre-appropriate?

As a result, about an hour after he goes for the day, I experience a GMing Crash that is usually only a little less severe than the one caused by actually GMing for a like period of time.

Solo Prep

Solo prep, where you are doing it all on your own, is usually a lot less stressful and intense. You can stop whenever you want to, take breaks as necessary, and – if you’ve followed the advice offered in other articles here at Campaign Mastery- in particular,
 

• To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 3: Preparations,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures, and, most important of all,
• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity (which lays out a process for prioritization)

– even if you only follow the advice in principle – then you know that you’ve hit the most important parts of the game prep and are going to be as ready as you can be.

Sustained effort is still exhausting, of course, but it takes a solid 10-14 hours of game prep to achieve the same levels of fatigue. You can get an awful lot done in that sort of time-frame!

In fact, my guideline for solo prep is 1 1/2 to 2 times the playing time usually produces a playable outcome if the work is prioritized correctly. Anything that can contribute to future adventures as well as the immediate one can either be counted on top of that basic game prep requirement, or can be amortized over the entire spread of adventures to which it is going to be relevant.

That means that if you are creating an NPC who will appear in four adventures, only 1/4 of the prep time involved should apply to this particular adventure. And if said NPC is not going to appear in this adventure at all, but is going to influence it, that counts, too.

But it’s usually too much work splitting hairs that way, taking time that can be put to better use – so I simply tack it on as extra to the normal and move on.

Game prep can be pleasurable, but it’s not often fun – and that encapsulates the intensity concerned, which in turn indexes the scale of the GM crash that follows.

Image by mohamed_hassan from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Excessive Prep Needs

There are times when the time available is simply not enough, or – worse still – you underestimate the prep required (or lose yourself down one of the many creative rabbit-holes that can eat time faster than a black hole consumes a light lunch).

When this happens, you have only three options:

1. Work like a dog trying to achieve an acceptable prep standard in the time remaining, even if it costs you sleep or interferes with other activities;
2. Inform the players that prep is taking longer than expected, and the next game has to be deferred/canceled as a result;
3. Create or unpack a fill-in adventure that is deliberately designed to be low-prep (even if it means interrupting an ongoing adventure) to buy yourself more prep time. If you choose this option, turn your attention to the fill-in adventure immediately.

Options 1 and 2 are clearly extremes, Option 3 is a somewhere in-between.

Which one you choose depends on two factors: How often you play, and How late in the process you realize the situation you’re in.

How Often You Play

The more frequently you get together, the less important it is if – on rare occasions – you have to miss a session. Option 1 beckons, with Option 3 as a backup.

In fact, it’s possible to have a second campaign (even if it’s run under another GM) established as an on-going backup solution. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens by accident, but it is the sort of idea that good planning can produce – because you will probably need it at some point!

How Late In The Process

The closer you are to game day, the closer you are to the prep finish line – and that makes Option 2 more attractive, again with option 3 as a backup.

Confronted by these circumstances, you then have to make a second, harder, choice: you can either set the main adventure aside long enough to prep the fill-in to an absolute minimum standard, with the intent to run a lot of it ad-hoc (see the many articles listed under “GM Improv” on the Game Mastering page of the Blogdex and the section on Ad-hoc adventures on the Adventures page of the same resource – in both cases, it’s the last section of the page, so scroll to the bottom and work up).

Again, there are those who advocate having a fill-in adventure prepped and on standby; I have done so, myself. The problem is that it’s entirely too easy to go overboard when you do this, and before you know it, you have something that’s just as rich and complex as your regular adventures – and takes just as much time and effort to prep.

You can get around that by not developing more than a singe-paragraph outline of the fill-in adventure, leaving all other prep work for when you actually need the fill-in. This is a compromise, but it’s not a bad one. Equally, you can draw any other line in the creative and metaphoric sand that you want to use, the principle remains the same.

Enough Sleep?

I mentioned, in the context of option 2 of the ‘too much prep to do’ solutions, a key term: Sleep. I’ll have more to say about it in relation to avoiding the GMing Crash, but first I want to look at the question of how much a lack of sleep impacts on the GM Crash itself.

At an absolute minimum, I need about 5 1/2 hours sleep before I can GM. If I’m half-an-hour short of that, it brings the Crash forward about 15 minutes, and starts a “droop phase” about 15 minutes before that.

A “Droop Phase” is when you are starting to struggle with fatigue, impairing your decision-making, concentration, and reaction time. Just as the adventure is coming to a climax for the day is possibly the worst time for this to happen, exceeded only by the climax of the whole adventure, or the climax of the whole campaign.

A second half-hour short brings forward the Crash by 5-10 minutes and begins the Droop Phase 15 minutes earlier again.

It’s when sleep drops below that four-and-a-half hours that things really take a turn for the severe. In fact, in my experience, if you are going to get less than that, you are better off not going to bed at all – but I’m a night owl most of the time.

Every half-hour below 4½ hours sleep brings forward the GM Crash by about 15 minutes and the Droop phase by about 25 minutes.

Let’s count those up:

• 5½ hrs Sleep = Crash 30-60 mins after the game
• 5 hrs Sleep = Crash 15-45 mins after the game, droop for 15 mins before that
• 4½ hrs Sleep = Crash 5-35 mins after the game, droop for 30 mins before that
  — Note the risk of droop commencing during play
• 4 hrs Sleep = Crash between 10 mins before game end and 20 mins after, droop for 55 mins before that
• 3½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 25 mins before game end and 5 mins after, droop for 80 mins before that
• 3 hrs Sleep = Crash between 40 mins and 10 mins before game end, droop for 105 mins before that (1 hr 45 min).
  — Compromised performance for up to 1/2 the game session.
• 2½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 55 mins and 25 mins before game end, droop for 130 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for more than 1/2 the game session.
• 2 hrs Sleep = Crash between 70 mins and 40 mins before game end, droop for 155 mins before that (2 hrs 35 min)
• 1½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 85 mins and 55 mins before game ends, droop for 180 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for almost the entire game session.
• 1 hr Sleep = Crash between 100 mins and 70 mins before game ends, droop for 205 mins before that.
  — High probability of Compromised performance for the whole game session.
• ½ hr Sleep = Crash between 115 mins and 85 mins before game ends; droop for 230 mins before that.
  — Virtual certainty of Compromised performance for the whole game session.

Image by Amr from Pixabay

No sleep at all is about as bad as getting that full 4½ hours sleep, but it makes the eventual Crash more severe, and typically requires an early night afterwards.

To some extent, a lack of sleep the night before can be ameliorated by getting ample sleep in the nights before that – typically, 3-4 nights worth, running. I haven’t factored this in because it can be quite variable. The other crash mitigation techniques offered below can also assist to at least some extent (but there are limits).

Sleep quality is another ignored factor here – suffice it to say that if your sleep quality is poor, for whatever reason, you need more of it to reach the same levels of restedness!

Note that this is all in terms of my personal experience, it may be better or worse for you, just as it used to be much better for me – before my sleep started to be compromised by bodily aches and pains, for example!
.

Why do I call it a Crash? What Happens?

When you Crash, your thinking becomes woolly (you might prefer the term fuzzy) in the extreme, your judgment is largely irrelevant because it’s hard to concentrate enough to actually make a decision, and if you relax for more than a moment, you are likely to drop off – it might be for minutes or for an hour or more. You will remain prone to nodding off for the rest of the evening.

None of this sleep can be considered quality sleep; you will awaken eventually, but will not experience much in the way of recuperation from your fatigue. It takes 1½-3 hrs of such dozing to recover – and that’s enough that it can disturb your usual sleep patterns. But a protracted doze will bring you back to the level of exhaustion that you should feel after being awake for as long as you were at the time you dropped off, or thereabouts.

Which means that you are then good for another 5 hours or more of activity, and will find it hard to actually go to sleep for a like time-span..

Playing through a Crash

Droop happens in spite of the stimulation provided by play, and so does a crash – to at least some extent. If you can actually restart play, or employ any of the amelioration processes below, you can usually reboot yourself enough to return to the GMing chair.

That does not mean that it won’t affect your GMing – it will. Your decision making will be poor, and if the action level ever pauses, even for a little while, you can still Crash to the point of dozing off, mid-game.

It’s a far from ideal situation.

Partial Solutions

There are no magic bullets. You’ve been working hard, and grow fatigued as a result, and that’s only natural.

But there are a few things that can lesson a crash in severity and even combat droop for hours – enough to present a facade of normality, even at the game table. These have been proven to work, at least in my case, even though some of them are a little counter-intuitive.

Exercise

Mild exercise – walking or jogging for a few minutes – can be enough to make the Crash a soft landing. One of the other reasons I call it a crash is because of the suddenness with which the fatigue strikes, and at least part of that is the adrenaline rush wearing off. This stimulates a more gentle downslope, such that your energy levels might be a little low for the rest of the evening, but you are otherwise fit to engage in other activities.

Stimulation

It’s not enough to turn on music or call up a movie or TV show that you want to watch; you need something dynamic which prompts an actual response from you. The music only works if you get up and dance.

Computer games are a better choice, because they are interactive. Conversation is a good choice for the same reason. In both cases, though, beware lulls in the action – the Crash is lurking and can strike given the least opportunity.

Napping

You can take the edge off a Crash with a 15-30 minute nap. This requires someplace totally devoid of stimulation (no conversations audible) and as comfortable as possible – and an alarm. Set it for 20 or 30 minutes. When you awaken, splash some cold water into your eyes and proceed with the measure below.

(Legal) Stimulants

Drink a cup of hot tea or coffee. Cold drinks don’t work as well. Make it black if you can, as milk becomes a soporific when heated.

If you must have milk, energy drinks like Red Bull and V are probably a slightly better option unless you can drink the resulting hot beverage very quickly.

The idea here is to create a quick rush of energy to cause a softer landing – just as with exercise.

Fatigue-minimization techniques

There are a number of other fatigue-minimization techniques listed as part of my article, Tourism in Sleepland: Sleep management for GMs & other creative people (be warned, it’s a long one). You may not be able to use some of them, but others can be of value in this situation – a hot/cold/hot shower, for example, need only take five or ten minutes. If you are going to play again, tell your players that you need to take a few minutes to perk yourself up.

To that general advice, I can add one thing more: discomfort is the enemy of fatigue, especially being cold. Being comfortable or warm is the enemy of alertness when you are fatigued. The trick is to ensure that any cooling or heating goes far enough.

Using these techniques, a GM Crash can be minimized or even seem to be avoided (I’m not confident that the avoidance is complete). They can be enough to enable you to carry on GMing – maybe not at your sparkling best, but close enough for everyone to be entertained. Or, they can be enough that you can carry on working for the rest of your normal day, or to permit you to relax and watch something of interest without falling asleep in the middle of it.

In other words, they can bring you back to something approaching a normal condition. I never thought that I’d need them for that, but if – like me – you do, you now have the tools to defeat the dreadful GMing Crash.

Art from Subversion. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact.

Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I never seem to remember how much work goes into one, by the same token – if they started showing up all the time, I might be less eager!

This time around, I have just such a product / campaign to tell you about (and I hope to have another in a month or so!)

There are a number of things that RPGs do poorly, despite many attempts through the years.

Two of these are moral systems and the integration of computer-interface time scales with real-world time. Close behind these two come the integration of technology with magic, and keeping pace with the last (perhaps a half-step ahead or behind) is the integration of different combat styles.

It follows that any serious attempt to better the high-water mark in any of these areas is going to be of interest to a great many players and GMs whether or not the game itself is something they might want to play.

Which brings me to Subversion by Fragging Unicorns Games.

Subversion

Subversion is a new RPG being delivered and enhanced by a Kickstarter fundraising program. As I write this, the campaign has 17 days to go, but by the time you read it, that is likely to be 16 days or less.

This is a fantasy game in a Cybertech environment. The setting is “Neo Babylon”, where the ruling populace are wealthy, powerful, technologically enlightened, corrupt, and self-serving (sounds fairly typical of a Cyberpunk setting, doesn’t it?)

Most characters in such environments are expected to be anarchists opposed to the status quo (which casts them in the role of the downtrodden). While they cooperate out of necessity, they are individualistic, competitive, and prone to go their own way at the drop of a hat somewhere clear across town.

Subversion, on the other hand, has ambitions to establish a different relationship between characters with an altogether more-interesting take on these two classic genres. So, let’s talk about those intractable problems for a moment, and how they shed light on potential interest in this RPG beyond the borders of its actual content.

Tech and Magic

PCs in Subversion are representatives of communities striving to survive and prosper in a world subject to rapid change from “powerful magic, pervasive technology, wondrous creatures and Babylonian Gods”.

All of these save the technology have, for millennia, defined power by proximity to these forces, but now corporations and the technology that empowers them are challenging the old world order.

Right away, that all ticks the “Tech v Magic” box, then.

Morality Systems

Each of the seven major species – Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Humans, Orcs, Yettin, and Harmaku (winged humanoids) – are envoys of a community of that species, with their own unique ability combination, “determined to protect and advance their communities while remaining true to their own ideals”, to paraphrase the blurb text.



Art from Subversion, brightened slightly by Mike. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

The game is focused on community, direct action, revolution, hope for the future, and commonality of interest, all being confronted by “runaway technology, unchecked power, and dangerous secrets”.Differing social values and the relationships between them are buried beneath the surface but essential driving forces to the game dynamic, especially the confrontation between capitalism and nationalism.

The PCs are cast as heroes who need to collaborate with the envoys of the other races or be plouwed under. Diversity and relationships are critical to success.

This takes issues of moral standards out of the province of the individual and places them where they truly belong, elements of the society from which the individuals derive. Each individual has to then interpret the imperatives of their communal behavioral standards into a personal ethos by which to live, and hopefully, prosper – just as it is in real life.

When PCs act in accordance with their defined values, for good or ill, they are rewarded; when they oppose these values (for convenience, to help a friend, or another reason), they are confronted with consequences and may even have to make amends.

The Communities that each PC represents are partially created by the GM and partly by the player; giving joint ownership of the results to both; this encourages both to create a community that is interesting and one that the player wants to represent and exemplify. The more creative the player, the more deeply this relationship can extend; we’re talking a package deal in which the player has at least some creative control not only over the individual but the background that drives and defines them.

This is the element that is predominantly missing in most Cyberpunk campaign concepts, directly responsible for the ‘collection of misfit anarchists’ philosophy common to the genre, so right away, this RPG promises to be something profoundly different.

Even more significantly, it presents a template for other campaigns to follow to achieve the same result. This directly opposes the conceptual core of “Murder Hobos” without forcing draconian restraints on the characters. It can be argued that this is exactly what D&D and Pathfinder have been missing all their many years!

Combat Styles

Subversive is built around what the authors are describing as a “unique paradigm system” that “lets players build tons of customization into their characters, not just in how well PCs can fight”. Paradigms are “like mini-classes that you can dip into as much or as little as you like.”

The rules system is described as “medium complexity” but “easy to learn”. It’s primary mechanical philosophies orient around two principles: “Make storytelling easy and fun” and “make character advancement meaningful and worthwhile”.

At the core of the mechanics is the skill test, which is a dice mechanic unlike those of any other RPG I’ve seen. It’s sort of half-way between the Hero System and my own Sixes system, with heavy admixtures of the basic mechanics common to RPGs from the early days of D&D forward.

With each Community and Species being so individually distinctive, their philosophy and approach to battle will inevitably be equally distinctive. The diversity of challenges that can confront the PCs is such that no one solution to such problems will be universal; tactics will need to evolve to become optimized, and that can only happen if the combat styles mesh in terms of game mechanics.

This is not stated outright in the materials reviewed, but even the promise of doing so through the mechanics incorporated makes this product of interest to anyone who runs any other genre-mutable campaign or environment – and they are all of that nature to at least some extent.

D&D / Pathfinder, for example, blends the martial and the magical and sometimes the spiritual. Superhero games blend all of these in even more diverse combinations. Horror games like Call Of Cthulhu blend the spiritual with technological forms of combat (and reserve the traditional martial as a last-ditch option). I could go on, but you get the point.

Computer Time

Even less explicitly addressed is this issue. And yet, there are nuggets of information that imply the presence of this issue within the mechanics, and it is – to at least some extent – inherently a part of any cyberpunk system.

So the game makes no promises, but if the mechanics are not broken in this respect, there is the implication of a solution. For some GMs and genres, this alone might be worth the price of admission!

That all sounds quite promising, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The setting

I’ve already mentioned this but it’s worth pulling in some other descriptive text from the campaign page to expand on the point.

The core of the setting is the city of “Neo Babylon”, and a map of the city is provided along with, presumably, other setting details – organizations, businesses, and the like. That would hold a certain value in some campaigns all on its own.

Cropped excerpt of the map of Neo Babylon from Subversion. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

But there’s more: “The story of Subversion is set against the rival powers that are currently fighting for control, wealth, and power in Neo Babylon. The old masters, the Ukkim council, hoard magic like secrets and their old money and old magic still has preeminence. But the explosion of cybertech has meant that the power gap between the magical haves and have-nots is closing. Corporations, guilds, and even organized crime lords are now every bit as threatening … as the Arcanist mages.”

The richness and diversity of the stories and campaigns that could be told from this starting point are simply breathtaking. Anything from…

• …a superhero campaign (modeled, perhaps, more closely upon the Legion Of Superheros, where each character is an exemplar of a particular species, with the abilities that make that species unique are that character’s ‘powers’)…
• …to a Cthulhu-esque plot in which the ruling overlords summon something they shouldn’t in a bid to regain lost dominance…
• …or a more general steampunk interpretation…
• …perhaps even a pulp / sci-fi riff in which the PCs have to uncover the hidden past that not even those old masters know as clearly as they think…
• …or maybe a “Pirates Of The Caribbean” -inspired riff of corporate commercialization vs the freedom to be an individual.

That’s a lot of diversity. And, of course, they can all blend and run together, nuancing some common thread (the PCs).

One of the stretch goals of the campaign is a separate map of the city. That’s a $60,000 target (presumably USD) – it comes after extra artwork (the primary motive for the Kickstarter campaign), two adventure PDFs, and a fiction anthology. The only one that I would question is the last – I think the separate map might be a more attractive goal than the fiction add-on, myself.

Campaign Status

Art from Subversion’s Kickstarter campaign, layout slightly compressed by Mike. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

The campaign was 200% funded in 4 hrs, 32 minutes (and 34 seconds). It’s currently sitting at AUD $66,253, which is about $44,850 USD.

Which means that the two adventure PDFs are already funded and the campaign is almost half-way to the fiction anthology add-on. It seems very likely to me that the campaign will achieve that $60,000 level and may even reach the stretch goal beyond it – a third adventure at $75000. I’m not quite so sure that the top tier bonus, a GMs screen at $100K, will be reached.

That still makes this an eminently successful fundraising campaign.

Other Opinions

There’s often not a lot of interest on Kickstarter pages once you get past the Risks section (and that tends to be fairly boilerplate). This time, it’s different – there are excerpts from playtesting feedback and reviews that make for very interesting reading.

I have no doubt that these are at least partially responsible for the success described above. I wanted to include a couple of excerpts from these quotes in this review.

• “The rules were intuitive and easy to understand.”
• “The dice mechanic is honestly one of the coolest I’ve seen in a while.”
• “Every time I climb to a higher rooftop to shout the praises of this setting it just affords [me] a better view of everything it has to offer.”
• “The game’s focus on community makes it stand out … and intertwines perfectly with the … mechanics and themes in a way I’ve never seen before.”
• “I … often find myself at odds with the mercenary and criminal elements that are common in the [cyberpunk] setting. Subversion is a breath of fresh air with its focus on community building, humanistic character creation, and central theme of fighting against oppression and corruption.”

One other comment referred to the values-infusion brought to their approach by Fragging Unicorns Games, but I thought I’d close this article by giving them a chance to speak for themselves in the form of one or two more quote from the Kickstarter page:

“FUG (Fragging Unicorns Games) is trying to make the world a better place, one game at a time.

“We want to be decent people. We don’t want to step on people on our way up. We want to see things and do things differently.

“We’ve gathered diverse, inclusive, and good-hearted people to be the best there is at being cool. To everyone. For everyone.”

But it does make me feel old to realize that they are all about half my age….

So, there you have it

There are a lot of reasons to back this Kickstarter, in fact to kick it up to a next level of funding, and not a lot of good reasons not to.

To join what is already a sizable crowd, click on this link, or on any of the illustrations that adorn this article.

And tell ’em that Mike sent you!

I used careful scaling, blurring, sharpening, cropping, framing, contrast enhancement and black tinting to turn a single base image into a story told in a sequence of five panels, because I lost too much detail in that base image when I scaled it to fit. The Base Image was by elukac from Pixabay

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests and spokesmen to interrogate the deity in question directly.

One of those central questions is ‘Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?’ The stock answer is a platitude about ‘God’s Plan’ that (to me) always seems to evade the question and is never satisfactory to those receiving it.

This was a problem that was considered very carefully in crafting Cyrene, the deity and her mythos in Assassin’s Amulet (see The Creation Of A Deity: The Origins Of Cyrene and Cyrene Revealed: an excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet – the first is the backstory of the creation and the second an edited excerpt of the content from the game supplement itself).

Today’s post is going to offer a number of better answers for you to put into the mouths of priests and deities in your game world for use when tragedies strike people who don’t deserve such misfortune.

Some Caveats and Important Contextual Notes

I’m NOT trying to convert anyone, here. If you have faith, that’ wonderful for you. If you don’t believe in higher powers, that’s fine, too – but it only makes it more imperative that you have reasonably convincing answers to put into the mouths of your NPCs when this (and similar issues) arise, for the sake of plausibility if nothing else.

The problem with presenting this sort of list is that it directly challenges GMs to answer the question of why these answers are not sufficient for them in real life – and those can be uncomfortable questions to answer. I have my own answers to those questions, but I’m not here to force them on anyone else.

Again, I’m not trying to create controversy, here. This is strictly an intellectual exercise regarding one philosophical aspect of the simulated unreality in which our games take place, nothing more.

So, without further ado, let’s talk a little turkey…

1. Toughen Them Up

It is often said that mothers, and those who suffer from some sort of ongoing medical problem causing pain, have a higher pain threshold. Certainly, most military organizations seem to operate on the belief that pain experienced in a controlled environment (basic training) makes soldiers more resilient under combat conditions, when the lives of the soldier, and the other members of his unit, stand in the balance. That principle – toughen ‘them’ up, either directly or indirectly, so that they become fit to be ‘soldiers of [God]’, can be used to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Consider the logic: if bad things happened to bad people, it can be perceived as simple justice, and no-one save those who fall into the category of ‘bad people’ can be expected to learn a thing. These are not going to be inclined to be ‘good soldiers’, no matter how many object lessons they experience.

The preferred recruit is always going to be a ‘good person’ (from the perspective of the recruiting sergeant). Therefore, these people should suffer more, not less, to equip them to fight and survive.

But a deity who is seen to be unjust and a persecutor will find it hard to attract recruits – so the optimum balance is achieved by distributing pain and ill-fortune as evenhandedly as possible. It’s just that there’s an ulterior motive for the suffering of the worthy and spiritual.

2. Egalitarian Worship

If all men are created equal, and all are treated equally by the god(s), with no room for fear nor favor, it encourages people to see others as their equals. No favored sons permitted. Gods can’t spare their followers, because the faith of those followers will then become a crutch, a way of avoiding punishment, a way for the unworthy to swell the ranks of the worthy. One bad apple can contaminate the whole bunch.

This goes far beyond ‘you get what you deserve’ or ‘as ye sew, so shall ye reap’. It elevates thinking of yourself or your group as ‘special’ or ‘chosen’ to one of the ultimate sins, in the eyes of the deity.

The flip side of this particular coin is that this is a particularly heartless philosophy, one devoid of empathy. You can either embrace that, or you can compensate for it with greater empathy in other ways.

For example, the price of a Healing Deity making a cure available for every ailment might be for everyone to suffer equally, no matter how much the deity might wish it did not have to be so – ‘no pain, no gain’.

There is a deep-set implication of some sort of ‘cosmic balance’ that is served by this egalitarian approach; the nature of that balance should be the subject of deeper thought by the GM.

3. Balance Of Good And Evil

Speaking of deeper balances, let’s talk about elementary account-keeping. In order to spend, you have to have money – that’s fairly basic. Even if you borrow money, you have to repay that debt, usually with interest, making things more expensive in the long run.

In order to bestow suffering on those who do not worship a deity, that deity might need to build up their ‘bank balance’ by forcing the faithful to suffer. Of course, having a greater bank of suffering built up than you inflict upon the non-faithful would be cruel; so this world-view only works if the deity ‘spends’ every cent they accrue.

Bad things happen to good people so that bad people can be made to suffer.

Or, contrariwise, it might be that bad things happen to good people to accrue the capital for good things to be done to good people. It’s just another interpretation of the same basic philosophy.

In most campaigns, it is the faith of the followers that is the fundamental ‘power unit’ of what the deity does. This proposal suggests that it is not their faith that matters, it is the suffering inflicted on the faithful – the matter of their faith simply determines to whom the resulting ‘credit’ will accrue.

I, personally, find this to be a very bleak and dystopian concept, and hence one that would suit a very bleak and dystopian game world.

4. A Harsh Education

‘Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind’. In many game environments, Gods are limited, not omnipotent, even within their pantheistic role. Gods inflict pain on worshipers because painful things will happen anyway, and the caring Deity wants to equip their followers to survive in a hostile and harsh reality.

This philosophy works particularly well if there are one or more groups of antipathetic non-Deities – Devils, Demons, etc – who are outside the control of the Gods, and who inflict suffering for their own perverted pleasure / gain. It can even be seen as immunizing the faithful against the far worse suffering that the faithful may encounter, because the Gods can’t protect people against everything all the time.

There’s a lot of resemblance between this philosophy and that of justification number one, above. This is also a very paternal / maternal concept, reflective of the ‘strict parent’.

5. An Appreciation Of Contrast

This is, perhaps, the answer that most accords with my own personal philosophy – without the occasional bad time, you have no appreciation of how good the ‘good times’ actually are, in fact you are more inclined to take them for granted.

No-one who has not suffered from some chronic medical problem fully appreciates the occasional pain-free day, or so it seems to those who do so suffer. Certainly, those subject to chronic disease are far more appreciative of ‘good days’ when they happen to occur.

Gods can inflict suffering just so that the faithful can properly appreciate a lack of suffering. After all, it may be beyond the power of a Deity to bestow a life that is any better than a lack of suffering.

This plays into the attitude of many horror stories about wishes like The Monkey’s Paw – the concept that life is a zero-sum game and that one person’s reward has to be built upon the suffering of one or more others. There is only so much ‘wealth’ in the world, this theory runs – whether that ‘wealth’ is good fortune, or prosperity, or health, or whatever – and anyone being gifted such wealth requires it to be withdrawn from someone else. Over the whole of a society, the best that a deity may be able to do is provide a lack of suffering – most of the time.

‘Into each day of sunshine, a little rain must fall; into each deluge, there will be a break in the weather, an eye in the storm’.

In a metaphysical sense, suffering could be said to occur because someone, somewhere, is depriving others of their fair share of good fortune. Greed can be satisfied only by the suffering of others. It follows that greed for more than one’s fair share of those good things listed earlier will eventually be harshly punished. But, until that happens, a lot of other people will suffer through the actions of satisfying that persons greed and ambition.

6. A Test Of Faith

It’s easy to be faithful when that faith is never put to the test. Gods may inflict pain on their worshipers to test their faith, seeking to identify the elite, who can then be rewarded either in this life or the next. This concept is endemic within the Christian faith, where only the ‘worthy’ will be welcomed into heaven. It reeks of elitism.

But there can be many subtle variations. Perhaps the elite are to be singled out to perform in the direct service of a deity in the protection of the general populace from a worse fate – this is an ‘officer candidate school’ equivalent of the ‘basic training’ concept offered as justification number 1. The testing is to see who can be trusted with the power and authority that the Deity grants to the elite in his service – and the freedom and independence that power and authority bestow.

Heaven is for sheep, in this worldview – anyone can earn their way into it. It’s enduring the suffering without losing faith that is the pathway to real rewards.

No-one who subscribes to this philosophical approach can do so fully without having read Robert Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy Of Justice” (link is to Amazon, available in Hardcover, Paperback, and Audio CD – the printed versions are reasonably priced, I will get a small commission if you purchase).

Job is the story of God persecuting a worshiper to prove to Satan how strong that worshiper’s faith is. This persecution takes the form of shifting the worshiper from his native world to others at random intervals while throwing the promises of rewards at him and then snatching them away. Enduring a shipwreck, an earthquake, and a series of world-changes Alex and Margrethe work their way from Mexico back to Kansas as dishwasher and waitress.

Whenever they manage to make some stake, an inconveniently timed change into a new alternate reality throws them off their stride (once, the money they earned is left behind in another reality; in another case, the paper money earned in a Mexico which is an empire becomes worthless in another Mexico which is a republic). These repeated misfortunes, clearly effected by some malevolent entity, make the hero identify with the Biblical Job.

The protagonist, Alex, attributes these misfortunes to Satan, while Margrethe attributes them to Loki (she is a pagan by Alex’s philosophy). As they near their destination they are separated by the Rapture – Margrethe worships Odin, and pagans do not go to Heaven. Finding that the reward for his faith (eternity as promised in the Book of Revelation) is worthless without her, Alex journeys through timeless space in search of his lost lady, taking him to Hell and beyond.

— Summary partially excerpted from this Wikipedia page. I can’t go into much more detail without spoiling the book for anyone who hasn’t read it.

If you are one of those unfortunates who haven’t read ‘Job’, it is definitely worth your time. Be warned, Christians may find it challenging.

7. The Chess Player

Moving on, we have a variation on the omniscient omnipotent “not a sparrow falls” / “God’s plan” concept, in which the Deity is a master manipulator who is steering humanity (or part thereof, or equivalent) toward some end that only he / she can perceive – but which is so worthwhile that any short-term pain inflicted is amply justified.

Problems with predestination can be avoided by having some other agency actively working to oppose this idyllic future, causing the Deity in question to continually revise his plans and strategies.

I’ve used this basic concept (usually in the form of a Pantheon vs Something Else) a number of times.

My superhero campaign contains a deliberate progression at a metaphysical level – from us vs them, to good vs evil, to order vs chaos, to cooperative world-building vs the forces of anarchic destruction and nihilism in the guise of ‘freedom’.

Each such conflict eventually ends in a cataclysmic confrontation between metaphysical exemplars of the philosophy in question that destroy almost everything, but which leave a residuum that grows and evolves into a reborn reality, shepherded into existence by the next generation of metaphysical entities.

The Zenith-3 campaign is currently building toward the next such confrontation – in fact, the Apocalypse is the underlying tapestry of the current campaign.

One reason for using it so often is that you don’t need to create a fully fleshed-out grand strategy – you can do most of it on the run, as opportunistic moves and half-baked tactics cause responses and reactions. This convenience can save you a lot of world-building time, which can then be devoted to other campaign needs.

8. Dominance Games

One of my persistent criticisms of Deities as Stat Blocks is the potential for non-Deities (read: the PCs) to challenge and even overcome / overthrow the Deities, something that is inherently embodied in the concept of restricting Deific power levels to a mere set of numbers.

Naturally, I’ve examined the opposite choice, in which Deific ‘turnover’ is accepted, and Gods view mortals as potential rivals and heirs even though said deities are inherently dependent upon the mortals. This, in fact, was the central conceptual spine of my Rings Of Time campaign.

This asserts that the Gods (1) use mortals to do their dirty work, because they are always less than myth and legend would have it, and (2) inflict suffering on the populations subject to them (whether they worship the deity or not) as a means of establishing, reinforcing, and cementing their dominance over those potential rivals.

If you choose to go down this path, a central concept of the Theology that results needs to be the reasons why the Deity is dependent on their mortal followers. There are endless possible answers, and variations on those answers, to explore.

For example, one that I have never utilized is that Mortals give the Gods a Moral Foundation; without mortal worshipers and the object lessons that the Deity gets to experience through them, they become Evil (Devils) or Anarchic (Demons), they lose their way as it were.

Whatever the ties are that bind the two together, these love-hate-fear relationships are central to the resulting mythos.

One of my earliest posts here at Campaign Mastery was A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs. This is exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind.

9. An Illusion Of Simplicity

Finally, we have the possibility that – at least superficially – one or more of the above appear to be true, but that appearance is the result of oversimplifying an even more complex reality.

This is “there are more things under heaven than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” writ large and made manifest.

The usual approach to this possibility that I recommend is to pick one of the others (the over-simplification) and use that to define restrictions on behavior – then, once the players are familiar with it, and with its implications, carve out an exception, a case where what has to be done doesn’t fit the model.

No theology in a game should ever hold all the answers; the fringes of understanding should always contain dark corners and unexpected departures for future discovery and exploration.

I’d like to close this section of the article with a (relevant) quote from Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

— quotation provided by brainyquote.com.

There may well be other answers to the question; but these nine are all better than that wormy old proverb, in terms of credibility and plausibility (it is worth pointing out that some of them can be simplified into that proverb, however).

Having Priests articulate one of these arguments in response to the question, or offer it as comfort to those suffering loss, and believe it wholeheartedly, puts their faith (fictitious though it is) onto a firm characterization footing.

Of course, each of these, if taken as the official position of a theology, will impact the practices and beliefs of that theology in other areas. That sort of extrapolation is not possible in an article of this scope, and rests too strongly on other aspects of the game worlds offered by the GM.

In other words, you will need to explore the ramifications for your game world on your own. But at least this is a starting point.

Oh, and don’t ignore the possibilities raised by the converse question: “Why do Good Things happen to Bad People?” These can be equally illuminating, and a good Theology should be able to answer both!

Application

The articles that I linked to earlier offer a demonstration and example of how to go about such extrapolations. We were very careful to make Cyrene a deity with rich characterization, with both positive and negative aspects, and with some aspects that could go either way depending on the individual’s circumstances.

In general, the impact of a particular philosophy or theology will come down to (a) offering appeasement, (b) seeking protection, (c) giving thanksgiving, or (d) requesting intervention (one way or another), and each of the possible answers listed earlier will manifest in all four of these.

In addition, there will be (e) some races / classes / professions that are thought to be protected by their relationship to the answer, (f) some that will be considered threatened, (g) some that may be considered offensive, and some that are considered (h) friends, (i) allies, (j) enemies, or (k) interested observers / subjects of observation.

The complexities of Theology

By the time you have entries under each of those headings for the chosen justification of suffering promoted by a specific deity / priesthood / clerical order, you will have developed a diverse, rich and compelling set of interpretations and roles for the deity, just as we did for Cyrene. You can easily determine, on the fly and as necessary, how any given group or profession will relate to the deity in question and vice-versa.

Once you have done two such interpretations for the same deity (favored by different priesthoods / sects / orders / groups) or for a different deity, you can start exploring and defining the complex ways that they can interact and interrelate. Heck, even a broad conceptual description of those others is enough to get you started.

That’s all we had for the other deities in Cyrene’s pantheon. The relationship of that conceptual thumbnail with the one deity who had been fleshed out was enough to start fleshing out the others. Each deity subjected to the process then forms a building block to further define others.

The bigger picture that results

This simple process can turn a bland list of deities into a genuine pantheon with its own internally consistent and original Theology. Even if the perceptions are erroneous, and all this merely projections onto the Deities by over-inventive mortals, you achieve an ever-tighter integration between that Theology and the game world, the environment in which adventures take place, making it more unique, more interesting, and more complete.

The justification of suffering is a toolkit for the enrichment of your game in all sorts of ways. It’s never a wasted exercise.

“I’m sure that it’s in here somewhere…”
Image by Jerzy Gorecki from Pixabay

It’s happened to all of us – we receive some paperwork that is important, do whatever we have to do with it, and then put it away for the next time we need it. And then, when the time comes, can’t remember exactly where it is – or it isn’t where we thought it was.

It’s not just true of paperwork, either – my personal history is replete of examples of putting something away ‘somewhere safe’ and needing to search for it when it once again became needed.

There are analogous situations in other contexts, too. An office worker files a document somewhere. Someone else, at a later time, needs to find it – that might be a temp, a manager, a replacement, or a thief.

In The Hero System

In writing the Adventurer’s Club adventure currently in progress, an in-game situation of this type has been anticipated, and so we turned our attention to the rules to see how the game mechanics handled the situation.

And quickly ran into a brick wall.

There was no ‘search’ skill.

We agreed that if the object of the search was out in the open, a simple perception roll would suffice, perhaps with a negative modifier for haste or obscurity – we’re used to such situations and can handle them without batting eyelids.

In time, we discovered “Concealment”, which is described in the game mechanics as representing “a character’s ability to hide things and find things others have hidden – important papers, weapons, jewels, artifacts, drugs, and so forth”.

But this implies a deliberate act of concealment – which is not the case in those examples proffered earlier. Nevertheless, it’s the closest thing that we could find anywhere in the game system.

There is also a list of Sight Perception Modifiers in the rulebook, and the following notes:

“Like Skill Rolls, PER Rolls are subject to modifiers. Some of these modifiers are the same as those for Skills, others are different or specific to PER rolls based on a given Sense.

Skill Modifiers

“As a general rule, GMs can apply the following types of Skill Modifiers to PER Rolls (see p45) for details:

• modifiers for Routine, Easy, Difficult, and so on;
• taking extra time; and
• excellent or poor conditions.

“Other such modifiers apply as the GM sees fit.

Range Modifier

“Attempts to perceive things at a distance are subject to the Range Modifier. See page 373.”

All these seem reasonably relevant to the question.

The broader question, in context:

This sort of question comes up in RPGs all the time, regardless of the game system that you are using – usually as a result of a PC doing something that the game mechanics didn’t anticipate.

It’s relatively rare for such problems to come up when you can take your time to consider a solution. As such, this is an unusual opportunity to examine House Rules and the processes of crafting them.

While this specific question might not be relevant to the game system your campaign employs, it’s a near-certainty that, sooner or later, some other gap in the rules will open up beneath your GMing feet – so this is a chance to think about the processes involved and set some basic rules to make life just a little bit easier when it happens.

Past Examinations Of The Subject

As you would expect of such a broad topic, this is hardly the first time that it’s come up here at Campaign Mastery. The following articles seem especially pertinent (excerpts from the Blogdex Metagame page, plus some extras tagged as relating to “House Rules”):

• Ask The GMs: Going Beyond The Rules – How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations?
• The House Always Wins: Examining the Concept of House Rules – I look at the basics of House Rules – and in particular why campaigns have them. Along the way I introduce readers to some of the many controversies relating to the subject that have raged amongst gamers for as long as I’ve been involved in the hobby. I have some fun with some of my players in the comments.
• Precision Vs Holistic Skill Interpretation – Skills can either be interpreted as strictly and explicitly defined within the mechanics, or can be viewed as incorporating anything related to the skill’s application that isn’t explicitly covered by a separate skill, which I refer to as the Holistic approach. The examples offered make a strong case for the latter.
• The Personal Computer analogy and some Truths about House Rules – I realized that constructing a campaign was analogous to constructing a Personal Computer, that the analogy revealed some valuable insights into the relationships between different bodies of rules, and that there were some especially notable points to be made in this context about House Rules and importing rules from other game systems.
• The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules – The speed of events in the computer world mandate that rules be codified and violations detected, and acted upon, automatically. Yet, human behavior does not readily boil down to neat straight lines, and that opens the door to rules being enforced when they shouldn’t, or not being applied when they should. Human Error is an inherent part of the system. I use these thoughts to re-examine the question of how much dominion the GM should have over the rules and update a previous article, Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs, which examined these issues from a genre-and-campaign perspective.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) – This article lists (and offers as a freebie download) the house rules that my co-GM and I have developed for our Pulp campaign, the first in a series of four on the subject. I then discuss the meanings and implications of some of the rules, and the broader principle from which they were derived (which apply to every campaign.
• “I Can Do That” – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
• Phase 1: Inspiration from the ‘New Beginnings’ series – I list and analyze 23 sources of inspiration, and discuss what to do with the ideas that they generate. Along the way, House Rules Theory and Campaign Ideas get discussed.
• Phase 4: Development from the ‘New Beginning’ series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major ‘bones’ of the campaign skeleton.
• Phase 6: Mindset & Underpinnings from the ‘New Beginnings’ series studies completing the structural elements of a new campaign. Specific attention is placed on the Campaign Philosophy, Campaign Themes, Magic, House Rules Theory, Races and Classes, with a key example from the Shards Of Divinity campaign.
• Phase 9: Completion from the ‘New Beginnings’ series – is mostly about dotting i’s and crossing t’s and a few other tasks that were put off, at least temporarily, earlier in the series. In particular, the categories of Campaign Structure, Adventure Format & Structure, House Rules Theory, PCs, Races, Archetypes & Classes, Campaign Background, and how Players will integrate with the campaign are considered.
• The Prohibition Disjunction: When Rules Go Bad looks at the integration of House Rules and Official Mechanics, amongst other aspects of Rules Failures.
• A Role To Play – this article is all about roleplaying and inhabiting a character. One section discusses how game mechanics can inhibit this and how that problem can be turned into a characterization asset with a little House Rules judo.
• Combining Abilities: Teamwork and Synergy between RPG Characters (updated) – most game systems try very hard to ignore the complicated question of multiple characters cooperating to solve a problem, even though they are the sort of problems that crop up in actual game-play all the time. I bite the bullet, posing 5 specific problems and multiple possible game mechanics solutions to uncover solutions that will work.
• A Wealth Of Stylistic Factors – giving each campaign its own style takes time and effort, and that’s what this article is all about. One of the contributing factors is House Rules, and in the relevant section, the article looks at that contribution and how to choose House Rules that will lend themselves to the style that you want to achieve.
• To Roll Or Not To Roll, pt 1 and To Roll Or Not To Roll, pt 2 – there are times when it can be more useful to the GM and his game to have a PC not roll for something. This two-part article (originally conceived as one big one) looks at the why, when, how, and the implications. If it looks familiar, it’s because it was only published a couple of months ago.

There are others, but they are more peripheral to the subject. In particular, some of the articles tagged “Philosophy” may be useful (there are only 150 of them – 151, counting this one.

A Reflection Of Expertise

First, I want to propose a way of handling the “searching an office” situation, so that I can exclude it from the more general question.

Proposed House Rule: If an object or document is filed or placed in a relevant location by someone who has a skill that is relevant to the placement of that object or document, a different character can use that same skill to locate the object or document. The skill of the original individual, divided by 5 and -2, is used as a modifier to the subsequent roll. This rule explicitly excludes anything deliberately hidden, including placement of sensitive documents into a safe.

If a secretary files a document in a filing cabinet, for example, their bureaucracy skill (or whatever the equivalent is in your game system) relates directly to the logic that defines the placement of that document. The better they are at their job, the more sensible and rational their filing system will be, and the more easily someone else will find it to locate the document using that same skill.

The same should also apply to someone with different lenses for a telescope (except that we’re talking about their Astronomy skill), and so on.

It’s up to the GM to decide whether or not a particular skill is relevant to the placement of the subject of the search.

I can’t help but remember passing exchanges from M*A*S*H about Radar’s filing system – I wish I could remember which episode so that I could quote from it more directly than simply name-dropping the series. It made perfect sense to Radar but no-one else could follow it. There was also a scene in which Frank Burns found out which cabinet contained Radar’s Bugle.

In such a case, bureaucracy would not help, in fact it would continually lead one astray. Radar clearly was not using that skill to place his files, he instead had a system of his own in which he had expertise.

If the character searching doesn’t have the right skill, this rule doesn’t apply, and this becomes a more general search.

Lost and (hopefully) Found

When something is not where we expect it to be, it’s a sure bet that the placement did not follow any replicable logic and did not utilize a skill to determine where such logic would place the item.

When this happens to me, there is a definite pattern to the resulting search.

• First, I search all the places that the item might reasonably have been put, in sequence of decreasing likelihood.
• Second, I search all the places that I put things the last time I remember having the item, even if unlikely.
• Third, I search all the places that I can think of that are plausible but unlikely.
• Fourth, I search all the places that contain similar items to the one that’s been misplaced.
• Fifth, I look at all the places where I routinely sit and do things.
• Sixth, I repeat search 1, but casting a wider net, and also searching nearby.
• Seventh, I start a systematic and thorough search by geographic area.

For example, let’s apply that sequence to searching for a set of keys:

1. I check the peg where I keep my keys, and the floor underneath. I check the draws and bags in the vicinity where the keys might have landed had they fallen. I check the bags that I use when shopping. I check the pockets of everything that I’ve worn in the last few days. I’ll also walk the ground between the bus stop and my front door – just in case.
2. The last time I went out shopping, what did I buy? Where did I put those purchases? Might I have put the keys down somewhere nearby – on top of the refrigerator, for example? Might I have dropped them without noticing when using them to unlock the gate or the front door?
3. If I bought groceries, I would have organized the shopping in the game room (because it has a large clear area that I can sit down at). Might the keys be on that table, or on the floor nearby I usually keep my mobile phone in the same pocket as the keys when I go out – where is the phone now? Are the keys nearby? Are the keys in the bathroom somewhere? etc.
4. I have a hook where I keep a spare set of keys. This takes most of the panic out of the loss (which is why I keep the spare set). Could I have put the original with the spares? Not likely, but I’ll check, anyway More to the point, there are a couple of places where I will hide other keys that I am looking after for someone else – could my keys have ended up there, somehow? There are places where I used to put my keys before I put up the hook – could muscle memory have put them there?
5. Next I will search my work area – especially looking behind the laptop, under the bag I use to gather rubbish, and so on, on the premise that I have simply put them down somewhere.
6. Back to search one – this time I’ll not only double check the pockets, I’ll double-check that I haven’t missed a pocket, and I’ll look to see if they could have been left in a pocket and then fallen out. I’ll look to see if they might have fallen out of one pocket and into another (it’s happened!) And I’ll look beneath the hook again, but this time I’ll get my eyes down to floor level, and so on.
7. If I haven’t found them by now, the odds are that they are lost – at least for now. I’ll start a systematic search, though, starting at the front door and proceeding through the unit – after taking a break to calm myself and get my breath back.

In other words, likely places, then plausible places, then possible places, then everywhere..

The process is the same if I’m looking for a document (my lease? a power bill?), a book, a grocery item, a screwdriver, a CD or DVD…

Translating the Search Concept

In order to translate this process into game mechanics, the first principle is to use the existing mechanics as much as possible – don’t reinvent the wheel. That means that searching for a lost or misplaced object or document has to be based on “Concealment”, which needs to be expanded to cover items that are placed with no intention of concealment.

That means that there is no concealment roll to hide the object in question; that should be replaced with a modifier, or with a series of them, and the only roll will be a ‘concealment’ roll to find the search object.

It’s worth remembering that we have excluded from these rules anything that has been deliberately concealed, or that is in plain sight.

I have compiled a list of 8 modifiers that reflect different attributes of a search object within the context of the environment being searched. There may be others, but these will do for now.

0. Scope

Before listing the modifiers and assigning values to them, though, it’s a good idea to establish some scope. I have the notion that every 2 by which the roll fails ticks off another of the search location levels – so if you succeed, then what you are looking for is in the first place you look according to the logical schema described earlier.

If you fail by 1 or 2, then it’s not in the first group of places, but it is in the second. If you fail by 3 or 4, then it’s not in location groups 1 or 2, but it is in three, and so on. With six categories, that means that a result of failure by 10 is perfectly acceptable, and it will actually require failure by 12 (or the GM having determined that what the PCs are looking for is not there) for the search object not to be found – eventually.

The lowest actual roll you can make on 3d6 is a 3. The default value of the concealment skill is 9+(STAT/5), and the average value of INT – the stat in question – is 10. So that means 11/-, maybe 12 or 13 or less. Call it 12 or less on average. Rolling a three gives a fail by 10, which works.

But the average roll on 3d6 is 10.5 – a failure by 1.5. We want that to fall in the middle of the ‘failure’ range, about -5.

With 8 modifiers, most of them should have an average value of -1. But some of them will have positive modifiers – so a better choice would be +1 and -2 (giving the same average).

1. Size

This is a completely subjective assessment by the GM – an unusually thick folder might be large in comparison to everything else in a filing system, or it might be small in comparison to a building of large files. A flash drive is likely to be small.

Large enough to be relatively obvious: +1
Typical: +0
Small: -2

2. Obviousness vs Difficulty

How much does the object stand out? One particular baseball in a box of them doesn’t stand out very well. One particular piece of paper will be obvious if you can identify it as the target with a glance, and not if you have to read each of large stack of papers to find the one that you want.

Folded into this are all questions of environmental difficulty. Searching for an object buried in silt and underwater to a depth that you can’t see except with a torch, is obviously difficult. Trying to read something written in red ink when the illumination is also red is difficult. Trying to search calmly and efficiently while people are shooting at you is difficult.

Object is easy to find: +1
Object is not hard to find: +0
Object is hard to find: -2

3. Distinctiveness & Contrast

Again, let’s say we’re talking about a folder. If it has red stripes around the edges, and is the only folder that has this feature. Okay, maybe that’s covered under “Obviousness”. So let’s go with something slightly more subtle: this is the only folder stamped “top secret”. Or maybe the document inside is the only one signed in purple ink. It doesn’t matter what the point of distinctiveness is, what matters is that the object can be identified, at a glance, as the object of the search.

It might be the only set of blueprints. It might be the only papers with a green cover sheet, like my lease. If a book, it might be distinctively sized, or have a distinctive cover.

Let’s say that I’m looking in my DVD collection for a particular James Bond movie. Several of the movies in that series have matching covers in terms of color and font – that lets me go to the group right away. It might take a stranger a little longer, but you only have to see Thunderball and Dr No and Goldfinger all in a set and you’ve narrowed the scope of the search drastically.

Object is distinctive: +1
Object blends in: -2
Otherwise: +0

4. Luck

I’ve written about Luck in the Hero System before. See, for example,

Chances Are: Lessons in Probability.

Assuming that he has rolled some luck points, a character can use them to his advantage in conducting a search.

One level: +1
Two levels: +3
Three levels: +5

5. Logic & System vs Haste

I don’t quite know what it says about me that I have a defined system for searching for something that I have misplaced. But having such a system is clearly beneficial than blindly searching in random locations.

If the character can articulate a sensible search strategy, that should be worth a bonus – but such a search may well take longer, because you are taking more care. So it’s more thorough, but that comes at a cost.

The more time pressure the searcher is under, the more that should impact their chances of finding what they are looking for. There have been times when I’ve been searching for something in haste, and picked up and set aside the object of my search because in my haste, I didn’t recognize it as what I was looking for.

This is one of those rare modifiers in which both a positive and a negative can apply.

Articulated system or logic to the search: +2

Panicked Search (1/16th normal time): -5
Searching Frantically (1/8 normal time): -4
Searching in great haste (1/4 normal time): -3
Searching in haste (1/2 normal time): -2
Taking extra time: +1
Taking a lot of extra time: +2
Leisurely / Casual search: +3

Update#1 28 Feb 2023

My co-GM for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, for which all this work was done, spotted something that I missed.

Quiet Search (Enemies down the hall): up one rank on the time applicable
Silent Search (Enemies in the next room or closer): up two ranks on the time applicable

6. Mess vs Order (environment)

If you’re searching an area that is nice and neat (and assuming that you don’t make a mess in the process), it can make it a lot easier to find something. If you’re searching through a mess, there is going to be a loss of time from moving irrelevant stuff aside, if nothing else.

Size of the object being searched also makes a big difference here, for obvious reasons.

Large object, tidy environment: +1
Small object, tidy environment: +1
Large Object, messy environment: +0
Small Object, messy environment: -2

7. Numbers

Many hands make light work. But some searches are so large as to require many hands.

The GM is entitled to set a minimum number of searchers required to complete the search in a reasonable time frame (4 hours, say – but that is also up to the GM and the circumstances). If the searchers can’t reach that minimum number, the ‘reasonable time frame’ blows out proportionately, but there is no additional penalty.

For every 50% over the base requirement or part thereof, there is a +1 modifier.

8. Panic / Emotional Upset

Finally, the state of mind of the searcher is clearly a relevant factor. If you’re calm and controlled, there can be a lack urgency about the search, but being able to assess what you find rationally soon more than makes up for that. On the other hand, if you are emotionally overwrought, crying your eyes out or shouting at the heavens, or in a blind panic or state of extreme fear, that represents a significant hurdle to hinder success.

If you’re vulnerable to emotional distress, this will only get worse as you proceed with the search without finding your target. If that is likely to be the case, or there are hints that the player is growing frustrated at the lack of success, use the overall average to determine the modifier.

Calm state throughout search: +1
Emotional Upset: -2

These eight parameters cover most of the contingencies that I could imagine encountering. One of the things that gives me confidence in that statement is that there were originally only 5 entries on my list, and the others came to me as I wrote and thought more deeply about the subject.

To use the search metaphor, I found the obvious things and then the inobvious ones!

A small sidebar

What’s interesting is that most of these will also apply to attempts to use a Search Engine – the only difference is that the search engine has presented you with a number of places to look for what you want, probably within a long list of things that you don’t. If you’re lucky, or if your Google-fu is strong, it might be high up in the results; or, if your search term is not as good as your think, it might be buried a long way down, or missing altogether.

Other Game Systems

It doesn’t really matter which game system you are playing – it either has rules for searching, or it needs rules for searching!

If you need such a subsystem, the above can be adapted in various ways without great difficulty. So use what I’ve written here as a template, and create a set of rules that integrate into your existing game mechanics.

If your game system already has a system mechanic for this purpose, it might be that the modifiers offered cover something that your system didn’t anticipate, or simply offer a perspective that you had not previously considered.

Above all, I want to emphasize that the context of the search is all-important – the physical context (environment), the degree of resemblance between target and non-target, and the emotional context.

In conclusion, I hope that readers have found something they were looking for from this article!

Sorry – I couldn’t resist…

Click on the link to download the PDF

Update#2 28 Feb 2023

I also converted the article into a two-page set of House Rules for the campaign that may be of use to others.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Organization Matters.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, rotated by Mike

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November.

That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that my co-GM and I had been working on.

More directly, though, it’s inspired by the technique employed in last Saturday’s successful reboot of the Warcry campaign. This reboot adventure had to accomplish a lot, some of it easy but a lot of it quite difficult:

1. Dust off and reintroduce the campaign, which hadn’t been played since 2012 (see Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff for the reason for the inactivity).
2. Introduce two new PCs and connect them with the protagonist PC
3. Write out two old PCs with a heroic sendoff
4. Apply a layer of fuzziness to all background material deriving from the backstories of those old PCs
5. Apply a second layer of fuzziness to many established building blocks of the game universe
6. Update that game universe to make it consistent with what had been uncovered in the Zenith-3 campaign
7. Expand on the game universe and it’s meta-dynamics
8. Ensure that all PCs, both old and new, were critical to the outcome
9. Challenge all PCs according to their abilities
10. Have the adventure be consistent with the established, fairly freewheeling, style of the campaign
11. Make it fun for all three players.

All that in a single afternoon’s play.

My solution was to have the protagonist experiencing multiple time tracks, one in which the universe was facing an existential threat, and one where that threat had been resolved, but with an unstable solution. Once the protagonist became aware of the threat and it’s scale and scope, his goal was to identify a more stable solution, establishing the time-line with the new PCs as the new “reality”, replacing the one which contained the old PCs – and have this enterprise suddenly seemed doomed to failure until those old PCs (once again) pulled a rabbit out of their (metaphoric) hats, achieving victory through their self-sacrifice.

Writing this adventure required a new structure, one not entirely dissimilar to that described in the earlier posts, but also required a new adventure format to make it practical. And, in the course of that writing, I discovered that the format used when writing an adventure could – in at least some cases – be just as profound in its effects on the adventure content as the structure.

Today’s article explores what I learned, extrapolates on the resulting techniques, and adds a quartet of applications that use this format as a tool.

The Basic Structure

I want to start this discussion with the simplest possible model and add refinements and complications from that starting point, rather than plunging headlong into the harder stuff.

The basic structure is this:

Two columns, and multiple rows. Each cell contains enough game prep material to advance the plotline or plotlines, and then comes to an end. Each column represents a single plot thread.

This enables the GM to balance the attention and spotlight focus between the two plotlines. Events in column 2 can be occurring simultaneous with those in column 1, or sequentially, or with an overlap, or even with a gap, though the latter should be rare and consist of hand-waving delays and travel between significant plot points..

This was the exact format that I used for the Warcry adventure, which was unusual in that the protagonist was experiencing both columns’ action sequentially, even though they were occurring in distinctly different places and circumstances.

Flow

In writing this adventure, I found myself compelled to pay far closer attention to the transitions and flow between the two plot sequences. I could rough-draft each plotline in full, but needed to tweak the resulting outlines significantly.

For example, in plot thread one, there was a substantial amount of exposition to get through – time in which the protagonist was the only PC with a player present. My first draft had this as a fairly monolithic block of prepared text, but it became instantly apparent that this would not fly; I needed to continually intercut away from that monolithic block of text to action focusing on the other PCs present, and that action had to be plot-significant, too.

I started with a relatively trivial encounter that was designed to let the new PCs show off some of what they could do. But, once enough of the exposition had been presented, that encounter was usurped by an illustration of what the exposition was describing. The threat went from something being discussed to front-and-center and in-your-face.

This not only made the action more dramatic, it lent weight and substance to the dry recitation of prepared dialogue.

Participants

Structuring the adventure in this way made a relatively trivial task – that of making sure that every participating character had something to be doing at any given point (even if that were simply waiting around or roleplaying) by subdividing the progress even more than would be the case in a normal act / chapter / scene structure.

While that was relatively trivial in this case, I could immediately see that in other campaigns, this could be a significant advantage. In the Zenith-3 campaign, for example, there are occasions when all four PCs and two central NPCs have plotlines of their own running, and these frequently intersect. On top of that, while it doesn’t happen frequently, there can be interactions with another 20 or 30 NPCs – some recurring, some occasional, and some transient. There’s little more inconvenient than discovering in the heat of play that an NPC was simply hand-waved out of existence in between significant contributions; it’s corrosive on a sense of realism. What they are doing might never actually be shown “on camera” within the adventure, but having some sort of checklist that shows them doing something means that you’re prepared if a PC goes looking for them, or simply asks what they have been up to.

Mismatched Participant Numbers

Of course, there is absolutely no need to have a column for each character. The basic model already divides the plot by plot thread, and intertwines those plot threads – not by participating PC. Naturally, you can have combinations and groups of PCs within a single plot thread – it doesn’t have to be single-character plots.

It doesn’t take a lot of rumination to see that the participation rosters don’t have to be fixed, either. One character can start of participating in plot thread one, then get distracted by plot thread two, while someone from plot thread two may or may not take their place in plot thread one.

The subdivision of events into relatively small slices means that all you really need to do is make sure that each significant character is name-checked in each row to make sure that the spotlight is being shared reasonably evenly.

Content

That is also dependent on the amount of content that you place in each cell. Based on both my experience with the Warcry adventure, with similar structures in the Zenith-3 campaign, and the recent adventure structuring in the Adventurer’s Club, I would aim for 2-4 cells per ‘page’. That usually translates to 1-3 paragraphs per cell.

It’s necessary to convert conversation into ‘paragraphs’ because you need to allow for replies by the PC(s). The assumption I make is that they will be roughly as long-winded as the NPCs with their canned dialogue – sometimes more, sometimes less, but that’s a good starting point. I can then tweak that estimate based on the loquaciousness of the player – PC combination and the situation.

Characters / Players who are outside their comfort zone, in particular, will either respond by padding their vocal contributions or by becoming more curt.

Be aware, too, of how quickly things will proceed if the player chooses to “roll-play” instead of “role-playing” – if the players are any good (mine are) this will usually indicate either unfamiliarity with the game mechanics or a subject / situation in which their PC has greater expertise than the player does.

For example, one PC in the Zenith-3 campaign has been taking painting lessons, starting with still-lifes and progressing to live models. I know more than enough on the topic to improv detailed dialogue and narrative regarding any given image or subject, but the player of the PC in question is not only relatively unfamiliar with it, he has no particular interest in the subject. As a result, he frequently resorts to roll-playing and relies on me to ‘translate’ the results into something that both sounds as competent as the character is, but that also makes sense to him as a player.

Another PC in that campaign has been getting into woodcarving, under the tutelage of a master craftsman. I know relatively little about the subject, but the player knows even less. But I’m good at pretending to knowledge that I don’t have (see The Expert In Everything), so with a bit of research and prep, I can make the player feel like he is successfully simulating the expertise that his character is acquiring.

Below is a screen capture of the Warcry adventure (shrunken sufficiently to show an entire page). Although black borders were used in the original, I’ve rendered these in red to make them more visible.



There are a number of points to highlight in this representation.

• First, row one has one large paragraph in column 1 and two medium paragraphs in column 2.
• Row two has an even larger paragraph in column 1 and a medium paragraph in column 2. This indicates that the initial focus of the adventure is plot thread 1, labeled Reality 1, which is appropriate because it starts from the point of what was prior to the rebooting.
• The third row has a single line plus a small paragraph in column one and a paragraph of similar size in column 2. The equality is significant.
• The fourth and final row on this page has a medium paragraph in column 1 and a paragraph of similar size plus a smaller one in column 2, reflecting a shift in focus as the significance of the new reality starts to become apparent.
• To avoid cells that span two pages, additional empty lines have been added to the bottom of column 2, row 4.

The narrative flow within the resulting page looks like this:



You deal fully with the contents of a cell and then move on to the cell alongside it. When you get to the end of the row, you return attention to the next cell of column 1. It therefore doesn’t matter how many columns you have, i.e. how many plot threads you are tying together.

It is also worth noting that overall, the spotlight is shared roughly equally between the two plot threads, as signified by the amount of text in each column.

Complications

As soon as you start wanting to check for balanced participation, and making sure that you don’t have the one character in two places at once, and that a given cell has been given its final narrative ‘polish’, and any number of other such considerations, you start complicating the structure.

Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to tweak the text formatting to take a lot of the sting out of these activities.

One technique to consider is highlighting any character names each time they appear – which makes it easy to scan a row and pick out anyone who’s missing, or who is appearing when they shouldn’t.

A refinement would be to use a different highlight color for significant NPCs (I consider any NPC who might participate in a conversation with a PC to be ‘significant’ in that scene, whether they do or not).

You could go even further and color-code enemies, allies, and neutrals differently, or to recognize some other significant affiliation. But it doesn’t take too much of this to create so much color that the text visually ‘drowns’ in it, and the benefits of such highlighting are lost.



It’s often useful to create a little space to one side of the columns, like the example above. You can then use a diagonal slash in red to check off one requirement, and a diagonal slash the other way to check off another. You can add a tick or a circle in black or blue to indicate that there is a relevant illustration / map / diagram NEEDED – or that one has been sourced and prepared.

Yes, you could use a separate column for each of these purposes, but that would then require headings so that you knew what each one represented, and the results quickly become counterproductive. A single cell which can be used in several different ways is not only easier to use in and of itself, but also forces a minimalist approach to the whole checklist question. While that can be constraining, it’s usually beneficial in the long run.

Switches & Segues

You don’t have to work very long on a structure of this kind to realize that how you switch from one plot thread – one narrative – to another is a whole new challenge. In general, these segues should become shorter – go into detail at first to establish the principle and who is where and doing what, and then assume that players will remember this the next time you turn your attention back to them.

But there is another kind of switch that’s worth highlighting: specific characters can migrate from one plot thread to another. Focusing attention on them makes them a natural vehicle for the segue that helps to keep them fresh, dynamic and interesting.

For example, contemplate the following:

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4
A	B	C	D
A+B		C	D
B	A		C+D
	D+A	A+C	B

 

If A, B, C, and D are four different PCs, this illustrates how plot threads can be left dangling while players are being distracted by developments in another plot thread. If you end up with the same total number of occupied cells in all columns, the focus is roughly equally distributed between the four. Notice, also, the bottom row of the example, which uses A as a bridge between plot threads 2 and 3. This generally means on the next row (or the one after at the latest), A should not appear at all, so as to ensure equitable distribution of the spotlight.

This shows just how complex a narrative structure you can weave using a table to contain and structure that narrative.

A Variant Structure

It’s also possible to encode a plot structure with one character per column. This enables an additional column to be used to encode a reference to a particular plotline or plot development (I’ve illustrated this sort of thing any number of times here at Campaign Mastery, see the plot thread that occupies the last 1/3 of The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure, for example.

This can encompass all the problems described below in the “Four Or More Threads” section if you have more than 3 PCs to track, so it’s a lot more complicated in many ways, but it can still be a useful planning tool.

Three Threads

That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves; if it weren’t for the possibility of there being only 2 or 3 feature characters to track, I would not have mentioned the variant structure until later in the article.

So let’s take a step back and look at the somewhat simpler structure that is a Three-plot-thread braiding:

The basic structure of the three-ply braid looks, somewhat predictably, like this:

– three central columns (one for each plot thread) and two small ones on either side of the page for tracking whatever it is that you feel the need to track.

Within this basic structure, you have all the options and tools previously described available to you, plus a few that I have yet to get to.

Why Use A Three-Thread Model?

Let’s say that you have one significant plot thread, and two smaller ones that between them are equal to the significant plot thread. That would be one valid reason for using a three-thread model.

Presumably, one of those then leads into the main plot, which brings all the PCs together on the one problem – which may constitute a fourth plot thread.

There are other possible reasons, but they are all variations on this theme. For example, I once ran an adventure sequence in which one PC was driving the action while the others were kept hopping dealing with the fallout of those actions.

If you have six PCs, you can group them into two trios or three pairs – so having the three plot-thread model up your sleeve gives you a lot of flexibility.

But the best answer – and it’s still a variation on the same theme – is that you can dedicate one of the threads to the Villain and his actions / reactions to events. These never get related to the players, they show up as events in the first two plot threads if and when the developments get noticed. What they do is ensure that the Villain and his plot is developing and evolving in response to the PCs and their activities. It’s a planning tool of significant benefit.

Empty Cells

Further refinements are possible by leaving some cells empty. This only works with more than two plot threads, but enables you to sequence those plot threads as desired – this was a key point in the design of “Lucifer Rising”, the plot discussed in the article on plot structure.

A Second Variant

Let’s start with me name-dropping the Kree-Skrull War from the Avengers comic. For those who were comic readers of the time, this was the most epic plotline that had ever appeared in comic form, eclipsing earlier examples from the Fantastic Four (for example, the Inhumans plotline) and DC’s annual team-ups between the Justice League and Justice Society.

The three-thread structure facilitates the planning and construction of such epic plotlines by treating the events befalling one faction as a plot thread. In plot thread one, the supreme command of faction one might initiate a military confrontation with faction two as a distraction from a more subtle plot. A subsequent entry in faction two’s narrative then describes the outcome of the confrontation, while an entry in faction three’s plot sequence (the PCs) makes them aware of the confrontation and hints at it’s true purpose. There would then be a further entry for faction one detailing the success or failure or progress of the true plot.

This technique works whether faction one are Drow and faction 2 elves, or orcs and humans, or whatever the participants are to be. If necessary, coalesce factions into alliances to reduce the number of plot ‘threads’ to three, or at most, four.

Four-or-more Threads

Which brings me to the four-or-more structure.

If you use landscape orientation and a relatively small font, you might conceivably be able to manage four primary columns, but experience tells me that this is going to be touch-and-go.

For perspective on that, here are three views of the front page of the Zenith-3 adventure, The Tangled Web – the first one shows the two-column orientation used for this traditionally-formatted adventure.

The second shows a mock-up of a four-column version: I should mention that I tried formatting (for real) this way and found that because a page was larger than would show on my screen at full-width, I was having to scroll up and down frequently.

Note that the text seems denser, but you actually fit slightly less on a page. Of course, the title graphic could be reduced in size to a single column – gaining almost half a page:

This means that I could not hold the front page up to show the players (helping to set the tone for the adventure) – in fact, the subtitle is all but invisible at this size. And, because we’ve increased the text content about 50%, the already annoying ‘scroll up and down’ problem will be 50% worse, too.

As a rule of thumb, then, four columns and content don’t mix very well, even in landscape mode.

Practical Limitations Of Structure

That requires a modification to the structure of the format. Instead of content going directly into the columns, it needs to be moved, and maybe even formatted in a two-column mode just like my 2-column version of A Tangled Web. This is then linked to the planning section (where information is kept in the four-column / four-thread format) by a simple sequential code.

Unfortunately, my example is going to require a little additional explanation because I made an assumption that I probably shouldn’t have: that the adventure started with an all-four-threads scene and then split into two threads, each of which then bifurcated into four – and that the first three cells are all on page one of the document and this is page two..

That’s why the first entry is numbered four in the example below; it’s probably a more realistic example but also more confusing – but I don’t have time to redo it.



In the top section, we have the scene number and space to write in the PCs who are part of the scene. There is also the usual space for ticks and crosses to signify that work is required / done.

This enables the top section to be used as a planning tool just as was the case with the earlier versions.

The index number then points to the content section. Note that with 11 rows of content, there would only be room for a line or two. Anything more and you have to move scenes 12-15 to the next page – and that can be extremely inconvenient.

Conclusion: it can be done – but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Coming Together

Let’s go back to our three-column model. How do you represent it when two plot threads converge into a single situation? This can be expected to happen when the PCs start coming together for the main plot of the adventure, after all, so it’s likely to happen regularly.

The example above demonstrates how to handle this – it’s a simple matter of selecting the cells that have come together and merging the cells. Most software will be able to handle this process. What’s more, if you do this before creating rows below the merge, some software preserves the new structure when additional rows are added (some software doesn’t, though!).

Splitting Apart

Similarly, having a plot thread bifurcate into two separate sets of activities or lines of investigation is achieved by merging the cells prior to the bifurcation:

Seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it?

Non-Plotting Applications

If this were nothing more than a way of arranging the text contents that make up your game prep, it would be a curiosity, something to file away for use on the occasional rare occasion, nothing more.

But there’s a lot more that can be done with this approach. I’ve already mentioned the two factions and a force of PCs caught in the middle (using the three column structure) – but there are so many useful things to do with the basic two-column mode that it will shine as a planning and background construction tool on a frequent basis.

I have four – well, three-and-a-half – such applications to throw into your toolkit.

1: A Tale Of Governments

Almost every government can be described as a contest between two factions – it doesn’t matter if there are democratic processes or if we’re talking alliances in a noble court or merchants / guilds vs authority.

That means that you can use the two-column model to construct a political history, working backwards, and mentioning only events that were politically significant.

Nor do the membership of any given faction have to remain consistent – you can have affiliations and alliances that shift and change in response to political intrigue, just as the Republican Party are both the modern day party and the party of Lincoln, and which freed the slaves, while the Democrats have gone from the party of business (slave-owners) interests to the more progressive of the two parties.

Even the form of government can have changed (and frequently will have done so). Before America was the USA, it was the British Colonies – and a monarchy. Every culture has its revolutions – bloodless at times, bloody more often.

2: Family Legacies

Unless your species has extremely unusual biology, your sentient species will normally have a maternal line and a paternal line. That means that the simple two-column model can be used to track backwards, one story / anecdote at a time, compiling an ancestry with family legends.

Each row can either represent an individual (in which case I suggest color coding for generations) or a generation.

Of course, with every step into the past, the chances of error or distortion increase – but this is better handled as a chance of accuracy or a degree of accuracy, because you can simply divide it by a fixed ratio.

I recommend multiplication by 0.8 for individuals and 0.6 for generations in isolation. But I would probably add 5% for individuals or generations that were personally known by the character compiling this family archive.

• Siblings: 100%. Maybe 95%.
• Parents: 65%. Aunts & Uncles, ditto – unless the person has never met them, yielding 60% accuracy..
• Grandparents: 60% of 65% = 39%. So more than half of what you think you know about them is wrong. If you’ve met them, +5% to get 44%.
• Great Grandparents: 60% of 39% is 23.4%. And this is the generation when meeting these ancestors starts to become problematic.
• Great-Great-Grandparents 60% of 23.4% is 14.04%. 17 facts in 20 are distorted at best.
• Great-Great-Great-Grandparents: 60% of 14.04 = 8.424%. There might be a single grain of truth in there somewhere.

….and so on. But this also works tracing forwards – Descendants of the siblings of your grandparents are as well-known as going back two more generations (because there’s a 2-generation gap) – so that’s 14.04%, possibly +5% if you once met your distant cousins.

Of course, you can play around with these numbers as you see fit; this is a starting point.

I have to admit that I like the generational model because it basically means that there’s one family myth or significant figure in each generation, yielding a manageable history – but that’s up to you, and some cultures will be more tightly-knit.



This collage contains an American Football (Simanek, CC0), Mohammed Shami warming up to bowl against England at Edgbaston, in 2018 (Aidan Sammons, CC BY 2.0), an excerpt from a night view of the Sydney Cricket Ground as it often appears during the Big Bash, half of the games of which are night-time (Mathew F, CC BY 2.0), a Mercedes AMG which was the car to beat in the 2023 Bathurst 12-hour race – but this example is from a couple of years ago (jason goulding from Muswellbrook, Australia, CC BY 2.0, and Australian batsman Steve Smith hooking a shot (www.davidmolloyphotography.com, CC BY 2.0), all via Wikimedia Commons. There was also a couple of bicycle races and some swimming, and basketball, and more. Summer in Australia is VERY sports-heavy!

3: Sporting Seasons

Today, according to the morning news, is the day of the Superbowl.

At the same time, there is a cricket test-match and one-day international series underway in India, as the Australian Team attempt to wrestle the subcontinent into sporting submission.

And we’ve just had something called the Big Bash, and the Bathurst 12-hour.

Before that, there was a (cricket) test series against South Africa – so there’s been a lot of sport happening lately.

That got me thinking about sporting seasons and how they could always be characterized, no matter what the sport, into a clash between two rivals; there may have been others at the start of the season, but by the end, it always comes down to two rivals.

That always reminds me of the scene in Major League in which Coach Brown says, “I figure it’s gonna take xx more wins to reach the playoffs” – I forget the exact number.

That entire movie is the story of one turbulent season in the life of the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball team. Which means that – with the benefit of hindsight – an entire season leading up to the grand finale can be written as two simultaneous narratives, one focusing on each of the rivals.

Should it be desirable, you can even work toward a predetermined outcome by telling the story of one team’s season (with their rival-of-the-week being the other narrative thread). This enables you to compile the story one week (game time) at a time until the season reaches its climax.

That also reminds me of the M*A*S*H episode Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, in which Frank wins big by listening to a late-night broadcast of the games and placing bets with the rest of the camp personnel before the games are rebroadcast at a more “Civilized” hour. There was also another episode in which Charles gambles on baseball, convinced that Klinger is an expert, but I couldn’t track down the name of that one ( looked until I ran out of time).

Trying to write this sort of narrative without some organizing structure is a good way to lose track of pertinent details and have the ‘story’ stall if momentum is ever lost.

4: Grand Final Clashes

Just as obviously, a narrative form of a clash between two rivals can be done on a smaller scale, play by play (or the equivalent). To achieve a credible result, there is a minimum standard of knowledge required regarding the sport, I think. The actual process should be fairly obvious by now.

Not A Perfect Solution

Having spent most of this article singing the praises of the table as a tool, it’s time to come crashing back to earth with a dash of reality. Tables are not a perfect solution, mostly because of the software that is used to create them.

Word Processing Software Limitations

These days, the most common tool is a Word Processor. I have Word, but it takes forever to load, so I try to avoid it, instead using LibreOffice for my more complex tasks. I used to use OpenOffice, but it’s high memory demands made it unsuitable for the laptop that is my front-line computer these days (it has barely enough RAM to get by).

All of these implement tables in slightly different ways, and all have their own quirks, which it is necessary to master. For example, for some reason, LibreOffice puts its Table icon-ribbon at the bottom of the screen, where I never remember to look for it; this forces me to scramble around, looking for the controls to do what I want to do, at least until I again rediscover the table ribbon.

Interface & Formatting Inconveniences

Another of the frequent headaches lies in the reversion of text formatting, in whole or in part, when you copy and paste into a new cell with some Word Processors. Others preserve most of the formatting (tabs seem to be a particularly difficult problem in this respect). Again, every implementation has its own idiosyncrasies that have to be mastered.

A Simple Web-page editor?

A simple alternative that may be of use is to use a web-page editor. I still keep a copy of Frontpage Express around from my Win-98 days because it makes it so much easier to lay out a complex table structure. I then sometimes import the saved html into LibreOffice for final tweaks, but know enough html that I do a lot of it directly in my plain-text editor.

There were some things that Netscape’s equivalent to Frontpage did better, but tables weren’t one of them (from memory). When I was first learning, I quite often bounced the one html document from one editor to the other and back.

These days, though, you need to know CSS to make this solution work. I know just enough to get myself into trouble in this department, I’m afraid. If you’re in the same boat, the Word Processors are probably a better bet.

There are things that you can do with a hacksaw that simply can’t be done with a hand saw. The tools that we use can have a significant impact on what we can do with the words that comprise our raw material. While they are not the arbiter or restrictor of plot structures, they can facilitate or hinder.

In particular, some plot structures are far more accessible through the magic of tables in a Word Processor or WYSIWYG HTML editor (WYSIWYG = “What You See Is What You Get”) – the links near the bottom of the page may be of use in choosing your tools for working with tables if you don’t have one already, or don’t like the one you have).

In fact, there are some things that are extremely difficult or annoying to attempt in any other way. And that makes the table-based approach something that every GM should know about.

This composite image combines a d20 extracted from dice-3563941 by Dieter Staab (plus a couple of variants rotated and color-shifted), one from dices-4804498 by Armando are (contrast & brightness enhanced), a third from rpg-468917 by Sayaka Photos (contrast & brightness enhanced), a fourth from dice-3380228 by Devin (plus a copy brightened, color-shifted and rotated), and a fifth from dice-5923500 by Renate Köppel, in front of a fractal image (abstract-art-1476001) by Patty Talavera, all from Pixabay, framing, image editing and compositing by Mike,
— all to symbolize the concept that hidden patterns may exist in the most seemingly-random of datasets.

I was reading something on Quora the other day that offered a fairly convincing argument that most people wouldn’t recognize real randomness if it bit them on the toe (in less colorful language).

Now, most GMs are not ‘most people’; we work with randomness all the time. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the majority would be just as vulnerable to the common misperception of randomness, and that understanding the difference between perception and reality could be a valuable tool.

Fake Randomness

When most people think of a random distribution of results, they actually think of an even distribution, or a scatter-plot. And, at first blush, that makes sense; each of the possible results of a d20 has an equal likelihood of occurring, and so (over many results) you would expect the number of times any given result comes up to equalize.

The problem is that most people seriously underestimate the number of results that you need in order for that to happen. For example, let’s take a string of five results: 4 – 7 – 8 – 10 – 16. Even probability means that this is just as likely to occur as another valid set of results: 10 – 10 – 10 – 10 – 10. Yet, if you were to show those strings to someone, they would have little hesitation in describing the first as random and the second as decidedly not random.

It’s a known fact that humans absolutely suck at seeing and recognizing randomness. In fact, our brains are hardwired to spot and recognize meaningful patterns taking as many shortcuts as possible in the process to speed it up. Being able to spot the tiger stalking you behind the greenery from a minimal number of glimpses holds an obvious survival benefit.

These shortcuts are what is responsible for the phenomenon of optical illusions. This is one of those subjects that I find absolutely fascinating, so I’ve dealt with it a number of times here at Campaign Mastery:

• Art-Spiration, for the Nov 2022 Blog Carnival;
• The Glow Around The Corner;
• The Power Of Blur, for the June 2021 Blog Carnival;
• A Sharp Lookout: How Much Can You Adventure?; and
• Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see?

Oh, and while I’m at it, I should probably also mention that this isn’t my first article on the subject of randomness:

• Into Each Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall;
• Pieces Of Ordinary Randomness;
• Randomness In RPGs;
• Principles of Randomness; and finally,
• The Sixes System, which has randomness and probability at the heart of the game mechanics.

So the survival strategies built into us by countless generations of kill-or-be-killed are directly at war with the ability to distinguish the absence of pattern, to such an extent that the mind will try and invent a pattern when none exists.

This reality is responsible for all sorts of things, from Optical Illusions to Eyewitness Contamination to Social interaction during Jury deliberations to Conspiracy Theories and, perhaps, to an even broader application to paranoia itself.

The Truth About Randomness

In reality, then, true randomness doesn’t look anything like an even distribution. So what does it look like, then? And what light can be shed on the number of rolls that you need before a reasonable level of uniformity of result (as perceived and defined by a layman) can be observed?

These are far more complicated questions than it might first appear, so they will take some time to answer.

Distribution Of Results

To provide a real-world analysis, I rolled and documented 448 d20s. The graph analyses the results.

Why 448? Well, it’s more than 400, and 400 divided by 20 is 20; my instincts were that having the average tally of any given result be so high would be enough to show just how uniform the occurrence of any given result would be.

At the top, you can see the actual distribution of results – 16 times, I got a 1, 13 times I got a 20, and so on. A whopping 36 times, I rolled a 16! Surely, that means that the rolls weren’t truly random? That’s one result with a little over half the expected tally, and another with almost double it!

Well, when you calculate the average result, you get 10.4 – which is a smidgen below the theoretical average of 10.5. So maybe we need to look a little more deeply into these results.

Some Analysis

There were 448 rolls, so even distribution would be 22.4 occurrences of each result. What has actually been observed ranges from the low of 13 to the high of 36. Those are differences of -9.4 and +13.6, or -42% to +60.714%. So what can be said is that 448 rolls yielded an average of 22.4±61% occurrences per result.

What’s more, it’s reasonable to expect that this margin of error would probably halve each time you doubled the number of rolls. So, at 996 rolls, we have a probable error margin of ±30.05%. Let’s round those to 1000 and ±30%, for convenience.

Double again, and we get 2000 rolls and ±15%. Again yields 4000 rolls and ±7.5%. and, once again to get 8000 rolls and ±3.75% – finally a margin of error that is smaller than the range of the results (5% vs 3.75%).

UPDATE

A comment to a repost of this article on another site has pointed out that the ‘reasonable to assume’ is actually incorrect. To halve the error margin actually requires four times as many tests, to reduce it to a quarter requires sixteen times, and so on.

Which means that to get a probable error margin of ±30% requires roughly 2000 rolls, to get that down to ±15% requires 8000 rolls, ±7.5% needs 32,000 rolls, and ±3.75% needs 128,000 rolls.

I don’t think this makes any material difference to the remainder of the article, but bear it in mind. Individual results are far more smeared all over the map, more chaotic, than I thought they were.

Huge thanks to Andrew for passing on the feedback. Much appreciated!

More Graphical Analysis

However, die rolls are notoriously non-linear in their probabilities, which I’m at pains to point out in my analysis of the mechanics of the Sixes System. The normal pattern when it comes to a standard distribution is a core of very flat probability, in which variations are commonly observed, surrounded by a region on the curve in which the number of results rises or falls at a steep angle, surrounded by a plateau of very low probability results.

My standby tool for evaluating such large numbers of die rolls is Anydice, but when I went there, I found that this many dice went beyond it’s accepted limits. Instead, I had to drop the number of dice to 112 – so it’s not going to be directly relevant. But the principles will still be the same.



Base curves plotted with Anydice, refer link above.

If you’re talking about 448 die rolls, the central pyramid is only going to be narrower. At the same time, there are so many results with virtually zero chance individually that one or two anomalous results would not be surprising.

But this is all misleading, because we’re talking about 448 individual rolls, not one roll that compounds 448 dice. It is this difference that explains, and causes, the erroneous interpretation of randomness; on any individual roll, the chance of any given result – from one to twenty – is 5%.

The chance of two of them is 5% of 5%, or 0.25%. The chance of three is 5% of 0.25%, or 0.0125%. The chance of 4 is 0.000625%.

448 individual rolls is 224 pairs of rolls, so applying these percentages, we get:

• 448 rolls at 5% = 22.4 ones, 22.4 20s, and so on.
• 224 rolls at 0.25% = 0.56 pairs of 1s, 0.56 pairs of 20s, and so on.
• 112 rolls at 0.0125% = 0.014 triplets of 1’s, 0.014 triples of 2’s, etc.
• 56 rolls at 0.000625% = 0.00035 strings of 4 ones, strings of four 20s, etc.

Hmm – I’m not sure this adds much to the conversation.

Maybe it’s the whole concept of aggregating die rolls that’s leading us astray. So let’s contemplate a way of thinking about the sequences of results, translating them into some sort of graphical display.

Sequential Results

Clearly, mapping each actual result onto a single space on a grid is going to be fairly useless. What’s needed is some way of consolidating individual results into shorter strings of results.

The method that I decided to use, after some thought, was to roll d20s and map them onto a single row of a horizontal grid until a result came up that matched a result that had already been rolled; since this would not fit on the existing row (that space was already occupied), it would force the shift to a new row. I further broke them up into four sets of results to make the graph more convenient.

With a set number of rows to fill, the decision was to keep rolling until a result came up that ‘fell off the bottom’, signaling the end of the run. That, of course, explains the reason for the odd number (448) rolls.


Length Of Result Sequences

I also thought it important to analyze the theoretical length of the resulting strings – I didn’t want them to be too short, or too long. Because it made the math easier, I did this theory as a chance out of 400.

• Length 1: 1 in chance in 20 = 20 / 400 (by definition).
• Length 2: 19 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 2 results = 38 / 400; subtotal 58.
• Length 3: 18 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 3 results = 54 / 400; subtotal 112.
• Length 4: 17 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 4 results = 68 / 400; subtotal 180.
• Length 5: 16 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 5 results = 80 / 400; subtotal 260.
• Length 6: 15 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 6 results = 90 / 400; subtotal 350.
• Length 7: 14 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 7 results = 98 / 400; subtotal 448.

So the average length of a string will be 6-7. Which means, out of 20, that about 2/3 of each row will be empty space. That seems like it will be enough.



True Randomness

This is the result, prettied up a bit, and right away you can see that true randomness is lumpy, coming in clumps. There are huge voids, like the one just below the right-hand top corner, and a smaller one just above the center. There are long strings of sequential results 2, 3, 4, and even 5 long. And there are a number of vertical bars that indicate the same number recurring time after time.

Below is an animated graphic showing a random walk with 25000 steps. It shows the same clumps and voids as my d20 results, and for exactly the same reason: randomness is not uniform in results, only in the likelihood of results (and sometimes not even then).. .

The misinterpretation has been responsible for a number of superstitions and fallacies that remain commonplace today.

The fallacy that a result is ‘due’, for example. If you are flipping a coin, the coin has no magic memory that makes a given result more or less likely – it doesn’t matter if you have just gotten 5 heads in a row, there is still a 50-50 chance of getting a head with your next coin-flip.

The fallacy that a past observed trend resulting from true randomness will persist, or be reversed, gives rise to the superstition that some numbers are more or less likely to result. To take an example from the die rolls that I have tracked in preparing this article, the number of results of “16” doesn’t mean that I’ll keep rolling a disproportionately high or a disproportionately low number of 16s in the near future.

In exactly the same way, the relative lack of twenties doesn’t mean that I will roll extra 20s to make up the shortfall anytime soon; it might happen, and will probably happen eventually, but it could be in 20 rolls or 2000.

Animated random walk with 25000 steps by Laszlo Nemeth (anglicized credit), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

No surprise – non-random digit distributions

The distinction between perceived randomness and true randomness might have surprised some. It might even have surprised me, but as soon as I saw it, my mind connected it to another phenomenon: non-random digit distribution.

If you invent a supposedly random series of multi-digit numbers, there will be a preponderance of threes and sevens in the digits. People tend to avoid even numbers, fives, nines, and zeros when inventing numbers because they perceive these as ‘less random’ than they should be.

This is one of the obvious consequences of the difference between true randomness and perceived randomness.

Note that you have to exclude leading digits in such analyses, because of Benford’s Law.

Benford’s Law

The leading numbers of any long series of numbers is going to be disproportionately low. This makes total sense when you think about it for a minute.

• In the numbers 1 to 20, eleven of the results will start with a 1, and two of them with a 2.
• In the numbers 1 to 200, one hundred and eleven results will start with a 1, and twelve with a 2.
• In the numbers 1900 to 2023, all but 24 of the numbers will start with a 1, and the rest will start with a 2. This is a completely not-random distribution.

Benford’s law, “also known as the Newcomb-Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small.” –Wikipedia

While it’s obvious why Benford’s Law applies to some data sets, in others it is simply an observed fact that resists simple explanations. To test for randomness of digit distribution, you therefore have to exclude the leading digits.

No surprise – chits

Random sequences are a different thing to a set of random numbers or random die rolls.

For example, consider what happens if you are drawing chits numbered from one to twenty without replacing them. The sequence of results will be random, but each draw is not an independent variable, because you cannot draw a result that has already been observed. Every result (assuming you continue until all the chits have been drawn) will occur, but the sequence will be random.

This actually sheds light on both true randomness and perceived randomness.

Public Domain Image supplied by Wikimedia Commons.

The Perceived Randomness Significance

When people think of what they perceive to be random distribution, the result is not unlike drawing chits from a bag for each coordinate on a chart. The accompanying illustration is a 200×200 grid containing 20,000 dark points (out of 40000) – so an even distribution of black and white. This is a plot of noise, basically, but it’s still what most people perceive as randomness.

If you keep adding dark pixels at random, sooner or later, all the white will be gone. Drawing chits from a bag instead of using a random number generator simply cuts out any intervening span by ensuring that you are selecting from the current population of white pixels only.

The True Randomness Significance

Below is another random walk pattern that was generated using pseudo-random numbers. At each step, the black could move into any of the nine cells surrounding it (which includes back the way it came, or staying where it was). After 2,000,000 steps through the 40,000×40,000 grid, the process was halted and the current state captured in the image which was then cropped.



Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I chose this image because it clearly shows the clumps and voids of true randomness. Which is ironic, because it’s not actually true randomness being displayed – results are constrained to be right next to the current pixel. This is not the same constraint as occurs when drawing chits from a bag, but the effect is similar, in that each point of white is simply a coordinate that hasn’t been ‘explored’ yet. Once again, if you continue generating steps, and exclude those results that take the ‘point’ out of the 40,000 pixel square space, the entire space will eventually become filled with black.

What’s more important – randomness or the Perception of Randomness?

All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his games?

After careful consideration, I don’t think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct.

Repeat Exclusions

If what you want to do is to generate a sequence of some kind, but no choice is to be repeated, the chit-draw approach is the best choice. For example, if the intent is to determine the sequence in which the PCs interact with the individuals listed as patrons in a bar, this is the better approach.

True Randomness

Only if you don’t intend to have all possible outcomes occur should you consider alternatives. If the intent is simply to flag a course of action or plot, or to present a limited number of the possible outcomes, a die roll is the better approach.

For example, if you are generating a list of ‘serial numbers’, rolling d10s for each digit (rolling multiple dice and reading them left to right) achieves the randomness that should be there – though it may be necessary to insert a leading digit generated with a smaller die or even a fixed set of leading digits.

…with overrides

The basic technique of rolling for digits (or whatever) will serve many but not all needs. For example, if you want to generate a simulated fraudulent sequence or list of sequences, you might roll a d6 as well as a d10 for each trailing digit – on a 1, you override whatever is showing on the d10 make the digit a 3, on a 2, you override the d10 to add a 7, on anything else you ignore the d6.

If the results look too obvious, you could replace the d6 with a d8 or even a d12.

Perceived Randomness

If, however, a list is to be presented to the players, it may be more useful to aim for Perceived Randomness and not true randomness. Perceived randomness, for example, will feel ‘fairer’ than the real thing (even though it probably isn’t).

It all comes down to the keyword, ‘Perceived’. If perceptions of the results are important, then willfully making choices to create the sense of randomness is too important to leave to the chance of true randomness – better to do something that will ‘feel’ right.

A good example is weather – if you were to create a random weather generator, then it would be very easy to set it up to be true random, but this would be quite unrealistic. Seasonal variations or modifiers should apply, obviously, and so should yesterday’s weather. But it would be better to create such a table or subsystem and then use it only as a guide so that you can ensure that the weather ‘feels’ random, even if it is not.

Randomness is a lot more complicated than most people realize, but an awareness of the differences between reality and perception can be a valuable asset, and manipulation of game or plot variables to create the desired impression can be a useful tool.

One Final Example: An Adventure

Let’s contemplate a mystery adventure that takes these thoughts into account. First, decide what the mystery is, and what the solution to the mystery is going to be. Next, list a series of clues that will lead the PCs to the point where they have everything they need to solve the case. Then, create a mini-adventure whose reward is one of these clues.

Some of the clues can nullify or reveal lies that are initially presented to the PCs – remember the axiom that every suspect / witness in a mystery should leave something important out or lie about something, and if the latter, they should have a strong motivation for the deceit.

Throw in a concluding mini-adventure in which the PCs deduce the identity and motive of the criminal and act on that knowledge, and you have a complete plotline. Oh, and the criminal should do their best to look both innocent and to steer suspicion on someone else, throwing out at least one red herring, as should anyone else with a prejudice or a penchant to indulge in conspiracy theories.

Here’s the thing: you could present these clue-reward mini-adventures in sequence, or in true randomness, but the better choice would be to harness the perception of randomness so that one clue can logically lead to the next.

Let’s work some numbers:

Confrontation & Resolution: 30-60 minutes.
Post-resolution / wrap-up: 15 minutes.
Mini-adventures:

Number of clues: 4.
Number of lies / distortions to be revealed as clues: 6.
Number of red herrings: 2
Number of clues to the nature of the red herrings: 2
Total number of mini-adventures: 14.
Average length of mini-adventures: 15 minutes each.

Subtotal of mini-adventures: 210 minutes = 3 hr 30 min.
Initial mystery: 30 minutes.
Preface / introduction / preliminaries: 20 minutes
Total time: 30-60 + 15 + 3 hrs 30 + 20 = 4 hrs 35 to 5 hrs 5 min.

All told, a quite reasonable adventure. If you were to increase the length of the mini-adventures (15 minutes average is a little on the short side) to 20 minutes (average), you would add an additional hour and ten minutes to the total. Which means that adding a further 10 minutes to each to bring the average up to 30 minutes each would take the estimated playing time for the adventure to 8 hrs 5 min to 8 hrs 35 min – a big day’s play, or two (more moderate) game sessions.
This is probably a better target length, simply because there’s quite a lot to happen in each!

Of course, knowing the average length allows you to design these ‘to order’ – setbacks, complications, character interactions, and so on.

You could run those 14 mini-adventures in a random sequence, or simply list the focal point and leave it up to the PCs which one to pursue next. But it would make more sense to map out two or three different sequences of arranging the mini-adventures that is a combination of logic and perceived randomness.

Randomness can be your friend, if you’re willing to work with it.
Why? Because the ‘clumping’ of true randomness can feel forced and not random at all.

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all about what they have in common, how to take advantage of the phenomenon, and things that you can do to put a fresh coat of paint on a concept that’s just a little too obvious or old-hat.

Who are the obvious villains?

I think the place to start is with a non-exhaustive list of the creatures that populate the classification of ‘obvious villains’. I’ve listed eleven (including a couple of ring-ins), but I’m sure there are more – I haven’t listed Demons, Devils, or Dark Gods, for example, (too obvious!) but they absolutely belong in this category.

1. Vampires & Necromancers

We all survive by consuming the lives of other life-forms, be they animal or vegetable, but there is something so much more direct about the way Vampires consume the lives of their victims that it feels more evil. This automatically elevates them to “the villain’ whenever they appear in a plotline – even when they aren’t.

Robert Asprin, in “Myth-ing Persons”, the 5th in the “Another Fine Myth” series, played on this expectation in the person of Vilhelm, the “Dispatcher Of Nightmares”.

But, unless you are very careful and creative, their natures as a vampire can overwhelm all sense of individuality about them, leaving them all feeling very much alike.

Closely allied to the perceptions of Vampires are the way players look at the presence of a Necromancer in an adventure. Like Vampires, these use the lives of others to empower themselves, which is frequently seen as inherently evil..

2. Liches

Liches are – conceptually – Vampires who have done away with the need to feed at all, subsisting directly on evil energies, and gaining still greater powers in the process. These changes do not make the sense of ‘evil’ more remote; these are always manipulative and evil, so opposed to the natural cycle of life that they have abandoned all humanity to preserve their existences.

As soon as a Lich or DemiLich is even hinted at in a plot, they are automatically elevated to ‘the bad guy’ of the plotline. Usage of this creature type usually falls into two categories, however – an evil plan of some sort, and some clever twist on where and how they have hidden and protected the phylactery that preserves their existence, and the lack of variety can become a detraction if they are over-used.

3. Other Sentient Undead including Ghosts & Mummies

These are all studies in obsession – so consumed with a desire of some kind that not even death can bring it to an end. In contrast to Vampires and Liches, there is something at least a little romantic in that notion that weakens the horrific edge that these creatures carry.

Even in The Mummy (Brendan Fraser version), there is that little edge of sympathy for the doomed lover who will do anything to bring back the lost love of his life.

Similarly, a ghost who yearns for Justice for some past misdeed perpetrated upon them carries a level of sympathy and understanding with them.

But it isn’t enough for these ‘creatures’ (using the term loosely) to achieve their goals, no matter how honorable, commendable, understandable, or sympathetic they may be; they have to be the instruments by which these goals are achieved, and will let nothing stand in their way. Their humanity has been sacrificed to their obsession.

It’s not quite so automatic to consider such beings to be the obvious villains of a plotline; it’s necessary for them to have some intermediate goals that reveal their villainy and capacity to influence events. In The Mummy, it is the way the titular mummy sacrifices others in order to restore itself and achieve its ends.

This is a natural outgrowth of their obsession, but the GM/writer still has to engineer an opportunity to put it on display. Doing so immediately elevates these creatures to enemies of the living, and the villains of the plot.

Often, the initial villain is not the obsessed Undead creature, it is the high priest who brings about the Undead creature’s return / escape; but obsession in no way permit such creatures to accept a secondary role; the roles between the two are soon reversed, and the servant becomes the master. The smartest such agents of resurrection recognize this inevitability and that – having brought the Undead back into the world – they have (plot-wise) served their purpose; conceding authority to the creature they have ‘created’ tends to preserve their existences a little further.

But there is always something appropriate in a Summoner who is so obsessed with achieving his goals that they sacrifice their own lives to unleash the monster, as was the case in the Dr Who two-parter “The End Of Time“, because this plays so directly into the themes of obsession.

As soon as it is established that the ‘monster’ will do whatever it has to in order to satisfy its obsession, and cannot permit anyone to do so on its behalf even if that amounts to self-sabotage, they are immediately elevated to the role of master villain in the adventure.

4. ‘Dark’ Dragons

Evil Dragons are so rarely handled in such a way as to make them the objects of awe and fear that they should be that I almost didn’t include them in the list at all. For a palpable example of how they should be perceived, read the “A Coming Storm” and “Scorched Earth” chapters of “The Bag Wars Saga” from Kenzerco / KODT..

There are essentially two different approaches to the characterization of ‘Dark’ Dragons: either these are so overwhelmingly physically powerful that they are used to simply overpowering opposition (which makes them a menace but not a Villain), or they are very well aware that their perceived natures makes them an existential threat to lesser beings, and use intelligence and wisdom to supplement and apply their raw power is clever and subtle ways.

In fantasy fiction, the latter is generally the only model that is acceptable.

And that model of ‘Dark Dragon’ can very definitely be the Villain. As soon as it is established that you are using that model, or as soon as you get a reputation amongst your players for doing so, the first hint of Dark Dragon elevates them to the status of Presumed Villain.

I should take a moment to address the nomenclature. In D&D, ‘Chromatic’ dragons – those named for colors (Red, Black, White, Blue, Green) are ‘evil’ and those named for Metals (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Brass) are ‘Good’ (‘Neutral’ Dragons are frequently named for Gems). Other campaigns and Game systems operate with different classification systems, or even treat this schema as a vast oversimplification.

Hence, i have used the generic term ‘Dark’ to refer to hostile dragons off whatever hue or texture.

5. Mind Flayers / Psychic Vampires / Parasites

Some interpretations would add ‘Doppelgangers’ and/or ‘Fey’ to this sub-category, whose members all subsist on, digest, or otherwise consume the self-identity of the individual.

(Refer to Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Dopplegangers for an interpretation of Doppelgangers, complete with misspelling in the title, which supports this perception, and The glass is half-Something: two variations on Fey for the equivalent treatment of Fey).
.
In many cases, they also add the knowledge and/or skills of their prey to their own. Even when this is not known to be the case, folklore usually suggests to players (regardless of canon) that this is at least possible.

To keep players’ paranoia active, many GMs have local populaces also buy into this conjecture. Regardless, they are manipulative, and capable of worming underneath the hardiest of physical defensive capabilities and attacking a ‘soft underbelly’ that most characters don’t even consider and couldn’t protect even if they did.

Smart, manipulative, deceptive – it should come as no surprise that these qualities put these creatures on the ‘suspected villain’ list immediately they are encountered.

6. Drow

Speaking of which, Drow (a.k.a. Dark Elves) are another favorite of whom players will naturally assume the worst. This is two-fold – first, they serve / worship Lolth, who is evil, manipulative, clever, subtle and never inclined to take a back seat to anyone; and second, the Drow themselves aspire to be like her in both their internal social relationships, their politics, and their relationship with other species (especially those of the surface world).

Every D&D campaign that I’ve ever run has featured a different ‘take’ on Drow, it’s one of my ‘fingerprints’. And they are always Villains of one sort or another – even in those game worlds where the Schism between Elves and Drow has yet to occur.

7. Orcs

In a lot of low-level campaigns, Orcs are the source of the early villains. They are quite ubiquitous. As campaigns age, it is common for Orcs to be revealed as cats-paws for more serious villains, degrading them in respect of making them obvious villains; but this ignores the societal and cultural propensities that allow them to be so easily manipulated. It’s relatively rare for campaigns to explore that aspect of the setting at all.

Part of the problem is that relatively few GMs actually put any thought into Orcish societies, treating them as generic primitives in a gang-like social structure. This was something that I set out to specifically explore in the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign; I deliberately set out to map out a society for Orcs that contained elements of which Orcs could be justifiable proud. There had to be positives as well as negatives.

I refer readers to Not Like My Tribe – Sophisticated Primitives, Part 1 and Part 2;

… to the four-part Distilled Cultural Essence series;

… to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3 (and to the Orcs & Elves series more generally),

… and to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Orcish Mythology specifically..

8. Trolls

Strictly speaking, Trolls shouldn’t be here in this listing, because (once again) there is really no propensity to take them seriously except as Menaces in most campaigns. But the concept of Trolls has changed somewhat with the advent of modern communications (especially social media) and – somewhat generalized – the identification of “troublemakers” as Trolls has breathed new life into the concept.

Most GMs have not conflated the two definitions of Troll, but doing so immediately adds new life, richness, and depth to the traditional Troll.

I would argue that as soon as a demagogue shows up in a campaign, an ‘internet troll’ (with or without the internet existing as a platform), they get automatically tagged as a villain, and hence that they belong in this list; conflating ‘fantasy trolls’ with these agents provocateur spreads the joy (and the relevance).

Besides, doing so gives me the opportunity (a little later in the article) to share a fun encounter from the Zenith-3 campaign that literally left the players gob-smacked.

9. Goblin Hordes

How respectable are Goblins in your campaign? Many seem to treat them as ‘lesser Orcs’. In some of my campaigns, I introduced ‘Strategic Feats’ specifically for Goblin Hordes; these are feats that only work for characters in a group. In some cases, all members of the group have to have the feat, in some cases only one feat holder is necessary. Part of the inspiration was a discussion of overbearing rules, but I no longer remember where that discussion was located.

I’ve mentioned these feats before, and was sure that I had actually written them up, but a careful search of Campaign Mastery’s archives have failed to turn them up. An example might be +1 to archery-based attack rolls for each member of a group who had the feat – so a Goblin Horde with 200 members trained in this feat could add +200 to their attack rolls. This would translate to 10 automatic successes against any target attacked by the horde, each combat round according to the feat (as I remember it). But even a small unit of 5 goblins, all of whom get +5 on their ranged combat rolls from this feat, each combat round, suddenly make that unit a lot more terrifying. There were restrictions and limitations – the ‘horde’ had to outnumber the targets, for example, in terms of total character levels or Hit Dice.

This article is not about those feats, specifically, but the effects of those feats were sufficiently profound that Goblin Hordes were immediately elevated from Menace to Villains when they were encountered.

10. Sorcerers

I don’t know why, but it’s an observed phenomenon: people don’t trust Sorcerers, and by people, I mean ‘players’. At best, they are received with suspicion and paranoia. Mages can be good or bad, and get assessed on their personalities; but for some reason people seem to think the worst of Sorcerers from the word go.

11. Politicians

Finally, as soon as a politician who acts like a politician on the campaign trail turns up in a campaign, players are immediately suspicious of them. And the harder they work at ‘looking good’, the more untrustworthy they seem.

Taking Advantage Of Obvious Villains

The appearance of an obvious villain automatically makes players suspect attempts to distract them or manipulate them. There is an assumption of a master plan (whether there is one or not) and many events that don’t fit that master plan are easily dismissed as attempts to conceal or distract from that plan by the villain. How the villain achieved this is irrelevant.

In other words, as soon as an Obvious Villain is encountered, the presumptions about the role in the adventure of that Obvious Villain begin shaping the perceptions, assumptions, and thought processes of the players and their characters.

The thing is that, in most cases, there is no need to establish the villain’s credentials as a villain, or even the villain. That makes them much easier for GMs to work with, and that’s part of the reason why the groups listed earlier have the associated perceptions that they do – these tend to be the villains that new GMs reach for.

Using Obvious Villains as Misdirection and Smokescreens

As GMs become more experienced and sophisticated, they will usually stop being content to let the players’ assumptions do all the work, and will start trying to introduce less obvious villains or obfuscate the involvement of the obvious villain.

It isn’t long before they start looking for something more original and unusual to do with Obvious Villains.

Pretty much the first thing that they do is to use an Obvious Villain to occupy the spotlight and take the blame while the true Villain lurks in the shadows. The Obvious Villain is, essentially, a flunky who provides a public face to intimidate and obfuscate.

More subtle approaches are soon devised. Having the real villain make themselves appear to be an Obvious Villain so that their enemies target vulnerabilities that don’t actually exist – I once had a Halfling Illusionist create the deliberate impression that they were a Human Vampire, for example. Such misdirection not only bestows a level of threat that the true identity of the villain might not, but they work well as a defensive measure and can keep players guessing for quite some time. This derivative clearly smacks of The Wizard Of Oz.

A related trick is to have the Villain of a plot appear to be one type of Obvious Villain when, in reality, they are another – a Doppelganger posing as a Necromancer, for example.

The other thing that tends to happen fairly quickly is that the plots put in motion by villains, obvious or otherwise, tend to become more subtle and sophisticated, and part of that is the defensive measure of making themselves look like a traditional representative of their type while the villain has some secret abilities that enhance their prowess or capabilities.

And, of course, there is usually good value (if you can make it convincing) in having the Obvious Enemy turn out to be an ally (possible reluctant). In some cases, though, this has been done to death – Drizzt has ruined the concept of “Good Dark Elf” for many a campaign.

Repudiating Expectations

it’s a short step from these developments to devising ways to play against type. ‘A Vampire who is also a Paladin’ became the central concept of an order of Knights Templar early in the Adventurer’s Club (pulp) Campaign, for example.

These also tend to become more subtle and sophisticated with GMing experience. As an example, below is an encounter with a Troll from the Zenith-3 campaign:

117 Parkdale

Background

The PCs have split into two teams traveling through Texas and Arkansas (with a side-trip into Mississippi) in search of a base of operations. The “117” means that this is the 17th location to be scouted on Day 2 by Team 1.

Location

Information given to the players from a ‘Guidebook’ on the towns and locations of Arkansas (in reality, equal parts research and fictionalizing)

Twelve minutes after departing Hamburg, you approach Parkdale, a city of 412 people occupying 158 households in a 1.02 sqr mile area. The racial makeup of the city is 29% White 67% Black 2% Hispanic / Latino. Median income is half that of some communities in the state.

Perched at an elevation of 36 meters (118 feet above sea level), which is high ground relative to its surroundings, Parkdale (originally known as Poplar Bluff) is one of the oldest unincorporated communities in the county. A store was built at the present location in 1857, and several farmers were already working the land in the vicinity. The owner’s son worked as a clerk in his father’s store and later opened his own store. A Methodist church had also been built sometime in the 1850s, and it was joined by a Baptist church and a Masonic Lodge in 1857. The central point of the community was a steamboat landing. Key parts of the community were burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War, but after the war, the damaged operations were rebuilt and even expanded.

A railroad through the then Poplar Bluff was completed in the early 1890s. Because the railroad also served the larger city of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, railroad officials named the depot Parkdale. The name of the post office and of the city followed suit. In 1902, Parkdale was reincorporated as a second-class city. The Bank of Parkdale was established by 1905. Stores near the depot included a pharmacy, several mercantile establishments, and an auction house. A bridge was built across the bayou in 1908, costing $8,000 in Ashley County funds and an additional $1,500 in local funds. A telephone exchange was operating by 1912. The Baptist congregation, which had declined in size, was revitalized by a revival service in 1909.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Parkdale became notorious for violent crimes, including murders. Historian Y. W. Ethridge described Parkdale as a “boisterous community” due to the railroad, sawmills, and saloons. One citizen later said, “Parkdale was terrible. There were a bunch of outlaws. It was a shoot-up town. There was a rough and rowdy white element here. It was wild.” One of the most unusual crimes in Parkdale was the lynching of Ernest Williams, an African-American man, in June 1908, by a group of African-American women who had organized a league to enforce better moral conduct, and whose standards Williams had evidently fallen foul of. Consequently, they seized him one evening, dragged him to a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town, and hanged him. His body was not discovered by local authorities until the next morning, and no one was ever charged with the crime.

Parkdale is home to the Overflow National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1980 to protect one of the remaining bottom-land hardwood forests considered vital for maintaining mallard, wood duck, and other waterfowl populations. 17,000 acres including a seasonally-flooded wetland complex and a narrow strip of escarpment on the western boundary.

As late as 1939, Parkdale’s cotton gins led the county in cotton production. A fire in 1940 destroyed part of the city, but buildings were rebuilt, and the city continued to flourish beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Although several had struck in the vicinity over the years, one disaster that seemed to avoid the town were tornadoes, so there was some good news.

After 1970, when the cotton price collapsed, stores began to close, and many buildings were abandoned. Several more collapsed in the snows of early Ragnarok, including some which were still inhabited at the time. There are no longer any commercial operations situated in Parkdale other than the Post Office. The nearest restaurant, service station, and supermarket are all 5 miles to the South along Highway 165 in the town of Wilmot.

When the fimbulwinter snows topped two meters, a stranger came who seemed able to melt them with a touch. Without him, the locals feel they would not have survived. When the heat came, though, he vanished into the night. A statue in an empty lot in the center of town is dedicated to the helpful stranger.

Four properties in Parkdale are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Baptist church built in 1910, the Methodist church built in 1926, the house of Dr. M. C. Hawkins built in 1912, and the house of Dr. Robert George Williams built in 1903.

Lawyer and judge Turner Butler was born in Parkdale when it was called Poplar Bluff. John Caldwell was a well-known banker and community leader in Parkdale whose art career took off late in life when he became widely known for his award-winning wood engravings and woodblock prints.

Encounter

Things immediately take a turn for the interesting when you approach the western edge of town, and the bridge over the Batholomew Bayou. The paved road continues straight ahead to the historic bridge, which seems to have caught fire at some point and is officially out of service. A rough gravel dogleg leads to a very rough new bridge with a very rough and unusually large stone hut situated at the side of the road. (25-117a, 25-117b).

“25-117a” & “25-117b” refer to illustrations. “25” is a sequential code used to put entries into playable sequence so that I can switch back and forth from team one to team two; the “117” is the team and location code again, and the “a” and “b” indicate the first two photos / illustrations for that location.

25-117a Wooden Bridge
Image Source: Wikipedia, “wooden bridge over tarang river” (actually located in Thailand), released into the public domain by the author; cropped with ‘windscreen tinting’ added.

 

25-117b The Hut
Image Source: Uncertain, but it matches a smaller image from Pinterest, described as an Irish Cottage with a thatched roof. The same hut from slightly different perspectives appears on several commercial clip art sites such as Alamy.com and dreamstime.com, and on a number of travel sites. Some of these identify the location as Ennis, or County Claire. I have vague memories of painting out a watermark in the lower right corner.

Encounter Content:

A stout tree has been trimmed of it’s branches and lies across the entrance to the bridge next to a sign which reads, “Pay Toll”. From the hut, a huge man-like figure, 10′ tall, emerges and stomps over to your car window. Greenish skin, a brown loincloth, long and greasy green hair short legs and arms that reach almost to the ground, sharp white teeth and long, savage claws complete the picture. (25-117c)

’25-117c’ is the D&D5e representation of a Troll. Not reproduced for copyright reasons even though the image appears on a number of RPG-related sites such as RPG Museum (hosted by Fandom.com), Critical Role Wiki (also hosted by Fandom.com), and Enworld. Click on any of these links to view the image, especially the last. I seem to remember cropping and tweaking the background.

Carefully, it reaches up and taps on the window [if the PC hasn’t already rolled it down]. “Toll. Eat Lunch and Speak News or green money in each basket” it says in a rough, crackled voice like that of Louis Armstrong on a bad day, as it waves it’s other arm at four baskets placed beside the road.

While you could pay the toll, it will cost you $27 based on the notes that you have at the moment – two ones, a five, and a twenty.

IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST EARLY (they didn’t): Breakfast was a good five hours ago, and even though you aren’t due to stop for another half hour or so, the notion of an early lunch and providing the creature with news and some company for a few minutes is undoubtedly attractive. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.

IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST LATER (they did): It’s about 3 hours since you had breakfast and you aren’t due to stop for lunch for almost an hour. But it might be better, and would certainly be cheaper, to accept the invitation and stop for an early meal and provide the creature with news and company for a short time. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.

If the team decide to stop for lunch, the huge figure will point at a spot beside the hut and say “Me Grobhan. My Kind you call Troll, I call Darenwu [Pronounced “Darnwoo”]. Put car.” Anyone who knows Mandarin will be able to translate Darenwu as “Big Shot” – assuming that his language actually is Mandarin, and this isn’t a coincidence!

“Mandarin” is based on, and related to, the Chinese language – but with 10,000 years of additional evolution.

When you have parked, he leads you into his hut and points at a round table of normal height, about 10′ in diameter. Your host could easily reach from one side of the table to the other while seated. He turns a knob on a large stove and runs his fingernails down a slab of stone of some kind, generating a shower of sparks, one of which ignites the gas. He then places a large copper-bottomed pot with a spout on one side, capable of holding a good twenty liters or more of water, onto the stove. The sound it makes clearly shows that it is reasonably full of some liquid. A shake from a packet tosses a handful of dried leaves into it, and the figure turns to a cupboard full of crockery both oversized and human-scale. “You will have tea,” he announces. “And deer-meat pie. And seed-cake.”

A deliberate inversion of the “Don’t feed a troll” meme / advice, which relates to the ‘internet’ troll variety.

You notice that the far end of the tree blocking the road projects through a hole in the wall. Every couple of minutes, the sound of an engine arriving at the toll bridge can be heard, and Grobhan bellows out the window, “Pay Toll. One green money in each basket. Or go away.” Most pay, a few turn around after eyeing the size of the tree-trunk. One yells back, “My wife is ill and I must buy medicine. I don’t have money to pay a toll.” Grobhan bellows back – “I smell your car, I know its name. Do good thing for stranger, help wife get well.” As he does when someone pays, he then uses the wall as the fulcrum of a lever and raises the tree by pushing against the protruding end. His strength might not be at Blackwing standard, but it’s not inconsiderable – at least 50 times human, and probably more.

When the foodstuffs are presented – sliced by one of his nails – they look strangely like fairly standard supermarket manufacture, right down to plastic wrapping – Grobhan sits down on a creaking wooden chair and begins to eat. “Eat, and Speak Of World and News,” he instructs you.

After about 20 minutes, the food is consumed, and Grobhan has eaten as much as the rest of you put together. You kept trying to steer the conversation toward him and the town, and each time he gave a succinct answer and then redirected the conversation back to news of the outside world, in the process showing that he was a lot smarter than his appearance or conversational English would suggest. At the end of the meal, you have learned that:

He came from a vast city (probably Mandarin’s Capital), where he worked as a stonemason and carpenter. He was welcomed here but treated with some suspicion until a roof started to collapse as he was walking by. Running into the building, he held the roof up while the family escaped. He then drew plans in the dirt showing how to repair the collapsed roof and reinforce it in the shortest possible time, taking advantage of his strength.

After that, he was considered one of the locals. They asked him to rebuild the bridge. He told them he could not afford to do so, he needed to find work for food. They agreed to let him charge a toll to use his repaired bridge. There are four baskets because one goes to the town, one goes to the family who buy him food from the market in Wilmot every week – they get to keep whatever’s left but have to pay anything more – one goes to improve and maintain the bridge, and one provides him with spending money for other things.

He built the cottage himself. The bridge took about a month to construct, but he had a temporary thing for humans to walk across in a day or two. It then took him another month to create the one-room cottage.

A quick round of introductions:

Blackwing was the superhero identity of one of the PCs when he was transformed into a gargoyle by the mystic armor that gave him super-strength, amongst other abilities including shape-changing.

Basalt is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for the character formerly known as Blackwing. Using his shape-change, he transforms into a 10′ tall figure of Rock (permitting him to use his super-strength openly). The new (and completely fake) civilian identity that goes with ‘Basalt’ is Frank Hudson, a man-hunter.

Specter is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for Runeweaver, the team’s mage, who uses magic and tech to appear to be a revolutionary-war-era ghost. When not in super-identity, his new and completely fake civilian identity is Isaiah Lucas, a ski instructor and competition Woodlogger.

Zantar is a new superhero identity for the Kzin Martial Artist member of the team, who usually operates under the nom-de-plum “Defender”. His new civilian identity is Brust, a Kzin tourist and inveterate explorer. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Earth and Kzin, there are plenty of ‘tourists’ running around – they seem to regard the political [situation] currently being experienced as a curiosity of human society to be ignored whenever it’s inconvenient. In this identity, he has foregone the clan markings (stripes) on his arms and (while undercover ) is wearing “typical Kzin tourist apparel”, not too inappropriate for the season, consisting of Sunglasses, baseball cap, singlet, shorts, flip-flops (called ‘thongs’ in Australia), and a large gold earring.

The PCs and Zantar are currently in their ‘civilian’ cover identities.

Mandarin is a former enemy of the team’s parent group who was permitted to conquer a neighboring alternate-history world in which that was adjudged to be the lesser of two evils. He used his magic to accelerate time in that dimension and established a multicultural Galactic Empire based around magic instead of technology, slowly becoming an ally to his former enemies. That space-time was destroyed in Ragnarok, but many of his subjects were saved by ‘seeding’ planets throughout the Milky Way with refugees. One of the more profound discoveries made by the PCs is that there were a LOT more of these refugees on Earth than they thought, mostly keeping themselves out of the public eye and dismissed as myths and legends. Some have begun to assimilate into the local culture, however.

Basalt notices, in the course of the meal, that the stones have actually been shaped more perfectly and exactly than would be possible with unmodified natural resources. Conclusion: there’s more to Grobhan than meets the eye. What’s more, you haven’t seen any stones of this type anywhere in the region – you couldn’t prove that Grobhan manufactured them himself, but it’s far from out of the question!

Specter, you notice that Grobhan is radiating a low level of magic – not enough for him to be a significant spellcaster, but enough that he could be a low-level mage or some sort of more expert but specialist mage. Which makes a certain amount of sense: in an Empire the scale of Mandarin’s, you would need to be something exceptional to be allowed to migrate to the capital. You suspect that this particular Darenwu is a trained stone-mage, and maybe a wood-mage as well, and that he may well have magical devices hidden away to enhance his arts.

Zantar is quite certain that Grobhan isn’t as thick as he looks, not by half. He is probably a trained Imperial Master Artisan, specializing in Wood and Stone-crafting, and trained to utilize magic the way human carpenters, masons, and builders might employ apprentices and subcontractors. He could just as easily have planted a medieval castle with a drawbridge as he did a simple tree-trunk, he thinks, but he went simple so that he would better fit in, locally.

IF THE PCs PAY THE TOLL (they did): They will barely get across the bridge before their car will have a blowout in it’s left rear tyre, possibly punctured on the bridge. Grobhan will emerge from his hut, walk across the bridge (which sways alarmingly) and assist by holding the car level like a jack while you change the tyre. As a result, the wheel is changed in about 10 minutes – but you will need to stop somewhere and get the spare repaired or replaced, which will take more time.

I seem to have been so confident that they would do so that I did not spell out what would happen if they refused. In retrospect, I can see that there were too many possible outcomes to have done so, anyway; it would have to be improvised and exactly what was said and done would have a material impact on the course of developments.

This was also a complete inversion of the mythic trope of the Troll “living under the bridge”. It was a completely unexpected encounter but one that made perfect sense to the players in hindsight.

Stating The Obvious

Using an Obvious Villain creates certain expectations in the minds of players, and these can then be manipulated by the GM to lend color, drama, and/or distinctiveness to a plotline.

Sabotage assumptions, or play into them. Throw surprises and plot twists into the plot. So long as you make sure that everything makes sense in the end, the end result is a game word that is richer and more complex than the overt simplicity created by the Obviousness of the Villain.

Even if you decide to play with a straight bat, with no significant twists in the plot, the expectations can blind-side you if you don’t take them into account.

For some reason, that reminds me of the Cybernetic Eco-terrorist Druid from the far future that I dropped into one of my fantasy campaigns at one point, complete with his robotic dogs… No-one expects a Druid to be the bad guy, never mind one of the most dangerous that had been encountered to date!

Image by wal_172619 from Pixabay

Dialogue: Essential Techniques

There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue.

1. Canned Dialogue

This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide.

There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, building in layers of depth and meaning, incorporating technical accuracy where it is appropriate, and generally making it possible for the conversation to be more immersive.

The primary price is interactivity; what you prepare are really a series of monologues that will only deliver the full impact desired if your assumptions are correct. As soon as the players go off your pre-determined script, you have to scramble to rewrite on the fly or extemporize to steer the conversation back to the course you have engineered.

This immediately detracts from that sense of immersion.

Ultimately, canned dialogue can be easier on the GM in many respects, and that’s why it’s a common first resort.

2. Extemporized Dialogue

The most commonly considered alternative is the exact opposite and involves the GM making up the NPCs dialogue on the spot, something that is called extemporizing. This is a LOT harder than simply reading prepared dialogue, even when the course of the planned dialogue goes off the rails.

Quite often, technical accuracy and nuance and even characterization is sacrificed to the god of Interactivity, and it’s at least twice as likely that the plot will go off the rails in the course of the dialogue.

To extemporize properly, the GM has to keep several factors in mind at the same time, a juggling act that is never simple.

□ The Personality of the speaker;
□ How to manifest that personality in expressions and figures of speech;
□ Giving each character a distinctive ‘voice’ and being consistent in doing so;
□ Making the character’s communication clear and comprehensible;
□ The ambitions, motives, and desires of the speaker;
□ … and how those will influence what they say and how they will say it;
□ The relationship (if any) between the speaker and the PC;
□ … and how that will impact on the conversational content and delivery;
□ The technical information to be imparted (if any);
□ The big picture, i.e. how this conversation relates to the adventure as a whole;
□ The local picture, i.e. how this conversation connects to and propels forward the immediate plot;
□ How to manipulate the content of the conversation to achieve those purposes both local ad big-picture;
□ The pacing and desired drama of the dialogue.



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That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air at once. any GM who can manage it regularly and reliably is entitled to feel at the top of their game. More frequently, some form of compromise is needed – something has to be sacrificed.

The big picture is usually the first to go, followed by pacing considerations, then the interpersonal dynamics and finally either technical accuracy or compromised individuality.

And any GM who doesn’t think the players pick up on the cues and clues that these compromises produce, and use to assess the reliability of the information imparted, has rocks in their head. A better way to think of it is that you have only one thing that you can impart clearly – personality or technical accuracy – and players WILL judge which one they can rely based on your manner of presentation.

Even attempting this technique can be incredibly hard work and extremely stressful. Many GMs try it once and immediately retreat to canned dialogue.

3. The Hybrid Model

Quite often, GMs will not retreat all the way from full Extemporization, instead adopting some form of hybrid model. Prepared paragraphs containing just the technical information, for example, letting the GM read the important bits while giving them freedom of expression outside of the technical dialogue.

This will frequently result in having a half-dozen or more prepared responses to anticipated comments and questions, and that introduces a new problem: the GM has to be able to find, almost instantly, the correct response, and also has to make sure that any critical information gets imparted even if the players don’t steer the conversation in the right direction.

I’ve often found it useful to summarize the plot purposes of any conversation as GM reference at the start of any planned dialogue, especially if that dialogue is to be extemporized in part or whole.

It can also be useful to list pertinent personality and relationship details and how they might impact on the style or demonstrated attitude of the character prior to the conversation.

The danger here is that the GM needs time to read and digest these notes without interrupting his gameplay to any noticeable degree. That means that they have to be specific, very brief, and easy to use.

The mixed mode

My approach is to employ a different compromise each and every time – if there is minimal backstory, full extemporization with a couple of brief notes on plot and personality; if there is more complex history, a hybrid model; and if there is considerable technical detail or sufficient plot importance to justify it, something more fully approaching the ‘canned dialogue’ technique.

In particular, interactions with any NPC who is unlikely to ever appear in-game again tends to favor the extemporized approach; the more likely it is that the NPC will appear again, the more important consistency becomes, and that is built on notes that can be referenced on the occasion of future appearances.

In general, the more you can adopt the principle of only doing work once, the better off you will be in the long run..

This ‘mixed mode’ approach lets me decide which set of compromises is better suited to a specific conversation, and which set of strengths will be more important to that particular interaction between PCs and NPC.

This is not a different approach to the other three (which is why it is not numbered ‘4’); it’s picking and choosing between the techniques to suit the needs of the moment, as much as available prep time will allow.

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Dialogue Considerations

Dialogue has to carry a lot of baggage in both fiction and RPGs. There are only two real sources of information about what is occurring in an adventure – what the character observes and what they are told in conversations. Characters have to digest the information they acquire from these sources, develop theories as to what is taking place, and try to devise ways of testing and verifying those theories. They may have to make decisions based on the assumption that the theories are correct, or may have the luxury of deferring those decisions until after the theories are verified.

Everything that a character (and their player) learns during play that is not directly observed should come from conversations. In real life, there are no omniscient voice-overs, and because they can undercut PC agency within a campaign, I discourage their use in RPGs.

That said, in real life you can have multiple conversations with multiple people and progress can be nine parts tedium to one part interesting. That won’t work in fiction, and it won’t wash at the game table, either. Some means of compression is therefore necessary to get the tedium down to an irreducible minimum, and then to make the communication more interesting.

One technique for doing so is the omniscient narrator. Another is to coalesce many conversations into one, and to composite many sources into a single character. This sort of thing goes on in films, TV shows, and even documentaries all the time.

This solves one problem, only by increasing the importance and workload of the dialogue that remains.

I have assembled a list of no less than nine critical tasks that dialogue must (ideally) achieve.

1. Natural Speech

It’s vital that what an NPC says sounds natural, as though the character would say it, and say it that way, if they really existed. The more you can achieve this, the more immersive and believable the game world will be.

2. Lecturing

The dominant aspect of lectures that every GM should take away from this article and take into account forevermore is that they are inherently boring. This is because they are almost completely non-interactive monologues, of necessity. Some GMs avoid lectures by always extemporizing, but I think that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There are times when it is necessary that an NPC deliver a briefing or a lecture. Recognize the inevitability and actively work on developing techniques to combat the liability of boredom that comes with the territory.



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Subdivide and Conquer

There are three techniques to handling this problem that I particularly want to call to reader’s attention.

Illustrations and Presentations

Of course, lecturers have known of this problem for decades if not longer. For a long time, there wasn’t much that they could do about it – but then PowerPoint came along and livened things up. I stole that basic idea and used it to prepare a couple of ‘illustrated lectures’ in my Zenith-3 campaign – it was a while back, now, but it still seems fresh and clear to me as a result.

I detailed the first of these in a dedicated post at Campaign Mastery because I thought it might be useful / interesting to readers and GMs in its own right – The Meta-Physics Of Magic.

The second was less likely to be of universal interest and dealt with some of the nuances and complications of time travel within the campaign, presented at a point where that was about to become important to the PCs. This was embedded in part three of another series here at Campaign mastery, “A Long Road”. I’ve linked below to both the series as a whole and to the specific post concerned.

□ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Synopsis & Notes
□ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Notes for all Pt 3

As noted in the latter, both of these were sprinkled liberally with what were supposed to be snapshots excerpted from a dynamic display supposedly being generated interactively within the game as illusions by a skilled mage.

Key to the success was providing a copy of the illustrations to a player with another PC so that the illustrations could be seen at the same time as I was reading aloud the carefully-prepped canned dialogue. At the end of the adventure, I also provided the player with an excerpted copy of the ‘lecture’ to accompany the diagrams for their future reference.

The key to the success of this technique is making the illustrations compelling enough to hold attention. Plain text on a screen – frequently seen in PowerPoint presentations – won’t cut it. Not unless it tells a joke, and a good one, anyway.

The next time I need this technique, I intend to try and make the ‘lecture’ even more interactive by presenting the illustration and getting the PCs to interpret it before the lecturer expands on their understanding. When that will happen, I have no idea…



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Illustrated Documents provided in advance

The final technique is one that I have employed both in the Zenith=3 and Adventurer’s Club campaigns. It basically involves preparing documents and giving them to players in advance of their characters acquiring them, relying on them to read them and then not to use knowledge that their characters don’t have yet. My players are pretty good at the second, and (in some cases) not quite so good at the first, but still better than average.

The Adventurer’s Club examples came from the “Prison Of Jade” adventure, and were provided in-game as handouts, rather than in advance. This is not necessarily the best approach, especially to anything longer than, say, 4 pages or so. These were excerpted and incorporated into the text of Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade – the first starts with “The Mystic Properties Of Jade” and the second, “Kali and Kalika”. Both are without the illustrations that accompanied them when provided to the players, unfortunately, as explained in the ‘behind the curtain’ notes that are interspersed within the article.

Since the subject has come up, there are a couple of other posts here at Campaign Mastery that specifically address Handouts and the problems that can come with them that I should bring to the attention of readers.

□ Beyond the Game I: Handouts and Props

□ A Helping Handout

□ Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question

□ The latter parts of the ‘New Beginnings’ series also discuss handouts for campaign background and rules extensively.


The other major example that I can point to is the background for the current Zenith-3 campaign – much of which was presented here at Campaign Mastery in the 12-part ‘Imperial History Of Earth-Regency’ series – noting that when the original version was provided through my campaign newsletter, it was even more lavishly illustrated because I was not concerned with the image source. The Campaign Mastery version does contain corrections, expansions, revisions, and additional details than the original, however.

3. Interactivity

When a PC says something to an NPC, that NPC should be able to respond to what is said in a natural and normal way. The dialogue content is thus an interaction between the player and GM as much as between the characters that they then embody.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? At the heart of it lies a very straightforward proposition: How would this character respond to what they have just heard? – but in practice, it’s not that easy.

Achieving interaction requires Extemporization, i.e. inventing dialogue off the cuff, and that requires that long list of considerations that I discussed earlier. On top of that, there are those who will take the ‘plot function’ of dialogue too far and turn the discussion into railroad tracks on which the plot rolls along. This is, pretty much by definition, the exact opposite of genuine interactivity.



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4. Informative

Often, the primary purpose of dialogue is to impart information to the PC or PCs who are present. Such information has to be both clear and concise, and yet has to reflect the persona of the NPC delivering it – and those requirements are frequently incompatible if not completely contradictory.

5. Big-Picture

It’s never helpful to lose touch with the big picture. Some of my most creative work was the result of doing so and then having to rescue the adventure or even the whole campaign from my own creative instincts.

6. Motivation & Purpose

These don’t refer to your intentions and desires for the conversation, but to the NPC’s motivations and what purpose they want the conversation to achieve.

One of the most fun things that you can do is to have an NPC react to whatever the PC says as though it was the greatest reward they can imagine – or a declaration of a blood feud – even though what the PC said was neither.

     [NPC]: “Good afternoon, Sir Gently.”
     [PC]: “Chancellor Extrak. Enjoying the festivities?”
     [NPC]: “Quite a distinctive visual display. Quite skilled, I suppose. But I haven’t been able to pay them enough attention to really appreciate them. Busy, busy, busy.”
     [PC]: “I watched some of them from the balcony, earlier. An excellent vantage point, i thought.”
     [NPC]: So long as the weather stays fair. But I must be going, now.
      “Thank you for the… conversation.”

That last statement is critical – depending on how it is phrased and delivered, the interpretation of the conversation from the NPCs point of view is delivered. Smug and condescending, or casual and friendly, or with barely-controlled fury, or the icy manner of someone forced to be polite despite taking extreme offense. Only the “casual and friendly” response is in any way reasonable, given the content of the small talk.

Which means that if the tone indicates one of the other reactions, the PC (and player) should be left scratching their head and asking “what just happened?” – it is clear that the NPC got far more from the conversation than met the eye.

The GM’s fun can last all the way up to the point where they have to provide some sensible explanation for the reaction. If you didn’t have a strong reason at the time, though, that can be when the fun stops and the scrambling starts.



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7. Omissions, Errors, Blind Spots, Prejudices and Malice

Given that ‘errors’ are listed explicitly, the implication is that ‘omissions’ are deliberate acts on the part of the NPC. It’s my experience that most GMs don’t spend enough time thinking about these five items that should contaminate most conversations in some way.

□ What will the NPC deliberately avoid mentioning, and why?

□ What does the NPC misunderstand about the situation? What is the source of that misunderstanding? And what is the NPCs inaccurate understanding?

□ What is the NPC unable to see about the situation?

□ What prejudices on the part of the NPC will color his or her interpretation of events and actions – past, present, and future?

□ Does the NPC have some reason to deliberately lie to the PC?

All too often, unless they are known to be the villain or in service to the villain, the GM will ignore these questions; if an NPC is asked a question, or given some information (by a PC or another NPC), it will be honest, open, and reliable. That’s not the case in real life, so why should it be the case in an RPG?

There can be exceptions – in a Pulp campaign, morality is far more binary, more black-and-white, and that means that NPCs will not overtly lie and mislead (unless they are villains, of course, and usually not even then). Bur in general, the truth is that most NPCs are unreasonably honest.

8. Plot Impetus & Direction

There are two basic approaches to populating an adventure with NPCs. The first is to roleplay every encounter, because the players should not know which ones are important; the second is to only roleplay those conversations that are significant to the plot. Conversations that are not important get described in passing by omniscient narration or completely ignored.

[GM]: “You quickly arrange lodgings and a meal with the tavern-keeper, who shows you to your rooms, advising that a bell will sound when the evening meal is ready to be served in the common room.”

Actually playing through introductions, negotiations, etc, could easily take five or ten minutes. If the NPC is to be important to the plot in some way, is to provide some crucial information or something, by all means, take that time; but, if nor, a GM should at least consider not doing so, under the precepts of the second approach.

If I were playing the one campaign weekly or even fortnightly, I would tend to incline toward the first approach, because it gives the game world greater verisimilitude; if play is less frequent, or constrained in hours in some other respect, I incline towards hand-waving trivial encounters.

Note also that ‘imparting verisimilitude’ is an entirely reasonable plot function for an NPC or an encounter to have, one that on its own is sufficient to justify playing it out – if that sense of believability, of suspension of disbelief, needs some reinforcement at that point in the adventure.

The final factor that plays into this type of decision is the desired pacing of the adventure. If the big climax is approaching, hand-waving this sort of empty dialogue is far more desirable than is the case early in an adventure.

If, however, I wanted to deflate the pace of the adventure – to get a climax to coincide with the end of play for the day, for example, or because I wanted time to ratchet the tension up a notch or two higher, empty conversations like this one are a great way of doing so.

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9. Characterization

The last critical ingredient is characterization of the NPC.

You can deliver some of it through descriptions of them and of their workplace (assuming that they have some measure of control over it) or home (same assumption).

You can even prepare the ground by having others express an opinion of the NPC in advance of the meeting.

But the real meat of the characterization comes from what they say and how they say it.

Focusing on the holes

This article was actually inspired by some TV advertising for British-made crime dramas on one of the television networks here in Australia, and by some additional thoughts that the advertising triggered.

In a nutshell:

• Everybody Lies
• Everybody makes untested and unverified assumptions without stating them directly
• Everybody has prejudices and opinions that leak into their observations and interpretations.

It is well known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. First, if people are distracted, they can miss the blindingly obvious, something that I have described a number of times.

• In Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see?, in the section, “The focus of inattention”, for example.
• The Power Of Blur: Blog Carnival June ’21 gives the Basketball Gorilla Illusion it’s own dedicated subsection, towards the end of the article – look for “The Basketball Gorilla”. It also contains a link to a book by the creators of the experiment, if you’re interested.
• A Trick Of The Mind: Aides de Memoire also discusses the Basketball Gorilla, in the section “The Junk File”, along with several other sorts of information that the brain discards.

Second, humans are hardwired mentally to ‘fill in the blanks’, something that optical illusions are known to exploit. I discussed this in Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see? (again), in the section, “The Relevance Of Illusion”.

If you put a bunch of eyewitness together, an opinion expressed forcibly enough can actually overwrite witness memories, changing what someone was wearing or what they looked like. It’s called witness contamination. I describe it in The Other Side Of The Camera: Depth in RPGs, in the section “The Camera Of Implication: A witness statement” (it’s early in the post).

Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases, from theNOBA Project, explores the subject in more detail.

Finally, in the post The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, in the section “6. Eyewitnesses & Confusion”, I discuss the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in a more general way, with links to a couple of specific articles on the subject.

I know I have recommend it to readers before, but I can’t not mention Wikipedia’s page on Eyewitness Testimony, which makes fascinating reading. They also have an even longer page on Eyewitness Memory which is worth reader’s time.

There is a personal anecdote that I should mention at this point. At one point, one of the duties required by my employer of the time was to assist in the counting of takings from another of the employer’s businesses, completion of deposit information, and walking the takings (all bundled into individual days’ takings) to the bank. On one occasion, it became clear that others had observed the routine; I got robbed at knife-point. Simply by refusing to let go of the plastic bag containing the bundles, and using them as a shield against the guy with the knife, I was able to save two days’ takings from the long weekend that had just passed.

Although the weapon clearly held some of my attention, and the struggle some more of it, I can still clearly remember the shirt that the offender was wearing – blue and white horizontal stripes about an inch-and-a-half wide. I had a clear memory of the faces of the perpetrator and his knife-wielding compatriot. As a result, I was taken to the police station to look at mug books – and that was where the investigation went off the rails, because they had not obtained a full description before this process commenced. About half and hour later, after looking at more than 500 mugshots, I could not have picked the criminals our of a lineup if my life depended on it; my memory had been contaminated. The bigger guy was about 6 inches taller than me, and grabbed the bag; the smaller one was about 5’8” and waved the knife around, but that’s all the description that I can give of them.

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Anyway, the advertisement goes on to suggest that it takes a trained investigator to separate fact from fancy and truth from fiction.

But, what I really took away from this advert was the principle of leaving stuff out, and that was because it connected with another thought that was already at the back of my mind.

Many Turns Of Expression

When it comes to technical information, there may be only one clear way of expressing it. Should the topic of conversation be anything else, however, there may be dozens of choices if not more.

When it comes to literary writers, the usual advice is to keep it succinct – cut out any waffle, any unnecessary words, and get on with the story. But people don’t usually speak in bullet-points. So I started to wonder how valid that advice, that general principle, really was – at least when it came to RPGs.

That was what led me to the analysis of conversational content that comprises the bulk of this article, in an attempt to derive a truism that could be applied. To my surprise, my answer seems to me to apply to fiction, too – completely replacing the ‘usual advice’ listed above so far as I’m concerned:

The best way of phrasing any statement within a conversation, or characterizing a conversation in general terms, is Whatever best expresses the personality of the speaker and is compatible with all other indicated purposes of the conversation.

In other words,.if there are multiple possible ways of phrasing something that are of equal value in all other respects, you should choose the alternative that most clearly expresses the personality of the character speaking.

Of course, it’s rarely that simple. Different modes of expression can rarely be characterized as absolutes in any respect, only as effective or ineffective given the context. Beyond that, you’re into gray fuzziness.

One option may better impart technical information at the expense of characterization. Another may make the choice of action clearer to those hearing it than either – but that’s not necessarily a good thing. While the GM, through NPCs, can advise, the players should make the decisions for their characters. Expression of personality is one component of a complex evaluation with many criteria.

What the general statement makes clearer is that within each of these subgroups, the option that should float to the surface is the one that most clearly expresses the speaker’s personality.

A methodology

This in turn is suggestive of a method of approaching the whole question, one that works almost as well when extemporizing as it does when utilizing a canned dialogue or hybrid approach.

1. Select the most important function of the conversation other than expression of personality.
2. Draft a response that addresses that need.
3. Assess that draft response with respect to all the other functions and criteria except (again) expression of personality. If it’s adequate, proceed, otherwise, modify the draft to be at least acceptable in that metric, then proceed.
4. Rephrase the draft to embed as much expression of personality as possible without compromising the primary function chosen in step 1.

This brings three important considerations to the fore.

• It means that instead of having to keep the whole list of considerations in mind all the time, they can be treated as either background information for the GM or as a checklist of qualities that need to be rated as ‘satisfactory’, lightening the GM’s workload massively.
• It subordinates everything other than the one most important consideration to the expression of personality while mandating that any given expression must achieve a minimum standard of success in all other considerations.
• It’s not quite as fast as saying the first thing that comes into your head, but it’s not all that much slower – snap decisions make the selection of phrases quick and relatively easy.

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Of course, having prep time dedicated to polish and nuance is always going to deliver a better result when precision is necessary. But, most of the time, you can simply list what the substance and purpose of the communication is going to be, and the personality of the speaker, and extemporize from that foundation.

A little context on the tail

It has been said that it’s easy to catch a bird – you just need to get close enough to sprinkle a little salt onto its tail.

Meaningful phrasing and rhetoric in an RPG are exactly the same – getting close enough is the tricky part, once you are in the vicinity of ‘good enough’, that’s all you need – move on.

It can actually get easier to create that meaningful phrasing and rhetoric, because statements do not have to be definitive; each creates a context for the next things to be said, and those ‘next things’ can refine and modify the interpretation of the first statement.

This means that ‘close enough’ is not a fixed standard – it can start fairly lax and be refined as you ‘get down to business’. The implication is that initial statements and social niceties can actually be used to set the stage for the meaningful dialogue. And, since these have virtually no semantic content within the conversation, you can dedicate them entirely to an initial expression of personality.

Flawless technical language can be bracketed by expressive non-technical foundations that provide context and shape to the whole communication.

You can offer the best of advice to a PC while ensuring that they are unlikely to take it simply by implying that this is what someone they don’t like or trust would want them to do.

Nuance and depth get created as ‘illusions’ – just as a couple of lines can become a railroad track, or an empty space can become a white triangle (see some of the linked articles listed earlier if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Conversations don’t have to be hard. Good conversations are not much harder than Bad dialogue. The secret is to choose an approach that suits the needs of the conversation and its purpose within the game, then apply a methodology that takes most of the work and stress out of the task.

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One final piece of advice

It’s almost impossible to overact when GMing an RPG (but don’t take that as a challenge). Chew the furniture, inhabit the role as though it were one that you were born to play – you will not only be more expressive, and more on-point, but you will have more fun, and make the game more fun for your players.

It can be hard to let yourself go when you have so much on your mind – that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the attempt.

Image by Samiran Modak from Pixabay, slight color tweak by Mike

This is not the article that I intended to post today (that’s still somewhere in the pipeline). Real-world events have overtaken my planning and this post is in response to those events.

Some of the language may be provocative or even incendiary; I make no apologies for that – this is a subject that has a lot of people very angry and unhappy, and this emotional landscape is reflected in the things that they are saying and writing.

The middle part of this article quotes, in full, a Quora answer by Edward Conway, which he has graciously permitted me to quote in full. It’s the most complete summary of events up to the date of its original publication that I have seen, anywhere, bringing together a lot of material and opinions that I had encountered in bits and pieces elsewhere.

After that quoted text, I’ll be back to offer my 20¢ worth on the subject.

First, though, a preamble to describe the state of mind in which I think these events should be interpreted.

Bad Decisions 1

On December 6, 2000, the music industry declared war on file sharing, especially targeting Napster, through the courts. Fair enough – I may disagree with their motivations, but have to concede their right to do so. But this led them to view the consumers who paid for their product as criminals until proven otherwise, because Napster was far from the only peer-to-peer file-sharing service, and the lawsuits were ineffective in achieving the stated goals as a result.

Legal academic Lawrence Lessig wrote, in his 2004 book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, “When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero.'” Since Napster were unable to do so, the record companies through the RIAA targeted the (potential) users of these services, i.e. their own customers.

The Rootkit Scandal

In 2005, this led Sony BMG to incorporate copy protection on the CDs that they published, and if that was as far as they had gone, it might have been seen as a reasonable measure. But it wasn’t; they also incorporated a rootkit, software that actively probed and modified any computer through which an attempt to play the CD was made. Even worse, the rootkit undertook active measures to obfuscate what it was doing – it was a deliberate malware infection of those computer systems, and it opened points of vulnerability that other malware was able to target.

The resulting public outcry, government investigations, and class-action lawsuits led to a rescinding of the policy in 2007 and a recall of about 10% of he affected CDs. But it took relations between the recording industry and their customers to a new low, and caused many who had been neutral or even supportive of the industry’s active pursuit of copyright infringers to turn against the industry.

See Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal for more information.

RIAA Lawsuits vs Individuals

Studies in more recent times have attempted to quantify the scale of the losses to file-sharing, with estimates ranging from negligible to moderate. Nevertheless, the Association began taking legal action against individuals who they alleged were destroying the industry. Amongst those targeted by these lawsuits were college students, parents of file-sharing children, a deceased grandmother, an elderly computer novice, and (allegedly) a family with no computer at all (see RIAA efforts against file sharing.

Winning the battles, losing the war

The RIAA and broader recording industry as a whole won virtually every battle in their war on file sharing, but paid a terrible price in customer relations. The war was never fought to a conclusion; iTunes and legal downloads rendering the conflict largely moot. The recording industry was already imploding by this time, as shown by the number of gold, platinum, and diamond records that have been certified each year.

At first glance, such a list (sourced from here) seems to disprove the argument. But if you look more closely, you’ll find that the list includes both singles and albums. Sorting it by year of release and then release type separates the two. The date of certification is also important; in more recent times, digital downloads, streams and even youTube plays count, before 2016, it was sales alone. This change caused The Eagles Greatest Hits to jump from somewhere around the 26 million mark to 38 million (I’d be more specific, but I lost the link to the source, so I’m working from memory).

I especially want to call attention to Visualizing 40 years of Music Industry Sales by Nick Routley and the graph that heads the article. They grant the right to use the graphic so long as it isn’t resized, but I can’t fit it onto Campaign Mastery’s page size without doing so – the best I can do is link to it.

It shows, graphically, how music sales dipped catastrophically for years, dropping from a peak of 21.5 Billion US$ in the late 1990s to 6.9 Billion US$ in 2015, a 17-year decline. Part of this is no doubt due to increasing competition for retail dollars, part of it is due the loss of the marketing channels (and loss of relevance of those that remain) when MTV switched from music videos to reality TV, and part is due to the various sources of ill-will caused by the war on the consumer from 2000 to 2008.

As an exercise in shooting yourself in the foot, at least in terms of Public Relations, the 2000-2008 period was a bell-ringer.

Bad Decisions 2

There are a lot of parallels with a more recent series of catastrophic decisions – I am, of course, referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Musk offered three times what the platform was worth, tried to back out of the deal, but was forced by the courts to go through with the purchase. In order to pay the interest on the loans taken out to fund the purchase, he needed annual revenues of 2.2 Billion US$ – from a service whose best year was a profit of 1 Billion US$ and is usually significantly less.

In an attempt to boost profits, Musk sought to relax moderation in an attempt to lure back the more populist and egregious users who had been evicted from the platform under the previous ownership. He described this as supporting Free Speech (I’m trying to be as politically agnostic as I can here).

He also fired more than half of the employees who kept the service running, and imposed working conditions so draconian that any who weren’t fired would have immediately started looking for employment elsewhere. The really good people would have found it; ultimately more than 90% of the staff left. And the only reason the total is that low is because Musk was forced to hire back a number of critical staff. This wasn’t just cost-cutting, it was cutting off your nose to spite your face, and a direct consequence of not understanding how the business worked and what these people actually did for the company.

The loss of public confidence that these measures raised was only compounded by a hypocritical attitude towards Free Speech when Musk began banning members of the press and public who were critical of his management decisions. This led one of the largest advertisers on the platform to ask questions of him that were quite neutral in tone; Musk banned them, too.

Its reported that revenue has fallen by 21/22nds as a result. Advertisers are deserting in droves, according to some sources. Meanwhile, users are also defecting, some driven away by a lack of confidence in the platform, some by the absence of adequate moderation, some by the rush of extremists (mostly from the right wing of politics) returning to the site. Even more are retaining their accounts (so as not to lose touch with their friends and contacts) but are no longer active on the service. This only worsened when Musk attempted to make mentioning any other form of social media account a banning offense.

There are now so many ways in which the entire operation can now fall apart that there are long odds against it surviving the next year.

In terms of public relations, this is a long string of bad decisions, and it has run Twitter into the ground. Whether or not it can recover from this position remains to be seen.

And that brings me to the terms of the new Open Gaming License from Paizo/WOTC…

What are the ramifications of the leaked draft language of Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming new version of D&D’s Open Gaming License? How would the new license’s terms change D&D gaming and content creation? What existing content would be effected?

Answer by Edward Conway,
Reproduced with permission from the Author
Originally posted January 6, 2023, Updated January 9

Wizards just declared war on Pathfinder, Critical Role, Roll20, and every other entity outside of Wizards that creates or sells D&D content. And yes, that includes DMs and homebrew content.

In the year 2000, D&D makers Wizards of the Coast granted 3rd parties and individuals the right to create and sell content using parts of the D&D ruleset, without payment to Wizards, free from the threat of legal action as long as they abided by the terms of the OGL 1.0.

They are attempting to revoke that right, for all D&D content: past, present, and future.

(image creator Patrick Correia, details in footnote[1] )

The new OGL license states that it goes into effect Jan 13, 2023, and that the old licenses are no longer valid.

The original OGL allowed content creators to create content based off of a portion of the D&D rules of 3rd Edition and 5th Edition known as the SRD. As long as this content abided by the rules, content creators could make and sell their content without having to fear being sued by Wizards.

The resulting multi-million dollar content creation industry has led to greater popularity of D&D and has vastly increased the number of players and DMs. The primary reason that 3rd and 5th editions became so much more popular than other editions was the increased freedom of players and DMs to create new content for their games, and to do so without the threat of being sued.

That is ending.

The new OGL states that the old license is no longer authorized.

No where in the terms of the OGL is it stated that Wizards can de-authorize a license. The official statement by Wizards on its page explaining the terms specifically states that Wizards cannot remove the ability to use an existing license:

7. Can’t Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn’t like?

Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway. [2]

Note that Wizards deleted this from its website shortly before releasing the new terms, to hide its tracks.

Then Vice President of Wizards Ryan Dancey, the man who created the original OGL, has stated clearly that Wizards and Hasbro does not have the power to de-authorize a license:

Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to de-authorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked. [3]

There is no grandfather clause in the new license text, on the contrary, the new OGL states that all creators who created and sold under the original license must now switch to the new license.

This directly contradicts the terms of the original license:

9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License. [4]

The meaning of this becomes clear when you examine how the license has changed:

1. OGL 1.0 covered 3rd edition content.
2. GSL (a different license) covered 4th edition content.
3. OGL 1.0a covered 5th edition content.

All of these licenses have been established as valid and authorized by Wizards. Wizards has not taken any action to de-authorize any license over the 22 years OGL has been in force, until this month. The contract language does not grant Wizards the power to de-authorize an existing license. The contract specifies the process Wizards must follow if there is a contract violation: notification, 30 days period to rectify the violation, followed by termination of only that license holder’s contract, not the license as a whole.

Wizards has failed to follow the terms of its own contract.

Under contract law, parties to the contract can only change the terms in ways spelled out in the contract. Wizards of the Coast, in its attempt to unilaterally de-authorize existing licenses, is potentially in breach of its contractual obligations under those licenses.

The action this month by Wizards goes against the terms of its contract, the statements it made about that contract to licensees, and the stated intent of the creator of that contract. If you take nothing else from this answer, understand this: Wizards of the Coast is attempting to change a binding contract it drafted, signed, and has supported for 22 years, without the permission of license holders and in possibly violation of the law.

Beyond that:

1. The new OGL states that Wizards of the Coast can modify the terms of the license at any time, for any reason, and the sole requirement is to give 30 days notice by posting the changes to their website.
2. The new OGL states that Wizards can revoke any creator or company’s permission to create, sell, and distribute content for any reason, and that the sole requirement is to give 30 days notice.
3. The new OGL states that if a company has their license revoked, they must, within 30 days, delete and destroy any and all material that uses D&D content. Yes, you read that right: this gives Wizards the power to order Critical Role to delete all videos, books, etc., if they choose. This gives Wizards the power to order Netflix to take down Stranger Things. This gives Wizards the power to order Paizo to destroy all Pathfinder books, and to remove all Pathfinder games from Steam[5].
4. The new OGL lays out the requirements to register with Wizards (along with how often you have to report your income to Wizards), and states that Wizards shall have a right to publish, sell, and distribute, any and all content created, without paying anything to the content creator. This license is stated to be perpetual, unlike the new OGL license to use D&D content. Yes, Wizards is copying one of the core mistakes of the Warcraft 3: Reforged[6] debacle by Blizzard: anything you create, they can sell without paying you a penny.
5. The new OGL lays out the royalties content creators must pay Wizards for the right to sell their content, based on platform, type of content, revenue, etc. It details the special deal Wizards negotiated with Kickstarter to reduce the royalties cut Wizards will demand from all Kickstarter funded D&D projects[7] . In the linked article, Kickstarter states that it did not receive any payments as part of this deal.
6. The new license forbids lawsuits and requires binding arbitration to settle any disputes.

Will there be lawsuits?

Hell Yes. I am not a lawyer, but based on the analysis and commentary of at least one lawyer who is also an avid gamer[8], the new OGL terms, if enforced successfully, would shutdown most tabletop roleplaying companies.

Edit: There have been some great additions posted in the comments section [of the original answer], including responses from Pathfinder publisher Paizo and the creator of the original OGL, and videos with further legal commentary. Big shout out to Maya Deva Kniese for the updates.

Royalties are not the issue: paying royalties is commonplace. The core issue is three-fold:

1. Wizards can shut down any company within 30 days, without any requirement for cause, and with limited to no right to appeal.
2. Wizards can order any company or creator to delete or destroy all copies of their products, again, with no requirement for cause or meaningful route to appeal.
3. Wizards can change the terms at any time, in any way, and the new terms will apply, with no right to sue to force Wizards to abide by the terms originally agreed to.

No company in the world would agree to such an unbalanced contract.

Doing business requires a degree of certainty and stability, and this license provides neither.

Netflix has sunk millions into Stranger Things. Critical Role has sunk tens of millions into its videos and products. Paizo, makers of Pathfinder, which surpassed 4th Edition D&D in popularity, makes approximately 12 million a year.

On January 13th, the perpetual and irrevocable license Wizards issued will end, jeopardizing 22 years of D&D content creation and sales.

There will be lawsuits.

While I am not a lawyer (I would welcome commentary and answers by those who are), even I know that attempting to unilaterally change the terms of a 22 year old agreement that a multi-million dollar industry depends on will result in lawsuits.

Beyond that, this breaks the social contract of Dungeons and Dragons.

For 22 years, we players, DMs, and content creators have been free to add to the hobby, creating new classes, races, spells, abilities, and settings.

This freedom built D&D, literally: the vast majority of content in the official rules started out as player and DM created homebrew. Paladins, Monks, Bards, Skill Proficiencies, Feats: all of these were created by players and DMs, shared within the community, and later incorporated into the official rules.

Dragonlance began as a homegame, and grew into a published series with 190 novels published[9] . All because of a homegame.

Critical Role has launch massive online streamed campaigns that have been adapted by Amazon Prime Video (thank you to Colin Byrne for correctly my Nat 1 Perception check) after a Kickstarter raised $4.3 million on the first day, raising $11.4 million during the whole campaign. This started as a homegame.

Stranger Things, at 4 seasons in, is still the most popular show on Netflix, and it is about a D&D homegame.

Under the new terms, none of this will be possible in the future, and everything that has been created can be destroyed by Wizards at anytime.

Wizards of the Coast, with the new license, is attempting to kill the D&D community’s ability to run homegames, to create and sell content for homegames, and to celebrate our homegames.

That breaks the foundational social contract of D&D: that players are DMs should be free to create, modify, and add to the game, and share what they add with the community.

This is a declaration of war against the D&D community, and it should be treated as such.

Footnotes

[1] File:Book burning.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
[2] Open Game License: Frequently Asked Questions
[3] Ryan Dancey — Hasbro Cannot De-authorize OGL
[4] Open Game License v1.0a
[5] D&D’s stricter licensing rules might impact some beloved RPGs
[6] “Warcraft 3: Reforged” Is A Disaster — Here’s Why Fans Are So Upset
[7] Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPV7-NCmWBQ
[9] List of Dragonlance novels – Wikipedia

Further Developments & Opinions

The first lawsuit?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10496c9/a_letter_sent_by_a_genuine_lawyer_to_wizards/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

John McKnight

John McKnight, in a comment to the original article, wrote,

I know several people who are already committing to not give Wizards any more money, for any products. Players ready to give up MtG [Magic The Gathering] , even. Because of this announcement.

He also provided a link containing “more information. Including copies of WotC’s earlier statements regarding potential OGL changes:” D&D: WotC’s OGL 1.1 Leaks Get More Confirmation, Creators React

Hahn Ackles

Also in a comment on the article, Hahn Ackles points out:

The worst part is that unlike the original OGL, the new license specifies that when it comes to digital content it can only be used for “static digital products”, such as PDFs.

Which sounds semi-reasonable until you realize that means interactive character sheets and character building apps, which are super f***ing popular, are no longer allowed.

(My censorship).

In a separate comment, he suggests that all the goodwill that WOTC had generated with their apology and open playtest leading up to 5e have just evaporated, a point with which I concur.

In fact, having lost and then regained that goodwill and now having lost it again, it will be ten times as difficult to regain it, in my opinion.

Greg Hunt

Greg wrote an extensive comment in response to the article, pointing out that this is a scorched-earth policy; there is no way back for Wizards. Once public trust in an institution is lost, it’s lost for a VERY long time.

That means that players, creators, and game companies that have supported D&D under the aegis of the original OGL will depart and will not come back.

William Tait MacDonald

William wrote about the legal requirements that have to be met for a contract to be binding, pointing out that the proposed license fails to meet those criteria.

In particular, agreement to the license has to be uncoerced. Applying new terms retroactively, which is what this license seeks to do, and using intimidation and threats toward anyone who does not agree to apply those terms retroactively, is overt and clear intimidation.

He also points out that this is an attempt to “re-copyright” material that the copyright owners (Wizards) renounced rights to and placed in the public domain under certain usage conditions spelled out in the original OGL – but copyright doesn’t work like that. Once you give up rights under copyright, you can’t take them back again.

More Resources

Edward himself offered a link to a Reddit thread that can be considered a hub for analysis and commentary on the subject.

The Paizo Response

On Friday, the day that the new license was to take effect, Paizo issued a press release announcing their own system-neutral open license:

PAIZO ANNOUNCES SYSTEM-NEUTRAL OPEN RPG LICENSE
Industry-leading Independent Publishers Seek Return to Open Gaming

[REDMOND, WA, January 12, 2023] – In response to rumors that an upcoming revision of the Open Gaming License (OGL) by Wizards of the Coast would “de-authorize” this keystone of the modern tabletop roleplaying industry, Paizo has begun work on a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).

Since 2000, the OGL has improved the community, incubated creativity, and grown the business of not only the licensees but the licensor. A stated goal of a perpetual and irrevocable OGL was to ensure the establishment and longevity of gaming networks and to drive sales to both. Recent reinterpretation notwithstanding, it succeeded. Many companies including Wizards of the Coast have benefited from that growth.

The Open RPG Creative License (ORC) will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Multiple leading publishers have already signed on to the effort to create a new and truly open license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world.

Complete details may be found on Paizo’s blog.

It’s not ready yet – but it’s coming. Even if Wizards were to rescind the new license, so much trust has already been lost that, when offered an alternative, people will jump ship.

My 20¢ Worth

This was a PR disaster from start to finish. There has been immediate fallout – which shows how thin the layer of accrued trustworthiness actually was.

This is not surprising; for every positive step they take, WotC shoot themselves in the foot and fall back a step. It’s happened before, with the GSL, as others have pointed out. And it happened when it became known that Wizards ignored play-testers’ feedback in the development of 4e.

The consequences are many-fold and even if the eventually-released form of the license is without the many, many nasties described, not all of them will be – can be – undone.

Immediate Impacts

I’ve broken my analysis of these consequences into to major categories – immediate (those that have already happened) and rumored/potential future consequences, assuming that Wizards stand firm.

Public Opinion

Ryan S Dance has a petition asking Hasbro and WotC to “make a clear statement that the #ogl v1.0a cannot be de-authorized or revoked” that has now accrued over 15 thousand signatures. This is indicative of the breadth of the public response to the proposed OGL, and backs up the opinions quoted above.

Subscriptions to D&DBeyond

A number of people claim to have canceled their subscriptions (but there are no hard figures available on how many have actually done so). Nevertheless, indications are that a significant percentage have ended their support.

What’s more, several of them have announced a decision to stop purchasing ANY WotC products immediately. A few have gone further and made it all Hasbro products. Again, I don’t know what percentage of their customer base this represents, but any loss of these die-hard supporters is bad news.

Unverified reports have started to emerge of WotC charging subscription renewals for those who have canceled their subscriptions. It’s possible that this is a simple error – anyone can make a mistake. It’s also possible that their systems are so overwhelmed by the number of cancellations of subscriptions that the part of their system that bills for renewals billed the credit cards of the subscribers before the cancellation could be processed – it would be poor systems design, but that’s still quite believable. But finally, it’s possible that someone has decided to charge subscribers who have canceled anyway, because many people don’t check their statements or might think, ‘well, I’ve already paid for it, so I might as well use it’.

Why does all this matter? Because there is evidence (of unproven provenance) that WotC are using D&DBeyond subscriptions as a way to measure public opinion in response to the OGL. What gives this credibility is that the message makes certain claims (for example that roll-out of the new OGL has been delayed because of the backlash) that have since been proven accurate.

Pathfinder

Were Paizo still selling Pathfinder 1.0, they might well have been vulnerable to the problems described in Edward’s post. However, it’s my understanding that one of the primary objectives of the rewrite that became Pathfinder 2.0 was to remove all SRD content – if true, then Pathfinder would have been immune to legal action by Wizards except through concatenation, a much harder debate to have.

Yet, this flies in the face of the reported ‘first lawsuit’ mentioned above, so perhaps Paizo themselves were not all that confident.

Successful past Kickstarter campaigns

Picture this: you’ve had a successful Kickstarter campaign, have written the text and sourced the art, and the whole thing is about to head off to the printers, who have a signed contract to provide you with the hardcopies to fulfill the orders of your backers, when the license under which your product is to be published is retroactively revoked.

Either you don’t have the money to rewrite the product, leading to the cancellation of the whole project and ill-will all round, or you do, but it means that you make no profit (or less profit) on what has been months of work. RPGs are generally published on a shoestring, and any unexpected major expense or delay can be fatal.

Either way, a loss of confidence on the part of your backers is likely to result, no matter how understanding they may be about the circumstances.

Lawsuit? Maybe. Certainly, you could establish a financial loss as a consequence of the change of license.

Current Kickstarter campaigns

That loss of confidence would also be felt by any fundraising campaigns currently underway. The threat alone could be enough to cause several projects to be canceled, possibly with the intent of rebooting them once the dust settled.

Retail Sales

If customers won’t buy a producer’s merchandise because of something that producer has done, the retail outlets will often simply return the unsold (and unsalable) product and demand a refund. There were rumors that this effect alone was going to cost WotC millions of dollars in the month of February.

Publishers of existing product

Fat Goblin Games bundled up their entire catalog of OGL material and offered them for sale at a ridiculous discount. They called it their ‘F*CK WotC Bundle’ (but were persuaded to rename it by DrivethruRPG. The implication of the language used in the announcement is that once the new license comes into effect, sales of these products will stop.

In the same announcement, they offered:

“A lot of you are looking for other, non-OGL games to check out because screw supporting corporations only interested in $$$. And I totally get that, so I talked to a bunch of my friends and associates and we put together this amazing bundle of games for you. These games are all core books or complete books, cover an assortment of genres, and vary in complexity and rules systems.

TRY THIS RPG [BUNDLE]

Nearly 30 games are made available for you to check out and at a great price. Give it a try, let me see what you think, and maybe you’ll have a new favorite publisher! Available for the next week, but act fast!

Maximilian Hart of d20 Digest mentioned the whole kerfuffle when announcing that his new adventure was now available through DrivethruRPG

But with the way the winds are blowing, I thought it best to release under 1.0 instead of 1.1 – and if that makes no sense, just search the Internet for “D&D OGL” and “mess” and “on fire” and you’ll catch the drift quickly enough!

(The adventure is “Pearly Prison Of The Crocodile Queen“, available through the link provided).

Dungeon Master’s Workshop issued a statement over Twitter about their future with D&D. In part, it reads:

“Dungeon Master’s Workshop will not sign the new Open Game License (OGL) 1.1. We categorically reject Wizards of the Coast’s ability to de-authorize OGL 1.0a, which has allowed for mutually productive partnerships for the last 20 years. Their attempts to pull the rug out from under the creators – who have supported the brand and grown D&D into the world’s greater roleplaying game – are wrong, in bad faith, and almost certainly illegal.

We also categorically reject their demands that we pay royalties to use what we have already been allowed to use royalty-free in perpetuity, or to hand over our rights to control our intellectual property and allow WotC to use and sell what we create without permission, compensation, or even credit. These are demands that no creator could accept, and WotC is wrong to make them.”

They also state, “Several major 3PPs (third-party publishers) have already announced their intentions to create an entirely new system, including Kobold Press and MCDM”. Other creators have joined with DMW to create a “non-OGL and non-WotC version of an SRD that can be used commercially, royalty-free, forever.”

Publishers of future product

Also last Friday, Beyond The Horizon Games sent out a newsletter which announced their decision not to accept the terms of the new license. They have two products for 5e already in development which they intend to complete under the terms of the old OGL, in other words relying on Wizards intent to apply the new license retroactively as a legal overreach that will not stand.

Beyond those two products, they will be looking to support other game systems – they have yet to decide which ones.

Rumored / Potential Future Impacts

It may be getting ahead of myself in the story, but these impacts are unlikely to now proceed, for reasons described at the end of the article. In essence, Wizards have capitulated in all the areas that mattered to gamers. If they had stuck to their guns, however, these are the impacts that I foresaw.

Lawsuits

If there’s one message to take away from Edward’s post and the comments that it engendered, it’s that there would have been lawsuits. But very few companies are big enough to take on Wizards directly, let alone Hasbro; for that reason,, I suspect that most lawsuits would quickly coalesce.

Class-Action Lawsuits

….into one or two much bigger class action lawsuits. Preparations for at least one were rumored to be underway as of Friday. Quite often, the first one becomes a lodestone for all the smaller legal actions, and also teases out of the woods other parties who were not initially willing to risk legal action against so big an opponent..

Restraint Of Trade

Although it might look like any third-party publisher who had produced, or was intending to produce, 5e-compatable product could make a prima facae case against Wizards on the grounds of restraint of trade, several lawyers have publicly discussed this and concluded that for technical reasons (mainly that Wizards would not be preventing them from publishing something), such an action would be unlikely to succeed.

However, you can never be 100% sure of what a court of law will do, and the claim could have been used as a foundation to establish other grounds for legal remedy. So the notion would not have been completely set aside.

Retail Quagmire

No retailer likes stocking products from producers who are on the nose. At least some of them are likely to have boycotted Wizards products. The biggest retailer that this might have applied to is Amazon. The result would have been disastrous on Wizard’s bottom line, putting it into a financial position similar to that of TSR at the time of its’ collapse and acquisition.

New Product

Third-party producers have already started pulling away from D&D as a result, as described earlier. If Wizards had maintained a hard-line approach to the new OGL, this would have accelerated. This has an impact on the long-term viability of the product, inevitably, and this in turn would have turned some people off running the game. Something else would have been newer and shinier.

Nothing Has Happened – Yet

The new license came into effect on January 13th, or at least, it was supposed to. As suggested earlier, it has been delayed (this was going to be a much larger section of the article, but then this happened):

The Last Word (maybe)

After a week or so of all of the above hitting the fan (and the internet), came an official statement from WotC on the status of the OGL.

It spells out what they claim their motives and intent were with the update – and those sound entirely reasonable.

It alleges that the ‘leaked’ OGL was actually a draft that was deliberately intended to open public discussion on the subject. If true, it has to be the most inept such roll-out in the history of mass communications.

But it also admits that the language used in the agreement was a total and unmitigated disaster, implying and capable of being interpreted in all the nasty, nasty ways described in Edward’s Quora post. The claim is made that these interpretations were complete surprises to WotC – if true, either they failed to consult their lawyers (improbable) or they should fire those lawyers.

There’s a problem, though. Quoting a date effective of Jan 13 for a ‘proposed’ policy change that was being offered ‘for review and discussion’? Nope, that simply doesn’t wash. So at least part of the official statement is an attempt to rewrite history, to save face.

It’s also a bit rich to expect to announce something on the same date as it is to take effect and still expect debate and discussion on any rational basis to result. To me it seems far more likely that they really did intend to try and sneak one past the gaming community and got caught – badly. But that’s just my opinion.

The rest of the announcement is essentially a mea culpa, walking back, one item after another, all the things that people have raised such vehement objection to, and begging for the chance to ‘make this right’.

You can read it for yourself at this link.

Unfortunately, the clumsiness with which this has all taken place (if innocently meant, as WotC claim) has burned bridges. All that goodwill has gone ‘poof’. This is an unqualified PR disaster.

Many are holding their breath and waiting to see what terms the actual final document actually contains, but many business decisions have already been made on the assumption that the leaked document was going to be implemented as written, and those have a momentum of their own – some will be irrevocable. The official response is too little, too late.

The time to make such a public announcement – even if it was less complete and comprehensive – was the day after WotC realized that it had leaked, not more than a week after the fact.

They failed to get ahead of the story, and so the story has gone beyond their ability to control the consequences. And that’s true regardless of what WotC’s actual intent was.

No matter how you slice it, this has been a PR disaster for WotC, and one of the moist significant events of the past 22 years for the Tabletop RPG industry.

Have Wizards done enough to stop the hemorrhaging Time will tell, but I suspect that they have simply slowed it, and it will only stop when a ‘clean’ OGL is publicly released. And maybe not even then. Trust is sometimes a precious and rare commodity, and Wizards have very little of it on tap to draw upon.

The tags used with this image describe the emotion expressed by these eyes as ‘fear’, but lowering your head and looking straight at someone from lowered eyebrows can convey several alternative emotions – anger and determination, for example. Image by JD from Pixabay

Welcome to 2023: A status update

So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come.

My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others that I haven’t seen in too long. The only dampener was an unwanted groin strain which has made mobility difficult from midway between the two festive occasions. But I am recovering from that, doing a little better each day, so I don’t expect it to hold me back for very long.

It was great to actually take a break from CM for a couple of weeks – I don’t take many days off from writing this blog, as long-time readers know, and that gets wearing after a while, no matter how much you enjoy doing something.

Today’s subject is intended to be a gentle reintroduction to the routine, normally something that I would not consider big enough to justify a standalone article. Nevertheless, I hope it’s thought-provoking and beneficial.

The Eyes Of A Player

Something that occasionally bugs me is a player focusing more on their laptop or phone or an unrelated sourcebook than on the game. I have one player who regularly uses his laptop in-game, but I don’t have a problem with that, because that’s where he keeps his character. It’s even been something that I can take advantage of, from time to time – showing his character a different vision (via a USB) than that displayed to the other PCs, for example.

I have another player who is also a GM, and who sometimes has to do last-minute game prep at the same time as playing in my games. While I’m not happy with that situation when it happens, I understand and try to make allowances. But there are other times when he’s clearly not paying attention and distracted by his device or whatever he’s doing, and I have to pause the game and wait for him to lift his head, and that’s when the behavior grates just a bit. Sooner or later, on a bad day, that might lead to a snapped temper, but so far it hasn’t come to that.

I was musing on my recollections of this behavior over the Christmas break, for no particular reason, and a number of thoughts seemed pertinent to other GMs.

A question of relevance?

First, the obvious point to make in this player’s defense is that the focus of attention was on other PCs at the time, at least most of the time. His character wasn’t directly involved, so he felt safe to focus his attention elsewhere.

But that’s not necessarily the case; I think very carefully about narrative structure when designing my adventures, and if I think it important that a player not know about what’s happening to another PC, I will take somebody aside for a brief period of private GMing. If I don’t do that, it means that I expect the not-involved PCs to learn of what’s happening eventually and trust the players not to use knowledge their character’s don’t have in the meantime.

This means that a story can unfold in a far more natural progression, focusing on what matters rather than being interrupted by recapitulations that are often inaccurate or incomplete. It means that I can play one narrative thread off of another to amplify and add nuance and depth to both. One day, perhaps, a distracted player will miss the key narrative points and not understand what is going on in the adventure, and all this will come to a head – but so far, it hasn’t happened, mostly because when I am embodying the plot and addressing it to the players, I make sure they each make that connection.

So it matters when a player isn’t paying attention, even if their character isn’t directly involved – at least sometimes. And the primary tool that I use when that’s the case is the eyes of the player.

Look at their eyes

What is the player looking at? Do they have a problem making eye contact (indicative of a guilty conscience, even when the person has only been a ‘little bit naughty’)? I don’t expect them to look at me when they are rolling dice, or consulting their character sheets; but when I’m talking to them, that’s a different story.

If they aren’t engaging at such times, it can only mean that the plot isn’t engaging enough for them or that they are distracted by something more vital – like their own game prep. The latter I understand and tolerate, as I explained earlier; and sometimes, the former is something that I can anticipate and even tolerate because that particular player (and/or his character) isn’t the intended focus of the adventure.

For example, another of my players isn’t a fan of universe-bending high-concept cosmic adventures. But others in my group do enjoy them, myself included – so I try to balance both competing perspectives, and even occasionally use that player to bridge the gap between high-concept and practical application in the “real world” of the PCs.

The eyes of the players at your table are sending you all sorts of messages as you play. Try to reserve a skerrick of your attention to pick up on them. You may not be able to change course within the current adventure; you may be willing to tolerate certain forms of behavior, even if they irritate; but in the long run, it will pay you to be aware of the subliminal messages that your players may not say out loud. Especially if such communications are telling you something that you’re not expecting.

The Eyes Of The GM

Such communications can, of course, be a two-way street, but the GM has a much harder job communicating in this way. First, you often have to direct your eyes to reference material or adventure notes or whatever, and that has to take priority. The few times I’ve tried to do things without looking at what I was doing have all been disasters.

Second, you have to split your attention between several different players. You may need to keep your attention on a battlemap much of the time, as well.

Third, you already have several layers of communications to manage. There’s the in-game plot narrative, there’s the activity and personality of any NPCs and anything that they have to say (I’ll have more on that in a future article, maybe next week), and there are the interactions with the game mechanics to manage. Adding a fifth layer to this melange can be beyond the capacities of some; no shame should accrue from that limitation, it’s just a reality that those GMs have to accommodate and work around.

The fifth channel

Some, however, have at least a partial ability to handle that fifth channel, using their eyes and eye movements to convey subliminal impressions to the players, even if only for the occasional overt statement (and it should be noted that these messages are rarely as obvious as the GM thinks they are).

For example, rapid eye movement from side to side when an NPC is speaking can be suggestive of fear, paranoia, or deceptiveness. Forcing yourself to stare without blinking can hint at obsession, or other intense feelings. Usually the combination of what the NPC is actually saying and the context will make it clear which of these interpretations is correct.

Using contradiction

If your dialogue communicates the same thing effectively, then this becomes reinforcement that elevates your performance as a GM; but if your dialogue is saying one thing, you can also use this technique (sparingly) to communicate an entirely different subtext or context.

The key is to try to think of how a great actor would convey everything without explanation to the audience, then try to ‘be’ that actor for long enough to do likewise.

‘Casting’ NPCs

One trick that I have found helpful is to try ‘casting’ the ‘movie’ with different actors in the specific roles. Applied consistently over multiple game sessions, these can help you distinguish one NPC from another in the eyes of the players, without them even being aware of what you are doing.

Is Tom Cruise the perfect actor to cast as Nathaniel West? Is Vincent Price the very embodiment of the impression you want Inspector Raschuas to convey? Do you want Laura Whiste to be more like Sarah Michelle Geller or Halley Berry?

Sometimes, a performance by such an actor can be so iconic that it stands apart from the remainder of their body of work, leading you to prefer to associate that role with the NPC rather than the character in question. “Doctor Phibes” is quite different from Vincent Price’s performance as the hero in “The Bat”.

Casting a broader net

Don’t neglect the possibility of casting people beyond actors if that’s appropriate – I’ve used everything from animated characters to newsreaders to sportsmen as ‘subjects’, with variable success – but enough success to establish that the failures were shortcomings of applied technique and not flaws in the concept itself.

I try to make these associations in advance, as part of my adventure writing / game prep, because sometimes it can be hard to capture the right flavor within the dialogue. Saying that you want an NPC to recall Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive is one thing; actually channeling the ‘outhouse, hen-house, dog house’ speech can be quite another.

Once I have made the ‘casting direction’, therefore, I review and revise the dialogue to assist me in conveying that personality.

Deceptive Measures

A couple of tricks that you can occasionally use to up the ante in this regard are channeling a player and channeling yourself.

Channeling a player

Channeling a player is the equivalent of mirroring a person’s actions, sitting the way they do, and so on. This conveys a sense of trust at a subliminal level, but it’s also fairly overt – and doesn’t have immediate effect (you can tell you have achieved such a ‘bond’ when you do something – reach for a die or a pen – and the person you are targeting mirrors your action. You started off by mirroring them, then usurp control over the link between you). Using speech patterns alone is more subtle.

But it also permits more complex characterization. If an NPC is interacting with the PC controlled by Player 1, and I ‘mimic’ the way that I think Player 2 would ‘play’ that NPC if it were their character, any established relationship between the in-game characters of Players 1 and 2 will ‘color’ player 2’s perception of the NPC usually without them even noticing it.

Channeling yourself

By the same token, consciously attempting to mimic the way you would play a character conveys a sense of falsity, of a character attempting to pretend to be something he’s not. This can be really difficult to achieve convincingly in any other way, so it’s worth adding to your repertoire.

Compounding these impressions with a minor mannerism can convey volumes. Deliberately winking quickly with one eye, for example, carries an Anthony Zerbe ‘crazy’ impression. Wringing your hands whenever a particular NPC is speaking suggests timidity and fear, no matter how confident their dialogue might be. Mixed signals of this type are always suggestive of duplicity. (Note that a GM screen can get in the way – one of the reasons I rarely use one).

You don’t have to be a great actor (it helps if you are, I guess – but I’m not one, so ‘guess’ all I can do). But if you pay attention to performances you see on your TV / movie screens, even those you come across accidentally or in passing, you’ll be astonished at how much it will help you to GM.

The Eyes Have It

Ultimately, GMing is as much about communications as it is anything else. The more aware of communications and communication techniques, the better a GM you will be. Hopefully, some of these techniques will enhance your abilities, or at least give you awareness of some that you didn’t have previously.

The allied subjects of Kinesthetics (‘body language’), Acting, and Speech-writing are far too complex to summarize in any single article, and I’m not an expert in any of them. But they are all worthy of your study as a GM. And a lot of it can be done simply by paying attention to the sounds and images that waft across your television screen – enough to get you started, at least!

If this subject has intrigued you, you might also find this article to be of value: The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players.