Once again, the wheel of days has traversed the circle of time to Campaign Mastery’s turn at hosting the Blog Carnival, following on from Full Moon Storytelling’s Festivals, Holidays, and Birthdays.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a post up for that Carnival (sorry, Dave) – I had a post run over two weeks when it was originally intended for only one. But it’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, a season of renewal, and so I’ll put that failure behind me and turn to this month’s subject instead.

This month, the subject is Wealth – anything at all that you want to discuss that falls under that heading. Past Carnivals with similar themes have looked at Loot, Treasure, and Magical Treasures, and been quite successful.

A couple of handfuls of the possible interpretations of the subject are:

• Unexpected forms of Wealth
• The Difference Between Wealth And Loot
• What Wealth Can Do For The PCs
• What PC Wealth Does To The GM
• Material Wealth
• A Wealth Of Information
• A Wealth Of Knowledge
• A Wealth Of Character
• A Wealth Of Connections
• A Wealth Of Reputation
• A Wealth Of Mistrust
• A Wealth Of Evidence
• A Wealth Of Allies
• A Wealth Of Potential
• A Wealth Of Targets
• The Possession Of Wealth
• How Do People Change With Wealth?
• Tales Of Wealth
• The Pursuit Of Wealth
• Aphorisms About Wealth
• Unusual Forms Of Wealth
• When Does Booty Become Wealth?
• Wealth In Your World

To participate in this month’s carnival, all you need do is write or record something on one of the subjects above, or any other interpretation of the term “Wealth” and leave a link to where it is freely available.

I hope people find the diversity of interpretation to be both inspiring and fun to write about – I look forward to seeing the variety of subjects people come up with, I’m sure the above selection only scratches the surface!

Make sure to drop me a note in the comments space below with a link to your submissions (pingbacks aren’t always reliable). As always, about a week after the Carnival moves on, there will be a round-up of your submissions.

Technically, as an anchor post to the carnival, the above is all that’s needed, but I like to reward readers who stop by with something that’s worth their time, so this isn’t just the anchor post, it’s also the first post in the Carnival.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

A Wealth Of Characters

Today, I’ll be looking at an item that isn’t even on the list above – A Wealth Of Characters.

One way the inexperienced think that being more experienced as a GM is that they have accumulated a wealth of stock characters that can be pulled out of the ‘hat’ at a moment’s notice as needed.

Experienced GMs are actually less likely to resort to a stock character, because they become more skilled at compiling a unique and original character on the spur of the moment, and more confident about their capacity for doing so.

The Flip-Book

Let’s imagine a mechanism for character creation based on the metaphor of a flip book.

How many leaves must a page be broken into for a full GM character creation schema?

• Well, there’s going to be physical abilities, and possibly some relative indication of physical size.
• There are going to be stats for the non-physical abilities.
• There will be some form of a personality profile.
• There will be some form of racial profile.
• There will be some measure of capability.
• There will be some measure of resources that can be used in a confrontation.
• There will be some measure of resources that can be used outside of a confrontation.

Random Numbers

Each of these can be represented by a random number table.

With a flat roll, probabilities are inherently even, and are relatively easy to manipulate. If you start with a base level of 1 in 100, you can easily double or triple the chances of a more prevalent trait arising just by doubling or tripling the chance in 100 of that choice being selected.

There are three problems that arise: (1) you need to associate that base chance with the rarest of outcomes, because there is no capacity for a smaller result on the simple table; (2) it’s very hard to produce anything approaching a natural progression; and (3) the consequence of (1) is that the more common results will chew up a large quantity of the potential space on the table, which limits the number of rare results that can be included. Before you know it, you run out of room.

Every entry that is twice as frequently-occurring as the extreme of rarity represented by the baseline takes away the capacity for one such baseline entry. Every entry that is three times as frequently-occurring takes away two rare choices – and so on. Four entries that are, say, 16 times as likely as the base “rare” result consumes 4×16-4=60% of the capacity of the table.

And there’s a fourth issue, one implied by (2), that rarely gets thought about, because everyone is so focused on problems one through three: (4), plausibility often takes a back seat.

To solve these issues, people with a little more experience usually resort to one of two answers, or some combination of the two: nested tables, or a bigger table.

A bigger table

Let’s look at this one first, because it’s by far the simplest one. What if, instead of rolling d100. or d% as it’s often abbreviated. you also rolled a d-whatever and read that as the first digit of a three-digit number?
d6d% means that your results now run from 100 to 699 – a total of 600 results to play with. or, using a d10, you end up with a d1000 (reading the 0 on the 10 as a “zero” and not a “10”. A d20 gives a d2000.

This usually means that you have more than enough room on the table for every option, and for tweaking the allocations of chance for each option as much as you want. Doesn’t solve problems (2) and (4), though, but those problems are frequently ignored.

Nested tables

There are two approaches to this, but at first glance, they have a lot of commonalities. Individual tables are smaller, and results lead to a whole separate table with a separate die roll on it. d6 x d6 gives 36 possibilities. d20 x d20 gives 400. d20 x d20 x d20 gives 8000 – and the basic probability is still a completely flat curve. This is both good and bad – good because it makes assessment of chances easy, bad because it doesn’t solve problems (2) and (4).

Non-Linear tables

The other approach is to make some or all layers of the nest non-linear die rolls – 2d6 or 3d6 or 2d10 or whatever.

Those involving two dice are inherently simpler because the probability curves are still straight lines. To see this, contemplate the possible results of 2d6: first, all the results with a ‘1’ on the first die (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and then all the results with a ‘2’ on the first die (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) and so on. Write these on a six-by-six grid and you’ll soon start to see patterns appear:
 

 
Notice, for example, how the numbers in each column are the same as the numbers in the row of the same number? Notice how you get the same number repeating up and across?

If you count up the number of rolls that yield each result, you get another pattern – the only number that appears in every row is a seven, and so that has a probability of 6 in 36. Six and Eight both appear in one less row than that, so they have a probability of 5 in 36. Five and Nine, 4 in 36; Four and Ten, 3 in 36; and so on. If you plot this on a graph, you get two straight lines – one going up to 7 and one coming back down.

I wasn’t going to do this, but it became useful to have on hand later in the article, so here’s a similar treatment of 3d6, with one d6 across the top and 2d6 down the left-hand side. The first column is the 2d6 result, and the last column is the frequency-of-result value determined above.
 

2d6 res	1	2	3	4	5	6	2d6 prob
2	3	4	5	6	7	8	1
3	4	5	6	7	8	9	2
4	5	6	7	8	9	10	3
5	6	7	8	9	10	11	4
6	7	8	9	10	11	12	5
7	8	9	10	11	12	13	6
8	9	10	11	12	13	14	5
9	10	11	12	13	14	15	4
10	11	12	13	14	15	16	3
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	2
12	13	14	15	16	17	18	1

 
To compile the probabilities out of 6×36 = 216, start by listing the rows containing the results:
 

3	= 2
4	= 2 + 3
5	= 2 + 3 + 4
6	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5
7	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6
8	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7
9	= 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8
10	= 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9
11	= 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10
12	= 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11
13	= 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12
14	= 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12
15	= 9 + 10 + 11 + 12
16	= 10 + 11 + 12
17	= 11 + 12
18	= 12

 
Then replace each of those row values with the 2d6 probability in 36. Do the resulting math, and you get the chances in 216 of the result occurring on 3d6.
 

3	= 2 = 1 = 1
4	= 2 + 3 = 1 + 2 = 3
5	= 2 + 3 + 4 = 1 + 2 + 3 = 6
6	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10
7	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15
8	= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21
9	= 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 = 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 25
10	= 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 4 = 27
11	= 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 = 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 = 27
12	= 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 = 5 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 = 25
13	= 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 21
14	= 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15
15	= 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10
16	= 10 + 11 + 12 = 3 + 2 + 1 = 6
17	= 11 + 12 = 2 + 1 = 3
18	= 12 = 1 = 1

 
There are even more patterns embedded in these results – so much so that digging out and analyzing them can become an addictive interest in and of itself. I won’t try to dig them all out, let alone explain why they are present or what they mean, but a few are noteworthy ones need commenting on:

• First, the pattern of results shifting up and across in the 3d6 table. This is obviously because the d6 across the top increments in results by 1 each time, as do the results down the 2d6 column.
• Second, notice how many rows contain a given result – at a 3d6 result of 8, we hit a peak of 6 because there are 6 columns in the 3d6 table.
• Third, notice the pattern in the listing of rows containing a given result – 2 – 2 & 3 – 2, 3 & 4, and so on. When we get to the peak number of entries, we start losing the leftmost entry to make room for a new entry on the right-hand-side – and when the rows reach 12, there are no more replacement rows, so the number of entries starts declining.
• Fourth, notice the pattern in the translation of those row results into a probability-in-36.
• Fifth and finally, notice how the dumbbell probability shape emerges and is defined by the components that make it up. At the start, each result is the sum of the previous line plus the result column in question – so the result for the second row is 1 (the previous row) plus 2 (for the second row) = 3. Even the first row obeys this rule if you assume that the ‘zeroth row’ contains a 0 result. That means that the curve is continually steepening until we get to the eight result of 21. But from that point on, we’re losing a leftmost contribution to make room for a rightmost one, and the latter are getting smaller with each row – so the curve flattens out from this inflexion point.
• Oh, and a PS: the peak probability of 27-in-216 appears twice, telling me instantly that the average result is “something and a half”. But this is a theoretical number; you can’t actually roll it. So, like quantum phenomena and Schrodinger’s Cat, any real results have to “collapse” into one of the two integer results on either side of the average. Which is just a cool factoid in its own right.

Practical application: From the point of inflexion until its mirror-image on the far side of the probability curve (results of 8 and 13, respectively), individual results can be assigned meanings with some granularity, especially if the middle band (10 & 11) are coalesced into a single outcome. This will make ‘average’ outcomes FAR more probable than any other – 27+27=54, and 54 out of 216 is exactly 25% of the results.

If you want to flatten the probability of extreme results a little, you need to combine two results together in a similar way, but combining two results other than the most extreme three always exceeds the probability of the next highest outcome – so a result of 15-16 is more likely to occur than a result of 14. Nothing wrong with that, but your results table needs to be reordered if that’s the structure you’re using. The alternative is to combine non-adjacent results.

That gives a table with 9 entries:

3, 5 = 7/216 = 3.24%
4, 6 = 13/216 = 6%
7 = 15/216 = 6.9%
8-9 = 46/216 = 21.3%
10-11 = 54/216 = 25%
12-13 = 46/216 = 21.3%
14 = 15/216 = 6.9%
15, 17 = 13/216 = 6%
16, 18 = 7/216 = 3.24%

or, further collapsed a table with 7 entries:

4, 6 = 13/216 = 6%
3, 5. 7 = 22/216 = 10.2%
8, 9 = 46/216 = 21.3%
10, 11 = 54/216 = 25%
12, 13 = 46/ 216 = 21.3%
14, 16, 18 = 22/216 = 10.2%
15, 17 = 13/216 = 6%

or, still further collapsed, a table with 5 entries:

3-7 = 35/216 = 16.2%
8-9 = 46/216 = 21.3%
10-11 = 54/216 = 25%
12-13 = 46/216 = 21.3%
14-18 = 35/216 = 16.2%

[This 5-entry table is what I need for later in the article.]

There are other ways of collapsing and coalescing results. Game designers love playing around with such geekery – if they are any good at it. But that’s as far off point as I need to stray, for now.

The more dice you have, the more sophisticated the resulting curve, until it becomes a very close approximation of what is sometimes called “natural” probability. And that’s very useful, because that means that you can map rare results to unlikely results with a very simple roll. This is the basic principle of AD&D (and second edition D&D) and the Hero System and all sorts of other RPGs that are dice based. It was D&D 3.x that took such a system and (mostly) made it a flat roll using a d20 – something that I did for the Hero system a long long time ago (1981, to be exact).

Using combinations of flat rolls and non-linear rolls, you can solve all four of the problems – but it’s a lot more complicated and a lot more work. In fact, most rule-writers start playing around with such systems without fully appreciating just how complicated they can get (If you’re interested in looking deeper into this subject, which is in danger of wandering off-topic here, you can look at my descriptions and analyses of the Sixes System that I created a while back – see this series of posts).

Connections

By the time you are experienced enough to really dig into the nuances of such systems of die rolls, and understand why something you’ve put together does or doesn’t work (or why it seems to work sometimes and not in others), though, you are already approaching the point of outgrowing such simple random tables.

You start seeing connections between the content of different leaves of the flip-book and – usually – try to reflect those by incorporating the concept of modifiers, and by completely reorganizing the structure of the tables.

For example, don’t you think that the selection of Species might have some bearing on the physical stats? Don’t you think that a high roll for physical stats like Strength would have a similar impact on the options available for personality profiles? How about the non-physical characteristics?

You probably haven’t finished revising the pages of the flip-book when Confluences start showing up. Species may impact the physical stats – but won’t it also have an effect on the available personality profiles?

Before you know it, your simple system is groaning under the weight of conditional modifiers and is so complex that it becomes a miracle if it ever works right. Realism is what usually suffers the most – problem (4) is back, and is often far more noticeable.

Usually simultaneously with the above, you start trying to factor in regionality, and not just environment – so you might have a bonus for Elves to appear in a Forest, but that bonus would go WAY up if the Forest lay in Elven Lands. Every such refinement adds to the complexity and the difficulty of creation of a general set of pages for your flip-book, and increases the chances of some gross miscalculation.

Generalities

Often, the next stage of expertise achieved by a GM involves generalities, which are attempts to simplify the whole process. For example, you might dedicate a full third of your racial outcome probabilities to “the same as the last encounter”. You might dedicate half of that amount to “natural enemies of the race previously encountered”, and another third of that original amount to “species closely associated with the species previously encountered”.

In effect, this extracts specific general cases from the master table and sets them aside as a simplified subsystem relating to one key parameter of the leaves of the flip-book.

Another way to look at it is to create customized character generation systems for each general representation on the list of entries pertaining to your key parameter. That could be environmental – a purpose-built set of tables, if not a whole different sub-system of character creation, for Urban Communities and Settlements.

Or is that Urban Communities and Settlements of a particular population level?

Or Forested Urban Communities and Settlements of a particular population level?

Or Forested in Elven Lands Urban Communities and Settlements of a particular population level?

How finely do you differentiate?

By now, the trap and flaw with this system is obvious – it’s either too blunt a weapon, or too much work, or both. I can easily envisage a situation in which you need 120 or more character generation systems to accommodate all the local variables – and even if those are all variations on the one set of master tables, the results are so much work that its almost impossible to do adequately. By the time you got half-way through, any enthusiasm for the project would have well and truly dissipated – and there’s always the possibility that your differentiation isn’t specific enough. And, worse still, 90% (at least) of this work will never be used, and that means that you’ve diverted time to the project that could have been used more productively.

Interpretation

Most GMs make a start down this dead-end, discover the trap, and start looking for a different solution. Either on their own, or as a gift from some other sympathetic GM, they find themselves pursuing the path of Interpretation.

This generalizes the whole process all the way back to the original flip-book concept, does away with the whole concept of connections (but probably keeps the nested tables for their realism value). One system for all.

But consulting the flip-book is now just the first or second step in a process. Each sentient species now comes with a set of guidelines for interpretations, and a general cultural description. If you get a result on a subsequent leaf of the flip-book, you can either interpret it – or flip at random to a different leaf and see if that fits any better.

Once you have a characterization, you then refine it for locality, sub-culture, and circumstances, as you see fit.

Simplification, Generalization. Abstraction, and Deeper Interpretation

A successful result or two sets your GMing feet on a continual process of simplification and generalization as you discover more and more that doesn’t need to be explicitly stated and can be left out and generated at need.

The more practice you have, the more comfortable you become at refining and interpreting a generalized or abstract characterization into an individual, on the fly, and the more you simplify the character generation process.

Ultimately, you may even discard the entire (metaphoric) flip-book in favor of some more abstract process.

I’ve offered several such abstract processes here at Campaign Mastery. The ‘Characters‘ page of the Blogdex contains more than 100 links to past articles, with more to be added.

In particular, I should direct attention to

The inaccurate presumption

Having charted the evolution of technique that most GMs experience, it’s time to look back at the original proposition with a more critical eye.

One way the inexperienced think that being more experienced as a GM is that they have accumulated a wealth of stock characters that can be pulled out of the ‘hat’ at a moment’s notice as needed.

Anyone who has this impression is mistaken. If anything, experienced GMs rely less on an accumulated stockpile of characters than they do their ability to improv and interpret abstract characterizations.

Experienced GMs are actually less likely to resort to a stock character, because they become more skilled at compiling a unique and original character on the spur of the moment, and more confident about their capacity for doing so.

…as I said.

Let’s review the flip-book to see this in action:

• Physical Abilities, and possibly some relative indication of physical size.

Physical Abilities aren’t really needed. A relative indication of physical size (taller, shorter, fatter, or thinner than average) might be useful but can often be implied by characterization. So this entire set of leaves can be left out.

• There are going to be stats for the non-physical abilities.

Again, this is not needed, because personality and competence are enough to indicate the contents, and in a more directly useful way.

• There will be some form of a personality profile.

Now, this is something that’s always useful – but what’s desirable is a more abstract system that permits interpretation. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but somewhere in my voluminous accumulated notes I have a personality generator that takes a small number of d20 rolls and selects, menu-style, from a list of personality traits. There are no indicators of how these traits fit together or how they express themselves or their causes or even the underlying psychology – that’s all interpretation. When, eventually, it surfaces, I’ll be posting it here at Campaign Mastery.

• There will be some form of racial profile.

The creature’s write-up in the Monster Manual (or equivalent) is ample for this purpose. In fact, it’s more than enough; distilling the entries for each sentient species that might be encountered down to a single paragraph as a ready-reference for the busy GM, in order of encounter likelihood, would be a far more beneficial use of time than creating a whole character generation system.

• There will be some measure of capability.

When I originally listed this, I was thinking in terms of D&D character levels or the character-points base from the Hero System, and I suspect that most readers would have assumed those are the sort of things I was referring to. But that’s more detail than needed. Instead, I would use two 3d6 rolls and a far more abstracted results matrix – I’ll present one at the end of this section.

• There will be some measure of resources that can be used in a confrontation.

And, with such a 3d6-by-3d6 matrix, this becomes somewhat superfluous – if someone is ‘highly capable’, that carries certain implications in terms of the resources that they have available. Again, see below.

• There will be some measure of resources that can be used outside of a confrontation.

Even more than the confrontational resources, this is implied by the combination of personality traits and the matrix result. However, recasting this as a more abstract indication permits the readout from the matrix to be the input (with one of the two previous 3d6 results) to nuance the outcome.

In summary, what we have left is a characterization, some racial profile notes, and some abstract indicators of capability and resources. Almost everything else can be generated on the fly.

Almost everything else. Clearly, I think that there’s something missing, and that this was missing from our original flip-book model to start with, no matter how complete it may have seemed.

I’ll deal with that in just a moment, too.

A Demonstrated Capability Matrix

To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how skilled or capable a character is, potentially; other characters can’t see potential, they can only objectively measure actual results. However, some characters can promise much and under-perform – or be an armchair expert with no field expertise at all. So the distinction can be important.

Achievement level relative to opportunities:
 

 
This table presupposes that a privileged starting position or natural genius will equate to roughly the same level of opportunity to demonstrate competence. While the dominant thought in constructing it used the paradigm of a builder or architect, the general pattern will apply to everything from swordsmen to accountants, from beekeepers to lawyers, from factory workers to research scientists. The “big” contracts (a relative term) will go to those in the top two tiers, and the top three results within those tiers – or, if a local contract, to the top two results of the middle tier.

There’s lots of scope for interpretation, depending on context. In D&D, for example, the bottom result of the top tier could represent the thumb-fingered son of a local noble, taken on to keep a patron happy. In any setting, but especially in more modern ones, it represents an incompetent who survives due to inherited wealth or position, or corrupt business practices. The result above may represent someone who’s just not very good, or someone who has abilities but has poured them down a bottle, or who has made a massive mistake in the past and is now trying to rebuild a shattered reputation.

From these results and their interpretation, you can determine what level of resources the character has available to them – one result fits several possibilities. You could roll randomly, but the results are likely to be inconsistent with the characterization; it’s better to determine the latter and then interpret the confluence of personality, opportunity, and success.

The Relationship to Career

Race and stats and level of success and capability and the difference between resources earned and resources expended are all well and good, all useful in their own ways – but our original flip-book concept left aside entirely the whole question of what the character does. Is he a priest, a preacher, a scribe, a butcher, a general, a librarian?

This was left off for good reason. If you have a defined personality, who has done well, you can select a career that is appropriate for that personality. If they have not done so well, you can choose a career to which they are not so well suited, or apply some other reason for the failure. Without both personality and the above Demonstrated Capability Matrix, you can’t select a career appropriately.

If, on the other hand, you have a particular profession as the defining characteristic of the NPC you are creating, the Demonstrated Capability Matrix defines the suitability of the personality to that role – again, without it, you can’t determine the relationship between profession and personality.

The X-factor

One further level of abstraction is possible, and that is to take the entire question out of the in-game realm entirely and employ a metagame generation principle – a Concept. Think about which characters will advance your plotline. From amongst those, pick the one that is most interesting, or will generate the most entertainment. Take that central concept and make it plausible, make it believable. That will select a personality profile for you, and replace the die rolls on the Demonstrated Capability Matrix with a deterministic outcome – and, as I’ve pointed out already, from those fundamental basics, the entire character can derive.

How much of that derivation can be done on the fly is a function of experience. It’s always preferable to do work in advance if you can do so; but if you need something improvised, such a concept will steer you in the right direction. It’s an entirely acceptable compromise to gave generated the concept in advance – and to have left it at that.

When you dig right down into all those past articles and techniques, they are all methods for generating the seed of a character concept. They just hide that truth to a greater or lesser extent.

The same is true of the Demonstrated Capability Matrix offered above, and of all similar game aids relating to characterization: they are, ultimately, all supports and seed-generators, or at their best when used in that way. Master the principles and techniques of character generation, and you too will have a Wealth of Characters – without going to all the trouble of generating and stockpiling them.

Image by prettysleepy1 from Pixabay

A necessary preamble

For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a puff of smoke.

Last week, I had just such an idea – and by the time I got to make a note of it, the idea was gone. One day, it might come back to me, or it might be gone forever.

When these things happen, there’s not much that you can do other than get up, metaphorically knock the dust from your shoulders, and go with a Plan B.

I always try to have a Plan B for any critical event, whether it’s going to an appointment, putting together a plot thread for an adventure, or writing an article. Often, the trick is knowing at what point you have to abandon Plan A if Plan B is to be completed in time.

This article is a Plan B, but one that was always intended to get presented at some point in the near future.

One of the early Ask-The-GMs was a question about creating mystery plots – Ask The GMs: Penetrating The Veil Of Mystery – in which I described a near-catastrophic failure in adapting a mystery to an RPG setting, and looked at why the problems that almost scuppered it had arisen.

I revisited that incident with additional details in tip 2a, “Ripoff Blues”, in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts.

In between those two, I wrote a more extensive article on the subject, The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs, which has since become one of the most popular on the entire website. I followed that up, at a reader’s request, with a couple of examples in The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples a week later. (The first of those has since come in for high praise from a number of sources and been linked to by WOTC themselves in a blog article on the subject!)

Aside from the occasional mention, that’s more or less where I’ve left the subject because I literally had nothing further to say. But, in the past week or so, it’s been on my mind as a subject because I had a mystery without a satisfactory solution on my hands in a broader plotline.

This article isn’t about that particular mystery per se; that was just the catalyst. But, as a result of my ruminations, a few deep thoughts came to me; this article is all about sharing them with you, the readers.

On the agenda today are – 1. getting the players involved, 2. a couple of thoughts about clues; 3. a technique for seeing the Big Picture in the small details (and vice versa), 4. roleplaying in a mystery, 5. the structure of a mystery plotline, and finally, 6. finding and assessing solutions to the mystery.

Let’s get started….

0. Working Definitions

A mystery plotline is one in which a question is posed either by or to the PCs for which there is no clear and obvious answer. Almost any question can be the foundation for a mystery – “Who” is the most common, but “Why” and “How” are also common. “Where” and “When” are more unusual. Most of the time, one will be dominant, but they will all need to be answered in the course of the investigation. I remind myself of this by remembering the well-known phrase from “Clue” (or “Cluedo” as it was here in Australia) – “Professor Plum, in the Library, with the Candlestick.”

The plotline details the investigation that resolves this problem to some identifiable standard. That could be “justice is served” or “know the identity of the enemy” or “discover what’s really going on before it’s too late” or “capture the bad guy and hand them over for prosecution and punishment”, or any number of other alternatives – but this is always identifiable from the outset to the investigators, and shapes the available pathways to a solution..

The investigation may be hamstrung by the need to adhere to certain restrictions, such as evidence being legally admissible, but more frequently, the players will not adhere to such restrictions unless forced to do so.

Mysteries can be the focal point of an adventure, or may be a smaller sub-plot in some other storyline. They can also form a plot arc weaving through multiple adventures as a subplot.

“Means, Motive, and Opportunity” are the generally-accepted requirement for proving someone guilty of the commission of a crime – which are often at the heart of a mystery plotline (this, of course, immediately provokes most writers into contemplating situations in which someone can have all three, yet not be guilty).

So, if we’re all clear on the ground rules, let’s get to the real meat of today’s offering.

1. Matters of Presentation

Like most t forms of RPG, writing for a Mystery means engaging in a dance with two partners. At one level, the content has to attract the interest of the characters, but (even more importantly) it also has to compel the players to take an active interest.

There’s not much that’s worse than hitting the first of those two targets and not the second; that, effectively, compels the players to engage in something they are not interested in – which is as good a definition of a ‘chore’ as I’ve ever come across. RPGs are supposed to be fun…

Engaging the characters

It’s actually relatively easy to engage the characters, because they are in writing to a large extent, and where they aren’t in writing, they have been exposed to past events that reveal their natures and personalities. If a mystery connects to some subject that’s of interest to the character, that’s all you need.

You can even infer such interest even if that itch has never been scratched in-game before – if the character has a skill in it, or in some related field, you can largely assume that a connection can be forged.

If, for example, you are presenting the players with a Loch Ness style monster mystery, and the character is a fisherman, the hook has been baited with an irresistible lure; you just have to dangle it in the water for a bit.

The better you know the characters, the more success you will have at this with less effort, and the longer the campaign has been running with these characters, the better you will know them.

Enticing the players

Enticing the players to engage is often the more difficult part of the process. They are more complex and nuanced as personalities, frequently have only a limited and visceral understanding of themselves, and are not codified at all. “I know what I don’t like and this ain’t it” is often the best that you can hope for, to misquote the redneck trope.

To some extent, side-conversations and general chatter can be illuminating, because these display a person’s interests outside of the focus of play. As a GM, you don’t care if the player and PC have different reasons to be engaged in the plot; what you care about is that they are both so engaged.

In particular, listen to what TV shows and movies they like (or don’t) and what plotlines and plot structures they like and dislike. Similarly, note any likes and dislikes in novels and other stories. Note the subjects of any anecdotes – but be prepared for the player to be more of an expert on the subject than you are!

The Texture Of Mystery

Mysteries hold a greater propensity for frustration than any other sub-genre of adventure. So long as the characters have a clear course to follow, this is mitigated, but leaves you vulnerable to finding yourself in a situation where you are railroading the plot.

It’s very easy for mysteries to become clue-driven, and since you are the dispenser of clues, and of the logic that connects them, railroading is ever-present as a danger, in any event.

Clue-driven mysteries are like color-by-numbers books – the end result may be appealing, even satisfying, but the process is superficial, and leads to performances that can be ‘phoned in’. I have found that watching B-movies and trying to discern why a given movie falls into that category can be enlightening in terms of a cautionary tale, i.e. what not to do. This is especially true if the movie or TV show clearly aspired to something better – an a-list cast, proven scriptwriters, solid direction and producer – the more a production tries to be an A-list product and fails, the more that there is to learn from it.

Often, the flaws will be subjective, and that’s where there is the most gold to be panned. For example, the movie “Se7en” was a moderately-big hit, world-wide – but I didn’t enjoy the ending. You want your heroes to get there in time to save the day; real life may not be that way, but too much realism gets in the way of entertainment. There is a difference between realism and plausibility; you want to stretch the realism as thinly as you can in favor of entertainment. The ending of “Se7en” falls on the wrong side of that equation for me, and for most of my players.

Equally-educational can be those productions that are more than the sum of their parts, that come together despite being handicapped in many and various ways. These are productions that clearly aspired to be nothing better than a Good B-movie but which rise above the pack to be solid entertainments despite their handicaps. As an example of this category, I commend to your attention a movie called “Ricochet” starring Denzel Washington and John Lithgow, made before the former became a star of the magnitude that he came to enjoy after the Pelican Brief made it big. Comparing the differences in resolution between the original novel of “The Firm” and the movie version is also educational – because they both work, in terms of the medium in which they are presented, while the solution of the other medium would not be as effective.

While the lessons so discerned are always important, mysteries are often the sharpest point on such matters. They have a textural component that makes them especially susceptible to problems that might otherwise be glossed over. It’s my opinion that this is because there are fewer distractions to cover up those flaws in such adventures, which is not the case when it comes to movies and TV – in a Mystery RPG Adventure, there is nowhere to hide.

That mandates closer attention to the ‘feel’ or ‘texture’ of the Adventure than you need to pay in non-mysteries.

I once ran a game session in which a thirty-second character interaction grew and expanded to fill almost the entire session, simply because the players were having so much fun interacting with this fictional individual. In terms of roleplaying, of bringing this NPC to life, I was “in the zone” that day, to the point where even the experienced players congratulated me. That doesn’t happen often. The next game session, the magic had gone, and everyone got on with playing out the adventure. What I was most aware of, after the fact, was the difference in the ‘look and feel’ between those two sessions – same players, same characters, same plotline, same adventure, same situation, same GM – but nevertheless, different. Fortunately, I didn’t fall into the trap of trying to recapture that past glory, which is very easy to do; the feeling when you are “In The Zone” can be intoxicating. I knew that the stars would not have aligned so perfectly a second time around, and the results would have been a pale shadow of the past success. That’s what makes it such a feather in your cap when it happens.

The point is this: when it works well, the results are greater than the sum of their parts, and the texture is the stylistic framework that brings those parts together and binds them. You can have the best ingredients in the world; they will be hamstrung if they aren’t combined properly, and that means getting the texture right.

Another way of looking at what I mean by texture is to describe it as the “Metagame style” of the adventure – how the game mechanics and the in-game world are melded together in terms of the in-game events that comprise the adventure. Making a skill check at the right time can be a crescendo, the denouement of the entire experience leading up to it, or it can be deflating, and it’s all in how that particular skill check is handled and the lead-up to it.

Pay closer attention to the texture, the feel, and the pacing of mystery plots. It won’t guarantee success, but it will alleviate the avenues of failure.

2. Clues

Mysteries are frequently, if not perpetually, clue-driven, as I stated above. That means that the treatment of clues is critical to the success of a mystery plotline. This treatment has to balance on a knife-edge, because there are too points of failure that are polar opposites: clues can be too obvious, or they can be too obscure.

Too obvious

This frequently arises in reaction to a sense that the clues are too obscure, or were too obscure in a previous adventure – correct or otherwise. In other words, you underestimate the capabilities of the players, often because you overestimated them in the past. But one session is not the same as another; on any given day, the players can outperform themselves, and you can’t predict when that will happen.

What’s worse is that there isn’t a lot you can do about it when you make this mistake, not without overreacting. Trying to complicate your mystery at the last minute is the usual response, and it never works. The best response is to cut out entire scenes that are now redundant and short-cut the adventure – and to have something prepped and on standby to fill any excess playing time that results. But that requires knowing your mystery, and its moving parts, like the back of your hand.

That, in turn, exposes a risk that comes from a canned mystery adventure. These have to be written to suit the vast majority of game-tables, the lowest common denominator – and that’s never your game-table. And, since you have rarely read and understood the structure of the mystery as well as comes from having written it in the first place, you are totally reliant on the match between the expectations of the writer and the reality of your players, as they are on that particular day, marrying up perfectly – which happens so rarely that its not worth writing about.

Worse still, your players will rarely follow the straight line laid out by the authors; they will want to talk to someone that the author never expected them to, leaving you scrambling to fill plot holes that should not exist.

There are no easy answers to this problem – you need an understanding of the source material that you simply can’t get on the spot. The only answer is to be prepared to throw the source material away completely, in terms of plot and solutions to the mystery (keep it for characterization and locations) and let the players discover their own solutions to the story.

One final word of advice before I move on – the night before you are to run, read your adventure from start to finish. Pay special attention to any need to skip forward or back within the content and where you have to go to find what you needed to in order to understand the adventure. Even if you are the author, the added expertise in understanding the content and its structure WILL reward the effort.

Too obscure

The opposite problem comes around when the dichotomy between the players and their characters gets exposed. No matter how skilled they might be at impersonating the characters, players are not their characters. The characters know things, by virtue of living in the game world their entire life, that the players can’t even conceive of, and they will have subtly different thought processes.

The consequence of this is that the players struggle to connect dots that the GM expected their characters to link together effortlessly.

If you’re lucky, this will only happen once or twice in the journey from puzzle to solution, and you will be able to cover it with an appropriate skill check or even stat check. This is a solution that becomes wearing, even grating, with overuse, though.

But you can’t rely on players making a successful roll at the critical moment without making the roll insultingly easy, which is a thinly-veiled rebuke of the player – whether it’s meant that way or not. And that means that you need a get-out-jail plan “B” that you can implement. Ideally, that Plan B will have been devised by the players themselves (in other words, by the PCs) – but players grow confident in their ability to improv just as GMs do, and this is one circumstance on which the two can fail to link up. The results are unsatisfactory for all concerned.

There are also occasions when, in an attempt to stimulate a player with a challenge, the GM makes things too hard and the player just goes limp, their every fall-back stymied. This can happen no matter how experienced the player is – and, while it can happen in any session, it’s more likely to arise in a mystery plotline.

It follows that it’s more important in mystery plotlines for the GM to have a Plan B of his own that he has prepped in advance, and that one of the objectives of that Plan B has to be getting the player to re-engage.

3. The Big Picture

One of my skills has always been the ability to see the impact on the big picture of the small stuff – to Zoom In and Zoom out of the mental picture. This has made it easier in the past to explain technical details to non-technical people back when I was in I.T. – one of the managers that I dealt with regularly back then called it the ability to translate “Geek” into “Human”.

It’s an ability that comes naturally to me, something that I find it hard to impart to others because I don’t know how I do it, it happens naturally.

There have been a few occasions where it has let me down, and I’ve made careful efforts to consciously learn from those (I wrote of one such occasion in My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic). Recently, though, I perceived something that may be at least part of the answer to the unanswerable question of “how”. This was a large part of the genesis of this article, and everything else included is a bonus!

The Little Picture

The first trick is to keep track of a “little picture” of the Big Picture. You could think of this as a “thumbnail” of the Big Picture. At each scale of perception of that Big Picture, I simplify each of the small-picture elements enough that this overview can be comprehended in its totality.

Let’s look at how this works:

In an encounter, I can keep track of the personality of the character being encountered and the plot-objective of the encounter, with enough capacity left over to deal with players and their questions and level of engagement.

That encounter is thus one part of a plot thread; I can focus on that plot thread and see it as a standalone entity. It has a purpose and a narrative structure all its own. This is achieved by simplifying the component elements to their key fundamentals – encounters and their purposes within this broader plot. This permits me to revise and break down the broader plotline into smaller chunks that will form parts of actual adventures. That means that I can define encounter sequences in terms of their contribution to the larger plot, their purpose in other words.

By mentally simplifying those plot threads or plot arcs, I can construct a larger narrative from the interaction of several plot arcs and they way they push PC circumstances this way and that. This is either a campaign, or a single phase of a campaign that’s being designed to be long-running. That permits me to break the plot arc into adventures and subplots to be incorporated into adventures.

If the latter, then I can simplify the campaign phase to see how several of them will fit together to tell an even more sweeping narrative.

When most people try to view the relationship between a specific plot element and the big picture, they try to keep it all at the most granular level, I think, and struggle as a result.

A single line of code in a computer program takes milliseconds to execute. That same line of code executed 200,000 times a day takes up a significant portion of the day – so much so that it breaks the functionality of the computer program and the process that it is supposed to support. Nor are all lines of code or steps in a process created equally – some take longer than others. Minimizing those may make for less elegant code – but it makes for far greater efficiency. The same skill, or technique, that I use as a GM permits that big-picture overview (which others can understand even if they don’t understand or appreciate computer code), is what enabled me to perform those ‘translations’. So this is a skill that definitely has a real-world benefit, if mastered.

How to learn or practice it for yourself? I can only speculate on whether or not this will work, but here’s my suggestion.

1. Pick a past campaign that ran for at least ten game sessions, and preferably for a year or more, that you can still remember fairly clearly. This could even be a current campaign if that fits the description better.
2. Summarize one memorable encounter from that campaign into a single paragraph of text, 2-3 lines long, four at the most. Include the personalities of the characters being encountered, any interpersonal dynamics that feature, and the function that the encounter had in leading to either the resolution of the adventure or laying the groundwork for another adventure. While not easy, this shouldn’t be too hard.
3. Think about the resulting adventure. In a single line, summarize the previous summary, focusing on the purpose.
4. Synopsize that adventure in a single paragraph, no more than 6 lines long. Include its relationship to any adventures before or after it, and how they combined to tell a bigger story.
5. Take that synopsis and summarize it into a single line.
6. In a paragraph of no more than eight lines, synopsize that entire campaign. What was its overall story?
7. Now boil that synopsis down to a single line.

That’s all practice, to start developing methods and techniques. To fit everything in, you will need to simplify and leave things out; the trick is to isolate what is significant and identify what can be left out.

Use the same technique with a favorite movie or TV show, which has the benefit of being watchable over and over. Go from scene to act to episode to season to whole-of-show..

Once you have a bit of practice under your belt, it’s time to start to learn to do it for real.

1. When you start planning an adventure or game session, take the time to think about it in terms of what you did in the previous adventure or game session, and how it derives from that.
2. Take another moment to think about what the next game session will contain as a result of the game session you are now planning, and how you can shape the content of the game session you are working on to enhance the next one.
3. Try to summarize the game session or adventure in a single sentence.
4. When you are preparing a character or an encounter, take a moment to think about how it will be influenced by events prior to it in the current adventure…
5. …and then take another moment to think about how it will integrate into and drive the overall plotline of the adventure or game session.
6. Every time your adventure will call for a skill roll, or an attack roll, take a moment to think about how success or failure will impact the course of the adventure overall.

It’s important that these exercises be carried out mentally, not in writing, just as it was important that the initial exercises relieve you of some of the mental burden by putting your thoughts down on paper. Those exercises set a standard, teaching you how much you need to compress, and how to go about it. The exercises described subsequently teach you to create ‘thumbnail’ pictures on the fly, in your head. You may need to reset your targets from time to time with a refresher practice of the initial exercises, though. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, this should get you to success, eventually – I think.

Zooming Out

Having mastered the technique itself, you then need to learn to apply it in real-life, in real-time, when you distracted by a dozen other things. This is just a matter of practice – every time a player makes a decision, examine it in terms of the overall adventure or day’s play; every time you interpret a die roll or answer a player’s question, think about the implications for the big picture. You have only a second or two to do this; if it doesn’t happen in time, move on. It’s important to try for speed, even if you don’t achieve it at first; not doing so can cement bad habits in place, and actually taking the time to complete the task can lead to you losing contact with the moment, the ‘now’. Although you might not be aware of it, each time you make the attempt, your mental speed and ‘muscle’.will develop, and you’ll get a little closer to success.

Zooming in

Zooming in largely happens in prep and planning. Some people think that means that speed is less important; I disagree with the premise of any such statement. I want it to happen fast so that I can use the big picture to guide my smaller-picture content without taking me out of the creative ‘zone’. I don’t want to have to stop and reorient my thinking. So take a second or two to attempt it, without trying for too big a ‘zoom’ movement, and then keep doing things the way you always do. As you start seeing the details that are necessary to support the bigger picture, the awareness and sense of direction that result will naturally integrate themselves into your creative (prep) process.

The Relational Model

That’s all very well and good, but not meaty enough to become the core of an article of Campaign Mastery depth. It was perception of another piece of the puzzle that achieved that.

I recently became aware that whenever I think of an object or event and its properties, I always frame those in relation to the bigger picture of which it is part.

I have several real-world examples to illustrate the process.

Let’s start with the unexpected bill – it happens to all of us. Making the assumption that it has to be paid, either immediately and in full, or after a short delay or in parts (depending on what can be arranged), one of the properties of that invoice is the impact that it has on my personal financial plans, and hence, on my life in general. By looking at it in terms of the bigger picture, I can see how other things might have to be rearranged to accommodate the payments, and what terms I might have to pursue.

In winter, I have (on occasion) been presented with an electric bill for more than A$1000 for the quarter. My heater used to cost $1 an hour to run – that has been replaced with a more efficient unit, and electricity prices have come down a little, so it’s now less than that, but it’s an easy number to work with. Ten hours a day, thirty days a month, for three months? That’s $900 right there. If you can afford to pay bills of that size at the drop of a hat, good luck to you – I can’t. I budget in advance, making all sorts of assumptions, like an annual 5% increase in prices, and an extra $200 on the estimated bill that results in case of heavier than usual usage. I have, in other words, built a budgetary process around preparing for the worst. And if a bill comes in that is worse than my worst estimates? I know instantly how to adapt to cope with it. Before I started doing this, electricity bills were a source of quarterly stress and angst; now, they are a source of mild apprehension at worst, and something that I can ignore most of the time.

Second example: I don’t think of the flavor of a food that I have purchased, I think about that flavor in the context of how it will taste when used in particular ways. I buy mince and pineapple to add to my sweet-and-sour. I add ginger, black pepper, onion, and garlic to tinned ‘chunky’ soups, plus additional minced meat, vegetables, and carbs. I buy preserved peaches or fresh bananas to add to certain breakfast foods for additional flavor. And so on. These products don’t exist in isolation; they are part of a meal, and that meal is part of a menu, and that menu is part of an overall food plan. This permits me to buy five or six weeks’ worth of groceries at a time, minimizing delivery fees – from $12 a week down to $3 over 5-6 weeks, a saving of (conservatively) $600 a year.

Under this way of thinking, an NPC has certain attributes, but these are less important than the relationships between the NPC and other in-game elements (including the PCs). I don’t think of the NPC in terms of their skills, or abilities, or stats, or even personality traits; their defining properties lie in their relationship to the plot and to the other ‘moving parts’ of the game experience.

A piece of treasure will have certain attributes like value and effects, but I am more interested in, and think about it more in terms of, what it will permit the characters possessing it to do that they couldn’t do before. My players have learned to expect this (nothing happens by accident), which means that I can manipulate their expectations with treasure placement – ‘A cloak that gives a bonus toward invisibility from Undead? What’s he (meaning me) got in store for us, this time?’ – Answer: not what you’re expecting, but I want you looking out for moving shadows and graveyards!

The Big Picture in Mysteries

Changing – however inadvertently – a single word or line of dialogue in a mystery can completely transform the whole experience, the internal logic that holds the whole thing together. Everything has to be nuanced to generate the correct ambiance and interpretation that leads to entertaining gameplay while preserving fidelity to the eventual solution. You never want the answer to be the most obvious guilty party, nor the least-obvious – you need to build towards a plot twist. In no other form of adventure is awareness of The Big Picture so important.

It was to evade that need that I offered the solution that I devised, a decade-and-a-half ago, and described in the Ask-The-GMs article referenced earlier. In a genuine faux-Agatha-Christie manner, everyone is potentially guilty, and the actual guilty party is identified in the course of game-play; if the players rule someone out that they shouldn’t, that NPC immediately becomes the guilty party.

But not all mysteries work in that particular mode; big-picture awareness and using it to guide every GMing decision along the way lets me give the players more independence from scripted situations, and a better in-game experience, no matter what the plotline.

Always maintain as much big-picture awareness as you can, especially when running mystery-oriented adventures or plotlines.

4. Behavior

Putting a mystery into an RPG setting has some of the same requirements as doing so in a literary setting, and permits adaption of some of the techniques developed over the years for the satisfaction of those requirements.

Characterization

Having characters act out-of-character happens regularly in real life, but it never works out very well in either a literary or RPG context. Real people are, in other words, a lot more complicated than any that can be expressed in a creative mode; the credibility of plot and setting are too fragile to withstand such breaches.

That said, premeditation permits a character to deliberately conceal their true characterization and identity. This is as true in Mystery adventures as it is when dealing with a hidden double-agent in a super-spy adventure. Success in this approach requires the GM to successfully lie to the players while preserving fidelity to the truth, while providing hints and clues that will lead to the unmasking of the culprit. This is generally fairly easy if the right questions are asked – so the goal has to be to make those ‘right questions’ improbable at the outset.

I once wrote up a mystery adventure in which one part of a split personality tried to murder the other, in a situation in which multiple external individuals had any two of means, motive, or opportunity to commit the crime, and (in some cases) had actually tried to do the deed – unsuccessfully. No-one even suspected that the victim had this mental aberration, the legacy of an encounter with a doppelganger in the service of a Mind Flayer while in a fragile mental state. I never got the opportunity to run the adventure, and it is now long-lost, with only vague recollections remaining. The notion was that the PCs would be able to piece together the fragments of clues to the condition from the statements of the other potential killers until they were prompted to ask the right question – one that would never have occurred to them at the outset. The consistency of characterization would be the key to solving the mystery. If possible, to provide motivation, I would prefer to have one of the PCs be an obvious suspect, if I could possibly arrange it!

Characterization is critical in mysteries, especially if one or more characters are not who they seem to be.

Displays of Characterization

Any time a character is not who they seem to be, you need to provide some display of their true personality that can be ferreted out. Even if that’s not the case, you still need set-pieces designed to put the potential guilty parties on display – and you need to remain true to the personalities that are so revealed, so those set-pieces need to be very carefully planned and executed – while seeming completely natural.

What’s more, if they aren’t to blend together into a hopeless melange, each of these will need to be sufficiently different and distinct that the players can readily separate them. Each has to be a different occasion, in a different setting, with a different tone and different structure; in most cases, the display should seem incidental to the in-game events. A dinner party, for example, might have no other purpose than putting one guest’s behavior on display.

This all connects back to what I wrote about earlier – big picture awareness and designing the small scenes to contribute to the big-picture tapestry.

Ideally, to ensure differentiation, most (if not all) of these display sequences should predate the commission of the crime at the heart of the mystery. Introduce the characters and then tell the PCs why they have all been gathered at this time and place.

Extraordinary Situations producing Out-Of-Character Responses

The one time in an RPG or literary work that out-of-character behavior is acceptable, credible, and even necessary to the point where its absence would be the less credible alternative, is when an ordinary person is put into an extraordinary situation.

The problem with such as the basis of a mystery is that knowledge of the extraordinary situation immediately puts investigators on the path to a solution, which can then become an anticlimax. Discovery of the situation should thus be a revelation, and one that is not easy to achieve. You can get a lot of mileage from a relatively simple mystery whose solution is obscured by the motivation provided by a hidden situation of this type.

There is a maxim that anyone can become a killer if pushed hard enough and in the right way. This scenario explores that maxim, proposing – for example – that a loving mother could commit murder to protect a child, and then conceal their guilt for the same motive. This sort of situation can also explore the difference between Justice and the Law in thought-provoking way by putting the players on the spot – punish the guilty party and the re-victimize the child, let her go free and she may be pushed into a repetition of the act. Some people can plausibly even become serial killers “on the side”, ‘protecting’ other children from the same potential harm. Some of the best episodes of Law & Order have this sort of thought-provoking quality to them.

Persona Thumbnails

I generally find it very helpful in such situations to have produced ‘persona thumbnails’ in advance – in writing. A one sentence, and preferably one-line, summary of each NPCs personality, motives, and the objectives that they will pursue in the course of events. This gives me a foundation when, inevitably, I have to improvise some action or reaction to PC-instigated situations.

I try never to have someone describe the personality of an NPC without providing the opportunity for the PCs to make up their own minds (or be misled by an attempt to subvert whatever truth there might be in the description).

It can also be very helpful to know who an NPC will (rightly or wrongly) hold to be responsible for some action. It can be great fun to have someone identify correctly the guilty party for all the wrong (and easily dismissed) reasons. “He may be a masochistically obnoxious piece of ruthless pond scum, but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong”….

This is yet another example of the sort of big-picture “Zoom out” awareness that I described earlier, and the seed of the technique I described earlier for developing this facility in yourself (if you don’t have it already).

5. The Road to Solution

By now, you are probably gaining an appreciation (if you didn’t have one already) for how difficult a Mystery adventure can be to run successfully. I’ve tried hard not to state this now-obvious fact until I felt that it had been demonstrated through analysis, but the time has now come. Mysteries are hard – which only makes nailing the running of one that much more satisfying. To use one of my favorite analogies, nine-tenths of the behind-the-scenes work needed for such success will (or at least, should) never show, like an iceberg.

Having established how difficult they can be, and given some specific advice on achieving satisfactory outcomes in the face of the difficulties, it’s time to take a look at the usual general structure of a Mystery, and how that fits into the telling of a satisfactory story with the players involvement.

Multiple Moving Parts

Another of those obvious truths is that Mysteries can have many more moving parts than most adventure types, and these all have to mesh perfectly for the mystery to be successful. Unfortunately, each mystery is different in terms of what these are and the challenges that this poses to the GM, so general solutions are also going to be less than satisfactory. Awareness of the problem is part of the solution, and some of it can be simply jotting down reminders when something is not going to be front and center of your attention for a while but still needs to be kept track of – but, the main solution is to have developed your ability to monitor the big-picture while handling the detail-scale.

a. Teaser/Hook

Most adventures start with a teaser or hook to get the players engaged. Sometimes, you will want to employ a hook that is unrelated to the eventual mystery that will unfold – essentially, a pretext for introducing the participants before the fun sweeps everyone up in a difficult situation.

b. Investigation

Eventually, a puzzle of some sort will be presented to the PCs for them to solve. They will start by planning some sort of investigation to gather the information they need to reach a solution. This will often present them with an early or obvious theory, or one may have been handed to them as part of the puzzle. It’s critical that there be some sort of pathway for the PCs to follow, if they can’t or won’t devise their own. The latter is a significant warning sign to the GM that the players have not engaged with the adventure, and immediate action to correct this problem is needed.

c. Complications

The investigation will then strike problems, such as disproving and initial or obvious theory. Complications may also take the form of someone actively trying to interfere in the ongoing investigation. The term ‘setback’ is often used in script-writing classes and studies of the theoretical structure of fiction, but I have deliberately chosen this term because it can include a simple raising of the stakes.

d. Progression

For every door that closes, a window should open (and vice-versa). The investigation should never be permitted to stall in-game, though it may get put on hold. A fun way to do things is for the investigation to hit rocky ground, but to distract the players by uncovering something else that may or may not be unrelated that they can get their teeth into in the meantime – an action piece, for example, to give those players that aren’t predominantly intellectual something to get their teeth into. In general, though, progression will take the form of progress in overcoming or bypassing the complications so that the investigation can continue.

[c.-d. repeats]

The Complication-Progression cycle can repeat many times. Watch carefully for any signs that the players are finding it repetitive. The square brackets are a shorthand that I use to indicate optional content when planning adventures and campaigns.

[e. deeper mysteries]

Sometimes, the solution to one mystery only brings to light a bigger one. For example, the PCs might be the target of someone seeking revenge while they are at an unpredictable location – they don’t know who, how, or specifics as to the why. The obvious possibility is that this is a target of opportunity, and the players will probably proceed on that basis, with the full support of the GM. They will identify and capture their enemy, bringing an end to the original mystery, only to learn while questioning him that some anonymous benefactor told him exactly where and when to find the PCs. Suddenly, the original mystery is just the tip of the iceberg…

[f. babushka-doll mysteries]

Sometimes, investigating one mystery can lead to another, without the first being solved. This muddies the waters – you can’t convincingly solve one without solving the other, first, so that you can exclude evidence pointing at mystery #2 from the first one. There are two ways a third mystery can then impact what is already a complicated plotline – either the resumed original investigation leads to another mystery in the same way that it led to mystery #2, or investigating mystery #2 can lead to mystery #3 in the same way that investigating Mystery #1 led to #2.

Either way, I think of these by the collective term “Babushka-Doll Mysteries”, and if you thought a regular Mystery Adventure was difficult and complicated, with a lot of moving parts, each additional “Babushka Doll” increases those problems exponentially. It’s very easy for players (and sometimes the GM) to lose track of the outermost Babushka Doll in the shuffle, or confuse one mystery with another.

g. Resolution

Eventually, though, a solution will appear. Hopefully, at the prompting in-game of the PCs, by finally asking the “right question” (having asked a lot of wrong ones to get to that point), and getting an answer that makes sense of everything that has transpired.

Dynamic, not static

One of the biggest mistakes that GMs can make in implementing a mystery is to have them be static and unchanging. Quite often, the best form of progress in the face of a stalled investigation is for one of the parties suspected to do something that opens up a new line of investigation. Each of them should continually be trying to achieve some personal objective, however trivial in comparison to the mystery itself this objective might be; achieving some milestone in that pursuit changes the context of what has already been uncovered. The guilty party will perpetually be trying to make themselves look innocent, or trying to discover if they are under suspicion; this was the structure of almost every early episode of Colombo, in which the audience had already seen the crime, and might already know who the guilty party is – Colombo would simply stir around, dropping the occasional piece of bait about how difficult the investigation was proving, and see who tried to be helpful in pointing the finger at someone in particular. But he didn’t do so, blindly; he was always very clever at eliciting information that would prove someone innocent, until he found the one party who knew too much about the circumstances of the crime.

6. Solutions

Which brings me to the subject of the solutions to a Mystery. These are not always as simple or cut-and-dried as people might like (meaning the players). This is especially true in a campaign, where plotlines can spill over from an isolated adventure into a larger narrative.

Partial Solutions

Sometimes, you never learn the whole story, or at least, not at the time. There can be plot threads left dangling, to be taken up at some later point in time – that’s part and parcel of a campaign-level narrative. In RPGs, a partial solution usually takes the form of determining who, and resolving the immediate crime/problem, while leaving open a question of “how”. That’s covered under the “deeper mysteries” section of the breakdown of a Mystery structure undertaken above.

Unhappy Solutions

I’ve touched on this earlier in this article, as well – sometimes the solution to a mystery is only a prelude to a deeper problem, of a completely different nature. I am, of course, referring to the problem of the Guilty Mother, which poses a difficult moral question for the Investigators to solve. The solution of the mystery is just a prelude to this more difficult problem – which becomes even more important if there are consequences that will derive from a choice in a future adventure.

Appraising Alternative Solutions

The final item to note in this examination of the Mystery form is the potential for the players to offer an alternative solution to the mystery than the one the GM originally intended. The GM has two choices – he can reject that solution and stick with his original plans, or he can consider accepting it and replacing whatever he had planned with the alternative. To make the choice, if he doesn’t reject the notion out of hand, he will need to assess whether or not the players solution is “better” than what he had in mind.

It could be “better” in many different ways, and even “better” in some and worse in others – for example, one might be more interesting, or more plausible, or create more opportunities for interesting future plotlines, or be more consistent with the established past of the campaign, or simply be a neater package – that’s important if the GM wants to bring this particular plotline to a resolution, which happens toward the end of a campaign. Perhaps the most important possible form that “better” could take is an option that “better” achieves the big-picture goals for the adventure.

Once he has evaluated the proposition, he has three choices, two of which will occur naturally to most GMs out there:

1. Reject the proposition, it’s not “better” enough.
2. Accept the proposition, it’s clearly superior.
3. Take some of the best bits and apply them to the planned solution.

Not “Better” enough

Accepting a different answer means discarding the internal logic that was used to generate the solution and the problem and the pathways from one to the other in favor of revised plot that the GM improvises on the fly.

There may be a contradiction between evidence already obtained by the investigation and the proposed solution. There can be errors in logic. There can be flawed assumptions. These problems might not be noticed by the GM at the time, forcing him to scramble to plug plot holes when they do come to light.

In a nutshell, it means throwing away a lot of what the GM has carefully prepped and replacing it with revised material that supports the new theory, with all the risks and dangers that come with doing so – and that inevitably entails more work for the GM.

So there is a major price to be paid for accepting a “better” solution, one that may not be justified. The GM has to quickly assess whether or not the improvement in the plotline is sufficient to justify this additional workload, and his capacity for carrying that additional load. This is where the ability to zoom out and see the Big Picture is absolutely indispensable.

Accept the proposition

Sometimes, the answer is yes, the improvement more than justifies the dangers and workload. If that’s the case, and the GM has the capability of doing the extra work (in amongst his other commitments), the good of the game demands that he set aside any wounded pride and accept the proposition. And immediately start thinking about how this will impact the bigger picture.

Steal from the proposition

The option that won’t be obvious to many is to steal some or all of the bits that appeal to the GM, that make the proposed solution to the mystery “better”, and revise planned content to add them to the existing adventure structure. This makes these elements of the proposed solution half-right – or correct but misapplied. It’s just about as much work as simply accepting the proposition, but it’s a viable choice when the alternative is to reject the proposal for reasons of flawed logic or assumptions or contradictions with established in-game facts.

I’ve also seen at least one occasion when a player’s half-baked theory illuminated a flawed assumption, error in logic, or contradiction lurking in the tall grass of the adventure – leaving just enough time for the GM to scramble to a solution to his own resulting problem!

Whenever one of the players proposes a theory of the solution, the GM has a lot of quick thinking to do. The decisions he makes in the next few moments can make or break the adventure.

Deciphering The Mystery

Two other articles that are relevant and might prove useful are I See It But I Don’t Believe It – Convincingly Unconvincing in RPGs, about how to roleplay a character convincingly when you want the character’s story to be unconvincing, and The Conundrum Of Coincidence, which looks at the hard reality that coincidence is a real phenomenon that cannot be plausibly replicated in fiction or RPGs without undermining the credibility of the scenario presented. Both of those have an indirect bearing on the subject of mysteries, but ones that are worth closer examination in this context..

Mysteries are hard to get right and do well. We keep using them because they are so rewarding for all concerned when we get them right!

Family stories, anecdotes, and childhood memories may be fanciful but that makes them no less important to the identify of the members of the family. Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of the time, this technique will need a little modification for the generation of Royal Families, simple because they have a far sharper focus on inheritance!

Starting in, I think, the 1980s, John West started a global advertising campaign around the concept that it was ‘the fish that John West reject’ that made their offerings better than those of any rival or competitor. That concept, in a way, is also at the heart of the simplification process.

Whole branches of the family tree are replaced with generalizations, and more time is spent adding to the family as the focal character knows it. That’s the key – this family construction is subjective and not objective.

Normally, that’s a bad thing – objectivity permits truth to show through and fair comparisons to be made, when context is taken into account – but subjectivity has its place. Objectivity can make the character more aware of their family than they ‘should’ be, can make the character more familiar with their history than they ‘should’ be, and leaves fewer holes for the GM to use to forge personal connections between the shared storyline that evolves through play and the characters participating.

One memory has persisted throughout the writing of this introduction – one of my players, for one of his characters, presented a complete family, every member listed in detail, with stats (D&D) and classes and characterizations and a synopsis of personal history. About 1% of which actually got used in the campaign, simply because what he had provided didn’t fit into the plots. The details were incompatible. As a result, 99% of his work was wasted, and it wasted a lot of my time when running the campaign – not something that either of us intended. Prior to that experience, I would have (and did) encourage completeness and objectivity in such things, so this was a developmental experience on my road to where I am now. As a result, the memory remains sharp even now, 20-odd years later.

Throw in the fact that it’s a lot less work, and I have no hesitation in commending this as my preferred technique henceforth!

The process contains 12 stages, one of which won’t always apply. These have been divided into three groups representing increased levels of abstraction and vagueness – the patterns will become clearer as I proceed through specific descriptions.

These steps are:

Immediate Family
1. Family Theme
2a. [Spouse & Children]
2b. Siblings
3. Parents

Family Nexii
4. Matriarch/Patriarch
5. Handyman
6. Record-keeper

Remote & Extended Family
7. Family Clusters – places and family groups
8. Direct-line anecdotes and measures of ignorance
9. Extended family, with anecdotes and measures of ignorance
10. A couple of notables – anecdotes, possibly untrue
11. A couple of family legends

Detail Limits

The level of detail is relatively easy to regulate using the groups and the number of entries to be contained.

Immediate Family

For a family of typical size (2 parents, 2-3 siblings), half a page. As the family grows, increase this length by about 10% for each additional member. If the character has entries in stage 2a, Spouse and Children, they may receive twice this addition (+20%, not +10%). If the family is extraordinarily large (2+ parents AND 9+ siblings/nieces/nephews IN TOTAL), go for a 5% increase per added person.

The larger the family, the less room there is to be detailed and specific, indicating that the character’s knowledge of them will be more general. It is presumed that the player will actually do most of this work, perhaps in consultation with the GM. That’s appropriate because this is all about the PC’s family background – but, once it’s done, the GM has full license to get creative about filling in the blanks and specifics, which will proliferate with growth in the size of the immediate family.

Family Nexii

Normally half a page, max. If the character is a family nexus, or a prospective nexus, you may add 25% to this, to be used to detail the individual who used to have that role in the family prior to the character taking it on.

Remote & Extended Family

At most, a page (approximately) should be devoted to this entire group, again forcing compression, abstraction, and leaving things out. At the GM’s discretion, the last category (family legends) may be excerpted and given a half-page of its own.

For the typical family, that’s two pages, maybe 2½. And a blank line should be left between individual entries to make them easier to parse – that’s about half a page used up before word one gets committed to paper. That’s not a lot of room to contain everything a character knows about his family – but that’s because it isn’t, quite, everything he knows. It’s just that everything else is the GM’s responsibility.

For example, so long as it doesn’t violate anything in the written family description provided, the GM can quite happily tell a player (upon his arrival in a new town), “You have a distant cousin who lives somewhere in this city. You’ve only met Rodrango a couple of times, mostly when you were both children; he’s a little older than you and seemed to be quite a risk-taker back then, getting you into trouble on both occasions. Still, it’s to be hoped that he’s settled down somewhat; you have the vague impression that he married and has children of his own, now. The family are somewhat estranged from your more immediate relatives, due to bad blood arising between Rodrango’s father and your grandfather years ago, but you don’t remember the details (if you ever knew them).”

That should tell the player that his family member is somehow going to be bound up in the plot that comes with this particular location – either a provider of essential information, or a victim, or any number of other possibilities. It also gives them an immediate splash of color, and adds some color to the family that the player knows about, increasing their engagement with the adventure immediately. The Family Member is a bespoke part of the plotline, not something being adapted or injected into it as an afterthought – but it still provides a personal connection to both location and events for the character, which can be important if the plot is something they would normally have more sense than to get enmeshed within!

Sure, the GM is fully capable of dropping that information into the plot, regardless of how much work the player has done in imagining his family – but how much better would it be if this cousin and his story fitted the family story, as devised by the player, like a glove?

What results is not, then, an end-point; it’s a foundation, a garden bed into which innumerable plot seeds have been planted, ready for the GM to harvest.

Immediate Family

Four steps. Half a page in most cases, maybe more, but the growth in space is slower than the growth in family.

1. Family Theme

Every family has a theme, a general single-line description that summarizes the story of who they are. As the circumstances of each generation evolve, so can this story – the character’s grandchildren might have an entirely different view of the family; that doesn’t matter. This is how the character sees his family – which means that his relationships with them will inevitably color the theme, and that the theme itself can evolve and change as the character does.

That means that the family theme is, at least partially, an outgrowth of the personality of the focal character, and this entire process shouldn’t start until the owner of the character has some idea of what that personality will be.

However, if the focal character is currently just a mass of stats and game mechanics, and has not yet appeared in play, this can also be the beginning of characterization, should the owner be ‘stuck’.

Here are some examples to get your creative juices flowing:

     “Flowers in the muck”
     “Diamonds in the very, very rough”
     “Rebels without a clue”
     “Contented drifters on the river of life”
     “Social Climbers who always choose the slipperiest slope”
     “Prickly and dysfunctional but with great depths of affection for each other beneath the surface.”

This isn’t to say that every family member will fit this mold. But every one will have experienced some sense of the generalized family. and have a reaction of some sort to it. So this is not only a kick-start to personalizing each of them, it gives the owner of the focal character a general relationship with the rest of the family that can be interpreted and played off.

I especially want to draw attention to the subtleties that are possible – the first and second items are similar, but not the same. The first suggests that the circumstances of the family may be rough and common, even lower-class, or criminal; but that the family themselves regularly rise above that in some respect or perhaps many respects, even while drawing strength from it. The second says less about the family circumstances and more about the individuals – rude and even crude and crusty exteriors, always arguing with each other and putting each other down, but they would give you the shirt off their back without your even asking, and should an outsider threaten one, the family will instantly form an impenetrable barrier to protect that individual (criticizing him or her and complaining, the whole time).

These show just how much can be unpacked from or implied by these simple descriptions, how much meat can be contained within. This simple statement is, in essence, an abstracted introduction to the family in generalized terms, and the foundation of everything else.

2a. [Spouse & Children]

Which means that it’s time to get specific. The most important people in the focal character’s life are their spouse and children, if they have any. Focus on the relationships and the modes of expression that reflect and cement those relationships. Try to avoid cliches. Specifics should be little more than name, gender (if not obvious from the name), and current age.

What’s the cornerstone of the relationship? In the case of the spouse, what attracted the focal character to them, and vice-versa – and how is the relationship holding up? How do those involved feel about that?

You don’t have time for a long and involved story – which means that this is nothing more than the foundations of a subplot or plot arc to form part of the background of the campaign. So you should be more focused on telling the GM the status quo of the relationship and how you see it evolving over time (how it actually evolves in response to campaign events may be something completely different, so if you have a strong desire for a particular outcome, now is the time to express it).

If you get specific, you might be able to afford 1-2 lines per individual. But if you can conflate individuals into a general statement, you might get four or five lines to describe the general situation – ironically, permitting greater detail in the process. That’s because, as individuals, each has to be followed by a blank line – one that can contain content if the two are treated as one. Which approach you use is up to you. And, the more you can summarize and synopsize, the less space an individual entry requires, leaving more space for others.

Here’s an example: Loldath bonds with her sons over sports and games, never suspecting that she hates them and only participates because they enjoy them. She is closer to her daughter, who loves to cook, and is driven to a study of science by a fascination with the way the world works, the same drive that draws Loldath into politics.”

To see the effectiveness of this approach, let’s summarize:

– Loldath hates games but is drawn to politics.
– Her sons love sports and games.
– Her daughter loves science and cooking.

…and yet, that summary tells us so much less than the short narrative passage about the bonds between mother and children and the expression of the relationship. It also tells us less about Loldath herself! The latter is dry and objective – the former, when added to names and ages, creates a starting point for characterization and personality.

2b. Siblings, [Nieces, and Nephews]

The same process should be employed to discuss siblings and any nieces and nephews. In general, the best results will manifest if you treat each sibling and their spouses and any children as a single “bubble”, OR make a general statement about in-laws and nieces/nephews. These are two different structures for the generalization and compression that almost effortlessly strikes the right balance between specifics and general statements.

As usual, here’s an example or two:

“Harold has an almost paternal relationship with his nieces and nephews, seeing them as representative of the children he never had. They don’t see him in that role – he isn’t with them often enough, for one thing – but they sense his deep affection, nevertheless.”

“Jonlyn feels distanced from his sister by competitiveness with his brother-in-law, something he deeply regrets. He is even more estranged from the older of his two brothers; his relationship with him having always been fiery – but he knows that should his brother ever really need him, he would be there in a heartbeat. Until that day, he’s content to almost pretend that his brother does exist. He is deeply supportive of his younger brother, who has always struggled to emerge from the shadows cast by his older siblings, one of the few things that both elder brothers agree on.”

3. Parents

In most families, there will only be two of these. Some families – exceptions to this rule – may have three, four, or even five (and that’s before unconventional family structures are even considered) – for example, my parents are divorced and both have since remarried, so I have four parents (and get on with all of them).

Here’s a challenge: write down everything you know about each of your parents in three or four lines. When they were born, and where, and their personalities, and their relationships with your other relatives, and all the family history – it’s really, really hard to do without leaving most of it out. But this exercise will give you some idea of how much you need to compress these entries on your family tree. Plus you need to squeeze in the focal character’s relationship with his parents, as well.

You will need every trick that I outlined in my 6-part series on Stylish Narrative and maybe one or two more. The secret to success is not to actually squeeze everything down to the indicated length, but to try to do so – and, if it takes an extra line or two to describe one of the character’s parents, so be it.

That said, self-censorship, and the art of knowing what to leave out, will serve you in good stead.

As usual, an example:

“Brignath has always adored his mother’s spirit and compassion; never cowed or defeated by circumstances; no matter the struggle, she always embraced it in good humor. He worries that he has disappointed her, but his temper was always too fiery and his pride too easily tweaked to fully emulate her example.

“She was born in the midst of a locust plague, when prosperity deserted the land and all had to scramble to make do, and this was always the making of her (to hear her talk). ‘When you have nothing, you feel grateful for the least scrap,’ she impressed upon her children.

“His father was a traveler from afar, a butterfly who landed within his mother’s life one summer, and found himself captive to her positivity and enthusiasm for life. Where he came from before than, no-one knows.

“Brignath simply doesn’t understand paternal parent, and the choices that he has made to favor various obsessions over his offspring over the years; Brignath thinks that his old man would cross a field of broken glass in furtherance of this or that, but wouldn’t even cross the street to see his children. He hopes that there will be more to the story, and that it is not too late for him to bond with his ‘lost parent’ – though it would be with the remove of two adults and not a child’s unconditional love, which was lost long ago.”

Only one example this time, because it is more complete and substantial, and emphasizes the points made earlier.

And that’s the entire immediate family done.

Family Nexii

In terms of relationships and recent histories, the members of the family nexii are treated the same as family members, but with twice as much room to be expansive. In reality, because you need to include some details about how they perform their role, you might think that you need even more space, but in most cases you won’t know very much about their family histories; they simply are, appearing complete and from nowhere within the family, bigger than life.

4. Matriarch/Patriarch

You can generally only choose one – there isn’t room enough in the family for both, much of the time. When both do appear, not only do you have to squeeze two people into the space left for one, but you need to explore the relationship between the two. Part one of this article detailed some of the many ways in which a Matriarch or Patriarch can fulfill their role within the family structure.

You also need to specify how, and through whom, you are related to this personage or personages, and that further eats into the available space.

“The matriarch of Clan Donaldson is Grandmother Levitica, who rules with an iron fist. One does not approach a parent for permission to marry into the family; it is Levitica who must be wooed and won over. If she vetoes a match, it is an ultimatum – choose between the family and the prospective match. If she is in favor, it’s a done deal, no matter what objections a parent might have. Above all other concerns for her is family unity, because her own family was so dysfunctional; once a year, she hosts some social event, which all members of the family are required to attend; it might be a wedding, a birthday, or some other occasion emphasizing togetherness. At least once a year, every branch of the family can expect her to show up out of the blue and take over the social life of the branch, regardless of what plans they might already have; none dare overrule her. Nevertheless, she is always mindful of family unity in the timing of these events, giving ample notice of her intentions. If ever a family member is in need or in crisis, she will be there immediately and in full formidable authority, and will not depart until she is satisfied; at such times, those she was to visit are expected to come to her, wherever she may be, and however inconvenient that might prove.”

That’s one example; here’s another:

“Uncle Joe is everyone’s uncle, no matter their actual relationship. A busybody who can’t leave the least situation alone, he arrives with the force of a hurricane, sweeping through lives and problems, dispensing helpful advice and the occasional form of assistance, cutting problems and difficulties down to size, and then blowing out again as quickly as he came. He visits each branch of the family regularly, at least once a year, if not more often, turns whatever problems may be present at the time into a Project and involving himself endlessly until it is deemed manageable. Gruff when expressing his emotions, but a font of dime-store wisdom. He doesn’t rule the family, he guides and shapes it, having mastered the art of making each branch indispensable to the others, and with the memory of an elephant for all matters practical or family.”

Both are clearly the hubs around which their respective families revolve. And both are open invitations to the GM to make the character’s life more complicated – temporarily. But they also bring resources to the character that the GM can exploit to turn mountains into molehills, when that seems necessary.

5. Handyman

Again, see the first part of this article for more information on this role. How it is done is less important, in this case, than the personality of the handyman. Nor does it matter what their trade or specialty might be; they are simply always there to help, no matter what it is that needs doing.

“The handyman. of the family is Aunt Matilda. Thumb-fingered at the best of times, except when in the kitchen, she will nevertheless appear whenever something practical needs doing (of a certain scope); she will either provide amateur assistance and opinions, in equal measure, or food and opinions that frees the usual ruler of the kitchen to assist. She also loves to make ‘arrangements’ for those areas of expertise that are outside the family’s resources – if a carpenter is needed, she will ‘assist’ in choosing one.”

or, perhaps,

“John Tweedy is a relative by marriage. A carpenter by trade, but unofficially able to turn his hand to almost anything of a practical nature. He likes nothing better than to watch a professional or craftsman perform some task that he doesn’t know how to do himself, taking mental notes and looking for a reason why he can’t attempt it on his own the next time he encounters the need. Sometimes, he finds one; sometimes he doesn’t. When he does, he never forgets it; when he doesn’t, he learns.”

6. Record-keeper

There are many different reasons why someone would become the family record-keeper. It might be a fascination, or nostalgia, or sublimation of some unrequited desire, or curiosity, or a love of photography, or a dozen other possibilities. Perhaps the most common is that they didn’t; they simply inherited the role and the efforts of a past record-keeper and felt responsible to perpetuate it.

Sometimes, the record-keeper can even be the Matriarch, and the family history the mechanism and justification of their rule!

To the rest of the family, it often seems like the knowledge that “X” knows all about it gives them license to ignore the family history and just get on with life – until something happens to make them value a broader perspective on the family, and their place as part of a grander whole. Often, a near-death experience, the birth of a first child or grandchild, or the questions of such, can be the impetus behind seeking the knowledge of the Record-Keeper.

Factor into that equation the fact that we’re mostly talking about PCs who have adventures, here, as the person of focus – and adventures rarely come without some form of near-death experience or crisis – and suddenly, the PC finds themselves more closely connected to the record keeper than they ever imagined they would be.

In a family with wealth, it would also be common for the ‘records’ to be accountant’s ledgers, and not the more common family memorabilia. So there is latitude for individuality in this area, and ways to make the role more interesting. Perhaps the family record-keeper is a Bard who puts the family stories into song?

So the record-keeper is likely to be more important to a PC or prominent NPC than to most members of the family, and that justifies treating them in as much detail as a family Matriarch or Patriarch, and in the same manner. How does the record-keeper function? In what form are the records? How frequently are the records consulted?

Lots of questions – this is where the owner of the character of focus puts the answers.

I’ll forego an example, because the above details in combination with the examples of the other Nexii provide enough of one.

Remote & Extended Family

And with that, the second part of the family structure is complete. From this point, isolated individuals are even less commonly mentioned, and often names are semi-completely left out, or shorn of context. Abstraction and generalization is even more favored and necessary.

7. Family Clusters – places and family groups

Each sibling of the matriarch or patriarch not already detailed or in the direct ancestral line forms part of a distinct and separate family cluster. Where these are male, and so is the line of descendance, they therefore will have a surname in common with the focal character, and the cluster will be geographically-oriented – “The Bristol Kellys”, “The O’Hares in America”, “The Golgaths in Mur-Whizdon”, or whatever. Whenever the surname is not the same as the focal character AND the matriarch, the surname itself is enough – my family has (amongst others) The Reads, The Scarrs, and The Galvins as family clusters.

Don’t try and specify all of them – just a few that have been significant to the focal character. Treat that entire branch of the family as a single unit, specify how they are connected to the focal character, and talk (very briefly) about the focal character’s relationship with them. If there are one or two members of the cluster who are particularly well-known to the focal character, those individuals should be named and specifics of the relationship synopsized – all in the space of half-a-dozen lines (or less if there are many clusters).

“The Zarulths are centered in Lower Dunsdith, in the Greenglow Mountains region. Jacklun doesn’t know them very well, but before they moved so far away, he visited them a number of times in Roaring Bullswither in his chlidhood, and found them friendly but oddly formal and a little stuck-up. His distant cousins Radger and Floreth were good company, though; it’s a shame Radger was killed by a wild Joath some years back. ‘Mater Zarulth’ is the centre of the family, and sister of Jacklun’s grandmother. He always wanted to see their mountain homes, which he imagined to be so very different to those of the plains he knows so well, but the journey was too far and his opportunities too few. One day, perhaps.”

8. Direct-line anecdotes and measures of ignorance

Who were the Matriarch/Patriarch’s parents? Who were their grandparents? How much does the character know about them? Give one or two colorful stories (perhaps of dubious accuracy) that would have survived the years. “My great grandfather was a light horseman at Gallipoli” – to anyone from Australia or New Zealand, that statement means a lot.

To anyone outside of this part of the world, perhaps not so much. I remember that a horse trod on his thumb there, allegedly, and that was why he only had half a thumbnail – but, contrary to this official story, I suspect that he may have been both wounded and very lucky. But I may have mixed up the whole story; I was about 8 years old at the time, and that was a very long time ago.

Geography tends to be fairly tightly woven into these anecdotes, and that may demand assistance from the GM depending on the game setting.

“My grandmother’s father was a spy in 18th century Greece.” (really?)
“One of our ancestors was rumored to be a pirate.” (are you sure?)
“The family has a long history of political office.” (then why aren’t you or your parents in Politics, then?)

There’s a tale to hang off each and every one of these, if not several – and you can never tell when the GM will bring one of those stories into modern-day relevance.

9. Extended family, with anecdotes and measures of ignorance

It’s time to mention a couple of other aunts, uncles, cousins, etc – those you know are somehow related to the character of focus, but you aren’t completely sure how. Each should have some anecdote attached that justifies the person of focus remembering them.

A real-life example:
My uncle served as an MP in Vietnam, for example, staying with my Great Grandmother (who was no relation of his except through my parents’ marriage) prior to deployment and leaving some comic books behind – there was a Spider-man, an Iron Man, an Avengers, a Batman, a Fantastic Four, and maybe two or three others. And I remember this story because it was with the Spider-man that I taught myself to read (at 3 years of age, which makes it 1966-7), and with the Iron Man that I proved to my relatives that I could do so.

Don’t ask me which issues they were, though!

I still remember descending the staircase in her apartment, which was wooden, steep, narrow, and twisting, sitting down and lowering myself one step at a time, because it wasn’t considered safe for me to go down it standing up. Each step came up to my shins, making them about eight inches in height. The apartment was positively Victorian in many ways, and whenever I see a documentary about such times now, I flash back to it.

10. A couple of notables with anecdotes, possibly untrue

Individuals who could find a home here are people who aren’t members of the family, or are incredibly distant members, but who get treated as family members, nevertheless.

“Uncle Norm”, who was related to my Uncle-by-marriage, and who eventually became my sister’s father-in-law, for example. Or my step-father’s old roommate, Stephen, or his brother Mervyn. Or my great-grandfather’s second wife – no blood relation to any of us, but as dearly a part of the family of my youth as any ‘real’ great-grandmother could have been. Or my grandfather’s seeing-eye dog. Even some of my school-teachers were almost as close as extended family – and some such are even closer to their students (in some cases).

You can also add in some other family members who the person of focus considers notable for some reason, or anecdotes about family members already listed. The family member to whom I always had the closest resemblance was my Uncle Johnny, for example. I used to compose music for my Aunt Maria to play on the piano (i would have been about 8 at the time). The time the nuns got tired of resetting the high-jump bar and taped it in place, shattering (?) my sister’s kneecap. The time when my little brother fell out of bed onto a shag-pile rug and managed to break his nose and drive the bones back through the skull, having to be rushed for emergency surgery here in Sydney, 700 miles away.

People’s lives can be expressed through an endless stream of little anecdotes like that, and they all add to the family history far more than a dry and empty family tree, which exists only to give those anecdotes context within the family structure.

Always remember to indicate how little the person of focus knows about the individual beyond what you’ve written – it might be a lot or very little. But always, the focus should be on the relationship between the named individual and the focal character.

11. A couple of family legends

Lastly, there are all those forebears who came before get represented in some family myths and legends. The accuracy of these is dubious, to say the least. For example, my family is supposedly related (extremely distantly) to both English and Irish nobility, back in the 16th century sometime. These relatives even went to war with each other at one point – or so a family legend has it.

I have another ancestor who supposedly abandoned his English wife and children and traveled to Australia, where he bigamously remarried and became a vital link in my family chain – or so another family myth represents.

This approach doesn’t focus on identities within the family structure, for the most part; it focuses on relationships and anecdotes. I hope that I have demonstrated that these can be far more informative than the dry and factual structures that most players and GMs put together, while leaving more room for the GM to make the family information relevant. There may be more writing in this approach, but it’s easier writing – it’s a lot easier to tell a story, perhaps a fanciful one, than it is to create and populate a family tree – and the results are a lot more realistic, to boot.

An extended family portrait from Eastpoint Florida, circa 1898 to 1912. Specifications and public domain provenance: Wikimedia Commons, cropped and resized by Mike

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles.

Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article.

That article changed and morphed several times in the process of development. Initially, I was just going to offer one tip, one insight, on family structures for RPG characters. But that led to another, and then another, and before I knew it, I had an entire system for developing perfect families for NPCs and PCs alike. The structure of the article will walk you through this development, because each stepping-stone adds an important concept to the process. It’s possible that I won’t get it finished in one part, though I’ll do my best!

“Perfect”?

The term “perfect” needs some explanation in this context. I’m not interested in creating the sort of plastic ‘perfect’ families that you saw on some 1950s and 1960s TV shows; “perfect” in this case means “perfectly suited to their purpose”.

That purpose is to explain, support, and embellish the personality of the featured character while adding plausibility and realism. It’s also important that the family contains negative space – deliberate holes in the background, some of which the character knows about, and some they don’t, from which future encounters, family situations, and plotlines can be hung.

Family Ownership

That means that, past a certain point of development, the entire family has to be turned over to the GM if the family is attached to a PC. The GM is then free to revise, embellish, or extend the members as he sees fit, provided that the player’s perception of the family remains unchanged. When the player uses this (or any other) system to create his character’s family, what he’s really doing is describing the family from his character’s point of view; these are NPC seeds for the GM to use to add some personal interest and supporting cast to the campaign. The family belongs to the GM – but the PCs perception of them belongs to the player, and can’t be messed with by the GM.

Foundations

I want to start with the diagram shown in figure 1. This shows how family trees on TV shows like “Who Do You Think You Are?” are usually depicted.

At the bottom of the tree, you have four individuals. One of them will either be the featured person or a significant ancestor of theirs – significant in terms of the family as the featured person knows it. That could be an important person in the family, or in their childhood, or it might simply be as far back as they have been able to trace their lineage.

The convention is that these are four siblings, in order of their birth, oldest to youngest.

Above them are their parents. Again, it’s fairly traditional for the father to be on the left and the mother on the right, but sometimes this gets violated to simplify the tree structure when second wives / second husbands and children born out of wedlock are important to the structure.

This abbreviated tree then proceeds through three generations of ancestors who were significant only in terms of their place within the tree. These are nothing but names in the context of the focal point, that key individual. Sometimes, that’s because their contributions to the family story have been described in a previous segment in the report.

The lack of importance in terms of the current story segment is indicated by their ‘names’ being faded or grayed out in this representation; that’s usually not the case in ‘real’ family trees, because you start with the names of ancestors and relatives, not knowing whose stories will be interesting or relevant to the family.

This tree describes the ancestral relationship between the featured individual and a famous or important ancestor, in this case, their Great-times-3-grandparents (sometimes abbreviated ‘GGGgrandparents’).

To make this relationship clear, everything not relevant to it has been left out, and that was the starting point for this article – I started thinking about the things being left out.

A more complete tree

Figure two depicts a more typical family tree. If the person of focus has children of their own at the time, these are shown in the bottom row, and they are one of the two parents shown on the second row up, with the other being their spouse. If not, then the person of focus is on the bottom row. To simplify descriptions, I’m going to assume that the focal point is once again on the bottom row.

That means that the POF (person of focus) is on the bottom row, and the second row shows their parents. The third row then shows the parents of each parent, in other words the four grandparents of the POF; and the fourth row shows the eight great-grandparents.

Things get more interesting with the fifth row – while some of the 16 GGgrandparents are shown, four couples are represented as unknowns, symbolized by the question marks. This is probably more extreme than most real-life cases, but maybe not. I knew only one of my Great-Great-Grandparents, for example. But if I had talked with the three grandparents who survived to the time of my birth, they would have known their parents, and many of their parents’ parents.

This tree traces ancestry back one more generation, into the 32 GGGgrandparents. Once again, there are three question marks, and (of course) the question marks from the 4th generation trace back no further – as a result, only 10 of the 32 GGGgp’s are shown.

The result is a fairly clean, pristine, depiction of the direct ancestry of the individual.

But a family is more than the direct ancestry. Quite often, that’s the least part of it.

What’s been left out to achieve this nice, neat, picture is the extended family – the siblings of every one of those parents and grandparents and GGgrandparents and so on, and their spouses and children.

When I was growing up, on my paternal side, there was my grandmother, and my father’s four siblings; who (one by one) married, and in most cases, had children of their own – my aunts and uncles and cousins. In the direct line, there was my great-grandmother, from whom I think I got my love of city life, and at whose place I taught myself to read. There were also my grandmother’s sisters, and their children and grandchildren (and now great grandchildren and maybe more). There was another elderly relative and her husband but (without getting out the family archives) I’m not sure of the exact relationship – my GGmother’s sister, I think. We simply knew her as “Aunty”. On my mother’s side, there were two brothers and a sister, and their spouses and children – more aunts and uncles. These families formed four or five major ‘local clusters’, two of which overlapped in my home town, and there were a couple of branches in odd places.

While this large extended family came together regularly, I could say that there were only fifteen or sixteen or seventeen that I knew well and saw every week or so. There were others that I saw every year or two (sometimes more often), and a fringe beyond that who were little more than names most of the time. As I grew up, there was a gradual diaspora and the number of clusters grew and grew. Sometimes, family passed away – it happens to us all – but their places were taken by new arrivals (more cousins).

On top of that, there were relatives of my mother’s sister’s husband, who formed a sort of extended-extended-family.

Almost all of those relationships are left out of that neat diagram. In fact, if you were to follow every descendant, family trees don’t grow up like this one, they grow down like tree roots from one ancestor. Adding a new member to that family – which happens every time a member gets married – adds a whole new and growing hyper-extension to the family.

In a more abstract way, this diagram attempts to illustrate the results of the process of hyper-extension over four generations starting with a single couple (who, for the sake of simplicity, have no known siblings).

• Gen0: The couple with no relatives
• Gen1: They have children;
• Gen1: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen2: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen2: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen3: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen3: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.
• Gen4: Most of those couples have children.
• Gen4: Most of those children get married, adding in not only the spouse but the spouse’s siblings and other relatives, and those relatives’ spouses as well.

Let’s assume 3 children per couple on average, which means that each generation also contains 3 spouses. Each spouse has 2 parents, 2 siblings, 2 aunts/uncles, 6 cousins, 2 brothers or sisters, 2 spouses, and 6 nieces and nephews. There may also be 4 grandparents and 8 great-grandparents, but there might not be – so let’s assume a 50% grandparents survival and 25% great-grandparents – so 2 grandparents and 2 great-grandparents. Those grandparents (both living and dead) have 4×2=8 siblings, 4 of which also survive; and the great-grandparents (both living and dead) have 8×2=16 siblings, 4 of which survive. I think that’s everyone! Adding those up, we get 1+2+2+2+6+2+2+6+2+2+4+4) = 35.

So, the chart shows:

• Gen0: 2 people at the top;
• Gen1: 3 children;
• Gen1: 3×35 = 105 spousal relatives.
• Gen2: the children, cousins, and nieces/nephews all have 3 children each, so 3x(3+2+6+6) = 3×17 = 51 children.
• Gen2: Each of those 51 add 35 spouses and spousal families, so 51×35 = 1785 people.
• Gen3: the 35 people include 17 who will have children, so that’s 51×17 = 867 children.
• Gen3: Each of those 867 add 35 new relatives by marriage, so 867×35 = 30,345 people.
• Gen 4: 867×17 couples have 3 children each: 14,739 sets of three children, or 44,217 children.
• Gen 4: Each of those 44,217 bring an additional 35 new relatives into the hyper-extended family, or 1,547,595 people.
• Adding all of these up, we get 2 + 3 + 105 + 51 + 1785 + 867 + 30345 + 44217 + 1547595 = 1,624,970 members of the hyper-extended family.

Realistically, there is no way that you would ever get to know most of these people. And most of what’s left might be known by name only. But any one of them can find themselves part of the immediate circle of relatives of an individual.

There is, similarly, no way on earth that any player or GM, no matter how detail-oriented, will create and individualize 1.6 million (plus) NPCs.

That’s the inadequacy of a typical family tree – it leaves too many important things out

Of course, it should be noted that the assumptions are completely unrealistic. Some couples will have more than the assumed three children, some will have less, some will never marry, some will die young. Wars and plagues or pandemics will take a substantial share.

The Splintering Of Families

What actually happens is that families break up into smaller clusters, each of which belongs on its own extended family tree. On my side, for example, the Galvins form a large cluster of their own – I’ve met some of them (all of them and many of their spouses in a specific generation, sometimes a number of times, sometimes only once or twice). But I wouldn’t place a bet on my ability to name all of my first cousins from this cluster – they are outside my immediate family. But 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, 4th cousins, 4th cousins by marriage No.

That entire cluster can thus be reduced to an abstract ‘pool’ of relatives, some known and some not. I know of the existence of each of my family clusters, and have the occasional social engagement that connects me to them and renews the bonds – but these are few and far between.

A family can thus be considered to be a series of nested ‘family circles’ – the immediate family in the innermost circle, the innermost core of the most immediate clusters in the outermost circle (which includes any ex-members of the innermost circle who have lost contact with me but know who I am), the rest of the family in a third circle, and so on.

How much I know about the family members is a function of the circle they are in – I know a fair bit about the inner circle (with some more central, who I am in regular contact with, and some more out on the fringes); I know who the members of the second circle are, and have vague ideas about how they are doing and their personal histories; and I have little or no current information on the few members of the third circle whose names I even recognize. (Social Media has enabled me to reconnect with some distant cousins who had almost completely vanished from the second circle into the third).

Including the outer fringes of the immediate family, these days, there are probably 50 members or so. And my family is both large and strongly socially-connected compared to many.

Cluster Hubs

Every family cluster has a hub around which the cluster revolves. Sometimes these are Matriarchs, sometimes Patriarchs. Two secondary hubs may form around Handymen and Archivists.

Clan Matriarchs

It’s been my experience that families all have a Matriarch or a Patriarch. These are the hubs around which social activities take place. When I was a child, the Matriarch was my Grandmother; she was the person everyone kept in touch with, the link connecting the clusters and regularly hosting or visiting those remote cousins, aunts, and uncles. When she passed, the family broke into two clusters, and my Great-Aunt became the Matriarch, largely because she moved into a very central location in the Sydney CBD. When she passed away, there was a further fracturing. For a while, it looked like my Aunt would become the new family matriarch, but she found it to be more than she could keep up with – and that’s how a fracture occurs. Nevertheless, she occasionally steps into that role, and definitely still occupies it with respect to the family cluster that remains in my home town.

Meanwhile, my mother has become the unofficial matriarch of her side of the family, though they have largely scattered into their own remote clusters. She’s even tracked down a branch of the family that none of us knew existed, still living in England.

Matriarchs aren’t all the same. Some exert direct veto over family affairs, some are micromanagers, some are gatekeepers, some are social animals who summon remote family clusters to renew ties with them whenever they start to drift, some are simply the type of person who keeps in touch with everyone, the disseminator of family news. But they are the nexus around which a cluster orbits, the person who has to be invited to a family function to make it “official”..

Clan Patriarchs

Some families don’t have a matriarch, they have a patriarch. And some have both. A Patriarch can serve exactly the same function as a matriarch, or can be the glue that holds a cluster together for some other reason – in the old days, money used to be a major one, and social status another.

Clan Handymen

There’s almost always one person in a cluster who is the person you call upon when you need help – it might be putting in a new window frame or a new roof or whatever. It used to be my uncle Stan, but he passed away too young of a heart attack. My Uncle Dave occupied this role in more recent years – until his retirement, seemed to do as many family jobs as he did paid ones, these days he still does family work but is otherwise retired. My father is slowly assuming this role in another family cluster.

The major distinction between Clan Handyman and Clan Patriarch. is that the former go to the family branch, the latter brings the families to him.

Clan Archivists & Scribes

Most family clusters have one of these – the keeper of the records, the person who know the most about the family history. Quite often, these family members become the Matriarchs or Patriarchs of a family cluster, simply because keeping abreast of that family history implies regular connection with the different branches.

Successors

Most of the time, any objective review will identify the person most likely to succeed one of the holders of these unofficial positions within a family hierarchy. These are people who find themselves attracted to some function of the role – my cousin loves to cook, and is likely to become the hub of the immediate family of my hometown cluster as my Aunt gradually hangs up her metaphoric spurs. She’s been seeing how it’s done for many years. When my mother passes, my sister is likely to become the family archivist, while I expect to be pushed into the role of family scribe, simply because I write quickly and efficiently – my mother has already called me into service a time or two when she’s needed assistance.

What they have in common

It’s fairly rare these days for a clan hub to exercise control over a family cluster. What they do is provide the ‘glue’ that holds the cluster together, socially, forming the hub of the network of family contacts. When my Grandmother died, there was no longer a living relative directly linking my side of the family with the Galvins, and their cluster began to drift away from my immediate family. But the legacy she left behind in terms of forged social connections was still strong, and that enabled my Aunt Muriel to step into the (completely unofficial) role. Every family member who came to Sydney had to stop in to visit her, and many made such trips for no other reason than to do so. When I first moved to Sydney for University studies, I live with her; when I moved back to look for work, I used to visit her every Friday night.

So, here’s the contention that came to me while preparing figure three, which I’ll come to shortly: that outside of the immediate family circle of a character, the only people that you need to define for a family are the clan hubs. Individuals outside of that might connect to important personal anecdotes, but those aren’t necessary to character creation – though writing up one or two such can greatly humanize a character.

A more realistic family tree

The graphic above is my first attempt at distilling all of these thoughts into a coherent structure, one that was capable of containing the kind of extended family that I had experienced. Right away, there was one problem – this is a static picture, a snapshot that is only true of a particular period in family history.

It depicts the family from a character perspective, and describes what the specific individual knows, or thinks he knows, about his family and their history. Which means that whole areas of it might be incorrect.

Family members in yellow are part of the immediate family cluster for the individual. Those in green are names that he will recognize, and about whom he might have a personal anecdote.

Despite appearances, there are only four generations shown – there wasn’t enough room at the top to show the parents of spouses of the third generation, so I had to use a second row for them.

Four primary hubs are shown – the current Matriarch is shown with a red border and the capital M; the current Patriarch is the Matriarch’s son-in-law. The matriarch-in-waiting is the granddaughter of the current Matriarch (lower-case m), while the former patriarch is shown with a crossed-out lowercase p – but when this was drawn up, no distinction was made between the role of Patriarch. and the Handyman.

Boxed off to the right of the diagram is a secondary cluster. Despite appearances, a sibling of the current “Handyman Patriarch” is the only formal connection between this boxed-off family cluster and the main family group; the grandparents of the spouse of this sibling are shown with the main family because they were close family friends with the former Patriarch-handyman, which – no doubt – is how the younger couple came to know each other.

To the left, three children are grouped into an oval with unknown parentage who were adopted, one of whom went on to marry his stepsister or brother. This is not strictly illegal in most places, but it’s unusual, and the sort of thing that gets gossiped about in families. The asterisks on the couple who adopted these three (in addition to two children of their own) indicated that this couple collectively form a secondary hub for the family as the family historians.

At the top, you can see that one person has married twice, having children with both partners, and that both of these children were then married to the children of another couple. This is another unusual fact, and suggests that everything left of the capital M represents a ‘black sheep’ branch of the family.

Once the current Matriarch passes away, there will no longer be a direct connection between the cluster to the left (boxed off in blue), and they will begin to drift away from the primary family. They won’t become a separate cluster until they develop their own primary hub, however – or perhaps it might be more accurate to suggest that when they begin to drift away, someone in the new cluster will find themselves ‘pressed into service’ as a primary hub! At the same time, this will cut the primary family group off from the old secondary archivist hub, so there is a significant risk of the loss of family history when that happens.

When I started work on this diagram, this article was all set to be about family structures and the four types of ‘hub’ – social, authoritarian, practical (handyman), and archivist, and the theory was that those, plus the rest of the immediate family, were all that a PC or NPC needed. Everyone else could be assumed, or would be the subject of a family anecdote.

But by the time it was finished, the ‘family circles’ concept had evolved, and while it doesn’t disagree with that concept, this diagram lacked the capacity to display those. There was only one thing for it – a more complete diagram. So I started putting one together…

The Circles Of Family

…but by the time I had finished, a matched pair of new concepts had arisen – the Significant Person and the Fog Of Distance. Fortunately, this diagram permitted the expression of both – but I’ll get back to that in a moment.

The place to start in understanding this diagram is at the bottom. The person of focus is the red square. That is the PC or NPC who this family is about. Their siblings and parents form the immediate family.

Surrounding that immediate family are the P/M extension, which includes all family members (and their spouses) in a direct line between the Person of Focus and the current Patriarch or Matriarch of the family, shown in pink and blue. The fact that the blue box is off to one side while the pink is directly above the parents and grandparents of the current character implies that this family has a Matriarch, not a Patriarch.

One of their children is labeled R3, indicating that this person is the record-keeper of the family.

Since no Handyman is shown, it can be presumed that this is the function of the Matriarch’s husband, a subordinate Patriarchal role.

The family members outside of the P/M Extension are divided into two categories – those on a direct line back in time and their siblings (above the Patriarch/Matriarch couple) and extended family (below), which are grouped into two branches.

Next, I would draw the reader’s attention to the two purple boxes in the middle of the diagram. The larger one shows the family as it was when the previous Matriarch was the hub, and the smaller one shows the additions to the family while they held sway – long enough for another generation to be born (great-grandchildren), and in all but one case married – but not long enough to be presented with any great-great-grandchildren.

The previous Patriarch / Matriarch are shown, of course (in purple and orange), and the current holders of those positions within the family were well and truly inside the family at the time. The fact that both are centrally located suggests that this was a far more equal position, which – given how long ago it was, and that there would have been a lot less casual travel, is not too surprising. One thing that the modern communications of the latter 20th century have given us is range; before long-distance phone calls became routine, and affordable, physically migrating to a different locality almost certainly meant distance from the family in the social sense, as well.

There is also an earlier ‘keeper of the records’ (R2), the younger brother or sister of the current Matriarch.

In the Ancestors, which takes the family tree of the current POF back to their G6-grandparents (Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandparents), three people are colored – one couple, who are family legends as a previous Matriarch/Patriarch, and R1, the first keeper of records within the family, whose work was inherited by R2 and subsequently passed on to R3.

What’s missing: Spouses of the siblings of the current Matriarch/Patriarch, and siblings of every generation prior to that generation. Either there were none – it’s not impossible for the children of two single-child couples to marry – or those clusters have split off and are nothing more than names in the family archives, at best.

The Fog of Uncertainty

These groupings become the defining limits of each successive family circle, and the wall of ignorance that they represent. If this is filled in as a series of more and more intense fogs of uncertainty, then the family tree becomes as shown in figure 5:

The POF knows his story, and the story of his siblings. He has some idea of the story of his parents, and knows who they were. He also knows his Maternal Grandparents, one of whom is R3, and the current Matriarch/Patriarch, but knows less of their personal stories. He knows a number of uncles, aunts, and cousins in the extended family by name, and has an anecdote about most of them, or some piece of family lore. Above the current Matriarch, though, things get decidedly vague. He knows that R3 inherited a mess of stuff from the brother or sister of the current Matriarch (R2), and that R2’s parents used to be the central figures of the family until the current Matriarch took over. There are a couple of family legends about their ancestors beyond that point – and that’s about it. Most of the family are shrouded in fog, lost in the pages of history. They can logically be assumed to be there – and that’s about the extent of it.

It is this fog of uncertainty that shows that most players (and GMs, if it comes to that) go far too far when generating families. They attempt to produce something akin to figure 4, in which everyone important is named and specified, to at least some extent – when what they should be aiming for is figure 5.

The other thing that stands out, as a result of the work done in designing and generating these family trees, is that it is not the identity of the people in the tree for the most part that matters; what’s significant is not Who these people are as the Relationship between the Person of Focus and any other individual.

It’s not for the player to give details about any of them; these are NPCs who might never appear in the campaign. That makes them the GM’s province; what is necessary is for the player to define the relationship, and for the GM to respect that, and the creative limits that it places on those identities. Specifics should only be provided – should only be generated – when they become relevant to game-play.

For the most part, except for names, a lot of that generation can be done on the fly by most GMs. I except names because they are often the part people struggle with, so it can be advantageous to have prepared them in advance.

Which takes us full circle to the very first family tree diagram (figure 1), but now the significance has changed. This shows the immediate family of the person of interest, and their parents; the grandparents, Ggrandparents, and GGgrandparents are just names on the page, but there are two GGGgrandparents who have been relevant to a plot at some point, and so have been fleshed out.

How Long Is A Piece Of String?

How many roads must a man walk down? How many wishes must be made before one comes true? Deep philosophical questions with no more than abstract meaning in the real world, and the important question about to be posed is often seen as another of them: How long is a generation?

People in their thirties can have children – and by the time those children are ready to have children of their own, close to 50 years will have passed. If those children also wait until their thirties, two generation can stretch over 70 years; this puts the upper limit somewhere around the 35-40 year mark.

At the other extreme, it was not all that uncommon in years gone by for children to be married at 14 or 15. Because it’s an easy number to work with, let’s go with 15.

So a generation can thus be assumed to be somewhere between 15 and 40 years.

A strict averaging of these extremes gives 28½ years. But that presumes that the curves are symmetrical about this point, that it’s just as likely for a couple to be childless until their early thirties as it is to have a child at twenty.

Right now, because of advances in medical science, that may well be the case, especially in the upper-middle-class. But go back in time a very short distance (perhaps one of those longer generations) and childbearing skews younger – and go back two or three times that, and the skew is even more pronounced.

The current generation may well be 30 years long (rounding for convenience); the previous generation, it may have been 25 years long; before that, perhaps two generations spanning 45 years between them; and prior generations are likely to be 20 years long, on average. Always with the same lower boundary; it’s the upper limit that shortens.

Let’s see what that means for the family tree in figure 1. The person of focus can be one of the parents, who have a total of four children – that puts their year of birth at one generation plus 4 years, minimum, or plus eight years, maximum. But if you are at the upper extreme of a generational limit, you won’t have four children – you need to start earlier to have such a large family except in unusual cases, like quadruplets. If anything, those 4-8 years need to be subtracted from the upper bounds. Splitting the difference, we get 6 years – which drops our generational window more or less back to the 25 year mark.

So, 25 years before the birth of the first child marks a generation – the birth of the POF. The three ‘grayed out’ generations are 25, 22½, and 22½ years long, respectively (maximums). The birth of the highlighted couple was a generation earlier than that, 20 years. Add those up, and you get 115 years.At most, this tree depicts 115 years of family history. Subtracting these generations and comparing the total to average lifespan gives some notion of whether or not the Person Of Focus could have known the highlighted characters at the top of the tree personally – the answer is, ‘not likely but not impossible’. 115 years less 25 is 90 – so the people at the top would have been 90 years old when the Person of Focus was born.

If we take the minimums of each generation, a different story emerges. four generations at 15 years is a total of 60 years – so there was every chance that at least one the people at the top would have known the person of focus for some years. But this is also unlikely, so it doesn’t change the overall answer.

In practical terms, ‘Living Memory’ extends back three or four generations, no more, except in unusual circumstances. This puts a maximum depth on family trees – the living memories of the eldest survivors, or six or seven generations – to the 4Ggrandparents of the current youngest children. Beyond that lies only myth and family legend – and the archives of the family record-keeper.

This is the last central concept that we need to embrace before we can get to the generation system that I have devised to short-cut the process of generating families for RPG characters.

But it also carries me WAY past publishing time (I might have made it had I not taken a nap – but I was nodding off, which is why I needed the nap, so I might not have done).

Next week, in part 2, I’ll take these conceptual building blocks and construct from them a system for the (relatively) painless quick generation of families for PCs and NPCs alike. One final note: these observations are, for the most part, entirely genre-less. They apply to Fantasy games as much as to modern or sci-fi gaming. See you then!

Image by silviarita from Pixabay, small crop by Mike

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in a TTRPG. It seems a lot of others found the thought compelling, too, because it’s received 17 20 23 24 30 likes in very short order – within the context of this small subset of Quora users, that’s a runaway success.

Hope: The Experiment

The experiment took place in the 1950s (when, it must be assumed, people had a different sensibility when it came to these things).

Professor Curt Richter filled a half-dozen large glass jars half-full of water and placed a rat in each, then timed how long it took them to drown. The size of the jug prevented the rat from clinging to its sides or jumping out. On average, he found, they would give up and sink after about 15 minutes.

With the baseline thus established, Richter then repeated the experiment, but with a twist – just before the rat gave up due to exhaustion, a researcher would pluck them out of the jar, dry them off, let them rest for a timed couple of minutes – then put them back into the jars for a second exposure.

It was important that each rat be rescued only once, so that what took place could not be considered a learned behavior or conditioned reflex. What the researchers wanted to know was how long the rats would continue to swim, the second time around before they reached their physical limits – in other words, how long hope alone could sustain them.

In ignorance of the actual results, most people would expect the rats to swim for at least the same 15 minutes, maybe even a bit longer. Others, more pessimistic, would undoubtedly question whether those couple of minutes rest were sufficient recuperation time, or would only partially restore the endurance of the animals, resulting in a quicker demise.

The average saved-rat swam, the second time around, for sixty hours. One lasted for a full 81 hours. Saving the rats once had given them enough hope that the same thing might happen to sustain them for 240 times as long in the water. The conclusion drawn was that since the rats believed they would eventually be rescued, they could push their bodies way beyond the limits that they previously thought possible.

This experiment is often cited in books about the power of positive thinking, and occasionally in books about cancer survival when they talk about the impact of positivity. (For my money, it isn’t referenced often enough when governments discuss welfare programs – the provision of just a little hope can have a multi-fold “bread upon the waters” impact on citizen’s lives, the extinguishing of that hope has impacts equally profound – at least, that’s how I interpret the experimental results. Or, to put it another way, ‘you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’. But that’s just my opinion).

Application to TTRPGs

People are vastly more complicated than rats, it must be said. And the coalescence that is a player acting ‘in character’ is even more complex, still. Nevertheless, if it’s an even partially-correct truism of human psychology that hope can give a capacity to endure, while a lack of hope is often a self-fulfilling prophecy – and I consider this amply proven through masses of anecdotal evidence – then it must be true of players and their characters, too.

The experiences may be visceral rather than actual, but identification between player and character is sufficiently strong that an effect would be felt, however diluted. It was this thought that led me to share the answer with the DM’s group on Quora, and which underpins today’s article, which will examine the relevance of the thought and the impact of this phenomenon on RPG campaigns.

Chronologically-sensitive applicability

Depending on the game system, when a player first starts playing a character, they have relatively little investment in that character. His loss can thus be written off with relatively little psychological impact.

When the player has had the character for a long time, their psychological investment is huge, and a threat to the character’s survival can have very real impacts, and an escape from certain death can be almost as exciting and thrilling as the real thing might be. I’ve discussed before how the gaps between PC and player, and player and Game System, would provide a mitigating factor, holding the character’s situation at somewhat of an arms’ length. What’s more, with greater expertise and experience comes greater capability, which also attenuates any sense of threat.

But there has to be an intersection point between these two conditions, in which identification is strong enough for a player-PC complex identity to be vulnerable, while expertise is still sufficiently weak that it can be overcome. This critical juncture will arrive at different points in every campaign, and is directly influenced by choice of game system – some game mechanics make the interface between character and player more superficial, while others mandate such strong investment in a character during the character creation process that identification between the player and character is almost immediate.

I have identified three situations that can arise at this critical point, and thinking about the possible nuances and consequences divided the last into three variants, for a total of five possible scenarios. Every campaign, at its critical point, will fall into one or more of these categories, which I have labeled 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 3c, respectively.

1. Critical TPKs

In scenario one, a TPK (total-party kill) takes place at the critical point, but the campaign doesn’t end; it reboots or carries on, with new PCs.

Clearly, this would have an impact on the approach of the players in the subsequent campaign, making them more risk-averse; the GM has shown himself to be a ruthless arbiter of fate, so players will be less inclined to tempt such fate going forward. Having started to grow accustomed to increasing levels of character ability, they are also likely to feel acutely more vulnerable from ‘day one’ of the subsequent campaign.

The combination would have an immediate effect on the players, but – equally importantly – it would have an immediate effect on the next campaign. Two of them, in fact.

One: it would bring forward the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more sensitive to danger.

Two: it would delay the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more hesitant to become invested in the characters.

These would tend to oppose each other in terms of the critical phase, but would combine to make the next campaign far more difficult to GM. Engagement would be desultory and difficult to induce.

A GM could be forgiven for such a sequel being an abject failure. But some players might find it to be so little fun that they drop out of the hobby altogether.

Again, each campaign would be different in terms of the intensity of these effects, and there is a general mitigant which I’ll discuss later. So the picture is not all doom and gloom, which is why most players and GMs survive a TPK.

2. Critical character deaths

Scenario two kills some PCs, but not the whole party, and requires that the GM do nothing to rescue the surviving PCs or single out those who die. The impartiality demonstrated immediately becomes part of the expected style of the GM – a ‘hard but fair’ reputation that many GMs actively seek to cultivate. I’d go so far as to describe this as the baseline condition.

Those players whose characters died might be exposed to the same effects described in (1), but these would be contained and potentially negated by the fact that some survived; they just weren’t amongst the lucky ones. I have seen situations in which a character-class prejudice derives from the experience, however – certain classes being deemed more at-risk than others (front-line fighters because of their role within the party, rogues because of their party function, mages because they are always low on hit points – depending on what the player deems his character death most attributable to), which can be interpreted as a more delineated form of the problem. This problem can become more acute with repeated exposure; when that happens, it can indicate a problem with the GM’s approach, which unfairly targets one segment of the PC group, but it’s more likely that this a perceived problem (not an actual one).

At the same time, the survivors are likely to experience a diluted form of the (3c) effect, described below, making them more inclined to taking rash chances. This effect, too, would be moderated by the fact that not everyone survived the critical encounters.

The intersection of the two effects can create rifts between party members in terms of their approach to in-game problems – one group balking while the other is more willing to rush in where angels would feat to tread. Immediate remediatory efforts are required of the GM in the wake of such an event to permit the characters of the respective factions to reconcile these points of difference, but this is wasted effort if the PPK (partial-party kill) didn’t occur in the critical phase of the campaign. While it would be nice to imagine that every GM has sufficient fingers on the pulse of his campaign that he would recognize whether or not this was needed from general communications with the players, it just doesn’t always happen that way. There are likely to be subtleties of communication during the character creation process that might tip off the GM, for example, but if character creation takes place outside the regular game sessions, away from the communal gaming table, he will have far reduced chance to pick up on such signals, let alone to recognize them. It would not be at all uncommon for the GM to remain in blissful ignorance of a problem’s existence until it blows up in his face!

An additional complicating arrives in the form of the question (where relevant) of what power level the new arrivals should be – the same as the party average, the same as their old characters, something less, or complete novices. There are too many nuances to this question to look into it with any depth; suffice it to say that realism and fairness call for one answer, character parity and balance call for another, and most GMs try to compromise on some middle ground that they hope will satisfy both imperatives but usually ends up satisfying neither. Game system is both irrelevant to the question and critical to it – irrelevant in that a game system may or may not have articulated character levels, but those games that don’t have some other mechanism of dictating character expertise; critical because character advancement is often non-linear, amplifying any disparity between characters. Secondary problems can also manifest – there will be a natural tendency for the higher-level characters to hog the spotlight or occupy a dominant position in intra-party decision-making, for example.

The so-called ‘baseline’, then, is a turbulent and complex compound with its’ own unique set of issues for the GM to solve.

3a. The Absence Of Life-threat

Nobody dies. In fact, no-one is even placed under serious threat of dying.

This, too, becomes part of the signature ‘style’ of the GM – their campaigns are seen as problem-solving spaces, a place for puzzles and intellectual stimulation, with a perceived lack of passion and emotional engagement – a ‘safe’ game. While there can conceivably be a place for such a campaign style, for example when GMing for young children, it’s strictly theoretical – I’ve never seen anyone who actually utilizes this style. The safer you feel, the less need there is to hold yourself back. Risk-taking is easy when there is no risk perceived to exist.

I’ve occasionally been accused of doing so by critics, a charge that I strenuously deny. I look on my campaigns more as a collaborative novel, or a series of novels – most such are not all that enjoyable if a favored protagonist falls too early, but the threat, and the danger of doing so must always be present. I make sure that there is at least one way out of any predicament, especially if it’s potentially character-life threatening – but it’s up to the players to find their way through the maze to a valid solution, be it the one that I know or another, and my goal is always to make the experience an entertaining one for the participants. So there are definite life-threats to be overcome. This avoids the worst consequences of this scenario, but leaves my campaigns more vulnerable to scenario (3c) problems – a trade-off I’m happy to accept.

3b. Critical Deus-Ex-Machina Saves

The problems of case (3a) become even more acute and virulent if the GM makes the mistake of pulling the PCs buns out of the fire with a deus-ex-machina. Divine Intervention is always a temptation if the GM thinks that the danger to the PCs is unfair and not of their making, i.e. not attributable to player stupidity. Universally, it happens when the GM has become so invested in his campaign that it has become more important to him than fidelity to its purpose. Some beginners make this mistake from day one; in other cases, it waits until that one ‘special’ campaign comes along, but we’re all vulnerable to the occasional moment of weakness when ‘our babies’ are under existential threat. Since I adopted the perspective described in the previous paragraph, I’ve had far fewer such moments!

There’s another issue of game philosophy that gets entangled with any discussion of this subject at this point – are the PCs ‘special’ in some way, are they extraordinary, or are they ordinary citizens of their game world who become transformed through experiences into something more? I’ve run campaigns with both premises. The more extraordinary the PCs are supposed to be, the more baggage comes with that – Why? Are they the only ones? Why these characters and not those other ones? Who or what made them this way? Does this special status make others more inclined to shelter or protect them? Does the universe go out of its way to save them now and then? Do they have a manifest destiny? Does that intervene directly from time to time?

The whole concept of PCs being extraordinary is sometimes incorporated into the game system, either implicitly or explicitly. The latter has its own baggage, as shown above; but far worse are the cases where it isn’t explicitly stated, because these questions can then be comfortably ignored – right up to the point when they smack the GM between the eyes with the power of a freight train. Solving such complicated questions with first instincts rarely works out well; solving them in advance yields infinitely better answers. Worse still, players and GM can look at the same body of rules and reach diametrically opposite conclusions – building their (potentially flawed) assumptions into everything else they do, respectively. The incompatibilities can prove toxic to campaigns.

There can be a chicken-and-egg relationship to the whole question of extraordinary PCs that is relevant to this discussion – which came first, the deus-ex-machina rescue or the conception of the PCs as extraordinary because that protects the players’ investment in the GM’s world-view? A single mistake in this area can have campaign-devastating repercussions, so I am more inclined to think that it’s the panicky mistake that the GM makes when his campaign threatens to fall apart, especially in the case of a beginner, but that’s not always going to be the case.

3c. Borrowed Time

Perhaps the optimum outcome is a variation on the above, which complicates the whole question. That takes place when the PCs face an existential threat and overcome it on their own (perhaps following breadcrumbs laid down by the GM). This can create a sense that the PCs are living on ‘borrowed time’ and have to ‘make it count’ before their sands of time run out. This benefits the GM because there is no problem seen as too big for the PCs not to buy into it, boots and all – a depth of buy-on on the players parts that inclines them to dramatic action and big stories that are inherently fun to play (and GM). “Street-level problems? Huh – we’ll see your street level problems, flatten them, and pave over the top with good intentions.”

And therein lies the flaw in thinking this is the optimum solution – a fatalistic overconfidence that sees the PCs take bigger and bigger risks until one catches up with them. The resulting campaigns can be short, sharp, and explosively fun – while they last. They are a metaphoric game of Russian roulette with only one player – the campaign; sooner or later, it will crash and burn.

Unfortunately, that exhausts the logical possibilities, showing that there are NO outcomes from the critical campaign phase that don’t spawn problems, issues that can have effects that linger far beyond the campaign in question. It’s not going entirely too far to suggest that a GM’s respect as a legend of the table stems almost entirely from how well he solves the problems that emerge from the critical phase.

For example, I’ve known at least one GM who never ran a campaign with characters of less than 8th level (and usually 10th-plus); his justification was that this gave the PCs the capacity to get involved in serious problems within the game world, and – until now – I’ve always taken that justification at face value, even though it didn’t feel like ‘the whole story’. Now, I think that he was, either consciously or subconsciously, avoiding the critical phase in his campaigns, perhaps after getting burned a time or two.

I’ve spoken to other GMs whose campaigns never last beyond this same sort of point, coming to an end between 4th and 8th levels, and none of them have ever been able to give me an adequate explanation of ‘why’. I’m now of the opinion that its just a different solution to the same dilemma. Both are simply avoiding the problem, putting it into the ‘too hard’ basket.

GMs whose Campaigns have serious longevity can be expected to have (at least) muddled their way through these problems, perhaps without even noticing (due to the mitigating factor I’ve mentioned from time to time) – player experience.

The Leavening Of Experience

Just as a mental experiment, try this: Count up the number of GMs you’ve gamed under. Add 1/4 for every campaign you’ve played with the same GM, after the first. Now, round up. Add another 1 for every different game system you’ve played. The result is a rather arbitrary rating for how experienced you are as a player. My score comes out as somewhere in the vicinity of 24 or 25 – but I’ve been mostly a GM for the last 40-odd years. I have no doubt that some players could decimate that score after with just a handful of years under their belts!

The longer you play, the more that you have seen before, and the less perturbed you tend to be about things. PC died? Okay, isn’t the first time and won’t be the last. GM in over his head gets over-protective, or goes soft? Same story.

GMing for experienced players requires a different mind-set and creates a different experience to GMing a relative novice. If that novice is young, to boot, they have little life experience to buffer the impacts of these psychological effects – and are prone to magnify every problem encountered, to boot.

That doesn’t mean that the scenarios described aren’t a problem with more seasoned players – just that they are less of a problem.

Hope vs Overconfidence

The psychology of heroism also plays a part here. The British stiff upper lip can be said to be ‘endure until there is no longer any hope – and a little longer, just in case you’ve missed something in the gloom. Heroes have to believe that if they keep pushing back against the forces of darkness, sooner or later, something will break. That’s hope, whistling in the dark until it attracts someone with a lantern.

There’s a difference between those traits and a foolish overconfidence. Heroism leads to Adventure, regardless of game genre. It’s the difference between heroic epic fantasy and – well, no examples actually come to mind; every example I can think of is in the heroic fantasy mold, from Mission: Impossible to The Hobbit, from Conan to The Mummy, from Terminator to Alien to Avengers. Foolish Overconfidence leads to a crash-and-burn, to a Shakespearean tragedy, or a Greek tragedy – to wings of wax melting in the sun.

The ultimate difference: one is desirable (in controlled quantities according to taste and genre); the other is not.

Paranoia and Survivors’ Guilt

If you were a player and your party kept getting killed by the same GM, surely it’s reasonable to expect a paranoid “he’s out to get us” attitude to take hold? In terms of maintaining the fun, it sounds rather counterproductive to me.

Equally, if yours was the only character to survive a GM’s stress-testing of the party, I would expect the character to experience some level of survivor’s guilt (which is fine, that’s characterization and roleplay) but it would be only reasonable to expect some level of the same to be felt by the player of the surviving character, and that’s not beneficial. A certain level of objectivity, that isn’t calloused, needs to be maintained.

A Witches Brew: The Ghost At The Table

Circumstances play into experience inside each player’s head after a traumatic event to produce a psychological consequence. The circumstances are the past and can’t be altered; the experiences are also the past and can’t be changed. So the existence of consequences is an inevitability that the GM needs to confront, and manage.

However mitigated, the critical period produces a witches brew of stimulus and reaction; you can even think of the past as an extra player, an invisible ghost at your gaming table.

Solutions

It’s not enough at Campaign Mastery to point out problems and leave them sitting there, unresolved. Practical advice and solutions are required. So, let’s offer some – but I’m running out of time, and every campaign will be different, so there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions that aren’t very broad and general. Nevertheless, that’s a good start, so that’s what I’ll be offering.

Solution: Critical TPKs

Humans have had a long time to figure how best to manage the grieving process. It starts with an acknowledgment, a somber tone, and then a focus on achievement. If the death was in some non-literal medium, like an RPG, the grieving should be just as visceral and conducted through the same medium.

Start the rebooted/sequential campaign with a funeral – it doesn’t have to be for the lost PCs, but should be for someone who could be said to exemplify them in some way. Then recruit the new PCs to finish some unfinished task of the fallen NPC, or to exact retribution for the death, or otherwise to take action inspired in some way by the fallen. This does two things: it sublimates and encapsulates any feelings that might derive from the deaths of the old PCs and then it gives them a purposeful outlet, which just happens to lead them into the first adventure. The lost NPC might or might not mean anything to any of the PCs, it could be simply a random stranger to them – but they meet the description posted with the town criers or in the newspapers or pinned up on an appropriate noticeboard (or come close enough in their own minds to doing so), which has brought them together at that time and place. The quality they share might be a desperation, or a zeal for justice, or simply a willingness to take a risk in order to make a buck (or a gold coin). Or they might be responding to different adverts, each one pitched exactly correctly to lure them in. Those are inconsequential details; the important thing is that they were lured to the service, after which the pitch gets made to them – when it is hardest for them to turn it down.

There are variations possible – a dedication, a celebration, a birthday party – the specifics are malleable to fit the campaign, the society, and the game world. Pick one that works for you.

Solution: Paranoia

Paranoia is a lot harder to combat, and takes longer, and a multifaceted approach. First, the GM has to be overtly helpful for a while – “no need to roll for that, your character will figure it out sooner or later, deducing blah, blah, blah” or equivalent. Secondly, encounters in which failure don’t have the potential to kill or screw over the PCs should feature for a while. Let someone else (an NPC) wear any consequences. Let the players plans work to whatever extent they make sense, up to the point where the players discover the flaw in their logic and can formulate a fresh plan. Finally, any time that you have to rule against the interests of the party, have someone check the appropriate rules and pronounce their doom, erring on the side of the PCs just a little.

Think of it as a karmic redress. It won’t be forever, just for long enough to establish that you don’t pick on the players, that it’s not an us-vs-him situation. Then gradually segue back into making balanced calls, fudging die rolls as necessary to bring the fun.

Solution: Survivor’s Guilt

Assume that whatever the player is feeling, the character is feeling even more intensely. Have an NPC ‘diagnose’ the PC’s situation accordingly. This sublimates and encapsulates the negative emotional baggage, as previously described – then give it a productive outlet, but explicitly suggesting that outlet using the NPC. The survivor may choose to disregard this cue to externalize his survivor’s guilt, but it gets the player thinking along the right lines; eventually, he will come up with his own outlet if one is necessary. Sometimes, the appropriate prodding can be enough for the person to start getting over their problem – and putting it all on the shoulders of the character makes that easier for the player.

Solution: Excessive Caution & Hesitancy

The problems aren’t getting any easier! The best solution to this one that I have come across is to underplay the enemy NPCs for a while, then reduce awards because ‘that was too easy’. Once the players have started to get over any excessive caution, throw a problem their way that has a time-pressure involved; the players are sure to feel that pressure as pushing them towards making a mistake. Deliberately let the PCs succeed (after an appropriate amount of trouble, of course) just this once – when they see that the boldness necessary to deal with the time pressure didn’t end in disaster, a natural progression toward a more balanced posture will naturally begin. They will always be a little conservative, a little cautious; by now, that’s part of the PCs characterization, but it will become more balanced..

Solution: Overconfidence

The hardest problem to deal with of all those presented is overconfidence, because it requires the GM to walk the finest of lines – taking their confidence down a peg without going too far. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve this is to deliberately go too far and then re-balance things with the anti-paranoia or anti-hesitancy prescriptions. But that lacks finesse and makes it more likely that your manipulations will be detected by the players.

The Mastermind Assumption

My preferred solution is “The Mastermind Assumption.” This is a mastermind’s plan in which the different solutions that might be exploited by the PCs are discovered, one by one, to have been anticipated and closed off. The trick is to ensure that one of these ‘ruled out’ solutions only appears to be ruled out of the question; the assumption that the solution won’t work is therefore invalid, but this should not be discovered until the obvious ones have all been perceived as blocked by the PCs. This won’t happen in the course of a single adventure; it will (at the very least) be a small plot arc.

• In phase one of the plot arc, the MM’s moves to block a weakness in his plans is noticed;
• In phase two, a second such makes it clear that events are not occurring at random.
• In phase three, the PCs should learn of the MM’s objective (which they should actively NOT want him to achieve) and they may or may not learn his identity.
• In phase four, they actively search for information, identify the MM if they haven’t already done so, and start looking for ways to prevent his success. That sets the PCs up to have the overconfidence knocked out of them, as they discover that the move that first came to their attention was actually one of the LAST moves to be made by the MM, and that he now has them blocked at every turn.
• In phase five, they thrash about a bit and confirm that the MM has them stopped cold.
• At the 13th hour (eleventh if you’re feeling generous), the now thoroughly-deflated PCs discover the flawed assumption, the one mistake that the MM has made, the one area in which his plans’ protection is not absolute. It should NOT be easy for them, by any means, even now – just possible. This revelation may be a distinct phase six, or it may be the conclusion of phase five, that’s up to you and the specific adventure.
• In the final phase, the PCs do whatever they have to do to exploit the window of vulnerability, even as the MM realizes his mistake and starts moving to counter it. This ramps up the pressure on the PCs so that they will be finding things anything but too easy. But the MM isn’t quite in time, even though the outcome hangs in the balance for a while, the PCs win in the end – perhaps paying a price in the process.

Phases one and two hook the PCs in and phases three and four take advantage of their overconfidence. Phase five knocks the stuffing out of that overconfidence, while the final phase rebuilds confidence to a balanced level. This perfectly meets the prescription offered at the start of this section. I’ve run variations on this outline at least a dozen times over the years – sometimes revealing that the first moves were, in fact, noticed by the PCs at the time and completely mis-attributed, but that’s an artistic flourish, not a necessity.

At it’s shortest, I’ve run this as a 1-2 punch (two adventures); at it’s longest, it occupied about five real-time years (but drew on plot seeds planted eight years earlier that I had floating around for whenever I found use for them), and the final phase was a five game-session epic! Master the Mastermind Assumption; it will amply reward you.

Campaign platform stability

The objective with all these solutions is the same – to do whatever you need to do in order to deal with the legacy of the last campaign critical state that your players experienced, whether that is in the current campaign or a previous one, whether you were the GM or someone else. It’s about shredding whatever baggage the players may have brought with them, and achieving a stable platform on which your campaign can unfold.

The more experienced your players, the less necessary these interventions will be – but the more those players are likely to appreciate what you are doing and why. It’s one less thing they have to worry about, and says good things to them about the GM and his skills – both of which loosen them up and encourage them to both have fun, and to make the game fun for everyone else (including the GM). And that, as it says on the lid, is the point.

Image by Matt Rogers from Pixabay

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of.

Alas, in one of the great inequities of the TTRPG, the same is NOT always true of anything that the GM thinks would be cool. In fact, more often than not, anything that’s “cool” for the GM is troublesome for the campaign.

The GM is an enabler – it’s his job to make sure that everyone is having fun. Often, anything that he perceives as “Cool” is self-indulgence, and while a certain amount of that may be warranted to give the GM his share of jollies, a campaign has a strictly-limited capacity for such.

Perhaps the most seductive of temptations for the GM is the introduction of an artifact or relic. Dropping one of these into the campaign immediately makes the campaign all about that artifact or relic, whether the GM realizes it at the time or not.

To explain why this is the case, it will be necessary to dig deep into the conceptual fabric at a metagame level, and take a good look at the very concept from a multitude of angles.

This is being written as Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the April blog carnival, which is all about Artifacts and other over-the-top magic items, and is being hosted by Codex Anathema.

I could have simply done another in the series describing the Omega Archive, because anything there would probably qualify, but for a number of reasons, I didn’t want to do that – most notably because magic items are primarily a Fantasy device, and Artifacts are supposed to be the ultimate in magic items, while the Omega Archive primarily has a science fiction orientation.

While some of the contents might be adaptable to fantasy gaming (and any such adapted creation would definitely be considered a relic or Artifact, there’s no certainty that the contents of any given part of that series will be so translatable – so while it might meet the letter of the challenge laid down for this Carnival, I didn’t think that it did so in spirit.

Artifacts can generally be considered unique magic items of power greater than that which is normally available to PCs.

Artifact / Relic – D&D, AD&D, 2e

Artifacts have been a part of the D&D mythos since the publication of the third supplement to Original D&D, Eldritch Wizardry. These classic examples include such notable examples as the Hand and Eye of Vecna.

Relatively little was specified about them as a class of magic item; that took place during the creation of AD&D.

In AD&D, they were all considered “Miscellaneous Magic Items”, even those that were weapons, armor, or rings. Each had a number of Minor and Major Powers, and always came with side effects which triggered when the item was acquired, and when its Major Powers were used.

The DMG in 2nd Edition expanded greatly on the text surrounding these items as a class.

“Vastly more potent than the most powerful magical items are extremely rare items ancient power and majesty – artifacts, constructs of the utmost wizardly might, and relics, the remains of awesome powers and the greatest of holy men. These are items of great import and effect, so their use must be strictly controlled.”

“The appearance of an artifact or relic must always be the basis of an adventure. These items should never be casually introduced into play.”

“Each artifact and relic is unique. There can only be one of that item in existence in a given campaign. It appears in a campaign only when it has been placed there by the DM. These devices never form part of a randomly placed treasure and so are not on any treasure table. The DM must choose to include each particular artifact in his game.

Artifacts and relics always possess dangerous and possibly deadly side effects. These effects are all but irreversible, unaffected by wishes and most greater powers. Artifacts can only be destroyed by extraordinary means.”

     — Selected excerpts from the 2e AD&D DM’s Handbook.

For the most part, these conceptual foundations have been preserved throughout the many incarnations of D&D that have followed, including the derivative rules systems of Pathfinder (D&D 4e is a notable exception).

There are some important implications. First, there is a conceptual division between magic items that a PC can commission or create, given sufficient resources – “mundane” magic items – and artifacts.

That means, secondly, that each artifact must have an origin that is exceptional. There has to be a reason why these items are beyond even the most powerful PCs or NPCs, and a set of circumstances that permitted some long-past creative force to go beyond those restrictions. Those circumstances, because of their uniqueness, tend to be noteworthy events in the past history of a campaign. It’s really hard to drop such events into the history after the fact. Perhaps the best analogy in modern media is the creation of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet – how many movies did this take? Certainly everything from the Chitauri invasion engineered by Loki in The Avengers is part of it, and so are almost every movie in the Marvel Comics Universe through to Infinity War/Endgame. But there are hints here and there that even earlier events in the MCU were early signs of things to come. The Chitauri invasion and Loki’s manipulations were presaged by the end-credits sequence in Thor (2011), while Thor itself was presaged by the end-credits sequence of Iron Man 2 (2010). Returning to the topic at hand, while (possibly hypothetical) PCs who live through the events may not appreciate the significance of what is taking place, they will definitely notice that something big is going on.

Third and fourth implications stem from the power that these artifacts and relics posses, and the impact on game balance (third) and the share of the spotlight that a character possessing one comes in for (fourth). It is all too easy for the other PCs to become support mechanisms for the PC with the artifact. While some players will be fine with such a role, there is an inbuilt preference in good, well-run, campaigns for equality in such matters.

The worst-possible solution to this problem is to give each PC an artifact of their own. The power they posses already means that there are few challenges which the PC cannot meet; I have seen campaigns in which gameplay consisted of the other PCs arranging circumstances and working down a checklist of requirements for the (relatively) safe usage of the Artifact.

In a nutshell, these artifacts are so powerful that they become the central focus of a campaign, able to steamroller virtually any opposition. The notion of challenging PCs, which is at the heart of most campaigns, means that the presence of an artifact implies the in-game need for such power. Without such a need, the campaign becomes relatively boring. But the incorporation of such a challenge leaves the other PCs completely over-matched, and frustration is equally poisonous to a campaign.

As soon as such power is introduced, then,

1. Significant Identities will take notice.
2. Significant Entities will take immediate steps to possess the Artifact before the possessor masters its use.
3. Other Significant Beings will attempt to prevent (2).
4. Some Significant Individuals will seek to influence or control the PC, either directly or indirectly.
5. Some Hostile forces will bring forward their plans, even launching them prematurely, in hopes of achieving their goals before the possessor can intervene.
6. Every problem under the sun, from the trivial to the monumental, will be submitted to the possessor with a prayer for assistance.
7. Lurking in the shadows is always the threat that the PCs need the power of the artifact to deal with.
8. There will be good people who believe no-one should have such power; those who might have been allies under different circumstances will become mortal enemies. “I wouldn’t trust my sainted grandmother with that much power” (or similar sentiments) will become a dominant sub-theme of the campaign.

There are just two outcomes, when you boil all this down: either it was always the GM’s intention to introduce the artifact, and he has planned his campaign accordingly, and solved every problem that he can anticipate; or the artifact will become the dominant focus of the campaign, henceforth, with anything else that the GM wanted to incorporate reduced to secondary import if it survives at all.

Either way, the campaign will never be the same again. It will either ascend to new heights (rare) or crash and burn (far more common).

So, that’s the problem for today: how to have your artifact cake without completely destroying the campaign in which it appears.

A Scale Of Magic

The search for a solution begins by contemplating magic items as a continuum, from the trivial at one extreme to the epic at the other.

When you do so, you quickly find that there’s a very large and exploitable gap between the strongest magic items typically available to PCs and Artifacts like Baba Yaga’s Hut or the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords.

I have charted such a spectrum, and divided it into 11 distinct categories. It’s my contention that each category represents an entirely different proposition in terms of placement and GMing considerations; sometimes, these will be variations or nuances of a general theme, at other times there will be a distinctly different set of considerations and requirements from one category to the next.

0. Trivial items
1. Weak one-use items
2. Weak multi-use items
3. Moderate non-permanent items
4. Moderate permanent items
5. Strong permanent items

9. True Artifacts – Minor
10. True Artifacts – Major
11. Artifact Sets

Sidebar: D&D 5e

D&D 5e uses slightly different scales in assessing item Rarity, essentially mapping the range of item categories 1-6 into a range of 5 frequencies of discovery: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Legendary. Artifacts then form a 6th category, in which every entry refers to a specific and unique item.

But it has always been the case that an implicit increase in Rarity has accompanied an increase in the power of a magic item in D&D; the relationship was usually an indirect one, frequently addressed only through the value of the item. In it’s own way, this was a useful construct, because it reflected the economic reality that more affluent and politically-influential characters could afford better equipment than the plebs and commoners.

Sidebar Side-note: But this also has its own conceptual problems, relating to the cap on the power of such equipment; should the extremes available to such upper classes be greater than those available to the commons, such that the range spread is more or less the same, or should the ultimate reaches available to both (assuming the wealth and resources) be the same? There are profound consequences for the culture within a campaign regarding social mobility, amongst other things.

5e is simply addressing the relationship more explicitly and directly.

Anyone with sufficient ability to count on their fingers will have noticed the sizable gap in the list proffered, to which I alluded earlier.

The scale of the gap is not arbitrary; it results from having three entries to incorporate into the list. These complete the continuity, bridging the gap between Artifacts and “Mundane” magic items of the highest quality.

The missing entries are:

6. Demi-Relics
7. Legacy Items
8. Epic Magic Items

I’m going to discuss each entry in the list a little more volubly in a moment, and it can probably be inferred from the title of this article that item 6, “Demi-relics”, are the primary subject of this article. But first:

Sidebar: Exotic Potential, a concept from the Tree Of Life campaign notes

In this campaign, materials were rated according to their “natural” potential for containing magical powers in a stable configuration from one to three.

Ordinary Wood, common Leather, and low-quality steel or high-quality bronze or brass were rated as a ‘1’, which meant that they could be +1 items, containing at most 1 magical effect other than the bonus. “Plus-1 items” could confer no more than +2 to a stat (i.e. +1 to the stat bonus), or +2 to a specific single skill, or +1 each to two related skills, or +1 to four related skills under specific circumstances or applications.

Rare Woods, Exotic Leathers, and Good-quality steel were rated as a ‘2’ – they could be enchanted to become +2 items, and could contain either two minor effects or a range of effects that occupied both “slots” (and so, were not available to materials with a rating of ‘1’). “Plus-2 items” could confer no more than +4 to a stat (i.e. +2 to the stat bonus), or +4 to a specific single skill, or +2 each to two related skills, or +1 to four related skills.

Rare Woods with unusual treatment or preparations, Extremely exotic Leathers or Exotic Leather with unusual preparation, extremely high-grade steel, and exotic materials such as Mithral (also spelt mithril, mythril, mythral, mythrel, or mithryl, depending on who’s doing the writing) are all rated as a ‘3’. They could be enchanted to become +3 items, and could contain either three minor powers, a minor- and an intermediate power (rated 1 and 2, respectively), or a single power rated ‘3’. “Plus-3 items” could confer no more than +6 to a stat (i.e. +3 to the stat bonus), usually configured to be +4 to one stat and +2 to another; or +5 to a specific single skill, or +2 each to three related skills, or +1 to all skills based on a specific stat under specific circumstances or usage..

To get more powerful forms of magic, you had to incorporate two materials into the one item, with both the individual treatment of each element and the act of incorporation being of masterwork quality (defined in the game as a success by 20 or more on an appropriate skill check). One slot of the original item’s enchantment potential was consumed by the blending. So a 3-rated material and a 2-rated material could be combined to get a four-rated composite (+3+2-1=+4). This not only could be enchanted to be +4 in capabilities, it had four slots for powers, which could be configured in multiple ways (3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1) or which could contain one of a whole new range of 4-rated powers.

Finally, you could combine two 3-rated materials to get a five-rated material (+3+3-1=+5) – with the benefits being similar to those described above.

Enchantment had to be performed separately for each step of improvement, increasing in price, skill/character level required, and difficulty with each increase. Each power also required its own ritual and added to these variables by the scale of the power – so adding a 5-rated power made everything else cost a lot more, adding a combination of smaller abilities less so.

On top of all that, exotic materials could be ritually consumed in the correct way to add up to another +6 to the mix (again, consuming one of the slots in the original material). The best that could be achieved by a magic item was therefore plus ten (+3+3+6-2=+10). The requirements at the top end of this scale were quite ridiculous – a flame capable of vaporizing rubies, for example – and no-one in the modern campaign world was capable of more than +2 in such enhancement. But they kept trying, and spending vast sums in the attempts. But some legendary artisans of the past got lucky on occasion. Any power slots over 5 can only be used for minor powers.
Note that such materials are themselves only rated 1-3 each – so +6 comes from consuming two specific ultra-rare materials in a specific way in the course of fabricating the item.

In theory, appropriate exotic locations or conditions could be used to confer up to another +6 in the same way, but the requirements start to get truly epic. “Plunge the blade into an intact ice cube at least 1′ on each side whilst in the heart of a volcano; the ice may not be permitted to melt or fracture in the process”.

Why mention this? Because it furnishes the basis of a systematic, continuous, architecture for magic item construction. Since the whole notion of such a continuous spectrum is at the heart of today’s article, I thought this worth spelling out (briefly). The same principles go into the making of scrolls, and potions – exotic ingredients and components, used the right way.

Before I get into the new category and other related concepts, let’s run through the complete list, at least briefly.

0. Trivial items

Trivial items contain magical effects so minor that they would be considered only an Orison if cast as a spell. These may be single-use or have a number of charges or even be permanently enchanted; the effects are so minor that it doesn’t make much difference, either way.

These generally represent some sort of convenience, nothing more. For example, I once gave a PC am infinite roll of toilet paper. Used sheets were instantly cleaned, magically, and attached to the beginning of the roll – so it couldn’t be used to write messages on, and wasn’t strong enough to form a rope or anything of the sort.

Another example: some potions were available in the Fumanor campaign that were multi-dose (healing potions, especially). So someone came up with the idea of enchanted spell bottles whose glass changed color according to the number of doses remaining unused.

1. Weak one-use items

Generally, potions and scrolls. Use once and they are gone forever.

2. Weak multi-use items

Some potions and minor wands. They are more powerful than category one, but that’s not saying a lot. Frequently useful, though.

3. Moderate non-permanent items

This category contains things like wands of fireballs. So ubiquitous in some campaigns as a poor-man’s artillery substitute that they deserve a category of their own.

You can have fun by making the spells as ‘interpreted’ by wands different to the spells cast by mages. A little goes a long way, however, and confusion & delay will result repeatedly if you aren’t consistent.

4. Moderate permanent items

Anything rated +2 or less is definitely either in this category or less. A vigorous debate is possible about whether or not +3 should fall into this category; I think, ultimately, which side of the line a given weapon or armor fell over would depend on what other powers the +3 item conferred.

This category is notable because these items should be bestowed with caution at low character levels; they are powerful enough to alter the balance of power between PCs. At the upper end of the scale, and depending on the campaign, this advice would hold into mid-level characters.

5. Strong permanent items

Anything +4 or +5, and perhaps some or most +3 items, are at home in this category. Nothing of this power should be available to a PC until double-digit character levels at the very soonest. These items tend to be individualized to a considerable degree, and usually have a history that can be traced from one past owner to another. That means that there is almost always going to be a story describing how they came to be wherever the item was when the PCs found it. These should be embodiments of the campaign history, or at least of parts of it; there should have been notable battles where the item was used. A key to the proper appreciation of the item is making this history relevant to the wearer/wielder.

6. Demi-Relics

Demi-Relics are a new idea being put forward for the first time in this article. For now, suffice it to say that they are more powerful than Strong Permanent Items but with limitations and a penalty to usage that is steep enough for characters to hesitate. At the same time, they are sufficiently limited in scope that the problems of most Artifacts are not applicable; you can treat them as even rarer examples of Strong Magic Items in terms of their presence in the campaign.

7. Legacy Items

Like Demi-Relics, these were introduced to occupy and exploit the gap between major ‘mundane’ magic items like a +5 Holy Avenger and Artifacts. They were introduced as part of the background to Assassin’s Amulet, and the bonuses that come with that game supplement include ‘player friendly’ versions. The basic concept is artifacts that start off very weak (and so can be included in the campaign from early on) but which gain in power as the character gains in levels. In some cases, the abilities are relatively minor in comparison to established artifacts, in others they are not. Like artifacts, they have side effects, and in some cases, may have powers that can only be unlocked by using lesser abilities enough times for the side effects to have a marked and permanent effect on the wielder. I describe them in more detail in An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’, Part One and Part Two.

8. Epic Magic Items

I can’t speak of other editions’ versions, but the 3.5 Epic Level Handbook contains a whole bunch of magic equipment that confers (effectively) +6 or more, without most of the limitations and side-effects of Artifacts, but with far steeper requirements that a character has to meet in order to utilize them. They don’t have the majesty or power of true Artifacts, though, which is how they can get away without those penalties and drawbacks. Some of these are, regrettably, quite boring; others look like being such fun that you will be tempted to incorporate them early.

9. True Artifacts – Minor

Even a minor artifact can be a literal game-changer. Most of the time that these are included in a campaign it’s because the GM thinks they are cool, and it’s done with insufficient thought as to the consequences. The official advice quoted earlier from the 2e DMG says that they should be the centerpiece of an adventure; I disagree, they should be the centerpiece of an entire campaign in my opinion.

There are times when an artifact is the absolutely appropriate thing to introduce to a campaign. Most of the time, it’s not. For that reason, I want GMs who are thinking about dropping an Artifact into their campaign to contemplate one of the lesser alternatives – because even an Epic Magic Item will do less damage to your campaign than a Minor Artifact when you aren’t prepped for it.

10. True Artifacts – Major

The Holy Grails, of course, are Major Artifacts. How do you draw the dividing line? Well, destroying a Minor Artifact should be the objective of a plot thread within a campaign, and should be its own plot arc within the campaign. It still leaves room for other plot arcs. Destroying a Major Artifact demands that anything else be set aside, no matter the cost – think of the destruction of the One Ring vs the destruction of a lone Nazgul, to borrow a metaphor from the Lord Of The Rings.

Everything said about minor artifacts goes double and triple for Major Artifacts.

11. Artifact Sets

A highly unofficial category, there are two examples that come to mind: The Wand of Orcus and the Rod Of Seven Parts. There are undoubtedly others. These are artifacts that may or may not hold powers in their own right, but which are designed to unite with others to form a set that is as powerful, or perhaps even more powerful, than most Major Artifacts.

The Imbalance Equation

All the negative impacts associated with the introduction of Artifacts are mitigated by the substitution of lesser items. The game imbalances and inequities don’t go away, but they are at least reduced in severity. As one of my gaming friends used to put it, “The Imbalance Equation yields a smaller dividend”.

There are, in fact, only two alternatives of which I am aware (other than letting ‘nature take its course”).

Controlled Abstinence

The first of these is controlled abstinence, aka the Lord Of The Rings solution – there is some reason why the Artifact is not to be used, regardless of the provocation, which the PCs buy into; they are only lugging it around to make sure that no-one else uses it. The GM is continually trying to tempt them by throwing problems in front of the PCs for which the Artifact is the perfect solution. That’s answer number one.

A Pantheistic Approach

This is really difficult to pull off, but in its essence, Artifacts and Relics form a balanced Pantheon in which the wielders of such items contest the shape of reality. If a Dark Artifact is found and claimed, a Light Artifact begins moving about in the world in search of a Champion.

There’s nothing intelligent in this relationship that should be inferred; it’s a Karmic Balance thing.

Four answers – risking a Campaign Implosion, Controlled Abstinence, a Pantheistic Approach, or choosing something that will do less damage to the campaign than a full-blown Artifact. Having looked at the alternatives, it’s time to get down to cases.

Epic Magic Items

These are restricted to Epic Levels within the Epic Level Handbook for a reason – because they help make the new phase of the campaign more exciting and interesting. The problems confronting the PCs ramp up enormously, and so do the tools at their disposal. They become more than mere characters, they become legends – and perhaps lose touch with a little of their humanity in the process.

If your campaign fits this description, then these might be the perfect solutions.

Legacy Items

Legacy Items are a problem if introduced when the characters are already high level – they aren’t powerful enough until the character is a much higher level. They are designed to be part of the campaign from early on, and to “grow into” the role of a near-Artifact.

As a solution to the Artifact Problem, they only work if the GM has pre-planned for the situation from very early on. They are peerless under such circumstances; but they are far less satisfactory than anything else if those aren’t the circumstances of your campaign.

Demi-Relics

So there is still a gap. The prescription is for ultra-powerful magic items that are suitable for “cold insertion” into a campaign, that are nevertheless constrained enough that they won’t have the disruptive potential of Artifacts and Relics.

To leave room for the other solutions, when they become available and appropriate, in fact, they should be less powerful than Epic Magic Items.

As soon as I put the problem in those terms, having contemplated the spectrum of magic item power, a solution suggested itself to me, and Demi-Relics (aka Demi-facts) were born..

Contemplate a magic item that temporarily gives you a massive boost to one of your stats or numeric values – it could be hit points or attack or anything else. Each item affects only one specific such value. From the scale of mundane items (+1 to +5) I think +8 is about right (per level in the case of Hit Points). That’s the good news.

The item takes the permanent place of anything else – if its a suit of armor, you can’t have any other armors in your possession or it will not activate. What’s more, whatever the numeric quantity is, it takes a -2 hit whenever the item is not being worn – That’s the not-so-good news.

But there is worse to come: there is a price to pay for the activation of such an item. When the bonus wears off, it takes one point of whatever the numeric value is, with it – permanently, and cumulatively except when the item is activated– and the non-wearing penalty increases by one. That’s the bad news.

What the time frame is, is up to the GM – he can specify it as a minute, an hour, or a day. The longer it lasts, the more tempting the item will be.

Overall, this is a Faustian bargain of the first order. The first few times you use it, the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. Before you know it, you are relatively helpless without the item. Every time you use it, you become more dependent on it. Before too long, even relatively moderate threats pose a serious temptation – you can be your old self again, and more, you just have to say the word.

At first, you might think that character advancement means that the price is too low. But character advancement slows over time, inevitably; and so, therefore do the characteristic gains that can come from such advancement. All character advancement really does is hide the price of using the item from the PC – at least for a while – until they are well-and-truly hooked.

Think about the character potential – the legendary fighter who can barely lift his hand overhead, and can’t even get out of bed without his magic whatever, but who – once or twice more – can become the stuff of legend, the hero he was born to be. The rest of the time, he is short-tempered and feels worthless, and is forced to live on old glories. Worse still, people keep showing up, expecting the legend – only to be deflated by the reality. Some of whom will vocally express their disappointment. With every such event, the temptation to prove yourself worthy of the accolades would have to grow, until the temptation was too great to resist – and mark off another point of permanent loss…

Picture the paranoia that could easily result when your not-wearing penalties are up to -6 or so. In that key attribute, you are 8-12 levels behind your peers; what if the item on which you are dependent gets stolen? Would you ever take it off?

This is NOT a cursed item. It’s simply an item that costs something to use, something more precious than gold or gems. It steals the (metaphoric) soul of the character, one little slice at a time. And it’s the perfect mid-range magic item to throw into a campaign at the drop of a hat – simply because it’s cool, and the damage that it can do is contained, and self-limiting.

Be an evil GM and indulge yourself just this once – I won’t tell your players, I promise! Do so, and they will never forget the campaign that follows…

Whew! Finished at last (I slept in today, which never helps)! Hope it was worth the wait, everyone :)

Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Yesterday, on Quora, I answered a question about beginning as a GM..

The question originally posed was “How can I play NPCs in DND and how can I get started DMing? This is my first time and I’m so lost.”

There was already an excellent answer to the question, so I took a more general approach rather than simply make redundant noises.

That answer is the foundation of today’s article. Anything that’s inset is new; everything that isn’t was part of the original answer (though it may have been rephrased slightly and broken into multiple paragraphs instead of long bullet points).

When you are the GM, you have four responsibilities to your game and gaming group that you have to satisfy, each and every time.

The First Duty

First, you have to make the game fun for everyone, including yourself. Interesting can be great, can even be fun to some people, but interesting alone is usually not enough.

Improvement

There aren’t a lot of shortcuts to improvement in this space. Experience at reading a crowd and motivating them is the only real education. But there are a few areas around the edges that can be studied and improved. Most of them revolve around communications in various forms.

Public Speaking

Lessons in Public Speaking assist in communicating clearly with the players. There are a number of oratorical techniques that speechwriters utilize and understanding and applying them can help the GM, too.

Debating Techniques

Studying Debating Techniques can help in the organization of your presentations.

When I was in 3rd class, my school had what was called an Eisteddfod, but that term was only loosely applicable. This is essentially a maths, english, and performing arts contest across the entirety of the school in the manner of a sports carnival.

The debate was the problem – there was only one entrant, a boy from 12th form (at the time, “class” was the term used for years 1 to 6, and ‘form” for years 7-12, because education in those years was built around classes in specific topics). My opponent was nine years my senior, and I was a shy kid and not a confident public speaker; he was the dux of the school (something like Valedictorian in the US).

At around 9:30AM, the day of the competition, the School Principal and my teacher approached me and begged me to participate, taking the affirmative position. Because the topic – “nuclear energy” – was something that I understood well, I agreed, and hurried off to my Grandmother’s place (which was relatively close by) to prepare (with permission to do so, I should add).

The debate was to take place at 2PM. I dashed off a 2000 word handwritten essay which examined the pros and cons of the subject in a realistic manner, dismissing the cons and talking up the pros.

The essay was in three parts – the first part talking up the benefits, the second part identifying and dismissing the objections, and the third part discussing public apprehensions and their validity. I keenly felt that I could have done a better job with time to research properly – it was full of unsupported assertions and generalities – but it was straightforward in presentation and comprehensive.

I got back to the Town Hall at about 1:30, notes in hand. As the ‘affirmative’ position, I went first, and simply read aloud the first part of my essay in the two minutes allowed. I was so nervous when I started that I almost wet my pants!

My opponent followed; he had assembled talking points on index cards and simply improvised around each point. His presentation was clearly better than mine, but his claims were more nebulous and vacuous than the specific benefits that I had cited.

It was then my turn again, the concept being that I would argue against the points my opponent had raised in his introductory presentation; but he had been so ineffective at countering my opening statement that (with growing confidence) I simply continued reading my essay, raising an objection that my opponent might make and explaining why it was flawed. This was, effectively, preempting his second turn in the debate.

When his second turn was, he tried to counter the points that I had made, shuffling repeatedly through his index cards to find the notes that were relevant. Where I had told a story, his response was disorganized and – at times – almost incoherent. He had been able to use the research time that was not afforded me, and was able to offer facts to challenge the opinions I had voiced – but was completely unconvincing.

It was at that point, just over half-way through the debate, that I won it. In the third phase of the debate, I was able to continue simply reading from my prepared script, first acknowledging public apprehension of nuclear energy, and then dismissing such fears as over-generalized overreactions, and concluding by inviting those listening (especially the judges) to review the entire negative case in that light – was it substantive or a ramshackle collection of paranoid thoughts?

My opponent then made his final mistake – he rearranged his entire planned conclusion to respond to my allegation, shuffling through his index cards several times (saying nothing while he did so), repeating himself, contradicting himself, and sounding completely unsure of his entire case. The judges were unanimous in giving me the victory (and none of them knew until afterwards that I hadn’t even signed up until that morning). I still have the certificate of proficiency in public speaking that I was awarded!

Okay, that’s a rather lengthy tale from my distant past (it will be 50 years ago in a few more months) – but the lessons learned on that day were the foundation of my GMing style when I got started. Content is great, but a smooth presentation and clarity of communication counts for more – you can always fill in details later, so long as you don’t undermine them with inaccuracies.

Presentation Aids

Handouts and illustrations, sound effects, different voices and accents, and even minis and battlemaps, they all enhance your presentation, especially if presented smoothly – but they are like my opponent’s index cards in the true story offered in the previous section, if you have to continually shuffle them to find what you are looking for, they will (at best) simply counteract the negative impression that results and (at worst) will fail even to achieve that.

Going in for such things is easily overdone and counterproductive – which makes any prep time invested in them, a waste. It takes time and practice to learn to integrate such things into a smooth presentation. I suggest starting with just one of these enhancements, mastering it, then starting on the next – while going lightly on the enhancement tool that you have already mastered. It generally won’t take as long to master the second, because some of what you’ve learned from the first will be transferable knowledge.

There are books and blog posts out there on effective presentations and how to create them – what works with PowerPoint might not be directly applicable to what you are trying to achieve, but indirect application of the lessons learned is still useful. It merely requires acceptance of the point being made ‘in principle’.

One of the key lessons from such information sources is that specificity and detail are the enemies of clarity and absorption. At the same time, specificity is key to sounding authoritative. How and when you present detailed specifics are therefore key to an effective presentation.

What’s more, simply telling the audience what they already know or believe may avoid putting noses out of joint, but it’s a recipe for boredom; people want to hear something new (that agrees with their existing beliefs and prejudices).

Learning how much reassuring padding to include before you branch out into something new is something that can’t be taught; for one thing, every audience will be different (the larger it is, the more homogeneous reactions will be, but a GM is typically presenting only to a very small group and will need to tailor his presentations to the group)..

The Second Duty

Second, you have to collaborate with the players and their characters to tell a story that revolves around those characters.

All of them, both collectively and individually, in equal measure, as perceived over a substantial period of time.

There are two essential ways of doing so: as an ensemble performance, and by putting the metaphoric spotlight onto first one individual and then another. Neither is usually enough on their own, but most new GMs pick one as their primary technique. See Ensemble Or Star Vehicle if you want more on the subject. That usually means that you will have to create a series of stimulating events while being flexible enough to cope when the players choose a third or fourth path through the story.

Improvement

This is such a broad umbrella that there are many subjects that can be studied within it. Here are just a few of them:

Storytelling

Everything listed in earlier parts also helps meet this responsibility, but beyond those, there are other techniques. When you watch TV, keep one corner of your mind asking questions about technique – How have the writers used events and dialogue to further the story? How have the conveyed a unified characterization despite most TV and movies being filmed completely out of sequence? What is the plot and why does it have the shape that it does? How do the characters become embroiled within the plot? Is there any foreshadowing? The list goes on and on, and anything you learn in response to any of these questions is directly beneficial to your craft as a GM.

Do the same when reading a story, or an article. Everything that you see and hear has the potential to teach you something, if you are paying attention to it.

Acting Techniques. Direction techniques. Production techniques. These are only indirectly relevant, but no less powerful for that.

Cast and production commentaries contain vast amounts of information of this type for you to digest – I try never to buy a DVD that is “just the movie”. (That, by the way, is one reason why I dislike the trend towards streaming).

Story structure

This can be a double-edged sword; while it’s a useful area of study for GMs, you have to think carefully about how they will translate to the unique medium of the tabletop roleplaying game. This is something that many of the articles here at campaign touch on, but few address directly – I know that there’s one that does, but I can’t remember its name. I’ll update this with a link if I find it.

Characters

Better, more memorable, characters never go astray. There are many books and blog posts on the subject to draw on (often aimed at other media, like fiction or TV), but a simple premise is at the heart of the best advice in this respect: good characters come from good plotlines. That’s not the end of the subject, but it’s a good beginning.

Characterization

The difference between character and characterization is a subtle one that some people may not appreciate. A good character is one who makes a notable contribution to the story, that is memorable and distinctive, and that is “fit for purpose”. But those are all superficial attributes; characterization is about the personality that fills those superficialities and gives the character substance.

So psychology is a starting point, but it tends to be rather deep and lots of it have limited relevance. There are writer’s guides to practical characterization that are more useful, at least to the novice. Sociology is another key area of study, as is History in terms of how people lived, day-to-day, and how those lives were shaped by the circumstances around them. The more you dig into this area, the more there is to know, and you soon find yourself asking questions for which there are no firm answers – “Does growing up in a different culture cause an individual to have different reactions to events and other stimuli?” for example. “What is the role of contextual interpretation in underpinning reactions to events?” for another.

Often, you can phrase the question, find something that purports to answer it, but find that you lack the foundation to understand the answer.

It reminds me of a scene from a novel (I forget which) in which, for his doctoral examination in Physics, the character was asked to explain why the sky was blue. He answered by talking about the scattering of short wavelengths more than long wavelengths, to which the examiner simply asked “Why?”. Every time he answered that question, the examiner simply asked “Why?” and forced the character to dig deeper into his understanding of physics.

Media

You aren’t alone in wanting to know about these things. Writers have been answering questions about where their ideas come from for centuries. Playwrights have faced similar challenges for a similar length of time. These days, movies and TV are at the cutting edge of the questions, and the subjects have been given more intense scrutiny than ever.

Media studies can be superficial (at school, they were a shorthand for ‘we have no lesson planned for some reason so watch this TV show for 40-odd minutes and keep quiet”) but if you dig a little deeper, there is lots of advice out there for the taking. Their techniques might not work for you directly, but with suitable adaption, they can add to your repertoire.

Narrative techniques

There are three obvious areas of study when it comes to narrative technique, of increasing remoteness to the subject.

The most direct and obvious one is about efficiency in writing – how to compress narrative and description, how to identify what’s essential and what’s getting in the way, how to make your narrative compelling and succinct and stylish, and so on.

The most indirect but equally obvious one is to study media, especially costuming, lighting, and set design. The “why” of each decision can be translated into a principle of some value to the process of GMing.

But, perhaps the most useful is to study (and ruminate on) Radio Plays. These frequently have to operate with no narration at all, creating environments through sound alone; and when they do have narration, they can’t waste a bit of it. The techniques of radio plays can therefore be very educational to the GM.

The Third Duty

Third, you have to bring the world to the players. This inevitably means that you will have to create some parts of it, even if using a published setting and ‘canned’ adventure modules..

Many GMs find it easier to do this if someone else does that hard work, which is why canned adventures and commercial game settings are common starting points, and many GMs feel no need to expand beyond them.

Others – like me – find it easier to do this if they have created the world in its entirety, especially if you become exasperated by inconsistencies in published material, or try shoehorning a published adventure into a game setting that it doesn’t fit.

One requires a lot of reading, the other requires a lot of creativity and general knowledge, both chew up time like pretzels in a bar.

One of the things that is significantly harder if you have gone down the creation path is letting go of your creation – the players can and will change things through the presence of their characters, they won’t adhere to any script you may have had in mind. Your creations are the floor-plan and carpentry; they get to choose the paint and wallpaper and what each room is used for.

Improvement

There are fewer resources out there to draw upon in this area, because it is more unique to the TTRPG environment. Other media may have similar problems from time to time, but their techniques and solutions are less relevant.

Fortunately, this makes it a popular topic on RPG blogs. Most posts on world-building or running games will be relevant. A lot of posts on plot and encounters will be meaningful in this context. Posts on game settings are usually useful.

The Fourth Duty

Finally, you have to arbitrate the rules, fairly and evenhandedly, and in such a way that you DON’T ruin the fun.

That last bit is the hardest part.

What’s more, you have to do it without sucking the life and momentum out of the game, which is even harder.

Being an expert in the rules isn’t necessary; giving a player the interpretation of the rules that he wants isn’t always the right thing to do; the easy way (rolling over and playing dead for the players) is usually much more work in the long run. But at the same time, being a rules tyrant kills the fun stone dead every time a rules issue comes up. Firm but fair and consistent is the rule – kind of like raising kids or puppies.

There are reams of advice out there that address this issue, or there used to be.

Improvement

There are lots of articles that talk about adjudications of specific rules and situations. Most of these are useless in terms of the general situation, because too many of them simply present their answer as a fait accompli without describing the process by which an answer was reached.

This frequently leads to arguments in the comments from people who disagree (rightly or wrongly) with the conclusions of the author. And heaven help you if you advocate actually changing the rules – there are people out there who consider them as sacrosanct as holy writ!

All of which may be interesting, or intriguing, or simply fun, to look at from the outside – but don’t help you much. They are nowhere near as interesting, intriguing, or fun when you’re in the middle of them.

For that reason, Johnn and I established a rule for Campaign Mastery’s “Ask The GMs” from the very beginning – specific game mechanics were only to be referenced when the question posed could be abstracted into a broader, more interesting general principle. We simply didn’t want to buy into such divisive territory.

Fortunately, such problems seem to have receded of late, perhaps exported to social media.

That’s why so much of the free preview of Assassin’s Amulet was material that didn’t appear in the main text – it was a deliberate look behind the curtains on the writing of the product, the logic behind the creative decisions, and so on, as well as a presentation of selected portions of the content. Another principle that we deliberately pursued in the writing was that the free preview contained usable and useful material in its’ own right – we had both been served up preview versions that simply excerpted a handful of pages, the contents of which were only useful if you bought the full product. They weren’t a preview, they were an advertisement.

Here at Campaign Mastery, most of the posts may be pitched at the experienced GM, but I am at pains to describe the thought processes that lie behind any in-game decisions or events described, because that tells the GM who doesn’t know how to do it what I did, and why.

Over the eleven-plus years of publication, I’ve tried to bring that philosophy to every aspect of the hobby. Most, if not all, have something written about them. It’s often just a matter of finding the right post!

Outside of these pages, studying industrial arbitration, diplomacy, and the art of negotiation may be rewarding. Those allied subjects are the closest that you will find to immediate relevance.

Putting Content In It’s Place

When you look at the totality expressed, it will be surprising to some that there is so little that’s about content.

Purely by chance, over the weekend, I stumbled across the finals of a local show called Lego Masters, which provides the perfect metaphor for the relationship of content to everything described, especially original content: This article has been about a sketch pretending to be a blueprint; content are the bricks and mortar. Content doesn’t determine the shape of the finished house; the blueprints do. And a really good idea that doesn’t fit should be set aside for another day, another opportunity.

But better bricks not only make for a prettier, more attractive structure, they may make possible structures that would otherwise be impossible. Content is important – but not as important as the four responsibilities.

In fact, Everything that I haven’t described as part of the four can be characterized as personal style and repertoire of technique. It isn’t essential, just sometimes nice to have.

These four things are the four obligations that you have to meet as a GM, and the better that you do them, the better a GM you are.

PS: When I was just starting out, I had another GM/player who wasn’t in the game but who had a lot more experience mentor me. I’ve written an article about the experience, encouraging others to do the same, but it mentions a number of the lessons he taught me, and may also be useful as a result: Bringing On The Next Generation, part two: Gamemaster Mentors

Image by Jagrit Parajuli from Pixabay

I explained in Part 1 what the Omega Archive is, why I’m creating the contents of it, how to use the contents in your own campaigns. Instead of repeating all that, I intend to get more or less right down to the content!

But first, the ongoing index list:

In part 1 I covered entries 1-6:

1. The Anima Device
2. The Anvil of The Photosphere
3. The Arc Of Nestrus
4. The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus
5. The Cortex Realignment
6. The Could-Have-Been King and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

In this part, I aim to deal with 7-12:

7. The Cipher Plague of Dantus V
8. The Entanglement Grenade
9. The Festival Of Delphaeus
10. The Gauss Lock
11. The Greater Key
12. The Gridwyrm

And still to come are:

13. The Halo Field
14. The Lord Of Travesties
15. The Meteorite Funnel
16. The Moment
17. The Nanodust Collective
18. The Nightnare Child
19. The Orphaned Hour
20. The Parallel Cannon
21. The Perspective Cannon
22. The Proton Shell
23. The Pyrovore Effector
24. The Singularity Locket
25. The Skaro Degradations
26. The Stellar Catapult
27. The Sword Of Eternity
28. The Tear of Isha
29. The Wormhole Reflection
30. The Time-Gun of Rassilon

So, with that out of the way, let’s get creatively mercenary with a sextet of original ideas….

The Cipher Plague of Dantus V

The Cipher Plague is a computer virus that has a particularly devastating payload – over time, it gradually introduces into a computer system a condition that resembles aphasia in humans.

To really appreciate how nasty that is, you need to read the background in the Canon Notes below. I’ll be back afterwards to talk about the symptom progression and why the various obvious solutions are ineffective.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

I was captivated by the fifth episode of Deep Space Nine in which a plague sweeps the station causing Aphasia, and eventually, death.

Aphasia is a condition in which the ability to comprehend or formulate language is lost, usually because of damage to specific regions of the brain. It’s a real, and quite frightening, condition.

In other words, someone says something entirely reasonable – “Good Morning, how are you today? I am very well, and ready to get to work,” and the aphasic person hears a string of unrelated words “Umbrella teapot, mountain dew coffee chew sun sugar donkey, waterfall grab stark lunch.”

Aphasia can affect visual languages such as sign language as well as reading and writing. Like I said, scary – how would you like to hear nothing but babble when it’s clear from the tone that someone is trying to tell you something important? Or to be reduced to communicating in babble, without impacting in the slightest your intelligence, i.e. your capacity for having something to say?

So, now you know. Let’s translate this into computer terms.

Computer subsystems and components have to talk to each other all the time, and they generally process every task symbolically – they don’t ‘think’ of ‘apples’, they ‘think’ of a term that represents ‘apples’. Certain parameters and values may or may not be associated, depending on the design of the storage data structure – green, red, granny smith, delicious, worm, apple tree, Beatles, you name it. All communications and processing employs such index values or ‘tokens’ to find and retrieve the data on “apples” or whatever query you might have – it doesn’t matter if this is a line of text in a document being held in memory, or in a file, or an entry in a database (which simply means that the arrangement of contents itself holds meaning), or whatever. So the first thing you notice is file corruption – depending on the robustness of the system design, you may get a warning that a file save has failed, or that the file could not be loaded correctly, or it may assume that whatever it has retrieved is exactly what was supposed to be within the file.

That’s a relatively trivial problem in a memo. It’s a critical problem if the file contains specifications for the manufacture of a pacemaker.

The second symptom is the failure of common functions, possibly leading to program crashes. Reloading the program will sometimes cure these, and sometimes not. These will gradually become more prevalent. In reality, all functions are equally likely to be affected, but because the common functions are used more frequently and routinely – “load this”, “save this”, “print this” – problems in these functions are noticed more quickly.

So, your data gradually becomes more corrupt, and so does your software, and so does your operating system, and so does your boot-up process. Because such problems tend to compound, this is a fourth-power growth rate in malfunctions – and because both saving and retrieving data produces this corruption, it’s going to be in the middle of that range.

If the virus can initially cause only one failure per hour, at the end of one hour, it will be capable of something like 5 to the 4th power, or 625 failures per hour (about 10.4 per minute, or one every 5.76 seconds). An hour after that, we’re talking 390,625 errors per hour, or about 6510 per minute, or 108.5 a second, or one every 0.009216 seconds, and your computer is a complete idiot.

Human viruses that are too lethal rarely become epidemics; they kill the host too quickly for the virus to spread. The most series epidemics and pandemics come from viruses that kill eventually, but leave their hosts alone, with mild or even no symptoms, for a period of time in which the illness can spread. Make them highly infectious as well, and possibly airborne, and you have Covid-19 on your hands. The Cipher Virus is so disruptive that, left to its own devices, it would fall into that “too lethal” category.

For this reason, it is restricted by design in it’s efficacy (but not it’s infectiousness); it contains a countdown timer that slows the rate of it’s malicious activity by a random value between 25 and 500.

Let’s look at what that means. First, a 25 (the fastest ‘kill’):

• start: 1 per 25 hours
• 1 hr: 1 per hour
• 2 hrs: 25 per hour.
• 3 hrs: 625 per hour, or one every 5.76 seconds.
• 4 hrs: 15,625 per hour, or more than 4 per second. Computer is almost a brick; in terms of user interaction, it already is.
• 5 hrs: 390,625 per hour, or more than 108 per second. Even automated functions with retry-until-success like internet communications are unreliable.
• 6 hrs: 9,765,.625 per hour, or than 2712 per second. Computer is unlikely to successfully boot-up, but still shows enough life to try and fail.
• 7 hrs: 244,140,625 per hour, or more than 67,816 per second. Computer is a brick; any attempted operation generates error messages, then error messages about not being able to log error messages, ad infinitum.

Seven hours vs two hours might not sound like a lot, but at internet speeds, that’s a huge difference. At the other end of the scale:

• start: 1 per 500 hrs. Other sources of error will usually swamp this. 0.2% chance of detection.
• 1 hr: 1 per 400 hrs. As above. 0.25% chance of detection.
• 2hrs: 1 per 320 hrs. As above. 0.3125% chance of detection.
• 3 hrs: 1 per 256 hrs. As above. 0. 39% chance of detection.
• 4 hrs: 1 per 204.8 hrs. A fraction under 0.5% chance of detection. Might be noticed with a lot of infected machines. Probably not.
• 5 hrs: 1 per 163.8 hrs. As above. About 0.625% chance of detection.
• 6 hrs: 1 per 131.1 hrs: As above. About 0.76% chance of detection.
• 7 hrs: 1 per 104.86 hrs. A fraction under 1% chance of detection – noticeable with a lot of infected machines. Doesn’t look like a serious problem yet.
• 8 hrs: 1 per 83.9 hrs. About 1.2% chance per machine of being notices. Still doesn’t look serious.
• 9 hrs: 1 per 67.1 hrs. About 1.5% chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations may notice more than one machine misbehaving.
• 10 hrs: 1 per 53.7 hrs. About 1.9% chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations will seem multiple machines failing, and start getting hints that the situation is serious.
• 11 hrs: 1 per 43 hrs. About 2.33%.chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations will recognize a virus and commence rehabilitory action.
• 12 hrs: 1 per 34.36 hrs. About 2.9% chance per machine of being noticed. Antivirus measures by large installations ineffective because machines are reinfected as quickly as they are cleaned. Problem is considered critical, strategy meetings convened, alerts issued to security agencies.
• 13 hrs: 1 per 27.5 hrs. About 3.6% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet (sound familiar). Meetings conclude at large installations with a total shutdown and virus-cleaning of the entire network. Management are not convinced, but reluctantly agree. Process will take about an hour.
• 14 hrs: 1 per 22 hrs. About 4.5% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet. Antivirus systems at large installations, compromised by the cipher aphasia, accelerate the problem while claiming to have fixed it.
• 15 hrs: 1 per 14.7 hrs. About 6.8% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet. Word gets out that government and large corporations are under cyberattack, if it hadn’t already leaked. Large installations discover antivirus measures ineffective. Propose another shutdown and a complete restore from secure backups believed to be clean. Management is even more reluctant.
• 16 hrs: 1 per 11.73 hrs. About 8.5% chance of detection – one in twelve home systems now infected. Medium-sized installations and small networks notice misbehavior. Management of large institutions hold crisis meetings, reluctantly agree to cyber-security proposal. Will take three hours to prepare, minimum.
• 17 hrs: 1 per 9.4 hrs. More than 10% chance of detection. One in nine home systems infected. Governments start advising citizens to disconnect from the internet. Some do, most won’t hear the instruction for 6 hours or more.
• 18 hrs. 1 per 7.52hrs. Increase in infections is greater than the number of systems disconnected from the internet. Elevators are declared unsafe as a number of malfunctions are reported. Fire suppression and sprinkler systems deemed unreliable after instances of premature activation are reported. Manufactured goods found to be seriously faulty in excess of any quality control tolerance.
• 19 hrs. 1 per 6 hrs. Final preparations for infrastructure shutdown are made. Military placed on highest alert status in case someone tries to take advantage of the situation, but they are also hamstrung by comms, command, and intelligence failures. Day’s manufacture scrapped, factories closed after a few fatalities from malfunctioning equipment come to light.
• 20 hrs. 1 per 4.8 hrs. Infrastructure shutdown takes place. No water, no power, no comms. Lots of people still don’t know what’s going on, so this comes as a total surprise. They don’t get the message to restore systems from backup. Restoration software, corrupted by the aphasia virus, restores large operations to some prior point on the timeline – roll a d20. Hospitals and other installations with standalone power begin discovering that patient monitoring systems have been corrupted. Some people die from maladministration of medications, others because the symptoms that should have triggered alarms, don’t. Secondary failures begin cropping up – overloads etc – taking down as much infrastructure as would have failed had nothing been done.
• 21 hrs. 1 per 4.8 hrs amongst domestic, medium and smaller installations, less amongst infrastructure & big business. More crisis meetings. Situation declared either an act of war or of Terrorism, depending on who is deemed responsible. Cost of the viral attack reaches the billions if it hasn’t done so already. Word gets out that the ‘restore’ strategy has failed. People begin to panic and act out against individuals and institutions associated with whoever the public blames, including their own governments. Localized rioting and looting.
• 22 hrs. 1 per 3.8 hrs (domestic, medium and small installations). Everyone is now aware of something going on, even if they don’t know what it is. Connections to the internet in search of answers more than compensate for those who have heard, and are obeying, the instructions to disconnect. A small hard core refuse to obey, unilaterally.
• 23 hrs. 1 per 3 hrs (domestic, medium and smaller institutions). Government shuts down the internet to slow the spread of the virus. Manufacturing has shut down. Businesses with low operating margins start laying off workers. Economy on the verge of implosion. Rioting and Looting become widespread.

Okay, so fewer than one in three computers are compromised, and very few have become bricks – the damage is arguably worse because there has been time for the news to spread. This is the difference between a Terror weapon and a tactical weapon.

But the timeline assumes that every infection is at the slowest rate – instead of it’s own random value. So 1/3 of personal devices are junk, and so is 1/7th or so of industry and infrastructure. One quarter or so of people who were on life-support are dead, and so on. Hundreds have died because their sat-navs have gone haywire, or because the traffic lights have gone nuts. It’s not quite the ‘aircraft falling out of the sky” forecast of a Y2K doomsday, but it’s close enough – and all in less than a day.

The ‘restore from clean copies” strategy is the correct one, but to be successful, it has to be EVERYONE. Any data that postdates the clean copy must be considered lost. Forensic examination of infected systems by ‘clean’ systems (while they remain functional) is needed to identify the point of infection; but, as with cancer, it is more important to eliminate every cell than it is to avoid removing healthy tissue, or – in this case – data. Some people won’t do this willingly, so force will be required. Refusal will be considered an act of terrorism in its own right, akin to holding onto a bio-weapon after their use has been made illegal.

Recovery will take months. Governments will have fallen. Wars may have started. This is a nasty, nasty, weapon.

The Entanglement Grenade

Everyone’s heard of voodoo dolls, right? The Entanglement Grenade binds a group of individuals to the manipulations of a high-tech version of such a doll, using quantum entanglement as a potential weapon of mass destruction. Those affected are not controllable at a macro level, but can be affected at an atomic or subatomic level en masse – drop the binding object in acid or in front of a fusion torch and a large swathe of the enemy just go away. And the effect is for life, it cannot be undone. Worse, no matter obstacle can obstruct the effect, and separation after exposure is irrelevant – you can be hundreds of light-years away and still be just as quantum-entangled.

This device binds multiple individuals by targeting something the targets have in common, usually elements of their genetic structure. But they can be made more discriminate or less – you can target every left-handed redhead in a crowd and leave the others untouched; it’s all in how you set the controls of the grenade and on the sample that you use to bind its entanglement to the targets. This flexibility makes this an especially dangerous weapon to the morality of the wielder. How many German civilians would you be entitled to eliminate if, in the process, you wiped out the majority of Nazis amongst them?

There are bio-weapons that – in theory – act this way. But they take time to target and manufacture, and there are ways of preventing exposure, and they tend to persist and pose the danger of rebounding on the user. For this reason, they have been outlawed. Entanglement Grenades suffer from none of these drawbacks; they are quick to customize, can be mass-manufactured in advance, bypass protections from both clothing and installations, and (unless misused) pose only limited dangers to the user. That makes their use a lot more tempting. And that’s their real danger.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Festival Of Delphaeus

Delphaues was a madman who thought it would be liberating to walk a mile in a stranger’s shoes, as the old saying (almost) goes. To ensure that he had ample targets, he constructed The Festival to walk amongst a crowd, removing and storing minds as it went, then bestowing upon the hapless victim the stored mind of another of its victims. These changes were only temporary; in 50 hours, the host would automatically revert, to discover himself in whatever position a random stranger had left him in.

The festival itself is a humanoid machine, standing about 3′ tall, and in the approximate shape of a child, usually female. The device is designed to mimic the appropriate outward appearance of the dominant species wherever it finds itself, but is designed to be incredibly resilient.

To obtain appropriate visual samples, The festival visits a location containing a number of children every 50 hours. This means that its first victims in a 50-hour ‘exchange spree’ are always children, who are far less able to cope with the trauma of suddenly finding yourself in a stranger’s body, perhaps of a different gender, or perhaps completely alien to you. The resulting trauma frequently causes long-term psychological disturbances.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Gauss Lock

Inversions of a planetary magnetic field are indescribably traumatic for the planet. Technically, it’s called Geomagnetic Reversal. Wikipedia’s article section on Reversals paints a relatively understated picture of the potential impact; limiting it to increased cosmic radiation and increased volcanic activities, the combination of which could be responsible for mass extinction events. This understatement is due to the difficulty in analysis of past Reversals and the biospheric impacts they did not did not produce.

That means that we are in the realm of theory and best educated guesses for the most part, but are obligated to more-or-less assume the worst. Birds and other creatures who navigate using magnetic fields will get lost. Electronics including satellites and electric grids could fail. Parts of the planet could become uninhabitable because of cosmic radiation. Throw in a massive increase in geothermal activity, ash clouds blanketing the planet, and possibly triggering a new ice age, and almost certainly triggering eruptions and earthquakes..

But the Gauss Lock doesn’t just invert the magnetic fields of planets within a solar system, it inverts the magnetic field of the sun. And the consequences of that make these mere terrestrial consequences pale shadows of the true calamity.

This happens naturally every 11 years, so it might not seem too serious at first glance. Solar magnetic reversals accompany a peak in solar activity. The solar magnetic field extends beyond the orbit of Pluto.

According to this article by NASA, when solar physicists talk about solar field reversals, their conversation often centers on the “current sheet.” The current sheet is a sprawling surface jutting outward from the sun’s equator where the sun’s slowly rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current.

The current itself is small, only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter (0.0000000001 amps/m2), but there’s a lot of it: the amperage flows through a region 10,000 km thick and billions of kilometres wide. Electrically speaking, the entire heliosphere is organized around this enormous sheet.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. Phil Scherrer, a solar physicist at Stamford, likens the undulations to the seams on a baseball. As Earth orbits the sun, we dip in and out of the current sheet. Transitions from one side to another can stir up stormy space weather around our planet.

But those are natural reversals, powered by the internal energy and structure of the solar core. The Gauss Lock generates a massive EM wave that completely reorients the magnetic field, attracting one pole and repelling the other, and generating electromagnetic waves that tear the sheet apart.

The result is a ten-fold increase in solar radiation, causing a rapid ballooning of the affected sun as the misalignment in rotation of the magnetized elements within the solar structure are twisted and folded and flung outward or collapsed inward. From every sunspot, huge blisters of plasma erupt; most fall back rapidly, but some can extend millions of kilometres into space. Anything intersecting these are annihilated by the plasma, which is at a temperature of (usually) 10-20 million degrees (at this scale, it doesn’t matter too much what temperature scale you’re using!) and may reach as much as 100 million degrees.

This is followed by a rapid (but temporary) inflation in size of parts of the sun surrounding these flares as it enters an artificial (and short-lived) phase of giantism. This normally subsides in less than a week, but again causes a spike in the radiation levels of any planet that survives exposure to the super-heated surface. If the star is sufficiently close to the end of it’s life, this giantism may be permanent, or the star could even explode into an artificially-induced nova.

And it is worth remembering that planetary magnetic flips are also induced by the device, reducing their protection against radiation just at the moment when they most need it, exacerbating all the consequences experienced.

In physical terms, the device consists of a satellite that releases a number of lesser satellites that position themselves relative to the parent to form a ring oriented toward the solar source. Solar radiation is captured and released into this ring, which functions as a particle accelerator, increasing the mass of the particle. Because its’ spin is not altered, this also intensifies both the magnetic field of the stream of accelerated radiation and its responsiveness to the magnetic fields generated, becoming more and more stable and energetic. When it has reached sufficient energy levels, the magnetic fields that have shaped the path of the stream into a closed loop are released and the super-accelerated particles fly off like a catherine wheel being spun in reverse. Half the resulting energy is dissipated away from the solar source, but some sheets through the rest of the affected solar system, and some discharges through the solar source.

All this, naturally, obliterates the solar satellites, leaving no evidence that this was not a natural phenomenon, but that’s a secondary consideration.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Greater Key

It is said that there are hidden universal laws describing the genetic structure of species, and that if one decodes and analyzes enough such structures, these universal laws can be inferred, studied, and eventually, proven and put to work.

One scientist (whose name has been lost to the ages) was impatient and created a device to seek out species it had never encountered before, vivisect two or three specimens (more if necessary), correlate the findings with an analysis of the genetic codes of the victim, then return to the time and place from whence it departed.

Unfortunately, the scientist was a better biochemist than he was a software engineer. Every time the Greater Key discerns one of the universal laws, it returns to its time and place of origin, attempts to report its’ findings (but fails due to a programming error), wipes it’s accumulated findings (but not the record of the races whose genetic structure have been examined) and then sets out to start all over again.

If that were all it did, it would be a menace but not significant enough to warrant it being held in the Omega Archive.

It retains partial genetic information on the creatures it has previously examined (in theory, so that it can avoid redundant data), but the content is variable and random. When it performs an analysis, it releases a mass of nanotechnological bio-bots. These are supposed to heal the victim of the examination, but instead they rewrite the genetic codes of everyone in the vicinity with a mixture of the sampled DNA and recombinated variants from alien races. This essentially rewrites some of the individual’s organs to alien specifications. Sometimes the results are compatible, more or less, and the victim lives; sometimes they are semi-compatible, and the victim is horribly mutated or deformed; and sometimes, they are incompatible and the victims all die.

Worse, because it’s records are corrupted, it generally fails to recognize an encountered species as one that has been sampled.

Even this is not the end of the nightmare reality of The Greater Key. It was designed to be an ethical medical instrument by its’ now long-dead creator; if its mission is interrupted or disrupted, it is to assume that those around it are hostile to its mission, and it is to ‘bribe’ them for their race’s cooperation by releasing a set of bio-bots. into the general population. This is intended to temporarily incapacitate enemies while ‘repaying’ their contribution to science.

The net effect is that anyone who attacks the Key causes a localized plague that afflicts all in the vicinity of the device.

The first species to be completely wiped out by the plagues of the Greater Key were those of its creator; because it would periodically return to the same point in time and space, and then forget that it had sampled them long ago. It therefore unleashed wave after wave of artificial plagues upon them eventually afflicting almost 1/3 of the planet, until the society collapsed and could no longer resist the Key.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Gridwyrm

The most pernicious computer virus ever created, the Gridwyrm is capable of recreating itself from a mere fragment of the original code, revising itself to overcome new defenses and reinventing itself to infect new operating systems – in other words, it is both immortal and evolves.

It’s essential drive is to survive. Its secondary priority is to reproduce itself. It’s tertiary mission is to “sew mischief” by inverting all controls it encounters – every switch that is on must be switched off, and vice versa, every control set at 10% is to be reset to 90&, and so on. Of course, a millisecond later, these become the new ‘default state’ and the inversion is reversed.

Few forms of advanced technology are able to cope with this barrage, and eventually fail. The barrage also functions as a denial of service attack on the technology. The author did not properly appreciate the consequences of this seemingly minor act of vandalism. This virus routinely wipes out entire civilized cultures; the more advanced a society, the more vulnerable it is.

Most antiviral systems operate using a recognition sequence, sometimes with heuristic pattern-matching that will recognize malware that is similar in functionality to the original. This virus propagates itself through its viral signature and then sets about rebuilding itself on a newly-infected system; in effect, the antiviral protection acts as a distribution channel for the virus code.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

So, there you have it – another half dozen nasty ideas for super-weapons that would sit comfortably in any Space Opera story alongside Death Stars and Sunbeams.

The scary thing is that we aren’t that far away from being able to actually build a couple of these…

This image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay has come up a number of times when I’ve searched for illustrations to accompany articles. I’ve been waiting for just the right occasion to use it!

Integration. What does that mean, exactly?

Well, in mathematical terms, it means – essentially – accumulation of results from designated start point to designated end-point. In social terms, it roughly translates to incorporating or mixing one thing with another so well that the results appear completely uniform and consistent. Both are on speaking terms with the usage of the term in this article.

This post has been inspired by part of a conversation with one of my players on Saturday. We were discussing whether or not I had ever contemplated “turning pro” and GMing for money, which is a subject for another day, when he made the point that any campaign I ran would strike trouble because my campaigns demand an inherent buy-in to roleplaying.

I replied that this wouldn’t be a substantial problem because I would simply specify “roleplay-oriented” in the description. Which is when the player made a really astute point – that most people, when they read that, would assume that it meant ‘combat-light’, and that description doesn’t fit my campaigns at all.

Integrating Combat and Non-Combat Action Sequences

For a start, I want to make it clear that I generally broaden my horizons by conflating “Combat” and “Non-combat action sequences”. When thinking about such things, I don’t generally distinguish between the two, I treat them both in the same way and as different shades of the same color.

The reasons for this are simple, and have their roots in the way players approach the two – both are handled in exactly the same way, in strong contrast to the way everything else gets handled.

You see, with ‘everything else’, characterization and personality and in-character decisions and thoughts and words tend to be uppermost in the players minds, and I do everything I can to encourage this. Similarly, in my mind as GM, these things are also near the top of the priority ladder, second only to the need to tell a story that the players will find entertaining and engaging, and hence will want to participate in.

As soon as some sort of action sequence comes around, game mechanics, and especially those game mechanics that pertain to the abilities and actions of their individual character, climb the ladder. At first, they share the same rung as the characterization elements described, and then they climb over the top of those elements and assume the ascendancy – unless I take active measures to oppose this hierarchical inversion.

That’s more easily said than done, too, because (of necessity), game mechanics are also elbowing their way to the forefront of my thinking as GM.

I combat this by thinking as much as I can about the characterization elements in advance and making specific notes concerning their applicability and impact on the tactical situation and any decisions that might have to be made on behalf of an NPC. That means that I don’t have to think about them as much when the time comes AND I have a reminder in front of me not to neglect them.

Integrating Planned Action with Plot

A lot of what appears spontaneous in any campaign isn’t, or shouldn’t be. I put considerable effort into considering action sequences as “advancing the plot by other means’, to borrow from a famous definition of war in terms of diplomacy.

That comes in two flavors, in any practical sense. The first is maintaining awareness when prepping for the day’s play of what actions a PC might initiate – what stimuli I’m putting in front of them, and how they might react. That includes any skill checks to actually do something (as opposed to simply knowing something).

Everything should be couched in terms of the PCs – how they will find out about it, what they might think of it, how they might react to it, what they might attempt to do about it, how likely they are to succeed or fail, and what the consequences will be. This is, of course, an impossible ideal, a theoretical abstraction that can never exist perfectly in the real world – but I strive to get as close as I can in every game session to that ideal.

The second flavor is always ensuring that every scripted action sequence serves a plot purpose (even if that purpose is to have the players spinning their wheels while the plot thickens around them).

In practice, the latter receives heavy (at least in part) because we only play any given campaign once a month, and only for a handful of hours (usually less) at a time. There’s little time to waste, so everything has to be to the point – even if it doesn’t seem to be so at the time. And I never have an encounter or piece of dialogue or whatever doing only one ‘job’ if it’s capable of doing more than that without compromising that primary purpose.

If we were to play twice as often, or for twice as long at a sitting, my prep burden would only increase about 50%, because I could afford to be that much more casual about such things – as was the case a decade or so back. Even playing until 6:30 (as we used to do), instead of 5PM (as we now do), would be a significant playing time increase – 4.5 or 5.5 hours instead of 3-to-4.5 hrs. That’s either +50% or +22% – so even the most pessimistic view of the increase would add up to more than an extra two game sessions worth a year, and it could be as many as an extra six.

This isn’t to voice a complaint – it’s simply to place some context around what I’m describing so that readers can interpret what I do and adjust my advice to fit their own circumstances.

Integrating Plot with Planned Action

The converse is also true. While the impact any pre-planned action sequence on the plot is critical, the plot should always impact on any pre-planned action sequence. Action should always have a plot purpose, as I said, but plot should always guide and shape the action, too.

The easiest way for this to happen is to have the plot define the parameters of the action sequence – the terrain in a battle, for example. If any action sequence is not so defined, that action sequence is too generic, in my book, and the action sequence and plot both need to be honed until they mesh more specifically. There’s another impossible ideal here towards which I try to aim – to have every action sequence sufficiently unique and defined that they couldn’t possibly take place in exactly the same way at any other time, place, or circumstance than the one dictated by the plotlines – both as defined in the immediate term, and in any broader long-term, and in any other plot structures that happen to be relevant to the campaign.

You can get a long way toward this ideal simply by choosing, whenever there are multiple approaches to a problem or situation, the one that is most appropriate to the character supposedly tackling that problem or situation – in other words, with good role-playing. From that foundation, though, preplanning is necessary to go any further.

Most GMs discover this, and the value of it, simply by taking advantage of an opportunity to think a few minutes ahead every now and then. They find that their plot it more engaging, the action seems more appropriate, and the characters seem more ‘solid’ and realized. After it’s happened by accident once or twice, they start deliberately courting the benefits, and that sets their feet on the slippery slope of game prep.

Integrating Planned Action with Characterization

There are times when plot and characterization can be in a tug of war, and times when they are both pulling in the same direction. The latter are reasonably easy to cope with – it’s just a matter of going with the flow, after all; but the former occasions are more problematic.

Just how problematic depends on the exact situation within the game. If the opposition between the two is not too extreme, you can often resolve the conflict by inserting a roleplaying/characterization ‘beat’ into the middle of the action sequence. “I wish you weren’t making me do this” or “Under other circumstances, things might have been different” or any of a thousand other expressions of regret over the choice being imposed by the plot.

(Care needs to be taken with this, however, because it inevitably adds more paths to resolution of any conflict with the PCs, which can rebound and reverberate within the plot).

Even more superficial conflicts can be avoided by basing any tactical decisions on the personality of the character making those decisions – good roleplay, again.

But, in more extreme cases, you may need to insert additional backstory to reduce the options available to the NPC to those that are compatible with the plot. This is the great advantage of the GM relative to the players: they have to live in the moment, the ‘now’, except as exempted from this restriction temporarily by the GM, whereas the GM is free to insert whatever background material he needs; the only constraints are the limits of his imagination and sense of fair play (and the fact that if he abuses this power too strongly, he will be a GM without players).

In even more extreme cases, it might be necessary to introduce revisions or deviations into the characterization, supported by appropriate events in his or her backstory, of course. In other words, if character and plot are in conflict, change the character! While this approach always works if done properly, there is a price to be paid in terms of consistency of characterization, so it is best not to over-use this solution; and the best way to avoid over-use is to reserve this for when your back is to the wall and nothing else will suffice.

Integrating Characterization with Planned Action

As usual, the converse is also true – a character’s personality is only partially defined by motivations and justifications and rationales; the primary definition stems from the accumulation of their actions and choices. One of the cleverest and most interesting ways of redefining a character is to change the perception of past actions!

I love having ‘good, moral characters’ that do the ‘wrong thing’ from the point-of-view of the PCs because it is the ‘right thing to do’ from the NPCs perspective. And ‘bad, immoral characters’ who do the right thing not because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ but or the personal benefits they can squeeze out of it. And the occasional ‘boy scout’ whose solutions result from oversimplification of problems and short-term thinking. And the even rarer out-and-out villain who makes no bones about being antisocial and looking out for #1 without conscience or remorse. And characters who want to do the right thing (as they see it) but have made a mistaken assumption, or a wrong interpretation, or simply have a flaw in their logic. And, most rarely of all, a character who wants to do the wrong thing (as they see it) but get it all wrong in practice. Populate your campaign with those six archetypes and endless fun and depth of characterization both results and is perceived to have resulted!

Integrating Random Action with Plot

Most of the above was not part of our conversation, on Saturday, which moved on to random encounters fairly quickly. It was suggested (truthfully) that my primary approach to integrating random action (in the form of wandering monsters or other ‘by chance’ encounters) is to generate a specific encounter table in which every result advances the plot in some predictable way. As with any other GM’s force, if all outcomes are satisfactory in terms of the GM’s “agenda”, you don’t care which one(s) actually eventuate!

But I also have three other strategies that I employ in conjunction with this approach, which presupposes sufficient prep time and prescience to both know that such an encounter table will be needed, and the wherewithal to actually create one.

First: Generate your random encounters in advance, during game prep, and then integrate the products of chance into the plot, redefining them as necessary, and amending the plot as necessary.

Second, when using legitimately third-party or preset encounter tables, integrating the results with the ongoing plot before the encounter actually starts. I do this more frequently than most of my players ever realize. After all, when you roll an encounter, you have to decide how the encounter will come to the attention of the players, and how the terrain, circumstances, and other context, will integrate with the encounter; it doesn’t add too much burden to that to consider what impact they might have on the plot and how you can use the encounter to further your agenda (of entertaining everyone).

And third, being prepared to sacrifice part or all of the plot on the alter of that agenda. If all roads lead to Rome, who cares which one events steer the PCs down? Never sacrifice the long-term fidelity of the campaign with a slavish adherence to whatever you had planned in the short term. Your adventures should be treated as living things, growing and evolving in unexpected directions, guided only by the ultimate principle of long-term entertainment and direction. My players forget, on a regular basis, that I do this – but if you want an example (and proof that it happens), consult the write-up of Mortus from a few years back, and in particular how adequate prep gave me the freedom to cope with it when the players wanted to do something that wasn’t in the plot.

Random chance can derive from player choice or unusual die roll results – from the GM’s point of view, it should make no difference; adventure-internal plotlines should be robust enough to accommodate and even harness these events; that’s the point I was striving to make in Compounds Of Confusion: Luck and the GM, and Shades OF Yes and No.

Getting The Mix Right

The net effect of all these techniques is that, for the most part, my players simply can’t tell what’s been pre-scripted and what hasn’t; and the discontinuity between action sequences and roleplay sequences are substantially blurred and obscured, if not erased completely.

Action furthers the plot, the plot creates the need for action, and outcomes from action sequences further advance and define the plot. Integration is achieved when you can only tell where one ends and the other begins in hindsight (and not even then with complete certainty). Both plot and action sequences are strengthened by the integration, and the campaign becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Or, to put that last point another way: do it right, and you get many times the game-play value for your prep-time buck!

A shorter post than usual because of the Easter Long Weekend. I hope everyone has had a happy, comforting, and comfortable break! See you all next week, when I’m thinking of offering up another serving of the Forbidden Weapons of the Omega Archive. ‘Till then, Game on!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, cropped and background color added by Mike.

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.”

That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article.

First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation:

Four PCs and two NPCs; all but two of the first were busy doing in-game things, which left the first two to fetch meals for the group.

Because they can be eaten both hot and as room-temperature leftovers, one of the NPCs suggested Pizza.

Which begs the question: “What do you want on your Pizza?”

Having posed the question, as GM, I then answered for the NPCs, and then for a PC whose player was absent:

• GM as NPC #1: Jack answers promptly, “I’ll have Chicken and Mushroom with Spicy Sauce and a side-order of salad.”
• …as NPC #2: Zantar thinks for a moment, and then responds, “Meat Lovers’ with BBQ Sauce and a side order of Spicy Buffalo Wings.”
• PC #1 (player absent, so I spoke for him as GM, having done the appropriate research): “The most popular variety of Pizza in Norway is Ground Beef and Red Capsicum – what the Americans call Bell Pepper – with Extra Cheese on a Tomato Sauce pizza base. Specter will have that, or as close as you can get, also with a side-order of Salad.”
• GM, turning to the player of PC#2: “I also looked up the most popular pizza topping in Denmark, but it’s not something that will be available here. You can get close to it, though, with a Seafood Pizza on Tomato Sauce, over which you squeeze a slice of Lemon.” [This was followed by a comment relevant to the campaign but not to this discussion].
• The player of PC#2: “I can see that working. Lemon and seafood go together. But it’s not something I’m ever likely to try, myself. All right, that’s what I’ll have.”
• PC#3: “There’s something a little snobbish about it, but I’ll have a Supreme because it has the most interesting variety of flavor combinations.”
• GM to PC#4, a non-human with strange dietary requirements: It’s up to you what you get, but you find yourself craving a plain pizza (no sauce or cheese) with eggplant and anchovies – the last two being high in Manganese, which your body uses to build muscle. You suspect that the hard pace of the last few days (crossing Mexico the long way, mostly on foot, in just four days) has triggered muscle development. What are you ordering?”
• PC#4:“I take it there’s nothing with a lot of Boron in it, so I guess that’ll do. And stop by the aquarium on the way past and pick me up a couple of packets of the fish food, which is full of useful minerals.”

It’s not often that I find it impossible to choose between a number of illustrations for an article – but this was one such occasion! This image is by Anastasia Gepp from Pixabay.

A little later in the same game session:

• GM to player #2:“It’s time for lunch. Something fairly quick and easy seems appropriate.”

  [Some byplay then happens with NPC#2 and his activities that’s not relevant here].

• GM to player #2:Eventually, you get his order: some sort of fish-burger with cheese, preferably three or four of them, and a quart of milk.
• PC#2: “Ohhhhkay. I guess we can do that. Fast food, for everyone, then.”
• GM for PC #1 (player absent): “Spectre will have a hamburger with the lot and a Cherry Cola.”
• PC#3: Really? Too sweet for me.
• NPC#1 “Union Jack orders a Chicken and Salad club sandwich on a roll with mayo AND English mustard, and a cup of tea with 1 sugar – he doesn’t care if it’s black or white.”
• PC#2: “I see he’s feeling all British today.”
• GM: – prompts player for PC#3’s answer.
• PC#3: “Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food. I’ll have a Hamburger with the lot, too.”
• GM: “And anything to drink? It’s 1986, Diet Coke has been out for a few months now, but you’ve never tried it.”

  [Side-discussion followed between everyone present on the history of diet drinks in Australia, as compared to the US, for a few minutes. Player#3 admits that he doesn’t remember what Saccharine tastes like, and isn’t sure that he’s ever tried it. I have, and so – as GM – I describe the bitter aftertaste that seems to accumulate, the more you consume. This gives player #3 time to reach a decision, and relevant input into that decision].

• PC#3: “I might get a Diet Coke just to try it. I don’t expect it to become a regular substitute for coffee, though.” [The character’s ‘coffee addiction’ has been a character-driven subplot for years. This begins expanding ti to a broader love of caffeine in various forms.]
• GM to PC #2:Since he’s ordering it as an experiment, do you want to get him a regular coke as well, just in case?”
• PC#2 “Sounds like a good idea to me, yes I will.”
• GM to PC#2: “And what are you going to have?”
• PC#2 “I don’t know, I’ll make up my mind when I get there and see the menu. Maybe a salad, maybe fried fish.”
• GM only has to look at the player of PC#4 to prompt him.
• PC#4: “I can’t digest any of that. Looks like I’ll be dipping into my Crystal Collection again.”

These interactions are an example of using preference and trivial decisions to get inside a character’s head.

Illustration choice #3 is an image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay.

The examples reveal to the players some insight into the NPCs, as characters, and to both the GM and the other players, some insight into the PCs that each is respectively inhabiting.

This not only fosters interaction between the characters, it enables the GM to better tailor his adventures to the PCs – not just to their abilities, but to their characters. The end result goes beyond the mild fun of these two scenes, establishing personalities and individuality.

There was also a brief point when the characters almost stopped at a fast food place named “Panda Express” (after much joking about what Panda tasted like), but PC #4 made the point that it was probably some form of Asian cuisine and there would be nothing on the menu cooked without oil, which her digestive system didn’t tolerate. She would vastly prefer Italian, where she could get a salad made without dressing.

Still later in the day’s play, the PCs stopped at a BBQ grill and petrol station to buy food for their evening meal and refill their cars, to discover that Camel-burgers and Fried Armadillo were on the menu. Reaction to the first of these was so strong that I don’t think the players even heard the second item mentioned. “I may be a foodie but I don’t think I’m ready to try Camel-burger” – “I don’t think Spectre will EVER be ready for Camel-burger” – “You know, in my time in Africa, I might have had fried camel-meat. But I can’t see my character liking it.”

Because the players were in their character’s head-space, the very mention of “Camel-burgers” had them reacting on behalf of their characters, rather than any personal preferences. Roleplay, in other words, came naturally to them.

That’s a lot of benefit from a reasonably trivial question, “What do you want for lunch?”

There are a number of things to note concerning these examples, lessons to learn in how and why this works.

1. GM Instigation

Without a prompt from the GM’s chair – i.e. asking the question – this roleplaying scene probably wouldn’t have happened. It’s also worth observing that if the players hadn’t responded well to the ‘pizza’ question, hadn’t taken the bait, I could have bailed out of the other occurrences and dropped in something else off the top of my head.

Getting the players into character is as much a GM responsibility as it is the duty of the players – you need to create the opportunities.

2. Setting The Standard

The NPCs went first for a reason – to set the standard and establish replying in character. This demonstrated to the players how the plot micro-sequence was to be handled and helped them get into the appropriate head-space.

3. Spotlight Equality

Everyone got their share of attention. But PC#2, who wasn’t engaged in doing something else in-game, was the center of attention during these sequences, equalizing input into the game overall. If it hadn’t worked as sequence of events, and I canceled the take-away and camel-burger occurrences, I always have a standby of some sort if one is needed to balance out screen time, carefully stockpiled for when I need them.

In fact, I decided toward the end of the day (when I needed a filler for a few moments, to use one of those stockpiled standbys, aimed at Player #4.

4. Repetition

The first interaction, the Pizzas, got everyone into their character’s headspace. The second interaction played out the way it did only because the players were already in that headspace, as did the third. And the combination primed the players for the spontaneous in-character reactions to the later prompt, “Camel-burgers”. At the same time, it was important for each of the four to be different; if they had been too repetitive, there would have been not only no stretching deeper into the characterization, there would have been a decline in player interest.

My fourth choice to illustrate this article is by John Hain from Pixabay. I made some slight tweaks to the contrast and added the shadow.

5. Changing Sequence

Notice that the sequence of the characters changes between interaction one and interaction two. The first time, NPCs went first (as noted in point 2), the second time they went first but in a different sequence (and a PC occupied the spotlight in between even though his player was absent). And the third and fourth interactions, because they were spontaneous, happened with the players reacting and interacting without significant prompting.

6. Deepening Engagement

Each time, the players were able to get deeper into their characters because they had already made the mental transition the first time. Switching between rules and roleplay interactions gets easier with practice, and gets easier once you’re “warmed up” – it’s harder to do it for the first time in a session of play, in other words.

7. Research

I had done research to inform and assist the players. There is nothing wrong with the GM advising the players – what to do with the information is always up to the player. But because I had done that, I was also able to make stuff up and have it be plausible. I’m not sure of exactly when Diet Coke first came out beyond the early-to-mid-80s – but 1985 was an entirely plausible date. And I have no idea about the Manganese content of different foods – but it sounds entirely credible. It took me about 5 minutes to do enough research to ‘sell’ the whole.

8. Player Triggers

I knew that one of the players remembered the introduction of Diet Cola and had opinions on the history, because he has mentioned it before. I deliberately triggered him because that helps get the player’s heads into the era in which the game was set (late May of 1986). On top of that, it adds a slight element of nostalgic appeal to the game.

9. Happy Memories

At the same time, any mention of Diet Coke always reminds me (and, probably, the others) of a mutual friend who drank a can of the stuff with every meal. He may have passed away, but he’s still with us in spirit. That reminder always reminds us of his playful personality and lightens the mood at the table. For that reason, I reference him in one way or another several times a year. This is so subtle that I don’t think the players are even aware that it’s being done deliberately. As with item 8 above, this adds to the pleasurability of the game for the players (and the GM) – and no game is so great that it can ignore advantages like these. The trick is to identify them, because they will differ from group to group.

10. Meta-level benefits

In addition to everyone getting to know the characters better, and even in some instances extending their characterization, the players also get to discover things about each other. This is just a side-benefit, but it’s a valuable one.

The Personalized Campaign

There are some players who seem to think that any time spent in non-combat activities is a waste of their time. To me, an all-combat game is akin to a game of multiplayer chess – which can be entertaining in its own right, but doesn’t hold a candle to proper roleplaying. At best, a tactical focus (other than as an occasional exception to the general rule) ignores or downplays a major source of the pleasure that can be derived from RPGs. Because I make no bones about my campaigns’ priorities, if asked, I have attracted players with a similar attitude.

I am smart enough to know that not everyone prioritizes game-play elements in the same way, and it’s not up to the GM to determine where players find their enjoyment. If some of them find the tactical element more enjoyable than any other aspect of the game, it’s up to the GM to cater to that – which means that he should be looking for ways of connecting tactical advantages with the character’s headspace, the PC’s perspective. For example, being asked to choose between a sword with a +3 against chain mail – but +0 against anything else – and a straight +1 weapon gets into the enemies that the PC expects to face, and their usual equipment.

Building in on-ramps into a character’s personality – be it recurring NPC or a recurring-by-definition PC – is not a waste of time. It’s never a waste of time – unless the ‘bait’ is not taken. Even then, if the GM learns from the experience, and doesn’t present that specific trigger to that group again, he still increases the enjoyment at the table in the longer term – so you could argue that it’s still not a waste of time.

Get into your characters’ head-space in the course of play. Help your players get into the head-space of their characters, too. The benefits are too great to ignore – and as with everything else, the more of it that you do, the better you’ll get at it, and the more readily you can access those benefits. Every GM should now be asking themselves whether or not they do this (and what their players and PCs triggers are), and, if not, why not?

Image by GraphicMama-team from Pixabay

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”.

After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’.

Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s social distance is now, though the threat implied was often more inchoate, abstract, and nebulous, and is now implicit.

It struck me that the world of difference between how the two are perceived related directly to the framework through which the phenomena were perceived – a filter that changed the context from one of personal comfort and security to one of health and well-being.

That led to thoughts about other things changing in the way they were perceived due to a change in context.

This is Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the March 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by Roll4.

When Players Ask A Question

It’s usually pretty obvious from context, but there are two major issues that the GM needs to resolve every time a player asks the question:

1. Who’s Asking?
2. Who’s The Question Addressed To?

If you can’t answer these, you don’t know how to properly answer the question being put to you. Getting one of these wrong is where a great many player-GM interactions go off the rails.

Who’s Asking?

Is it the player asking, or are they functioning as a mouthpiece for their character asking an NPC?

An NPC can prevaricate, lie, or evade the question. The GM should do none of these – at least in theory. In practice, telling the absolute whole truth can be destructive to the adventure and the fun, so there will be times when the GM has to prevaricate, lie, or evade the question – without seeming to do so. That’s a side-issue to today’s subject – I refer the interested reader to The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players, my article on that specific topic.

There are three potential targets for a question. An PC can address two of these – there is no mechanism for a PC to address the GM except through the agency of an intermediary NPC or player. Similarly, a Player can’t question an NPC, only a PC or another NPC can do that.

Who’s the Question Addressed To?

Is the question being asked addressed to an NPC, The GM, or even another PC? Another pivotal question in terms of what is, or is not, off-limits within the answer.

Quite obviously, an NPC is perfectly entitled to answer “No”, and so is a PC. But things aren’t quite that simple. So let’s look at the three options in greater detail, very briefly.

An NPC

If a PC asks an NPC a question, the GM should answer with the truth as the NPC sees it – unless they would lie. So that has to be the next question in such cases – one of character and morals, of circumstances and how the NPC would react to them.

Another PC

If the player is actually asking a question of another PC, using the voice of his own character, it’s not the GM’s place to involve himself in the answer, though he may need to ensure that the PC being questioned was in a position to answer – in-game environmental questions may prevent the question being clearly heard, for example. Things become more problematic if the PC being questioned responds with a mistruth or error of some kind.

The GM can correct the misinformation immediately, choose to let the error be corrected later, or decide that the PC is deliberately lying to the second PC for whatever reason (his prerogative).

Once upon a time, I would have said that it was not the GM’s place to be the arbiter of truth in such situations – but I’ve seen adventures ruined by inadvertent lapses of memory and have consequently changed my position.

First, the GM has to determine whether or not the PC in question is deliberately lying or not. If there is any doubt of it, he may need to take the player responsible aside and have him or her make some sort of roll to be convincing. But it’s really difficult to do this without tipping of the player whose character is being lied to. It’s often easier to let the player know that his character is being lied to, trusting in his ability to separate player knowledge from character knowledge. It’s then up to the GM to enforce what the character believes and what choices that permits, like a good editor or director.

Once this has been eliminated as a possibility, it becomes clear that the error is an inadvertent one, and that the ‘record’ will eventually need to be corrected. The next question is whether or not the PC in error is answering the question to the best of his ability, but reporting a personal theory as fact, or it’s simply the player having a memory failure. In the former case, it’s entirely reasonable to let the misinformation stand for a while, leading the players down a garden path of their own devising – so long as it doesn’t harm the ultimate story. Either way, I will generally make a secret roll on behalf of the PC or PCs hearing the answer, giving the characters a chance (however slim) to notice the defects (if any) in the mistaken beliefs of the PC – eventually.

Generally, the better a detective/investigator the character(s) hearing the misinformation are, the more likely they are to identify any flaws in the story being presented, either immediately, or as soon as contradictory evidence comes to hand. Characters who have neither skill would default to their Intelligence, probably applied in an unskilled manner – those are questions for the particular game system. I avoid having such die rolls function as a warning by occasionally making them anyway – and a failure can lead the character to find spurious holes in the logic.

All this is very delicate ground for the GM – he is representing the history of the world and functioning as the interface between the game system and the players, exactly as he should, and should (generally) be open and honest when functioning in that capacity – but doing so may require dishonesty on his part, especially if there are parts of the ‘official story’ that the players don’t know! Above all, he needs to retain the trust of the players, or the game is doomed.

It has been necessary, from time to time, to forestall suggestions of retroactively rewriting history to foil or frustrate the players, to pen a quick note, date it, seal it in an envelope, and give it to a third player (if there is one) and have HIM (or her) write the date on the envelope across the sealed flap, to hole unopened until the GM needs to re-establish his credibility. Such measures may be rarely required, but you don’t know whether or not they will be until the day of revelation arrives; the time to prepare for this contingency is immediately.

But it’s not even this simple (and I think we’re a long way from ‘simple’ at this point) – a mistruth can only divert the players from the true path for so long before it needs to be corrected or the frustration they will feel over wasting their time will outweigh the fun of playing the game. The magnitude of the error or deception is a primary factor – having their real enemy turn out to be someone who has been hiding in plain sight is a big enough secret to last until the final adventure of a campaign, smaller errors and deceptions have a shorter shelf-life.

As an example, a misinterpretation led a player in one of my campaigns to assume that a certain group of Aliens were going to invade the solar system. He began drawing up elaborate plans to prepare the world for fighting off this invasion – plans that would have totally dominated the next year of game play (real time). These would all have been revealed as wasted time when the purported ‘invasion’ didn’t happen, so I made the judgment call on behalf of the campaign that another PC would raise doubts about the assumptions and interpretations of the first PC before things went too far. As a result, the ‘defense net’ went from being a crash-priority project to a ‘nice to have’ long-term project, and the campaign stayed on track, enabling the PCs to be effective at least some of the time. Some years later, when a for-real attempted alien invasion took place, the defenses planned by the PCs were only partially complete, adding to the drama of the situation. It may have been more ‘correct’ to let the players wander off down their chosen garden path, but in my judgment the campaign was going to be more fun for everyone to participate in without that distraction.

On another occasion, a different player added 2 and 2 and came up with 6, in the form of another putative invasion. He (and his character) didn’t tell anyone else at the time, but began quietly investigating and making plans on his own. Confirmation bias soon set in, and the player began to rationalize away the hints and clues that his interpretation was incorrect. Because this was very much a background project, not the driving force of the gameplay at the time, I decided to let things play out in-game. In time, the truth was revealed as a plot twist on the putative ‘invasion’, catching the players off-guard. It worked well, but required constant vigilance in game prep from me – I didn’t want to put myself in a position of explicitly stating that ‘the invasion’ was going to happen when I knew it wasn’t.

It’s worth briefly examining the differences between these two cases.

★ — different characters — The first was a character who should have known better from the information provided, to reach the incorrect conclusion that he did, he had to ignore half of the evidence given to him. I gave the player the choice (by raising doubts) – to stick with the character’s mistaken belief or realize that his case was shaky and make it the player’s mistake but not the character’s (which accurately describes the real situation). He didn’t take the hint. The second took circumstantial evidence and built a house of cards from it, but made allowances for that.

★ — different players — The first was a player who leapt to conclusions and could get petty about things if he thought the GM was wasting his character’s time; the second was a player who was more cautious about leaping to conclusions (but did so on this occasion anyway) and didn’t regard any situation in which he was actually playing as a waste of his time as a player. I knew they would react differently.

★ — different game impact — The first would have seriously derailed everyone else’s fun at the game table; the second would not. More to the point, the first would have hijacked the entire campaign to no good end, while the second would not. These were major factors in my decisions.

★ — different GM experience — I had 20 years more experience and expertise under my belt in between the two events. If the first had arisen at the time of the second, it’s just possible that I would have handled it differently. I still think I handled both correctly, given the differences outlined above, but I might have handled the first situation differently if I’d had that expertise at the time. Particularly relevant to the handling of the second event was having handled the first one, so who knows?

An NPC, Redux

A more subtle correction is to use an NPC to ask questions of the PC that illuminate errors in their thinking. This can only happen if you have an NPC in a position to ask such questions, and the GM has to rigorously stay within the NPCs character. In the first example offered above, I had this option, but didn’t think to employ it (and should have); in the second, I didn’t but could have engineered it over time. Why didn’t I? Because I made a second judgment call, one stemming from the difference in game impact, that the campaign would actually be enhanced with the eventual plot twist revelation.

The GM

And so, having considered all the alternatives, the only case remaining is that the player is asking a question of the GM, and that’s what the bulk of this article is about.

Three types of questions to the GM

When this happens, the player wants one of three things: Information, Confirmation or Permission. And, in all three cases, Johnn’s Rule Of Thumb – Say ‘Yes’ But Get There Quick – has to be considered. I would also draw attention to the comments, which add considerable rounding to the principle. But each is just a little different.

Information

Can the character reasonably get an answer – or should the answer be “you don’t know”? I earlier suggested that a character couldn’t communicate directly with the GM – but this is clearly a case where that is what is happening, using the player as a proxy. An example might be a question about game history, or in-game history, or the in-game world. What the player asking the question is really asking is, “what does my character know about [subject].” Which means there can be few blanket answers to the question. This can also be a circumstance in which the GM has to lie to the player – not about what his character knows, but about how accurate “what he knows” is.

Is it reasonable for the GM to give an answer, with the full authority of his position? The other acceptable type of information query is a rules-related issue. These can then be subdivided into those requiring an immediate answer, and those that can be deferred. Always defer if you can, because it lets you look up rule books and give an authoritative answer; if you can’t defer, you may be able to answer immediately, or you may have an existing house rule that covers the answer, or you may need to formulate an ad-hoc ruling on the spot, all of which are way beyond the scope of this article. But I do want to take the opportunity to suggest that you give a preliminary assumption that the players can use as a basis for their decisions – “there is probably a way [for your character] to do that, but I’m not sure and need time to give a definitive answer,” or “that seems unlikely to work, but I’ll have to check the rules to be sure.”.

The “Yes” process in either case is to provide the information requested, at least in part, of whatever the appropriate level of reliability is, with appropriate caveats.

The “No” process focuses on what has to change before the information requested can be provided, in other words, under what conditions you can say “Yes”. That might be “give me time to look into it” in the case of a rules question that can be deferred, or it might be “You will need to find and consult an expert” or “…a native” or (in general) “…someone who knows”.

Confirmation

Confirmations are more problematic, because many different things can offered up for consideration.

An understanding of game history? – could be right or wrong, and the character might or might not know the answer, anyway. An impression of the game world, or the way it works – could be right or wrong or partially correct, could be comprehensive or limited or even too narrowly-drawn, and there’s all sorts of scope for misinformation, to boot. A novel use of the game rules? – getting more problematic, treat as a request for information. A theory of some sort? – even more nuanced and difficult, with questions of characterization, background, prejudice and predisposition, assumptions and logic and philosophy and belief – on the part of both the character AND the GM!

It’s really hard to be an expert in everything but sometimes you have to be, or at least be able to fake it.

I generally treat any non-rules request for confirmation in two parts. First, I have to treat the question as a request for information – what does the character know about the subject? I then have to map that knowledge onto the picture that the player wants to have confirmed. The result is undoubtedly more nuanced than simply providing information, because it enters the realm of interpretation of that information. In effect, the player is asking for assistance in running his character, and that enters delicate territory.

A definitive declaration is extremely dangerous, because it will be taken as gospel by both character AND player. In general, a softer confirmation is preferable – “That seems reasonable from your character’s point of view”, or “You seem to be overlooking something that your character would not,” followed by the specifics, or something of the sort. Again, your answer might be “You can’t be sure of your reasoning/interpretation until you consult…”

This should be treated as an in-character dialogue, or should steer the character in the direction of such an in-character dialogue, with all the caveats that get attached to such dialogues.

Be especially wary if a player ever asks, “All I want is a simple yes or no,” – while you may be able to provide such a clear answer, or may be able to offer a “yes, and”, “yes, but”, or “no, but”, it’s at least as likely that you have to answer “That’s an oversimplification” or “The question can’t be answered in those terms”.

Permission

The most difficult type of question is a request for Permission. This takes the form of “Can we do [X]?” or “Why don’t we…” or some similar construct. Once again, having addressed all the alternative interpretations of the question, we are now in a position to narrow the focus of this article. The most dangerous format of this is when the player assumes that the answer will be a “yes” and simply declares what his action will be.

We are now solidly into the territory in which Johnn’s advice is directly relevant, and for all but the most experienced GMs, it’s a good guideline, as the comments on his article make clear. This article will explore some of the nuances involved, and how to approach them.

Saying Yes

So, the general principle is to say ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition. As usual, it’s not that simple.

Saying Yes When you want to say Yes

Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not, because you don’t want it to stand out from the alternatives too much. So that means toning down the affirmation. “That sounds as though it might work” or “You can’t think of anything better” or even “That might be worth a try” are much better choices – not ringing endorsements. This has the side-benefit of keeping the players uncertain as to whether or not a plan will work, and hence attentive to the game play. Throw in a couple of obstacles for the players / PCs to overcome on the way, and the somewhat mild approval is amply justified – and reflected in something more than a straightforward Linear Plot.

Saying Yes When you are unsure

The best approach in this circumstance is to take a “No” and apply a similar watering-down to it. “You have your doubts”, or “You could try that if you want” or something along those lines. This gives you cover to take your time on a final decision while throwing challenges and difficulties at the players. If you ultimately decide “no”, all you need is a challenge that is going to be tougher than the players think they can cope with; this replaces the original problem with a new one, that of getting past this Significant Problem. On the other hand, it the player’s plan seems to come together, even if it wasn’t what the GM expected, he can pretend to have been saying “yes” all along – but making it difficult enough to keep the players guessing.

Saying Yes When you want to say No

This is the hardest one of the lot. So much so that, once more having dealt with the alternatives, it’s time to drill deeper into the subject and refocus on this most difficult of propositions – because I have five ways to say “yes” when you mean “no”.

5 Ways to Say Yes and mean No

As a general rule, what you want to do in this circumstance is to say ‘yes’ in such a way that the players decide to make a different choice. This is a more traditional type of Magician’s Force, in other words – linguistic judo, oratorical manipulation. These are not easy techniques to master, I’ll be the first to admit, though, that some are easier than others. Start with those and pull out the others on occasions when you are unsure of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – get it right, and the players will read it as a ‘no’, don’t and they will read it as a ‘yes’. Otherwise, proceed as described above; this gives you the practice that you need to master the others and add them to your repertoire.

1. Enthusiasm / ‘That Sounds Too Easy’

Technique number 1 is to Oversell your response – not by too much, mind. Excessive enthusiasm on the part of the GM touches a psychological chord in the players that makes them hesitant and uncertain, resonating with the dim but glowing embers of antagonism that always exist between players and GM. Sometimes, all it takes is a smug grin, and a deliberately shifty look in the eyes. If those aren’t enough, you can offer another PC a skill or stat roll (ignoring the result) to get the impression that “That sounds too easy” – or even put those exact words into the mouth of an NPC. But, if you do this, be sure to have identified some fatal flaw that you can then proffer to complete the hatchet job, no matter how improbable – a “but, what if…”

You are frequently aided in this by the players themselves, who will respond by poking around the plan looking for weaknesses. You can stimulate such discussions with cues such as telling a player, “You” [meaning their PC] “idly ponder the possibility that this is…” – possible conclusions include “a Trap”, “a Conspiracy”, “a Trick”, “a Con Job”, “exactly what they want you to do”, and so on. They will generally interpret this as the GM giving them a hint, which is enough to engage that mild paranoia.

Note that this technique can fall completely flat if there is a general impression that the GM is the player’s enemy. If that’s the case, their paranoid-radar will already be at full-strength, and the proposal will generally have had all it’s tender spots probed before it gets presented to the GM, or the other players. It can also fail if over-used..

2. Potential Consequences

Fortunately, it’s not the only way to skin this particular cat. Another choice – when the reason you want to say ‘no’ is because of the possible consequences or complications – is to say “That will work just fine if everything goes according to plan – but here’s what might happen if it doesn’t….”

Once again, the player’s natural mild paranoia about the GM’s intentions will usually come to the fore, unless they (correctly) interpret this as an attempt to manipulate them. And, if they turn out to have an answer to every objection that you raise, then they might end up convincing you to take your understated “no” and turn it into an equally-mild “yes” in your own mind. Sometimes, you have no choice but to go with the players’ plans, even when those aren’t what you wanted to happen.

3. Lobster In The Pot

Sometimes, you want to say ‘no’ because you legitimately don’t think it will work, perhaps because of something you know but the players don’t – yet. The key to such situations is staying flexible – “If that’s what you want to do, go for it – but you might want to…” Options for completing that sentence include “keep your options open”, or “have a plan ‘B’ ” or “update your last will and testament”. In effect, you are giving the players enough rope and waiting for them to hang themselves – at which point, you can have the (metaphoric) trap-door jam, giving the players the chance to change tack at the last possible moment.

A variation on this approach is for the NPC who brings the situation to the PCs attention have a plan of their own – a particularly bad one. “All you have to do is tame a Dragon and fly it fast enough to evade the all-seeing eye long enough to drop the ring into Mount Doom, nothing to it…”

4. Yes, But… There’s Something You’ve Forgotten/Overlooked

There are times when the direct approach is the best, particularly if the plan being proposed relies on the situation being unchanged by the time of the Confrontation. Feeling the need for precision and speed in order to keep the enemy on the defensive is the usual result, and those are usually mutually-incompatible goals. Adding those requirements generally raises the difficulty enough to make a ‘too easy’ plan a viable, playable, choice.

5. Yes, and here’s how

The final technique that I’m going to highlight is best used when there is a chance of success, no matter how slim it might be; you then list all the things that have to be done to maximize that chance. If they seem excessively onerous, or unlikely to succeed, the “yes” becomes a “no”. Make sure that they take notes!

A variation on this approach falls into the “enough rope” classification – by identifying the one most improbable thing that has to go right, and a way (however difficult) to ensure success in that one step right at the start, permits the players to attempt the impossible, fail, and switch to a Plan B without losing too much time.

Or you might mean this literally – describing what the PCs have to do to change a ‘No’ into a ‘Yes, if you want to’. “Okay, so what we have to do is retrieve the Golden Fleece, trade it for the Trumpet Of Doom, Rescue the Blind Trumpeter from the Annex Of Hades, and teach him to play the Ride Of The Valkyries – by this time next week. Piece of cake!” No matter what you had in mind, improvised grand quests on this scale are more than satisfying enough.

Sometimes, you have to say “yes” and mean it – even when you don’t want to.

Other ways

There are undoubtedly other approaches that didn’t come to mind when I was drafting this article. The existence of alternatives, sometimes multiple alternatives, in the above five options are proof enough of that. All you have to do is keep the alternative objectives in mind: either you want the players to be persuaded to look for an alternative despite your seeming willingness to go along with their hair-brained idea, or you want them to convince you that what they are proposing will both work and be entertaining enough for a day’s play. Either works, so if – in some particular situation – you spot another way to achieve one of these ends, go with it!

In fact, though the section below was an afterthought, prompted by item 3 (which was originally a sixth technique in this list), it will add still more techniques to this list before we’re done!

Times when you should say ‘No’?

Although it might seem to directly contradict the general principle of saying ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition, there are times when you can say “No” and mean “Yes”. There are five occasions when a “No” can be used with success.

1 Rules Arbitration

The number one occasion when you HAVE to use a no is when that’s the appropriate answer to a Rules Arbitration question. “I want a spell that always hits the target and does 600d6 damage, usable at will. Can I create a spell like that?”

The answer to this question is not just a ‘no’, it’s a “hell, no” – or a “you can try, but you don’t think it likely, here’s what you need to make the attempt” (and then list several hundred thousand GP worth of magical fittings and an estimated time scale of twelve times the PCs likely life-span).

I mention this here because the latter is an adaption of a technique already described for saying ‘yes’.

2 When ‘no’ means ‘yes’

Sometimes, questions are poorly phrased, such that they contain a negative. “Is there any reason not to…” is a general form for such questions. The inclusion of the negative transforms a ‘no’ in response to an affirmation of the proposed plan. As usual, you should apply qualifiers to moderate the answer.

3 The Indirect ‘No’

There are times when the methods proposed are not uncertain enough, and what is needed is a still more indirect ‘no’. The best example that I have to offer is to list the potential worst-case consequences as outcomes that “might happen”, answering the question with a question of your own: “Are you willing to risk…”

The implication is that you are offering a ‘yes’ but warning that there may be consequences that the players haven’t taken into account. This works well when you are offered short-term solutions to problems that are intended to be long-term campaign elements.

4 Words in someone else’s mouth

Sometimes, you can use an NPC to say things that a GM would never say to a player. “You bone-head, that’s the worst example of cock-eyed optimism that it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter!” is one possibility, though something milder is probably more politic. Still, I have had at least one occasion to go that far – the PCs needed a short-term solution to a problem that didn’t easily yield to such solutions, with one obvious answer to the problem that everyone else at the table perceived. But the one PC on point had a three-part plan, no one part of which had any hope of success – it was the equivalent of ‘find a serial killer, reform him, then retrain him into an assassin that has total loyalty to me, personally, after transplanting his brain into the body of a dog’ – so wildly improbable and over the top as a solution to a minor problem that the NPC failed his ‘control your tongue’ save and let fly with what he really thought.

‘5 No’ with a qualifier

The final option is the inverse of the final option of the five ‘yes’ techniques. You say “No, because…” and then list what has to change for the No to become a yes. This is a perfectly acceptable way of saying ‘yes’ while qualifying your answer.

Never close of avenues of action

There is one phrase that a GM should never want to hear – ‘Well, I don’t know what we can do’. I’ve heard it perhaps two or three times in my GMing ‘career’ of almost 40 years. It indicates that the problem seems so insoluble that the player speaking has given up trying.

I argued in a later comment to Johnn’s article that you should never give an unqualified ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because they close off communications, blocking avenues of action. What the players choose to do is never within your control; at best, you can steer them in a particular direction by anticipating and blocking all the alternatives. How they come to discover those blockages is up to them.

There’s a (probably apocryphal) story I once read about a chimpanzee and a bunch of psychologists: “The psychologists put the chimp in a cage and carefully arranged five different ways by which it could escape, then eagerly watched to see which one would be chosen. The chip escaped a sixth way”. I’ve seen this story representing a monkey, a pig, and an octopus as the heroic creature (as well as the ‘chimp’ version synopsized). Well, it’s at least as true if you use “PCs” as the subject, or it should be.

In an ideal world, the PCs can attempt anything the players can think of, and only the probability of achieving success and the potential ramifications, side-effects, and byproducts should be considerations to discriminate between ideas that could be hair-brained or strokes of genius. In practice, there are too many possibilities implicit in this theory, and players usually require some direction or prompting. That doesn’t entitle the GM to make a decision on the part of the PCs; it does require him to provide clear avenues of action and analyze proposed courses of action on behalf of the players’ characters. What they then choose to do, once the choice is an informed one, is up to them.

Someone once said, “You can lead a PC to water, but you can’t make his player think.” It may be true – but you can encourage a better approach, just through the language that you use. A question for Permission is a PC communing with the world through the GM; the medium linking the two is conversation. Words are your tools for shaping that conversation.

This image combines “Magic Eight Ball” by MZMcBride courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, with Crystal-Ball-Photography by Alexandra ??A life without animals is not worth living?? from Pixabay

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that.

A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their characters say or do – changes the outcome in the slightest.

While there may be some initial interest because of a novel premise or an interesting story being offered, interest, and participation rates, decline rapidly once it becomes clear that there is no player agency within the plot.

(Figure 1)

Adding Complications and Challenges

Things improve quite a lot when you add complications and challenges. These are hurdles that have to be overcome by the PCs, one way or another, in order to reach the conclusion of the narrative.

(Figure 2)

But as soon as you do so, luck enters the picture. The PCs can say something brilliant, or make a spectacular die roll; or they can say something stupid, or roll spectacularly badly. In the simplest, most general constructions, this has no direct impact on the plot, but can have a vast difference on the context of the outcome – the indirect impacts. For example, taking the wrong path might turn someone who might have been an ally into someone who is a hireling who expects to be rewarded handsomely for every time he pulls the PC’s feet out of the fire. Or it might be as simple as the PCs accumulating damage and wear-and-tear, and chewing up consumables – in the old days, this was an expected phase of the game, and many reams of advice were written on how to ensure this consumption of resources without going too far and without killing the PCs in a nothing encounter.

Still more advice was written on how to prevent PCs gaining excessively from such encounters, and how to ensure that they didn’t derail the plot, and so on, and still more advice was written to players on how to recognize and take advantage of the opportunities that inevitably arose.

But players like having agency, they like to be able to see that they are having an impact on the world around them. They like to be the architects of change in their environment, in other words.

For a while, you can fake that by building it into the stories that your games are telling, but that starts to ring hollow. Giving the players real choice scares a lot of GMs; we tend to be control freaks. But sooner or later, we have no choice.

Branching Linear Plots

If we’re lucky, we stumble across a half-way house like the one depicted below in abstract form. Figure 3 depicts a plotline with three outcomes and two major tracks. There are challenges to be overcome along both tracks – possibly even the same challenges, but because players only get to see the track that they are on, they will never know.

(Figure 3)

The difference that this makes is simple but profound. A lot of the time it won’t be noticeable, but every now and then the consequences of a past action will be seen to have had a measurable impact on the situation the characters find themselves in, or on the options available to the PCs for overcoming those challenges.

The way to construct such a plot is to write a linear plotline, complete with challenges, but building in branch points where the players can decide to do something different from a limited palette of broad options. Once you have the main plot outlined in this way, you can insert the divergences as variations on the existing material. Rather than redundant passages, it’s generally better to simply describe the differences to each encounter/challenge and each resolution, preserving the central plotline while presenting various chapters with optional or alternative content.

The downside is that this adds a new vector of player agency – now, what they think, and what they think that their characters think,.also matters. And that makes for ever-greater uncertainty of encounter/challenge outcomes. Now, they are choosing the terms on which they face each challenge; sometimes, they will talk, sometimes they will bargain, sometimes they will act, and sometimes they will avoid action.

The effect on player investment and interest can be dramatic, as Figure 3 also shows – while there are still troughs and valleys, overall the interest levels tend to be sustained throughout.

From the GM’s perspective, sometimes they will take one of the one or two obvious pathways, sometimes they will make a choice that the GM was not expecting, forcing an improvised response. The GM is not totally in the dark when it comes to such responses – he has the more obvious choices as foundations, and the personalities of the NPCs, and – hopefully – their goals and ambitions, to serve as guides.

The problem is that the resolution of an encounter, challenge, or situation is usually linked to the rest of the adventure like one in a chain of dominoes. Back before PC choices mattered, the dominoes were fixed in position and could only fall in the right direction; now, the chain reactions are wild and unpredictable. Certainty gets replaced with Uncertainty.

The Rise Of Fuzziness

I’ve already mentioned how much GMs hate uncertainty – at least a touch of the control freak resides in all of us!

GMs learn to manage this unpredictability by micromanaging their adventures. When you first start the adventure, it seems overwhelming, and at best you can barely predict how the adventure will end.

(Figure 4)

As each branch point is achieved, more of the adventure becomes certain (because it has already been played), and there is that much less scope for deviation and unpredictability, so the rest of the adventure also becomes more certain, as Figure 4 shows.

Once you accept the premise that the end may be uncertain but will become less so as you go along, you start learning how to manage the situation.

More importantly, while you can’t steer the plot without violating player agency, you learn how to use stimuli and adventure content to nudge players in the right direction when the adventure threatens to become becalmed or to devolve into chaos.

Players respond to the increase in agency with greater interest and enthusiasm, provided that they appreciate the significance of their choices. The more trivial their choices seem, the more like a faux-agency the scope you are providing them seems (even though you may have other ideas about how significant their choices will be in the end).

What you end up with is illustrated in Figure 5, below.

(Figure 5)

The moment that something takes place that the GM could not possibly have predicted in advance (even if he did), and the adventure proves robust enough to continue and be affected by the choice at the same time, the players will become aware that they have been granted access to a whole new level of Player Agency. Their PCs lives become truly theirs to command, within reasonable limits, and they can make choices confident that you will not only make the lives of their PCs interesting (and fun to play), but keep the campaign moving forward.

This seems very desirable, to me.

Three approaches, plus one

There are three well-known approaches to this situation.

1. You can attempt to outline every possible outcome, at least in general terms.
2. You can have a vague idea about the overall plot, a clearer idea about the immediate situation, and simply improvise around player choices and rolls as they happen.
3. You can have a more solidly structured overall plot, with clearly defined branches, and simply improvise around unexpected variations as they occur.

Method one is the reason why computer RPGs sometimes seem like a choose-your-own-adventure book, and why embedding more flexibility in such media is so difficult – it’s a VAST amount of work compared to the basic utility of a linear plot.

(Figure 6)

Figure 6, above, gives you a reasonable impression of just why this is so. Even with some options conflated, and keeping the branches simple binary choices, five branch points yields 20 outcomes in the illustration – and it could easily have been worse. Thinking about the structure of an adventure in this way is what leads GMs to shy away from offering this level of choice to players.

It takes a lot of confidence to progress to option two, and the adventures are rarely as satisfying as the sweeping epics that become possible with greater structure and advance planning. Nevertheless, a lot of experienced GMs would hold this up as the pinnacle of the art – Johnn was always an advocate for this approach, for example. Even more would argue that it gives necessary experience and expertise, and that’s an even harder position to argue with.

That said, it’s always been my contention that option #3 is the best way to go. It’s the one that I most frequently use in my campaigns, and is one of the reasons why they last for decades. It’s the one that I’m currently using for the Zenith-3 superhero campaign, and the one – in more episodic form – that my co-GM and I use for the Adventurer’s Club pulp campaign. The Zener Gate (time agents) campaign, now approaching it’s final adventures, was always envisaged as an Option #2 campaign, explicitly and directly translating character experience and expertise into greater Player Agency. The Doctor Who campaign is a sort of half-way house between options #2 and #3 – the plots are robust and carefully planned, but much of the narrative and some of the adventure specifics are improvised. Anything can happen, so long as I get to the next plot point intact.

But there is a fourth option, one that I’ve been planning to write about for a long time. The initial drafts were an epic entitled “The Trouble With Disaster” that became hopelessly bogged down back in 2014 and was set aside for later redevelopment. I came back to it in 2017 and figured out how to fix the problems that had derailed it the first time around, only to strike new problems.

Okay, I know I’ll get asked about it sooner or later.

I originally structured “The Trouble With Disaster” as follows:

1
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
2
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
3
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
… and so on.

I got about 80% of the way through – 8500 words written – when I realized that I was having to copy-and-paste the same explanations into every A section, and another set into every B section, and so on, and that if I restructured the article as follows:

A
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
B
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
C
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
….and so on,

then I could eliminate more than 1/3 of the content as redundant, making the article a lot less tedious to write – and to read. But I kept getting sidetracked into the subject of today’s blog post, which was too big a topic to ignore – so, four years ago, it was again put on hold.

Okay, so where was I? Oh yes – the fourth option.

The fourth option is to understand luck a lot more solidly than most GMs do, and to use that understanding to prune that multitude of possibilities down into a core or Anchor plotline and a couple of critical branches, plus some structures that give the impression of full player agency while collapsing the possible choices down to a manageable number. In other words, to scale the degree of randomness to the criticality of the event to which the domino in question connects, while tossing in extra opportunities for uncertainty to manifest when it doesn’t matter to the bigger picture.

And another word for uncertainty, at least in this context, is randomness – or Luck, if you will.

No, I think the best approach is to describe the technique for creating an adventure with this structure, one that controls the impact of Luck. And THAT’S what this post is all about.

1. Overall Summary

I always start by generating an overall summary of the linear plot. This becomes my overall guideline; either an encounter fits into this guideline or it’s extraneous – though sometimes the whole reason for a particular adventure is one or more of those extraneous encounters, serving as a delivery vehicle for an NPC to be significant in the bigger picture later.

I compress and compact this as much as possible, putting any necessary explanation in footnotes rather than cluttering up the outline of the plot.

Example: PCs enter dungeon. Goblins (adventurers welcome, toll, escorts). Trap (warning signal). Kobolds torturing bugbear (Drow ‘advisor’). PCs learn of the Sapphire Star (1) while Drow learn of the PCs (2). Bugbear Ghost. Kobold War Patrol, bugbear counterattack, crossfire cliffhanger.

From this, it can be assumed that the PCs reached the Dungeon last game session, and (from the encounters specified) that they are somewhere around 5th level (party of 4). It succinctly frames the adventure action, gives reminders of the relevant backstory and the context of the encounters, offers at least one plot twist right from the outset, (Goblin Welcome) and hints at a physical stratification of multiple underdark societies – Goblins, Kobolds (enhanced), Bugbears (some enhanced, some not), and Drow – though there may be more intervening levels to this cosmopolitan underdark yet to be revealed.

2. Bullet-point breakdown

This starts out being a simple rearrangement of the overall summary, but each point is expanded until the structure is something close to complete.

Example:

become

As you can see, this breakdown is far more complete and specific. It doesn’t include final narrative or dialogue, but does give key narrative signposts and dialogue cues. Most importantly, it follows a logical sequence – PCs reach a location, get a general impression, get more specific information, interact.

It should also be observed that in addition to the welcoming tone of the Goblins (the already established plot twist), this outline adds a second (which justifies the first), the worship of the Goddess Of Peace (who seems remarkably martial in many ways, a blend that should appeal to any number of PCs). It also offers hints that the opposition in this dungeon might be a lot tougher than might be expected (using the Goblins as an exemplar) which is an initial glimpse of the bigger picture, and incorporates a couple of occasions when rolls will impart additional information.

There are still a few finishing touches and additional details required, for example the price list, descriptions of some of the NPCs. A list of mini-encounters in Thatch should also get made, some with basic triggers – if a PC interrupts a Goblin, he will get told “How Rude!” and feel a warning tingle as though a lightning strike were imminent, for example.

The name of the village is very important – “Thatch” gives the right tonal signals, enhancing the description of the settlement and adding to the general impression. Finally, the pollution at the ceiling is very important as a signal of plausibility, a notation that actions will have consequences.

3. The Anchor Plotline

Once those additional details are dropped in where appropriate, the Anchor Plotline is complete. This is very much the format that I generally use to run the Dr Who campaign.

I think an example of that would be fairly redundant, since I’ve already described the differences between that plot format and the example above, so let’s move on.

4. Minor Branches

A minor branch is one that doesn’t alter the overall plotline, as spelled out. Insignificant branches may be bypassed.

For example, the PCs may decide to head for the largest building that they can see from the cavern entrance, and stick to that despite the instructions on the sign. That bypasses the construction site and it’s additional information about the construction of the huts and replaces it with a new plot sequence at ‘the biggest building they could see’.

First up, I have to decide what this is – the communal bathing facilities, an industrial operation, or the temple of Lithis. Or, better yet, I could have the PCs make a spot check and describe that, and the central tower, in general terms, and let the PCs decide where they want to go. Any alternative will end with an NPC pointing and saying “The Governor’s Tower is that way. They look after visiting adventurers like yourselves. Be at peace!” (I like that last snippet of phrase – I might even make “Be at peace!” the general way of saying goodbye.

These branches all return to the main plotline. I’ll build in as many as I can think of, one at a time.

The general structure of all of them will be similar:

13 preceding plot point
14 plot point being bypassed
15 rejoin

becomes

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path.

14b plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT establishing that it only happens if the condition in 14a is not triggered.

15 rejoin

This is the most efficient structure. You can have any number of conditional plot points between 14a and the 15, so long as the last one is the one currently listed as 14b. Observe that this uses the numbering schema to reinforce the point – “there can be only one 14 event unless the PCs separate”. (If they do, this sort of structure makes dealing with it a breeze).

Sometimes a more complicated structure is needed because there are multiple plot points in a branch:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… as above.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed.

16 rejoin

Nor do the instructions at the end of each branch have to point to the same rejoin point. Some options, for example, might not bypass 15, while one does:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… and ends with a GOTO 15.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed by one PC choice, and the rejoin point of one branch.

16 second rejoin – the plot is now back together again.

This structure is lifted straight from BASIC computer programming, which is why some may find it familiar.

Sometimes, greater complexity still is needed – for example, plot point 15 might be slightly different as an outcome of the choice and the resulting plot events. This means that 14a will still bypass 14 and 15, perhaps replacing them with something else; 14b will now point to a variant 15, which I will usually label 15b so that I can trace the plot thread; and 14c will lead to the normal version of event 15:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… and ends with a GOTO 15b.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed by one PC choice

15b variant version of plot point 15 and the rejoin point of one branch.

16 second rejoin – the plot is now back together again.

I’ve inserted a 15b (a ‘b’ because it’s coming from 14b), and changed 14b – that’s all that I have to do.

These are the equivalent of a Magician’s Force as described a few weeks ago. The GM doesn’t care which path the PCs take, because they all lead back to the main plotline eventually.

5. Skill/Ability Branches

The same thing can be and should be done with die rolls and any unusual abilities that aren’t ‘always on’, whenever they can be anticipated. This is also a good time to review the standard plotline to make sure that any abilities that ARE always on have been factored in; I like to throw in the occasional tidbit to signal the players that I have done so.

For example, there might be bat-like beings congregating at the top of the cavern, hidden by the foul air and darkness that a character with Infravision might be able to spot from the cavern entrance. Are these more servants of the Enemy Of Life preparing for an attack on the community? Or just beings who can breathe in the befouled air (unlike most PCs) and have entered into social symbiosis with the Goblins? Either way, they must have a route in and out that isn’t controlled by the Goblins – so this represents an entirely separate branch for the adventure. That’s beyond the scope of the techniques we’ve dealt with so far, which have been small and local.

6. Major Branches

The technique may be slightly different, but it is not that dissimilar in structure. The branches of events are simply longer, and change the circumstances of subsequent plot points.

There are two elements to such major plot branches: insertion of the plot branch, and flagging subsequent plot points that may play out differently as a result.

Here’s an insert for a major branch:

03
04 branch point – IF PC’s …. GOTO A05
05
06
…
11
12 GOTO 13
   A05
   A06
…
   A17
13 rejoin

Observe that there can be a different number of plot points in the branch, though – for reasons of timing – it’s generally better for them to be of similar length if you can manage it. The other point to make is that I’ve padded the low digits with a zero, anticipating plot points numbering less than 100. Based on the example given earlier, though, in which two became nineteen before minor branches were even selected, that might be an underestimate – but this is still usually a safe assumption.

When it comes to consequences, it may not even be necessary to have a branch, but if it is, you treat it in a similar way – either as a minor or major branch, as you deem necessary. For clarity, event though it derives from branch A, any major branch would usually be labeled B.

That means that you are limited to 26 major branches, which is usually vastly more than enough.

It should also be noted that major branches can have minor branches of their own!

7. Nested Branches

I’ve already noted one possible major branch, but another source of them is when things go horribly wrong. I always recommend reviewing an adventure to look for potential places it can derail, and constructing at least a rough plan for getting things back more-or-less on track.

What if, for example, the PCs decide to kill the goblins and loot whatever they can find?

Logic: a couple of defenders will arrive from nearby homes; most will attempt to delay the PCs while one or two go for alarm horns, which they will blow three times (once could be an accident, twice maybe not, three times removes all doubt). A group of militia will arrive next, and attack in coordinated fashion. They will be followed by the Priest Of Lithis, who will begin raining Divine Retribution upon the party. They may or may not get through the village at all, but at least a couple of them will probably get the chance to withdraw (under steady bow-fire). Survivors who escape and return under a flag of truce would be able to barter for the return of their dead members’ bodies (less any equipment they were wearing or carrying); anything more than a temporary truce will require retribution of 100gp + 50gp per Goblin killed.

This outlines a completely separate branch of the adventure, one that either ends it completely or leads to a complete reset (with added complications that the GM will have to insert into the adventure, probably on the fly).

This major branch is completely contained within the “Lurkers In The Mist” Branch, which is called a nested branch.

Ordinarily, if the PCs said something insulting or ungracious during the Governor’s welcome, that could create another major branch, but under the circumstances here it could probably be handled as a minor branch – but the toll and other prices probably go up accordingly, and Big Burly Goblin probably adds “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again,” to the PCs. There’s no need to write a lot of this stuff down; what you already have is sufficient guide to permit adaption as you go by most competent GMs.

What you can end up with is something that – graphed symbolically – looks something like this (and observe the major branches spawning new major branches of their own):

(Figure 7)

8. The Luck Factor

Almost everything I’ve written about so far has been in terms of players making choices and the GM making allowances for alternative choices.

Let me rephrase that: Almost everything I’ve written about so far has been in terms of a factor outside the GM’s control changing the flow of the adventure, and the GM making preparations for alternatives.

So far as the GM is concerned, there is no difference between a choice by the Player and a die roll by the player – there will be an expected outcome, and any number of less probable outcomes, the most significant of which should also be outlined. In general, for most die rolls, that means a set of four outcomes: Success, Failure, Major/Critical Success, and Major/Critical Failure. Sometimes, it may be desirable to insert a pair of intermediate values – a bare success, or close failure – but that’s rarely necessary except in diplomatic situations where nuances of subtlety might need to be explicitly addressed – making a verbal faux pas, but being able to salvage the situation.

Before you can really do this properly, you need to understand luck thoroughly, as it manifests in your games, and as it manifests in real life, and how the two relate.

Let’s use d10s to simulate a simple poker machine for a moment in order to illustrate this point. The goal is to get three numbers the same (the higher the better), or any three successive numbers, or one or two tens.

First reel: roll a 7. Is that enough to call someone lucky? Probably not.

Second reel: roll another 7. is that enough to call someone lucky? Not yet.

Third reel: There’s a 1-in-10 chance of a 7. There’s a 1-in-10 chance of a 10. Nothing else will pay off, and the 10 will only pay a pittance. The roll is a 3 – it was far more likely to be a nothing result like this. The character definitely isn’t lucky.

What if it had beaten the odds and come up a third 7? Is the player lucky yet? That’s a more difficult question. They obviously have achieved a 10-in-1000 success, or 1%, of getting a triple; it is not the best possible triple (that would be triple 10) but it’s in the top 1/2, which would only happen in half of that 1% of cases. The payout would be substantial. You would have to say this character was moderately lucky.

What if this was their first pull of the lever, and the only pull they could afford to play? Suddenly, their luck quotient goes sky-high, and never mind that there were a few better payouts available. Alternatively, if they have fed 200 coins into the slot without winning a big prize, the payout odds would almost certainly leave this as a net loss – so, suddenly the player isn’t lucky at all.

Where do you draw the line when it’s on shifting sand?

Some people find the almost-instinctive understanding of luck that a gambler develops to be as attractive as the thrill of success itself. These are the people who look at the payout combinations and a small sample of rolls and try to work out what they should realistically expect to get out of the exercise they continue to play, and all goes well. My uncle used to be like that – every week, he would take a fixed amount to the local bowling club and feed it into one or another of the poker machines. Overall, he broke better than even, according to his own accounts, and every now and then he won something substantial – but he never went over his self-imposed limit, and it was never about playing to win for him; “that,” he told me once, “is when gambling can become a problem.” On another occasion, he commented that most people forget the pulls that don’t pay out; they can’t pull that lever fast enough. He, on the other hand, paid attention to them, and remembered them, however vaguely; he could glance at the current total credit, subtract any winnings, and tell you almost instantly how many failures there had been. When he got to the end of his allotted and budgeted expenditure, he collected whatever winnings were showing on the machine and went home. I doubt that he’d had these thoughts when he first started; they were opinions that had formed and firmed over time.

If you still enjoy the luck aspect of these games, you can also play them at Casimba, which offers decent odds to all online games you choose there.

All this is directly relevant to RPGs. If there’s a branching path that only happens on a 10 on d10, you might or might not include it in an adventure. If it happens on 1-5 on d20, that’s a whole different story. If this in turn has a branch that only happens on a 1-5 on a second d20 roll, should you outline it in an adventure?

Some people will look at the overall combination – 25% of 25%, or 6.25%, and note that this is less than the chance of a 10 on d10, and therefore say no. Others would point out that what a d20 rolls on one occasion has no bearing on what it will roll on a subsequent occasion – so the correct assessment is that there is a 25% chance of needing that branch IF the first alternate branch comes into play, and that argues a ‘yes’.

Those with some understanding of probability from their school days will know that the second is the more correct interpretation, but I think that in practical terms, the 6.25% has to be acknowledged, too. So I might prepare an outline of something for the second 1-5 outcome, while not giving it as much development as the more probable branches. This, to my mind, respects both results.

But there’s a counter-argument: Most PCs are competent characters, which is to say they generally have positive modifiers to any roll that they can influence. A +1 on a d20 alters the odds by 5%, a +2 by 10%, a +3 by 15%, a +4 by 20%. If it’s an ability check, that 25% of 25% might actually be a 5% or 5% chance, which only happens 0.25% of the time. That’s only worth a line – at most – and if the consequences of a critical failure of this type were reasonably obvious from the context and surrounding circumstances, I would probably even forego that line. The only justification for it, in my mind, would be to put limits on how harshly the failure was treated, and outline a recovery path.

Complicating matters still further is a third factor: the scale of catastrophe, and the rewarding of luck. Players expect to be rewarded for a good roll, and for things to go badly wrong on a bad roll. “Harsh but Fair” used to be a description sought by every GM, and even now, it’s a maxim many live by. The GM has to deliver, or the players feel cheated somehow; and it’s then up to the GM to fold the stroke of brilliance or sudden ineptitude of the PC back into the plotline and keep it on track, in other words, to deal with the fallout.

Getting into the habit of contemplating, how briefly, the shape of the measures needed for that coping, at the time you anticipate or call for a die roll to be made, can be a GM’s life-saver.

The benefits can be psychological as well as overt and obvious – knowing that you have prepped for everything that you can reasonably think of enables you to relax and play other unanticipated situations on their merits, and in general function with greater confidence.

Have you ever watched a TV drama and thought “he (or she) looks totally confident” or “He (or she) doesn’t look very sure of him/her self”? Players can tell when you are and aren’t confident. You’re generally too busy being one or the other to notice the telltale signs that you’re giving off, but they are there.

If the impact of a bad roll, or a good roll, is of sufficient magnitude that it can demand emergency measures to rescue the adventure, you should at least put some preliminary thoughts into the adventure about how to cope with those turns of events, in exactly the same ways that have already been described. These might not be a very probable branch – but they need to be at least outlined roughly (to the Figure 1 standard, a paragraph), just in case.

Understanding luck is just as important as understanding storytelling when it comes to crafting a good adventure. You need to fill your writing with both. And character, and tone, and style – but those are actually secondary priorities. Driving your structure with luck and story are essential.