My original article on Covid-19 has now been split into three parts:

Part 1: Covid-19 Facts, Analysis, and Advice
Part 2: Busting Covid-19 Myths
Part 3: Should My Game Be Canceled?

Each part will link to the other two, and they will all be extended and updated as necessary.

Part 1: Covid-19 Facts, Analysis, and Advice

• UPDATED March 15, 2020, in the section “Timeline”.
• UPDATED March 24, 2020, in the section “Infectiousness & Viral Persistence”.
• UPDATED March 26, 2020, in the section “Infectiousness & Viral Persistence”.
• UPDATED March 27, 2020, in the section “Timeline”.
• UPDATED April 5, 2020, in the sections “Symptoms”, “Treatment” and “Infectiousness & Viral Persistence”.
• UPDATED April 25, 2020, in the section “Infectiousness & Viral Persistence”.

Coronavirus. Specifically, Covid-19. What are the facts? What do they mean? And what should you be doing about them, to protect both yourself and others?

Douglas Adams said it best:

Don’t Panic. There’s a lot of misinformation, speculation, and panic reaction floating around out there, and social media channels are more adept at spreading it than they are distributing reputable information.

Panic is an unthinking reaction to a situation in which there is a perceived emergency requiring clear thinking – and, as such, it is never helpful. Panic might lead to making the right choices by pure chance, but it probably won’t.

One reaction to panic is to try to calm people down – and the avoidance of measures that would be reasonable, but would promote further panic often implies an under-reaction to the current situation. Not that you can blame the authorities for that; they are walking a fine line between taking effective action and exacerbating any existing alarm, as well as triggering new public alarm.

The truth is that the situation is almost certainly both better than the doom-and-gloom merchants would have you believe, and worse than authorities can admit, unless they have been forced into drastic measures.

The absence of information is therefore a logical inevitability of managing a health crisis of this sort – but is also a breeding ground for misinformation. If you compare the information presented on the Australian Government’s Department Of Health on the subject, much of it has a vague or incomplete feel to it, at least in comparison to the public information page hosted by our national broadcaster.

With that in mind, this post will attempt to answer a serious question: should we suspend RPG gaming for a month or so?

To answer that question, I’ll be looking at the symptomology, the known clinical picture, the people believed to be at greatest risk and why, and so on.

This post will contain the most accurate information I can find, as of the 14 March 2020, and explain it as much as possible. Where I am including speculation, it will be specifically labeled as such and I will take extra care to explain the basis of that speculation, and will attempt to analyze how being wrong will impact on the analysis of the question.

At the same time, I want to make this post as short and digestible as possible. Nevertheless, along the way, I want to bust one or five of the myths that I’ve seen circulating. There’s a lot to get through, so this is likely to be one of those occasions when “short” is a relative term.

Pandemic

First, Coronaviruses are nothing new. At least one type of “Common Cold” is a Coronavirus. The human race has been living with them for a very long time. From time to time, a specific variety comes along that is notably worse than usual, that’s all. Covid-19 is one such case.

That has led to Covid-19 being declared a Global Pandemic.

What this declaration means is that the virus is now spreading in more than 100 countries, and that the illness itself is potentially serious.

In a practical sense: Each level of spread of an infection, when officially declared, triggers certain powers within and responses by, the government. What these are will vary from country to country. The most extreme responses to the current health emergency, by China and Italy, are empowered by such triggers.

Contagion

Covid-19 is known to be highly contagious. Nevertheless, a runny nose or scratchy throat does not mean you have Covid-19. You almost certainly do not. It does mean that you should take precautions like self-isolation, and if symptoms get worse, make arrangements to get tested.

That’s not as easy as it should be. In countries with a single-payer health system like Australia, the cost of the test is paid by the government if a test is deemed necessary. Here, the number of cases not occurring as a result of travel from an area with a serious outbreak (China, Iran, South Korea, Italy) is a handful, and those who have not traveled overseas at all number only 1 or 2 cases, nationwide. This is because Australia has put strong containment measures in place quite early on – we were treating it as a potential pandemic at least a week before the World Health Organization confirmed the status.

There have been reports that the test can cost as much as US$3500 to conduct, and they do not have a single-payer health system. Those on lower incomes are thus much less likely to be tested and can thus act as carriers for the disease. They are also far less likely to be willing to self-isolate on the mere chance that they are infected and attend work anyway.

For a long time, the orientation promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, backed by the Medical profession, has been “soldier on” – take precautions not to infect others, but the priority is to get back on your feet and back to doing whatever you do, as quickly as possible. That is considered terrible advice where COVID-19 is concerned. Instead, the advice is to minimize your chance of infection in the first place, and self-isolate at the first sign of symptoms, just in case.

Transmission

The Virus is spread by small drops of moisture we release when we sneeze or cough. The moisture has to get into your body to make you sick, which means you can catch Coronavirus if those droplets get into your eyes, nose or mouth.

The skin is always covered by a layer of dead cells and the living cells beneath are relatively tough, designed to cope with wear and tear. The virus can’t get through. The greatest danger is that you get the virus on your skin and then rub your eyes or nose or bring your hand to your mouth for any of a dozen reasons – for example, I have the habit of stroking my beard and mustache when thinking. Washing your hands to remove the virus almost completely eliminates the danger – unless you’ve touched one of these “forbidden areas” in the interval.

That’s where face-masks come into the picture. They not only stop transmission of the virus if you cough or sneeze, but they stop you putting your hands to nose or mouth. If everyone had access to one, it could help slow the spread of Covid-19 significantly; but that’s not going to happen; there is a global shortage of masks right now. Ironically, Wuhan was the world’s #1 manufacturer of surgical masks. With that supply disrupted, countries all over the world have been scrambling to make up for the deficit.

Whenever a discussion on this subject arises, my mind instantly (and persistently) flashes back to an episode of Mythbusters, from, I think, the final season with everybody. The episode aired on June 9, 2010, entitled “Flu Fiction” and the segment in question asked, “Is it true that Nasal secretions from a person with a cold can spread so far and so quickly that anyone in the vicinity can become contaminated.?”

The Wikipedia write-up of the experiments reads:

Adam and Jamie consulted with an otolaryngologist and learned that a person with a cold may secrete up to 60 milliliters of mucus per hour. Jamie built a rig from a syringe and tubing to match that drip rate with fluorescent dye, and Adam wore it by his nose as he did model-building work. After one hour, he and everything he had touched were stained with the dye.

They then set up a party for Adam to host, with three ‘germaphobe’ guests (Kari, Grant, and Tory, who were briefed to try to avoid contact with Adam) and three unsuspecting ones. Thirty minutes later, Adam, the whole table, and every guest except Kari – who admitted that she actually was a germaphobe – were heavily contaminated. In a second experiment in which Adam consciously did his best to avoid physical contact (such as bumping elbows with his guests instead of shaking hands and asking the guests to pass certain things out to the other), all six guests came up clean.

Adam and Jamie declared the myth confirmed at this point, commenting that a healthy person would find it very difficult to avoid being contaminated by a sick one who did not attempt to keep from spreading his/her germs.

I was hoping to be able to present a screen shot of the table with the horror show of the fluorescent die everywhere, but couldn’t find one. But I was able to find a youTube video of the experiment up to this point which includes those unforgettable scenes of contamination. It’s ten years on, and those scenes remain firmly lodged in my memory, for good reason.

Timeline

There’s a lot that is still not known about COVID-19. Statistical data is still being gathered, and is a secondary priority to actually treating those with the disease. As a result, the timeline of infection is a little vague, and this has shaped the advice being given.

A day or two, possibly three, after you become infected, you enter a stage of being infectious while showing no symptoms. Between one and three days later, you begin to experience the symptoms but remain infectious. Most people suffer only very mild symptoms and there is a strong temptation to go about your normal routine, enabling the virus to spread. You will typically experience symptoms for three-to-seven days, usually 5. Add all that up, and you get 13 days at most. There is a possibility that you will still be contagious for a day or so after that, but this is unconfirmed.

UPDATE 19 March 2020:

Over the last couple of days there has been some additional clarification on some of these subjects.

1. Most people become ill 2-4 days after becoming infected. Symptoms may be so mild, especially in younger people, that they do not realize that they are infected.
2. In the majority of cases, people have become contagious 24 hours before symptoms develop.
3. In a few cases, people have become contagious up to 48 hours before symptoms develop – but it’s entirely possible that the symptoms developed sooner and the victim simply didn’t notice them. For the sake of prudence, health authorities and the rest of this article will use two days as the infectious pre-symptomatic period.
4. It is therefore possible for one set of responses to an infection to occur while the commencement date and time of symptoms is unknown or only approximately known, and for those responses to be shown to be unnecessary when the patient is interviewed and an accurate determination of the onset of symptoms made. The current advice in Australia is that if you don’t have that accurate information, use the 48-hour rule; if you do, you can use the 24-hour rule. That’s to determine if you have potentially been exposed, whether or not you need to self-isolate, whether or not you may need to be tested, and so on.

UPDATE 27 March, 2020:

More information has emerged on the timeline of the illness. In general (and in a nutshell), the second week is more uncomfortable and symptoms are more serious; the first week, they may be comparatively mild, even in serious cases (i.e. those requiring hospital treatment). I don’t have further specifics.

Thus the advice that if you come down with possible symptoms, you should self-isolate for 14 days, and if they get worse, seek medical advice. In most people, it’s all over in a week or less, but in a few cases it may last longer – so the 14-days is long enough to not only cover the immediate victim’s experience with the disease, but any immediate family who are likely to have been exposed to the virus. If none of you are showing symptoms after 14 days, you’re clear – for now, at least. That’s not unlike any cold or flu.

There have been some reports of incubation periods of 14 or even 21 days. These are now regarded as extremely rare if they are even accurate at all.

Symptoms

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Covid-19 is that you can be contagious and experience no symptoms at all. That doesn’t happen often but it is a known fact. In a sample group of 100 people with Coronavirus, about 80 will have only minor symptoms, if any at all. About 15 people will have more serious symptoms, and between one and three people out of 100 may die as a result of pneumonia and respiratory complications. The current mortality rate, globally, is 3.7%, but the trend is slowly downward. Compare that with influenza, which normally has a mortality rate of 0.1%; even a bad year, like 2019, only elevates that to about 0.5%.

By far the majority of people who contract Covid-19 infections report symptoms similar to those of the common cold. The “Fifteen in 100” mentioned above might report symptoms ranging from those of a mild influenza to a serious influenza.

The limited clinical reports available suggest that those under 18 are less susceptible to the virus. Those over 40, and especially over 65, are at a higher risk of developing more severe symptoms as are those with pre-existing conditions like heart disease or asthma. Those with any form of respiratory complaint are especially susceptible to the more virulent reaction. Below the age of 80, survival rates are quite high, but over that age, they suddenly ramp up considerably.

It should be remembered that diseases evolve to maximize their own spread and survival, and one of the mechanisms that they use is not killing the host.

UPDATE April 5, 2020:

Further reporting of cases has revealed some more subtle patterns to the symptomology. Most cases take two weeks to run their course; there have been outliers who have taken mere days and others who have experienced symptoms for three or more weeks. Symptoms in the first week are relatively mild for most people, becoming more intense in the second week. In a mild case, people might not even notice that they have it until that second week.

Last night I read a very moving first-hand account of what the experience is like for those who experience more severe symptoms They do not make for a pleasant experience, to put it mildly. You can read it for yourself at Quora (and if you click on the question after reading it, you will find at least 71 other stories, most nowhere near this severe), but it is worth remembering that at worst, this is the experience of a minority. Nevertheless, spare a thought for those suffering through the worst of this pandemic, the next time that restrictions and social distancing begin to bite.

One thing that several (but not all) mention is stomach pain and itchy or dry eyes as early symptoms. Others report the loss of their sense of taste and smell as the first symptoms. Intense lethargy is also a common symptom. In most cases, the fever predates the cough, but not always. It does seem at the moment like every case is just a little different and unique to that individual in terms of the sequence. However, there are definitely common themes in terms of what is experienced, and a lot of the treatments are aimed at controlling the symptoms. A number of complcations have arisen through dehydration – keep an eye on your weight and if it declines markedly, increase your fluid intake. One patient with a confirmed case lost 2kg in 2-3 days through dehydration and came close to needing hospitalization for that alone. Drinking hot liquids is reported as assisting in the breakup of the mucus that causes breathing difficulties, and gargling warm salt water helps clear the throat, which can become very painful during the coughing phase.

It is also now known that blood type makes a minor difference, though research is not clear on exactly why. Essentially, those with Type A blood are slightly more at risk of a serious case, while those with type O blood are slightly less at risk of a serious case. Types AB and B blood are about the same, and are therefore the standard against which the comparisons have been drawn. Understand that these are minor influences – perhaps plus-or-minus 5% to your risk of a serious case.

Infectiousness & Viral Persistence

Viruses are generally not the super-bugs that people like to imagine (there are specific exceptions). According to some reports, Covid-19 has very limited capacity to survive outside a host body; estimates that I have seen suggest a 24-48 hour period, and it might turn out to be considerably less. However, studies of other Coronaviruses suggest that the virus might be able to survive on a surface for as long as 9 days, though almost certainly most of it will be dead long before that, so the risk would decline even before that date.

UPDATE 24 March 2020, REVISED & UPDATED 25 April, 2020:

A study recently published in the New England Journal Of Medicine is the first serious investigation into the question of how well Covid-19 survives outside of an infected person. In air, it lasts at least 3 hours before settlng on a surface. Once there, it’s lifetime is variable, depending on the surface: Plastic and Stainless Steel, 72 hours; Cardboard, 24 hours; Copper, 4 hrs (note that no-one knows why copper is so much shorter than other materials – this research is simply too new).

There is also new evidence that the virus breaks down very quickly and completely in bright sunlight, but that hasn’t been confirmed.

From the moment that Covid-19 comes into contact with a surface, the danger that it poses is diminishing. On plastic, the amount of viable virus had halved after 6.8 hours; at 72 hours, none could be detected. It is not known from the summary of the research that I sighted whether or not this rate is consistent across all surfaces; logic suggests that it can’t be, because of the way the copper and cardboard results differ from plastic and stainless steel; it must be dying off more quickly.

The recommendation emerging from the study is to clean surfaces more regularly than you normally would, but that ordinary household cleaners are more than adequate to the task; Covid-19 seems to be extremely susceptible to soap, bleach, and alcohol-based hand sanitizer – much more so than many other viruses.

To those, I would add / reiterate: wash vegetables and fruit when you bring them home; you don’t know who had been at the bin before you. Wipe down cardboard packaging and plastic packaging with a rag moistened with a diluted bleach solution and dry it carefully. (Note added April 5: These are my personal recommendations; they are considered overcautious according to most health advice. Make sure not to use an antibacterial cleanser for these; not only could that attack useful bacteria if consumed, not only could it be inherently harmful in other ways if consumed, but we are already massively increasing the quantities of such materials being introduced into the environment, which risks long-term impacts. Wev’e already seen this with an older version of cleanser. Whatever we can do to reduce such threats is necessary to the long-term health of our societies. End note.) Continuing the advice: Try to get your hands on a box of disposable gloves (no pun intended) and wear a pair anytime you have to go out, so that you reduce the impact of other people having pressed the elevator call button, etc. Wash your hands before you make a meal, and do it again before you eat. Note that washing hands frequently can dry the skin, so a small amount of moisturizer afterwards may also be useful.

UPDATE 26 March 2020:

Bad news from the CDC – according to this report, “SARS-CoV-2 RNA” (aka Covid-19, aka Coronavirus) …”was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the Diamond Princess but before disinfection procedures had been conducted (Takuya Yamagishi, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, personal communication (to the CDC/report author) , 2020).”

This is hearsay, but from a credible source. Now, RNA alone doesn’t mean that there was still viable virus on those surfaces, but it does mean that there might have been. These were closed-up rooms, and there have been stories of flu strains preserved on surfaces by freezing in the past. The rooms had not been cleaned. There is a suspicion that something in the environment on board a cruise ship increases the susceptibility to the virus – it might be as simple as encountering the same infected people day after day, or it might be something more serious, relating (for example) to the way they distribute cool air to cabins.

All of which adds up to uncertainty as to whether or not this information is relevant to a domestic surface that is cleaned reasonably regularly. No-one knows what this means for you and me (assuming neither of us is on a cruise ship). We can’t simply assume the worst because that is contradicted by the actual lab-condition studies described in my March 24 update. At best, we can say that If you don’t follow the advice of health officials, as relayed above, your chances of infecting someone else if you have the bug are potentially much greater. We always knew this particular agent was extremely infectious; this might be the first hints as to the reasons for that.

Now, back to the original post…

This vagueness is partially responsible for the conflicting information in this area; I have seen suggestions in the past that virus survival should be given in half-lives, like radioactivity: “wait this long, and half the virus population on an isolated surface will no longer be dangerous”. But that is not the way things are done at the moment. The bottom line is that just being exposed to it doesn’t mean that you will catch it – the most reliable estimates that I can find suggest a 10-30% infection rate.

That’s still scarily high. Let’s do some math:

One person becomes infected.

If they come into contact with 10 people a day (a low number), and are infectious for 2 days before noticing symptoms, that’s 20 people exposed. If 20% of those 20 people then catch the virus, that’s 4 people, even assuming that the original victim does his best to self-isolate. Two days later, 4 people become 16, 16 then become 64, 64 become 256, 256 becomes 1024, 1024 becomes 4096, 4096 becomes 16384, and 16384 becomes 65,536 by the time the original carrier’s two-week isolation period is up.

If the average is contact with 20 people a day, those two days infect 20% of 40 people, or 8. Then 64, 512, 4096, 32768, 262144, 2097152. That’s 2.1 million.

But these numbers are unnecessarily pessimistic. For one thing, the contagion rate outside the worst-affected areas appears to be closer to the 10% mark, or less, than to the 20% used above, or the 30% originally reported from China. For another, taking reasonable steps to minimize infection like coughing or sneezing into your elbow (far more effective than covering your mouth with your hand) and washing your hands regularly can drop the risks 100-fold or more.

A more realistic number of contacts, daily, is 100. Let’s try a more realistic set of calculations, with precautions: One person, two days, 200 people contacted. 10% of 200 is 20, divided by 100 is 0.2 people. One fifth of a person. That means that to get even one more victim, we need to start with five people infected, spreading the disease.

The real danger is of people not taking enough care. You only have to miss once – touch an elevator call button or a door handle or whatever and fail to wash your hands afterwards – and that 0.2% can leapfrog back up to 20%. Do so five times and the chance of being infected climbs markedly to 67%.

On top of that, the calculations shown assume that there are none of these potential 200-per-day encounters in common between the sufferers, and that’s improbable beyond description (but the math is a lot easier that way). The reality is that there would be overlaps, people exposed to the virus multiple times, and hence far more likely to catch it, and this results in clusters of people becoming ill.

You may have wondered why “Pandemic” is such a big deal, based on what I wrote earlier. The answer is that when a disease is “Epidemic”, it’s confined to these clusters, but when it becomes “Pandemic”, the size of the clusters and the number of clusters are such that the risk becomes general to the whole population. The “Pandemic” declaration means that the World Health Authority think that there is a very good chance that this will happen. That’s the reason for governments having greater powers in such events, and what they are trying to stop.

It’s statistics like these that led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to forecast that she expects as many as 70% of the German population to contract the disease – eventually. She may be correct – but for the immediate future, that prediction is alarmist. It may take years for that to occur – or it might be a lot more rapid; we just don’t know, yet.

National social habits will undoubtedly play a big part in determining the rate of infection. In France, for example, it is normal to kiss people on the cheeks in greeting; while I have no doubt that the current advice is not to do so, this would have increased transmission of the disease markedly before the restriction was put in place. That’s why there is now a surge in French cases taking place.

Detection

There is a test for Covid-19. Currently, it takes 24 hours to process a test kit. Various labs are working on faster-response kits – South Korea reportedly now has one that is 99% accurate and gives results in just three hours.

Early kits were even slower and – in the case of the first kits released by the CDC, flawed. I’ve mentioned the impact of those flaws and the consequences elsewhere.

When developing such test kits, there are four goals that are almost contradictory – affordability, speed of manufacture, speed of results, and reliability. Often, one or more needs to be compromised. Sometimes, a two-tier approach is needed – a cheap and somewhat unreliable test that never gives a false negative for an initial screening, and a more expensive test with high reliability for those possible cases flagged by the first test.

Testing regimens for Covid-19 are not yet that advanced. The US test kit is particularly expensive – I can’t speak to the cost of the tests of other nations. I can simply state that for the same price as getting tested in the US, I could have a double hip replacement here in Australia (not that I need one, thank heavens).

Kits will get cheaper, and faster to manufacture (which will also make them cheaper). They will get faster at giving results – hopefully without compromising reliability. But they aren’t there yet. And that means that unnecessary testing becomes a significant problem, eating into the limited supplies of the kits that are available. It’s in addressing this problem that the Australian government has made its’ most serious misstep in its management of the emergency to date.

We know that eventually, inevitably, there will be cases of people becoming infected as a result of exposure to someone who caught the virus overseas, rather than catching it overseas themselves. This is secondary transmission. Until now, the policy has been to test anyone presenting symptoms – but demand has outstripped supply and analysis resources. That tends to happen in a panic. In response, the government has decided to develop a protocol for assessing whether or not someone needs to be tested for Covid-19. So far, so good. The problem is that in the meantime, the advice is that unless you have recently been overseas, you don’t need to be tested. With at least two reported cases of secondary transmission, it’s too late for that restriction; it will only be counterproductive, enabling the broader spread of the disease here. It’s a white flag, an act of surrender to the circumstances. It’s an acceptance that the virus has escaped containment, and an unwillingness to be told how bad it really is out there in the real world.

If this policy goes ahead, what will happen is that the government will buy itself some room for complacency until the protocol is developed; they will then find that far more people are meeting the standards for testing than they were expecting (return of the problem), and that an unexpectedly high number of those tests will result in confirmed cases (the consequences of the misstep). Thus, the number of confirmed cases will skyrocket even faster than they would otherwise have done, and if anything is likely to induce panic, that’s what will do it. Of course, if that’s the only mistake they make, they will be doing an exemplary job of handling the crisis; but it signposts the possibility of other failures of the decision-making process, and that’s the real problem.

Sorry, letting myself drift off-topic there. Getting back on-track: since the initial announcement of the three-hour kits, I have heard nothing more on the subject. Results continue to be overnight, here in Australia, some weeks after the report. That says to me that the Korean test kit has a significant failure in one of the four criteria; taking their reliability and speed of results at face value, that means that it either takes too long to mass-manufacture, or costs too much, or both. At best, if that’s the case, it demonstrates that a faster test is at least possible. But we don’t have it yet.

Treatment

Currently, there is no effective treatment other than general respiratory support in the event of a serious form of the illness. A human vaccine is probably a year away, and it will still need testing and mass-manufacture, a process that the most generous of fast-tracking cannot reduce to less than about six months. The clock on this is already running; it started the moment a lab outside China succeeded in culturing the virus, three or four weeks ago. In effect, they learned how to manufacture more of the virus so that it could be studied in multiple locations under laboratory conditions. But don’t expect it to be announced before December 2020 or widely available sooner than mid-July 2021.

The current expectation is that Covid-19 will be like the flu – it will mutate relatively rapidly from one strain to another. Immunity to one will confer a limited immunity to other strains that will probably further mitigate symptoms upon reinfection, except in those who have become more vulnerable in between due to other medical problems or advancing age. I speculate that It will take years before the vaccine achieves full effectiveness.

To understand this last, it’s worth briefly recounting how the flu vaccine works because the Covid-19 vaccine is likely to work in a similar manner.

There are four major strains of influenza. Each year, labs select the two that appear most likely to be widespread in the coming winter and prepare a vaccine against those strains. This confers immunity to those strains for two or three years, slowly reducing in effectiveness. Some of this protection goes away more slowly than the rest; a vaccination may help mitigate symptoms from a strain as much as five or ten years afterwards. But that will vary from individual to individual, so one of the pillars of the vaccination programs is not to rely on that residual benefit. It is also widely believed that the benefits of a fresh immunization before the last one targeting that strain will have minimal benefit. That’s why they don’t target all four strains every year. So, this year they might target the A and B strains, next year the A and C strain, the year after, the B and D strains, and so on. That’s why, if you are considered vulnerable to the flu, you should get the shot every year.

The A strain, twice in a row? Yes, because the vaccine-makers can’t assume that you got vaccinated last year. For those who did, the A-strain vaccination a second year in a row has virtually no benefit, but for anyone else, it confers protection against one of the two strains most likely to be circulating.

There are times when the predictions are wrong, or when a particularly nasty sub-variety emerges, and the vaccines have to be re-made with different priorities.

So, let’s apply this knowledge to the likely form of a Covid-19 vaccine. How many strains will it have? No-one knows; we’re busy dealing with the one that’s circulating at the moment. But it’s likely that it will be more than one. The vaccine, as first developed, will probably only protect against one of these strains – the one that’s currently running rampant.

Diseases don’t come out of nowhere; they are simply a more virulent strain of something that’s been around for a while. Quite often, they will culture and evolve in animal hosts until getting a toe-hold on the human population. That’s true of flu, of the common cold, of Ebola – and almost certainly true of Covid-19. What that means is that from time to time there will be an outbreak, but in the meantime, there will be little or no risk from the virus. It’s entirely possible that by the time we have a vaccine, we’ll no longer need one – for this outbreak.

The US Center for Disease Control knew all this years ago, and established a program to specifically look for the next pandemic and prepare for it in advance as much as possible. President Trump and his republican allies gutted that program when he came to office, deeming it a waste of money. I can only speculate on how much better-prepared we might have been if this short-sighted decision had not been taken. You can’t blame Covid-19 completely on them, but they bear more of the blame than others for the social and economic harm that is now occurring.

What a vaccine will do is put a full stop to this strain, for at least the time being. And it is exceptionally unlikely that the next strain will be anywhere near as serious – if that were likely, there would have been an outbreak before this, and we would have known about it before now. The mere fact that Covid-19 seems to have come out of nowhere shows that it’s usually pretty harmless. What we are now learning – the very hard way – is that it can assume a more malevolent form, and that we need to actively monitor it. It might be fifty years, or seventy-five years, or a hundred years, before the next life-threatening outbreak – of this strain of this disease. But, when it does, we’ll be ready for it.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be looking now for the next bird-flu, or SARS, or swine-flu. It’s out there, waiting. The CDC program described was an insurance policy; most years, you pay it and don’t need it, making no claims against it. But every now and then, something catastrophic will happen and you will be desperately glad that you have that insurance – unless you’ve let it lapse in the meantime.

UPDATE 5 April 2020:

Some sites have been reporting that there have been 8 strains of Covid-19 currently circulating globally, all extremely similar genetically. I have not seen this confirmed by a compelling source but it fits information that has come from such sources.

The virus has been genetically sequenced in at least 32 different countries. Contrary to the expectations raised above, it appears to be extremely slow to mutate significantly. This means that a vaccine is likely to be much longer-lasting, conferring immunity for years or even decades. It also means that it’s slow to become a threat and slow to stop being a threat once that transition is made.

That says to me that Covid-19 will become another of the childhood immunizations that everyone needs to get, and that there may need to be booster shots at regular intervals. More like measles than the flu, in other words.

Recovery

Eighty percent of victims recover with no special treatment whatsoever. Most people with minor symptoms will be told to quarantine themselves at home, keep up fluids and take paracetamol to control their temperature. Australian patients have generally recovered in about four weeks according to some reports, and that’s the long extreme; most are reported to recover within a week to fortnight.

People suffering from more severe symptoms may need to go to hospital, where they will be cared for in a negative pressure ward (to keep the virus from spreading) and might be given intravenous fluids and possibly oxygen in more serious cases.

A few may develop an infection which could lead to pneumonia. These patients would be treated in an intensive care unit where more aggressive life-support is available. Severe pneumonia can lead to respiratory failure, which is the leading cause of death from Covid-19.

Health-care Capabilities

One of the primary goals of containment is not to eradicate a virus, but to buy enough time for the health-care system to prepare by slowing the spread of the virus. Until there is a vaccine, the spread of a really infectious agent like Covid-19 can only be slowed, not stopped, unless there is really low levels of exposure.

This pandemic will almost certainly be a lot worse in the US than in someplace like Australia, for a number of reasons. First, the health-care system, as mentioned previously, is not set up for mass testing and mass-immunization; it operates on the premise that all medical treatment is optional, to be paid for by the person opting for treatment. Health insurance may or may not relieve them of part of the burden. But a LOT of people can’t access health-care, promoting the spread of the virus. Second, the emphasis of the Trump Administration was on keeping the number of confirmed cases low at all costs – not on locating and identifying those with the illness. This gave the virus still more opportunity to spread. Third, the test kits that were initially released were defective. If they merely gave the occasional false positive, that would be bad enough; but they actually permitted a false negative, telling infected people that they were not infected, enabling them to further spread the virus. There have been some estimates that for every confirmed case in the US, as a result of these circumstances, there may be as many as 10,000 undiagnosed cases. And the math I presented earlier shows in graphic (if exaggerated) terms just how quickly 10,000 can become a hundred thousand, and how quickly 100,000 can become a million.

If 1,000,000 people become ill with the virus, 800,000 will be fine – but 200,000 may require medical treatment in hospital conditions. The US Hospital system is not set up to cope with that level of demand, but they can hardly be faulted for that – few national health systems are. The Chinese managed this problem by building three temporary hospitals in the heart of the outbreak at astonishing speed. While it seems unlikely that this can be matched everywhere in the world, the success that has resulted suggests that the temporary re-purposing of existing structures and the erection of temporary structures might be enough.

The current population of the US is almost 309 million. If 10% of them become infected, that’s 30.9 million. That’s 6.18 million requiring hospitalization. Those are the sort of numbers that the alarmists are offering. The reality is not that bad, because those cases won’t all occur at the same time. But the long-term picture is still gloomy; the current expectation is that even with all possible precautions, 25% of any given population will catch the virus over the next six months.

Six months is 26 fortnights. 25% divided by 26 is roughly 1% – certainly within the margin of error. But the cases won’t be evenly distributed; they will increase for a while, and then peak, and then die down. The peak might be as high as 5%. For the more heavily-populated northern hemisphere, that six months includes some spring, a whole summer, and some autumn – which is also good news. For those living in the Southern Hemisphere, though, we are entering our cold and flu season. Inevitably, both the number of confirmed cases and the number of people presenting as possible cases is going to explode here.

The other troubling number is that the number of confirmed cases in Australia is roughly doubling every five days. In six months, there are roughly 182 days – which is 36.5 lots of 5 days. Two to the power of 36.5 is 97,184,015,999 and a fraction. That’s only 3790 times our total estimated population – if we had only one confirmed case. We don’t; we have 160, of whom 26 have recovered and three have died, leaving 131 current cases.

You can see why the authorities here are pushing measures to contain the spread. Even reducing the rate of doubling to every six days or seven days has a massive impact due to the exponential growth involved. Six day doublings is only 30-and-a-fraction doublings, which still produces a monstrous number – but not as big a number as before. Seven days gives, as you might expect, 26 doublings, and two to the power of 26 is only 6,7108,864. Every increase from that point only lowers the total number of cases – both overall and that have to be coped with at any given moment.

It follows that even if your local authorities are not implementing emergency measures to achieve containment, you shouldn’t wait; you should prepare now and implement a considered stay-safe plan without waiting.

There’s a secondary consideration: Covid-19 is happening on top of all the usual things. There will be no fewer heart attacks or accidents or cancers because it is happening. That becomes a problem when the hospital bed, or hospital equipment, that would normally be available to treat your condition has been appropriated to care for someone suffering from acute Covid-19. Inevitably, the mortality rates from other conditions will rise because some of the health-care capacity of the existing system will have been diverted to the Coronavirus.

Once again, the reality is slightly better than this grim picture; there is always some slack built into the system for moments of peak demand. But part of the process of making private hospitals profitable and public hospitals affordable is to cut that slack to the bare minimum; so this is a very limited balm to spread on this problem.

Many forms of emergency are localized, and when that happens, additional capacity can be brought in from outside, or patients transferred elsewhere. This has enabled the slack in the system to be further reduced. Because of its international scope, that’s not a viable approach to Covid-19. That’s the grim reality being experienced in Italy at the moment., where patients have overflowed from the available capacity into field hospitals, and the mortality rate is skyrocketing from lack of equipment that could have saved some.

Rate of Serious Responses

There has been some suggestion today that the risk of serious health complications for the under-80s – that’s the vast majority of people – is 3%. I’ve also seen figures of 5% and 8% reported. The trend in reporting lately has been downward. Above the age of 80, the rates rise to 15% or more, and there is at least three times as much risk that death will result from such serious health conditions as there would be in a younger person.

Do whatever you can to avoid exposing the elderly to Covid-19, therefore.

Child Exposure

Initially, it was suggested that children were also at elevated risk. Their immune responses are still forming, after all, and they are well-known to be germ factories; if there’s anything going around, kids seem sure to catch it and pass it on. In part, that’s because they have no judgment – while a slight unease can feel like the end of the world, at least as often, enthusiasm makes them willing to forget and ignore feelings of ill-health. They are also less likely to wash their hands often enough, and more likely to touch hands to mouth or nose. In other words, to do all the things that you don’t want people to do under the current conditions.

To some extent, the urgency has gone out of this advice. Children are still a special problem, but not quite for the same reasons as were initially assumed. The indications are that they are less prone than adults to get seriously ill from Covid-19, but no more- or less-likely to catch it. And schools are natural mass-gatherings. Effectively, so are park and playground equipment. Consider both to be petri-dishes incubating whatever is going around; normally, that’s just a cold or flu. Right now, it’s more serious.

Therefore, the concern is not about the kids being at direct risk, but about them passing the disease on to someone of lower resilience.

Here in Australia, it had become a regular thing for preschools to visit nursing homes. Normally a brilliant idea, under current conditions, it’s one of the worst, and was the first activity curtailed here in response to the outbreak. The resumption of the practice will almost certainly be one of the last signals that the crisis is past. (That’s not meant to say that our government has gotten it right 100%, just that we’re batting above average when it comes to this crisis. It doesn’t forgive or make up for past lapses nor any current/future idiocy on the part of our elected officials).

Some people don’t understand these facts, and call for schools to be closed. That’s part of the playbook for dealing with an influenza pandemic, and it works because when it comes to influenza, children are super-spreaders. They’ll not only catch it, they’ll pass it on to someone else. Wherever schools have been closed in the current crisis, it’s because people have been treating Covid-19 like the flu – when it isn’t. There is presently no evidence that closing schools does anything whatsoever to contain the spread of the disease.

An exception has to be made for schools where a student or staff member have actually tested positive for Covid-19, and if the virus spreads far enough through a population, that will eventually be all or most of them. And Universities are not the same thing.

Of course, the other reason why most governments will be reluctant to close schools is that this automatically removes almost half the workforce, who then have to be home to care for the children. Child-care facilities, even if they were affordable, are no better than a school would be; they kind of defeat the purpose. Given that Covid-19 will already have economies under extreme pressure, dealing yet another body-blow is something that most governments will consider only reluctantly.

Mass gatherings

The most recent emergency measure here is a banning of unnecessary mass gatherings, which have been defined as more than 500 people. That’s a problematic number because our mass transit systems can carry that many aboard a single train at rush hour, and there can be thousands of people waiting on the train platform for their ride home at the end of the day. It’s not a problem of the same scale going the other way, because the numbers are dispersed over a much greater number of railroad stations and therefore platforms.

Our government has deliberately excluded train travel, for this reason. They are referring to sporting events and social events and cultural events. There are still some problems to be surmounted; the question of movie theaters, for example, where a premiere can pack in hundreds at a time and far more than 500 in a day – without time to disinfect the seats in between. Big businesses with more than 500 staff are also an uncertain proposition – which includes the Australian Government itself; there are about 5,000 staff in parliament house, and while they don’t routinely gather, the number of contacts is still significant.

Fortunately, these have been described as preemptive and preventative measures. They aren’t actually necessary here, yet – so there’s time to work out any bugs before they do become critical.

Sporting codes across the world are either suspending their 2020 competitions or competing behind locked gates. Conventions are being canceled. Broadway has closed. Everywhere you look, society is making it easier for you to do so. But these measures will do no good if patrons who would normally attend such activities simply gather to mourn the absence of their preferred pastime.

This is an area where there is no one-size-fits-all advice; it depends on the number of cases and the rate of spread and the estimated number of undiagnosed cases, all of which combine to determine the potential exposure of a group of size X. The one rule of thumb should be that if you don’t have to go somewhere where there are such crowds, you should not do so.

Smaller Gatherings & Events

These are currently unrestricted here. They are drastically restricted in Italy. The US is currently somewhere in between the two of us – but it’s probably closer to Italy in terms of the number of undiagnosed cases.

A Keep-yourself-safe plan

The advice being offered at the moment is very simple and sensible stuff.

Washing Hands

Wash with soap and water. You don’t need an anti-bacterial hand sanitizer, Covid-19 is a virus and won’t be affected. Wash frequently and thoroughly.

Zone of separation

Stand at least three feet away from a person who is sick to avoid being sprayed with liquid droplets from their bodies.

Self-isolate

Be prepared for the need to self-isolate without further warning. That means having 14 days worth of food and medication and other essentials on hand at all times. In particular, if you feel unwell, do not visit the elderly.

Face masks

If you are a member of a vulnerable group, or if it is confirmed that you have Covid-19, wear a surgical mask. If your job involves contact with a lot of other people, e.g. cashier, wear a surgical mask. Otherwise, don’t wear a mask; doing so only takes one away from someone who may need it more.

Consciously avoid touching your face.

Put a reminder on your hands – a fluorescent label or tag or something. Write the word “STOP!” on it in big black letters. Whenever it comes into view, you should glance at the label and be reminded – because it’s all too easy to get distracted and forget.

Save.

Especially if you’re a casual or part-time worker, or a recent hire, cut your spending to the bone until you have enough set aside that you can live on it for about three weeks, paying any bills that will be due in that time. Your income might disappear tomorrow, either directly (you or your boss gets sick) or indirectly through economic impact.

Spend

The effects of the Coronavirus outbreak on the global economy are only guesswork at the moment, but current expectations put the magnitude as roughly double that of the Global Financial Crisis. Yes, that bad. And that’s without fools making the problem worse.

To combat these economic impacts, governments are putting various stimulus packages in place to support their economies. The specifics vary from country to country, government to government, economy to economy; just as every country is different, so their exposure to the consequences will be different.

There is also an inherent inertia to stimulus packages. They take time to prepare and implement, and by the time you find out whether or not it has been enough, it may be too late for another.

In large part, these stimulus packages are designed to do two things: sustain the businesses that are impacted so that people have jobs to go back to when the crisis is over; and keep an economy ticking over, even if at a reduced level of activity, until a recovery can begin.

Part of protecting yourself from Covid-19 has to be doing your best to prevent damage to the essential economic infrastructure around you. And that means keeping the economy moving by spending what you can afford, taking into account the realities of freight and delivery. So as soon as you have the savings minimum in place (a moving target), spend every cent in excess of it that you can, and spend on local products as much as possible.

Casual workers are a problem that will be faced by a great many countries, and are one of many reasons why this economic emergency is not the same as the GFC. In Australia, 25% of the workforce are now casual labor, accruing no sick leave or other benefits; if they are required to self-isolate, there’s a huge economic problem. Because they can’t afford not to do so, they would probably work on – spreading Covid-19. There’s a great deal of uncertainty as to whether or not the current plans adequately address this problem. It’s a situation that will be replicated the world over; most countries have this problem to some extent. In the US, the percentage of casual labor is even higher at 30%, for example.

Right now, the world has a high fever, and it’s rising. Adding a recession to that won’t do anyone any good.

Avoid Panic Shopping

I said at the start, Don’t Panic.

Panic Shopping is a form of panic in which the victim assuages their jangled nerves by performing an unreasonable act of shopping. In Australia, we’ve seen shelves emptied of toilet paper (even though few victims of Covid-19 experience symptoms that would require unusual quantities), shelves emptied of hand sanitizer (more reasonable, but ordinary soap will work just as well), and mass buying of staples like rice and flour (month’s worth). You need to keep enough food for a fortnight’s isolation – that’s it.

Support others

If you suspect that someone around you – a friend, co-worker, or neighbor – is self-isolating, contemplate what you might be able to do to help them. Supplies of perishables – milk, bread, sugar, eggs – can go further than you think. Even simply inquiring as to their health through a closed door can have a tremendous positive impact on the psychological problems that result from self-isolation. Call people on the telephone. Interact with them over the internet. Do all the things that you would hope someone would do for you if you were the one isolating yourself.

Self-isolation in the modern age does not mean that you have to become a hermit.

Avoid perpetuating myths

…at least, myths about Covid-19. Squash misinformation whenever you come across it – but be aware that the information sources you are relying on may have dated; the impact that Covid-19 is having is constantly evolving, and the responses to it are also evolving in response. The content of this article was best advice on Saturday the 14th – it might be out of date by Monday March 16th, when it’s actually to be published.

Be friendly, supportive, and polite

Have you ever had to do two people’s jobs because someone was out sick? How about three people’s jobs? With unreasonable customers screaming at you because you were slow in wiping their nose and rolling out the red carpet? While you were worried about making ends meet because there weren’t enough customers?

Assume that everyone still on-the-job is operating under maximum stress and difficult circumstances as best they can, cut them as much slack as you can, and don’t be the unreasonable a**-hole in the picture. Do what you can to relieve some of that stress. It’s a good habit to get into, regardless of the circumstances.

And, should bad news come, don’t shoot the messenger and don’t shoot bystanders. There’s always someone whose life is worse than yours.

Minimize exposure

Avoid large crowds as much as you can. If you can’t avoid a crowd, take appropriate precautions while in that environment, like washing your hands before and after. Don’t shake hands with others. Avoid unnecessary contact. Don’t kiss strangers. Contain sneezes and coughs. If unwell, stay home – and avoid contact with the vulnerable, especially. If you need it, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Wash Everything You Buy (or cook it)

With the uncertainty over how effective the virus is at surviving on a surface, assume the worst. When you buy something, it will have been touched by at least one person (the stockist who put it on the shelf) and may have been handled by many. So wash the fruit and veg (DON’T use soap!), wipe the packets and plastic containers with a moist cloth and dry well, cook the meat well, and so on.

A Covid-19 Myth Or Two (or three, or four…) Jabbed

This section of the article has been excerpted into it’s own post – it was simply growing too quickly, and had reached the point where it needed to be out there on its own.

The Central Question: Should My Game Be Canceled?

Answering this question was the original motivation for publishing the article, and the advice within remains: three different ways of getting to the right answer to the question. Those techniques have been placed in their own standalone article.

PRINCIPAL SOURCES (in no particular order):

1. ABC-TV (Australia): Coronavirus symptoms explained – what happens when you get COVID-19 and how likely is a full recovery?
2. ABC-TV (Australia): Coronavirus FAQ: Frequently asked questions about COVID-19
3. Australian Government Dept Of Health: Coronavirus (COVID-19) web-page as retrieved 14th March 2020
4. KVIA.com: Coronavirus Outbreak Timeline Fast Facts
5. Facebook: Coronavirus Q&A with Dr Norman Swan
6. ABC 7 (New York): Busting COVID-19 Coronavirus myths: Facts from the Centers for Disease Control
7. ABC News (Channel 24, Australia): “The Virus”, broadcast March 8th, 2020
8. ABC 7 (New York): How is Coronavirus spread? Symptoms, prevention, and how to prepare for a COVID-19 outbreak in the US
9. Worldometer: Coronavirus Web-page
10. ABC News (Channel 24, Australia): Covid-19 Stimulus Package Review & Analysis with David Spears, broadcast March 12th, 2020
11. World Health Organization via New York State Senator Alessandra Biaggi (Twitter Account)
12. Dr Faheem Younus, MD, Chief of Infectious Diseases, University of Maryland UCH (Twitter Account)
13. ABC-TV (Australia): Fact Check Website

This article has now been split into three parts.

Part 1: Covid-19 Facts, Analysis, and Advice
Part 2: Busting Covid-19 Myths
Part 3: Should My Game Be Canceled?

Each part will link to the other two, and they will all be extended and updated as necessary.

Part 3: Should your next RPG Game-session be canceled because of Covid-19?

Having summarized just about all the available knowledge on the subject, we’re now in a position to consider the question originally posed: Should your RPG be canceled for a month or so?

There are multiple ways to analyze the current situation where you are in order to answer that question, hopefully with a fair degree of consistency between them. They rely on the facts and analysis already presented, and don’t rely on any of the myths. They do presume that you are following the advice given.

Rather than answering a definitive “yes” or “no”, let’s look at the conditions under which you should cancel:

1. Gaming At Home, and you are feeling unwell. Don’t take chances, self-isolate. That means the game should be canceled. And your friends warned that you may have already exposed them.
2. Gaming At Home, and one of your players is feeling unwell. This is a more difficult decision. If there’s any risk that the ill player has exposed anyone else in your group to the virus, the game should be canceled.
3. Gaming At Home, and someone started feeling unwell a couple of days after you last played: Absolutely cancel the game; the previous session almost probably took place while the ill person was infectious, assuming they have contracted Covid-19, and that means that everyone else at the table might be infectious but not yet experiencing symptoms right now. Respond accordingly.
4. Gaming At Home, and everyone is already suffering from presumed or confirmed cases: Why, you self-centered bastard! Don’t expose others by traveling to someone’s place to game and don’t require others to do so. Cancel that game!
5. Gaming At Home, and the entire city/country is in lock-down: Anyone contemplating gaming in this situation isn’t just self-centered, they are stupid. And a menace to the public health.
6. Gaming in public with more people than the current association limit: Stupid, stupid, stupid. Violating the limits of association for ‘frivolous’ reasons in this manner leaves you open to prosecution almost certainly, fines if you’re lucky, jail if you aren’t. Assuming that the cop you are endangering doesn’t solve the problem directly – if the association limit is 500 people, they probably won’t, if the limit is 5 or less then the odds go way up, because the limit would only be set that low (or lower) if the situation was truly dire. Of course, if you or one of your players is showing symptoms, all bets (and games) are off.
7. Gaming in public with 1/5th the current association limit or more, but less than the actual limit: I’ve chosen my wording very carefully on this one. The game store where I co-GM the Adventurer’s Club campaign usually has some sort of trading game tournament underway at the same time – twenty-plus tables with 4-5 people at each, and there used to be more until they moved to smaller (but more accessible) premises. That puts them at the bottom of this range. Frankly, this situation is more about the travel to and from the venue than anything else; if unnecessary travel is banned or advised against, then cancel. If not, and the venue isn’t providing hand-cleaning to everyone entering the premises, either take your own or relocate the game, or cancel. Finally, even if all the other conditions for a go-ahead have been met, if anyone’s unwell, cancel is the prudent course of action.
8. Gaming in public with less than 1/5th the current association limit: Take reasonable precautions – but game on! – unless someone is showing symptoms or has other reason to suspect possible infection.

In other words:

• DON’T break quarantine or isolation
• DON’T break limits of association
• DON’T put others in a position of violating restrictions
• DON’T put others at risk
• DO think of others
• DO protect yourself
• DO protect your friends
• DO look ahead

Looking Ahead

If things get as bad as they possibly might, the Italian solution might be the right one. Right now, no-one knows for certain. The time to start preparing for the worst case is now. The trigger for implementing your plans and preparations is the day that citizens are advised to avoid unnecessary travel, or even to avoid travel altogether. Very few countries are at that point yet, and some may never reach it. Others may implement the restriction by the back-door method of shutting down public transportation.

• Have a plan agreed upon with your players and friends.
• Establish channels of information.
• Investigate the option of virtual gaming in advance.
• Contemplate figuring out how to run your campaign by email, or by chat room.
• Plan for alternative venues, and for alternative digital venues.
• Make sure everyone knows, and can access, any software required. And any URLs required.
• Prepare any physical venue appropriately.
• Know whose responsibility it is to verify whether a game can go ahead or not.
• Know when the decision has to be made.
• Take responsibility. It’s your game.

I was already contemplating this much-larger-than-a-fill-in post when it became clear that the next part of the Sixes System would take longer to write than the available time.

So, when my free time was suddenly opened up by the cancellation of the Australian F1 Grand Prix, I took it as a sign…. Part 3 of the Sixes System, “Doing Things” will follow next week, I hope (and expect).

Because of the subject matter, and it’s urgency and relevance, I might post this early.

Addendum 15 March 2020:

This morning, as I was contemplating the question posed in the last line above, and whether I could make my conclusions any clearer, and before I’ve caught up to date with developments over the last 24 hours, a different way of looking at the question came to me, which provides the clearest guideline yet.

1. Count up the number of people who will normally be in attendance at your gaming venue. At home, that’s probably just you and your players; at an outside venue, it could be hundreds or thousands.
2. Subtract about 20% for people who will stay home because of the current situation.
3. Add an estimate of each unique individual that any of your players and GM will encounter on their trip to the gaming venue. Depending on the route followed and the means of transport, that might be a handful (travel by personal automobile or walk), dozens (travel by public bus), or over a hundred.
4. If there are going to be other people at the gaming venue, or that you will encounter in the course of normal activities like buying lunch, add in 10% of an estimated number of contacts for them, too.
5. Compare that result with the limits currently recommended for congregations. Where I am, that’s a limit of 500; at other places, it might be 5,000, or anything in between. If there are any reported cases in your country, state, or city, assume a figure of 5,000 in the absence of any guidance. Since we’re counting people encountered casually en route, and they aren’t double the limit.
6. If over the original limit – cancel. If over the elevated limit: cancel.
7. If anywhere close to the increased limit (above, say, 75% – cancel through prudence. If none of you are in the higher-risk categories, you might increase that to 85% of the limit. For each person in the higher-risk categories, drop it by 5%, or even 10%, depending on how cautious you want to be.
8. If more than about 10% of the limit, proceed – but with precautions.
9. Otherwise, go right ahead. Unless the travel itself is forbidden by your local authorities.

Using this test, let’s take my planned game for next week: 2 players plus myself. I don’t have to travel, so +0. One of my players has to catch two buses: figure a worst-case of about 20 people on each: +40. The other has to catch a train and a couple of buses: figure 250 for the train and 40 for the buses: +290. Getting lunch: 2 vendors, plus 10% of the number of customers they are likely to encounter in a day: +10% Î 2 Î 500 = +100. Total = 433. All three of us are in the high-risk group (two diabetics and one person around 65), so start with the 75% threshold and drop it by 15% to 60%. The current limit of congregations where I am is 500, which doubles to 1000 – 60% of which is 600. It’s safe for this game to go ahead – at least at the moment. Especially if I force the players to wash hands after buying lunch (and before eating it).

The week after is my superhero campaign. Four players, including both the players listed above. Another traveling by train (+100, these aren’t as packed as the other trains). The fourth travels with the second, so his encounters are already counted. Same venue, same lunchtime arrangements. 4+40+290+100=434, plus the lunchtime 100. This is getting close to the threshold of 600, but if the same limits still apply, this should still be fine – especially with the same requirement as above. However, elevated risk categories suggest an abundance of caution, so “should be fine” is probably a 50/50 proposition – with a bias toward prudence.

A week after that, the Adventurer’s Club campaign with the same players plus two more, and a public venue, normally with about 60 people present. One of these additional players takes the train (+200 people), but both the player who normally takes two buses to my place usually travels with myself and the sixth player (-40). Lunch probably increases in risk to 200 people, +100 over the previous figure. Figure that those 60 people have probably contacted (collectively) another 1200 discrete individuals in the course of their day – that’s another +120. Putting those together: 534+2+60+200-40+100+120 = 976. Unless the venue cancels its regular activities (removing those 60 people and their 1000 contacts), this is right at the limits of permissible risk. We should at least talk to the players about cancellation or relocation. Given that several participants are in the high or highest risk categories, it’s probably a washout.

Being Realistic with some Worst-Case projections

Sydney currently has a population of about three-and-a-half million. At last count, there were 112 known cases current in this state; I’ll assume that they are all here.

Number of current cases doubling every 5 days? That means that they are increasing by a factor of a touch under 1.15 per day. If you’re infectious for two days before developing symptoms, that’s 1.15 Î 1.15 = Î1.32. So 112 known cases means 148 people undiagnosed. It’s easy to postulate a worst-case situation in which there are ten times as many people carrying the disease as there are known cases, but the mathematics just doesn’t stack up; if that were the case, there would be virtually zero chance of not catching the virus over the next twenty days, and the country would be locked down like Italy. It’s not – yet.

We also know that in up to 20% of cases, people will experience no symptoms at all. That’s a times (100/80)^5 factor that we should also take into account. That works out to be a Î3.05 factor. And 3.05 Î 1.32 = 4.028.

Worst-case, then, there might be as many as four times as many infectious people out there as there are currently-active cases.

Next Weekend’s game

For Sydney, under the assumptions given, the projected number of infectious people, based on these simple calculations, is currently 448 people.

Given that those are yesterday’s numbers, and that they are doubling every five days at the moment, continuing with the worst-case calculations, next Saturday there will be Î2^(7/5) = ×2.64 cases. 448 Î 2.64 = 1182.

Even if NONE of these have self-isolated, the odds of encountering one of them are infinitesimal: 1182 / 3500000 = 0.03378%.

Most of us will encounter only 100 people, maybe 200 at most, in a day. If you work in a busy store as a cashier, you might get to 1000 encounters a day. To calculate the risk, we need to work on the part of the equation that reduces – that’s the chance of being safe. 100 – 0.03378 = 99.96622% per encounter.

0.9996622^100 = 0.966778 = 96.68% safe, 3.32% risk.
0.9996622^200 = 0.934661 = 93.47% safe, 6.53% risk.
0.9996622^1000 = 0.7133 = 71.33% safe, 28.67% risk.

A week from now, expect the number of hours a cashier can work to be restricted. Halve the number of contacts in a day, drop that 1000 to 500, and you greatly reduce the risks to us all:

0.9996622^500 = 0.84457 = 84.46% safe, 15.54% risk. Even that is higher than the government will probably be comfortable with, so there will be even tighter restrictions if current trends don’t improve.

But for most of us, a 3-to-7 percent risk? We might think about it, and then we’d probably take those odds – in a game. But this is real life, with no mulligans on your saving throw. Exercise appropriate prudence according to the situation around you.

The risk to next week’s game is – well, not negligible, but not substantial, either. And remember that all these numbers are the worst-case scenario.

A week later?

1182 Î 2.64 = 3121 infectious people. Out of 3.5 million, that’s 0.0891714% risk, or 99.911% safe – per daily encounter. (Remember, divide the estimated infectious by 4 to get the number of confirmed cases expected at this point; 3121 / 4 = about 780).

0.99911^100 = 0.9148 = 91.48% safe, 8.52% risk.
0.99911^200 = 0.8369 = 83.69% safe, 16.31% risk.
0.99911^1000 = 0.4105 = 41.05% safe, 58.95% risk.

If current trends continue, the risks will have become too high at this point for life as normal. Further restrictions on travel and association are virtually certain, as are the closure of non-essential businesses.

But the risks to Saturday Week’s game are – still not trivial, but not all that dangerous, either.

Two weeks from now?

Twenty days from now, the Adventurer’s Club campaign is due to continue. If cases double every 5 days, that’s 16 times the current number of cases – so 112 Î 16 = 1792. Four times that gives the number of infected people out there, worst-case: 7168.

7168 divided by the population of Sydney is 7168 / 3,500,000 = 0.002048, or a massive 0.2048%. That means that 99.7952% of the time, you will be fine going about your usual daily routine.

But:
0.997952^100 = 0.81464 = 81.464% safe, 19.536% risk.
0.997952^200 = 0.66364 = 66.364% safe, 33.636% risk.
0.997952^1000 = 0.12872 = 12.872% safe, 87.128% risk.

Those risks are clearly significant. Before this point is reached, I would expect significant restrictions on congregating and traveling to be put in place. In the worst-case scenario.

The Adventurer’s Club campaign is almost certainly going to be a casualty of the pandemic, at least for the time being. If current trends continue, and the worst-case materializes.

Applying these standards elsewhere

Some numbers will change when you’re looking at somewhere else. The number of confirmed cases, the size of the population, the estimated ratio of confirmed cases to infectious people, the number of encounters per day – these are all subject to local variations. I’ve given my calculations in such detail for two reasons: first so that you can copy them and do your own, relevant to your situation. Remember, worst-case means being pessimistic but not alarmist.

If you only have total numbers for your state, assign them proportionately by population to your city or town. For example, as I type this, Illinois has 32 confirmed cases and 92 test results pending. Worst-case scenario, all 92 come back positive, so that’s 124 cases. According to Wikipedia, Illinois has 12,419,000 people, with one major city (Chicago, obviously) and several smaller ones. If you are in Springfield, Illinois, population 114,694, your “share” of those cases will be 0.924% – call it 1.24 cases. Worst-case scenario, so let’s assume that you’ve got more than your share and bump that up to 3 by doubling it and rounding up.

Because of the problems described elsewhere in this article, I’m inclined to bump the ratio of infectious citizens to confirmed cases up by at least 50%, to 6. So that gives 18 infectious people theoretically loose on the streets of this small city.

18 / 114694 = 0.000157 = 0.0157%.

In a city this size, you might encounter 50 people on an excursion down to the local gaming store (assuming this city has one).

1 – 0.000157 = 0.999843.
0.999843^50 = 0.99218 = 99.218% safe, 0.782% risk.

Right now, gaming is as safe as it’s ever likely to get.

Three weeks from now, we’re talking about a 16-fold increase in the number of cases (worst-case scenario). The 18 people has become 288 people and the 0.0157% has become 0.0157 Î 16 = 0.2512%.

1 – 0.002512 = 0.997488.
0.997488^50 = 0.8818 = 88.18% safe, 11.82% risk.

The odds are still in your favor, but I’d start taking precautions.

Five days later, 0.2512% becomes 0.5024.%
1 – 0.005024 = 0.994976.
0.994976^50 = 0.7774 = 77.74% safe, 22.26% risk.

It hasn’t quite doubled, but it’s close enough to it that you would have to seriously consider canceling. And five days after that, if there’s another doubling, that’s about 44% risk, and there would be no question but to cancel. That’s a 20+10=30 days prediction – worst-case scenario.

An observation

The rapidity of change within the situation implied by a doubling every five days is absolutely massive. Public authorities can’t make policy based on the way things are right now – they have to assume that the information they have is already out of date. Instead, they have to make policy based on next week, and the week after, in an attempt to corral that increase and cut it down – massively. If it sometimes seems like the policies being put in place are premature, or a panic-based response, take that into account.

Why these calculations are totally bogus

There’s one absolutely massive factor that these calculations aren’t taking into account. As a result of policies now in place, whatever they might be and wherever you are, the number of encounters per day that you are likely to experience is almost certainly way down on the norm. As things grow worse – which they will, for a while yet – that number will further decline.

And that makes a huge difference.

0.999^1000 = 0.3677 = 36.77% safe.
0.999^500 = 0.6064 = 60.64% safe.
0.999^100 = 0.90479 = 90.479% safe.
0.999^50 = 0.9512 = 95.12% safe.
0.999^25 = 0.9753 = 97.53% safe.
0.999^20 = 0.98 = 98% safe.
0.999^10 = 0.9900045 = 99.00045% safe.

The more this number declines, the more that “doubling in five days” slows down. Modeling that is beyond my basic math; I can see how to do it, but not how to determine all the variables. But it would be a computer algorithm that takes each day’s result and uses it to calculate tomorrows’ result, and the result the day after, and so on, because the key variables would change on a daily basis.

This is why I kept on insisting that the projections were a worst-case scenario – because I knew that I was willfully ignoring a compensating factor that would make a BIG difference. Once again, the lesson from these projections is: Even the worst-case scenario looks scarier than it actually should be. Take appropriate precautions and obey the restrictions placed on movement and gathering in numbers, and DON’T PANIC.

PRINCIPAL SOURCES (in no particular order):

1. ABC-TV (Australia): Coronavirus symptoms explained – what happens when you get COVID-19 and how likely is a full recovery?
2. ABC-TV (Australia): Coronavirus FAQ: Frequently asked questions about COVID-19
3. Australian Government Dept Of Health: Coronavirus (COVID-19) web-page as retrieved 14th March 2020
4. KVIA.com: Coronavirus Outbreak Timeline Fast Facts
5. Facebook: Coronavirus Q&A with Dr Norman Swan
6. ABC 7 (New York): Busting COVID-19 Coronavirus myths: Facts from the Centers for Disease Control
7. ABC News (Channel 24, Australia): “The Virus”, broadcast March 8th, 2020
8. ABC 7 (New York): How is Coronavirus spread? Symptoms, prevention, and how to prepare for a COVID-19 outbreak in the US
9. Worldometer: Coronavirus Web-page
10. ABC News (Channel 24, Australia): Covid-19 Stimulus Package Review & Analysis with David Spears, broadcast March 12th, 2020
11. World Health Organization via New York State Senator Alessandra Biaggi (Twitter Account)
12. Dr Faheem Younus, MD, Chief of Infectious Diseases, University of Maryland UCH (Twitter Account)

0. Fundamentals (repeated for all posts:)

— The Sixes System has been used in my Dr Who campaign since September 2014, and has just come to a successful conclusion.

— Characters are constructed using a point-buy methodology with NPCs generatable using die rolls for speed.

— Success or Failure on tasks is determined by adding dice to a pool based on ability and circumstances which are then rolled against a target number determined by the GM.

Clarification
Some feedback I got from the previous part of the series said “some interesting ideas, like the Nimbleness/Intelligence thing. But it also leaves me wondering how you can have an Int-based character without an Int score.”

My reply: If you need to and can’t find a better general term, you could use “Intelligence” for the sixth stat. But there will usually be a better choice: Engineer, Detective, Problem-Solver, Archaeologist, Jet-jockey, Inventor, Science, or even Time Lord. And any of them will tell you more about the character than “Intelligence” does.

3. Skills

Skills define a character’s expertise and abilities. The breadth of what that encompasses means that there are a lot of rules relating to Skills.
 

1. Characters may spend as many Character Construction Points on skills as they have unspent.
2. Stats cost 2 Construction Points to buy to rank 1 and the one point to raise by 1 thereafter.
3. Characters may buy skills as hobbies (rank 0) for 1 point. It only costs 1 construction point to elevate a hobby to a full skill.
4. Players define their own character’s skills.
5. Skills include spells, super-powers, mutant abilities, etc, as appropriate. Where necessary, the effect should be described in both in-game and game-mechanical terms. Such descriptions should occupy no more than 1 line each. See sections also 13 and 19, and section 3.1 below, for guidelines.
6. When acting, Characters may divert “skill ranks” from a spell or power (reducing the ability to target/use a spell correctly) into greater levels of effect. Each capability of this type will have an irreducible base level of effect that must be approved by the GM. Capabilities with a better base level of effectiveness may incur additional character construction costs to (1) purchase and (2) improve. See section 3.1 in the discussion below for guidelines.
7. The GM must approve a character’s skills, and is free to require greater precision if that seems appropriate, or to reject a choice as being too narrow. These decisions must be justifiable in terms of the campaign genre.
8. Skills may be as broadly-defined as a player wishes provided that they do not encompass an entire profession, or as specific. Cultural and Social context thus defines the expected norm. Since the GM provides this cultural and social context through his campaign background, and furthermore interprets genre through that background, these should be considerations in determining whether a skills is too narrowly-drawn or too broad.
9. Skills are defined by their name. Skill names may be interpreted in any one of three different ways: (1) as a profession, encompassing everything that the practice of that profession uniquely demands; (2) as an action, in which case the name must be, or must contain, a verb; or (3) as a field of expertise, i.e. knowledge, which incorporates practical knowledge at one rank lower unless a character also has the appropriate practical skill.
10. As a rule of thumb, no one skill should encompass everything that the character does with the user-defined stat.
11. A character attempting a task for which they have no skill subtracts two dice from their pool.
12. A character with only a hobby only subtracts 1 dice.
13. A character with an appropriate skill adds 1 dice per rank in the skill.
14. Where a character has no specific skill that exactly describes (in general terms) what the character is attempting to do or know, but which comes close, the GM may designate the skill as “tangential” to the attempt. This adds no additional dice to the die pool, but avoids the subtractions described earlier.
15. Where a character has two or more skills that could apply to a situation, the character may add 1 temporary skill rank for each such skill. The GM is entitled to restrict this as he sees fit. That may include excluding certain skills, requiring those skills to have a minimum number of ranks, or any other restriction. He should be consistent in his approach, though exceptional circumstances may lead to exceptional rulings.
16. One skill that should be highlighted is the character’s primary attack skill, if any. Unlike most skills, compound terms may be entirely acceptable. For example, “Broadsword with medium shield” is a perfectly-reasonable skill.
17. Any other combat skills must have fewer ranks than the primary attack skill. A combat skill is defined as a skill that can be used to inflict damage on an enemy. Note that “damage” may have a broad interpretation, it is not necessarily restricted to physical harm.
18. Normal characters skills are capped at 4. Exceptional characters are capped at 6. Explicit GM permission and written justification, which must be approved by the GM, is required to exceed these caps.
19. Characters may take Handicaps to increase their Character Construction Points. A Handicap is a Skill that is reduced to negative ranks, i.e. below zero. Such handicaps are worth as many skill points as the negative ranks. Handicaps can only be reduced with GM permission; they are considered part of the character’s definition.
20. In play, a character may only improve a skill by one rank at a time without GM authorization. Essentially, the player will have to justify the change in terms of the concept that he sold to the GM in the first place. The GM may mandate a disadvantage or other penalty to compensate.

Designer’s Notes & Discussions: Skills

The Innovations

I hesitate to describe “choose your own skill definition” as am innovation since I used this as a feature of the Zener Gate system. However, this dispenses with the classification into broad, narrow, or specific and treats all skills as the same. I also want to note that skills should be interpreted as Holistic (see Precision vs Holistic Skill Interpretation).

Greater novelty is shown in the idea of including everything from spells to paranormal abilities into the skills structure. While this notion derived from the notion that all such abilities have an incorporated skill that defines how good the character is at using that ability and how successfully they can go beyond the normal restrictions that they or the rules have defined for that ability, it is important to note that in this game system, these have no other existence. A skill is an ability to do something that has been refined and improved through education, training, and practical experience – and that includes all those extraordinary abilities. Beyond that, it all comes down to genre limits and character concept.

Incorporation of “Handicaps” as negative skills is both a new concept and something that has antecedents ranging all the way back to the original Hero System, if not further. The concept that they are treated as “locked skills” is the new thought in this aspect of the game system. A number of similar treatments are contained in the game mechanics used for my superhero campaign, and have been since the 1990s.

Finally, the presence of a “define your own skills” mechanic in a game with at least one self-described stat choice makes this game system more responsive to character concept than just about anything else I’ve seen. That also skirts close to being an innovation – close enough to warrant mentioning, anyway.

Self-Defined Skill Choices

I want to quote a couple of the rules above as the starting point of this subsection:

Skills are defined by their name. Skill names may be interpreted in any one of three different ways: (1) as a profession, encompassing everything that the practice of that profession uniquely demands; (2) as an action, in which case the name must be, or must contain, a verb; or (3) as a field of expertise, i.e. knowledge, which incorporates practical knowledge at one rank lower unless a character also has the appropriate practical skill.

As a rule of thumb, no one skill should encompass everything that the character does with the user-defined stat.

I thought it might be helpful to discuss example skills that reflect each of these rules.

“Blacksmith” or “Blacksmithing” is clearly a profession, and is a perfectly satisfactory skill for anyone but a Blacksmith. If the character has listed “Blacksmith” as his sixth stat, he can’t have a skill of the same name – and no single skill is precise enough to distinguish his capabilities within his field. The best approach is to list all the sub-skills that a blacksmith might have – “Blacksmith: Design”, “Blacksmith: Metal Purification”, “Blacksmith: Metal Casting”, “Blacksmith: Metal Fabrication”, “Blacksmith: Horseshoeing”. “Blacksmith: Repair Metal Object”, “Blacksmith: Accountancy”, and so on. Then delete the word “Blacksmith”, if necessary, rearranging the sequence of words to make more sense; thus, this list becomes “Design, Metal Purification, Casting (Metal), Fabricate (Metal), Horseshoeing, Repair Metal Object, Accountancy,” etc. This breaks the profession down into its essential skills list, things that the character should reasonably expect to have at least one rank in. Another valid choice would be “Blacksmithing: History” which would become two skills, “History (Blacksmithing Tools & Techniques)” and “History (Blacksmithing Styles)” – though I would personally recommend to the player that “Metalwork Styles” might be a better definition, simply because it becomes clearer what the skill encompasses.

The above paragraph also contains examples of all three skill-name interpretations:

– “Accountancy” (or perhaps “Bookkeeping”) is a profession.
– Casting (Metal), Fabricate (Metal), and Repair Metal Object are clearly examples of actions, each containing a verb – casting, fabricate, and repair, respectively.
– The two history skills are clearly defined as Knowledge skills.

It’s generally fairly straightforward. But there can be traps for the unwary – and I’ve just demonstrated one of them without most people even noticing.

“Accountancy” can also be considered an area of Knowledge, with both a theoretical branch and a practical branch. Simply taking “Accountancy” means that the character has studied the theory and law of accountancy, which implies the practical skill of “Applied Accountancy” at a rank one lower – unless the character buys it explicitly.

What the character really wanted was that practical skill – perhaps better described as Bookkeeping. All of the above still applies, but this time, the theory of bookkeeping – why it works – is inherently relevant; you can’t perform it by rote without slowly absorbing and understanding the principles behind it, at least in its basic and most common forms.

This shows both the subtleties and complexities with which the GM must grapple, but it only has to happen once, during character generation. The speed in play, responsiveness, and flexibility of the game system makes it a price worth paying.

Spells, Powers, and Abilities

Line of thought #1:

When you attack with a weapon, there’s a skill roll to see if you connect and a game mechanic for determining the damage that you do. The critical requirement is the use of a piece of equipment, to wit, a weapon.

When you attack with your bare hands, there’s a skill roll to see if you connect and a game mechanic for determining the damage that you do. If you do not have an appropriate combat skill, everything remains the same, but you lose some dice from the die pool.

When you attack with a spell or an ability, it works exactly the same way. So why not list spells and abilities as skills, the same as either a bare-hands or weapon usage skill?

Line of thought #2:

When you attempt to force open a door (for example), you make a roll with a die pool in an attempt to reach a target number that has been set by the GM. The number of dice in that pool derive from the Stat (probably STR, possibly the self-defined stat) that you are using and the Purpose with which you are using it (probably Attack). The size of that die pool is modified by any relevant skill you might have (or the absence thereof). You may also get some additional dice in the pool from a crowbar or other tool (see equipment, below).

When you attempt to force open a door using Telekinesis, you make a roll with a die pool in an attempt to reach the target number that has been set by the GM. The number of dice in that pool derive from the Stat (probably “Psionic” in the 6th slot) and the Purpose with which you are using it (probably Attack). Instead of additional dice from equipment, you get additional dice from having a genuine skill called Telekinesis. Sound familiar?

When you attempt the same trick using a Telekinesis spell, the only real difference is that your stat is probably “Spellcasting” or “Magic” or some-such, still in the sixth user-defined slot. That’s the only difference.

Those lines of thought explain how powers and abilities of all types are implemented within the game system. If the game mechanisms are the same, why should such abilities be handled any differently by the system?

Similarities and Differences between Spells, Powers, and Abilities

Is a Beam Of Light, defined as a “Blinding light so bright that it can cause unconsciousness” the same thing as a Stun Ray, defined as an “Energy beam that causes unconsciousness”?

The game mechanics are exactly the same, but that doesn’t make the two abilities the same. Your target might have a force field that prevents stunning attacks and other physical harm. That would stop the Stun Ray but not the Blinding Light. At the same time, the target might have a smoke grenade (or equivalent), which would interfere with the Blinding Light – but have no discernible effect on a Stun Ray.



Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

When it comes to the use of powers, spells, and special abilities, the GM has to determine what happens, guided by – in sequence – the name and narrative description; the game mechanics description; and the basic game mechanics.

That gives an extraordinary capacity for uniqueness to the system. I expect players to initially simply copy the vernacular and descriptions from some other game system with which they are familiar, but that won’t last.

The Effect of Spell Diversity

It may be pointing out the obvious, but there is a reasonable correlation between “skill” in a spell and it’s effectiveness. Having more ranks means that more difficult tasks or targeting can be undertaken, and also means that more ranks can be diverted to enhanced levels of effect without compromising the ability to use the spell.

The typical D&D Mage gains access to an average of 39 spells every 2 levels – call it 20 spells a level – and that’s not counting the 19 cantrips (3.x). It’s rare for a mage to actually acquire anywhere near that many – my experience suggests that at high levels, a mage might know up to 75% of the available spells, at mid-level, that’s more like 50% (and there are fewer spell levels to which the mage has access), and at lower levels, 30% is doing well, and 25% is more common.

Let’s divide the spells, including the cantrips into three groups: 0th to 3rd level, 4th to 6th level, and 7th to 9th level. That gives us 150, 127, and 94, respectively, in terms of availability. Applying the percentage estimates gives:

Low Level: 25% of 150 = 38
Mid Level: 50% of 150 = 75; 25% of 127 = 32; total 107, increase from low-level of 107-38=69.
High Level: 75% of 150 = 113; 50% of 127 = 64; 25% of 94 = 24; total 201, increase from mid-level of 94.

Let’s further assume that half these spells are just improved versions of spells the character already has access to, conflating these similar spells. That gives 19, 53, and 101 spells, respectively.

At one rank in each, under the sixes game system, that’s 19 skill points, 53 skill points, and 101 skill points. Typically a beginning character, even an exceptional one, will have about 30-50 character construction points to spend on skills and equipment; 19 chews up a considerable number of those. By mid-level, you might have a dozen adventures under your belt, earning an average of perhaps 7 construction points each – that’s 84 in total, under estimates that are fairly generous. From that 84, some will have been spent improving stats, some will definitely have been spent improving non-spell skills, and some will have been invested in improved skill in the spells the character already knows. That doesn’t leave a lot – perhaps 20 – to cover the 69 needed for additional spells. The gap only gets bigger with high-level characters.

And that’s only pushing the existing spells by a couple of ranks, nowhere near the six maximum permitted by the rules.

Too few points, too many things to spend them on – that’s a recipe for individuality.

There’s a feedback loop: things that the character finds useful, he will sink points into. The more points that have been invested in something, the more flexible and useful it becomes. The more flexible and powerful an ability is, the more it will be a first resort – in other words, the more the character will find that ability to be useful. You can start with 10 identical characters and each will find his own M.O. and improve different things by different degrees. Some may diversify, becoming a jack-of-many-trades; others will narrow their focus and become experts in a narrower field. This is especially true if they are adventuring together, because the next character over already has the specialist skills needed to handle certain problems; this character will automatically get “more bang for his buck” by focusing his efforts elsewhere.

None of this is accidental.

3.1 Effectiveness Levels

As a rule of thumb, each spell or ability rank will translate into a d6 of effectiveness or less. So a knife or a sword will cost 1 point, a great-sword having 2 dice of effect will cost 2 points, a large-caliber pistol having 3 dice of effect will cost 3 points, a large-caliber rifle will have 4 dice of effect and cost 4 points, 5 points gets you a grenade, and 6 gets you a ww2 mortar shell, several sticks of dynamite, etc. 7 would be a world-war-two bomb with several hundred pounds of high explosive, 8 would be a small a-bomb, 9 gets you a thermonuke, and 10 would be a doomsday weapon. That’s all on the personal scale, the effect on the individual; vehicles handle things differently, and so do starships. Of course, since 1 rank costs 1 point once the initial purchase to 0 ranks has been made, these translate directly into ranks in a skill. The biggest thing that’s man-portable here is the mortar, and that’s only because we’ve developed shoulder-mounted missiles that do equivalent damage.

Any of the above can kill you, but the odds go up rapidly with increasing ranks of effect. Still, most things are survivable (under the right conditions) until you get to the 6-ranks level – then, the only survival option is to be elsewhere or prevent it going off somehow.

This same scale is intended to apply to everything (again, talking at a character level). If you’re using TK, then 1 rank gets you “enough TK to have 1 dice of effect under normal conditions and circumstances”, two ranks gets you 2 dice of effect, and so on.

Range is another factor. 1 rank is close-quarters, 2 ranks is arm’s reach, 3 ranks is maybe 100 meters (use feet if you’re more familiar with them even though 100 feet is nothing like 100 meters), 4 ranks is perhaps 1500m (or feet), 5 ranks and you’re measuring in kilometers or miles, and on up from there.

Except that increasing the range for the base level of a power, or increasing the ranks of effect for that matter, sucks ranks out of the skill base. A base level with 2 dice of effect and 3 ranks of range – a sniper rifle, say, without enhanced sights – extracts an additional 1 rank and 2 ranks, respectively, for a total of 3. This “penalty” is added to the cost of rank 0 in the ability – so rank 0 now costs 3 skill points, rank 1 costs 1 more skill point, and so on.

If and when advancement means that the six-rank limit is violated, this cost is also added to the price of each additional rank, and it may be necessary (it usually will be) to get GM approval.

To continue the sniper rifle-equivalent example, once the character has purchased 3 ranks in the “skill”, he is theoretically at the 6-rank limit. However, he still does not have 6 ranks in the “skill” itself, which is the hard limit – so he can continue to improve it. Each increase in rank will now cost +3 points, however – so rank 4 costs 4 points, and so will ranks 5 and 6.

Instead of 7 points to reach rank 6, this ability would cost 16 points – more than double.

I tried putting this in game mechanics with the rest of the skills rules; it was just confusing. So I decided to violate my own post architecture and put the commentary/explanation first, foregoing the rule. In the standalone rules compilation, the above will be translated into game rules.

4. Equipment

The possession of any skill implies access to the normal equipment required. That means that very few rules are required to handle equipment.
 

1. Most equipment simple adds or subtracts ranks from a skill that uses the equipment.
   • Superior equipment/tools add +2 to +4 ranks. NB: +3 and +4 are only available through “extra-normal” means).
   • Good equipment/tools add +1 rank.
   • Standard equipment adds 0 ranks and is presumed to have been acquired in the course of gaining the skill that uses it. This presumption means that it doesn’t have to be listed – but there are exceptions discussed in 4.1 through 4.7, below.
   • Poor equipment/tools costs -1 rank.
   • Substandard equipment costs -2 ranks.
   • Inferior or Improvised Equipment costs -3 ranks.
   • Cursed Equipment costs -4 ranks and is only available through “extra-normal” means.
2. Poor equipment cannot reduce skill ranks below 1 if the character has 1 or more ranks in the skill.
3. Good equipment cannot increase skill ranks higher than 6 except through GM permission and exceptional circumstances. However, unused ranks can be taken into account by the GM in setting target numbers or to otherwise offset penalties that might apply; this is a circumstantial factor for the GM to take into account.
4. Good equipment cannot compensate for a handicap to anything better than a hobbyist standard of ability (0 ranks). Unused equipment ranks cannot be used to offset penalties elsewhere. Having better equipment than skill and training warrant is useful up to a point, but after a while it becomes sheer affectation.
5. “Extra-normal” equipment may violate the above restrictions at the GM’s discretion. Such equipment should always be central to the immediate plot.
6. If the character doesn’t have the equipment that is normally assumed to come with a skill, in addition to any other penalties accruing through the rules, the GM can reduce the primary die pool of the character by 2 for any rule requiring that equipment.
7. Some equipment is “demanding” in that it can only be used at less than its potential if you do not meet the required skill minimum. An unskilled driver can essentially learn to drive a formula-1 car at a fraction of its capabilities (it may take them a dozen attempts to actually get it moving without stalling, however). Only if you have the minimum skill level that the vehicle requires can you even get close to it’s limits. Similarly, certain weapons are “demanding”, sacrificing accuracy for power – until you become sufficiently skilled in their use. Each rank in skill required equals one rank of “demanding”.
8. “Demanding” equipment may also require a specific Stat to have a value greater than 10 for the effective use of the equipment. Each +1 to the Stat minimum over 10 is one rank of “demanding”.
9. “Demanding” equipment may also require the character to have a skill in using this specific piece of equipment rather than a more general skill. This is worth a single point in “demanding”.
10. “Demanding” ranks can be used to offset additional base effect limits. This increases the rank at which the increase in cost takes effect, but does NOT alter the amount of the increase. See 3.1 above.
11. The cost of equipment equals the number of ranks of benefit that it provides, plus any extra ranks required to meet the base description (refer 3.1) in either range or level of effect, less any unused ranks in “demanding”.

4.1 Magical Gear

Any equipment or tools can be designated “magical”, explicitly “stating” how the benefit is achieved, and that wards and protections against magic are effective against this particular equipment. Magical equipment may bypass some ‘mundane’ protections or reduce their effectiveness.

Magical equipment can contain one or more spells. The maximum rank in beneficial or nominally advantageous spells that can be contained is equal to the ranks that the equipment confers. The base cost of a spell is the number of ranks in the spell, plus one.

1. If the spell is self-recharging, +1 point.
2. If the spell can be replaced with a different spell by the user (Variable spell), +1 point.
3. If the character is required to know the spell, -1 point.
4. If the spell is triggered automatically or at will, +2 points. If it requires a spoken command word or a gesture, +1 point. If it has a more complex activation procedure that will take a character’s full turn, +0 points.
5. If the item already has a spell incorporated that is not to be replaced by this spell: +1 per additional spell.
6. If the spell can be used an unlimited number of times per day, +3 points. If it is restricted to the number of ranks conferred by the equipment per day, +2 points. If it can be cast only once per day, +1 point. If it can only be used once in a longer period or once only, and is not self-recharging, -1. Anything else: +0.

For example, as explained in 3.1 above, a standard broadsword costs 0 points but would only have 1 rank of effect. To fully meet the description of the item, it must have an additional rank in range (to arm’s length) and an additional level of effect, a total of two ranks of improvement. Thus, the cost of a non-magical broadsword is Quality+2 points.

It’s not reasonable to impose a STR minimum or DEX minimum in excess of 10, and the character might not have DEX anyway – this is a common weapon in its era and genre. So there can be no reasonable “difficult” modifier for stats.

This ubiquitousness also restricts the other major form of “demanding” on offer – a skill minimum – as the GM makes clear that he won’t accept a rank requirement of more than 1 to use the weapon. That’s “Demanding -1”, though, which is better than nothing, and reduces the cost to Quality+1 point.

The third avenue of “demanding” would mandate a named piece of equipment and a specific skill in using this equipment rather than the general “broadsword” or even more general “melee combat”.

Since the character intends this to be a magical weapon, this is tempting, but it would also restrict his options if this weapon was unavailable for some reason. The situation is closely-enough balanced that some players would choose the additional rank of “demanding” and the lower cost, while others would not.

For the sake of the example, we will say no, and keep the price to Quality+1. Next, the character chooses the quality of item; since this is not D&D, in which magical swords are next to unbreakable, the character decides to limit his risk and go for quality +2 ranks, a total cost of 3.

This brings the total ranks of the sword to 3 – the base 1 and the +2. So the sword, being Magical, can contain spells totaling three ranks. The character decides to choose one rank 2 ability and one rank 1. For the rank 2 ability, he chooses “Heal, command word, self-recharging, 3 times per day, self only.” For the rank 1 ability, he chooses “Mend, automatically activated, self-recharging, 3 times per day, self (magical broadsword) only.”

Heal: Rank 2=2+1=3 points; command word=+1; self-recharging=+1; 3 times per day=+2; total cost = 7.

Mend: Rank 1=1+1=2 points; automatic activation (damage to weapon (self))=+2; self-recharging=+1; 3 times per day=+2; one spell already in the item=+1; total cost = 8.

This leaves only the “self only” restriction, which is not listed above on the standard list of price modifiers. The player tries to convince the GM that it’s worth a -2, but the GM stands firm and lists it as a -1 cost modifier. However, he offers the player a deal: if the one set of activations covers both spells, he’ll consider that worth another -1 each. This would mean that the sword can heal itself or its wielder, once per day, and – given the activation methods, the sword will take care of itself first and it’s wielder as an afterthought. While the player dislikes the restriction from a purely tactical perspective, he likes the amount of character it gives the weapon. So he accepts the devil’s bargain offered by the GM, but tries to argue that this restriction should be worth -2 points instead of -1. The GM listens, then again offers a compromise bargain: -2 to the Heal spell, because it might not be available at all if the weapon is badly damaged. Expecting the GM to again stand firm, the player accepts the offer. That gives him a 3-point reduction in the cost of the Heal spell, and a 2-point reduction in the cost of the Mend spell, for 4 and 6 points, respectively.

The final description of the sword now reads:

3 Broadsword, magical +2 skill, 2 effect, range: arms reach, difficult: 1 rank rqd.
    4 Heal, 2 ranks, command word, self-recharging, 3 times per day*, wielder only.
    6 Mend, 1 rank, automatic, self-recharging, 3 times per day*, self only.
        * activation limit covers both spells

‘Molthar’ is a typical broadsword with red-leather handle and round guard. If it is damaged, the pieces will fly back together and the sword reform. It can also be ordered to heal it’s wielder. ‘Molthar’ looks after itself first and its’ wielder second, and has the personality of a crotchety old man, reluctant to get up in the mornings, needing to take naps regularly, and bone lazy the rest of the time. [Character name] needs to talk to it for at least a round before it is willing to ‘get with the program’ at such times. He also imagines that ‘Molthar’ talks back to him in his head if he speaks aloud, maintaining a running commentary on his owner’s faults, the current situation, and his opinions in general, and won’t listen to anyone who tells him otherwise.

The GM chides the player on being overly fulsome in his narrative description – easily twice the three hand-written lines allowed – but approves the weapon for use.

4.2 Hi-tech & Sci-Fi Stuff

In terms of game mechanics, this works exactly the same as Magical Gear. What it can do is sometimes a little more nebulous; the GM should continually revise his estimates of what a “Gadget” can do based on the needs of the plot, the player’s ingenuity in using what he’s got, and the cost paid. Many things will function “at the speed of plot” and in accordance with the “rule of cool” – within reasonable limits.

4.3 Vehicles

Dice of effect in vehicles can be used in five ways (not all simultaneously, thank goodness!); Speed, Acceleration (to top speed), Handling, Load, and Stopping. Each of these has 1 base rank at no cost. Specifications can impose modifiers to these actions; increasing one costs 1 point, decreasing one costs -1 point. In addition, each vehicle has “controllable effect” which is purchased like any other ranks of effect in other gadgets; this can be applied to any ONE of these four criteria at any one time. The rest are maintained at the base levels. “Load” represents the vehicle’s ability to carry a load.

Weapons and Armor are “extras”, that is, they start at 0, but they are common add-ons. In addition, the vehicle designer must spend points according to the top speed of the vehicle.

When operating a vehicle, in most cases, the GM will focus on navigation, or the environment through which travel is taking place, or simply hand-wave the entire journey. Most vehicles will operate at the speed of plot, within reason. But there may be times when more substantial determinations are required.

If the character decides to act principally on the current Speed of the vehicle that means that his priority is maintaining the current speed and operating the vehicle in a safe manner. The “controllable effect” ranks are applied as extra dice to the relevant driving skill, as is the modified base ranking in the four ‘stats’. The GM sets a target as usual (still to be covered) and if the character beats it, he can increase or decrease the speed as he sees fit; the GM interprets the results to decide how much or how little the speed changes. He then compares the Base Speed given above with the other functions and if they are going to be needed in the ensuing Round. If they are, he notes the difference in base levels and recalculates the success without the difference in the best and worst die results, in that order, against the same target.

I appreciate that’s not terribly clear, so let me clarify with a theoretical example or two.

Let’s say that a vehicle has speed 2, acceleration 1, stopping -1, handling -1, and load 2. It has three ‘controllable effect’ dice as well. From the Stat and Purpose, the character gets 8 dice, and from his ‘driving’ skill, 2 more.

The vehicle is proceeding at high speed, weaving in and out of traffic. The Character has to make a driving roll not to get cut off and be forced to slow down, so his focus is on speed. That adds 2 more base dice and three controllable effect dice, for a total of 15.

The car is big and doesn’t handle very well, and the conditions are clear; the GM sets a target of 39 and because of the heavy traffic, requires 3 sixes. The character rolls 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, a total of 44. What’s more (despite appearances), the character has achieved his target number of sixes – two of them directly, and the third by compounding the three fives and both fours. So he has succeeded in keeping his speed up.

However, he’s weaving in and out of traffic, which the GM feels will require a handling check. Disregarding the three effect dice and 2 speed dice gives 5 dice off. The -1 to handling removes a sixth. Alternating between the high and low ends, starting with the high, the dice previously rolled are excluded – that’s the 6, a 1, the second six, the second 1, a five, and a third one, and leaves 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, for a total of 29. Fortunately, the number of sixes requirement doesn’t stand, but the character is 10 points short of the target, so he has hit something in the course of his maneuvering. Since this hasn’t cost speed, it’s not a stationary object; it’s most likely that cars have been hit and possibly spun around.

The GM decides that two cars and another object have been struck in one major collision and two smaller ones, doing (respectively) 6, 3, and 1 dice of effect to the PC’s car. Using random rolls without a table and proceeding by instinct, he announces that one car has been spun around, damaging the handling of the car still further, a second hit has taken off the bumper and forced another car to brake suddenly to avoid hitting it, causing a possible pile-up; and the minor collision is rear-ending a police car, damaging the radiator and possibly the engine.

Having split up the dice of effect, the GM rolls for each of the impacts and determines the damage done to the vehicle being pushed way beyond its safe limits, given the conditions.. He’s clearly thinking Smokey And The Bandit or the car chase scene from The Blues Brothers. But going any further is beyond the scope of this example.

Compare that with the outcome with the same rolls but in a sports car:

The vehicle has speed 3, acceleration 2, stopping 1, handling 2, and load -3. It has three ‘controllable effect’ dice as well. From the Stat and Purpose, the character gets 8 dice, and from his ‘driving’ skill, 2 more.

The driver makes Speed the focus of his action, as before. That adds 3 more base dice and three controllable effect dice, for a total of 16 (one more).

The car is small and nimble and conditions are good; the GM sets a target of 39 and because of the heavy traffic, requires 3 sixes. The character rolls 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, a total of 50 – and three sixes outright. So he has succeeded in keeping his speed up.

To the handling check: Disregarding the three effect dice and 3 speed dice gives 6 dice off. Handling 2 puts two of them back, a net loss of 4 dice. Alternating between the high and low ends, starting with the high, the dice previously rolled are excluded – that’s the 6, a 1, the second six, and the second 1, leaving 6, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, for a total of 41, two better than the target.

This is what this type of car is built for! It dodges in and out of tiny little holes in the traffic like they were custom-fitted.

Environment
The GM may add additional costs to reflect unusual operating environments.
Surface only = 0 points; submersible or in the air = 1 point, submarines and extreme altitude aircraft (above 35000 feet/ 6.6 miles / 10.7 km high i.e. above the cruising altitude of a 747) = 2 points, near-earth = 3 points, permanently submerged = 3 points, local planets = 4 points, and so on.

The presumption is that these are traversible in a “reasonable” time-frame, but “reasonable” is in inverted commas for a reason. A “reasonable” trip to the outer planets takes years. If the vehicle can go faster than that, the GM should increase the cost. Each additional point should increase the speed at least 5-fold (except the first, which is only 3-fold), so we’re talking about a significant increase in pace.

Automobiles
Example: Ordinary Cars in the 50s typically maxed out somewhere in the vicinity of 100mph (161 km/h). If that’s our baseline, then +1 points would get a car that operated at between 100mph and 300mph (formula one cars and elite racing motorbikes). +2 points gets us into the territory world land speed record attempts (1500mph – almost Mach 2). +3 points takes us way beyond the known limits of mechanical systems (4500mph, Mach 9.855), +4 points takes us beyond even that. The current world land speed record is 763.035 mph, to put these speeds into context.

But in the 2020s, you can get ‘production’ sports cars that rival formula one cars, and a standard production car costing around $20,000 US new will get closer to 160mph (about 260km/h) at top speed. Reflecting the limits of mechanical systems and the efforts of rule-makers to contain burgeoning speeds (and safety risks), formula 1 cars aren’t going much faster in a straight line, but go around corners enormously faster than they could in the 50s. The net effect, according to one set of calculations, is that the 1955 cars were only 10% as fast as the 2017 cars, and they have only gotten faster since. Part of that increase is the result of building down to the race limits – f1 cars at one point were designed to last for two hours or 300 km, whichever came first! – and then had to be completely rebuilt. Recent changes to the rules have forced many key components to last for multiple races and qualifying and practice sessions, by limiting the number of units that can be used in the course of a season, so this is only partially true these days.

Aircraft
These speeds are also not that far out of the ballpark for propeller-driven aircraft, which have a maximum service ceiling somewhere in the vicinity of 60,000 feet. In 1912, the 100mph limit was broken for the first time; in 1918, the record was raised to 163 mph, and a year later, to 191.1. Neither of those last two records are officially recognized though; so for that we have to wait until 1920, when the record officially goes up to 191.9. The 200mph mark is broken in 1921, the 300mph mark in 1928, and the 400mph mark in 1931. The record for a propeller driven aircraft was raised a number of times through the years that followed until a new mark was set in 1939 of 469.220mph – and then the jets took over. It would not be until 1960, more than 20 years later, that this achievement would be bettered in a propeller-driven aircraft – 541.45 mph in level, controlled flight.

Let’s put those numbers in perspective: cruising speed for a modern aircraft is likely to be around the 250-300mph mark. +1 points covers all propeller-driven aircraft. It also covers all 747s and similar aircraft. To go supersonic is +2 points, and covers all aircraft up to about Mach 5. Faster than this are Hypersonic aircraft, like the Lockheed X-17. All told, and not counting Spaceplanes, there are 8 hypersonic aircraft models, and 19 more in development. These cost 3 points. Four points would cover everything from Mach 25 to Mach 125 – speeds at which Mach numbers are actually irrelevant. That’s fairly close to the highest speed ever achieved by a manned earth vehicle – Apollo 10 when it orbited the moon.

Spacecraft
But you wouldn’t use those speeds for space vehicles. The baseline here is probably the Atlas rockets used by project Gemini – 6,700 mph – though it’s more normal to use speeds per second and kilometers which gives a nice, neat 3. +1 points gets you triple that, or about 9 kps, or 20,000mph. +2 points is 45 kps, or 100,000 mph. +3 points is 225 kps or 500,000 mph – or 0.075% of the speed of light.

Starships
Starships and other interstellar craft therefore require a new scale: let’s pick 1C for the baseline. 1 point gets us 3C; 2 points gets us 15C; 3 points is 75C; 4 points is 375C; and 5 points is 1875C.

Again, we need to put those numbers into perspective. Alpha Centauri is 4.1 light years away. To get there, and ignoring the need to accelerate and decelerate, 3C is almost exactly 500 days. 15C is therefore 100 days; 75C is 20 days; and 375C is 4 days. 1875C is a little over 19 hours. 36 days is how long it took Christopher Columbus to reach the Bahamas in 1492. That time-span comfortably in the 3-point range.

Sailing Ships
For sailing ships, it’s probably more reasonable to pick a top speed and work backwards. We aren’t talking about modern liners or warships here; these are olde-time vessels of canvas and wood and the occasional nail. Let’s say that the fastest modern racing yacht is a 5-point affair and see where it gets us, working backwards.

According to Google, In November 2012, the Vestas Sailrocket 2 was clocked at an astonishing 59.23 knots (68.1mph), smashing the previous Speed Sailing record by 4.1mph. Six days later, and it broke the record again, clocking 65.45 knots. Let’s assume that this is not the absolute limit, but it’s getting close to it, and set an absolute limit of 75 knots. One glance at the opening paragraph of the Starships section tells the story: Like most of the other land vehicles, we have a 3-point scale, and 3 points gets you speeds up to 75 knots. 2 points therefore gets you speeds of from 3 to 15 knots. This comfortably encompasses 17th century sailing ships (4-6 knots) all the way through to modern container ships (12 knots). It’s quite possibly too broad a scale – but the difference (a point or two) isn’t worth fussing about.

Military Warships
Introducing military vessels complicates matters because they vary in size and weight so much. It’s hard to pick a baseline, and one or two points is almost certain to cover everything there is. It’s probably more important to scale their displacement tonnage and assume that the speed costs are all 1 or maybe 2.

But that brings me to weapons.

4.4 Melee Weapons (M)

Melee weapons generally do 1-4 dice of effect. They can have ranges of 1-3 points, as described earlier (see 3.1 and the example earlier). A critical hit in combat will multiply the dice of effect.

4.5 Ranged Weapons (R)

Excluding firearms, you’re looking at 1 dice of effect for everything that’s not a siege engine. Those are up around the 4-5 dice of effect. Maybe even 6 for a really big one.

Accuracy is far more important with ranged weapons; it can be almost impossible to hit the broad side of a barn – if that barn is far enough away, of course!

0-50m = no loss
51-150m = 1 additional six required
151-750m = 2 additional sixes required
750+ m = 3 additional sixes required

(this may not mean much until we get to the combat section, but the “fundamentals” at the top of the post should give you a clue).

4.6 Firearms (F)

Firearms don’t rely on muscle power to launch a projectile; they use a chemical reaction. That gives the relatively low-mass bullet a relatively enormous velocity, at least when it leaves the muzzle; at a range of 500m (assuming your weapon can shoot that far), it will have lost roughly 1/2 it’s velocity, and will be down to 1/4 of it’s kinetic energy. That’s 1/4 of the damage potential. If you fire straight up, you’ll lose energy faster due to the force of gravity – but not a lot faster.

In it’s own way, the rough equality is a godsend, because it means that you can more or less aim for where you want to hit; if there was a significant difference, due to atmospheric density or a different gravity field, the accuracy would vary with the angle of elevation of the weapon, and you would need to make a significantly different correction for targets that were higher than ones that were lower.

The system makes the assumption that all firearms are optimized around a particular maximum range dictated by the ammunition, and that within that range there’s no range effect to worry about. Outside that range, you’ll lose a dice of effect against targets of triple the range of effect; beyond that, you’ll lose two dice of effect, but by this point, accuracy is by far your bigger concern.

0-100m = no loss
101-300m = 1 additional six required
301-1000m = 2 additional sixes required
1001+m = 3 additional sixes required

(Same comments as at the end of the section on ranged weapons).

4.7 Bigger (Heavy) Weapons (H)

The simplest way to construct vehicles in a game system is to construct them as characters and then vary the scales. Instead of referring to how much a character can carry, the STR value now relates to the amount that a vehicle can carry in it’s holds (or in the boot or back tray or whatever’s appropriate).

This system doesn’t go quite that far, but it does state explicitly that different vehicle types have different scales of movement. But that, in turn, implies that there are different scales of weapon – the bottom end of the next scale up being more effective at killing or damaging a target than what’s normal in the previous one, even if that means that you have to cap the previous scale, or have them overlap.

Tanks are great against other tanks and lightly-fortified installations. They aren’t much against heavily-armored warships – though they could probably make a mess of a cargo ship with repeated fire. Tanks will get unprotected people – defined as anyone not in armor or having protection of some sort – very dead very quickly. If we include all forms of artillery in this one scale, the baseline is the WW2 mortar – which has six dice of effect against unprotected humans, but probably won’t do much to a tank except possibly with a direct hit. So that’s what you get for one point. Two points gets into modern artillery, and modern tank weapons. These are designed to kill other tanks and lightly armored installations. I don’t know if they would be enough to take out a heavy bunker from the WW2 era, though. In this category we would also find shoulder-mounted missiles.

Next up, for three dice of effect, we’re into the naval guns on a modern battleship – twenty-inch stuff. A single ship might have three or more of these and be able to lob the shells over the horizon. Four dice is a big bomb, with several hundred pounds of high explosive. Five dice is an air raid of such bombs, up to and including the fire-storming of Dresden in WW2. This is also where the a-bomb can be found. Thermonukes are six dice of effect – from the hundreds of kilotons of explosive or low megatons, all the way through the range to the big ones.

But it’s worth noting that Nuclear weapons have been shrinking for many years. That’s because the value in terms of destruction doesn’t increase in proportion to the force of the explosion when you get to these scales. Not even close, though the actual drop-off is not a settled matter – I’ve seen everything from an inverse-fourth-power relationship to an inverse square-and-a-half relationship put forward. Anything more than about 20 Megatons is considered waste, spending most of the extra making sure that you’ve killed something that’s already dead. Instead, multiple warheads in a single missile is the more frequent design objective these days – break that 100 Megaton weapon up into 5 20-megaton devices and spread them around for five times the pain inflicted.

If spacecraft and satellites weren’t built to the flimsiest possible standard, a Nuke in space wouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience – unless you achieve a direct hit, or close to it. Of the 360×360 degree panorama, the target occupies a minuscule fraction of the sky and therefore receives a minuscule portion of the total harm doled out by the weapons. At least 95% of the fury is likely to just vanish – and that’s for a large and relatively close target. The farther away it is, the more infinitesimal that tiny fraction becomes.

No, effective space combat a-la Star Wars will require a whole new order of weapons, and a 20-megaton thermonuke is very much the bottom end. Plasma Torpedoes and Phaser Banks and what-have-you. And these vessels tend to have defenses to match. Against these weapons, bomb shelters and concrete bunkers will crumble and your best battleship steel is so much tinfoil.

Anything else / In general

Characters should pay what they want a vehicle or other piece of equipment to be worth to them. 1 point is enough to give a character an ability they didn’t have before, 2 points makes it better in one significant respect, 3 points begins to confer flexibility, and so on. If a player decides to spend 4 points on a superior handgun (and it’s genre-acceptable), the GM should determine the specifications of the weapon based on that price and what else the character would have been able to buy for the same points. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a hovercraft, or a crate of eels. You get what you pay for..

Designer’s Notes & Discussions: Equipment

The Innovations

Describing equipment in terms of the bonus or penalty they confer upon skills when used is nothing new. But the notion of equipment as ‘demanding’ in various ways (as opposed to merely being restricted in usage) is semi-new (directly inspired by the ‘limitations’ in the Hero Games system, and using that to create and express a personality is definitely newish. The multiple-scale approach to defining equipment is something that I haven’t seen before.

Equipment Descriptions

Descriptions should concentrate on putting everything that the game system “needs to know” on one line. Most equipment requires no further explanation than the name, possibly preceded by the quality – “Superior Lockpicks”, “Good Handcuffs”, “Magical Ring”, and so on. Narrative descriptions should focus on the effects (if any) but may note anything unusual about the item. Where possible, this should be placed on the same line.

    3 Superior Lockpicks +2 – smaller, lighter, and more easily hidden than usual

is a perfectly satisfactory description.

Note that the description does NOT restrict the bonus to lock-picking; while there may not be many skills with which a set of lockpicks can be used, there are other pieces of equipment that are more flexible.

Vehicle Descriptions

Vehicles often require more lines of description. One for the make, model, color, and interior color/decor, and any identifying number that is externally visible or can be interrogated; one spelling out the dice of effect and other mechanics details; one giving the vehicle a personality; and one reserved for recording any damage that needs repairing. Players will often add a fifth, providing additional description.

Weapons Descriptions

Weapons need one line of specifics (Maximum Range should be noted, ammunition (if any), clip size (if relevant), and so on.) and may have a second line of description. It is often useful to append the range modifiers relevant to the weapon. Additional line(s) may be required for any spells, extra abilities, and add-ons that have been incorporated. I gave an example of a Magic Broadsword earlier; other, non-magical add-ons can be incorporated the same way and within the same rules. For example, a +44 magnum may be bought with “Intimidation +1” as an add-on. One point that should have been made earlier is the weapons code – this was shown in sections 4.4-4.7 in brackets – M, R, F, H – which is a shorthand reminder to the GM of the applicable rules. It may also be necessary to state the scale of the weapon – so H-Artillery or H-warship or H-sailing ship or H-starship or whatever

Not all weapons need a narrative description. But exceptional weapons and any that have been customized or modified from standard should have those alterations explicitly stated.

It may be observed that these rules still haven’t told you how all this is actually used in play, not completely, anyway. That’s the agenda for Part 3, “Doing Simple Things”.

0. Fundamentals (repeated for all posts:)

— The Sixes System has been used in my Dr Who campaign since September 2014, and has just come to a successful conclusion.

— Characters are constructed using a point-buy methodology with NPCs generatable using die rolls for speed.

— Success or Failure on tasks is determined by adding dice to a pool based on ability and circumstances which are then rolled against a target number determined by the GM.

1. Stats

Stats have 8 basic rules:
 

• Normal Characters may spend 30 Construction Points on Stats during character construction. Exceptional Characters may spend 50 points.
• Stats cost 4 Construction Points per stat point to improve during character construction and 6 Experience Points thereafter.
• Characters can reduce stats to harvest points, but these points can only be spent on improving other stats. Since the price is the same, this is essentially one-to-one transfer û put one stat up and the other down.
• There are 6 stats: Strength, Nimbleness (or Intelligence), Dexterity, Glibness, Aim, and “?”. See below for definitions and explanations.
• Stat values range from 2-12. Characters cannot exceed these limits during creation but may do so through the expenditure of experience.
• All characters start with a base value of 6 in each stat for free.
• No more than two stats should have the same score at the conclusion of character generation, and only one such pair is permitted. Once play has commenced, the expenditure of experience may cause violations of this rule.
• Players/GMs should consider listing stats in sequence of high-scores to low-scores. Refer designer’s notes for explanatory comments.
  

  1.1 Strength (STR)

  • Strength is the ability to effect or resist change in a situation by physical force.
  • Characters can typically lift 2.5 kg per point of STR with an adequate grip, up to STR 6.
    • STR 7 +5kg = 20kg
    • STR 8 +5 kg = 25kg
    • STR 9 +10 kg = 35kg
    • STR 10 +10kg = 45kg
    • STR 11 +15kg = 60kg
    • STR 12 +15kg = 75kg
  • Weightlifting or equivalent skill multiplies these amounts by (1+ranks).
  • Each point of success in a STR check adds 1kg. Each point of success in a Weightlifting skill check adds 4+d6 kg.

  1.2 Nimbleness or Intelligence (NIM or INT)

  • Nimbleness is used for Intelligence-oriented characters. Intelligence is used for Physical characters.
  • This stat represents the characters ability (or lack thereof) outside their relevant basis of expertise.
  • Nimbleness is the ability to effect or resist change by shaping or moving the hands and fingers.
  • Intelligence is the ability to effect or resist change with the power of the intellect.

  1.3 Dexterity (DEX)

  • Dexterity is the ability to effect or resist change in a situation by altering the location of a character.
  • It should be used for all movement-related skill-checks unless assistance is needed and not available.
    • Climbing a ladder uses DEX.
    • Climbing a rope uses DEX if there are climber’s knots and STR if there are not.
    • Climbing a cliff uses DEX if there are ropes and pitons and STR if there are not.
    • Running without tripping uses DEX.
    • Changing location in combat uses DEX.
    • Sneaking uses DEX.
    • Swimming uses DEX. (Staying afloat uses STR because there is no movement involved.)
  • Characters can move 2+DEX in meters in combat or over difficult terrain before triggering a movement check. Checks are made AFTER movement out of combat, BEFORE movement in combat.
  • Characters can sneak DEX/2 meters in combat before triggering a movement check to remain stealthy.
  • Characters can run 2.5 times as far as they can walk before triggering a movement check.
    • Running skill adds 0.1 to the multiplier, and 1m to the total distance, per rank.
    • Marathon Running skill adds 1 to the multiplier, and 5 meters to the total, per rank.
  • Carrying weight in excess of what the character can normally manage reduces the multiplier by 0.2 per point of additional required STR. Results less than zero indicate that the character is immobile (and probably crushed).

  1.4 Glibness (GLIB)

  • Glibness is the ability to effect or resist change in a situation using words, be they written or verbalized.
  • Glibness is not used to employ Telepathy, but is used for any Telepathic communication.
  • Glibness is used for all interpersonal interactions. It can focus on concision/minimalism, expression, plausibility, or morale, as the circumstances dictate.
  • Glibness checks (usually checks against some interpersonal skill) are usually made against a target determined from a resistance roll made for the targets. Beat the target and you succeed.

  1.5 Aim (AIM)

  • Aim is the ability to effect or resist change in a situation using accuracy with a thrown or fired weapon.
  • It presupposes that the character has the strength required to throw the object the required distance.
    • For every point of STR, a character can throw a 1/2 kg weight 1m. Multiply or divide accordingly to get the base range of any given thrown object.
    • If the object is designed to be thrown, triple the range.
    • If the object is fired by a device that stores or amplifies a character’s STR, e.g. a bow, multiply the base range by 5. Such weapons will have a STR cap; character strength in excess of the cap is wasted.
    • If the object does not use a character’s STR (e.g. a firearm) it will have a designated range, but will still have a STR requirement to use; the same principles apply.

  1.6 “?” (to be determined)

  This is reserved for a campaign / class-specific stat. The GM will usually mandate a default choice appropriate to the campaign genre, but it is generally recommended that characters choose something more specific to their characters. SUCH CHOICES SHOULD NOT OVERLAP PREDEFINED STATS.

  • To achieve maximum benefit, the stat should encompass as much as possible of what the character normally “does”; so there is a drive towards generality, but the strictness of interpretation creates a drive towards precision.
  • The limits of a skill’s meaning are to be interpreted strictly by the GM from the terminology used in the name of the stat.
  • Stat titles must be encapsulated within a single word with no qualifiers.
  • The GM must review and approve each choice, and should recommend a more generic term if one is appropriate. He or she is the sole arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. As a rule of thumb, if it requires a written definition, it is not general enough and should be rejected. If you need to look it up in a dictionary, it isn’t general enough and should be rejected. If you can’t tell what a character does for a living (or will do within a campaign/adventuring party, it’s probably too general and needs refining or replacing.
  • “Adventuring” or anything similar is so vague as to defy precise definition, and so is not considered a valid or permissible choice.
  • This Stat is the equivalent of character levels in other systems to at least some extent. By giving characters the capacity to “choose their own stat”, the system effectively permits characters to define their own character classes while retaining game balance.
  • Technically, these stats are defined as ‘the ability of the character to effect or resist change using (STAT).

Designer’s Notes & Discussions: Stats

The Innovations

There’s a lot to unpack in the rules given above. The system contains two innovations that I haven’t seen anywhere else: The shared Stat, and the Self-Defined Stat.

By defining itself as the element that is least relevant to the character, the shared stat makes room for the Self-Defined Stat. Neither of them work well in isolation; by being a generic catch-all for “(almost) everything else”, the shared stat makes possible the Self-Defined Stat.

Self-Defined Stat Choices

Because I want the main rules to be as genre-agnostic and concise as possible, I’ve excerpted several bullet points from section 1.6 about suitable choices and translated them into paragraphs of designer’s notes below. In any published version, expect these to be relocated – some to the sections dealing with genre (Posts 7 & 8 and some back to the 1.6 from whence they came. Putting them here permits me to be a bit more fulsome than that would permit.

The “No qualifying words” is important. “Quorsh Politics” is excluded; “POLITICS” is fine. This forces both generality and concision, even though the two objectives are frequently at odds. These trends are further constrained by the need to be able to interpret the term without recourse to a dictionary or written definition; the name of the stat alone should be all the GM needs to interpret the stat and its breadth, i.e. what it covers and what it doesn’t.

In Sci-Fi campaigns, “TECH” is a popular choice (“SCIENCE” would make the character well-versed in the theory, “ENGINEERING” would make the character well-versed in practical applications, “TECH” covers both). But others might be “HELM” or “COMMS” or even “WEIRDNESS”. Or “SECURITY” or “OPERATIONS” or “TRANSPORTERS” or “TEMPORAL MECHANICS”. The last is an important example because it implies that the general terms “Mechanics” and “Physics” don’t encompass the totality of “Temporal Mechanics” as a subject – which would not be the case if it was purely a theoretical discipline; so this implies that the Stat deals with practical matters of what happens to paradoxes and temporal changes in the real world, how to employ technology relating to time-travel, and so on, in addition to the theory. And, of course, in some campaigns, some other terms might also be valid – “Swordsmanship” for example.

In a fantasy campaign, Sages might take Knowledge; Wizards would take MAGIC; Fighters might take Swordsmanship or Fortifications; Nobles might choose Duelling; Leaders would choose Command or perhaps Tactics; and so on. Rogues might choose Theft or Item Possession or Sneak Attacks û so long as they can make the case of these being significantly different. Purchasing skills, abilities, or tools, that are restricted to that mode of action would do so û something to be covered in more detail in the next part of this series.

Each genre will have it’s own set of appropriate possibilities. It’s impossible to think of all of them, which is what makes even similar characters unique and differentiated from each other. This stat, from a player’s perspective, is all about the character carving out a niche within the campaign for themselves; it’s then the GM’s responsibility to make their choice relevant. This is something that should be borne in mind when approving or rejecting choices. “Great idea but it won’t mesh with the rest of the party” should be a response always at the GM’s fingertips – but at the same time, should not be an automatic response. Take your time and try to find some way of making the choice work.

Although he’s never played the system, I know at least one player who is likely to present three choices, in order of preference. I’m not saying that you should mandate this approach; I know another player who would struggle to define one, never mind three.

It should also be noted that choosing a Stat that doesn’t encompass something a character might want to do (e.g. Casting spells when your stat is not “Magic” or equivalent) does not prohibit them from doing that task with an appropriate skill, it simply means that the character lacks a natural talent in doing so – and will therefore always be second-rate in comparison to characters WITH such an advantage.

Finally, another implication of the concept should be amplified and stapled to every players’ forehead: A clear character concept is essential to the creation of a character. That can simply be a personality within the context of the genre, or it can be a profession, or it can be a vision of how the party will function in-game – that’s all up to the player.

It does bring up an interesting choice for the GM to make, though: whether or not everyone should generate characters at the same time. If the answer is ‘yes’, you should get each player to describe their character before character generation starts and for there to be a group discussion about the choices and how the party will work together. If the answer is ‘no’, each player should be firewalled from the others as much as possible during character generation. The first promotes greater unity and overall cohesiveness, with the strength that this implies; the second promotes greater individuality. Some players will struggle under the first approach, others under the second – and some will simply struggle with choice, either way. A description of the “virtual person” and what they do and what their basic personality is, provides guidance and inspiration for the choice of Stat.

Personally, I think that the system permits such diversity of characters that no party is ever likely to have everything covered, so you might as well go for the maximum of personal expression, which means private character creation, free from the influence of others. But that might be impractical, and theory should always give way to practical reality.

Stat Sequence

It is recommended that players and GMs consider listing a character’s stats in sequence from high-score to low-score as this should speed game-play (presuming that a character relies more often on a high-value stat than a low-value stat) and should shape the player’s thought processes when playing the character, assisting roleplay. However, it is possible that some players will find consistency more useful in permitting them to know exactly where to look for a given score. As the best alternative will vary from group to group, I can’t put it more strongly than that.

Using stat sequence to encode aspects of a character’s personality probably qualifies as a third innovation within the game system, but it’s not for everyone, so I haven’t counted it.

Stat Specifics

I’ve included some specifics on how fast characters can move, how much they can lift, and so on. GMs should ignore these as much as possible – they didn’t even exist in the working draft of the rules. Instead, everything should proceed at the speed of plot – if it advances the plot for the character to do something, they should be able to do it (on a successful roll, of course). Even whether or not a roll is required should be determined by the GM on the basis of plot and excitement / fun.

Basic Stat Rules

I tried very hard to winnow the list down to only six items so as to tie into the system name, but couldn’t quite do it without conflating points that should be separate.

Mixed Scores

The system deliberately forces characters to start off better at some things than others. While it permits the expenditure of experience to equalize the different Stats, the presumption is that a character will orient himself around what he is good at, and prioritize that for improvement at least some of the time. Besides, this doesn’t matter as much once a character’s style has been established – and while a PC is busy flat-lining his stats, another is becoming very superior within his “Shtick”.

Leftover Improvement Points

The system deliberately leaves a remainder of unspent Construction Points at the conclusion of character construction. This is intended to offset the first point of Stat Improvement from Experience Points, reducing the price of that improvement to the same level it would have been at during character construction.

Optional Rule:

GMs may find it simpler to state that stats have starting values of (normal characters) 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 (exceptional characters) 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, to be allocated to the specific stats as the player sees fit. This is not the only way to arrange the scores such that the rules are met, but they should all bear a reasonable resemblance to valid arrangements.

2. Purposes

Purposes describe what a character is attempting to do with a Stat. Purposes have 7 basic rules:
 

• Normal Characters may spend 8 Construction Points on Purposes. Exceptional Characters may spend 12 points.
• Purposes cost 2 Construction Points or Experience Points per Purpose Point to improve.
• Characters can reduce Purposes to harvest points, but these points can only be spent on improving other Purposes.
• There are 4 Purposes: Attack/Build/Unbuild, Explain/Persuade/Emote, Defend/Repair, and Analyze/Understand/Spot. See below for definitions and explanations.
• Purpose values range from 1-6. Characters cannot exceed these limits during creation but may do so through the expenditure of experience.
• It is important that the sequence in which the purposes are listed is maintained. In the event that more than one Purpose might describe what a character is attempting to do, the one listed first takes precedence.
• All characters start with a 6 value points to distribute amongst the four Purposes, for free.
  

  2.1 Attack/Build/Unbuild

  • This Purpose is to use a Stat to effect change in a status or situation.

  2.2 Explain/Persuade/Emote

  • This Purpose is to use a Stat to effect change in an attitude, personality, belief, intention, or relationship.

  2.3 Defend/Repair

  • This Purpose is to use a Stat to prevent change in a status or situation, or to undo a change that has previously been introduced to a status or situation.

  2.4 Analyze/Understand/Spot

  • This Purpose is to use a Stat to investigate, analyze, or understand a status or situation to whatever extent of which a character is capable.
  • It includes the accessing of prior knowledge that may or may not be relevant. A separate action check may then be required to interpret that past knowledge.

Designer’s Notes & Discussions: Purposes

The Innovations

The entire concept of having different ways of applying Stats that apply to ALL stats probably qualifies. With six Stats and four Purposes, there are 24 possible combinations. Some will be used frequently, others only rarely.

At first, some combinations might seem to have no relevance – for example, Attack/Build/Unbuild and Glib – but then a player announces that he is attempting to intimidate an NPC. This is not explanation, not quite persuasion, and not emote unless the player states that he is simulating anger to intimidate. If that’s not the case, then it ca be assumed that some sort of physical threat is being used to intimidate, perhaps some demonstration of physical prowess – and that is certainly edging into the territory of Attack/Build/Unbuild. As soon as it does so, the precedence rule clarifies the rules situation – and suddenly, Attack + Glib = Intimidate.

Rather than trying to anticipate every possible action by a character, the system relies on the player describing what the character is doing, in narrative terms, and perhaps proposing a game-mechanics interpretation of that action, which the GM is free to accept or amend. This flexibility is key to the system being able to cope with every possible choice by a character – no more holes in the game mechanics due to the GM’s failure of imagination.

Purpose Descriptions

The intentions described by the name are the most common purposes of such a change. It’s for cases that don’t quite fit any one, exclusively, that the precedence rule exists.

Some GMs & players will understand that “Attack/Build” implicitly incorporates “Unbuild”, i.e. Destroy, and it is common to leave it off. Similarly, “Understand” and “Analyze” may be considered synonymous by some. If such compression is understood by all, the names of the Purposes may be simplified. The simplest definitions are, respectively, “Change”, “Connect”, “Resist”, and “Observe” (the latter in the Holmsian sense). But prior attempts to use these terms resulted in confusion, hence the more explicit terminology used in the Dr Who campaign, which worked quite satisfactorily..

The Nuances Of Fighting Style

One of the benefits of this system is that it permits a wide range of combat styles to be expressed while maintaining parity amongst them.

• • Attack + STR = Physical Force, with or without a weapon, battering through the enemy’s’ defenses.
  • Defend + STR = block an enemy’s attacks until an opening presents itself.
  • Attack + DEX = Using Agility to evade an enemy’s defenses. More likely to do damage, not as likely to do a lot.
  • Emote + GLIB = Using prattle, insults, etc, to goad an enemy into a rash move.
  • Attack + AIM = Staying out of reach while throwing/firing missiles or bullets.

The above is just a small selection, there are many more. Whichever one a character is best at will obviously be their preferred fighting style.

It may be observed that these rules haven’t yet told you how these combinations are actually used in play – in fact, outside of the designer’s notes, there’s not much of an overt suggestion that they do, in fact, combine, though that would be a logical inference. I’ll get to that in Part 3, but first, there are more ingredients to list – in Part 2, “Education, Abilities, and Tools”.

Clarification Update:
Some feedback I got from the previous part of the series said “some interesting ideas, like the Nimbleness/Intelligence thing. But it also leaves me wondering how you can have an Int-based character without an Int score.”

My reply: If you need to and can’t find a better general term, you could use “Intellect” or “Intelligence” for the sixth stat. But there will usually be a better choice: Engineer, or Detective, or Problem-Solver, or Archeologist, or Jet-jockey, or Inventor, or Science, or even Time Lord. And any of them will tell you more about the character than “Intelligence” does.

This update will be repeated at the head of the next post in the series to ensure that everyone sees it.

0. Preface

I’ve been thinking about writing this article – and the rest of this series – for a while now.

You may be wondering, what is The Sixes System?

It’s a slight refinement of the sophisticated but minimalist game system that I’ve been using for my Dr Who: Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign for about 3 1/2 years now.

The thought was that I might want to publish the game system as a cheap download through RPGNow or through gumroad, the front end that we’ve been using to distribute Assassin’s Amulet.

I gave myself until the final session of the Dr Who campaign to get something organized, but the reality – as it has been with other side projects from time-to-time – is that unless I can make the work do double-duty through Campaign Mastery posts, I just don’t have the time or physical capability to get it done.

So for the first couple of months of this year, I’ve been investing thought and energy into planning the best way of doing just that. This series is the solution that I’ve devised.

I’ve designed the structure of the posts in this series so that I can transform them easily into two separate documents: a rule-book and a set of designer’s notes. The rule-book will be very minimalist, which is appropriate given the way the game system works, and the designer’s notes will be everything else from these columns edited down into a very tight little bundle of explanation and underlying concepts.

These articles, in comparison, have a comparatively unlimited budget for side-issues and exposition and analysis, for additional material that will get in the way of actually using the game system, but which will ultimately shed a lot more light on the design philosophies and underlying mechanics – the proverbial nine-tenths of the iceberg that aren’t normally on display. You won’t need these notes to use the game system – you will need them to understand the why’s and wherefores.

For this reason, I don’t know how many posts it will take to corral and contain the entirety of the game system. Ideally, it will be three or maybe four. But it could be more, maybe a lot more – a more pessimistic breakdown gives eight posts. Right now, the intention is to publish them continually until the series is complete, but with the occasional break for something completely different, just as a way of keeping myself fresh. The series will be designed to be read in one continuous lump, so there will be minimal introduction between parts of the series.

Each post will consist of sections in pairs and occasionally triplets – rules & instructions, designer’s notes, and – optionally but usually – explanations and expansion and discussion. Then move on to the next section.

The table of contents below will start as theoretical (and pessimistic) but be revised after the publication of each part in the series to reflect the reality as it happens on the page.

And, at the end of it all, I can collate the text, extracting like sections, to create the publishable version of the system. Today’s post is intended to be an overview and introduction, with some very general observations.

0. Table Of Contents

Post 0

• 0. Preface
• 0. ToC
• 0. Underpinnings (Introduction)

Post 1: Fundamentals

• 1. Stats
• 2. Purposes

Post 2: Education, Abilities, and Tools

• 3. Skills
• 4. Equipment

Post 3: Doing Things

• 5. Resolving Actions
• 6. Setting Targets

Post 4: Campaign Infrastructure

• 7. Base Values
• 8. Disadvantages
• 9. Penalties
• 10. Experience
• 11. Improving Characters

Post 5: Doing More Things

• 12. Simple Attacks
• 13. Complex Attacks
• 14. Operating Machinery
• 15. Character Interactions

Post 6: Characters

• 16. NPCs
• 17. The Scales Of Ordinary
• 18. The Scales Of Extraordinary

Post 7: Genre Notes

• 19a. Sci-Fi
• 19b. Fantasy
• 19c. Superhero
• 19d. Spies/Agents
• 19e. Crime & Cops
• 19f. Mystery/Detective

Post 8: More Genre Notes

• 19g. Cyberpunk
• 19h. Pulp
• 19i. Wild West
• 19j. Horror
• 19k. Animated

Underpinnings (Introduction)

With two different campaigns starting at the same time, it was inevitable that the game systems would be compared. Just like the Doctor Who campaign, the Zener Gate campaign was always intended to have a fixed end-point.

But the Zener Gate campaign has two players, not one, and had an initial list of 24 adventure ideas while the Dr Who campaign had just ten – so the latter is finishing soon while the former still has ten or so adventures to run, and probably won’t conclude until next year sometime.

The Zener Gate campaign operates on the third Saturday of each month, while the Dr Who campaign initially operated only on the 5th Saturdays of the month (when there was one) and more recently on the second Saturday of the subsequent month as well. The latter change was to enable adventures to be completed more quickly, creating an increased sense of urgency and pace as things began to come to a head. That meant that the Zener Gate campaign was initially getting twice as many game sessions, reducing to 50% more per year than the Dr Who for the past year.

None of this is accidental; when they were to be played (and the number of players) was an integral part of the design of each campaign.

And both had bespoke game systems, though those systems had very different underlying philosophies.

The Zener Gate system was built on a bedrock of using minimal dice. Instead, it shifted target numbers with modifiers and made a big deal out of rules to add or remove one or more dice. We’ve been using it for a couple of years with only a minor tweak or two, and it works well – but it can take longer to set a target number than is really desirable.

The Dr Who system doesn’t adjust the target numbers all that much per die, and a primary functionality is adding or subtracting dice from the pool to be rolled in an attempt to reach whatever the target is. What’s more, it’s a soft target specific to that individual under the current in-game circumstances.

That means that despite any superficial similarities, the two really are chalk and cheese. The Zener Gate system is about 40 pages long (as presented here at Campaign Mastery a few years earlier); I will be very disappointed if the Sixes System takes more than about 4 pages. My original hand-written draft, used throughout the Dr Who campaign, was on one page!

But one thing that the system demands absolutely is an understanding of probability with multiple dice. If you get this understanding wrong, you will make target numbers too easy or too hard – and the difference can be only a point or two. Fortunately, any GM worth his salt can learn from experience and acquire or improve such understanding in only a game session or two. If you aren’t confident, just be a little conservative in setting your success targets until you are.

Or you can simply take the tutorial that comprises the remainder of this article!

Average, 10%, 25%, 50%, and 75%

Below, you will find a graph showing how the probability curve rises with an increase in dice. (I’ve omitted 1d6 as trivial).

Plotting with thanks to AnyDice. I appreciate that it can be hard to read something this small so you can click on the image to get a MUCH larger version to examine.

This is a really interesting image to those who are even moderately mathematically-inclined. What grabs your First, the most acute rise and fall is with 2d6; every extra dice increases the average (by 3.5, obviously), but it also flattens and spreads out the curve. Particularly interesting is the trend of the peak probability result – which not only drops a little with each such spreading of results, but the amount of drop is clearly decreasing. Finally, it should be noted that at 30d6, more than 1/3 of the curve at the low end and more than 1/3 at the high end of the results are virtually flat, essentially 0% chance of occurring. (Technically, it’s about 0.15%, which is the limit of resolution of this graph).

By itself, this isn’t terribly useful, a point that I’ve made before. What’s far more useful is a table of thresholds – the result at which there is 10% likelihood of success, and 25%, and 50%, and so on.

A table like this one:

Roll Ave 10% 25% 50% 75% 90% 2d6 7 11+ 9+ 7+ 6+ 4+ 3d6 10.5 15+ 13+ 11+ 9+ 7+ 4d6 14 19+ 17+ 14+ 12+ 10+ 5d6 17.5 23+ 21+ 18+ 15+ 13+ 6d6 21 27+ 24+ 21+ 18+ 16+ 7d6 24.5 31+ 28+ 25+ 22+ 19+ 8d6 28 35+ 32+ 28+ 25+ 22+ 9d6 31.5 38+ 35+ 32+ 28+ 25+ 10d6 35 42+ 39+ 35+ 31+ 28+ 11d6 38.5 46+ 43+ 39+ 35+ 32+ 12d6 42 50+ 46+ 42+ 38+ 35+ 13d6 45.5 54+ 50+ 46+ 42+ 38+ 14d6 49 58+ 54+ 49+ 45+ 41+ 15d6 52.5 61+ 57+ 53+ 48+ 44+ 16d6 56 65+ 61+ 56+ 52+ 47+ 17d6 59.5 69+ 65+ 60+ 55+ 51+ 18d6 63 73+ 68+ 63+ 58+ 54+ 19d6 66.5 76+ 72+ 67+ 62+ 57+ 20d6 70 80+ 75+ 70+ 65+ 60+ 21d6 73.5 84+ 79+ 74+ 68+ 64+ 22d6 77 88+ 83+ 77+ 72+ 67+ 23d6 80.5 91+ 86+ 81+ 75+ 70+ 24d6 84 95+ 90+ 84+ 78+ 73+ 25d6 87.5 99+ 94+ 88+ 82+ 77+

Again, the mathematically-inclined will notice patterns, both across the rows and down the columns. From quite early on, the differences are 3 or more to achieve the next best result. A 50% chance is the average, rounded up or down. As you get closer to 36d6, the differences across the rows grow fractionally, until they are all 5 or 6 across at 25d6. In theory, at 36d6, they will be uniformly 6 across the board.

So, the average minus 3 to 5 is going to give a 75% chance of success; the average minus 6 to 10 will give a 90% chance of success; the average plus 3 to 5 will give a 25% chance of success; the average plus 6 to 10 will give a 10% chance of success. Every 5d6 or part thereof added to the roll will increase these gaps by 1 (25%, 75%) or 2 (10%, 90%).

Master these ready-reckoners and you will be ready to grasp the shape of the probability curve that matters almost instantly once the number of dice are determined.

What’s more (and this is the other part of the game mechanics), for every 6 dice, you would expect at least one “six” result. So that’s 6d6, 12d6, 18d6, 24d6, and so on. Requiring additional sixes in excess of this average adds steeply to the difficulty – but if you get there by adding 2.5 to the target required, each, (the difference between an average roll on one die and a six), you automatically configure a system in which enough fives can accumulate to be worth the equivalent of a six.

Similarly, for each six that’s probable, you would also expect a 1. A good roll is one in which the number of 5’s and 6’s exceeds the number of 1’s and 2’s. It only has to do so by one or two to achieve a result 10 or more better than the average result – and that’s our 10% chance of success again.

Finally, let’s look at what happens to the chances of making each target by adding one or two extra dice to the mix without shifting the targets. Rather than do another massive table, which would undermine the importance of the table above, let’s pick a few representative cases. I’ll go with 5d6, 10d6, 15d6, and 20d6.

5d6: 10% = 23+ 25% = 21+ 50% = 18+ 75% = 15+ 90% = 13+ +1d6 = 6d6 23+ = 36.3% 21+ = 54.6% 18+ = 79.4% 15+ = 93.9% 13+ = 98.03% +2d6 = 7d6 23+ = 66.3% 21+ = 80.8% 18+ = 93.9% 15+ = 98.8% 13+ = 99.72%

 

10d6 10% = 42+ 25% = 39+ 50% = 35+ 75% = 31+ 90% = 28+ +1d6 = 11d6 42+ = 30% 39+ = 50% 35+ = 75.8% 31+ = 92% 28+ = 97.5% +2d6 = 12d6 42+ = 53.3% 39+ = 72.1% 35+ = 89.6% 31+ = 97.5% 28+ = 99.4%

 

15d6 10% = 61+ 25% = 57+ 50% = 53+ 75% = 48+ 90% = 44+ +1d6 = 16d6 61+ = 25.7% 57+ = 47.1% 53+ = 69.4% 48+ = 89.2% 44+ = 96.66% +2d6 = 17d6 61+ = 44.4% 57+ = 66.4% 53+ = 83.9% 48+ = 95.6% 44+ = 98.9%

 

20d6 10% = 80+ 25% = 75+ 50% = 70+ 75% = 65+ 90% = 60+ +1d6 = 21d6 80+ = 22.3% 75+ = 45% 70+ = 69.4% 65+ = 87.4% 60+ = 96.3% +2d6 = 22d6 80+ = 37.8% 75+ = 62.2% 70+ = 82.4% 65+ = 94% 60+ = 98.6%

 

The more dice there are to start with, the smaller the impact of adding one or two more – but those impacts are still profound. At the worst case analyzed, a 10% chance of success becomes 22.3% with one extra dice and 37.8% with a second additional dice. And, for the record, adding a third dice increases the chances of the “10% success” to 54.8%!

Reducing the number of dice can be equally profound:

5d6: 10% = 23+ 25% = 21+ 50% = 18+ 75% = 15+ 90% = 13+ -1d6 = 4d6 23+ = 0.1% 21+ = 2.7% 18+ = 15.9% 15+ = 44.4% 13+ = 66.4% -2d6 = 3d6 23+ = 0% 21+ = 0% 18+ = 0.5% 15+ = 9.3% 13+ = 25.9%

 

10d6 10% = 42+ 25% = 39+ 50% = 35+ 75% = 31+ 90% = 28+ -1d6 = 9d6 42+ = 2.5% 39+ = 8.7% 35+ = 28.2% 31+ = 57.6% 28+ = 78% -2d6 = 8d6 42+ = 0.2% 39+ = 1.4% 35+ = 9.1% 31+ = 30.5% 28+ = 54.1%

 

15d6 10% = 61+ 25% = 57+ 50% = 53+ 75% = 48+ 90% = 44+ -1d6 = 14d6 61+ = 3.6% 57+ = 12.2% 53+ = 29.4% 48+ = 59.2% 44+ = 80.4% -2d6 = 13d6 61+ = 0.7% 57+ = 3.7% 53+ = 12.9% 48+ = 37.4% 44+ = 62.6%

 

20d6 10% = 80+ 25% = 75+ 50% = 70+ 75% = 65+ 90% = 60+ -1d6 = 19d6 80+ = 4% 75+ = 14.2% 70+ = 34.5% 65+ = 60.5% 60+ = 82.5% -2d6 = 18d6 80+ = 1.1% 75+ = 5.6% 70+ = 18.6% 65+ = 41.9% 60+ = 68.4%

 

Again, the impact becomes less when you have more dice to lose, but it still has a massive impact. The chance of getting 60 or better is 90% on 20d6, but drops to only 82.5% if you take one of them away, and to 68.4% if you take two. Remove a third and you are down to a 50-50 chance of success!

So this is a game system in which small differences in target number make a big difference, and small changes in the number of dice required have an equally significant impact.

It might seem like this is a recipe for getting things wrong in as many different ways as possible, and yet, because the targets are based on the number of dice to be rolled, it is actually a very forgiving system, and one that can be front-loaded with drama.

And that makes it a very good mechanic to build a game system around.

When a deity shows up in your game, how do you make sure the PCs – and more important, the players – know what they are dealing with? How do they recognize that the being that stands before them is something more than mortal?

Of course, sometimes it’s obvious that the creature before them isn’t human, but is not animal either – but in a Fantasy world full of strange creatures, some of them sentient, that’s not enough. And besides, a great many Gods look, well, human.

Cleanliness

In a game in which bathing is an infrequent luxury or a once-a-week ritual, an immaculate appearance might be a clue – but the nobility generally adhere to higher standards of personal hygiene and present just such an appearance of cleanliness, as much to associate themselves with Divinity as anything else. So that’s not enough.

Divine Aura

You could have the deity radiate an emotion that is appropriate to their divine nature and/or portfolio – but telling players that their characters feel a particular emotion can put noses out of joint, or (almost as bad) simply be ignored and discounted by the players. It’s not good roleplaying, but when the principles of good roleplaying and the principle of player independence collide, the latter tends to win, hands down, every time.

What’s more, this solution compromises your ability to express the emotional state of the NPC deity, either masking their emotion or their divine ‘aura’, or sending mixed messages.

Recognition

One of the worst possible solutions is simply telling the players that their characters recognize “X” the deity. This immediately posits the reaction, “what makes them so special?”, undermining the entire objective of introducing a deity.

Miracles / Productions

That tends to leave doing something “impossible” to establish their bonafides. But that’s a solution with a number of problems, too; for one thing, it’s not always appropriate, and for another, it makes the Gods look like arrogant show-offs. Which is fine if that’s how you want to characterize them, but not so good otherwise.

Incognito

There is a long history of Gods walking incognito amongst men, recognized only after their departure (and sometimes only with uncertainty even then). Perhaps this is the solution you’re looking for?

The problem with this approach is that it makes Deities too easy to ignore. You WANT the players paying attention when one turns up. As with the “do something spectacular” option, this is a choice that might be useful in some situations but not as a general rule.

And we’re fast running out of solutions.

Proxies

Perhaps the Gods only work through their priests, and only through dreams and visions? I’ve made the point before that it’s one thing to ignore the shouting man or woman standing on a soapbox, and quite another to ignore them when their God has given them the power to create Miracles and cast lesser spells. Even being able to summon the likeness of a God without retribution is a big deal, and would go a long way to silencing critics – of the Priest.

This solves the problem by putting it in the too-hard basket and saying “It will never happen.” Sometimes, that will work, depending on the campaign – and sometimes it won’t.

And woe betide the deity if he attempts to persuade a cynic under this model!

Divine Aura II

What if there was something compelling about the Deity, something that forced saving throws for things that a PC would normally be able to do without a second thought – like turning away, or interrupting the deity?

We had earlier dismissed the notion of forcing actions on the PCs, but this uses an already-established mechanism for doing so. Of course, judging the difficulty involved is a bit of a tricky art – too high, and you might as well not permit a saving throw in the first place; too low and once again, you might as well not bother, because the PCs will do what they want to do, anyway.

There’s something to be said for the following approach to this question: Rate the Deity’s desire for the PCs to pay attention, his intensity, on a 1-10 scale, and set the difficulty equal to the average save value of the PCs plus this amount plus 3, 4 or 5. That means that the ‘average’ PC needs to roll something like 15 or better on the dice to break the compulsion – some may have a better chance than that, and some a worse one, but it’s not often that there is a five-point difference in save values between characters. And if there is? Instead of the +5, use a +3 or whatever to broaden the scale. Yes, it makes it easier for the characters with a good save – but it preserves the principle that even characters with a bad save have SOME chance, however small, of resisting.

And this is not a compulsion to obey – unless the instruction is “Listen Closely” or words to that effect; it’s simply to hear the Deity out and be inclined to judge him as sincere. Which means he either is sincere or is a very good liar – either works!

Another interesting option to contemplate is making this save of a type that would not be expected. The most common expectation would be for a WILL save or its equivalent – which makes it attention-getting when you need a FORT save instead, to physically force yourself to look away or stop listening. This implies that the connection is somehow more primal than conscious, at an instinctual level – which suggests interesting things about the relationship between Deities and Mortals, a bonus!

This is definitely a contender for our default position. But I always like to offer at least one alternative, on the assumption that a single choice might not suit every GM and every campaign. The more solutions, the better!

Proxies II

If I had been too quick to dismiss Divine Auras as a solution, perhaps I was also too quick to dismiss Proxies. After all, biblical manifestations have the voice of God coming from all manner of animals and even a pillar of flame – and such manifestations are, in their own relatively low-key way, as spectacular as a full-blown light-show.

Alas, it’s my feeling that the existence of a Ventriloquism spell undermines the drama and miraculous sense of this answer – especially since Ventriloquism is such a low-level spell (second level, from memory).

But that doesn’t completely rule this solution out; the column of fire shows that a relatively low-key manifestation in combination with the Voice can still work.

Of course, there’s a vast range of possibilities in between “just noticeable” and “over-the-top”, and that gives each deity room to exhibit their personalities. Differences between the deities can also be manifested through changes to the basic theme that reflect those differences. If you’re crossing a desert and suddenly a spot by the side of the path ahead sprouts and blossoms and erupts into greenery, centuries of growth in a few seconds, the message is pretty clear, and there is a very short list of candidates as the sender. A column of fire that doesn’t burn anything is equally good as a signature move, and so on.

That makes this a valid second default option.

Gateways

And, of course, if someone should walk out of one of these manifestations, using it as a gateway, that personage will probably do as a Deity until something better comes along, if you get my drift.

So that provides a third default answer.

The moving finger

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” – from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859, with thanks to The Phrase Finder for providing the accreditation and full quote.

One of the most compelling ways a Deity can establish their divinity is by interrupting the normal flow of events – at least long enough to say their piece, maybe bestow a gift or two, and then get out of the way again. When everything except you and ‘this guy’ freezes in the middle of combat – full bullet-time effect – you tend to pay attention to ‘this guy’. Or girl. Or dog, or cow, or whatever.

I have used this approach once or twice myself as an exception, not as a default, because of a subtle undercurrent: the implication that whatever happens in that frozen moment won’t be noticed unless something is changed when time resumes. Then it’s like a jump-cut in a piece of film, the jump in a piece of looped tape that reveals the deception – see Speed if you don’t know what I mean, but it’s a gimmick that has been used a number of times!

Minor discontinuities can be ignored or pass unnoticed. But everyone should be back in their places when time resumes.

I have also employed a variant in which the universe forced the PCs to “assume their proper places” at the end of such a freeze.

Of course, the implication is that this assistance or advice or warning or whatever is forbidden – raising the question of who has the power and authority to both forbid a Deity from doing something and to make the prohibition stick – at least, up to a point. There’s a sense of evasion, of being surreptitious and covert, that you simply can’t get any other way. So, while this option could be employed as a default, I prefer to keep it in my back pocket until that special occasion for which this added sense is appropriate.

The Rarity Of Exotic Spice

Of course, none of these options should be overused, or they will lose their magic. Divine visitations should be rare events, signals that matters of greater significance than any that have come before are in the offing. Nor should they be positive from the PCs point of view, at least not all the time. It’s perfectly acceptable for a deity to turn up and warn the PCs that they are in over their heads and should go home and leave the celestial problems to “the big boys” – and just as acceptable for the PCs to disobey the instruction.

Not every manifestation should be by a friend to the party – not even a friend they haven’t met yet!

And, always remember that if the PCs receive divine assistance or instruction, so can their enemies…

Afterthought

It might behoove you to contemplate a Divine Visitation on three scales of reaction. One for the ordinary folks, one for the followers of some other deity, and one for the worshipers of this particular Deity. Ask yourself who the Deity is trying to impress? and go from there.

Personally, I would add something along the lines of reinforcement of personal convictions in the latter case, and would vary the drama of the Visitation for the other two depending on how the two Deities in question get along. If allies or neutrals, save the big production for the infidels sorry, for the non-priests. If they normally tread on each other’s toes and antagonize each other, go all out for the worshipper of the misbegotten Deity. But that’s a nuance that can sometimes over-complicate things – if in doubt, one size should fit all.

You can also think about the visitation in terms of what each character will take away from it, and put your variations there – giving a lead to your players for roleplay with pointed questions, NOT decreeing what those takeaways are going to be (except in the broadest possible terms).

Which takes me back to the earlier question: Who is the Deity trying to impress, and how are they going to react?

Some History

It used to be so simple, back when I first started GMing AD&D.

Each monster had a treasure type, and each treasure type had a table (or sequence of tables) that you rolled on, and a set of rolls on that table determined what treasure would be found in the vicinity. Room, Inhabitant, Treasure, Rinse, Repeat – easy!

The cracks in this edifice began to show very quickly – the first time a monster rolled up a treasure that they should logically use (instead of the crappy default weapon his race was normally stuck with).

And then, monsters with Treasures they should run from, screaming, or drop into the deepest, darkest bog that they could find. Weapons that were anathema to their kind. Armor that conferred immunity to their greatest attack. Like, any rational entity was going to leave those lying around. Pull the other one, it has bells on.

In the original DMG, there was also a table to indicate how much treasure a humanoid NPC with levels should have on them. That was fine, because such didn’t get a treasure type, they got this stuff instead. And, unless you decided otherwise for some reason, all the goodies were on or about their person, making them easier to find.

Some More History

Then I went away and did other things for a long time. But I did design a new D&D campaign, with the full intention of using AD&D once again. I knew and understood those rules, I knew where the weak points were, and what changes I would be introducing through house rules.

When I finally found the time and players to bring this new campaign to life, I was persuaded – somewhat reluctantly – to use the 2nd Edition AD&D Rules, even though I didn’t have a copy and hadn’t read them. It was, according to the most insistent player, just “AD&D with some of the bugs fixed”.

This was supposed to start out as a magic-light campaign and slowly gather magic as the party went further and further afield. After all, virtually every magic item in existence had become a fused lump of base metal in an apocalypse a little over 100 years earlier, and at the same time, Elves and Dwarves virtually vanished and mages were banished (and usually lynched) because they got blamed for said apocalypse. That eliminated most of the sources of magical equipment, so it stood to reason that magic would be lower level and far less widespread than in a standard campaign..For a while, things seemed to go okay. Bit by bit, though, things started to escape control.

Systemic Woes

And so, even though I had never GM’d the game system, and hadn’t read it in about 20 years, the decision was made to port the campaign to Rolemaster, on the grounds that it was designed to be closer to the magic-light environment that was supposed to contain the campaign.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Character conversion didn’t take the PCs back to where I thought they should be at that point in the campaign, it took them to a point equivalent to what they had achieved, perpetuating the problems and compounding them with other difficulties.

Less than a year later, the whole campaign transitioned again, this time to D&D 3rd edition. For the most part, this conversion was a success, though the characters seemed to have gained about 5 levels in process – and, unlike AD&D, and 2nd Ed, these levels were capped to a maximum of twenty. What’s more, the players demanded that their characters be equipped with things that were deemed reasonable for PCs of their level, according to the DMG.

I compromised, since it was about time for magic to start becoming more widespread than it had been before in the campaign. Where the book suggested a +3 or +4 item, it became a +1 or +2. Once again, this didn’t reset the characters to what they should have been, but it didn’t mess things up too much in the treasure department, only in the character levels department.

The new system didn’t incorporate the old Treasure Type tables, which I would have happily house-ruled to bring my campaign planning into fully-formed existence. Instead, there were a more universal set of tables in play. The problem was that the guidelines offered in the text and in the different tables didn’t match up with each other. If I set an encounter at a level that provided a suitable challenge to the PCs and was appropriate for the in-game circumstances, it came with a bucket-load of loot, and earned lots and lots of XP to boot. A large part of this discrepancy arose because of the game-system contortions, I admit, but it was an in-game reality.

In particular, it was really difficult to reconcile the treasure levels given in monster descriptions with the treasure tables in the DMG. It didn’t help that certain rooms had their own treasures provided as necessary decorations, or that monster treasures were entirely too easy to find, because I had not yet discovered the truth about the DC scales provided by the rules – which worked fine at low character levels but broke down hopelessly at higher levels.

The Bigger Picture

In part, these problems can be laid at the altar of inexperience with the game system. I was literally learning it “on the fly”.

But set that aside.

The popularity of articles like With An Evil Gleam: Giving Treasure a Personality and all the articles that were offered when the Blog Carnival topic was Making The Loot Part Of The Plot (including no less than six articles here at Campaign Mastery) – the link is to the roundup page; unfortunately, all too many of the sites are no longer in existence – shows that I’m not alone in being interested in the subject.

I’ve already suggested uncoupling XP from encounters (see Objective-Oriented Experience Points). I was thinking about that while writing last week’s article on Random Encounters, when an even more radical proposal came to mind – and that’s the subject of today’s article.

Why not uncouple treasure from the encounters, too?

A reality check of the most brutal kind

The loot that should be recoverable after an encounter should be the intersection of three different considerations: What the PCs can find of what was there for them to find, what was there for them to find because the encounter had collected it, and what the encounter had collected out of what was there for them to choose from.

Those treasure tables sure pack an awful lot of unsubstantiated assumptions into their nice simple figures, don’t they?

If the primo loot was never there in the first place, it can’t become part of a creature’s hoard.

Even if something was there, the creature will obviously either use it, destroy it, trade it, or conceal it.

If they conceal it, it may be hidden nearby or it might not.

If they use it, they may not actually have it on them – they might use it to bait a trap, or to lure dangerous enemies closer to a more deadly encounter.

Even if they use it in the traditional manner, the item may have been lost or stolen in the meantime. (The party in my Fumanor campaign at one point attracted the attention of a high-level rogue, who correctly tagged them as a pack of up-and-comers. While they were busy dealing with an encounter, he was carefully and secretly filching the best of the loot that was on offer. They never figured this out. It was only when he lost their trail in the depths of the Drow City that their treasures returned to “normal”).

If they can’t destroy it, the next best thing is putting it in the most inaccessible location the creature can reach. How many would-be thieves are really going to spend round after round groping around in that river of lava looking for dumped magic items?

There are, therefore, multiple factors eroding the retained treasure relative to what was there to begin with.

Then we get to the whole question of where the creature keeps it’s goodies. Does it bury them? Hide them on shelves? Disguise them? In one place, or dispersed over many places?

Because the searching is tedious, GMs tend to hand-wave it and simply list the treasure that’s available to be found as the treasure that has been found – I know, I’ve done it myself. If the entire party rolls, to search, and only one of them needs to succeed in order for them all to succeed, the odds of failure quickly become vanishingly small.

I don’t know about your players, but once mine found some treasure – any treasure – they tended to assume that was all that there was to find, and moved on. Smarter creatures used to leave a few “trinkets” (and a few things they had misidentified as trinkets) where they could be found relatively easily so that their main cache went undiscovered. Not that it helped the creatures much – most of them would have been killed by the PCs long before this loot was found.

The point is, of course, that the treasure tables are blatantly unrealistic and PC-friendly compared to anything even remotely realistic.

The History Of Each Object

In theory, if you can back-trace the path taken by each object to get to where it is when the PCs find it, you can make the entire campaign a far richer experience for the PCs. Arcana skills become knowledge of this history, once this unique item is identified, and each item is made a whole lot more special as a result.

The downside is that this is an impractical amount of work. I can see the potential upside quite clearly, and in my opinion, it isn’t enough.

What’s needed is to shortcut the process, killing off as much of that extra prep requirement as possible.

After tossing the problem around a time or two, I’ve come up with a two-pronged attack.

1. Create Legendary Artisans
2. Histories of Key Items only

Create Legendary Artisans

A legendary artisan is one who was so skilled that his handiwork is still routinely found, today. There should be a legendary sword-smith, a legendary armorer or two, a legendary leather-worker, a legendary potion brewer, a legendary wand-maker, and one or two more – a legendary weapon-maker, for example. Most if not all of these should be long-dead.

Each should have some distinguishing trademark by which their handiwork can be recognized.

And, finally, each should have a percentage chance of any given loot of the appropriate type being their handiwork. This need not be all that high – 5-10% – for the name to quickly be recognized. In general, the more ubiquitous a loot item is, or the more diverse, the lower the percentage needs to be. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with your Legendary Sword-smith being responsible for 25 or 30% of the blades that have survived the eons, if you want to.

Personally, I think that level of productivity probably takes away the uniqueness and becomes suggestive of an industrialized process – churning out low-end magic items to empty the wallets of tourists. If that’s you guy’s personality, then fine – but otherwise, reign in that enthusiasm a little.

This sort of detail is clearly what the authors of D&D, from 3.0 onwards, had in mind – the process of creating a magic item makes that clear with the need to create a Masterwork item. But it’s never carried to its logical conclusion.

A Problem Of Population

The sheer number of magic items that would be present in a typical game world is at odds with the concept.

If nine out of every ten characters survives to achieve their next level, we get:



which could be more usefully stated:



So, to get one character of tenth level, we would expect there to be 10^1.4575749 = 28.6797 first level characters out there. Seems reasonable.

To get one character of fifteenth level, we need 43 first level characters.

To get ten characters of twentieth level, 74.02737 first level characters – and 82.25 zeroth level characters.

If you do the math, one twentieth-level character requires 82 zeroth + 74 first + 67 second + 60 third + 54 fourth + 49 fifth + 44 sixth + 39 seventh + 35 eighth + 32 ninth + 29 tenth + 26 eleventh + 23 twelfth + 21 thirteenth + 19 fourteenth + 17 fifteenth + 15 sixteenth + 14 seventeenth + 12 eighteenth + 11 nineteenth + the 10 at twentieth, or a total population of 733 (according to my quick math).

Let’s say that on top of that, each of these needs 10 people to feed, clothe, and equip them, and another person doing the admin. And someone needs to be in charge, so 1 nobleman. That carries us up to 8796 people.

So, in a kingdom of 100,000 people, there would be 113 or 114 such twentieth level people – each with, according to the DMG guidelines, something like 80,000 gp worth of magic gear. That’s 9 million, 120 thousand gp of loot floating around in the world.

In a kingdom of 1 million, there would be 1137 twentieth-level characters and 90 million, 960 thousand GP worth of treasure amongst them.

Okay, you say, that all sound reasonable. And then you realize that this means that the average wealth per citizen – counting everyone (except the level twenty characters) as having nothing – is more than 90 GP per head.

The problem gets worse if you factor in the assumed wealth of all the other character levels. That almost 91 million becomes 596,834,040 gp – or almost 600gp per head.

And that’s still with every peasant and noble and churchman and tradesman and salesman who doesn’t have character levels supposedly having nothing. Which I find very hard to believe.

With these survival rates and this level of wealth, that Kingdom of 1 million doesn’t really need to have any sort of economy other than adventurers going out and bringing back goodies.

The common-sense solution is to say that these NPCs form an economic hierarchy at least equal to that of the adventuring population, and probably several times it – five or six times sounds about right. If you do that, then adventuring becomes a minor part of the economy, important for other reasons, but no more-so than wheat or mining or livestock or land or trade.

What’s more, social mobility up the economic scale is likely to be a lot harder to achieve – the equivalent of a far lower survival rate. If only 1 in 10 achieves the next step in social standing, then for every noble with 80,000 gp in goodies, times that factor of five or six to get 480,000 gp or so, you need 10,000,000,000 peasants with nothing.

That 1-million-people kingdom has become a 10-billion-people problem. We don’t have that many people on the entire earth right now!

Which simply means that 1 in 10 is too harsh. Maybe it’s one in five, yielding a bottom-of-the-heap population count of 9,765,625. Suddenly, that’s sounding a lot more reasonable, if still a little high.

But you can’t reduce it too much, or adventuring becomes a disproportionate share of the economy.

There are lots of variables that you can play around with – even reducing the adventuring survival rate from 90% to 89% has a significant effect, increasing the numbers at the bottom of the pyramid a lot faster than those at the top.

If you’re really interested, get yourself a spreadsheet and start calculating the parameters of Kingdoms in your game world. And be prepared to lose a lot of time, it tends to suck you in.

Of course, all this stems from my gut feeling that an average of 90 gp a head is way too high, that it should be more like 4 or 5 gp a head, average, or less.

For our purposes, it’s enough to say that there’s a LOT of money out there. And that’s the problem – if the typical 15th level character has 22,000 gp and the typical 18th level character has 47,000 gp, how many 15th-level characters does the 18th level character need to bump off to have more wealth than most 20th-level characters (80,000 gp)?

Two.

Just two.

Yet, the disparity in levels means that you would expect the eighteenth-level character to win seven days a week and twice on Sunday. In terms of risk-vs-reward, the reward WAY outweighs the risks – if you can tell what level a character is from the gear they are carrying.

If you try and analyze table 3-3 in the 3.0 DMG, it seems to be all over the place. The first four levels are linear multiples of 300gp, at level five, that goes up to 320, and at level six, 333.3. If you plot the table on a graph, however, you get a surprisingly orderly result.



Anyone who remembers any high-school maths will glance at that and say “that looks like an exponential curve”. It might be something else, but as a first guess, that seems pretty good.

Graphing the Log of the treasure values is even more revealing:



From level 3 onwards, this is essentially a straight line (at least to the eye), confirming an exponential relationship. What’s more, Level 2 isn’t that far removed from that straight line – but it is noticeably just a little lower. The one case where the results have clearly been massaged is first level, and that’s entirely forgivable. No doubt a ruler applied to a printout would uncover all sorts of minor bumps and shallows, caused by rounding – every value on the chart has been rounded to a value in the hundreds.

These are results that you clearly would not have expected, just from looking at the raw numbers, which demonstrates the usefulness of the graph as an analytic tool.

An exponential or a geometric curve is exactly what you would expect to find, in any event. The question that needs to be posed is whether or not that curve is too flat? Perhaps whole thing should be shifted to the left so that the “bend” (where vertical increases become larger than the horizontal) should happen at 10th level and not 16th?

This would give a higher value for 20th level – I estimate it to be roughly 10^5.4 (using the log graph), which equals 251200 (rounding to ’00’). But we can scale everything proportionately, simply by multiplying the results by 80,000 and dividing by 251,200. Better yet, we could neaten things by setting the 20th level to 100,000gp.

If I do that, I get

EL Official Result Calculated Result 80k Result 100k Result 1 300 787 500 570 2 600 1033 600 750 3 900 1356 800 1000 4 1200 1780 1000 1300 5 1600 2335 1400 1700 6 2000 3065 1800 2200 7 2600 4022 2300 2900 8 3400 5279 3100 3800 9 4500 6928 4000 5000 10 5800 9092 5300 6600 11 7500 11932 6900 8700 12 9800 15659 9100 11400 13 13000 20550 11900 14900 14 17000 26969 15700 19600 15 22000 35393 20600 25700 16 28000 46449 27000 33700 17 36000 60958 35400 44200 18 47000 80000 46400 58100 19 61000 104989 61000 76200 20 80000 137784 80000 100000

What’s clear, looking at these results, which were derived using the average change in the logarithm results from 3rd level through 20th (because it gave the nice, neat total of 2.125, well almost) is that until quite high levels, the 80k adjusted result is low by almost exactly the amount that the 100k result is high – so 90k would probably yield the best fit to the existing table. But I don’t care about the existing table, I want neatness.

The first level results will still need to be massaged – the 80k adjustment to 300, and the 100k to 500.

From 3rd level to 18th level, the 80k adjusted results are down – encounters would be worth less treasure. The amounts start small – 100, 200 gp worth – but ramp up massively from 13th to 16th levels, with differences of -1100, -1300, -1400, and -1000. But there’s a difference of 500gp or more from level 9 all the way to level 18.

The 100K results are different. Every level gives more than the existing table, so if you are looking at this as a way to control treasure disbursements, you will need to find another – increasing the value of magic items MIGHT be the better way, but is a double-edged sword. The best method is a magic tax – 10% of the value to the crown every time a magic item is bought or sold. This puts the price of magic items up for the purposes of allocation, but puts them down for the purposes of PCs actually selling loot. And puts them up again if the PCs commission or buy magic goodies, to boot.

For the most part, the differences between the official numbers and the 100k results aren’t all that great – 100gp, 200gp – until 6th level. Then it’s +300, +400, +500, +800, and it all rockets up from there.

So, let’s revisit the question I posed earlier: how many 15th-level characters would an 18th-level character have to pillage before he had more gp / loot than the average 20th level character? The official numbers say 2 – but, in fact, that puts him a long way over; the truth is one-and-a-half.

With the 80k adjustment, he gets 20,600 from a 15th level character, and he needs 80,000 minus 46,400 or 34,600. So the answer is still 2, or more like 1.7.

With the 100k adjustment, he gets 25,700 and he needs 100k-58,100 or 41,900. Still only two, but the real number is about 1.6.

So both the changes provide a better answer to the problem without being completely satisfactory – and the 80K adjustment is the best of them.

Once again, feel free to set up your own spreadsheets and start playing around – and the same warning applies – prepare to lose a LOT of time. A base log value of 2.54 and a change of approximately 0.12 per EL will get you started. The lower the base, the lower the 1st level value; the higher the value per EL, the faster the curve will rise. The second is VERY sensitive.

Histories of Key Items only

Major caches might have one “signature” item per 25,000 of value. It’s worth thinking about the history of that one item. Your 20th level character will probably have 3 of them, and a 20% chance of a fourth. Fewer than 1% would have five.

These are items whose history can be discerned from details of the construction, decoration, and makers’ marks, at least in part – it might not be clear how they came to be where the PCs find them!

I’m fond of the idea of a mad alchemist whose potions are always in a bottle of green glass. Sometimes his healing potions are an ointment, sometimes you have to quaff them. He was notorious for adding little “extras” to his potions – sometimes enhancing their effectiveness, sometimes ruining them. He never took notes – not any that survived, anyway – so you never know quite what you’re going to get out of one of his bottles.

Give your Legendary Artisans personalities and find ways to reflect those personalities in the items they crafted. And let the rest be fairly generic.

To each Level, treasures!

The major reform is this: the Objective-Oriented XP system already defines an adventure as being worth sufficient XP to gain X number of levels, then divides that down to individual encounters, whose values are thus measured in terms of the advantage or detriment they pose to the completion of the adventure.

If you look up the resulting number of character levels on the chart, you get the total value of loot – that’s gold, gems, and magic – for completing the adventure. Multiply by the number of PCs to get the total on offer. Subtract the value of any goodies that the NPCs are actually using against the PCs (but don’t count any that they simply have on hand). The rest can be distributed anywhere within the adventure that the GM sees fit. There will be some temptation to make the end-of-adventure reward extra juicy with a disproportionate share of the loot value – resist the urge. If anything, since that already has a major reward – enough XP to gain a level – I would be tempted to spice things up elsewhere in the adventure.

Place your treasures, both in time and in space, in places where they make sense in terms of the story, and in terms of the opposition to be faced.

Most GMs do this anyway – but don’t make any allowance for loot that the baddies might be using when they stock their adventures. As a result, treasure quickly VASTLY exceeds the GM’s expectations.

Of course, you can’t have an enemy using something and then deny it to the PCs without good reason. (Which reminds me of another NPC I used at one point, though I forget his name. This guy would pop out of nowhere (Wand of Teleport), attack with a wand that he had looted that was almost out of charges until it ran dry and evaporated, then teleport out again. What the players of the time never realized was that he came with the treasure, and the wands that he was using against them were treasures that the PCs were expected to recover later in the adventure! Somehow, I forget how, they cottoned on to this and exiled him in the Plane Of Mirror Images by screwing with his teleport-escape…)

The power of this proposal is that it makes the connections between opponents and loot completely indirect unless the hostile can use that loot to give the PCs more trouble. The rest can be put in places where it’s sensible for treasure to be hidden – an adjacent room, a wall cavity, inside another (less valuable) treasure, or whatever – even completely outside the dungeon walls if the creature has access.

If the loot on offer using this system seems inadequate, you can increase it, knowingly – and put it in places that will take more than a search roll to find and recover. Your goal is to have the loot that the PCs find match the amount that the system says goes with the character levels that will be achieved – if they only find half the loot, you can double the amount to be potentially found without distress.

You can even rob Peter to pay Paul – if there’s an adventure that seems likely to be short in loot potential, you can knowingly give away a little extra before and after.

Loot means more than treasure

When Johnn and I were working on a more comprehensive taxonomy for Roleplaying Tips, I listed thirty or more types of reward other than “treasure”. Throw in treasure subtypes, like “Magic items” and you have a huge list.

Alas, I no longer have that taxonomy; many of the planning documents from that era were lost in a computer crash when my backups turned out to be corrupted. Nor can I reasonably hope to replicate the many hours of work that we put into that list, back in 2009. So the list below is likely to be a little abridged.

1. XP

The standard. Included for the sake of completeness.

2. Money

As standard and default as XP.

3. Mundane Goods

Often overlooked, these should be a lot more ubiquitous than they usually are. But they are often boring.

3a. Party Goods

A couple of bottles of booze and some ready-to-eat snacks that won’t stay edible long enough to sell should always be popular rewards. A sub-type of category 3.

4. Ornaments & Decorations

It’s not quite $24 worth of beads, but it’s in the same line. Should offer a circumstantial CHAR buff, the circumstances to be defined by the GM, which can be trickier than it sounds. My advice is to keep it simple.

5. Exotic Goods

How much is a jar of spice worth, if it’s a variety few have ever even heard of before? How about a whole set of exotic spices? Or an unusual die – Purple is associated with royalty because the die was so rare, and worth as much as 10x it’s weight in gold. How about seeds from a rare plant – of practical value. People forget how many of our foodstuffs were imported from other lands – everything from tomatoes to rice.

6. Magic Items

Another ubiquitous choice, possibly over-used as a reward – because they carry with them the exotic flavor of the fantasy game. But a little goes a long way..

7. Rare Coins

A favorite of mine, because unless the players look closely, this will be mistaken for category two. I once ‘slipped’ a wooden coin into a trove; the players threw it away, thinking it worthless. Only later (when I rubbed their noses in it, in character) did they discover that it came from a desperate time when metal was in short supply and was probably worth more than the rest of the trove put together!

8. Tradable Commodities

Commercial quantities of something – even as a one-off – are a great way to get the players enmeshed within the commercial realities of trade in the game world. The sheer quantity elevates this from category 3. Examples: 10 bolts of high-quality silk. 40 sacks of beans. 100 cheap long-swords. 75 Quills. A vat of fermenting wine. A set of 6 healing potions that confer an additional +1 per die if all 6 are consumed by different people simultaneously.

9. Books

I remember at one point discussing whether or not “rare books” should be a separate category with Johnn. His point was that in this pre-printing press era, all books were hand-copies, or magic copies, making every book rare and valuable. That thought should perpetuate through every detail of every book (scroll, etc) that appears in the game – either it’s an original work, or someone wanted the information within badly enough to hand-duplicate it. An educated man might have two or three books plus his own journals; a collection of 100 books is a major library. This is why the Great Library of Alexandria is vast enough to qualify as a Wonder of the Ancient World. GMs and Players undervalue books massively, our sensibilities tainted by modern publishing capabilities.

10. Entertainment

A night’s feasting, getting invited to dine with the royal court, etc make cheap rewards from the point of view of the person giving the reward – and, in theory, a once-in-a-lifetime memory for the PC. Hosting the whole group at once might be seen as giving them too much prominence, but inviting each member in succession is more low-key. And the sequence can be used to score political points, as a bonus.

11. Expertise

Almost 2/3 of the list were rewards that could only be bestowed by someone as a reward for services rendered. Johnn thought these should be all lumped together because you couldn’t stick them in a dungeon hoard – until I pointed out that the service in question could be performed in a dungeon. It might be clearing a source of local trouble, it might be the recovery of some family heirloom, it might simply be boosting the economy through the trade in exotic knickknacks. It didn’t have to be rescuing a member of the royal family from bandits or Orcs or whatever.

“Expertise” is the first of this type of reward – it’s not that the noble has it, or gives it to the PC (that’s covered separately), it’s that he pays or instructs an expert to provide his expertise to the PCs to some restricted degree. It might be “three questions”, it might be “three days”, that doesn’t matter – the point is that it’s not an unlimited resource. If the PCs want more, they will have to go out there and earn it.

12. Education

Here we have someone of substance – wealth and/or position – who pays the bills to get a PC some additional skills or expertise.

The smaller the reward in terms of game mechanics, the more the actual skill acquisition can be hand-waved. Giving someone four extra skill points is fairly major and might represent 6 months to a year of education – that’s fairly hard to skip over, unless all the PCs are doing it at the same time. A single skill point, on this scale, represents about six weeks work – quite possibly with a single lesson a week, and studies and practice the rest of the time. That’s right on the edge of hand-wave territory. Or it might all get done in a single week of intensive attention – that really is a time-frame that can be set aside. Gaining +1 to hit or +1 damage due to training in some exotic combat style is probably the equivalent of those 4 skill points. Converting a cross-class skill into a class skill is comparatively minor, but obviously bigger than a single skill point of extra skill.

Remember, no matter what your character might be getting out of it, it’s boring to sit around while others are doing something – but not much worse than doing something dull every time the spotlight points your way. On the other hand, various incidents might be intensely memorable and to be roleplayed – so give some thought as to the personality of the instructor and the reactions and identities of his other students.

It’s also worth contemplating the personality of the person bestowing this reward. If there is some expertise with which he associated, it is a lot easier for him to share that expertise than it is for him to arrange lessons from a master of some other discipline.

Nor do characters actually have to request this as a reward, contrary to what some GMs seem to think. Once the idea occurs to someone who has to hand out a LOT of rewards for service, they will exploit it to the hilt, regardless of what the character on the receiving end might want.

13. Servants/Staff

This is not necessarily any form of slavery, as some people thought when I mentioned this type of reward casually – just because gifts of slaves were common in the era when slavery was practiced. No, it might be the Jarvis solution: a manservant who is paid by the giver to care for the character whenever the character is in town (in the original comics, Edwin Jarvis was a butler given to The Avengers by Tony Stark to maintain their Mansion – in fact, he more or less came with the Mansion. But he continued to get his paychecks from Stark).

Many of the other reward types that follow can be assumed to include servants or staff most of the time (but not doing so can be a way for the giver to trim his expenses, if the giver is a bit of a skinflint). It can also be an opportunity for the giver to clean out the malcontents, incompetent, unruly, and accident-prone from his own staff – again “cheapening” the value of this reward considerably.

If the servants/staff are competent, one next has to consider questions of loyalty. The giver might be placing a spy in the PC’s household! This also speaks volumes about the character of the giver.

In some societies, having servants or staff might be a “right” that has to be purchased from the crown (or their local representative, annually). So this might not actually involve specific individuals – not until the PC goes out and recruits them.

Either way, the servants/staff are, at least potentially, recurring NPCs, and should be treated as such by the GM – as an important development within the campaign.

14. Sponsorship

Granting admission into some sort of club or private organization is another sort of reward that can sometimes be bestowed. There was a time when this was the equivalent of being Knighted in the manner of a field commission!

But this reward type can also represent Patronage, which can be significant from a character perspective – but, unless it’s a means to an end, probably means character retirement from Adventuring.

That still leaves open a broader interpretation of the concept. A small stipend, paid into an account administered by the crown on the character’s behalf (assuming there are no private banks yet), to defray the costs of adventuring? Why not? 5 gp a week while actually on an expedition, 1 gp when not – or a 2 gp flat rate each week – can be a godsend at low levels.

But the term “expedition” raises still more possibilities. It was not at all uncommon during the Age of Exploration for an individual to back an “expedition” aimed at achieving some significant goal or reaching a specific location, with the backer providing personnel and equipment for the attempt. This practice continued all the way up to and including the age of the Entrepreneur, beginning to decline in frequency only during the Great Depression. “I will sponsor an expedition, led by you, to establish a new trade route to the Crescent Sea and the wonders of Jastinople” – sounds like a great choice of reward to me! A ready-made Adventure, and everyone gets something out of it if it succeeds.

And that, in turn, suggests something beyond even this fairly traditional interpretation of the concept: “There is a pestilential hell-hole that blocks access to the silver-mines of Dunthragg, a fortress of beasts and Undead. I will pay you and your friends 20,000 gp each to go and empty it of the living and unliving. 2,000 now, the balance if you succeed and live to claim it.” Again, this sounds like an eminently suitable reward – if the personality of the giver fits. (When you first read this suggestion, many people automatically assume that the ‘giver’ is the local Nobleman. Not So! It can be anyone who stands to gain from a successful outcome – a trader, a merchant council or league, a regional mayor, a consortium of small businesses…)

15. Concessions & Licenses

This was hinted at in category 13. “I grant you the right to search the Blacklands for mineral wealth, and to establish up to two mines in your own name within that region of Crown Land”. Or perhaps it’s a license to operate some regulated business – an inn or tavern. Or to provide a carriage service for goods and people along a particular trade route.

16. Transportation/Vehicle

Which provides a natural segue into this type of reward. “I gift to you a carriage of the finest oak, and eight trained horses to pull it, suitable for the transportation of nobles anywhere in the land.” What you then do with it – what you can get away with – is then up to you. Or it could be a more practical vehicle, or a ship. The latter always includes the assumed right of being permitted to display your flag, and of being able to trade anywhere that you can reach. So this reward contains a vast breadth of possible scale.

17. Livestock

Nobles had agricultural land, which was hard to replace, and livestock upon that land, which were comparatively easy to replace. If you had to reward someone, you might give them some of that livestock and a lease on the farmland on which they presently reside, in effect putting you into the farming business. Still more canny nobles might offer livestock and title to lands that they don’t actually posses yet, requiring you to go out and “capture” it in his or her name.

Nor does this necessarily tie the character down, or not as much as many players and GMs tend to assume. Once the land has been cleared of nasties, fenced, and patrols hired to keep it clear, the livestock can move in. Throw in whatever you need to actually farm them, and an Estate Manager to look after the business side of things (with the threat of the occasional audit to keep him honest), and you’re free to wander off, and maybe even do it all again. You don’t think nobles run their estates themselves, do you? Okay, these days, many have to, but back then labor was a lot cheaper, and it was common practice to turn the day-to-day headaches over to someone else while you went off to the capital to spend and politic!

Your reward (usually described as a “gift”) might be a herd, or a breeding pair. The encumbrance placed upon a character’s lifestyle is proportionate, but temporary. It’s just a couple of very different adventures!

18. Land

The next step up this particular ladder of reward scales brings land and that which resides upon it – be that peasants or livestock. This, effectively, rewards the character with the right to be taxed.

It normally excludes mineral rights, but there can be exceptions; I once rewarded a PC with a silver mine that the noble knew was almost played out. He got a half-dozen payments of a few thousand gold, and then title to a worthless mine. But, anytime the character was significantly hard up for cash, he could head up to his mine and dig out a few nuggets of ore – worth no more than 20 or 50 gp in total, but it was enough for a fresh start.

The noble also usually reserves the right to demand or maintain free passage through the land on any established roads. Nastier types might not include rights for the landowner to use any roads in the vicinity – forcing the rewardee to bargain for access to the better, more profitable, markets – every year.

I once granted title to lands to a pair of PCs for the establishment of two towns, which would confer minor noble status upon the pair (and expand the domain of the giver considerably). One was principally an Elvish community, with a few Humans of uncommon expertise thrown in; the other was a far more cosmopolitan affair, with Dwarves and Desmodu and Humans and Halflings and Gnomes and the occasional Elf (though most of them went for the first). The catch: the budget on offer for the construction of these townships and appropriate defenses was only about half what would be needed, and that was only the set-up cost; ongoing costs would demand the establishment of industry (taxable), trade (taxable), and commerce (taxable) – plus repayment of the throne’s investment in the form of regular tithes over the coming century.

19. Property

The final step up this ladder is, ironically, not that dissimilar to where we started – the granting of land, but land with some sort of building and business already operating. In discussions, we started using the term “property” to distinguish between mere land and land with a going concern on it. Again, this could be an Inn, Hotel, Bar, Warehouse, Dock, Toll-Bridge – almost any sort of structure.

Standing above even this level of reward is the granting of land with a bespoke building to be constructed upon it. Depending somewhat on the location, this can be the ultimate reward short of bestowing titles of Nobility. “I give over the crown lands located at Wiltshire Street, and the warehouses which currently stand upon it, which are to be progressively relocated to a site yet to be determined and razed for the construction of an Academy Of Magic” was an actual reward handed out to a PC at the end of the first Fumanor campaign. From temporary structures and less than half-a-dozen students, in between every adventure, this place grew and developed through the ensuing two campaigns, becoming a completed fixture within the campaign upon the retirement of the PC in question.

20. Retainers/Retinue

There’s a big difference between retinue and staff – the latter stay more-or-less where they are, the former travel with their master and serve on the road. Retainers are more like staff, but they can be relocated by their master as desired. Both tend to be permitted to swear personal loyalty to their master, superseding any other obligation in the process. That’s a big step up. The downside is that the character is expected to pay their wages.

21. Introductions

A fairly cheap reward, in the financial sense, though there may be all sorts of politics involved in actually bringing it about, simply introducing a PC to “the right people” can be a significant reward.

22. Fame

Public admissions of gratitude and debt are a far bigger deal than simply doling out some reward that only the bookkeepers pay attention to. The difference is one of generating Fame. This is always a double-edged sword; certain people will begin to perceive the PCs as rivals and potential enemies. There’s so much juice in the question of fame and PCs that it’s a subject for a whole other day. Suffice it to say, for now, that you can do more with a fan club than with a whole company of trained soldiers!

23. Pardons

Criminal Charges – trumped up or real – can be pardoned in exchange for services. That should be enough to get the gears in any good GM’s head turning.

And remember that these charges don’t have to be leveled directly at the PC. A friend or family member, a husband or wife or child, or even a complete stranger (if it’s the right complete stranger and the right PC) can do the job.

It’s generally considered particularly bad form to arrest the people who you have just rewarded, but some underhanded types won’t mind stooping a bit – in exceptional cases. More wholesome leaders will grant pardons for any crimes committed in the course of achieving the results for which the PCs are being rewarded.

And always remember that a wholesome public image may mask the most brutal of underhanded monsters.

A minor variant of the pardon is the Head Start, which honorable men sometimes grant the unscrupulous and unpardonable as reward for services. How much of a head start depends on the services and the leader.

24. Titles

Up at least one notch is the granting of a Title – “Master Of The Eldritch Bow” or something meaningless like that. This is a bestowment without authority, though it recognizes and commends some particular demonstrated expertise (whether or not there is actually a skill to reflect it).

If a Noble is so disposed as to hand out meaningless titles as rewards, they will quickly run out of good ones, which is how you can get “Keeper Of The Royal Spittoon” and “Protector Of Mutton” being recorded. The deeds with which the title is associated, more than the content of the title, tends to determine the respect in which it is held.

25. Endorsements

This is another step up the “Name Hierarchy”, and also reward types 14, 21, and 22. Endorsements aren’t an idea of the modern age; being able to say that someone famous or respected uses your wares was a standard of advertising for as long as there have been merchants.

A ship calls into port full of foreign trinkets, you might permit them to be sold at the markets, unless captain / crew give you reason not to with their behavior; such a ship arrives with letters stating that they are trusted suppliers to the Royal Family of some distant kingdom only the scholars have ever heard of, and you are likely to invite them to the palace – with samples of their wares. The wise merchant will then offer a discount on any large purchase in exchange for a similar letter from this noble, adding to his ability to trade elsewhere.

Even without a large order, or even a purchase by the noble of any sort, the mere fact that the Noble thought the goods worth personal inspection will make selling even things the Noble doesn’t personally want easier.

One could say that the famous attract offers of endorsement the way dogs attract fleas.

26. Art / Commemoration

“We are deeply indebted to… what were their names again?… and so decree that portraits will be commissioned and hung in the entrance to the Palace that all may know of the esteem in which these gentlemen and ladies are held.”

All you could really say is, “Gee, thanks”. Possibly under your breath.

“We shall commission a tapestry to commemorate this epic heroism for all time.” Gosh, that’s big of you.

“Let the word be spread, let hymns be written and songs commissioned by the finest bards, that all may know of this example of conspicuous gallantry” – that’s edging into ‘fame’ territory, as is the commissioning of art of any sort for public consumption such as statues to be erected at the site of the deeds being commemorated.

Such rewards are popular with those who are more politician than ruler; they seek to elevate someone in popularity in the hopes that some of the popularity will rub off on the giver. Nobles who care about public opinion, and who want to do well for and by their citizens, will often reward unexpected service with commemorative art.

As a general rule of thumb, the more prestigious the artist, the more prestige will attach to the rewardee from such bestowments, and the more it will drain from the Treasury. A favorite tactic of mine is to have a short-sighted noble commission lavish public art as a reward and then be forced to raise taxes to pay for it; the public therefore blame the PCs as much as the noble for the tax rise (insert evil grin).

27. Access

This reward type is one of the more valuable. Having the right to bring any problem directly to the King, or to the Chancellor, or to the Archbishop, or the General, and be able to expect a hearing at the very least, is powerful. The toadies and courtiers and would-be advisers and those with an opinion as to what public policy should be (right down to the barman at any watering-hole you even look at) will be quick to grasp the possibilities implicit in this new channel straight into the heart of power.

Bear in mind that it’s usually a crime to be granted access and then sell access to that access. But being a conduit of truth to Nobility can be a great source of adventures enmeshed deeply within a campaign setting.

28. High Office / Promotions

Appointing someone Sheriff, in charge of law-enforcement in part of one’s domain, is pretty much the minimum form of this reward, and the adventures that can result only grow with each scaling up of the reward. You can work your way up the various non-Noble offices, with proximity to the capital being the principle determinant of reward value. After that comes the more nebulous “Member Of The Court” (giving you one voice amongst many) and the more prestigious “Adviser To The Crown”. Then you get into the real big ones, which have real authority attached to them – “Chancellor To The Exchequer”, “Commander Of Our Armies”, and the like. The only step up from there is “Principal Adviser To The Throne” and then into the Nobility.

29. Noble Titles

So let’s keep the ball rolling. One lesson that I took from the “Family D’Lambert” series of Novels (supposedly by EE Doc Smith) is that the authority and respect of Noble Titles is not the absolute that they seem to be in theory.

Having Title to a small but immensely wealthy province is more powerful than having a higher title with less wealth. So that’s a second factor.

Size of domain is a third, even if much of the land is not all that desirable right now.

Proximity to the Capital is worth more than a Title in the Inner Kingdom, which is worth more than one in the outer Kingdom.

Having a Port (especially a seaport) automatically elevates a rank, too, as does having a major trade route..

Put several of these factors together and you can easily get a Baron with more real power than a Duke, a Duke with more power than a Prince.

On top of all that, most Nobles of importance end up with multiple Titles. Not only do these compound, sometimes they can combine in other ways to vastly exceed the mere sum of their parts.

And on top of that, you have the number and total authority of your supporters. Nobles who play the long game will maneuver people loyal to them into positions to be of service to the Crown, and will use any child not a direct heir to their titles, to gain further authority – on the general principle that if they don’t, someone less to their liking will.

Many nobles spend inordinate amounts of time and effort tracking small changes to the resulting pecking order. Others pay someone else to do so for them. Minor acts in Court are often trial balloons sent up to measure such authority. The outside observer sees nothing but the court wasting its time dealing with fripperies like the color of the flowers or the cut of the drapery; the reality might be a deadly-serious game that means life and death to many.

This is politics at the heart of the Government of the realm. Throw in temporary and limited alliances and vested interests and party memberships, and you will see that modern forms of government have simply found more ways of complicating the picture.

The granting of a Noble Title is an invitation to play in this sandbox. Actually, it’s more like a Royal Command to play in this sandbox. It is only nominally a reward; the expectation is that you will be loyal to the giver, and thereby reorient the power balance within the Court. Accepting earns you enemies you’ve never even heard of; Refusing marks you as a political enemy of the Throne and a potential Traitor. Even as the Nobleman offering the Title smiles and accepts your refusal, the authorities are turning against you.

It takes luck, skill, and wisdom to successfully navigate such a maze. Which doesn’t describe too many PCs.

But this is a double-edged sword – even offering the reward can mean a vast amount of work for the GM. Dozens of Nobles will need to be detailed, at the very least. So bear that in mind!

30. Tax Relief

This is a very VERY rare reward. But excusing someone from paying direct taxes, or giving them a reduced tax rate, is at least theoretically possible.

The reason it’s rare is because it largely removes the individual from the authority of the Ruler. Not only can this be a problem in and of itself, not only can this establish a precedent that could eventually beggar the Throne, but it can give people…. ideas. Subversive ones. Intolerable ones.

But it’s at least theoretically possible.

31. Adoption / Marriage

The ultimate reward: Adoption / Marriage into the Royal Family itself, with all the obligations, Titles, ambitions, duties, perks, responsibilities, and rewards that comes with it. I once ran an adventure in which – to foil an assassin – one of the PCs was forced to go undercover as a surprise Betrothed to the Princess. By the end of the adventure, you couldn’t have paid that character enough to get him to sign up for the real thing.

If you’re feeling particularly nasty, you can have it discovered that a PC is the descendant of a lost cousin – just out of the direct line to the throne. Everyone will immediately want a piece of the PC, aside from those who want the whole carcass mounted on their walls, and that’s just from sheer pragmatism and never mind any of these alignment niceties. There will be things done in the name of the PC that he could not and would not countenance, right up to armed insurrections against the throne; the popularity of the current ruler does nothing but mitigate the scale of the disaster. A little. Ambitious men being what they are, it won’t be enough to prevent one.

Any and all of these can be given out in place of part or all of a treasure payout. Many of them have obvious utility as a springboard to new adventures or even a whole new phase of campaign. This, of course, beggars the question of how much they are worth?

If there was a simple answer to that question, I would have presented it while discussing the individual awards. There isn’t; there are just too many variables.

There have been attempts that suggest that some of these should be handed out in the form of additional experience. That’s just fundamentally wrong, in my opinion, and compounds other problems, especially since it means that full monetary rewards will still be expected.

No, what the GM needs to do is to estimate a monetary value for the reward, excluding any ongoing earnings from it other than those that can be expected prior to the character next achieving a character level or completing the current adventure, whichever is longer. That value can then be deducted from the adventure awards that have not yet been placed.

Whats’ that? Did I turn that corner too quickly for some of you?

Sand-boxed Rewards

As much as possible, specific rewards should be allocated only a session before they are to be handed out.

There are obvious limitations. Villains need their gear from the moment of their first appearance. There will be some set pieces, rewards that can’t be altered too much or you risk an anticlimax. What remains is your pool for distribution as rewards throughout the rest of the adventure, subdivided into rewards to be accrued in each chapter of the adventure.

Some of those rewards may be cash. Some may be goodies. And the rest should be drawn from the list of reward types offered. If the logical reward is too valuable, you can steal up to about 10% of the value of subsequent pools before it will be noticeable, or you can take a closer look at the fine print attached to the reward – I’ve given several thoughts in that direction in discussing the individual types.

Final Thoughts

This article has been about uncoupling non-XP rewards from encounters, just as the earlier article Objective-oriented Experience Pointswas about uncoupling XP from encounters.

I was going to use the term “Divorcing”, but it’s not quite accurate; everything, from encounters to XP to loot is still derived from progress in the plotline; it’s simply been scaled to accommodate the rate of progress that gets recommended by the books (three adventures to one character level) or whatever rate greater than that with which the GM feels comfortable.

The chief advantage that results is that the storyline is strengthened immeasurably by harnessing both experience and loot to that end; and that in turn strengthens the campaign. The chief disadvantage is that players may have grown too accustomed to feeding at the trough.

If the proposal is too radical for you, however, you can always decide on a partial implementation, or a phasing-in approach to give your players time to get used to the changes.

For example, you permit 1/2 the normally indicated reward levels and 1/2 the story-indicated reward levels, then total the two to get the actual payouts.

You could start with a 90:10 split and shift it 10% in the other direction with each character level achieved.

The danger with this approach is that if the characters gain in level faster than you are expecting, which they almost certainly will, you will then face the difficult choice between adjusting your expectations or being even more miserly.

For example, the adventure after next might be best suited to lower-mid-level characters – somewhere around 7th or 8th level. But the characters have already earned 7 character levels, will gain an extra one-and-a-half in the course of the current adventure, and another one-and-a-half in the next – making them 10th level when you want them to be only 8th. Either you adjust the end-of-adventure goal for that adventure to 11th level – meaning the PCs will potentially earn substantially less than 1 level’s rewards, or you commit to handing out minimal experience and changing nothing, making the adventure a relatively easy one for the PCs. Neither answer is all that satisfactory.

Existing campaigns will face similar problems in changing over to this new system.

Fractional Levels

Part of the solution comes from rejecting the concept of character levels being integer values. As soon as we attach a decimal point, with the integer values representing a threshold at which all sorts of nice things can happen, we gain greater scope.

For example, The PCs have achieved 10th level, and are about 1/3rd of the way through to 11th. They are, in effect, at level 10.33.

Instead of setting your target to a hard 11, and giving out only 2/3 of the XP that this system is recommending, you could aim for 11.2, giving 83% of the new XP scale; the adventure after that, you could aim for 12.1, and give 90%; then 13.05, and 95%; and then you “lock in” to the integer values.

But there are two even better solutions

My preferred solution is to break a character’s XP total into two parts: Level + excess. A character in 3.x (and it works in other versions of the game system, too) isn’t at 10.33; they are at 10th+333xp. Then you simply aim for each adventure to deliver them to Level+333xp. This has two effects: first, the fraction of a level that 333xp represents will continually shrink, so you will approach the simplest view, i.e. the integer view; and second, this creates a buffer that ensures that a character will never fall just a couple of points short of expectations and fail to get a level – something that, with a number of variable factors, is otherwise quite possible. That’s good, and it means that the system will achieve it’s intended effects.

The alternative is simply to continually aim not for the integer levels, but to maintain whatever percentage the PCs already have: 11.33, 12.33. 13.33, and so on. This is simply a redefinition of what a “whole level” means. This seems simpler, on the surface, until you realize that what was previously simple (333xp) is now complicated; you’ll need to adjust your “excess target” with each character level. 33% of the gap between 11th and 12th level is 3,667 XP; 33% of the way from 12th to 13th level is 4000xp, and so on (The numbers might be different with Pathfinder, but not too much so, or the systems would not be even close to compatible). This represents an additional level of complexity – but there is a reward for your efforts.

Virtual levels

Imagine that when you achieved a character level, you didn’t improve the character, but instead rolled/chose what you would earn BY THE TIME OF achieving your next level. It seems a subtle difference, possibly an asset to roleplaying as the character goes through the steps they imagine will lead to that character level. But the GM has more systemic flexibility, and he can use that to the character’s advantage by stratifying the development process.

Let’s break the process of gaining a level into sub-steps. You

1. Gain a hit die plus any modifier in HP.
2. Spend as many Skill Points as your character class receives.
3. Adjust your Save bonuses if necessary.
4. Adjust your BAB, possibly gaining an additional attack in a round.
5. Acquire any class abilities that come with the new level.
6. Select Feats for each feat Slot that is acquired at the new level.
7. Apply the benefits of each Feat.

There might be more, but those 7 are enough to be going on with. Pick one that won’t occur until the new level is fully achieved – number 5 seems like a sensible choice – and you can let the others occur at discrete intervals along the way. How you structure this is up to you – I can see merit in top-loading everything into the second half of the gap, and also see merit in distributing gains throughout the acquisition of a level. Where multiple points are received, you can even split the gain up – if you are gaining 10 HP, then getting 1 HP every 0.1 levels works. If you are going from +11/+6/+1 attack BAB to +12/+7/+2 BAB, that’s three separate changes: you might go +6 to +7 in the middle (+11/+7/+1), then give the +1 to +2 at the low end (+11/+7/+2) and then, on gaining the level completely, the +11 becomes +12.

My suggestion would be to go simple. Divide a level into 10, 20, 30 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100% fractions of the progress – perhaps throwing in 25 and 75% if you feel like it – then allocate something to each of these levels.

Instead of an interval-system in which there are massive gains, this transforms the game into a progressive system in which immutable directions are chosen for each character at discrete intervals.

Just be consistent in your approach.

This gives an ongoing sense of progress to players. There is some character reward from every significant encounter. This is especially useful when it comes to acquiring a prestige level or level in a different character class, which usually means acquiring membership in some sort of select group or subgroup or a change in attitude – because you no longer get an instant effect of doing so, you acquire it over time. Time that is presumably spent studying and learning the ways of the new class, meditating on the path to be taken, practicing lessons that they have given you to unlock the potential within you, etc.

Character development becomes an ongoing personal evolution. That’s a difference both subtle and profound, and one well worth considering.

Treasure placement. Who knew it could get so complicated?

Maximilian Hart puts out a daily newsletter with a short thought and some links to resources that may be of value to D&D GMs called Dungeon Master Daily (subscribe and read some more about this resource here.

Of course, some of those links and resources have a broader applicability, which is the main reason I subscribe. From time to time, he’s good enough to link to Campaign Mastery.

He’s also on Twitter (twitter.com/maximilianhart_).

Last week, his editorial focused on Random Encounters, also called Wandering Monsters by some. His thought was that no-one but the GM (and sometimes not even him) loves the idea. I’ll leave discussion of why that might be the case for the relevant section, below.

He promptly received a barrage of communications disputing this premise, prompting a second editorial presenting the other side of the coin a couple of days later. You can read his Twitter thread discussing the subject at this link.

I’m a big believer in modifying the way that you play any game to suit the campaign story that you are trying to tell, but also being dynamically responsive to player wishes – something that is sometimes more difficult than you might expect.

That means that there is no wrong way to game, in my opinion, only ways that are mismatched with one or both of these objectives.

It also means that the question deserves closer inspection. Especially since there are more choices than might have occurred to many readers – including a new one that I’ve only just thought of, myself..

Today’s plan of action is to look at the known options, in sequence of decreasing randomness, and then I’ll throw in my wild card which doesn’t really fit the orderly progression – or, perhaps, fits it in too many different places!

Option 1: An Element Of Chaos

So the place to start is fully random, where the GM has no idea what the next wandering critter is going to be and how it’s going to fit into the story.

Why might a GM like such anarchy in their games? I can think of a few possible reasons.

Let’s start with Looseness. The unpredictability is a natural anodyne to any tendency to plot trains or over-planning your adventures.

We can follow that with Challenge – and there can be no doubt that making the products of anarchy seem sensible is a definite challenge to the GM.

Third is Verisimilitude – believe it or not! Real life is full of unexpected surprises, and random encounters are one way of reflecting that state in a controlled manner within a campaign.

Fourth, Random Encounters can provide an expression of The Fantastic that is a necessary part of the Fantasy Gaming experience when the adventure itself shapes up as a little mundane. It’s all about how those inexplicable random encounters get to where they are encountered.

for example, the PCs are in the middle of the Mad Elemental’s Fire Dungeon when the dice indicate a Frost Giant. You have three choices: (1) Ignore the result because it simply doesn’t fit; (2) Re-skin the encounter so that it makes marginal sense, eg to a Fire Giant; or (3) Let It Not Make Sense while making it rational, anyway – eg a random portal opens up to deposit a band of Frost Giants into this hellish (from their perspective) environment, in which they can only survive for a short time. They spot the PCs, immediately blame them for their predicament, and attack – fighting for their very survival. A diplomatic solution might just barely be possible if magic is used to extend the Giant’s capacity for withstanding the environment – which might gain the PCs a nominal ally, at least in the short-term, but also handicaps them with dependents.

Fifth, Random Encounters can be Inspiring, prompting the GM to discover solutions to their plot problems that they never even dreamed of.

Sixth, and finally, Random Encounters are – by definition – unpredictable, and so they consume game time with material for which prep is neither possible or necessary. And that can be a godsend when your prep has fallen short, either because the party have taken an unexpected direction or because the GM ran out of time.

There may be more, but those six are entirely adequate to justify a fully random approach to Wandering Monsters.

But there’s no escaping the fact that these would be meaningless filler in a book or movie. By definition, they don’t progress the plot (unless the GM is very clever, of course). That fact can turn a lot of GMs off the purely-random approach. While it must be remembered that an RPG is not the same as those forms of media, the less ‘screen time’ that’s available, the more the first comes to resemble the latter. For example, my usual campaign schedule permits only a few hours play in any given campaign, once a month. That puts a premium on story and plot advancement – any stagnation, no matter how brief, risks a complete loss of momentum and impetus. That’s like a stroke – if they recur, one of them will eventually kill the campaign, and short of that terminal state, it will be crippled, paralyzed, or even comatose.

Fortunately, for those GMs who don’t like untamed randomness in their encounters, or who can’t afford the potentially debilitating effects of stalling the campaign, there are alternatives.

Option 2: The Not-So-Random Encounter

The first alternative is to actually incorporate specific random events that are custom-fitted to form part of the main plot – a pair of wandering guards, for example.

Compile a list of ten or twelve such, and you have the simplest possible expression of the Not-so-random encounter.

A more advanced version allocates additional probability to the more common encounters and employs a larger die size – many GMs gravitate to the d20, others to the d%, for the purpose.

Still more refined is the notion that some encounters can only take place once, no matter what the dice might indicate – forcing a re-roll if they are indicated a second time – while others are naturally recurring.

Probably the most extreme version of the concept that I’ve ever encountered had a separate table (with only 6-8 entries most of the time, and only 4 on one occasion) for each room of a dungeon, based on the local geography and who was ‘living’ where. Personally, I think that’s probably going too far, but to each his own.

But a combination of these two factors – effectively treating each dungeon as it’s own terrain type – can provide the necessary randomness in a fairly controlled and confined manner.

Of course, once you have this notion in place and integrated into your dungeon design process, it’s a VERY short step to incorporating one or more critical plot elements into the encounters – like the (metaphoric) key to unlocking the next section or level of the dungeon!

A still further advance is the concept of “sticky” entries to the encounter table – once the party “encounter” a table with this entry without triggering this specific encounter, it gets attached to all subsequent encounter tables, perhaps even after they have left the dungeon. This can be an excellent way to get background information of no immediate relevance into the hands of the PCs in an interactive manner.

You don’t have to advance down this design pathway very far before you have crossed over into the next approach to random encounters to be discussed – integrating random encounters into the plot as essential parts of the story.

Option 3: All Part Of The Plan

In many ways, this isn’t all that dissimilar to the preceding approach. Essentially, it designates certain points in the dungeon (castle, whatever) as a location in which any designated random encounters that haven’t been triggered will automatically take place.

This can actually make the dungeon more responsive to PC actions. For example, there might be four different events that trigger a pair of guards to make their way along an individualized route to a guard post, where they will sound an alarm to summon still more guards. When the PCs reach the guard post, they find it manned by 8 + each un-encountered wandering pair guards. If the PC’s wandering monster rolls were unlucky (meaning that they didn’t encounter any of these pairs in isolation), there might be 16 guards to be dealt with – all triggered and on alert.

This still contains some random, ‘chaotic’ elements, but they are very carefully managed. But it’s possible to go one step further.

Option 4: One Plot To Rule Them All

You can design your dungeons and towns and whatever so that designated parts of the plot take place at random intervals.

This subsumes the very concept of ‘encounters’ into a larger schema; an ‘encounter’ might be stumbling over footsteps in the dust, for example. The “random encounters” list is dealt with in sequence (avoiding the dangers of anticlimax and incoherence that would otherwise be inherent).

This approach takes almost all the randomness out of Random Encounters while broadening the concept to include all manner of events that would not traditionally be considered an encounter. It is sometimes represented by the maxim “The dungeon’s not finished until the wandering monsters are vanquished,” which I first bumped into way back in the early 80s.

My early players meant that you should be able to close the doors and spend an unmolested evening in a cleared dungeon, but it was while contemplating the maxim that I first developed my current appreciation for random encounters.

Different Centaurs For Different Campaigns

It should be clear from my other writings and from the discussion above that I strongly advocate the deliberate choice of one or more of the above approaches for each distinct campaign. There may be times when the purely random approach is the most appropriate to the desired ‘look and feel’ of the campaign, as experienced by the players, while there will be times when one of the more structured approaches – or even doing away with random encounters altogether – may be more appropriate. Often, metagame considerations such as the frequency of play will be a significant consideration.

Nor does this exclude the other approaches. My fundamental approach in the Fumanor Campaigns was essentially the “not-so-random” encounter tables for overland travel, and a more structured choice within dungeons and set locations that were plot-significant. There were also a few locations, notably beyond the boundaries of “civilization”, where the choices were fully random.

You can have one dominant approach and exceptions wherever they seem appropriate.

Interestingly, it’s normal for players (unless you tell them differently) to assume that you are using either the fully-random or the not-so-random approaches, even in the most tightly controlled reality, and simply ‘doing a better job than usual’ of integrating these encounters into the ongoing narrative.

Which brings me to a variant sub-approach that I rarely see employed, one based on the ‘purely random’ approach, but which also works well with the ‘not-so-random’ concept: Dungeon Trivia.

Option A: Dungeon Trivia

At a fairly meta-level, dungeons should be thought of as a living organism. It needs a circulatory system (usually water); it needs lungs, i.e. some delivery system that feeds fresh air throughout the structure; it’s component parts need food, i.e. some sort of internal ecosystem; and, sometimes, it will have a brain that actively maneuvers the forces within to challenge and confound the PCs, and will react to their actions.

These are all parts of dungeon verisimilitude. Outside of that purpose, they have no function. They do not advance the plot in any way, shape or form. What’s more, even a hint that such considerations have been part of the GM’s design thinking is often enough to get the full benefits in the minds of the players.

Thinking about that gave me the idea of Dungeon Trivia, in which a list of all sorts of miscellaneous factoids about the dungeon or encounter location are gathered in a list. Each random encounter is then treated as an opportunity to highlight one of these factoids – or even just mention it. I just skim down the list (forcing the entries to be brief) looking for the one that’s most significant or relevant to the type of creature encountered.

This keeps the actual encounter backgrounds down to the minimum necessary information to tell the story and make decisions, while dusting all of the above with just enough additional color..

Because it can be used as a variation on all four of the previous options, I’ve called this “Option A”.

And that’s where this article was going to end (more or less) – until I had a moment of inspiration.

Option B: An Independent Plot

Why not have an independent second plotline that is purely derived from random encounters that may span multiple adventures before it comes to a conclusion?

That gives the GM two plotlines – one, relatively orderly and controlled, and one that is very loose and free-wheeling, with a balance that is easily controlled. The only requirement is that the second plotline must be able to connect to the PCs, no matter where they go – whether that is by some form of communications conduit, or a Dream-quest, or an actual presence/transition – a planar gate or whatever. This connection should be only partially controlled by the PCs – they might be able to initiate it on occasion, but should not be able to prevent it becoming active at other (potentially inconvenient) times.

This enables the players to use the second plot as a diversion when the first is dragging, or nothing important is going on, while the GM can use it to add secondary layers of complexity to the campaign the rest of the time.

What’s more, a second line of stimulation can’t help but provide new opportunities to explore the characters of the PCs and highlight distinctive elements thereof – elements that might get very little display in the more rigorously-plotted primary plotline.

The more creative you are, the greater the variation that is possible – and it all focuses on that interaction channel. Some channels may only be possible in certain environments – strictly local, small scale plotlines, like hunting down a bandit leader. Creatures encountered can be part of the band, or a victim, or a wandering beastie that is feasting on the remains of a victim – all of which shows that it’s not necessary for these random plots to get all existential and cosmic. Instead, they can be matched to the advancement of the PCs.

Old-school vs New Approaches to Random Encounters

An interesting thought came to me in the course of writing the above. Previous debates on the subject have largely dealt with the power level of the encounters, and whether or not they should be adapted or modified to match the capabilities of the PCs.

The division between the two possible camps – yes and no – regarding the latter question largely follows the division lines between old-school gaming and new-school.

The old-school argument is that creatures of all possible power levels are out wandering the reality of the game world, and any random encounter should therefore have a statistical probability of occurring, based purely on the rate of incidence of that creature. If you go into a realm known to be populated by Giant Spiders, the odds are that you will encounter such Arachnids – regardless of whether or not the party are up to coping with them or not.

When I first started gaming, the old-school was still contemporary, and the dichotomy was between dungeons (carefully-planned and balanced encounters) and wilderness (completely unplanned and not-necessarily-balanced encounters).

To be fair and honest, the tools for balancing encounters properly didn’t really exist until 3rd edition D&D provided them – even though those tools left a lot to be desired when you dug deeply into their workings. Furthermore, the game mechanics explicitly allowed for unbalanced encounters by fixing the experience awards for such encounters at a higher level than those of a balanced encounter. A number of the early posts here at Campaign Mastery deal with such game balance issues.

The new-school argument is that RPGs are, first and foremost, Games, and that some compromising of reality is desirable at times – and that it’s not fun to be killed in a battle in which you had all the chance of success of an ice-cube in hell or a moth drawn too close to a flame. Instead, the GM should moderate the danger posed by encounters, random or otherwise, to something that the party has a reasonable chance against – unless they are foolish enough to put their heads in the Dragon’s maw, of course.

This (mostly) avoids the catastrophic consequences of the flaws in the experience table, which can quickly spin a campaign out of control.

There are other points of difference between the two camps of gaming, of course, but they are not relevant to this particular discussion.

Frankly, I can see both sides of the argument, and while I personally am far more strongly drawn to the new-school argument in this respect, I have no problem with those who prefer the old-school camp. It certainly kept you on your toes, as a player!

Many of the thoughts regarding integration of random encounters with plotlines that have been expressed above have their origins in the contemplation of mechanisms and guidelines for this sort of encounter self-censorship.

There is also a third option, which I described in my posts about ecology-based random encounters – see the links at the end of the article.

The point that I want to make right now is this: it doesn’t matter which of the Four primary choices, or the -A or -B or even -AB sub-varieties of those choices you select, the philosophical position vis-a-vis the encounter models mentioned in this section remain completely open – “encounter level” (or whatever you choose to call it) lies upon a completely separate axis of decision. You can use the techniques and approaches described in this article regardless of your philosophical orientation.

Broadening the Random prospects

It should also be pointed out that the principles discussed should also apply to every other genre of gaming. A superhero wandering down the street should have a random chance of encountering a bank robbery or a mugging – and, if they don’t, that’s a break in reality that the GM has to take responsibility for. The more story-oriented approaches described might be a way for GMs running such campaigns to have their cake and eat it, too. Only the encounter content changes with campaign genre, not the general principles.

A hatful of links

In this section, I’ve isolated eleven posts and one series that go into some of the side-issues that I tried hard not to get bogged down with in this article.

XP & Balancing Encounters

• Ask The GMs: Pacing Your Campaign
• A Different Experience: A variation on the D&D 3.x Experience Points System
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 6: Challenges
• Objective-Oriented Experience Points
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Part 9: Rewards With Intent (includes a revised version of the system presented in Objective-Oriented Experience Points)

Encounter Philosophies:

• Decisions Of Plot: Encounter Planning and Prep
• Random Encounter Tables – my old-school way
• Pieces of Ordinary Randomness: Random Techniques Of Chance
• The Pentagon Of Encounter Design
• The Ugly Secrets Of The Drop-in Unplanned Encounter
• A Population Of Dinosaurs and the impact on RPG ecologies
• The Creating Ecology-Based Random Encounters series (three parts).

That’s probably got even the fastest readers sorted for the next week or two.

But in case it’s not: I tried hard to get this article done and published in time, but just missed the close of the January RPG Blog Carnival at Geek Native, which had the subject of Random Encounter Tables.

If you head to this post there and check the comments, You’ll find even more on this subject!

Today is a Public Holiday in Australia, so I’m posting something far more concise than usual.

The reason for the Public Holiday is that yesterday was Australia Day, which celebrates the arrival of white colonists from Britain, most of them transportees, in 1788 – the equivalent of the American 4th of July.

While the country had been inhabited for about 65,000 years before this event, the indigenous population was structured at a more tribal level. For better or worse, the arrival of the First Fleet set the populace on an inevitable path to a national identity and a national government.

It is for this reason that the date is celebrated, though it is also true that this also set the population on a path of inevitable conflict between the indigenous social structures and those of the colonists. Heavy-handed paternalism and racially biased beliefs would lead to many mistakes of policy and neglect, from which the nation still struggles to recover.

Personally, I feel that it is important to remember the history, warts and all, as part of the celebration. If we are to remember all the good that has resulted, we also need to acknowledge the harm that was done.

Unfortunately, there are some who use that past harm as a divisive issue, inhibiting attempts to use the date as a day of healing between the two communities. Still, little by little, and rarely marked by large or events or conspicuous changes, progress is being made. And, in addition to the national achievements of the past, that is what I celebrate – in my own quiet little way.

Honoring Service

Australia Day is also, traditionally, one of the two days on which the government honors those who have demonstrated gallantry, bravery, distinguished service, meritorious service, and long service to the citizens of Australia.

Unlike the national honors of many other countries, nominations from individuals and local communities are welcome. All nominations are investigated for worthiness, regardless of the source or the number of people who have nominated that individual. Until that investigation is complete, and the decision to grant the honor if it will be accepted (some refuse), the prospective honoree usually doesn’t even know that they have been nominated, and may never know who actually put their name forward in the first place.

As always, there were some awards which were controversial, and it is on those that the reactionaries on social media have obsessed; but, by a margin of more than fifty to one, the majority are ordinary citizens only known to their family, friends, and within their profession. There are usually some celebrities of song, stage, screen, and sport that will be more widely recognized by name alone. The three most likely to be known by the majority of my readers, being from North America or Europe, are Keith Urban, Glenn Shorrock (original lead singer of the Little River Band) and Hugo Weaving – that’s three from a list of more than 2500 names.

There’s always a lot of media speculation about some of the more prestigious awards, like the Australian Of The Year, and so the topic was in the back of my mind on Saturday.

Honoring Contributions

Saturday was the day of the first session for 2020 of my superhero campaign. One of my players was showing his copy of the new Robotech RPG, to which he had provided content, with not unjustified pride. Sure enough, there was his name, in the “Special Thanks” section.

Right away, a problem was evident. Like most of the big RPG projects these days, the production of the Robotech book had been financed via Kickstarter, and virtually every reward tier of the fundraising earned the buyer their name in the book.

The names were placed in a different section on the same page. But there was no way to tell whether they were there for writing part of the rules, for play-testing the game, or for supporting the production financially. All you could tell was they weren’t the principle author or the principle editor.

Name recognition is very important in RPGs, as it is in any community of interests. There are names that I recognize instantly – Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Monte Cook, Skip Williams (amongst others) – and with that name comes a level of earned respect for past achievements that put the latest product to which their name has been attached into a new light (and yes, I know the first two names on that list have passed away).

It was one of Campaign Mastery co-founder Johnn Four’s proudest achievements to have contributed to the Official Rules in an official D&D rule-book (DMG II). Having his name in the credits was a Noteworthy Achievement in his eyes. It gave him instant credibility – and when he started Roleplaying Tips and later Campaign Mastery, when he co-published Assassin’s Amulet, or any of this other gaming books, that name recognition and credibility grew, even as it helped imbue those projects with instant cred.

A Kickstarter Conundrum

That’s a problem because such contributions are clouded and even obfuscated by the inclusion of backer’s names. It’s only fair that financial backers get their due recognition – without them, the product would not exist – but I don’t consider “Backed multiple RPG Kickstarters” to be a qualification as an RPG writer. Heck, it qualifies you as a GM only by implication.

The two sets of names need to be kept separate, treated differently, handled differently, and presented differently – to give credit where it is due, and to begin earning name recognition for the incoming next generation of RPG writers (there always is one).

There is also the wider question of whether or not being named in the publication has now reached the point of being so ubiquitous that it makes us undervalue simply being name-checked. Should we, in fact, place a higher premium on getting your name in print?

It’s an easy reward to fulfill, and therein lies both its attractiveness to prospective publishers and the problem. It’s also become something of a default expectation, because it is so ubiquitous – a result of that attractiveness.

A little more thought might present alternatives – getting a planet or a minor character named after you, fr example, or a ship. If your product includes a scene at a market or bazaar, perhaps the backer’s names can be used for the merchants and their NPC customers. You may not have to say that much more about them – vendor, type of produce, a couple of lines on the type of activity at the stall, and a list of the customers involved.

Tombstones in the cemetery. Prisoners in the jail cells. Lost explorers. Farmers and unimportant townspeople (in terms of the plot). A list of the aides and junior officers reporting to senior NPCs in the military hierarchy. Latinized, a list of the “formal names” of some of the exotic plants of a greenhouse, or a Druid’s Grove. The unremarkable generic crowd in a bar scene. The names of Geographic features. Get creative, and let actually being name-dropped mean something.

Or, choose to be explicit: I’ve seen that done a number of times. “Backers, without whom, etc” and a long list of names, buried at the back. Nothing wrong with that.

All I’m suggesting is that people think about it – because it’s not as trivial a question as it might seem.

And, as for the proud contributor who got the “Special Thanks”, I’m told that he will get a more substantive credit in a forthcoming volume.

I have a professional interest in Runes.

The Mage in my superhero campaign (Zenith-3) uses Runes as the focus of his spell-casting, and I’m always looking for ways to invoke the resulting flavor, and for the implied limitations and benefits that come from this approach.

It has been established, for example, that it’s not enough for him to simply scrawl some runes onto a convenient surface with a piece of chalk, that it requires something more substantial.

There are times when I have pictured runes of fire hanging in mid-air as he casts a spell, but the player wasn’t in favor of that – even if only a handful of people could read them.

Something that has worked well are small glazed and fired tablets of clay, about an inch square, with a rune carved into the surface, that release a specific spell when they are crushed, as a way of “prepping” a spell in advance.

Another feature of the magic system is the capacity to ad-hoc construct a spell or spell variant. It has been established that these “rune-stones” are not strong enough to hold an ad-hoc spell. However, something more substantive like a cast metal rune-stone (hard to crush by hand!) might be a horse of a different color – we’ve simply never explored the question. (It’s relevant that he’s the ONLY rune-based mage to appear in the campaign, other spell-casters have each had their own styles). – (I dread the day when someone decides to play a poetry-based spell-caster, because none of the players I know are exactly poetic in nature – and poetry often bores me, anyway. And the first person to suggest a rap-based spell-caster will get a rap of my knuckles around the vicinity of their head!)

Runic Fascination

I probably first encountered runes in The Lord Of The Rings (the books, not movies), which I read before I read The Hobbit. I immediately found them to be fascinating and frustrating in equal measure – but was deeply impressed that an English-alphabet rendering did not sound like English, but sounded completely internally consistent – and informed the names of places and things in the Dwarfish lexicon – lessons that I have remembered throughout my time as an RPG career.

I found the fact that Elvish looked a lot like the English alphabet subtracted from the “alien-ness” of the Elves – they seemed more mundane, a perception at odds with their almost religious position within Middle-earth society. It was an inconsistency that nagged at me every time I read the books.

– Hieroglyphics were equally fascinating for much the same reason.

As an aside, I also find it fascinating that this would be less of an issue where I younger – my schooling was in an era when cursive handwriting (“running-writing”) was taught as preferable to printed letters, something that is no longer the case in Australia (I can’t speak for the rest of the world). My mother, in comparison, was educated in an era when the specifics of construction of cursive letters was much fancier, and had to be perfect or else – and in those days, corporal punishment was both accepted and widely-used. So the cursive script that Tolkien used would have been even less alien to my mother and considerably more alien than that taught to my just-married young niece.

(This has an impact that is both subtle and profound in other ways as well – the modern way places more importance on what you are communicating than in the mode of that communication. In mum’s day, the clarity of communication was more important than the substance. My generation falls somewhere in the middle, in what I now perceive as a phase of transition from one emphasis to the other. Most of my generation write more rapidly and fluidly than the generations to either side of us, but also arguably have far worse handwriting in terms of legibility. Which actually makes us better at deciphering barely-legible handwriting – which is ironic since the stated purpose of “running-writing” was to make it easier for students to achieve a satisfactory standard of handwriting…

These various impressions and observations have all contributed to my handling of language in RPGs ever since.

The Tools Available

Using Runes and other non-English alphabets used to be virtually impossible unless you spoke the language (and I’ve never been good at Languages, as my French teachers would testify – in fact, it reached the point where I was planted into the School Library and told to educate myself on something instead, because I was holding up the rest of the class.)

This is no longer a handicap, and there is no longer an excuse. There are three tools available to the GM in the modern era, and their use in combination presents a vast palette of choices.

Online Translation

Google offers an online translator as a service. Compose a piece of text (or a smattering of key words) and input it into “Google Translate” then pick the language you want. Drawback: it doesn’t give you a phonetic English translation, it renders it in the appropriate font – which often won’t come out right when you copy & paste into a text document. Instead, what you will find are a whole lot of question-marks, punctuated by the occasional recognizable character.

But for creating images that look right, this has proven invaluable.

Plus, there’s a button that you can push to hear the translation being read to you in the foreign language!

How good is it? Objective measurement, by translating something into some other language and then back into English, is probably a 7 out of 10. Some languages it does really well, some languages it does quite badly. But, unless you actually speak the language, it simply looks and sounds authentic – and it’s a lot less work than any of the alternatives. For example, French, Russian, and Japanese it seems to do reasonably well, German not so much.

I stated that it’s not a phonetic translation. There are other websites out there that will perform that service for you, too. These are less likely to be around for a long time (though I hope they are), so I won’t link to any specific one in this discussion. Some of these are language-specific, so the best search is “phonetic [LANGUAGE] online translator” or some variation. “Online Translator Phonetic Samoan” would be a valid example. Sometimes you need to add the word “Free” – and I recommend that if you do so, you surround it with inverted commas, the same way I have, which tells Google that the result HAS to include that term.

Of course, ‘real’ languages are one thing, non-human languages quite another. But there have been solutions to that available in the past, too – and it wouldn’t surprise me to find some of them still around. Quite often, these will give you the chance to translate into Tolkien Elvish or Tolkien Dwarfish – outside of that, your choices become a lot more limited.

Find-and-Replace

Those who read the second parts of each post in the (still incomplete) On Alien Languages series will already have some notion of the power of this tool, which is routinely included in word processors. I had a whole example worked up – until I realized that it wasn’t actually an example of what I’m talking about. So here’s a new one.

We start with a paragraph of text:

Writing things down is a major evolutionary step for a society. It enables a scholar to instruct future generations, passing knowledge from one hand to another.

Next, we need some ground rules, based on the biology of the species as well as its society. If your lips are hard beaks, you can’t make “w” sounds, for example.

It’s often useful to define these in sequence of most common to least common. Somewhere along that path, you will reach the point where only small portions of the original remain untouched. For example, let’s change all E to UZ, all TH to KH, all A to AZ, and all ING to OZ:

Writoz khozs down is az mazjor uzvolutionazry stuzp for az sociuzty. It uznazbluzs az scholazr to instruct futuruz guznuzraztions, pazssoz knowluzdguz from onuz haznd to aznokhuzr.

Next, delete all F’s and W’s, convert all IS to EZIK, all OL to ZU, all OR to YZK, all IONS to IOZ, and all CH to PAZ:

Ritoz khozs don ezek az mazjyzk uzvzuutionazry stuzp yzk az sociuzty. It uznazbluzs az spazzuazr to instruct uturuz guznuzraztioz, pazssoz knzuuzdguz rom onuz haznd to aznokhuzr.

At this point, there’s not much recognizable. IT, TO, KN, SOC, and the components of “instruct”. So let’s make them IK, KO, ZH, KOZ, and KUZUK respectively.:Also, “hand” is still recognizable despite having a Z in the middle of it; turning HA into KA and ND into OHK should take care of that.

Rikoz khozs don ezek az mazjyzk uzvzuutionazry stuzp yzk az koziuzty. Ik uznazbluzs az spazzuazr ko kuzuk uturuz guznuzraztioz, pazssoz zhzuuzdguz rom onuz kazohk ko aznokhuzr.

Finally, I would re-space this and tidy it up to make pronunciation a little easier:

Rikoz khozs don ezek az mazizk uz zuuton azray stuzp izk az koz iuzty.

Ik uznaz bluzs az spaz zuaz kokuzuk utur uz guznu zraztioz, paz ssoz zhzu uzdguz rom onuz kazohk ko aznok huzr.

Count up the number of operations used to render this text into something completely different and you will get 18 – and it has literally taken me longer to record what I was doing than it would have taken to just DO it. The big trick is to be able to repeat the process if you need to, down the track, so I would still have taken some notes.

Non-English Fonts

The final option open to all in the modern day is to replace the usual font with one that renders the text into exotic characters.

Rather than creating a new example, the one that I redacted from the previous section will do nicely, and save all that work from going to waste.

When I started it, I had just mentioned the On Alien Languages series (the problem was choosing the wrong language to translate into, as you will see): We resume from the point of that mention:

…the (still incomplete) On Alien Languages series will already have some notion of the power of this tool, which is routinely included in word processors.

For the benefit of any who haven’t, here’s an example of what you’ve missed out on:

Giant:

Giants once dominated many of the other races, It was when they attempted (and failed) to conquer Dwarves that they learned to write, and that in turn shaped and altered their language.

Translating text into Giant is best simulated by first translating it into Russian, using German for any terms that do not translate, with Hungarian for a third choice. The written form of the language can be achieved by rendering the result using Czar (note that italic and bold versions are also provided).

Orc:

When the Orcish tribes broke free of the domination of the Giants they retained much of the Giant language, but this quickly fragmented as any cohesion between them broke down. Each tribe now has it’s own dialect, extremely divergent from the original, which are collectively known as Orc, or Orcish. This makes communications with any specific tribe or individual extremely touchy; what might be a compliment to one tribe may be an insult in another.

Spoken Orcish is best rendered by first writing the text in English, randomly inverting the meaning of a few words here and there, translating the results into Hungarian, with Russian and then German as secondary and tertiary choices, removing all the spaces and inserting new ones after every one or two syllables. The exception is proper nouns, which have hyphens inserted instead of spaces.

Written Orcish is achieved the same way, but with the final text rendered into Czar.

For example, here’s a paragraph in English:

The winner is named the Merchant Prince of the Guild for the next year, the man (or woman) with the authority and resources to dominate guild policy for the next year, to agree the biggest contracts and commissions, the wealthiest and most successful practitioner within his Guild – for now. From the moment they are elected, the Merchant Prince’s primary goal is ensuring his reelection twelve months hence. (There’s more on the consequences of this political structure in a subsequent section).

And here’s a version with some inverted meanings:

The final not loser is named the Merchant Prince of the Guild, the man (or not man) with the authority and resources to dominate guild policy for the next year, to agree the biggest contracts and commissions, the wealthiest and most successful practitioner within his Guild – for now. From the moment they are elected, the Merchant Prince’s last and least-important goal (officially) is ensuring his reelection twelve months hence. The reality is different, of course. (There’s more on the consequences of this political structure in a subsequent section).

Notice that the meaning is still the same. Next, I translate it into Hungarian:



As it happens, there was a translation for all of the text, but a couple of words are close enough to English to be recognizable (highlighted in yellow). Purely for the purposes of demonstration, let’s translate the original English to the second choice, Russian, and drop it into place.



Now, there are all sorts of characters in the result that don’t appear in standard English. So the next step is to replace them with appropriate characters:

A vegso vesztesnek nevezik a Ceh Kereskedelmi Herceget, az embert (vagy nem embert), akinek hatalma es eroforrasai vannak a kovetkezo ev guildpolitikajanak uralkodasara, a legnagyobb szerzodsek es jutalekok megegyezesere, a leggazdagabb es legsikeresebb gyakorlora. Ceh – egyelore. A valasztasi pillanattol kezdve a kereskedo herceg utolso es legkevesbe fontos celja (hivatalosan) az, hogy ujbol megvalasztasat tizenket honapon keresztul biztossa. A valosag termeszetesen mas. (Ezen nonmtmyeckar ctpykrypa kovetkezmenyeirol bovebben a vetkezo szakaszban olvashat).

The penultimate step is to remove all the spaces except in proper names and titles, which form separate words without spaces in their own right – look to the original to work out what those are – and then insert new spaces and hyphens as necessary, leaving no word longer than two syllables without some form of spacing (I’ll use existing punctuation to separate words, then replace them with exclamation marks). This gives 13 words and one Title. Separating these to clarify them gives 11 paragraphs of Orc-speak.

Aveg sovesz tesnek nevez ika CehKer-esked-elmi-Herceg-et!

Azem bert (vagyn emem bert)!

Akin ekhat almaes erof orras aivan nakak ovet kezoev guildpol itik ajan akur alkod asar a!

Aleg nagyob bszer zodes ekes juta lekok megeg yeze sere!

Aleg gazdag abbe slegsik eres ebbgya korlora! Ceheg yelore!

Aval aszta sipill anatt olkez dveaker esked oherc egut olsoe slegkev esbef onto scelja!

(Hiva talos an)!

Az!

Hogyuj bolmeg valasz tasat tizen kethon apon keres ztulbiz tost sa!

Aval osag termes zetes enmas!

(Ezenn onmtmyeck arctpyk rypak ovet kezmen yeirol boveb benak ovet kezosz akasz banol vashat).

Looking at the results, I decide that single-syllables shouldn’t end a sentence, and make an exception to the two-syllable rule.

Aveg sovesz tesnek nevez ika CehKer-esked-elmi-Herceg-et!

Azem bert (vagyn emembert)!

Akin ekhat almaes erof orras aivan nakak ovet kezoev guildpol itik ajan akur alkod asara!

Aleg nagyob bszer zodes ekes juta lekok megeg yezesere!

Aleg gazdag abbe slegsik eres ebbgya korlora! Ceheg yelore!

Aval aszta sipill anatt olkez dveaker esked oherc egut olsoe slegkev esbef onto scelja!

(Hiva talosan)!

Az!

Hogyuj bolmeg valasz tasat tizen kethon apon keres ztulbiz tostsa!

Aval osag termes zetes enmas!

(Ezenn onmtmyeck arctpyk rypak ovet kezmen yeirol boveb benak ovet kezosz akasz banol vashat).

The final step for written Orcish would be to use a font called Czar (There are a lot of fonts named this way – the one I am referring to is a Cyrillic-style font named “Czar Regular”, available free from Fontsgeek. If I do so, it looks like this:



…which looks nothing like the original, or any of the translations encountered along the way. (Any characters that don’t appear will show up as an empty box; simply delete these or replace them with something).

By the time you run the various combinations and permutations of these tools together, you end up with a vast range of choices.

The diagram to the right illustrates the principles from a slightly different, more abstract, perspective. You start with an English-language rendering of what you want to say and can either react to the content or to the appearance. Either way, you end up with a path to both a rendered language (2) and a phonetic language (1) for an English-speaking person – paired to match each other.

The choices, if you’ve been properly guided by the anatomy and society of the species (“Race” in D&D terms) don’t appear out of thin air. Instead, they are reflections of the design decisions you’ve already made giving the resulting language an immediate cultural relevance.

And, when you notice that one word is almost the same as another, the temptation to link the two in some fashion can be the sort of inspiration that comes from on high. For example, if the Orcish word for victory is “ZUKH” and the Orcish word for mistake is “ZAKH”, you could reasonably extrapolate a connection between the two to say that all failures are personal to an Orc; someone is always definitively to blame, and that person is dishonored by the failure. No excuses or prevarications are acceptable, none will be accepted. You can use this foundation to create an entire social order, one based on the premise that victory by any means is preferable to any form of defeat.

Imagine trying to translate the principles of give and take inherent in diplomacy into such a social framework. “Neither wins” means “both lose”. “Both win” begs the question, “who loses?” – and there has to be someone – and so on. Losing a hand at cards would be enough for a declaration of war – and cheating (if necessary) to win would be regarded as the moral thing to do!

Yet, this would undoubtedly be regarded as a virtue, however mixed a blessing it might prove in other people’s eyes.

This is societal development the fun way, where each domino “idea” begins a chain-reaction. Just remember – while it might be perfectly clear in you mind now, some of the lines of reasoning will have already started to blur – document your thoughts as quickly, completely, and concisely as possible, as soon as possible! Trust me, I speak from experience!

Getting Back To Runes

Historical accuracy carries its’ own verisimilitude, and can be the key to unlocking another society that you can draw upon for inspiration. I am quite prepared to believe that you can never fully understand a society until you can speak in the language of that society; until then, there will be nuances that simply go over your head.

It obviously is not enough to simply pick up a font that looks like runes (there are several out there). Reference books are a good beginning, and I have a couple of those. I’ve also given the player of the rune-caster a number of books on the Vikings, and – assuming that he’s read them – I’m perfectly willing to concede that he’s a more knowledgeable expert on the subject than I am. I won’t let that get in the way of a plotline – his knowledge is of this world, after all, and subject to revision-as-necessary.

So anything with “Rune” in the title is sure to get my attention. A few weeks ago, Paul St John Mackintosh waved just such a product under my nose – something called “Casting The Runes”. This is a standalone RPG written and designed by Paul, which is to be published by experienced Game Publisher, Lawrence Whitaker.

The detail reveals a limited relationship to my runic interest, at best, but intriguing and potentially valuable material for entirely different reasons: Casting the Runes is an investigative roleplaying game based on the ghost stories and tales of the supernatural of M R Jones, described as a renowned medievalist and writer, who was active in the literary field of horror between 1904 and 1935.

The Kickstarter page for Casting The Runes described him as writing stories “based on and around the investigation of strange, uncanny, supernatural artifacts that either summon terrible, malevolent entities, or unlock the ways for disturbing events to manifest”. I was instantly reminded of that classic story, The Monkey’s Paw.

I have to admit that the only horror writer from the era that I’m really aware of (never mind being familiar with) is Lovecraft. But I was intrigued – after all, such stories as described should readily translate into just about any genre, if you were willing to throw enough of them away.

So I was sufficiently intrigued to investigate further, and discovered from the quoted CV that Paul is probably the most qualified person in existence to handle this project and any related ones, having won multiple awards as a horror writer.

The Kickstarter campaign has 14 days remaining as I write this, and has already achieved its funding goals. So you are as certain to receive product at the end of the day as it is possible to get with a Kickstarter. Furthermore, the RPG is described as already written, needing only production (artwork and layout) and printing to be complete, which is reassuring.

The story isn’t all peaches-and-cream. The stretch goals are such that only backers of the higher tiers will benefit from them, as they are all enhancements to the more premium versions of the book. As I pointed out in my reply to Paul, this provides little incentive for backers to promote the Kickstarter, so I expected that they would struggle to get further traction once the initial funding target was reached. That was 11 days ago, a time-span that has only validated the prediction. Paul was going to refer the notion to the publisher to see if there was anything that could be done to correct the problem which he recognized as soon as it was pointed out, but nothing has since changed so I suspect it has to simply be filed under “lessons learned” at this point.

Nor are these editions progressive, getting unlocked for certain tiers of backers as sufficient donors back the project to cover the expense. That means that backers in one tier can be subsidizing the product received by backers in higher tiers.

That said, there appears to be nothing wrong with the product that should turn you away if you want to back it. The cheapest copies of the finished book are Canadian $20 (plus P&H). The cheapest physical copies are at the $40 (+P&H) backer level – both fairly typical for a book of this size (192 pages).

For some of you, that’s enough information to steer you to the Kickstarter; for others it’s enough for you to declare a lack of interest. Either way, at least now you’ve heard of it and can decide for yourself.

But that leaves a middle ground who have yet to be convinced. For the morbidly-curious and otherwise-uncertain, there is a free preview PDF available through RPGNow that should help you decide. You have two weeks – make the most of them!

Plans & Changes

It’s strange how perceptions and plans can change as a project proceeds. This is the third in my series of articles about Prologues (spelt ‘Prologs’ in the US, and in the rest of this text) – but when I started, this was intended to be one single article, something relatively quick that I could toss off despite seasonal interruptions. When I started actually writing it, it was quickly split in two – a first part looking at prologs in general and in a more abstract way, then the second part dealing with the specifics of different approaches. The intent was to describe each in a paragraph and move on to the next, and if I had stuck to that plan, the original intent would have been executed. You can judge from the presence of a part three that I did not!

Instead, I found myself going into each prolog type in greater depth, aided by a recurring checklist that made sure I didn’t miss anything.

Now, looking back on it, it feels like this was always going to be a three-part series. It just “feels” right that way, as though anything less would not have contained the depth that readers have come to expect from Campaign Mastery when we tackle a subject.

In it’s own way, GMs frequently have a similar experience whenever we run an adventure. It is rare and noteworthy for events to unfold anything like the way we expected before we started, and that’s true no matter how thorough our plans are. And hopefully, at the end, it all looks like it was always intended to unfold the way it did – complete with death-defying cliffhangers, desperate situations, moments when all hope seemed lost, and inspired moves creating sudden changes of fortune.

Nevertheless, you don’t have to look too deeply below the surface to find the remnants of the intermediate plan, when this part and the last were intended to be one. In particular, this article will presume that you have read the last one, and will often refer back to the content of part 2.

And, when you get to the end of the detailed descriptions of prolog types, you’ll find what might almost be considered the seeds of a potential part four – a topic or two that were better addressed after the long list of specifics were complete, and some afterthoughts.

It’s a substantial work order that won’t fulfill itself – so I’ll stop dithering and get on with it!

9. Omniscient Alarms

You might think that I’ve already dealt with this type of prolog in type 2, “Aftermaths”. Everything stated there applies to this category, 100%. But, with some sort of alarm being sounded by an Omniscient Entity of some sort, there are a couple of implications and requirements that are unique. An “aftermath” can be nothing more than someone’s subconscious working overtime – an actual Omniscient Alarm is a horse of entirely different color.

First, the situation has to warrant such an Entity’s involvement. That in itself can be problematic; you have to avoid it being an anticlimax. In effect, an Omniscient Alarm ratchets the hype up to 11, and the situation itself has to live up to it.

At the same time, you have to explain why the PCs have never heard from this Entity before. The simplest such answer is that this is a greater threat than anything they’ve had to deal with previously. Others include the PCs having finally earned the trust and respect of the Entity with their past successes; the Entity having made some sort of mistake in dealing with the situation that has made it a lot worse, and that he is trying to undo; or even being temporarily out from under the thumb of a strict supervisor who is non-interventionist.

You also need to have an answer to the question of whether or not the Entity will intervene again in the future, in the event of other imminent disasters of similar magnitude – and if not, why not.

Another problem to avoid is the potential for every “ordinary” crisis that follows being an anticlimax. All this makes for a delicate balancing act.

Second, there’s the very existence of the Entity. Nature abhors the singular example – where there’s one, there are usually many. Why have none of the others made their presence felt in the campaign before now? Who are the others, anyway? Where do the Entities come from, what’s their story? The mere existence of the Entities can threaten to rewrite your entire Cosmology – unless they were “baked in” from the very beginning.

The Bottled Adventure

    “…I am strictly forbidden from interfering. My superiors judge that the situation will resolve itself to their advantage, never mind how much suffering must be endured en route to that resolution. I think they are overconfident and have been seduced by the potential gains. They maintain strict scrutiny of every agent they assess as potentially capable of direct interference in the situation. A rare and temporary coincidental cosmic phenomenon that may never be repeated has created a window between our worlds, and through that, I found you, and now I beg for your assistance. Help us, please, before it is too late!”

Notice how neatly this answers every one of the potential problems listed earlier. First, this becomes an isolated one-off event. Second, it removes the Entity and their entire existence from the usual campaign reality. Third, the actual problem to be faced could be relatively minor, but because the usual remedial actions are not available for “political” reasons, outside intervention is needed – so no threat of anticlimax.

If you are running, say, a cyberpunk campaign, and discover this really great D&D adventure and think it would be fun to put your players through a change of pace, this is the perfect vehicle. Or vice-versa! (The usual game-balance caveats apply, and you might need to think about the transfer of rewards).

Or you could restrict yourself to the usual milieu and simply remove this adventure in time and/or space from the usual campaign – so far away in one or both that events might as well be taking place in a parallel universe. Speaking of which, I’ve run this exact riff a time or two from parallel universes, which is somewhere in between the other solutions.

And, at least once, I’ve had the entity appealing for help turn out to be the villain, attempting to manipulate a situation covertly for his own benefit – and virtually everything said in that opening spiel turning out to be a pack of lies….

Omniscient Alarms either signal something out of the ordinary, or an escalation of intensity within the existing campaign. In the latter case, they signal a watershed moment, a point of transition between phases of the Campaign. This can create its own problems – what if the Players like the way things already were, better? The only satisfactory answer that I’ve found is not to hide the intention to transition the campaign between multiple phases from the players, and to significantly build up a sense of change being inevitable.

    “Life was a game, a lark. I could fall into one escapade after another and climb back out smelling like a rose because I didn’t take life seriously. Suddenly, there are consequences, things matter, there are people suffering and some I care about could be hurt or killed if I mess up.”
    “That’s what happens in wars.”
    “It’s cramping my style.”

This approach gives the GM license to experiment, to be a little different, to try something out and see if the players like it, without hanging the future of the entire campaign on the outcome.

It should go without saying that the subject of the Alarm should be strictly related to the main content of the adventure. It might seem reasonable, and even realistic, for more advance warning to be given, achieved by having the Alarm relate to a future adventure and not the immediate one. That can work, but it can also cause the whole thing to fall flat. It needs to be delicately handled or the result can’t help but be an anticlimax. The greater the separation in real time, the greater the risks that have to be managed.

10. Metaphors and Allegories

Something I’ve found over the years is that you can but commentary into a prolog that simply wouldn’t fit within the main adventure – like employing metaphors and allegories to shed a different perspective on the current situation, or on the adventure that is to follow. This works very well when you have taken a very abstract concept and translated it into some new context. For example, one adventure had the PCs confronting and exposing corruption within the in-game government of the day. The prolog depicted a patient on his sickbed as his system attempted to fight off a spreading cancer. I flashed back to this prolog in brief snippets throughout the adventure – when the PCs made progress, the patient rallied; when the PCs encountered setbacks, the patient went downhill. The metaphor was making a point about the way corruption spreads, one that would have either been boring as a lecture, or mentioned once and forgotten if brief enough not to be too dull. At the end of the adventure, with the PCs successful, the patient was discharged, in full remission – just as another patient was wheeled into the hospital room suffering from the same illness. Flash to two men, somewhere, shaking hands. Curtain. I didn’t need to elaborate further – it was a clear signal that the PCs may have excised one corrupt group, but corruption itself was beyond them as an enemy, a fact of life.

Handled the wrong way, this could have ended the entire day’s play on a depressing down-note. Because of the way I had set up and referenced the metaphor, the words spoken by the doctor to his (recovered) patient conveyed an entirely different message: “We are all mortal, so I fight death on a daily basis. I’ve learned to enjoy the small victories. Congratulations, and try not to die anytime soon, okay?” Those last two sentences might just as well have been said direct to the PCs and to the players.

An allegory is a poem, picture, play, etc, in which the overt meaning of characters and/or events symbolizes a moral or spiritual meaning. A metaphor is a figure of speech or narrative in which a word or phrase is applied to a person or situation in a non-literal sense in order to symbolize a quality or trait of the person or situation, EG “Brave as a Lion”. A given passage of text can be either, both, or neither. The reference can be standalone, or – as in the example – a touchstone. It can have a relevance that might only be recognized in hindsight, or it can shape perceptions from the moment it is related.

Simply relating the adventure title can be the entirety of the prolog, when that title has multiple meanings. That’s something I do a lot in my Superhero campaign – the current adventure is entitled “A Tangled Web” and it has already had three separate meanings within the adventure. The previous one was “Figures In Black” and that also referred to multiple different figures all wearing black and causing various developments within the campaign or the adventure, and also to some important numbers on a printed page. You get the idea.

There is an obvious need for the prolog to relate to the Main Content – that’s the whole point of this type of prolog. Which means that if you are making a point about a different perspective on the situation the PCs have found themselves in, the main adventure has to reference and progress that situation, it can’t just leave the status quo unchanged.

Outside of the dangers of being too obvious and heavy-handed, or too deep and subtle, there aren’t a lot of risks involved – so if you are careful to adhere to the principle of meaning being applied within the current adventure (and preferably, that day’s play), there aren’t a lot of other restrictions on this type of beginning to worry about.

11. A Glimpse Of The Past

This comes in two – no, three – sub-types:

• Reminders Of Past Events;
• Delivery of new information that PCs “already know” but the players don’t;
• Delivery of out-of-character information that neither the PCs nor Players know.

So distinctive are these that they really need to be addressed separately.

11.1 Remembering Yesterday

I need to ensure that readers distinguish this type of beginning from type 17, “Where We Left Off”. That can follow the main prolog, but this type refers to something so long ago that the GM felt the players needed to be reminded of it. This is especially true if one or more of the PCs weren’t with the party back then. Importantly, any space used by a status report should be taken out of the space allocation to the prolog overall. If you’ve got a page and a half, it’s reasonable for one-and-a-quarter to be devoted to the incident being remembered and 1/4 of a page to a very brief snapshot of the current situation. The players will be looking for the relevance of the prolog to the adventure, and an excessively-lengthy recap of the current situation can only frustrate them.

Obviously, there should be some connection between the incident being remembered and the current adventure, and that relevance should be made clear before the end of the first day’s play. I find that this relevance makes a great cliffhanger ending.

There is a noteworthy benefit to placing this sort of flashback sequence in a prolog – it means that you don’t have to interrupt the action with the recap when relevance makes itself known. In other words, this type of prolog is used for the effect that it has on the structure and pacing of the main adventure.

It is possible to get bogged down in side issues as the players waltz down memory lane, or (worse) challenge your “official” record of the story. In the interests of keeping the past relevant to the campaign, I indulge the first (to a reasonable extent) but come down hard on the second: “From time to time, plot holes are discovered that went unnoticed at the time, and past events have to be retrofitted to close them,” is my usual line – without elaborating further. My players accept this line of argument at least most of the time (it helps that they’ve found themselves demonstrably wrong on a few of these disputed cases). Of course, if you ARE wrong, make your mea culpas and start work on salvaging your current adventure!

11.2 Background Info-dump, Personal

In some of these cases, the guidelines for length presented in Part 1 are just that – a guideline, to be ignored if the probative value is high enough. In others, they are strict doctrines that need to be observed very tightly. Background Info-dumps manage to be both at the same time. In the case of personal background info-dumps, you can be a little more casual; in the case of ex-cathedra info-dumps (see 11.3 below), they are rigid controls that must be strictly observed.

The biggest danger with a personal info-dump is that you are, inherently, focused on just one PC, who will be hanging on your every word (one way or another). The rest may find it moderately interesting or openly boring. The less this is a factor, the more latitude you have – but beware of outwearing your welcome.

A secondary danger is that you may be messing with a PCs’ canon. Some players enjoy the GM adding to their character backgrounds, in the process integrating the characters more tightly with the campaign world – they get richer characters and a “personal stake” in the day’s adventuring. Others detest it. I have had one player tell me, “if there’s something my character knows and I don’t, tell me when I roll and not before!”

Others simply need more time to digest information than the immediacy of the gaming table. Background info-dumps for such players are best delivered by email, or in writing, in advance of the day’s play – with a reminder or synopsized recap as the prolog. And be prepared for the player to say “I didn’t have time to read it.” Handle such situations delicately – the reasons may be legitimate – but make it clear, without being offensive, that the player is inconveniencing everyone else at the table. But only make a fuss if they actually are inconveniencing everyone. Otherwise – “No problem, I’ll be focusing on the others for a while anyway, so you can read it now.”

It’s preferable to avoid giving permission for the players to just ignore something you’ve sent them.

Of course, not all background info-dumps, even of the personal variety, involve a character’s personal background to any significant level. “Back when Pangram was a student, he took a course in classical Dwarfish architecture (it says so, on his character sheet). His lecturer on the subject was Kalzar Briteblade the thirteenth. Pangram loved the subject, but Kalzar could make his own execution sound boring. Despite this, he soaked up as much as he could about [characteristic element one] and [characteristic element two], and learned [important fact #1].” The GM knows that “important fact #1” will be directly relevant to the day’s adventuring, something that the character would know because of what he has on his character sheet and has encapsulated it in an anecdote. The player knows that the GM has a reason for doing so, because it won’t have happened by accident, but doesn’t know if it’s the factoid or the lecturer from his past, or both, that will be significant. (Of course, the term “important” is a relative one!)

11.3 Background Info-dump, Ex-cathedra

One of the metaphors often used to describe the players of an RPG is that of an audience in participatory theater. This is an appropriate choice because each player has no idea what the other players will say or do next, they can only watch and react in character. There are times when it is more useful than others. This is one of those times.

This is a technique that you often see used in TV episodes and even movies. Somehow, it is more notable in the former than the latter, probably because a TV show is less expected to have the scope of a movie. RPG adventures are something of a cross between the two – they can have scope even greater than a movie, and yet their structures are more akin to those of a TV show – and that includes this kind of prolog being unusual.

And the reason is because the players are reduced to being an audience while the GM orates. And they won’t – and shouldn’t – sit still for that for very long.

Yet, there are times when this is utterly necessary. If the GM has planned perfectly, then he provided the relevant information in the campaign background, and only needs to recap it. But most of the time, this is information that wasn’t even thought of at that time, and that needs to be provided to the players now. It might even be information that the PCs have spent some time ferreting out in-game, and that therefore could not have been provided to the players any sooner.

Length is the enemy here – and the natural enemy of length constraints are felicity of style. If the narrative is coming from am NPC, there is a natural desire to present it in-character – but that ultimately means padding it with characterization.

If you go over permissible length, there are two (similar) solutions.

You can break the narrative up and present these in (relatively) brief snippets in the course of the adventure, a series of flashbacks that get to the point just as the information becomes essential. If you adopt this approach, I recommend snippets of no more than half the maximum length indicated for a prolog, and preferably only 1/3. This is choice one.

But what if the information is critical immediately? Then your only choice is the synopsis, in which detail and content is sacrificed to character style – and ends with the NPC saying something to the effect of, “I can tell you where to find more information about any of these events, but that’s the gist of it.” That puts the onus back onto the players, plants a delay in the manifestation of the criticality into the plotline, provides a measure of interactivity in what would otherwise be stale narrative – but the GM had better have done the prep necessary: Where is the information, How Far Away is that, Who has it, in what Form is it kept, and What will the PCs have to Do to get access to it? And how accurate and up-to-date is this information?

As a rule of thumb, be careful if the Quest you are handing the PCs will take more than a single game session to resolve – the first “chapters” will be lost and forgotten by the time they get to the end. There are ways of combating this problem – giving players a hard copy or electronic version of the accumulated narrative at the end of each day’s play, for example, gives the players a chance to refresh their recollections before play resumes – but they won’t happen by accident, either. It’s often helpful to party planning (and hence to GM planning) if you have a cheat sheet prepared, too, outlining the synopsis with the answers to these questions.

Sources include Scholars, Wizards, Priests, Talking Books, Inscriptions, Artworks, Museums, Curators, Diaries, Statues, Bards, Folk Songs, Elves (long-lived), Dwarves (ditto in some campaigns), Folklore, Thief’s Guilds, Dungeons…. you get the idea. 1/3 should be willing to help upon request, 1/3 will be easily persuaded, and 1/3 will be more difficult.

Most of these sources will require travel, even if it’s only ducking around the corner to the Temple Of Sassifras The Cat. Don’t hand-wave these trips completely – this is your chance to throw some variety into the mix. And work hard to maintain the impression of a ticking clock, with the hands moving with every piece of intelligence gathered.

Whether it’s what you intended or not, the length of background information to be imparted has made this your adventure. Proceed on that basis.

12. A Glimpse Of The Future

Obviously related to the Aftermath type of beginning, this differs from both that and from various other forms of beginning in its emotional content. Often a daydream, it functions as an emotional input into the way a character is roleplayed. You can use this as a vehicle for a more complex narrative, and restore an element of interactivity at the same time – see the write-up of “If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis” for an example. Each dream sequence started with just such an emotional input, based on things the player whose PC was concerned had said in past play.

Glimpses of the future are generally meant to be extrapolations of current trends and personal wishes on the part of the character experiencing them, and are usually positive for the most part. They are not warnings, they are not prophecies, and they aren’t Aftermaths. They may be presented as dream sequences.

It is often useful to take advantage of this break from reality by having the character begin the adventure in a place and situation without knowing how they got there, awakening from a dream-state of some sort. Gradually, memories of how they got there can then reassert themselves, intermixed with, and wrapped around, interaction segments plus segments involving the other PCs (so that everyone gets their share of the spotlight). Those other PCs should probably become aware that the PC who had been dreaming is missing – unless they aren’t, and the “missing” PC is being run as an NPC. If you think the player is up to it, you can even have them run the “NPC” version of themselves.

Aside from the usual pitfalls of starting the story in the middle, which only apply when your objective is as described in the previous paragraph, this is a fairly safe way to begin, or so it seems. In reality, many players find that the GM dictating their dreams of a perfect future is cutting too close to the bone. I have stepped around that problem somewhat by discussing the question “What is [Character Name]’s vision of their perfect future life?” in advance – but this necessarily means showing your hand pulling the strings.

There are a few ways around this problem, but they tend not to stand up to repeated use. The simplest answer is simply to put the player on the spot – “You are dreaming that you are living your perfect future. Describe it…”

13. Prophecy

A prophecy is generally intentionally vague and capable of sustaining multiple interpretations. Offering a prophecy at the beginning of an adventure presents a host of potential difficulties. The introduction to part 1 of this series, and the inspiration behind it all, talks about how this enables prophecies to be used by the GM to screw the players over (while remaining scrupulously fair). Other players detest prophecies because they perceive them as an invitation to the GM to railroad the plot. I’ve written a couple of articles on prophecies here at Campaign Mastery, one of which – The Perils Of Prophecy: Avoiding the Plot Locomotive – deals with this problem in detail (Readers have also suggested other techniques in the comments section, so don’t skip those).

Prophecies can be equally problematic for the GM. Not only can they cause various forms of player dissatisfaction, they can trigger accusations of bias (when there is none), or provide a target that the GM feels he has to live up to. When I decided in my superhero campaign that Ragnarok was going to happen, it took another 18 years before I had all the building blocks in place for that event. Yes, it was suitably epic, and suitably cataclysmic, and demanded feats of incredible heroism on the part of the PCs and their allies, but even so… In the campaign at the moment, I am currently building up towards Ragnarok II, and hoping that it, too, will live up to the hype. So far, I’ve spent eight years on the build-up – with another 7 or so to go. Where now at the point where events occasionally reveal big pieces of the circumstances – revelations that will become more frequent (and progressively smaller) as the campaign unfolds. With a plot twist or two thrown into the mix along the way.

No matter how you slice it, Prophecies can be a LOT of work, to little reward. In the best-case scenario, they can also be a rich resource and the foundation of a great adventure.

I think a lot of the problem is that players tend to view prophecies as black-and-white good-or-bad, even after they have set aside any animus from the causes described earlier. Which is to say, they have to decide whether or not to support or even actively try and bring about the prophecy, or fight against it with everything that they’ve got, even to the point of suicidal charges. This betrays a lack of trust in the GM, an assumption that the GM is out to screw the players over – and ensures that there will be unhappy feelings on both sides of the GM screen.

The more experience players have with you as a fair GM, the less inclined they will be to make the erroneous assumptions at the heart of this confrontation. For that reason, I recommend against using Prophecies early in a campaign with new players. Prophecies can be as touchy as nitroglycerin – throw them around with care until you know what you are doing!

The obvious question to be answered is “why use them at all?” The answer is that when everything works, Prophecies can be great foundations for adventures and even whole campaigns. They can tell the players things that they would have no hope of otherwise discovering, provide clues as to how to mitigate or prevent disaster, spark motivations in characters who would otherwise have a ho-hum reaction to events (regardless of how their players might feel)… they can be a good thing.

Don’t turn away from using prophecies when they are the best plot device for a situation, or when they spark your imagination.

14. A Startling Event

Red Storm Rising starts with a terrorist attack on an oil field in Russia. None of the principle cast of the novel are involved, or even mentioned. But the entire novel flows from that one event.Goldeneye starts with a confrontation between James Bond and a fellow MI6 operative. Both are examples of starting events. The first interacts only indirectly with the protagonists, as the true importance comes to light. The second is an action sequence (see type 1) that leads directly into the rest of the plot.

Putting the ‘triggering event’ into a prolog – whether the PCs are present to witness it or not – can be a great way to parachute the PCs into a plot. Once an event occurs, the time frame before any given person learns of it can be quantified fairly precisely; having pulled the trigger, the players know that the shot is coming and will reach them eventually.

The greatest danger that I have observed stems from players trying to beat that clock, either reacting before there’s anything to react to (and trying to disguise their actions), or manufacturing excuses to go out looking for the information that they have (as players) but don’t have (as characters). Good players won’t subject you to either problem; bad players tend to do anything they can think of to find a shortcut.

15. A Dream Sequence

Once again, this might seem like old ground, already covered. In addition to the many relevant pieces of advice presented both above and in Part 2, there is also my 2014 article, “Dream A Little Dream – using Dreams in RPGs“. So it might seem like there isn’t a lot to say.

One point that I do want to make, however, is that every dream should be signposted in metaphors from the life of the dreamer, that every dream should reflect the attitudes and reality and perceptions of the dreamer, should be an expression of their personality – and I do mean the deeper parts thereof, the ones that don’t often get paraded in public. A good dream sequence is twice as hard to write as a GM as ordinary plot, and may go through many drafts and revisions where the main plotline of the adventure is subject to no revision at all.

Make appropriate allowances and preparations.

16. Food For Thought

This is a type of beginning that is only useful in unusual situations, but when it’s appropriate there’s usually nothing better. In essence, the prolog throws something deep and meaningful at the players, the more compelling the better, permitting the opening plot sequence to be played out with partially-distracted players. Only at the climax of the adventure does a plot twist reveal that the whole adventure has been an exploration of one facet of the original head-scratcher.

For example, you might use “If it is better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be wrongly convicted, does that not mean that prisons should be abolished?” – then run a plotline revolving around some other sense of the term “confinement”, such as marriage as a means of securing a peace treaty between warring groups.

The largest potential pitfall is that such debate often engages players at the human level, and may push personal buttons. It can be difficult to judge whether or not a response is coming from the player or the character that he is controlling. Similarly, players can have trouble discerning your opinions from those expressed by an NPC.

This can be a great way of getting players to dig deeper into the thought processes and opinions of their characters. The only trouble with doing so is that the answers are often unexpected by both players and GM, and will usually be transfigurative for the characterization thereafter; when you have a stable status quo within the party, this risks upsetting the apple-cart. Personally, I’ve usually found that to be a risk worth taking; but I’ve yet to be seriously bitten by fallout, so my opinion may be biased.

17. Where We Left Off

From one of the most obscure types of prolog, we travel to one of the most common. It is almost mandatory to present a recap of the situation at the end of the last session of play, and perhaps some exposition concerning how the party got there.

A lot of GMs have trouble doing these without realizing it because it can be hard finding the right level of compression. Thus, while minor transgressions and lapses can be ignored, trying to hit the length targets described in Part 1 is a good general principle.

Beyond that, the GM should contemplate the intensity and energy levels that he wants the party to bring to the first sequence of play for the day. If you want them to hit the ground running, go for a short recap – one or two paragraphs at most. If you want them thinking about the nuances and meaning of past events, be more fulsome – if absolutely necessary, exceeding the length limits.

If you do have to exceed the length limits by a significant amount, look for a way to make the prolog interactive. An NPC saying to the PCs, “Now let me get this straight,” and then giving the recap with some glaring errors that the PCs are sure to pick up on, punctuated regularly with “Is that right?” or words to that effect. Or have an NPC and a PC arguing over the significance of past events as a means of getting the recap out in the open.

Obviously, you can’t use such tricks all the time – so save them for when you really need them.

18. Nothing At All / Housekeeping

Perhaps the second most common type of beginning is to deal with any pre-game housekeeping – experience, reminders of ongoing conditions like damage and so on – and then get straight into the game. I employed this approach a lot when my campaigns were running every week, because the past was fresh in the players’ minds. The only time there was any sort of recap was when a player had been absent for the previous session.

When three spin-off campaigns came along in 1985 to accompany the main campaign, there was only time to play once a fortnight, and I started learning the hard way how to recap past events. And that brought the subject of prologs into view for the first time. Prior to that, it was “start play where we finished, do housekeeping at signpost moments or when players requested it (because they had gained a level or whatever), then resume play until the real-world clock ended play for the day. Not much finesse needed or employed.

This type of “prolog” gets the players into the game session right away, but brings them in “cold” – there are times when that’s appropriate and useful, and times when it’s not.

The biggest dangers involved are players forgetting something significant. From day one, no-one has a better command of your background material than you do – you’re the one that has sweated bullets over its creation, after all.

Case in point: I’ve been co-GMing the Adventurer’s Club with Blair Ramage for 15 years now, but I still ask him questions about the campaign background when we are co-plotting adventures, and defer to his judgment about genre-related matters. Even though his original creation had nowhere near the robustness that we have built into the current campaign, it remains the seed at the heart of the assemblage.

Compounds And Elixirs

If it’s not obvious by now, it is easy to combine two or more of these beginning types. Because it fitted the in-game situation, I once ran an adventure in which each PC experienced a different beginning type – but that’s an extreme case.

Something that I’ve learned the hard way is that such combinations are risky. While it can be that Part B covers the flaws and problems created by Part A, and vice versa, such perfection is rare. More commonly, you end up with a compound that contains both sets of flaws; and, if you are lucky, both sets of benefits. Sometimes, you can’t even say that you have achieved that much.

There are infinitely more variables involved than I could ever hope to quantify, and the results would be lengthy and extremely dull to read. Consider: the same plot outline becomes two completely different adventures in the hands of two different GMs; even if the GM is the same, past history means that the two adventures would still be different in different campaigns; and even if that weren’t the case, the fact that it is to be experienced by two different parties with different players and different characters with different capabilities and personalities and thought processes means that the resulting adventures would STILL be different in the two campaigns. Now throw in the fact that different pacing and plot structures are enhanced, transformed, or damaged in different ways by different prolog forms, and that these effects are dependent on matters of mood, timing within the campaign, recent past in-game events, and authorial style… By my count, that’s 16 factors with anywhere from three to three hundred possible categories in each. A systematic approach would take a lifetime – by which time the social expectations would have changed, and the results would have limited applicability.

Some practical advice on prolog selection

Instead, what we need is a process for the selection of prologs, and then a willing GM who will do his best to entertain and let the rest take care of itself.

While it is a practice most often honored in the breach, the best time to write a prolog is when you have a clear idea of the plot and its structure, and you should not choose a prolog type until you sit down to write it. That time might be before word one gets written – but most of us have to work with our adventure ideas a bit before reaching that level of confidence. In cases that become more infrequent with experience and familiarity with the players and their characters, it might not be until the main adventure is complete!

Remember that we are interested in the plot as it actually manifests in the adventure, not the preliminary outline that might bear no resemblance to the finished adventure!

So, first question cluster: Is there anything missing from the main plot that a prolog could bring to the table? What form of prolog does that dictate? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If one or more forms pass this forensic appraisal, start writing and end the process.

If not, proceed through the second question cluster (looks a lot like the first): Is there a prolog type that would enhance the adventure? What is the value of that enhancement? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If one or more forms pass this series of interrogations, start writing and end the process.

If not, we get to the third question cluster: Are there any weaknesses or deficiencies or assumptions that could undermine the adventure proceeding in the most entertaining manner? Can a prolog be used to shore up those potential flaws, enhancing the likelihood of a successful day’s play in terms of entertainment value? What form of prolog does that dictate? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If you get past that without choosing a prolog type, the final question is whether or not a recap would be useful – if so, pick a target length and start writing. If you don’t think it’s necessary, given your players, make notes on any housekeeping and consider your adventure ready for play.

Put that way, it doesn’t seem quite so scary, does it?

Separations and Dividers

A further thought that came to me rather late in the process of writing this series. An adventure can have multiple prologs – just apply the same principals, especially regarding length.

You see, if we view adventures as this monolithic structure, complete within themselves, there can only be one prolog – at the start. But if we subdivide the adventure into Acts, we can have one “prolog” per act after the first – think of this as an “extra scene” that has been tacked on.

If you really want to, you can have two prologs at the start of the adventure – one for the overall adventure, and one for the first act.

The level of artistry demanded by this approach is high – any prolog involves taking a risk, being more artistic than is strictly necessitated by a straightforward adventuring approach. But the potentials can be equally high.

What brought this to mind? Remembering an old adventure, from about 20 years ago, in the middle of the first Zenith-3 campaign. It had a structure as follows:

That should look very familiar to anyone who’s been reading this section. What it doesn’t show is that the first prolog was a “Background Info-dump, Ex-cathedra” with no obvious relevance to the current in-game situation; that each of the Act prologues focused on one PC encountering a situation seemingly unrelated to anything else – the main plot or the adventure prolog, until the final act, which began by revealing that the prologs had been exploring the PCs opinions on analogous situations to the original prolog, which in turn was the key to understanding what had been driving the antagonist in the main plot throughout. How the PCs then used that information to resolve the main plotline brought several of the PCs into personal conflict with the group’s actions, a situation hinted at in the epilog, and which became the driver of a subsequent plotline. The greatest difficulty was in keeping the internal relationships of the plot structures a surprise until the plot twist in the fifth prolog.

As this (highly abbreviated and abstracted) example shows, prologs – done well – are integral to the overall plot, and in hindsight, this becomes obvious to all.

Prologs as part of the Adventure Template

It’s worth recapitulating a point that I’ve made in other articles that are at best marginally related to this series: if you employ a standard template or structure for your adventures, anything that is not the main adventure can be considered a prolog.

For example, adventures in my Zenith-3 campaign follow a standard structure for the most part:

1. Housekeeping
2. Recap
3. PCs Personal Lives
4. Transition To Main Plot
5. Main Plot
6. (Sometimes) Epilog: Consequences and Impact

It’s items 3 through 6 that are of interest in this context. Each PC has his own plot thread or threads, which experience developments from time to time. Those developments often impact the other PCs, directly or indirectly. On top of that, the local situation of the party manifests in a number of encounters that collectively comprise still more plot threads. And on top of that, anything that the players have indicated that they want to do forms still another series of plot threads, sometimes prominently, sometimes not.

One of these many plot threads becomes the main plot, involving all the characters, usually at the same time, sometimes consecutively, in the 4th part of the adventure. This transition can be casual, accompanied by still more plot developments in the PCs personal lives, or can be abrupt – some singular event that gets everyone’s attention.

The main plot then unfolds, and comes to a conclusion in the 6th section of the template. Because it has generally evolved from the personal lives of one or more of the PCs, there is an added form of engagement to the adventure. This also means that one or more impacts to those personal lives is likely to result; sometimes that is contained within an epilog, sometimes an epilog provides only a prelude, and sometimes the scope and ramifications are substantial enough that one plot thread either transforms into another or frays into two – which may come back together in some other adventure. Either way, this means that there is no epilog.

A similar structure has evolved in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, though plot threads tend to be shorter and more direct in that campaign, and are often started with no idea of where they will end.

In practical terms, this subdivides each act into a number of scenes – typically, some multiple of the number of PCs (ensuring an equal division of spotlight), but this can vary when two or more PCs become entangled in the one mini-plot.

And any one of those scenes can be a prolog to the main plot. It’s just a matter of finding the right segue in, and the right segue out.

Campaign Prologs

“EvilKipper Rob” (link to twitter account) is a miniatures painter, GM, and long-time support of Campaign Mastery through Twitter, and observed (while promoting the previous part of this series) that he “really love[s] doing an initial prologue session with a bunch of high level adventurers with epic gear facing a big bad that can either make a return if killed (vampire/lich style) or can only be banished.”

I responded with “What you’re describing is more of a prologue to a campaign than to an adventure. Which is another subject that I should at least mention in part 3 :)” – which brings me to this penultimate section of the series.

Prologs scale. Just as you can have a prolog to each Act in an adventure structure, in theory you could have one-or-two-line prologs to each scene – or an entire game session as prolog to a campaign.

Another comment talked about getting the players to design their characters as they would be at twentieth level (in D&D terms) as well as first level, then running those high-level characters through a prequel to the campaign (without resolving the situation) before going back in time to those first level characters. The entire campaign was thus about how the PCs went from A to B, and how they found themselves in the situation described in the prequel. This gives the players a road map to the development of their characters, gives the GM a road map to the campaign based on how the PCs want to develop, and gives the entire campaign a foundation.

Me, I’d have a constant worry that the Players might change their minds, based on the adventures that were actually unfolding in the game, and might resent any attempt to forbid it. But if your players can be trusted to stick to their game plan and trust the GM to make it possible (any appearances to the contrary), it could work – very well.

I’ve was trying to imagine a game structure so vast that an entire campaign served as a prequel when I realized that my superhero campaign was the perfect example.

Click the thumbnail for a larger (more legible) image.

I put this “family tree” together to show why.

• Campaign 1 was the Ullar Campaign, a solo campaign for myself to learn the Champions game system (now known as The Hero System) and to develop and test any house rules I felt necessary. It was always intended to be a temporary campaign that would form the background to the real campaign when it started. Set in the 1940s-1950s.
• A week later, I was persuaded to run Side-Campaign 1, shown as S1 here. The initial session was some 20 hours long and came at the end of a week completely without sleep. It’s amazing that it all makes as much sense as it does. Set in the 1960s.
• When Campaign 2 – the “real” campaign – started, Campaign 1 was shut down and that part of the background considered ‘fixed’. Set in the 1970s. Side-Campaign 1 continued intermittently for some time thereafter, in parallel with Campaign 2; it finally closed down for good around the second anniversary of Campaign 2 starting.
• That same anniversary introduced Side Campaign 2, better known as the Project Vanguard campaign. A New Mutants to my X-men – which either means everything to you or nothing, depending on how much Marvel Comics History you know. For the next year, we would have PV in the afternoons and The Champions in the evening. There was an 80% overlap of players, at least at first; that eventually became 100%, and then 80% the other way.
• Another year on, and the PV experiment was going so well as a campaign that Side-campaigns 3 and 4 were introduced simultaneously. Side-campaign 3 was Project Vigilant, a younger group of characters; Side-campaign 4 was a Secret Agents campaign set in the same game world. The pattern of play was now PVt + Agents one week, PV + Champions the following week, plus the occasional binge-Champions session on a public holiday or a Sunday.
• Six months or so after that, from memory, Side-Campaign #5 got started as an occasional and intermittent project. Now known as the Nebula Campaign, named after the character who had dropped out of Campaign 2 due to interpersonal conflicts with each other’s characters and gone her own way.
• The second anniversary of side-Campaign 2 saw the Graduation Exercises, a major crossover between the two campaigns. Starting the next school year, the original idea was that PVt would graduate to PV, and a new group of young kids would be brought in. However, for workload reasons and by mutual choice, Side-campaign 3 was simply wound up, the characters having exhausted a lot of their potential.
• That was followed by the commencement of the Mini-Campaigns. Essentially, each current character from Campaign 2 or Side Campaign 2 was given their own Limited Series (another comic term – think of it as a Mini-series). For the S2 characters, this was to define their life post-graduation, as there was not enough room in the main campaign for all of them (i.e. the players already had characters that they preferred to continue running). The second batch featured the solo careers of those PCs. i think I have the numbers – 5 and 7, respectively – right. The average length of these campaigns was four game sessions, but some ran eight. Even doing them 2 sessions a week, this took some two years of real time, even though all of them were supposedly happening concurrently in game time. This was a deliberate choice to limit the potential for one character showing up in the middle of another character’s solo adventure – they were all busy. In addition, the Agents campaign continued a sporadic existence through this period, as did the Nebula campaign. Both terminated shortly thereafter.
• When the band got back together, to accommodate other GMs and their games, and the players who had made commitments to them, the schedule became double sessions of Champions every second week. Events and consequences from the side campaigns and the Mini-campaigns all fed back into the main plotline, which was the growing imminence of Ragnarok. Buildup toward this event occupied the next two or three years, real-time.
• You’ll notice the shaded section at the bottom of Campaign 2? With about 1 year to go, the players pulled the plug. It was supposed to be temporary, and I continued to make notes and compile ideas, but I got wrapped up in running a major TORG campaign for more than 5 years, at the end of which it was clear that a reboot with fresh players was required. Since that would make zero sense in terms of the ongoing continuity, I chose to write the events in narrative form and start the new campaign, Campaign 3, five years later. That gave me the chance to reset the playing field and restock the campaign with new plot threads.
• Campaign 3 was the first Zenith-3 campaign, now known as the Earth Halo campaign. Although it doesn’t look it, this campaign ran to completion taking about as many real-time years as the original campaign (not counting the interregnum and writing time). This was new players and new characters and everything that had gone before as background. Set in the early 80s.
• About half-way through Campaign-3, one of the PCs began to overshadow the others for many reasons. Rather than simply write the character out altogether, it was decided that a new side-campaign, S6, would be started – also known on these pages as The Warcry Campaign. It came to a halt following the death of one of the players some years back, but plans are underway for restarting it. This was the situation when Campaign Mastery was founded.
• Meanwhile, the Earth-Halo campaign came to an end, and after a short break to complete prep work, Campaign 4 got under way. It’s been running since 2012. This features the same players as Campaign 3 and mostly the same characters. Set in the mid-80s.
• Recently, these same characters were required to create new identities and find ways of using their powers in a new Side-campaign currently being run in place of Campaign-4. In due course, the two will become ongoing, with Campaign 4 dominant and Campaign 4a an occasional change of pace. Don’t you just love in-game politics and spy games?

With so many connections and interconnections and characters going from one campaign to another, and sometimes back again, it’s easy to see why I still consider this all one vast campaign, starting all the way back in 1981. Which means next year will be the 40th anniversary, I’ll have to think of something special….

More importantly in this context, what you get with a campaign as a prequel is a background so rich and vast that there is too much of it for one campaign. To explore it all, you will need (a) LOTS of game sessions; and (b) Several campaigns, often running simultaneously. I don’t know that there is actually a term for that phenomenon – unless you want me to use Epic, or something similar.

One final tip

This series, and this article, is supposed to be about practical advice and real-world experiences. So I thought I should close with some more of that practical advice since my afterthoughts came dangerously close to abstract theory a couple of times along the way.

When you’re thinking about using a prolog, and trying to decide which type to use if any, think of a TV series – preferably a popular drama of some sort. Which one doesn’t much matter – it could be Buffy or Mission Impossible or Star Trek or Nip/Tuck for that matter. Try to match the tone of the episode’s opening scenes AFTER the show’s Main Title sequence with that of your adventure. That makes your prolog the equivalent of a pre-title Teaser. Some shows have them religiously, some have them occasionally. Some omit or delay the main Title sequence altogether so that prolog and first Act are joined continuously.

This takes you a step away from your adventure, permitting you to see the forest for the trees, which can sometimes be difficult. In particular, it lets you “try out” different tonalities of prolog to see how they will fit, permitting the process described earlier to be implemented quickly and objectively.

Prologs are easy to misuse, can have catastrophic consequences for an adventure if mishandled, but can elevate one to new realms of artistry if their full potential is exploited. While there is no substitute for experience, this series should at least give you a running start!

In part 1, I looked at the dictionary definition of Prolog (Prologue if you’re not from the US), and found it inadequate. So I formulated my own, and then took a good hard look at the implications. In a nutshell, used properly, and when appropriate, a Prolog can massively enhance an Adventure, novel, play, or media presentation; used improperly or inappropriately – and there were far more pitfalls than peaks – it could wreak incomparable harm.

A prolog exists to deliver information to the players or to the PCs, in an RPG context. That information can take many forms – from character background (the past) to prophecy (the future) and all points in between.

The dangers posed by a prolog are many, and even if the prolog is properly managed and formulated, they are not entirely eliminated. Ultimately, they exist to give players information they did not have, and that their characters might not know, and that’s always dangerous – but sometimes it’s necessary.

Having looked at prologs in the abstract, it’s now time to get into the practical reality. What are all the ways of beginning an RPG adventure?

The Big List Of Adventure Beginning-points

I’ve ended up with a list of 18 different beginning points for an adventure – i.e. 18 different types of content that you could put in front of an adventure. Some of these are similar, but differentiated by some minor detail; others are quite different, and present to perform a quite different service on behalf of the plot.

I’ve attempted to use vague, almost poetic labels for the options because I wanted to employ as broad a brush as possible.

In particular, I was interested in the traits that characterize and distinguish each type of beginning, the plot functions that each performed, the benefit so provided to the adventure, and what the relationship this ‘beginning bit’ has to the rest of the adventure where that differs from the benefit. I’ll also note any significant pitfalls from an RPG point of view and how they can sometimes be avoided.

My original intention was to examine all 18 in one article, but the complications of the Holiday period haven’t permitted that – so this time around, I’ll look at types 1-9, and next week, at 10-18.

The list that I’ve come up with Is:

1. Action Sequence
2. Aftermath
3. Personal Lives
4. Tranquility
5. Ominous Developments
6. The First Breadcrumb
7. An Introduction
8. A loose end
9. Omniscient Alarms
10. Metaphors and Allegories
11. A Glimpse Of The Past
12. A Glimpse Of The Future
13. Prophecy
14. A Startling Event
15. A Dream Sequence
16. Food For Thought
17. Where We Left Off
18. Nothing At All / Housekeeping

There’s a lot to do, so let’s get started!

1. Action Sequence

Starting with an action sequence has a number of effects on the plotline. It creates inherent excitement, gets the adrenaline pumping, and gives the more violence-oriented characters a turn in the spotlight, which in turn opens up the initial part of the adventure to a slower, more roleplay-oriented, buildup.

But there can be problems when those roleplay-oriented characters want to try options other than violence.

One solution to this is the mini-railroad, which I sometimes describe in jest as the “Light Rail” (You’d get the joke of you lived in Sydney). I describe the build-up to the current situation in Narrative, showing that all reasonable alternatives were explored as the situation escalated to the point where play begins. While I wouldn’t do this every game, on the one occasion when it was used, it worked a treat.

However, (1) the characters and their standard tactics were well-established; and (2) the players were informed at the start of “play” that if they felt I had anything egregiously wrong, I would listen to complaints and adjust if necessary. That took what was ostensible a narrative situation and made it interactive. (Because of 1, and careful plotting on my part, there were no such complaints).

Another key is to make sure that the narrative comes across as being in exactly the same tone that the players would have experienced in-game. While you might be able to use this as a non-standard tone delivery vehicle, it’s my feeling that this opens you up to complaints about players not being permitted to play their characters, whereas if everything proceeds as the players would have done it anyway, you have far less scope for that complaint to hold any validity.

So significant are the practice and practicalities of starting with an action sequence that I’ve already made them the subject of dedicated articles twice.

The more positively-oriented article is Starting In The Middle. The other article, Kickstarting The Story, takes a more conservative approach, driven by philosophic underpinnings, and is more abstract in its approach.

2. Aftermath

Another long-accepted literary approach is to start the story with the aftermath, either of a key set-up sequence in the middle of the plot (actually, usually the beginning or end of the middle), or of the main plot itself, both contained in a prolog. The rest of the story is about how this situation came to be.

I opened the first part of this double-headed article with a discussion of how the GM’s use of prophecy can discombobulate players. I don’t think I gave enough prominence to how problematic prophecies could be for GMs.

And make no mistake, starting with an Aftermath scene is binding the GM to a prophecy with absolutely no allegorical wriggle room. That tends to bring out the worst in any given GM because from that moment on, the GM is serving three masters.

Most GMs are adept at serving two masters: the entertainment of the players and the story that they are weaving. They achieve this by being prepared to sacrifice the latter if necessary to satisfy the former. But this adds a third, sterner, master – the prophecy. And it demands that even the players’ satisfaction be sacrificed at its altar if necessary.

There are sometimes solutions to this.

Wrapping the aftermath in a dream sequence sent by some hidden ally (or enemy!) makes this a foretelling of a worst-case scenario, giving the GM enough cover that he can place “service to the prophecy” in between “the story” and “the players” – all that he needs to ensure is that there is a potentially-likely pathway from the “Now” being experienced in-game and the “Future” forecast by the prophecy.

In a sci-fi environment, framing an aftermath sequence as an out-of-character prologue taking place in some parallel dimension turns it into a purely literary device.

In a time-travel campaign, you can literally go from the aftermath of an undesirable aftermath to the beginning of a crisis as a straightforward recounting of the players’ situation (but don’t overuse this approach).

In most campaigns, you can restore some of the much-needed vagueness by further abbreviating the prolog into a mere tease.

Where there are four solutions, there will be more. You could, for example, conclude your narrative with something along the lines of “With that final pronouncement of doom, the stranger elevates his bushy eyebrows and settles back in his chair, leaving you all to speculate on the import of his tale.” – which effectively takes “service to the prophecy” off the table while retaining all the benefits.

So, what are those benefits? In a nutshell, such aftermaths are inevitably of doom and gloom (I’ve never heard of one that wasn’t, at least), and that motivates the PCs to try to avoid the prophetic warning. As soon as they can arguably do so (if not sooner), the players will begin to shape their character’s thinking in response. They will tend to second-guess every decision, looking at how they might contribute to the outcome of which they have been warned. They will look for ways to protect themselves, and back doors that they can prepare in advance – there’s little as satisfying to a player as being able to say to the gloating Villain who thinks he’s won it all, “There is one small thing that you’ve overlooked,” before tearing down the victory before the villain’s very eyes.

Often, such warnings will make players more cautious, less prone to taking chances. At other times, it can cause players to be more inclined to brash chances. I have once had a player who started looking for ways to overcome the prophecy with a Heroic Death.

And that’s the other very big, very real danger of this type of beginning in an RPG as opposed to a novel: it can make characters react in strange, unexpected, unpredictable, and out-of-character ways.

What’s more, this danger is inherent and cannot be excluded, regardless of the approach used to mitigate the other problems. Employ it in an RPG at your peril, therefore.

3. Personal Lives

The typical adventure from the Adventurers’ Club campaign consists of 5-6 acts. The first of these, and sometimes the second, are usually devoted to the ongoing personal lives and personal dramas of the PCs.

This has multiple effects on the campaign. One, it keeps what would otherwise be a very static, episodic, campaign moving and developing. Players can never tell when an incident will be a passing phase and when it will have long-term implications for their characters’ lives. Usually (but not always), one of these personal developments will lead into the main adventure – which makes those adventures a natural outgrowth of the lives the PCs lead.

In a word, this approach provides context for the adventure.

But this is not the approach being discussed here, or not completely – we’re talking about taking this same approach and cutting it down to fit into some sort of prolog to the main adventure. This has the effect of confining the impact of those personal lives, relative to the main adventure – which might be appropriate for some campaigns, but will certainly not be appropriate for all.

Even this is not the end of the story when it comes to this approach, however; you also need to consider the potential of combining these results with intermissions in which these personal plotlines continue.

For example, consider the following structure:

• Prolog: Personal Lives
• Act 1: Travel from town to dungeon, explore area, plan approach, return to town
• Intermission 1: More Personal Lives
• Act 2: Buy supplies, travel to dungeon, enter dungeon, explore until forced to rest, exit dungeon, return to town
• Intermission 2: More Personal Lives
• Act 3: Buy additional supplies, perform research as necessary, travel to dungeon, complete dungeon, return to town
• Intermission 3: More Personal Lives
• Epilog: Plot Hook for next adventure

In effect, this creates two parallel plot-tracks within the campaign: a soap-opera track and the main “action” track, with the occasional potential crossover between the two. Which might be exactly what you want in your next D&D campaign.

4. Tranquility

Often, when the first act of an adventure consists of one shoe dropping after another, crisis after emergency after disaster after calamity, it can be helpful to contrast this state of affairs with a period of tranquility, “the calm before the storm”, full of molehills that might loom like mountains – until the main plot puts them into perspective.

I last used this approach in a superhero adventure entitled “One Busy Day”. If I were to summarize this plot, it would be as follows:

• Prolog: Tranquility for all PCs, progress in ongoing stories without dramatic development.
• Act 1: To each PC, an emergency.
• Act 2: Each PC’s emergencies grow more dire.
• Act 3: All PCs bar one get on top of their emergencies, in two cases by trading places and solving each other’s situations. The remaining emergency escalates.
• Act 4: Exhausted PCs return from their emergencies only to be drafted into assisting with the one remaining crisis, which again escalates.
• Act 5: PCs finally get on top of the crisis, and return to base.
• Epilog: PCs discover that the mega-crisis was not an accident, it was a distraction…

The contrast between the period of tranquility and the developing series of emergencies in Act 1 makes those emergencies feel even more dire to the PCs. It is quite literally the calm before the storm.

Without it, the increasing litany of disasters can become anticlimactic, whereas the expenditure of a single line of narrative prior to the arrival of an emergency can recapture that feeling of tranquility for the PC about to receive the GM’s plot largess when it has already been established.

5. Ominous Developments

I talked about this approach in the first part of this trilogy of articles. Essentially, it’s an out-of-character scene designed by the GM to do nothing but intimidate the players.

Things can get interesting when there’s no obvious point of connection with the status quo that the players expect to find. They will sometimes start seeing shadows, as the specter of the ominous development that the characters don’t even know about ingrains itself into the players’ thinking.

In politics, this would be what is known as “playing the man, not the ball” – in this case, “playing the player, not the character”.

As a technique, this tends to work better with less experienced and capable players; one of the things you learn through years of playing (and/or GMing) is to set player-knowledge aside and see situations through the lens of character knowledge.

If a GM suspects players of taking advantage of knowledge that their characters don’t have, this can be a way of testing them.

There is only one pitfall that I’m aware of: The last time that I tried this technique, the players went all-out trying to engineer ways for their characters to learn what they already knew. This became an ongoing distraction within the adventure, and all my arguments that their players had no idea that there was any information of importance to be discovered fell on deaf ears.

There can be a temptation to counter this approach by focusing the results of the PCs’ investigations on other (slightly less-ominous) developments. And that could work, if the players didn’t know that there was more to discover. Unfortunately, this often means the GM making things up on the spot without thinking them through; it can be a very quick way to lose control of your campaign.

My preferred counter to this is to include some specific pathway for the PCs to gain the information that the players already have, then allude to that pathway’s existence in my narrative transition from prolog to main adventure.

But there has been at least one occasion when I felt that the players were losing “the big picture” and focusing too much on the “threat of the week”. An Ominous Development led to one of those intensive efforts to turn player knowledge into character knowledge, an attempt that I was able to turn into a recitation of all the other problems that the PCs were ignoring (each of which had gotten at least a little worse due to the lack of attention). This turned what can be a disadvantage into a benefit.

There can be a temptation on the part of the GM to reduce this to a tease, as well, but that does nothing to ameliorate the problems that can result; it simply leaves some information in the GM’s pocket for dissemination when the PCs push the right buttons. Of course, that can be a worthwhile end in and of itself.

6. The First Breadcrumb

Sometimes the first half of solving a mystery is discovering that there is a mystery to be solved. Something strange happens and trying to understand that something leads to the mystery. An excellent example of this is the ST:TNG episode “Clues”.

At other times, the GM can be more straightforward – presenting a mystery and the first breadcrumb of a solution in the prolog. The entire “Cold Case” TV series is built around this pattern.

One of the most obvious and important consequences of this type of beginning is that it clearly aligns player expectations toward a detective story. There’s nothing wrong with stirring in little bits of other things but the driving force of play should be solving that mystery. You can have alternative tones deriving from that straight line (a shootout for unrelated reasons with someone you just want to talk to, or the genre-appropriate equivalent), or you can use snippets of something else as an interlude. Real life is rarely monochromatic, after all.

It may not be necessary for the adventure to follow the trail all the way to a solution, but in every game session that is part of the adventure, tangible progress toward a solution needs to be made or player frustration will exceed any entertainment value. And, if you intend for the plot not to lead all the way to a solution of the mystery, it’s important to defuse that frustration by making it clear in-game that “we can’t go further until…” – i.e. to present some definable condition that needs to be met before the mystery can advance.

This is, and will be taken as, a commitment by the GM that in due course, when the time is right, that condition will be unlocked and the mystery will proceed to a conclusion. I have found that this can, with success, either take place relatively quickly, or after a wait of such length that the players have almost forgotten the unsolved mystery – anything in-between tends to fall flat. I don’t know why, it just does.

I can also advise that it is especially effective for the condition to be satisfied through a plot twist, making this appear to be an unexpected opportunity (no matter how carefully the GM may have planned it).

In terms of plot function, this sort of prolog acts as both a tease for the mystery and the promise of progress in solving it. It can be especially effective when the mystery was presented as a tease at the conclusion of the previous adventure, strengthening the continuity between the two adventures.

The biggest pitfall is this: you are hitching the entertainment value of the adventure to the enjoyability of the mystery. If the mystery is boring, it doesn’t matter how much ‘entertainment’ the GM packs into its solution; the players will still be bored, and the adventure will be an anticlimax. If the mystery is engaging to the players, the procedural steps involved in solving it don’t have to be half as packed with entertainment value to excel in player satisfaction. If anything, in this circumstance, there can be a danger of being perceived to be ‘gilding the lily’ or of the procedural steps being anticlimactic relative to the actual plot development of solving the mystery.

In short, put as much effort as you can into making the mystery intriguing and interesting for the players and let them generate the excitement within the adventure thereby; don’t try and amp it up or puff it up during the process.

At the same time, be aware that there can be two completely different responses on the part of each player and how this can influence the way they play their characters: excitement creates enthusiasm, boredom creates plodding actions without deep thought or engagement. If you can, incorporating optional plot sequences that will boost the interest/satisfaction level of individual players through the course of the plot can be the difference between a snooze-fest and a good time being had by all. But this is a LOT harder than it looks and requires a deeper understanding of the psychology and playing habits of individual players than most GMs can command, even after playing with that player for decades. You have to predict where each player is going to “itch” if they aren’t sufficiently engaged, and prepare a plot development to scratch that itch.

7. An Introduction

There are all sorts of things that can be introduced. A villain, a hero, a comrade, and enemy, a situation, a macguffin – the list is almost endless. The only consistencies are that the characters must not have encountered this person or thing in-game before (they may have heard whispers, rumors, or legends) and the person or object being who or what they are should provide the adventure with its gravitas.

Dupres, the head of the Secret Police and Adviser to the Crown, feared by all, enters the inn, and speaks briefly in hushed tones to the innkeeper, who gestures in your direction. By now, half the patrons have found exits or hiding places. Nodding, he places a gold florin on the counter and makes his way to your table. A moment later, the innkeeper deposits a glass of fresh spiced wine – the good stuff, you expect – in front of both the newcomer and each of you. Whispering in conspiratorial tones, he says “One of our most trusted spies has just returned from a prolonged mission beyond the Nissert Range. He reports that the Orcs of Dunhollow think they have located a piece of the Dread Armor of Warsang in an abandoned Dwarven Mine. I for one don’t wish to find out if the legends concerning that particular artifact are true. On behalf of His Majesty, I wish to hire you to beat the Orcs to the Armor, if it is really there, and make sure that it can never fall into the hands of a hostile force. We have a map…”

This example is a double introduction. It introduces this character, whose position implies that he is NOT to be trifled with, and who forces his way into the PCs circle to introduce the Macguffin. Note that it isn’t necessary for the players to have ever heard of artifact, Warsang, mountain range, Dunhollow, or even Dupres before (though it’s unlikely that a mission of this sensitivity would be entrusted to first-level nobodies) – this is a perfectly serviceable first adventure of a campaign, especially if the PCs are already of reasonable capability (in fact, the GM should have an answer to the question “Why US?” recorded and ready to deliver).

Provided that the credibility of the adventure is not thrown out of inn on its ear by these considerations, there are all sorts of places that the adventure can then go in its’ opening act. If mission prep and acceptance are hand-waved (I advise yes to the first and no to the second), you could start the adventure itself with the players half-way to their objective, as they depart “civilization” and enter the untamed wilderness. Or you could start with a flashback sequence that fills in some of those missing pieces. Or word of the mission may have leaked and the action might start while the PCs are still in the capital.

What cannot be disputed is that the opening sequence of the adventure should be related directly to the introduction in some way. You’ve established some momentum with the prolog, you have to capitalize on it before it wanes.

There are a couple of other things which went unspoken in the prolog but which experienced players should nevertheless have picked up on. First, the characters already know each other, and have established relationships; second, there’s a clear implication that they have established a reputation of some sort; third, they have probably adventured together a number of times; and fourth, given that such a personage could not be absent for very long without it being noteworthy, there is a high probability that they are in the Capital. All of which makes sense if the characters are already mid-to-high level already.

An introduction is a specific form of tease, one that can be complete in and of itself but probably isn’t. You can think of an introduction as a slide in a water-park – the one certainty is that you’re going to get wet, and almost as certain is that you are going to find yourself unable to stop until you get to the bottom of the slide. And that you’re going to look like a wuss if you don’t take advantage of the situation to ride the slide.

I’ve also seen this described as ‘parachuting the characters into the plot’. And that’s where the potential downsides come into play – some players will object to that. Others will just roll with it – experience inclines players toward the latter disposition but does not dispel any predisposition. A huge factor can be past experience with the GM and the level of trust that has built up (if any) between GM and Players – though this sort of “rapid-fire” introduction to a plotline is also common in convention play, from what I’ve been told, and rendered acceptable by the limited and concise gaming ‘window’.

If you are ever unsure as to how much trust and respect you’ve accumulated behind the (possibly metaphoric) GM screen, this type of prolog will give you a very quick (and possibly rude) answer. Most GMs don’t employ it until they are already confident of that answer. However, a GM who pulls an adventure with this type of introduction off can establish ‘table cred’ beyond his experience level – which can be a big ‘if’, as it is possible to do as much damage to one’s reputation if you fall short. “Overconfident” is the mildest complaint that will be leveled at you in that circumstance..

8. A loose end

Many of these prologs could be described generically as an introduction under some circumstances. One of the types for which this is true is the Loose End.

If the players have already detected this loose end, and determined to pull on it to see what unravels, then it isn’t an introduction. If they have not, if the GM uses his prolog to have an NPC tell the players, “I think there’s something you may have overlooked…”, then you could describe it as an introduction, and everything stated above could be at least partially applicable.

Loose ends are inherently supportive and suggestive of a strong continuity. A tendency to forget and ignore them is an indication of a weak continuity and a more episodic approach. If the players insist on looking into any loose threads that they notice, that’s an indication that they want the former; if they tend to get bored more easily when you present a loose end introduction to an adventure, it indicates that they want a looser continuity.

Some GMs (I’m one of them) can’t help but build continuity links and building blocks into their campaigns, whether they are supposed to be there or not, even when making stuff up off the cuff. Players learn of a GM’s predilections in this direction very quickly, and incorporate expectations into their behavior. This can force the GM into a stronger- or weaker-continuity position than they intended – so, to a certain extent, a GM’s reputation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That tells me that “GMs should start as they mean to continue”, lest you become trapped in a style that isn’t your preferred approach. I don’t think that advice is given to beginners often enough. You will learn more by one incident of getting in over your head and getting on top of the situation than you will in a year’s GMing.

Be that as it may, most loose ends are also mysteries, with the mere existence of the loose end being the first breadcrumb – making that advice relevant, too. But there are times when this is not the case – a loose end might be a flunky who got away, or a mole whose presence has been forgotten in the excitement of taking down the KGB (or whatever).

These offer a broader palette to the GM. Instead of hitting the players over the heads with the existence of the loose end, for example, you could present an out-of-continuity plot sequence of the Loose End doing whatever the Loose End does. And then you could segue to a sequence where the PCs (uncommanded by the players) show up to ‘clean up’ their loose end – having one of them say “Thought we had forgotten about you, didn’t you?” before you hand control back to their normal owners.

As a technique, this can be valuable to both GM and Players; it’s another example of the “Light Rail” approach, but far smaller in scope, it gets the players straight into the day’s play in a thrilling way, and it educates them in what you – as a GM – expect from them. The implication is that while you will help them keep their blotters clean if they cooperate with you, you won’t guarantee doing so, every time – so they had better pay attention to the little details, because eventually one might turn around and bite them.

Of course, if the players have made a habit of doing so, a Loose End introduction can be considered to be the GM helping the players stay in character despite the intrusions of real-world interruptions.

The Loose End, in other words, changes character depending on the circumstances under which it is used. That makes it very flexible and useful.

9. Omniscient Alarms

I’ve already discussed this as one of the options the GM has within the “Aftermath” prolog. But there are times when a more straightforward approach is more appropriate to the Omniscient Entity responsible or the circumstances.

There is a tradition that such interventions be relatively allegorical, cloaked in ambiguity and metaphor, and delivered more frequently to those with whom some sort of prior relationship exists. Sometimes, this is because the Deity or Omniscient Being can’t be any more specific; sometimes, it’s because they want to avoid tripping some sort of alarm (especially if they’ve been forbidden to meddle by someone else); sometimes, it’s to prevent premature action on the part of the recipients; sometimes it’s to maintain a mystique or reputation; and sometimes (very rarely) it might be because the Deity has overestimated the comprehension of his target.

On at least one occasion, though, I’ve gotten mileage from delivering a straightforward but short warning to someone with whom the Being has no relationship. This is the cosmic equivalent of “acting casual” while slipping something extra into the outgoing mail – implying that the being is under observation and can’t assist more directly.

Warnings from an ostensible enemy can also create interesting dynamics within an adventure and within a larger campaign.

And all of the above presumes that the warning is accurate. It might not – it could be a mistake, or an over-reaction, or a means of manipulation. Whoever the players think is responsible might know nothing about the warning. Or it might be a deliberate falsehood.

Each of these adds its own distinct character to the unfolding of relevant events within the campaign, if not to the adventure.

Which is the final variable to be discussed here – Omniscient Warnings might not pay off in the current adventure, or even the one after that. This form of prolog can be almost-completely divorced from the main content – the caveat rests on the impact on player thinking.

A word of warning: it’s very easy to overuse this plot mechanic, and it is far more effective when rare. There is also the familiar “why me” or “why us?” question to contemplate – is there truly no-one better qualified to deal with the situation?

I’ve solved the latter problem in several ways in the past. One is the old “we know more than you do” approach; another is the “this might be nothing, but I need someone to look into it…” approach; and still another is “Frankly, you’re expendable.” Sometimes, the answer can be self-evident; at other times, so obscure that it will never be understood. “The swallow’s wing casts shadows in the candle-light” is a perfectly valid answer to the “Why Us” question – however unsatisfying it might be to the players or characters. Often, the trick is to get this answer to the PCs in the “right” way. In the “you’re expendable” circumstance, for example, every priest of the deity issuing the Warning immediately began addressing the PCs as “The Walking Cadavers” or “The Honored Dead” – which really threw the players, who knew full well that their characters weren’t dead yet!

So, that brings me to the end of Part 2 of this article series. Part 3 will detail beginning types 10-18 – in some cases building on the content above – and then close out the series with a couple of general topics that were better addressed after the types were detailed (or because I didn’t think of it while working on part 1!)