During play this Saturday past, I had reason to dissect a Save.

The entire process took only a few seconds at the time, thoughts following one on another so quickly that there was barely enough time to get a fleeting impression of one before it was chased out by the next.

I was helped in this process by the fact that it’s not the first time I’ve contemplated the subject. In fact, it’s something that every RPG designer knows quite intimately.

This prior experience permitted me to spare just enough mental capacity to recognize that each of those thoughts were mere surface impressions of much deeper subjects – and that, the next time I had to contemplate the subject, a quite different element within those subjects might be the one that’s relevant to the situation.

That means that every GM should have at least passing familiarity with the content of those thoughts so that when they need to do so, they have a foundation to build their own trains of thought upon.

1. Other Kinds Of Die Roll vs Targets

To start this discussion, I need to first address some laziness and imprecision of nomenclature. It’s quite common for all sorts of die rolls to be labeled as “saves” even when that terminology isn’t all that accurate, especially when the GM’s plot mandates that a check be made. These checks may be to comprehend a situation, receive a clue to a situation from one’s education, to carry out some obvious action, or for many other purposes – some of which I will describe later in the article (if all goes according to plan!)

For now, suffice it to say that there are two types of other die roll that are NOT necessarily saves.

Stat Rolls

The most like Saves are usually Stat Rolls. These are rolls that are employed to check on success or failure when a character is using native talent or raw capability, rather than an educated or refined expertise. Nowhere is this distinction more stark, more compelling, or more important, than when understanding the differences between Reflexes & Instinctive Reactions, Acrobatics (a trained expertise) and raw Dexterity.

Real life immediately complicates the situation; military training is aimed at implanting (amongst other things) certain triggers that cause a trained response to be employed instinctively. That’s often the difference between life and death for a soldier, and between the success and failure of an engagement. I can also accept the premise that training or native skill in certain expertises might imbue additional reflexes and instinctive behaviors – hunting comes to mind, as does the unconscious shifting of weight to retain balance on the deck of a sailing ship.

It’s also quite arguable that some instincts can be trained out of an individual. This is one explanation for why most people can overcome seasickness, for example. Certainly, most of us grow out of motion sickness in general, and pity those few unfortunates for which this does not occur even as we regard them – perhaps unfairly – as strange or unusual.

Skill Checks

The other major type of die roll is to determine the usage or application of trained expertise, usually in the form of skill checks. These are employed for two primary reasons: to determine how well something actually being done with the expertise, or to determine whether or not the character can recall and associate some theoretical, abstract, or learned knowledge or skill with the situation as presented to them. I am sometimes tempted to call the first “applied skill” and the second something else (such as “theory”) but that seems to shortchange the latter, suggesting that it is nothing but understanding of principles. The most accurate descriptive terms that I have found are “Applied Skill” and “Applied Knowledge”, to be honest – but that then gets hung up on some game systems defining some skills as “knowledges” and some not. This, of course, is the game designers groping around the same issues and trying to put in place a solution that distinguishes between book-oriented education and craft-oriented training.

Is it Really A Save?

Complicating the whole situation is that sometimes one of the above can actually be used as a saving roll. It all depends on circumstances and their interpretation within game mechanics.

In particular, one needs to contemplate the derivations of the various types of rolls, and what the different constructions might symbolize.

Stat rolls are a mathematical derivation of some measure of character ability.

Skill rolls are the total of a base score (usually derived from the stat roll of an appropriate foundation measure), plus an adjustment that reflects training and expertise. Further adjustments may reflect the quality and availability of useful tools and resources; while in other cases, it may be deemed that some tasks are simply impossible without certain tools or implements.

Saving Throws generally derive directly from a stat roll or from a different (but similar) mathematical treatment of a character ability measurement. The treatment that most strongly diverges from this fundamental principle was in an AD&D campaign in which the bases of the saving roll was the mean of two stats – INT and DEX for Reflexes, STR and CON for Fortitude, and WIS and CHAR for Will saves (the logic was strong in some cases and specious in others). Since this is the most extreme divergence from the principal that I can recall encountering, it’s fair to say that that it doesn’t diverge very far at all, and the principle is generally sound!

2. The Subdivision of a Stat

There have been attempts to subdivide stats into “more responsive” values that distinguish between different aspects of the rather broad and coarse stats that are commonly employed. I don’t want to burrow too deeply into that particular rabbit hole in this article, but some consideration is necessary. Because it’s relevant to the example that I intend to offer (the one which derived from last Saturday’s play and sparked the entire article), and because is the most definitive in terms of the differences between types of roll, I’m going to focus on Dexterity and the Reflex Save and why the two exist separately at all.

Dex: Fingers vs Feet

Dexterity conflates capacity in two quite different and distinctive areas – deftness with the fingers and agility. Ever since AD&D was published, people have been questioning that conflation. There is no doubt that the two are related, but they are also quite different and ability in one area does not necessarily translate into ability in the other. Quite the contrary!

The situation is rendered even muddier by the sloppiness exhibited in some early game designs in which the stat was labeled Dexterity but then defined as “acrobatic potential” or “nimbleness of foot” or something that clearly referred to Agility, or was labeled as “Agility” only to include in it’s definition “Deftness of fingers” or “Usage of tools”. I tend to be ruthless when encountering such, getting out a bright red pen and making corrections, often accompanied by exclamation points! But, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s ignore such sloppy designs.

I have even encountered at least one example in which the ability “to use a keyboard or numeric keypad” is part of the definition of Dexterity, as though that were somehow distinct from things like Carpentry. I, for one, have seen absolutely no evidence that the two are in any way related.

What most people mean by this stat has remained more or less unchanged since those days of AD&D.

Dex: Deftness, Agility, and Reflexes?

But the inclusion of a Reflexes Save, while an obvious requirement in some form or another, muddies this neat picture. The fact that this saving roll is also derived (in most systems) from the Dexterity score implies, in the eyes of many, that Reflexes are also a part of the melange that is the Dex stat.

What’s more, the breaking out of that save, in effect, partially subdivides the stat already – why not complete the job and subdivide the whole thing into its constituent parts?

The mechanics of doing so can vary, but they all boil down (in the end) to ensuring that the average of the three components equals the compound score.

This is true even if the rules require that the constituents be generated individually and then averaged to get the compound score. Though, the question then needs to be asked, if you have the three components, what do you need the compound score for?

The 3.x (compromise) standard: Dex to Dex and Reflex Save

I’m not entirely sure that the analysis in the preceding section has actually clarified matters all that much, though it has shed some additional light on part of the problem. To keep from getting bogged down or side-tracked, for the rest of the article I’ll be using the 3.x rules as a standard for discussion whenever it’s relevant, and contrasting with those rules as necessary. There are lots of reasons why this is a good idea, not least of which is that the ubiquitous of the 3.x/d20 system at least means that most readers will be familiar enough with it to understand the discussion and its relevance to them.

Why Subdivide at all?

I would argue that the compound score needs to be the basis of all its derivative scores so as to preserve the relationship between them – there might not be a direct correlation between deftness of hand and speed of reflexes, but there is a difficult-to-pin-down relationship – and by acknowledging that, and building it implicitly into the game system in the way 3.x does, you avoid the messy business of actually having to define the relationship and relevance of the components to each other.

But that only turns the question on its head, and takes us back to the issue that’s been lurking in the weeds this whole time: why subdivide at all? I have two answers, one founded in what the game rules are supposed to simulate, and the other in a far more metagame head-space – and, on this occasion, I think the metagame answer is the “real” one.

The “real world simulation” answer is that Deftness, Reflexes, and Nimbleness are all different things that are interrelated but not indistinguishable; so separating them permits greater fidelity of characters. You can have an acrobat who is all thumbs, or a carpenter who has two left feet but who makes the wood with which he works sing. Of the three, it also seems clear that reflexes and agility are more closely entwined than deftness and reflexes. If you assume that these two closely-entwined concepts are conflated for reasons of practicality, you end up with something that very closely resembles the 3.x handling of the question (which in turn derives from the AD&D version, and may even predate it)..

The parts of the picture that this overlooks are that the Reflex Save is never used as the basis of skills that are more Agility-oriented than Deftness-related. Of course, explaining the reasons for such a rules construction (which would be inherently confusing to an inexperienced gamer) would be difficult and possibly dull. The rules, as presented, avoid all that confusion by not treating a Save as a Stat.

The Metagame explanation has no such deficiency, and preserves the existing rules structure perfectly: the two are separated in the rules because it permits them to be treated differently in other parts of the rules.

Under this theory, you can forget all the deep naval-gazing about what the rules simulate or quantify or represent; they are simply ad-hoc constructs that yield a playable game, and the rules are a far more abstract representation of reality than most simulationists are willing to admit – or willing to accept, perhaps.

These decisions, and the thinking behind them, are inevitable in any game design. The questions posed are relevant to every rules system, only the specifics and parameters vary. The problem of how to represent reality in a reasonably-accurate-but-playable way are at the heart of every RPG rules system.

Nevertheless, the differences and distinctions between these different applications of the general concepts – Reflex Saves, DEX checks, and Skill Rolls – are essential to interfacing a character with a game situation, and have to be clearly understood by the GM so that he can ask for the right kind of check, if nothing else!

3. The Situation

The character in question was walking down a New York dock when he heard an insistent car horn beeping behind him. Turning, he saw a sleek black sedan racing down the narrow dock between the waterside and warehouses and many stacked crates being loaded and unloaded. Workers were forced to dive for cover to this side or that, onto or behind crates, or over the side and into the East River as the seemingly out-of-control vehicle careened toward the PC at high speed!

Let’s put this into context. This is a Pulp campaign, which means that dangers are hyped up, action is dramatic and energetic and stretches reality all out of shape. Think “swashbuckling” but in a 1930s context – something like Indiana Jones meets Jerry Bruckheimer production.

Solution Options

You may have noted that there was little in the way of detailed description of the scene – not enough for the character to even know what his options were. We rectified this situation by spelling out three obvious choices for the character, which also provided some of those details – a compressed form of writing that accelerates the action.

The options were (1) leap for cover behind some crates, with no idea what might be in them; (2) leap in the other direction, ending up in the river; (3) leaping for a hook attached to a crane, about 1m (about 3 1/4 feet) overhead, by bouncing off one of the aforementioned crates.

Always implicit is Option (4), Something else. It should also be noted that the distance to the vehicle, and its speed, are never mentioned. That implies that the options we have offered are the only ones for which there is time, and any “Option 4” solution must take only the second-or-two of duration that these require.

More context: an ordinary person can get about 1/3 of a meter (1 foot) off the ground in a standing jump. An athlete might be able to manage 1/2 a meter (about 20 inches). You can get a little higher with a running start, and a lot higher if you have a pole that you can use to translate your horizontal motion into vertical. The PC had no such aids, but did have the crate to use as a trampoline / launch platform, was naturally physically-capable, and “within his element” as it were. So two half-meter leaps were quite reasonable as solutions.

It can be argued that the player should have no say in determining a reflex action, but in the opinion of both myself and my co-GM, that takes too much free will from the character. Presenting options for the player to select between is a compromise that works for us. In a different campaign, where the “action standards” are different, the choices might be anything that the player can think of, perhaps within a real-time limit, or might be fully-dictated by the GM, subject only to a veto from the player that then has to be justified. Depending on the situation, I have used all of the above in my superhero campaign, for example, and have even permitted / required the character to make one or more skill checks to see if they think of any other (prepared) options.

The player immediately chose the most difficult third option, because it would permit him to drop after the vehicle’s passage and leave him in a position to take further action if it was warranted.

Once such a decision is made, regardless of who is making the choice, the next step is to engage the relevant game mechanics.

The Game Mechanics

The character in question had no acrobatics skill – something he may or may not choose to address in the future. Under the game mechanics (and most games will work in the same way), if you don’t have the relevant skill, the roll required defaults to a stat check; in this case a dex check.

This is simple enough in the game system that we were using, but would have been more complicated if we were using a d20 game system for some similar action (a runaway cart barreling down a hill toward a PC, for example), because everyone has a REFLEX Save. It can be argued that if you have the Acrobatics skill, that should take the primary role in determining the outcome – especially since we had given the character a choice of actions. “Volition means that this is not a reflex action” is the line of argument. But what if the character is not very good at Acrobatics, but has a very good Reflex save? Or perhaps the character should get a synergy bonus from the Acrobatics on his Reflex Save?

Personally, I find the Volition argument compelling – but interpret it as meaning that a character must have the relevant skill in order to have choices of action.

Sidebar: Should Characters Be Penalized For Not Having The Relevant Skill?

In most systems, this is the case automatically – to some extent. But I want to focus on two in particular as case studies.

In 3.x / d20, Saving Throws improve with character level and skills improve when skill points are allocated to them – and don’t improve otherwise, except from equipment modifiers and magic and the like. Because they are advancing at different rates, it’s easy for Saving Throws to exceed skill totals in relatively short order. Which brings back to prominence the question I posed earlier: if a character has both Acrobatics and a Reflex Save, which one should be checked in circumstances where both are relevant? And what if the other choice has a noticeably higher score than the one deemed most appropriate? One way to solve that problem is to assume that the two scores are on different scales and apply a correction – an increase – to the DC when employing the lower of the two. This is quite justifiable because of the distinction that can be made between a deliberate choice of action and an instinctive reflex. It can be quite plausible – depending on the action – that the difficulty of performing some tasks is much greater when they are performed instinctively compared to when someone with the appropriate training attempts to perform them. If the Saving Throw is 18 and the Skill only 14, then the same task might be DC19 when performed instinctively and DC15 when performed deliberately by someone who knows what they are doing. The implication of that is an answer of ‘yes, characters should be penalized with a higher DC if they lack a relevant skill, even when making a Reflex Save.’

Things are a little more complex in the Hero System:

— Stat saves are calculated as 9+(STAT/5), round in the character’s favor.

— For 1 character point (1 XP, aka 1 build point) the character gets 8 or less (written 8/-) in a skill.

— For 2 XP, the character gets 11/- in a skill.

— For a certain number of XP that varies from skill to skill (usually 3, 4, or 5) the character gets 9+(STAT/5), round in the character’s favor.

— For additional XP, the amount varying from skill to skill (usually 1, 2, or 3) the character can increase this score by +1.

— Checks are made on 3d6, with the goal of getting under the skill level. The GM can apply modifiers to the target to increase or decrease the likelihood of success.

That means that it’s routine for Stat Check values to exceed skill rolls in things that the character isn’t very skilled in, but might or might not be less in subjects in which the character IS very skilled – and you can’t put the Stat Check value up without also increasing the Skill Checks (all of them) that are based on that stat.

This can actually provide a disincentive for the purchase of skills if the character has a very high or very low stat value. The GM using this game system has to actively compensate with an incentive that matches or exceeds this disincentive – but there is absolutely nowhere in the rule book that tells you this, let alone gives you guidance as to what that should be.

For example, consider DEX 40 – a quite reasonable value in a superhero campaign for some characters. That gives a Stat Check of 9+(40/5)=9+8=17/-. Skill roll progression, depending on how much you spend on a skill, will be 8/-, 11/-, 17/-, more. You can argue that unless you intend to put a skill roll into the “more” category, you are better off spending nothing on the skill and defaulting to the 17/- skill roll.

I counter this with two – no, three – propositions:

— First, there are some “everyman” skills that everyone has to a minimal standard unless they take a disadvantage to give them a deficiency. These skills are at 5/- for no points.

— Second, some tasks are only possible are only possible if you have 8/- in the relevant skill, some are only possible if you have at least 11/-, and some are only permitted if you have spent the points to get better than the two basic levels of expertise. Other tasks are equally possible regardless of skill level, but take twice as long at the 11/- level, four times as long at the 8/-, six times as long at the 5/- level, and ten times as long if attempted “unskilled”. Furthermore, any difficulty penalties are doubled if you don’t have the appropriate skill.

— Third, I am a big fan of “quality of success” / “degree of failure” assessments – and some “quality of success” outcomes are off the table unless you have the appropriate skill.

The latter two propositions are applied depending on whether or not success will eventually be achieved with persistence. In my home-brew system, as used for my superhero campaign, many of these details are explicitly stated within the rules, but are all employed in a common-sense manner that is so predictable that it’s rare that I need to consult the rules for any specific skill. In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, we might occasionally use the “greater time required” option, but for the most part, we will do it all with quality of success, which is assessed with an awareness of the probabilities of a 3d6 roll.

Thus, missing a target by 1 will usually be a lot worse if you only have 11/- in a skill than doing so if you have 17/- in that skill – and worse still if you are attempting to use a skill that you don’t actually have.

So the answer to the question posed by the section title is an emphatic but unofficial “yes” in the case of the Hero System. The specifics may vary, but there is always a benefit to spending the points required to buy a skill, regardless of how good your “unskilled default” might be.

The Odds Of Success

Even though I’ve labeled the discussion as a sidebar, the above provides essential context to the application of game mechanics to the proposed task at hand – leaping to a hook on a crane 1m overhead by using a crate as a stepping stone.

In this case, the character does not have the skill deemed relevant – Acrobatics – and the game system subsumes Saving Throws into Skill Checks. Nevertheless, by the time his general competence and skill levels were taken into account, he had a 17/- chance of success on 3d6, less any penalties for difficulty that we GMs chose to access.

If we consider rolling or leaping to the side to be an essential step to all the different solutions we had placed before the player, they were all of similar difficulty magnitude.

The Roll

The player rolled three sixes – an automatic failure – and that meant that we were directly into interpreting the magnitude of his failure and what actually happened. It was this outcome that triggered the thought process described at the start of this article.

4. Moments Of Interpretation

Many rolls don’t require interpretation, for one reason or another.

Success

For example, if the character succeeds, on many occasions he simply achieves whatever he set out to do. Narrative need only begin with the consequences. This is a Simple Success.

There are times, however, when a simple yes/no outcome is not good enough. A character painting a portrait, for example, or laying out a book, or just about anything creative or craft-related – These require some assessment of Success Degree.

Failure

Likewise, there are lots of times when failure simply means that the character did not succeed in whatever they were attempting – Simple Failure. But, equally, there are times when Degree Of Failure is a relevant consideration.

Criticals

To some extent, this practice is merely nuancing something that many GMs already implement in their games – Critical Successes and Failures. It’s simply adding more shades in between those outcomes and a “bare minimum” success.

Relative Interpretation

Once you have multiple levels of success open to you, the next thing that you need is some method of selecting between them. There are many possible approaches to this, but the simplest is to simply consider the degree of success or failure revealed by the die roll. If you need 14 or less, and you roll 17, that’s a failure by three. If you take the relative probabilities of those outcomes into account, it’s a considerably bigger difference on 3d6 than it is on a d20. So, depending on how many nuances you have broken the skill into, you might interpret this as a far worse failure than if you had needed 11/- and rolled a 14. Or vice-versa. It’s all a matter of interpretation.

There are other ways of indexing possible outcomes. Distance from a critical failure, for example, places all the possible results on a continuum, and means that if you succeed by enough, you effectively get the benefits of a critical success even if you don’t roll one – a six might be good enough. Or Distance from a critical success. Either way, you are committed to either bunching results together into ‘bands’ of rolls that lead to the same outcome, or into creating many more layers than you probably need.

For my superhero campaign, this no problem – explicit interpretation structures are woven into the description of each individual skill, once again based on a common-sense interpretation of the situation. For the Adventurer’s Club campaign, that’s not much help.

This gives a great deal more flexibility to the campaign, but also places a premium on improvising outcomes.

5. The Anatomy Of A Reflex Action

So, looking at this particular roll and situation, the immediate response should be to dissect the proposed course of action. Many of these will be the same every time, regardless of the situation, especially if one adopts a less literal interpretation. This is important because each represents a potential failure point.

a. Awareness

The character needs to become aware of the cause of a need to act on instinct.

b. Reaction

The character needs to associate that cause with the need to act on instinct.

c. Opportunity

The character needs to subconsciously evaluate possible responses.

d. Target

In this case, the character needs to aim himself at his proposed landing point on the crate.

e. Leap

He then needs to carry out the leap to that targeted point.

f. Landing

There are times when landing will end the instinctive action of a leap this way or that. But not this time – instead, the character needs to land, dropping to his haunches, still balanced, and ready to leap off again.

g. Rebound

That second leap can be considered the rebound of the character. It has to be in the right direction and deliver enough upwards motion to reach the eventual target. You will note that there’s no re-targeting – no time, it all has to happen in one smooth motion – the ‘aiming’ of this motion was done back in step ‘d’, and the intermediate point reached in step ‘f’ is only a means to that end.

h. Grab

It’s quite likely that the hook has a motion of its own; the grab is not just to hold onto it, it’s to get it into a position to be held on to.

i. Hold

Finally, the character has to hold himself in place long enough for the danger to pass beneath him.

6. The Metagame Factors

Before any assessment of how badly the character fails, and what happens as a result, takes place, there are always some metagame considerations that have to be taken into account. These always function as mitigants, if they have any effect, but they can also rule some potential failure modes out of the question.

How important is it to the campaign that the character succeed?

This is often a critical factor in terms of restraining the GM from being remotely as lethal as he could be. In this case, it immediately ruled out killing the character for all sorts of reasons – inappropriateness to the genre (not being heroic enough for a PC) being a main one.

How important is it to the adventure that the character succeed?

While there would have been several ways around the problem if the character were to be left temporarily infirm, they would all have involved a player sitting around twiddling his thumbs for the next several game sessions. My Co-GM and I both consider this unacceptable, and rewrite adventures repeatedly if necessary to avoid it. “Everyone plays, everyone contributes” is our goal for each adventure (and each game session). So this ruled out incapacitating the character.

How important is it to the encounter that the character succeed?

Which leaves us with a minor injury or inconvenience as the absolute worst-case scenario. Within the bounds of possibility remaining, we needed the car to get past the character, one way or another, in order to complete the plot-relevant actions we had plotted for it – after that, we didn’t care one way or another. So a twisted ankle on landing? Okay, a little inconvenient adventure-wise, but that’s as bad as it can get.

Information explicitly conveyed

By describing the threat, we explicitly conveyed that the character had succeeded in steps (a) and (b) – he knew that there was a threat and that he needed to take immediate action to get out of the dangerous situation.

Options Explicitly Offered

Furthermore, by explicitly offering a range of options, and getting a decision from the player, we had explicitly ruled out a failure of step (c). We had presented the results of the characters assessment.

That meant that the failure lay in imperfect action of some sort. I instinctively went for the most dramatic option – the character leaped, but underestimated the motion of the hook, grabbing it only with their little finger, which could only hold for an extremely painful half-second or so. Just long enough, in fact, for the car to pass beneath the PCs’ feet.

7. How Long Did The Hold Have To Be?

Before I could announce that, however, it needed to pass a plausibility test.

How fast was the car going? How long was it? If I didn’t like the results, I would have to amend my first instinct and have the character land on the top of the vehicle and then try to grab hold.

We’re talking 1930s, so 60-70mph was a reasonably good top speed – but it takes time to get up to that sort of speed, and time translates to distance – and there wasn’t all that much distance on the dock. Even giving the car an initial speed as it screamed around the corner onto the dock, it wouldn’t be anywhere near whatever it’s top speed was.

Having said that, the car was clearly a powerful one, probably with a V12 aircraft engine (based on the length of the hood in the image we had chosen), so it wouldn’t be slow, either. I couldn’t see that it would be much faster than 50-55 mph – or much slower than 40 mph.

Fifty is the most convenient of these numbers to work with, easily translating up to 55 (take off 10% of the time) and down to 40 (add 20%). So that’s where I started.

The image on the screen was about 6.5 inches in length, with the width of the vehicle estimated to be about three inches, allowing for the somewhat side-on perspective. I also knew that this was a Bentley, a quite wide and heavy car, better known these days as a luxury vehicle but considered a performance car at the time. So, roughly 1.3m wide (4 1/4 feet). Which gives a length of 2.82m (9 1/4 feet).

9 1/4 feet is 0.0017390152 miles, according to Google. A car traveling at 50 mph will take 0.0017390152/50 hours to pass a given point, given it’s length = 0.000034780304 hours = 0.00208681824 minutes = 0.1252090944 seconds. Call it an eighth of a second.

Even tacking on an extra 20% to that isn’t going to be very much. The PC could hang on for as little as 1/4 of a second and be well clear.

8. Interpretation Of A Failure

Given the metagame considerations that were in play, and the high native ability of the character – you don’t expect to fail 17-or-less rolls on 3d6 very often, it’s well under 1% of the time – it also seemed reasonable that the character would be able to do most of what he had attempted. 17/18ths of it, to be exact! But that would put the point of failure on the holding on to the hook, and that didn’t seem reasonable if the character got any sort of decent grip on it. So, logically, the grip had to be the point of failure.

But if the grip was the complete point of failure, he would have dropped to land right in front of the oncoming car – an outcome ruled out by the metagame circumstances. So I would need the grip to be an almost complete failure, and the hold to be an ever-so-slight success – effectively taking part of the failure from step (h) and transferring it to step (i).

He wouldn’t have to hang on for very long, after all. So I ruled that he grabbed on with his little finger only, and that his pixie could only hold him for half a second.

Hanging On By His Little Finger

Of course, the character can’t start his leap as the car gets to his position, he’s going to have to anticipate it’s arrival to be out of its way. But if he leaps when it’s about twenty feet away, that doesn’t increase the travel time to much more than 3/8 of a second. So 1/2 a second would be plenty, and he would land a couple of feet behind the spare tire.

I also factored in that this character is one of the physically strongest of the PCs – his preferred ‘soft weapon’ is a capstan bar – a heavy iron bar over 2′ in length and more than an inch thick. If anyone could hang on by his pinky for half a second, it would be this PC.

Reasons To Interpret A Failure (or a success) When You Don’t Have To

#1: In a word, Flavor. Without interpreting success or failure, you have sterile outcomes that provide no toe-hold for consequences beyond the immediate success or failure. Such interpretations provide a foundation for flavor text that transitions from game mechanics to roleplaying within the game.

#2: I’ve mentioned a number of times the degree to which game mechanics is disruptive to the pacing, tone, and intensity of a game. Anything that softens or counters that impact is a significant improvement.

#3: It gives you a hint, a starting point, and that makes the job of devising the flavor text easier. So it can save you work in the long run.

#4: It adds an enhanced sense of realism, even to the unrealistic and fantastic.

There are probably more, but those are enough to be going on with!

9. Other Kinds of Save

That brings to an end the example of the process of dissecting a Save. Along the way, I’ve looked at when you might need to do so, and why it’s reasonably desirable to do so. But almost all of the discussion has been framed around that example, and Reflex Saves. With that in mind, let’s look at the different kinds of save there are – and these are almost ubiquitous, system to system, regardless of the specifics and mechanics involved.

FORT saves (passive)

Fortitude saves are generally made to resist some ill effect or to resist the onset of an undesirable condition. That can include exposure to diseases and environmental pathogens; it can include resisting blacking out from high g-forces; it can include withstanding shock, or blood loss; or simply maintaining activity despite extremes of temperature.

A key point about FORT saves is that they are passive. The character doesn’t have a choice about making the save – it’s completely involuntary, a test of how the character is reacting to the adverse conditions that have triggered the role.

This contrasts markedly with Reflex saves or their skill substitutes like Acrobatics, in which a character can attempt something knowing that it will trigger a Reflex save or other check.

WILL saves (passive)

WILL saves are also passive, and used to test a character’s determination despite adverse conditions, more than anything. That includes the determination to do what the character wants and not yield to some external mental influence. A lot of the time, WILL saves are underutilized; for that reason, when GMing, I never require a FORT save when a WILL save is just as appropriate.

PERC checks

Okay, so now we’ve moved beyond the “official” types of Save and into the realm of checks that GMs frequently use as saves. One player I know describes Perception checks as “Save Vs Surprise”, and in many ways, the term is appropriate.

Perception Checks come in two flavors, and for metagame reasons, it’s usually necessary to treat them completely differently.

Passive checks deal with the character noticing something without an active examination of the scene or locale. Example: PCs discover a building with a huge number of carved demonic images on its walls as reliefs, heavily overgrown. After they spread out to find the entrance, each has the chance to notice that one of the images blinks every now and then. This is a passive Perception Check. Obviously, the GM can’t have the players roll these checks, or if he does, they have to be made without the players knowing what the rolls signify; anything else tells the players that there IS something to perceive, which means that they will keep looking until they find it.

Which brings me to Active Perception checks. These are usually quite separate from, and different to, a search roll, but that depends on the game system. If a PC says, “I’m looking closely at the gargoyle with the bright red eyes – what are those eyes made of?” then they are using an Active Perception Check – specifically looking at something and asking for more detail about what they can see.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I absolutely hate having nothing to say when an active perception check is successfully made. It immediately makes the game world’s artificiality obvious – and makes it look as though I haven’t done my homework, to boot. Of course, you can always make something up on the spot off the top of your head – but that’s even more likely to get you into trouble because the rest of the adventure that you have planned makes no allowances for your little exercise in unbridled creativity. I solve this particular problem by carefully visualizing whatever the PCs are looking at before I start to answer, assuming that I don’t have more information prepped for delivery.

Another example of an active perception check is “This looks like good country for an ambush – I’m looking for any signs of trouble waiting for us.” That does no good if the ambushers are invisible (a particularly nasty trick to use) but under normal circumstances, you would have to think very carefully about whether or not there was anything to see before you could give an answer. (I’ve sometimes gotten good mileage from deliberately understating or extremely heavy-handedly overstating the absence of anything to make the players paranoid).

Sidebar: Extra Senses

Again, I don’t want to get too deeply into it – this article is quite long enough already – but it would be remiss of me not to at least mention the issue of characters with unusual senses that most characters don’t have. Does this confer an advantage when making a perception check? Does it only do so when making an active or a passive check? Does a Perception score function identically and equally for all senses? Those are just some of the minefield of issues waiting to blow up underfoot when extra senses come into play.

Oh, and while I”m within shouting distance of the subject: how about ordinary senses other than sight (spot) and hearing (listen)? Say, flavor, or enhanced odor discrimination?

Comprehension (INT) checks (passive vs active)

An NPC explains something complex to the player character, simplifying it as much as possible because the PC doesn’t have the relevant skill. The test for whether or not the PC understands – and how much they understand – is a Comprehension Check.

These come in two flavors – there are the comprehension checks that deal with implied statements and subliminal messages – “reading between the lines” activities, in other words – and there are comprehensions that come from reading things, or listening to lectures or speeches – “face value” activities. Since the first involves actively analyzing what you have heard and relating it to other information, that’s an “active” comprehension check, while the second is clearly a “passive” check.

There’s no official practical difference between the two, and many rules systems don’t even actively list this application of an Intelligence check. The unofficial difference would lie in the relevance of other related skills, in particular something like deduction or detective.

Idea (INT) checks (passive vs active)

You know a player is really stumped (or has given up) when he utters that immortal phrase that every GM encounters sooner or later: “Can I roll to have an idea?”

Sometimes the GM can see this coming and simply has the player make a roll to get a hint without being asked – which enables them to weave the question into the game narrative more strongly.

Idea checks are prime candidates for “will eventually inevitably succeed” interpretations.

Education checks (Skills) (passive vs active)

And then there are skill checks that are actually saves. I’ve already discussed active skills like Acrobatics so instead I want to move directly onto passive skill use, where checks are used to associate flavor text with significance, beyond that which is possible for the player alone. For example, a character might describe the animated corpse of a creature with the ears of an Elf and glowing blue eyes. While the character has a skill level in an ancient society – call it Atlantamuria – since this is an original creation of the GM, the player doesn’t know very much about it beyond what the GM has already revealed. So it would take an Education Check on the relevant skill to determine that the description matches a creature from Atlantamurian legend.

Like a passive Perception check, the GM can’t ask for the roll directly without giving the game away. And that’s why these checks should be considered Saving Throws and not ordinary skill checks – they are handled differently, or should be.

The same can’t really be said of active Education Checks (“My character knows Golthrokbin Legends, can I make a roll to see if there’s anything similar in their mythology?”) – they get included only for the sake of consistency.

10. The Save vs Uncertainty

One of the worst things to do is to hold up the game while you attempt to make up your mind about something that isn’t all that critical. If all your prep is for the city of Castlemaine and the PCs make a unilateral decision to head to Gracemeyre chasing some off-the-cuff rumor that the GM tossed out last week, taking pause to think is justified; but if it’s a saving throw, there should be no more than a couple of heartbeats between the announcement of the roll result and your delivery of an explanation. Equally, if the situation demands a saving throw be made, awareness of how to handle that save – both written and unwritten rules – should be as close to instinctive as you can make it. You have to make your (metaphoric) save vs uncertainty.

The more you’ve thought about this stuff in advance, the less time you have to spend thinking about it at the game table. You have to be able to dissect a save at lightning speed, and use the results to make a decision as quickly as the player can roll his dice. This article gives you all the tools that you need; how you use them is now up to you.

My apologies for the delay in posting this. I was struggling with exhaustion for hours last night (my time) in a bid to get it done; sometime between 11 and midnight, I succumbed, awaking almost 4 hours later, slumped over the keyboard. I still wouldn’t have been able to post it on time without that delay, but it would have been a lot closer to expectations.

Introduction

It still astonishes me that my co-GM for the Adventurer’s Club campaign knows so little about illustration and sketching. A little while back, he revealed that he doesn’t understand perspective, for example – not even the basic stuff that most schoolkids learn in the first few years of their education, in fact, as soon as they realize that showing the side of something as well as the front makes it look more real.

Where there’s one person with such a blind spot, there are likely to be others.

That’s a problem because the ability to sketch, however simply, is a vital tool for the generation and exploration of ideas. It may not be something that you will need every day of the week, but there will be times when its absence will be keenly felt, and can even make the difference between being ready to play and not.

I was contemplating this in the bright sunshine at the bus stop last Saturday morning, and realized that even those with some idea of how to sketch something might have only a vague understanding of how shadows work, a contention supported by the number of claims that the shadows cast by Apollo 11 prove that the moon landings were faked.

In particular, I was contemplating how easy it would be to add an explanation for the basic properties of shadows to a description of how perspective works, for the benefit of anyone laboring under this handicap, when I came up with the title of this particular blog post.

And immediately realized how powerful and useful a metaphor that was for a number of other things that GMs should understand. I had the outlines of this article written in my head by the time the bus arrived, and so clearly that all the reminder I needed was to note the title on a scrap of paper.

So here goes….

Top View / Plan View

The place to start learning about perspective is by contemplating the most fundamental view of all: the top-down or plan view, with no perspective at all. Shadows can sometimes be employed to suggest three-dimensional shapes, but that’s about the limit of it – and even that gets sacrificed if it gets in the way of even relatively trivial details. The illustration depicts just such a top view and the most immediate impression is how false, flat, and artificial it feels.

As an exercise in diagramming a street and number of buildings, plus dressings like trees, this is excellent, but that’s damning with faint praise in terms of realism.

Imagined Perspective

Contemplate a box viewed end-on. If you were to sketch that, you might draw a square. But that wouldn’t tell you much about what you were looking at, or the position of the observer in three dimensions, relative to it. Those shortcomings are simply addressed, just by adding a horizontal line that indicates the horizon. Since this, by definition of what a horizon is, is at eye level, this immediately indicates where we are relative to the box – and gives immediate information about the approximate size of the box, to boot. In the case being illustrated, our eyes are directly in front of the face of the box, and about 1/3 of the way down from the top of the box. We immediately assume that it is located on the floor, and that means that the box is a little taller than the observer – maybe 6’6″ or 7′ tall – and, of course, it’s as wide as it is tall.

That’s all the information that can be gleaned from the sketch above, and even some of that is potentially misleading – it assumes that we’re standing and of fairly typical human height, somewhere between 5’6″ and 6’2″ tall. What if this is a view from very close to the floor? Suddenly, the box is much smaller – and, assuming that it’s still on the floor and not hovering in mid-air, that size might explain why we’re down on the floor to look at it.

Still, if you were drawing such a sketch, you would presumably know what the size of the box is supposed to be, and from that, the height above ground of the eyes of the person observing it can be deduced. Still, that’s a lot of meaning for such a simple representation of reality.

Size – Distance relationship

The mind employs all sorts of shortcuts to process the world around us, and some of these explain humanity’s ability to create representational images at all. Artists have been manipulating these processes for millennia, to play cognitive tricks on the viewer.

The most fundamental such shortcut equates relative size with distance with implied depicted size. This is illustrated by the gorilla images to the left; notice how putting the fence behind the gorilla makes the fence seem more distant, while the image with the fence in front doesn’t look right because if the ape was that large, the fence would have to be impossibly tall and there’s no sign of that. If the ape image had been of a whole ape, though, the discrepancy would be harder to spot. This is how “forced perspective” works – we equate small things with distant things and vice-versa, and so the eye can be fooled into thinking it’s seeing a 50′ woman – or a 2″-tall man, ‘just’ by constructing realistic sets to the desired scales.

I write ‘just” because it’s not necessarily that easy. If you look at a photograph of a miniature, ninety times out of 100 you can tell immediately – the focal plane is too narrow, meaning that the model blurs in back as well as in front, and the shadows are too sharp, and there’s not enough air between camera and subject, and dust motes and other textures aren’t scaled properly – and we synthesize all those flaws into an instant conclusion, even without being aware of any of these problems specifically.

That The Incredible Shrinking Man rarely falls prey to these problems, or their larger-scale equivalents, explains why it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation when the award was first issued, in 1958. That it did not succeed as well in this regard despite arguably better critical reviews justifies the lack of similar recognition for The Amazing Colossal Man, a close contemporary of the Shrinking Man.

Singe-point perspective

The geometrically-fascinated ancient Greeks were well aware that things appeared smaller if they were farther away, and naturally spent time analyzing the phenomenon. They soon realized that straight lines could be represented with great accuracy using single-point perspective.

What is single-point perspective? Consider the box diagrams to the right. In figure 1, I have simply copied two sides of the box and moved them up and to the left of the box. If they were unchanged in size, the results wouldn’t look quite right, though many would not be able to explain why; it’s because the back of the box, being further away, has to be smaller than the front. This has also been made in figure 1.

If I simply connect the visible corners of the box, it immediately takes on the feeling that it has three-dimensions, a demonstration of the fundamental truth of the proposition. Figure 2 shows this completion – but it goes one step further and explains why: it’s because Single-Point perspective is perspective from a single vanishing point.

Vanishing Point

Figure 2 also depicts this – simply by extending the lines that are running from front corner to back corner of the imaginary three-dimensional object, we find that they converge to a point. What’s more, any box that was behind the one depicted and in line with it would also have the same vanishing point.

If the vanishing point weren’t on the horizon line, if it were above it, one would get the impression that the box was resting on it’s bottom front edge, with the back floating in the air. There are similar problems if the vanishing point is below the horizon line, but it’s the front edge that appears lifted off the ground. If these constructions are explained visually – the presence of a figure lifting one side or the other, as appropriate, for example – and supported by shadows, it is completely plausible; without such confirmations, the results simply feel “wrong”. The only vanishing point that yields the impression of a box flat on the floor is the one with the vanishing point on the horizon line.

Forwards

An awful lot of illustrations use a single vanishing point about 1/3 of the way down the center of the page, give or take, or the equivalent with the paper turned on it’s side. This is a completely natural view of straight lines, as shown by the photograph to the left.

How do you determine where a vertical division should be, in order for it to appear to occur with regular spacing?

Well, you can use some complicated maths to calculate the apparent distance, or you can use a simple geometric trick:

The illustration below takes you through the process step-by-step.

1. In figure 1, I’ve drawn lines from the vanishing point to the top and bottom of the shape to be repeated, and drawn that shape.
2. In figure 2, I’ve found the center of that shape by drawing lines from corner to corner.
3. The third step is to draw a line from the vanishing point through the middle of the shape.
4. That’s the hard work done! Step 4 is to draw a line from the bottom of one side of the shape through the middle of the other side. Where it reaches the top line to the vanishing point is where the next vertical bar has to drop.
5. In figure 5, I’ve done several more.
6. Erase the working (I’ve left mine very faintly) and put the tops and bottoms to the shapes, and hey presto! You’re done.

When doing this kind of work, you should always proceed from the large to the small, because your accumulated errors (and there will be small errors to accumulate) will shrink with the scale if you do. If you work from the small to the large, the accumulate error will grow, and you can get to the end of a lot of work to find that you’ve stuffed it up completely.

Note that a similar technique enables you to tile floors or draw concrete slabs, perfectly.

Vertical

It’s not really any harder to do a single-point perspective looking down than it is to do one looking horizontally outward, but the results are far more dramatic, as the forest image to the right reveals. These are sometimes known as birds-eye or aerial views, but that’s a misnomer; these more accurately refer to a horizontal view from a position of considerable altitude.

The more accurate term to describe this sort of image or a drawing from a similar perspective is an overhead view.

Object Rotation

Okay, so by now you’ve mastered the basics of perspective, it’s time to move on to something a little more difficult. Let’s take the box that we started with a little while back and rotate about a vertical axis to that one of the edges is closer to us.

It’s obvious from what we’ve already done that one face will run to a vanishing point, the same as in the single-point example. Let’s assign that to be the face to our left as we look at the box, so that the shape of the process is as per the example we’ve already got. Since the face on the right is also going to have a back edge that has to be shorter than the leading edge, it also has to run to a vanishing point.

To show an object with two faces pointing toward the character but not directly at him, you need two vanishing points.

The diagram to the left is rather more complicated than anything we’ve dealt with so far. Don’t let that put you off; as we get into it, you’ll see that it’s not as confusing as it might first appear. So, there’s our box; the side to our left is running to the vanishing point labeled a, while the face to our right is pointing at b. The panel on top is actually pointing toward both.

The rest of the diagram is there to explain a practical limitation regarding the placement of these vanishing points.

The Placement Of Two Vanishing Points

A is within the left-hand 1/3 of the page, and that’s fine, as shown by the green indicator beneath the “1”. Now, in theory, the right-hand vanishing point can be anywhere to the right of that point, at least according to some people. In practice, you soon learn that b should never be placed in the middle of the page (the red section under the “2”, and should only be placed in the right-hand side of the page with caution and forethought – because unless you get it exactly right, it simply won’t look real.

In fact, it’s generally far better for the second vanishing point to be located off the page, somewhere on a span that’s also 2/3 of the page wide. And, as a general rule, the greater the separation between the two, the more believable the end result will be. This example has b located on the right-hand-side of that ‘extended page’, and the results are just fine.

Two-point perspective

The placement of the vertical edge between the two faces is also important, as shown in the diagram to the right. In the first version, that edge is slightly to the left of the middle of the page, while in the second example, I’ve moved the edge closer to what is sometimes referred to as the “near” vanishing point. The result is that the building appears to have the larger side facing us more directly, with the smaller end presented at a more oblique angle.

One Point Perspective, revisited

It’s also worth considering what happens if we move vanishing point b further and further to the right. If you think about it for a moment, you could rephrase that as moving the vertical edge facing us closer to the ‘a’ vanishing point, relative to the ‘b’ vanishing point, exactly as I’ve done in the second version of the diagram. That means that the top and bottom of that larger face – the side with the windows – will continue to flatten out until, with ‘b’ infinitely far away, they are parallel with the horizon – and what we’re effectively left with is a single vanishing point.

That means that one point perspective is really just a special case of two-point perspective, one with some of the complexity stripped out of it. It also means that having any edges perfectly parallel to each other is a special case, a simplification that only works properly when one vanishing point is so far away that it might as well not exist.

The Need for Three Vanishing Points

The obvious implication is that as we shift our observation point up or down, relative to the top of the box or building, the oversimplification of representing the ‘vertical’ edges with perfectly parallel lines begins to become more and more unrealistic.

For a fully 3D image, we’re going to need a third vanishing point – one that’s up in the sky if we’re looking sharply up, or below if we’re looking down.

What’s more, as a rule of thumb not to be broken unless you know exactly what you’re doing, this vanishing point should be at least as far below the horizon line as the a-b distance, and preferably 2-3 times as much.

Of course, the more aggressively up or down we’re looking, the closer to the center of the page this vertical vanishing point becomes, eventually devolving into the other type of single-point perspective.

Three-point perspective

The result of what three-point perspective makes possible is represented by the line drawing of a building shown to the left. This has all three vanishing points off the page – two a long way above the top and a long way to the left and right, respectively, the third one a long way down the page. If you look closely at the image, you can note that none of the sides is drawn using parallel lines; they all converge at vanishing points.

Yet the result, even with the quite simple monotone coloring and total lack of texture, is clearly far more realistic feeling than the simple two-point or one-point examples I’ve been using so far.

Isometric Projection

What if all three vanishing points are all the way out to infinity in their respective directions at the same time? Then all the lines are parallel – and what you have is isometric projection. This is a simplified form of 3D that has gained a lot of popularity in computer games because it takes a lot less computing power to render content than a more realistic approach would.

The illustration to the right depicts an example of isometric projection.

That’s really all you need to know about straight lines and perspective. Curves get a lot more technical, but if you stick each sphere and cone in a rectangular ‘box”, and think about what you’re doing, you should be able to cope.

Shadows

A shadow is constructed using an additional vanishing point at the light source and one at the point on the ‘ground’ vertically below that vanishing point.

That makes it sound quite simple, doesn’t it? It’s just more of what I’ve been showing you how to do all article.

Before I walk you through an example, though, it’s worth pausing for a moment to remind yourself of what a shadow actually is.

The Absence Of Light

We talk about shadows all the time as if they were something real; they aren’t. They are a contrast, the result of an interruption of the light traveling from the source toward the surface on which the shadow is to be cast.

A shadow is the absence of light. It may be a convenient shorthand to treat shadows as a projection of the shape onto a surface – in effect, taking the simulated 3D shape and eliminating the third dimension.

The distinction is fine, but important, because there are times when casting a shadow when you need to stop and use this as a guideline to lift you out of a state of confusion. Without it, you’re stuck trying to use 3D geometry to try and solve your problem, and that’s a much more difficult tool to use.

Technique

I’ve deliberately made the shape in this example a little more complex; I knew that I was only going to be able to present one definitive image to describe the process.

Click on the image to open a larger version in a new tab.

1. I started with the horizon line and vanishing point (e) and outlined the shape.
2. I positioned S, the sun, and dropped a vertical line to a for the seat of the light.
3. I drew line a-b-c and line S-d-c. Obviously, where these intersected was the location of point c, which I hadn’t known previously.
4. I next drew a line from the vanishing point to the intersection point (c).
5. a line from a to pass through k gave me L at the point where it intersected the e-c line.
6. a line from S through j provided confirmation that L was correct.
7. a line from S through f, and locate the intersection with the e-c line, gave me point g, the top of the notch.
8. I drew a line vertically from f to h.
9. a line from a through h to g confirmed the position of g and gave me the vertical line of the notch.
10. a line from S through m to n gave me the bottom of the notch (actually, I was a little sloppy in doing this line, and in too much of a hurry to redo it the way I should have).
11. a line from S through h to i gave me the start of the angled part of the notch.
12. I then drew the outline of the shadow and filled it in, then erased my working. I added the blue and gray background splashes of color. The inset shows the result without clutter from the labels and working.

All that was needed was a ruler and pencil, or their equivalents since this was a digital file – and knowing what to do with them.

Multiple Shadows

I stated that it was a vanishing point at one light source and one seat of that light source. That’s an oversimplification.

The reality is that each light source casts it’s own shadows. Two light sources equals two vanishing points at the light sources and two more at their respective seats.

That’s right, you need one complete set of shadows per light source.

If the only time shadows showed up was by day, that would be no problem – here on Earth – but I’m obliged to consider alien worlds and the like under binary stars, and we humans have created light sources more than intense enough to cast large shadows at sporting grounds – and smaller, sharper, deeper shadows from candle-light. So I’m afraid I can’t quite let things go that easily.

The image to the left replicates a situation that I’ve seen many, many times on television coverage – a figure with four, six, or eight shadows from the stadium lighting. I usually see it with cricket, but if Major Leagues taught me nothing else, it was that baseball is also played under lights.

The image to the right is a photo from a day-night cricket match played in Tasmania several years ago. Such matches consist of half the match being played in the afternoon, while the other half is played after a half-hour interval in the evening – and hence telecast in prime-time, which is a large part of the appeal of these games. And yes, the grounds really do come up looking that lush and grassy!

Blur & Fade with distance from the edge

The other phenomenon that’s worth noting is that each shadow fades with distance from the light source, and blurs with distance from the edge of the casting object. I was careful to replicate this effect in the baseball pitcher image above; if I hadn’t done so, it would have looked a lot less realistic.

Shadows on sloping surfaces

This is exactly the sort of complication that you have to understand the nature of shadows to resolve. In a nutshell, if the ground slopes, falling away from the horizontal plane, the shadow that is cast has more room to grow, and fade. Effectively, the seat of the shadow shifts in the opposite direction – so if the ground slopes down to the left, the seat will need to move up and right. If there is am abrupt change in the incline – say, from flat ground onto a ridge and sloping ground into a gully – only those parts of the shadow that fall on the ridge or beyond will be affected.

The results can be visually-confusing if there is not some other indication of the slope of the terrain; a bare surface will no longer cut it. If you introduce the effects of terrain, you generally need to indicate what that terrain is – which means making it believable as well. Which is moving beyond the scope of this article.

Shadows on a curving surface

Similarly, if there is any sort of bulge, depression, or curve to the surface – the side of a hill or whatever – shadows will bend and curve in response, and will either shorten or lengthen (depending on whether or not the shadow has as far to travel before intersecting the surface on which it is being cast).

That’s where the Apollo-11 conspiracies fall apart; it’s far easier to explain the shifts in angle of the shadows of one object relative to the shadows of another with uneven terrain than it is to explain how a government that leaks like a sieve could involve tens of thousands of people in a conspiracy and have none of them leak the ‘truth’ – ever. To say nothing of an enemy superpower that would have to be party to such shenanigans, and innumerable others in other countries.

Every Shadow Has A Vanishing Point

Which brings me back to the title of this article. By now, you can tell that it has a double-meaning even if taken literally.

Meaning one: all shadows fade out at some point, some distance. Long before that point is reached, they will have blurred in form into a far more general representation of the shape casting the shadow. But there comes a point at which all shadows cease to exist, for all intents and purposes; if that point is reached before the end of the shadow, it simply fades into nothingness.

The other literal interpretation is quite specific – each shadow has its’ own light source, and each light source has its own vanishing point. A pair of them, in fact – one on the reciprocal of the nominal surface, and one not.

But, quite frankly, those interpretations both pale in comparison to the wealth of meaning that can derive from treating the statement as a metaphor.

As a Gaming Metaphor, Interpretation 1

Let us consider a complex object as an abstract representation of all the parts of the GMs plot, and each of the PCs is a spotlight. The shadows of the shape of the plot are only really tangible when a PC shines a light on that part of the plot; the rest of the time they fade and vanish into the murk.

It doesn’t much matter which part of the complex structure the PCs examine first, because they all interconnect. However, some parts are going to be far more viscerally satisfying to discover after an appropriate build-up, so it behooves the GM to shift his plot around so that whatever the PCs look at first is one of the more interesting parts of the plot.

But there’s still greater depth of meaning to this metaphor interpretation, because it also serves as a reminder that the consequences of any given plotline should not last indefinitely without the GM being guilty of misrepresenting the campaign to the players. At the very least, they should have the opportunity to set things ‘right’ (they might blow it, but that’s not the point).

There should be a statute of limitations on plot threads, a limit to how far a single plot can cast a shadow onto the campaign. The GM should plan accordingly. Of course, the brighter the light source, the greater that limit will be….

As a Gaming Metaphor, Interpretation 2

There are analogies to shadows being cast upon the tone of a campaign, too. Not every day can be rainy and bleak; some have to be sunny and bright, if only to make the rainy days more miserable.

There are also analogies to shadows being cast upon character personalities. No one can be a complete sourpuss all the time – not even Montgomery Burns or Scrooge McDuck.

As the old Ferrengi Rule Of Acquisition is alleged to recommend, “every now and then, declare peace – it confuses the hell out of your enemies!”

As A Gaming Metaphor, Interpretation 3

Of course, as GMs, we love shadows, especially to hide things in. But there are limits to that, both in terms of any single occasion, and in terms of the technique as a pattern. Predictability in a GM generally means that he either needs to up his game or is luring the players into a trap.

This shouldn’t be anything as overt as “the first monster after a meal break always has a peppermint-flavored potion of healing”. Even the least-paranoid player will smell a rat around that one.

But, “every sinister villain wears a signet ring” is an altogether more subtle deception. It can even turn that player-paranoia loose on your behalf, implying that there’s a “Fraternal Order Of Sinister Creeps” i.e. some sort of conspiracy going on. The more time the PCs spend investigating, and investing themselves, in this theory, the more blind they will be to the one exception, who “befriended” the party years ago and has been funneling tidbits that turn the party loose on his enemies ever since..

As A Real-Life Metaphor

Even more important, there is a real-life metaphor here, one that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

Shadows have long been a metaphor for depression. When you’re trapped in that head-space, you seem to be surrounded by them. The universe itself can seem like a malevolent entity actively plotting to make your life as miserable as possible.

All too often, the sufferer sees no way out of their situation, and takes the only escape they perceive – and their own life. The younger the victim, the greater the tragedy this represents; but everyone matters to someone, whether they can recognize it at the time or not.

A Half-heard statistic from the TV this morning shocked me: Australian Suicides (presumably amongst young adults) in 2018 were triple the number killed in car accidents. I don’t know if that was in a state-level context, or a national context, but either way it’s unacceptable.

It’s a number that is likely to only worsen without intervention of some kind. Not only are there are the usual sources of teen angst, but there’s wage stagnation and the perception that past generations have sold the younger generation’s birthright out from under them, and that climate change poses an existential threat. In the US more than anywhere else, but sadly not exclusive to that nation, mass killings and terrorist brainwashing / recruiting are also existential threats. Life was so much better when we only had nuclear annihilation to worry about; such times seem so naive these days.

Something that is not unacceptable is the value of gaming to providing an escape from those shadows.

Look, every teen and young adult (aside from a lucky minority) will experience some cause of intolerable pain in their youth. How justifiable the resulting angst is, really, will always be open to debate; what matters is that to the afflicted, they feel they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. Even if they do not intend to commit an act of intentional self-harm, their situation can nevertheless lead them to indulge in self-destructive behavior.

I’m no exception to this general truism. Nothing I tried, when under the spell of this bout of depression alleviated the pain, or even masked it. With one exception: once a week, more often if I was lucky, I could step outside my own shadow and, for a while, be someone else. Someone whose problems always had solutions, someone whose destiny was always within their own hands and close at hand, whose life was their own to chart.

I make no bones about it – eventually, one of those self-destructive behaviors would have caught up with me; gaming saved my life by starting and encouraging the healing process.

I’m not advocating gaming as any form of therapy unless so recommended by an appropriate professional. At best, gaming provides a respite from the overt symptoms of depression experienced by a sufferer; it is not a cure-all, but it can provide relief of a most profound kind.

And for that reason, I think the world needs more gaming. We need our youth thinking of new business models and new solutions to old problems – and implementing those solutions.

The lesson of smiles and frowns is worth remembering.

• If you smile at others, regardless of how you might be feeling, you make it significantly more likely that they will respond by feeling good and smiling back, no matter how they were feeling previously. And, when they smile back, our subconscious takes that as genuine, whether or not it is an automatic response to our feigned smile, and our own mood improves. Smiling is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• If you frown at others, regardless of how you might be feeling, the opposite effect occurs. Sourpusses bring down the moods of everyone around them, whether they realize it or not, and the only way to counter the effect is to shoulder your burdens and smile at the world.

All shadows have a vanishing point, beyond which they fade into insubstantiality. The trick is to avoid cloaking oneself in them in the meantime. And never assume that you can’t help someone else who’s having a hard time of it; even if you can’t intervene directly, you can help just be being around – and doing things that make you smile at others, that are genuinely pleasures.

Gaming makes me do that. And it makes others do that. And that makes it part of the solution that should not be overlooked or dismissed as trivial.

All shadows have a vanishing point, and all demons can be bested – if we try hard enough and provide the help that people need.

Like most article writers, I accumulate ideas that prove to be too small to be a worthwhile post in their own right. Every now and then, I gather these up and compile an assemblage of unrelated miniature articles as a single item. That’s today’s recipe…

1. Surrounding Language

English is full of synonyms, words and phrases that mean almost exactly the same thing. This is largely attributable to the language’s willingness to steal nuanced ideas from just about anywhere it finds them.

It doesn’t always happen – the Finnish term “Sisu” has yet to make any real inroads into the English language, perhaps because it’s so hard to pin down an exact meaning of the term. It describes an attitude to life and the consequences of living life with that attitude – part bravery, part bravura, part self-confidence, part developing the abilities that justify self-confidence. Supposedly, it is Sisu that makes the Finnish such greats at motor-sports.

This subject came up on Twitter recently when a writer asked which term she should use, A or B? Which one was correct? (The specifics don’t matter, so I’m not recounting them).

A was correct English, B was a colloquial expression used throughout the world by English speakers to mean the same thing.

I offered this as my response to the question posed, but – as always – I then looked for an RPG bent. Here it is:

The language used to describe a character, or used by a character to describe a situation or scene, can carry nuances about that character’s perspective or personality. Don’t waste it.

Often, when we’re roleplaying, and especially when we’re DMing and playing an NPC, we fall back on using our own natural phraseology and manner of speaking, simply because we have so much on our minds already. That’s one reason why I like to write canned dialogue in advance when I can predict that it will be needed – it affords the leisure time to build such nuance into the dialogue.

This can cause it’s own problems – you have 10 different responses prepared for use depending on what the PCs say and do, scattered over three pages – now find the right one without having to scroll back and forth or flip pages wildly. Solution: you need an index:

“If Players say A, -> Para 1”
“If Players tell B, -> Para 2”
“If Players ask C w/out explaining B, -> Para 3”
“If Players ask C after explaining B, -> Para 4”
….. and so on

What this tweet exchange reminded me was that it is often worth the extra second or two that it takes to pause and recast what you were going to say in more expressive language – expressive not so much of the mood of the NPC (which is what a fiction writer would try to capture, first and foremost), but expressive of the personality and nationality of the character in question.

The more you can distinguish an NPCs vocalizations from those of the GM speaking ex-cathedra, describing a situation or a rule or whatever, the more your players will learn to recognize the cues and respond with roleplaying and not with third-party perspectives and statements of action. This produces immersion, which is always a good thing for all manner of reasons.

2. Few Cover Versions Top The Charts

.I was pondering success in RPGs – what is it, how do you achieve it, how do you recognize it, how do you quantify and measure it, if you can so at all – in response to a question on Quora, when a thought intruded from a previous question I had responded to. That thought is summed up in the title statement of this section: Few Cover Versions Top The Charts.

You have a far greater likelihood of success with original material. If you lack the capacity to do so (for whatever reason) and must do a cover version, you have to work twice as hard to achieve success – you not only have to impart your own original and distinctive spin on the song, you have to then ensure that the quality of result is, at the very least, equal to the original version.

It’s no different when it comes to RPGs. You can recycle characters, scenes, adventures, even campaigns, sourced from the ‘outside’. If your players have never encountered these, they will respond as though they were original works to you, and all is well (kind of – see the next item). If, however, they recognize the source material, your task just became two or three times as difficult. You need to present a homage to the original, while imparting your own original flavoring, while maintaining consistency of characterization, and presenting the resulting collage to the same standard of quality that the source material did.

Often, it’s better to simply start with the source material and change it, justify that change, then change it again in some other respect, then justify that change, and repeat until it bears little or no resemblance to the original.

With a character, for example, you might start with appearance, personality, and capabilities all the same as your source. You start by changing the capabilities to something that suits your story needs a little better and is just a bit different to the original. You then make sure that every action supposedly attributable to this character throughout the adventure is adjusted to reflect the change, and every incident in the character’s background likewise needs adjusting. That in turn, changes the personality of the character just a little, so you have to repeat the adjustment process for that change. But the character’s appearance can also be tweaked just a little to reflect those changes. And, in the process of doing so, you get a new idea for further tweaking the character’s concept (that nebulous thing that ties all these aspects together) with an original twist. So then you have to repeat all the steps above – capabilities, personality, and possibly appearance – to incorporate the new twist. By this point what you have is a character that superficially resembles the original, but which is no more like them than Yellow is like Red, or Oranges like Grapefruit.

2a. Ripoff Blues

It’s harder with a decent plot, because everything tends to tie together more directly. But the process is exactly the same. You might be stealing a plot from, say, NCIS – I did just that for the Zener Gate campaign a few months back. Because I knew that none of my players watches the show (never mind watching the repeats,.of which the source was one), I didn’t have to change it that much.

In the course of that adventure, a key fact was rammed home to me, quite forcefully: when you watch a TV show, the personalities of the protagonists produce blind spots and processes that impact on the unfolding of the plot. If this doesn’t happen, the characterization is sloppy and inconsistent, which so mars a TV show or movie that you are less likely to want to steal a plot from it. But the director’s art is to keep you within the story, so – as much of the time as possible – they want you to share that character’s foibles by proxy. When there’s a risk that your more Olympian perspective will reveal a key point about the plot, they distract you, with every tool at their disposal. Thus, you will know from the show’s M.O. that “it can’t be that simple” but you aren’t given the time to find the flaw until the show itself brings it into the open.

And that’s a problem when translating that adventure into RPG terms – not only are the PCs going to be different characters to those participating in the original version of the story (in most cases), but the players have a LOT more time to think, and find those questions that the characters in the source material didn’t come up with until much later, if at all. In this particular case, the PCs thought up a key question that required one of them to be in the right place at the right time to discover whodunit very quickly and easily. What should have been a surprising twist would have become completely obvious and not at all surprising. In fact, the whole adventure would have fallen fairly flat.

So, you have to change things – on the fly – and depart from the script you’re using even though you’re hip-deep in that script as written.

This happens so regularly that I know to expect it to happen at some stage, and that I will have to scramble to fix things. Part of my process in adapting such plotlines is asking myself where things could go wrong and making preliminary plans to respond.

That, right there, is a hot tip. But here’s another one: I’ve discovered that the mere process of writing an outline of the expected plot, bullet-point style, and revising it to put your own twist on it, is usually enough to restore your own Olympian perspective. Suddenly, you discover all sorts of plot holes that you didn’t notice before, distracted by the director’s shell game and artistry – and can plug them in advance.

The last time I ran a “rip-off plot” without making such adjustments was 10, maybe 15, years ago, combining two B-grade novels with points of distinct interest – “The President’s Plane Is Missing” and “The Red President”. The basic premise of the blending was that the US President decided to fake being in a plane crash aboard Air Force 1 for the popularity boost he would get, and which he needed to get some controversial legislation passed. A mole within his circle of trusted advisers, in the know regarding this plan, informed an enemy nation of the President’s intentions, and they decided to kidnap and brainwash him using a new technique they had developed, a process that would take about 72 hours. In the meantime, they had to arrange for the President’s fiction to stand up to scrutiny for at least that long, so they used all the intelligence assets at their disposal to enhance the supposed crash and making it look like the President was lost and wandering about the snow-topped mountain, dazed and incoherent.

The plot was supposed to start unraveling when others attempt to use the President’s absence to squeeze greater status and power out of the system for themselves, including an unscrupulous Vice President and even more untrustworthy Union Boss. But they would need time to recognize the opportunity, and more time to put the wheels in motion. That would only happen if they thought the President was lost, probably dead, so the fiction had to stand up to scrutiny for at least 24-48 hours to create these problems for the PCs to overcome en route to rescuing the President just before the brainwashing process was complete – leaving everyone uncertain about his probity and eventually forcing his resignation.

What happened? The PCs went directly to the crash scene, rushing in an attempt to rescue the aircraft before it crashed, discovering the enemy agents in the process of “cleaning up” the site and “enhancing” the fiction. Within 5 minutes, they knew that the President wasn’t lost, he’d been kidnapped – and an active search for the kidnappers was underway, spearheaded by the PCs. As a result, the VP made no power-play, pretending to great concern for the President and the Nation, and so didn’t overplay his hand, and the whole purpose of the plot from my GMs perspective – to force the current leadership of the nation out of office – fell into a cocked hat.

Too many moving parts to cope with that monkey wrench being thrown into the machinery. From virtually page 1 of the adventure, I was improvising and unprepared to do so.

I’ve never made that mistake again.

• Synopsize your stolen plots.
• Make them your own through revision.
• Look for “soft spots” where things can go wrong, and plan responses. Because they inevitably will.

3. The Cliffhanger Challenge

I had a peculiar dream the other night – the particulars don’t matter much, just that it came in two parts, with a (dreamed) intermission, and that part 1 ended with a cliffhanger. Part 2 was just beginning when my alarm awoke me.

When I reflected upon the dream, I realized that the interval between a cliffhanger ending and the resumption of story is a critical factor in how the plot unfolds, and even whether or not it works as well as it should. This is something that I had been aware of, without actually noticing, as a result of watching multiple episodes of TV shows in “bunches” separated by longer intervals.

Cliffhangers come in two basic flavors: Drama (including emotional scenes, revelations and plot twists) and imminent threats, i.e. preludes to action. Either way, they are the culmination of the day’s play, the moment of peak intensity.

If the cliffhanger was an emotional scene, it always worked. If the resumption were a revelation or plot twist, it depended on the length of the interval – too much and you have too much time to get used to the new situation and start integrating the ‘new reality’ into your comprehension. The characters involved don’t – and so there is a dichotomy between what you’re thinking and what they are doing, when you are supposed to be on the same page, putting yourself in the protagonists’ shoes. And if the cliffhanger was a call to action, it depended on whether or not sufficient excitement could be recaptured using a teaser/recap – if it could, the action ‘worked’, i.e. was viscerally satisfying and tense; if not, the action fell flat and became very ho-hum.

It was also possible to over-stimulate with a recap, in which case the resumption felt as though it had been ‘over-hyped’ – and again, it fell flat.

Now, let’s put these thoughts into the context of RPGs. By definition, these are interrupted, in theory resuming at regular intervals. Those might be anything from a few minutes (after a meal break), a few days (weekly play), or a few weeks (fortnightly or monthly play) – or, in extreme cases, the interval might be measured in months (when a campaign shuts down for a period of time, for example while the GM is on military deployment or spending three months in Europe or whatever). The way you approach a cliffhanger ending should take into account the expected interval to the resumption of play.

4. Mini FX

The other day, I was remembering an old friend who I haven’t seen in a very long time, by the name of Ace. An occasional player in RPGs, but more interested in model railroads, a hobby that he supported by painting miniatures back in the days when they were all monochrome lead figures. We bonded over artistry in general and rocketry and sci-fi, but largely have lost contact following the death several years ago of someone who was our intersection point, much of the time, Kevin Dillon.

So, anyway, I remember discussing visual FX for miniatures, and coming up with a number of ideas that we talked about experimenting with, back in the day. Do they work? I have no idea. Try them and tell me.

Faded Colors

I remember Ace making the point that people prefer to face away from the sun as much as possible, and in a wilderness situation, having it out of your eyes could be critical. In particular, when walking, we lean slightly forward in order to generate forward momentum. The net effect should be that colors on the top and back of a uniform or costume worn in a wilderness situation should be more faded than the rest, for added realism. The difference could be slight, almost unnoticeable, but the enhanced realism that results justifies the effort – sometimes.

Mud

Paint your mini, then add a spatter of mud to the boots. Ace used to use a mixture of real earth, light-colored paint, wood glue, and coffee grounds for the purpose, applying them with the tip of a cotton bud, one stain at a time. I suggested capturing a little with the top of a straw (blocking the other end with a thumb) and then exhaling forcefully through the straw to achieve a natural “spatter”. The closer to the mini you placed the business end of the straw, the more confined the spatter would be. Furthermore, if you used a waxed paper straw, you could then cut the tip off and be ready to go again in a second with minimal wastage.

Snow

If you place a thin layer of glue or transparent varnish on the top of a painted mini – shoulders and maybe the crown of the head – you could simulate snow with talcum powder and maybe some light blue paint. Then spray-paint the whole figure with a clear varnish. Avoid the hands and arms; these are usually kept mobile, which prevents snow from accumulating on them.

Unfolding a paperclip and heating it with a cigarette lighter permitted the cutting of small holes in “snowdrifts” to match the positions of the legs. If the figure has a base, you will often have to cut it off to get access to those legs. A little application of the same mixture covered up any sooting and created consistency of effect. In this way, you could have the figure slogging through snow that was inches or feet deep, as desired.

Leaves

I suggested bleaching tea leaves and then painting them either green or golden/brown/red shades using an airbrush, to create leaves. These could then be placed with as much care as seemed appropriate on the base of a painted mini using a light glue or varnish as an adhesive and then covered in more of the same to preserve them. Ace was a little dubious about this one, as I recall, but interested in trying it.

Cobwebbed Victims

Apply a little light glue to the hands, feet, and perhaps head of a painted mini. Press a ball of cotton wool down onto the figure, lightly contacting all these areas. Wait for the glue to dry, then gently prize the cotton wool away, leaving strands attached to the glued positions. Using tweezers, grab the far ends of these cotton strands, pull them tight, and glue them down either to other extremities or to the base or to a background added to the figure, diorama style. Once the glue is dry, apply light paint (very light gray and maybe a hint of blue) to create the impression of webbing.

Wire Shrink-wrap

When I was into electronics, I bought from Tandy some wire shrink-wrap insulation. This was a small sleeve-like tube of clear plastic that, when exposed to the heat of a cigarette lighter, shrunk tight around the wire. It was intended for joints in hobbiest circuits. When I described this stuff to Ace, he was taken by the idea of covering a painted mini in this stuff, shrinking it, and then painting the shrunken cylinders, to create armor. Where you would buy such stuff from, these days, I have no idea.

Magical Shields

Carefully cut the shield off an existing mini, being careful not to distort its shape, then use it to create a mold. Use that mold to cast a translucent resin (possibly with sparkle), which can then be attached to the figure in place of the original. Additional effects can then be painted on, using the resin shield as a base.

5. Consider the Superficial

When you have encounters, remember to consider briefly the initial impression that the PCs should have of the NPCs and vice-versa. It’s part of your job as GM to convey those impressions through the actions, words, and behavior of the NPCs – before you start describing specifics.

I often find that contrasts help considerably in this when they are applicable. “The immaculately dressed and groomed civil servant takes in your disheveled appearance with one icy glance, before saying….”

“The majestic headdress of Ostrich Feathers died royal blue swivels in your direction as the King regards you with a raised eyebrow.” – the implication being that the PCs are under-dressed relative to this magnificence.

You get the idea.

6. Philosophic Opposition

It’s very common, especially in superhero and pulp campaigns, but true in all campaigns to at least some extent, that unless an NPC has a particular reason to be hostile to any PCs that he encounters, that they are generally cooperative.

The reality should be somewhat different. Everyone should have an opinion which leads them to prejudice certain groups and activities, either for or against. Their position might not permit them to express this attitude openly, but it should still color their interactions with any PCs that trigger them.

We have, for example, an Elven Warrior-Prince. What prejudices might he trigger in a general encounter? An innkeeper, say? Well, the innkeeper might distrust elves, or dislike royalty, or foreigners – but those are obvious. He might react to the prince being over-dressed for the neighborhood (because the PC can afford to be well-dressed and is expected to represent his people), or putting on airs (the PC is just being Elvish, but the NPC is reacting as though a human were behaving that way), or being out of touch with the working classes (a more sophisticated form of the anti-royalty prejudice), or might react badly to the PC pulling out a pouch of gold and requesting a room for the evening (too many NPCs have an immediate reaction of greed).

The Innkeeper glances from side to side nervously and whispers “Put that away, you fool, or you’ll get both our throats cut! One silver a night, soup for luncheon served in the common room is included, any disturbance and you’re on your own, take it or leave it.”

7. Break Decision Paralysis With Activity

In the Zener Gate campaign this last weekend, the players reached a point early in the day’s play where they had no idea of how to solve the problems confronting them, or what to do next. After permitting them a few minutes to try and escape their decision paralysis on their own, I took matters into my hands as GM.

First, given what the players had described of the NPCs was it reasonable that they would be unable to come up with any ideas to advance their situation – or at least, to clarify it?

Second, at what point does that reasonable behavior become unreasonable?

Third, how much should game time be compressed relative to real time when nothing is happening?

Applying (3) to (2) tells you when you should intervene. Of course, if the answer to the first question is “No”, then intervention should be as soon as you realize that the players have no idea.

Intervention comes in three forms – a PC has an idea, a PC gets to do something, an NPC invites a PC to do something or demands that the PC do something. I prefer to offer one from each of these menu options at more or less the same time.

In this particular case, I gave one character a glimpse of a big-picture perspective that had escaped his more mentally-sharp companion, suggested a wild idea that had come into the mind of that companion (one that I knew would be rejected, but that would kick-start the player choosing alternative courses of action), and had an NPC invite the first PC to accompany him, on the morrow, to “the graveyard” for more materials – titanium alloy and electronics. Result: the two quickly evolved a plan of action that would redefine the circumstances enough that any of several solutions might become possible. By the end of the game-time day, I had one PC involved in a wrestling match with three mechanical spiders based on a Martian War Machine while the other was trapped in a speeding carriage with mutated apes clawing their way through the canvas-and-leather roof…

It didn’t particularly matter what the action was, or what the thought was. One was helpful, one was not – choosing between them was up to the PCs. But by stimulating them and then distracting them from their paralysis, it came to an end.

It’s also worth noting that this is somewhat harder to do with a single player, either because only one member of a group is experiencing the indecision, or because it’s a single-player game; either way, you are lacking the interaction of two players verging towards overcoming the same problem at the same time, which gives both of them a boost in getting themselves moving. You will often need to place an NPC into the same mindset and then help both NPC and PC climb out of the mental “hole” in order to get the PC moving again as well.

Misery may love company, but that doesn’t mean that you should let company be miserable together – not when one or more of them are your players.

Character Development for an RPG is unlike it’s analogue in any other medium.

That wasn’t always the case; we have learned how to do it the way most GMs and players do it now, the hard way.

But I’ve recently become aware of a perception that the modern way is the only way, and that’s not necessarily the case.

There are advantages to the alternatives, and denying those advantages simply blinds you to something that in some circumstances might better suit the campaign to be played.

So here’s the agenda for the day: after a quick definition of what we’re discussing, I’ll look at a number of techniques (most of which have fallen out of favor) including some from other media forms: the television model, the literary model, the existential model, the structural model, the thumbnail method, the inversion method, the window-shopping method, backstory boxes, the relationship model, the functional model, and the modern model. Having laid the groundwork, I’ll then present a new model that incorporates many of the best features from several of the techniques discussed, the Lego Assembly.

I’m not going to claim that this “new” idea (by the end of the article, you’ll understand those inverted commas) is going to be suitable for every campaign. Instead, I want to put the question itself on the radar for readers; because there is no such thing as a ‘one-size fits all’ solution to the requirement. I want GMs to at least be able to consider the alternatives.

By the time I count a wrap-up section, I get no less than 14 moving parts to this story, so I won’t be able to go into great amounts of detail about many of the options – fortunately, I’ve written about some of them before. Even so, this will be a longish article and It’s only just begun – so let’s get this show started…

Definitions

Character development is a tern that is used to mean three different things, often all at the same time or without distinguishing between the specific meaning intended.

• There is non-game-mechanical character construction, or the initial formulation of a personality;
• there is in-game refinement and extension of personality; including character personality growth (i.e. external to, but often reflective of, character improvements through game mechanics, or vice versa;;
• and there is the GM’s creation of NPCs to be dropped into a campaign in an advanced state of readiness despite their not having experienced the developmental process that the PCs have undergone to that point in game time.

The Television Model

The television model has remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s. You define a character as he is now, to the bare minimum required for usage, then add background elements and refinements as they can be made relevant to specific episodes (“adventures”). This means that the actors discover the character’s background at about the same pace as the audience.

There are several advantages to this approach, most notably flexibility and responsiveness – the character can evolve with the plot. It inherently connects the character with the stories in which he participates.

Unfortunately, these advantages can be misused, turning them into liabilities. First, there’s a constant problem with consistency; any failures in this area permanently weaken the character. Second, it ties the quality of the characterization to the quality of the plots and the seamlessness with which the character integrates with them. Clumsy and Ham-fisted integration not only weakens the story, it weakens the character. Third, there is a constant risk of the “if only” syndrome: “If only I knew about this back then, I would have done things differently!”

The distinctions between the roles of players and GMs, as compared to the roles of actors and writers/producer, mean that the television model doesn’t translate directly into RPG usage – that would put the GM in command of character development and leave the player simply to interpret the character he has been handed. Wait one – that’s exactly what happens in convention gaming, where the GM provides characters and plot!

Characters developed using this method start of inherently shallow, and only gain substance as opportunity permits. It’s easy to develop a bias or blind spot where one specific character is concerned, constantly overlooking them in the allocation of development opportunities – and dooming them to stay shallow. It’s also easy to play favorites, and these can be self-fulfilling prophecies simply by virtue of the GM utilizing early character development as a springboard to more.

So the Television Model has significant problems.

The Literary Model

The obvious alternative is the Literary Model, in which a character is defined as he is at the start of a story and that original state is refined and redefined as necessary, retroactively, to achieve maximum penetration of the character into the storyline as it develops.

This subordinates the character to his role as a facilitator of the story. It avoids the shallowness of the Television model, but can replace it with slabs of text that need to be digested and integrated in the mind of the reader. Bad writers tend to deliver this text as exposition; good writers find ways of delivering it as interactions with other characters and with the world around the character, revealing the latter as the story proceeds.

This approach often breaks down when applied to an RPG simply because it becomes infinitely more difficult dealing with a large group. There is a huge potential for character misidentification when this is the situation. It is also more difficult to grasp and apply nuance; in essence, overload is a problem that forces a more simplistic approach to characterization. I once heard an editor define a “good writer” as one who knew what to leave out, what to merely hint at, and what to establish definitively. That advice suggests that characters can be more richly developed than the depictions actually presented on the page simply to give the writer greater understanding of how the characters will react, and greater flexibility in the narrative paths possible within the story.

There is a huge focus on the writer as a solitary figure in terms of character development. It can sometimes become obvious that several of the characters derived from the same mind with the same habits and thought patterns, something I have heard described as the “generic salesman” problem: ‘Character X is approached by a generic salesman…’

This singularity makes the literary model relatively easy to translate into the RPG sphere; each player becomes ‘the writer’ of a particular character, and the GM becomes a co-author to them all, providing the situations which lead to character development beyond their characters’ initial states. However, this translation is necessarily compromised by the way in which the GM and players ‘collaborate’, i.e. play the game; the players, of necessity, remain ignorant of the story until it unfolds, knowing only what their character knows at the time. That creates a logical discontinuity between a character as a player develops them and the character variant that would present the optimum accessibility to the storyline.

If that happened in the writing of a novel, the writer can simply go back and revise the character, and this may happen a number of times at different stages of the writing process – revisions that are ultimately invisible to the reader, who only sees the end product. It also requires the writer to revisit everything already written, as character reactions and responses may have changed.

The Existential Model

This is the original RPG characterization process – start with a bunch of stats and a fairly cardboard cut-out of a characterization, and use the interactions that the character has with his fellow PCs, with NPCs, and with the game mechanics, as informed and shaped by those stats, to derive a personality over time.

This clearly resembles the Television Model more closely than it does the Literary Model. In particular, it leaves characterization subject to all the inherent flaws in that approach. Most players, after being bitten by these flaws, turn to an adaption of the literary model for their initial character development, giving their characters more substance prior to the commencement of play, even if subsequent development uses the Television Model.

Effectively, this replaces some of the potential drawbacks of one model with those of another. It also introduces new wrinkles to consider – such as the player who isn’t into roleplaying and never develops their character adequately, and the situation when a player develops a character to the point where they are actually no longer able to play that character as a whole.

Nevertheless, this also has a benefit that causes the approach to be often remembered with affection by those of us who have been playing for a long time: it adds ‘discovery of the characters’ to the sources of potential pleasure that can be derived from the gaming process. This affection tends to be colored, as does all nostalgia, by selective memory retention – while there can be no doubt that when this process works at its’ best, it can be a rich and pleasant experience, but there will also be times when it is a millstone around the players’ neck. For this reason, it is usually supplanted, eventually, by other approaches.

The Structural Model

In the Structural Model, each character is assigned (or chooses) a role within the assembled group of characters, and then employs that role and one or more other developmental techniques as the process of turning that role into an individual who just happens to have that function. When GMs started thinking about the PCs as a “party” before play began, and requiring them to design characters according to standard roles within that party, this model of character development was the result.

To be more honest, this is more about setting initial parameters for a character according to a structured approach of some sort and then employing one of the other approaches to the task of actually developing a character beyond that simple outline. Nevertheless, as a means of creating a dynamic and resourceful party who can integrate relatively seamlessly, both as a group and with the campaign, it represents a huge step forward.

I employed the simplest possible interpretation of the structural model for the Zener Gate campaign – I had the players discuss the characters they had in mind with each other before they started actually constructing their characters. There were some areas in which they desired redundancy, others in which they were happy for the other character to take the lead, and each had elements that they wanted to claim as their own provinces of expertise. But, while this worked well with only two players, I would be cautious about employing it with larger groups; it might take a LOT longer to actually resolve character designs, and its possible that no satisfactory compromise could ever be reached.

One of the greatest advantages to this approach is that it permits the GM some input into the characters, ensuring that they will fit the campaign that he has in mind.

The Thumbnail Method

The thumbnail method is something that I presented as part of the Characterization Puzzle series in 2010. This is more of a method of generating content for use within one of the models already presented, or one still to come. It functions by directing and structuring an exercise in free association, which makes the players’ subconscious desires more accessible, while sparking moments of inspiration. The article itself focuses on the GM using the technique to generate NPCs (because the focus of the blog is on GMs), but I have used it for PCs as well.

The Inversion Method

Described in part 3 of the same series, this employs two sources of information – cliches and existing characterization – and generates a character who can act as a foil for another. There are times when this approach is brilliant, such as creating an interesting cast of NPCs with which to surround the PCs, or when the person creating the character knows the personality of their ultimate opponent in the campaign, without the inputs, it might seem that this is useless for the purposes being discussed in this article.

Not so! Think back to the Structural Model – no matter how the GM defines the entries within the “casting call,” there will be cliches and expectations and exemplars. On top of that, it’s often easier to pick an existing model as being everything that you don’t want for this character – for example, if you’re in another campaign with the same players, you might decide that you want your character in this second campaign to be something completely different. There are your inputs – just build your character to avoid those cliches and embrace the opposites of the source material and you’re on your way.

Once again, though, this is more concerned with generating content for a characterization than with the process of how and when that characterization gets refined. It’s a partial solution, but it’s incomplete in this context.

The Window-Shopping Method

This was a completely new technique that I developed in early 2010 and presented in the fourth part of the Characterization Puzzle series. It works by assuming that there is a “right personality” that can immediately instinctively intuited but not articulated or defined. It then manifests that “right personality” through its interactions with the “real world” in the form of answers to the question of “what would the character buy from store X”, then uses these specific interactions as the seeds to articulate the personality. It’s not a random generator, giving more directed and coherent results, but it has even more variety of outputs possible despite this.

This is certainly restricted in its application to the purposes under discussion in this article, more suited to generating content than in identifying the content to be generated.

Backstory Boxes

This is a variation on the Thumbnail Method (above) that I presented in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity back in 2015. I use this technique for NPC development when I get stuck or feel that whatever I’ve come up with is too ‘bland’ or ‘stock’. In the past, I have used it to reinvent a PC, to generate new PCs, to generator organizations and species and even a Pantheon of Orcish Deities! In fact the biggest problem with this process is that it often produces a lot more result than you actually need – exhibiting the same flaws as the literary model, in other words.

The Relationship Model

I’ve not actually employed this one yet. It’s at its best when developing NPCs to interact with an existing established party. In essence, you define what you want the principle relationship between the new character and an existing NPC to be, then give the character a trait that will trigger that response. If that doesn’t sufficiently define the character (and it probably won’t), pick another character and a different relationship, and repeat as necessary. Then take that list of traits and start constructing a coherent character using them as a starting point; Backstory Boxes or the Thumbnail method would work especially well for this purpose. Further development then employs one or more of the other developmental techniques.

The Functional Model

The GM supplies a list of possible functions within the group (defined in such a way that there are more ‘slots’ than there are characters to be developed, and employs some selection technique to enable players to choose from those functions not yet allocated to any players’ character. This is a more sophisticated refinement of the Structural Model. This technique was used in its pure form to create the original Zenith-3 group of PCs and a minor variations later used to assemble the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Note that once a function has been assigned to a particular character, that character then develops as an individual around that central concept, without input from the other players or PCs.

In many ways, this is a more generalized form of the relationship model, focusing more on what the character has to be able to do than on his (potential) relationships, but the same advice applies.

The Modern Model

The most common approach that I have seen used and recommended, especially for the construction of PCs, is what I have labeled “The Modern Model”. A derivation of the literary model, this attempts to define a finished personality prior to play, to the standards of the literary model. The GM is then expected to conform his adventures to the characters that have been defined.

That expectation is where things sometimes go off the rails for these characters. Duplicated functions within a group are a second hazard. Different standards of being “acceptable for play” between players and GM are also a concern.

If the GM intends to “leverage” the characters that have been created by the players to custom-fit adventures to the PCs, this technique is especially strong because it gives him so much to work with. On the downside, it takes part of the world-building that is normally exclusively the GM’s domain and removes it from his control, potentially introducing inconsistencies and contradictions. Quite often, it’s necessary for an ongoing dialogue between the GM and the Player to direct a rewrite of the resulting character because the original proposal simply won’t quite fit the game world.

Like all the techniques described, this has its flaws and its benefits..

There are variations in which ongoing character development derives from whatever circumstances are encountered in-game and player choices in terms of response to those situations. This describes the outcome when the GM makes minimal changes to his planning to embed the individual characterizations of the PCs into his campaign, and risks them becoming mere observers to the onrush of events.

The Lego Assembly

The other day, I thought of a new technique to add to this repertoire, one more closely related to the Television approach, but which incorporates strengths from several of the other approaches that I have discussed – which is one reason why I’ve taken the trouble to walk through them.

It divides a character into several working pieces and turns the process of character development into a more genuine collaboration between the owning player and the GM.

Initial Profile

The player designs the Initial Profile. This is a rough draft of the character, usually in note form, concentrating on the personality as it will usually present in play, where the character comes from, how old they are, and a couple of the key turning points in the character’s life.

The Initial profile may or may not be constrained by one of the approaches described earlier, that’s up to the GM, who also sets those parameters. The player is free to make the character an exception to those parameters if he has an idea, after discussion with the GM.

Foundation Bricks

The GM then defines a number of the foundation bricks – fundamental questions that need answering. Critical events that would have impacted the character from the campaign background, parts of the personality that he thinks need to be explained in an in-game context, and the like. Basically, questions that he wants the player to answer.

The player then determines the content that is in those bricks, verifying their content with the GM when it comes to campaign background interpretation, and with an eye toward consistency with the draft character profile.

Structural Bricks

When you’re building a Lego House, the corners are the structural bricks. They hold the roof up.

These are sometimes necessary justifications and chains of events that explain selected character traits that the GM considers unusual or requiring such justification, but more commonly, they expand on some aspect of the character’s current in-game situation. The traits are the dominant personality elements described in the initial profile, but not ALL of them – the player has to select at least two and no more than four.

Some possible structural bricks of the more common type are ‘work history’, ‘work colleagues’, ‘social circle’, ‘professional achievements’, ‘education and teachers’, ‘childhood incidents’, ‘immediate family’, ‘home’, ‘ancestry’, ‘character flaws’, ‘quirks’, ‘political views’, ‘most despised’, ‘responsibilities’, ‘ambitions’, ‘hobbies’, ‘weekends’, and ‘work attitude’. There are others, such as ‘rogue’s gallery’ or ‘enemies’ but these are very common choices.

The GM can then select 2-4 more that he wants the player to complete, and 2-4 that he wants to leave at loose ends. In general, anything that will impact the way the character will perform in-play should be defined, anything that doesn’t have such immediate impact can be set aside.

The player fills out content (in outline form) for those bricks that the GM has directed, then chooses 2-4 more that he wants to be left incomplete, before completing the rest. As a general rule of thumb, 2/3 of the possible structural bricks should have content assigned.

Let’s look at some examples of these Structural Bricks:

James’ Immediate Family:
– Older Brother, Rob, hero-worshiped
– Younger Sister, Evaline, social switchboard, always in touch with everyone and has the latest gossip
– Mother +23 years, Anne, battler on struggle street* and professional underdog
– Father +26 years, Jack, mysteriously vanished ten years ago

This specifies relationship, relative age, name, and interaction with the PC, whose name is obviously James.

* I’ve used a couple of Australian slang terms simply because of the character they impart. But they might need some explanation for those unfamiliar with them.

A “Battler”, or more fully, “Aussie Battler” (or even “Little Aussie Battler”) is an ‘ordinary’ or working class individual who perseveres through their commitments despite adversity. Typically, this adversity comprises the challenges of low pay, family commitments, environmental hardships and lack of personal recognition. Exemplifies the British “stiff upper lip”, someone who keeps going, day after day, no matter what troubles are being piled on them – and there are always troubles being piled on them. The term is often used as an indicator of pride and respect for the positive qualities exhibited by the individual. The closest equivalent in American is “Little Guy” but that has slightly different connotations and lacks the overtones carried by the Australian vernacular.

“Struggle Street” is more recent in origins, and a meaning has yet to crystallize from general usage. The Urban Dictionary lists the term, but the definition they offer is completely unrelated to the common usage in Australia. So I guess it falls to me… “Struggle Street” refers to a residential locale occupied by those at the bottom end of the poverty ladder, for whom everything is a ‘struggle’. These residents are often caught in a poverty trap or poverty cycle that prevents them ever rising above these circumstances. There are consequent psychological impacts – depression, self-neglect, substance abuse (especially alcohol), and antisocial behavior, which collectively add to the difficulties to be overcome before escape from these circumstances becomes possible. Climbing out of these holes is often the work of generations – and it’s very hard for a single individual to rise above the circumstances enough to simply make progress, never mind several generations in a row who can do so sufficiently to escape the poverty traps. “Struggle Street”, as a term, can also be applied to those suffering from situations that are psychologically analogous to those more literally experiencing such circumstances.

As a general rule, these two terms are contradictory; while both refer to those in poverty situations, the difference is in the reaction to those circumstances. However, there are many variations on those responses when you view this is a cyclic pattern of existence – “the battler who continually fights his her way up to the point of escape from the cycle only to be overwhelmed by a tsunami of negative events that mean they have to start over” would be a perfectly valid interpretation of the conditions and history summed up in the much more succinct and colorful “battler on struggle street”.

James’ Weekends:
– During the football season, hangs out on the couch or meets ‘the guys’ down at Jerry’s Bar & Grill. Hates to miss either a lead-up show or post-game analysis. Always has a small amount of money riding on the game. Consumes copious amounts of beer and snack food, especially salty stuff.
– The rest of the year, tries to get in shape with jogging and visits to the gym and take care of all those chores that have built up while he’s been on the couch. Never quite gets there with either of these goals.
– Saturday Nights are movie nights (unless there’s a game on). It’s normal for there to be an argument about what to see which leads to everyone going their separate ways at the theater. They reunite for ice-cream afterwards and describe their experiences / review what they saw.
– Deliberately orients his life around making room for these activities – small scale shopping expeditions every weeknight, for example.
– Seriously resentful of overtime demands that interfere with his habitual schedule.
– It’s not that he has nothing planned, it’s that he deliberately plans to do nothing.

Just putting those two together is enough for a very strong impression of the character to start to emerge, and shows the power of this technique.

Decorative Bricks

Anything else that the player might need to reference in the course of play is a “decorative brick”, and the player can fill out as many or few of these as they are likely to need. However, it’s commonplace for the contents to be name-dropped in conversation and for players to underestimate how much of these they will need to complete. It’s also true that ad-hoc completion of these is rarely as satisfactory or well thought-out as taking a couple of minutes to do them in advance.

A decorative brick, by definition, is something that is not definitive of the personality, lifestyle, or circumstances of the character. Quite often, these are filled with nothing more than a name or location. More are often identified in the course of play. Quite often, a decorative brick is identified by extension from a structural brick – for example, who are ‘the guys’ that James meets at “Jerry’s Bar & Grill?”

Sometimes, you can open more avenues for personal development by giving just initials and a surname, rather than full names. That doesn’t work with structural bricks, because the identity of those contained therein is part of the definition by extension that they employ to fulfill their purpose.

Anything that wasn’t selected as a structural brick is, by definition, a decorative brick.

The In-play Profile

Finally, the Player takes all of this material and creates a more substantial profile for use in play, taking what is known about the character and synopsizing it, leaving out what is not. It’s a good idea to number both bricks and bullet points within a brick for cross-referencing in such a profile, which is the equivalent of “see X.X for more information”.

The process of preparing the Profile for play will often throw up additional items that can be added to the Lego-like note structure. Add them.

Then turn the notes over to the GM; they belong to him, now – especially the parts that haven’t been completed, and the content of the decorative bricks.

Brick Completion

The GM can use these notes in a number of ways, depending on their relevance and level of completion. First, he can draw on existing content to anchor the character within an adventure. Second, he can provide additional details to fill out a brick whose contents have been hinted at. And third, he can add content to one of the potential structural bricks that were set aside.

These inclusions can be strategic, i.e. centrally important to the adventure; they can be superficial splashes of color; or they can be something in between, creating an encounter that’s important in terms of what the character is doing before or after the adventure. How the GM uses them is up to him; the only caveat is that unless it’s a structural element that’s already been defined by the player, the GM has to add or expand on the content. GMs being fairly busy folk, however, they will normally do so to the barest extent possible – which is probably going to be only one or two bullet-points (as compared to the several that have been shown in the examples). They will provide only the essential information to use the NPC in the adventure and no more.

That puts the ball back into the players’ court. They can either expand on the information using the GM’s seed input as they see fit, or leave things as they are, to let the GM expand on the contents at his own pace. Sometimes, the GM may tell the player outright, “I’ve got further plans for this character”.

The GM can also give the player far greater flexibility in their character’s activities as a result of the player having done this prep work. Instead of choosing something for the PC to be doing, even from the shortlist provided by the details in the structural brick, the GM can simply tell the player, “It’s the weekend and the Hawks are playing the Jets in 30. Where are you and what are you doing?”

Reinforced Structures

Sometimes, a GM can provide content for a decorative block that the player wasn’t expecting. For example, “Romance” might be a decorative brick, one that neither the GM nor the player elected to construct in advance (leaving it open for later development). However, in the category “High School”, the player has dropped a decorative brick “First Kiss: P W Nelson”. He might be mightily surprised if the GM subsequently fills that out with “Peter William Nelson” instead of a girls’ name – and that thrusts how the character feels about homosexuality into the spotlight, assuming that the character is male. He might be ashamed of it, like to pretend that it didn’t happen that way, even have invented a “Penny Wong Nelson” out of whole cloth to cover themselves. Or he might have been intrigued, and simply never brings it up because of the social attitudes towards gays – and, of course, because he’s now in a hetero relationship. Suddenly, what was a decorative brick has become an entirely new structural element of the character, brought out into the open because “P W Nelson” is back in town.

This is an example of reinforcing the structure – adding new definitive elements to it that don’t contradict what’s already established, but that open the door to new areas of personal growth in the character’s profile.

The End of the Beginning

By integrating the development of the character with the development of adventures, the GM becomes an active collaborator in the character without taking control from the player. By leaving some areas blank, some areas only vaguely completed, and some areas of particular relevance complete, the character has room to expand into new situations within the game and in particular adventures, while the GM has the opportunity to seed the character with connections that will become relevant later in the campaign, connecting the two more strongly. The character is defined sufficiently well that the GM can throw more scope for defining adventure elements into the players’ lap, and loosely-enough defined that the character has room to grow and develop.

The end result is something approaching the literary standard that has been achieved through a more television-model approach. This takes the strengths of several of the approaches described and few, if any, of the weaknesses and unites them into a cohesive form. The character is defined enough to play and loose enough to evolve.

It may not suit every campaign. It may not suit every player, or every GM. But when it works at all, it should work a treat. And, in the meantime, a greater awareness of the options and alternatives available to them should at least permit GMs to choose how they want players to develop the characters that they will play in a more intelligent and thoughtful manner, increasing the odds that they will employ the optimum for the campaign that they want to run.

I saw an answer on Quora the other week which related to the consequences of a 200-tonne asteroid made completely of gold crashing to Earth.

The answer dealt with the economic repercussions based on the resulting crash in the price of gold because the value attached to many commodities is a measure of their rarity.

This didn’t seem right to me, not completely anyway. It’s not rarity that causes the value of a commodity, it’s scarcity relative to demand.

Rarity is only half the story.

Rare Earth elements are both scarce and in great demand because they are essential to mobile phones and laptops and all sorts of other electronics due to their use in magnets and materials that respond to magnetic fields.

EE Doc Smith in the Skylark series made the point that platinum in quantity would posses engineering applications that would be a huge boon for mankind. Of course, he was largely making this stuff up off the top of his head, he could not know that platinum would one day be in equal demand for electronics as for jewelry, because it is a far better conductor (as are the other noble metals) of electricity. The smaller we make our digital devices, the greater the industrial demand for gold and platinum grows; already our computer chips are so tiny that their internal connections cannot be made of anything else or the chip would overheat and cease to function. Right now, gold is the preferred material, since it is more common (and hence helps keep the price of the chips down); but it is forecast that within a decade, platinum will be necessary.

Spices were once so valuable that they were traded as currency. But the reason they were valuable was that they were in demand – not only for the flavor contributions they could make, but to disguise the flavor and odors of meat that was going off but was still edible – and that the potential demand massively outstripped the available supply.

Purple is associated with royalty because the only really purple die available, named Tyrian Purple, used to be made exclusively in the Phoenician city of Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, from the ground up shells of a small mollusk that was exclusively found there. It took more than 9,000 such shells to create a single gram of the die – that’s 3-and-a-half hundredths of an ounce. Tyrian Purple died silk was literally worth it’s weight in gold. Purple die has only become available to the lower classes since 1856, when English chemist Henry Perkin accidentally created a synthetic purple that he patented and marketed under the name aniline purple – and earning himself a fortune in the process. (I’m always amused by cleric and mage robes being colored purple in illustrations, as a result of knowing this story. Many of them must have been wearing the value of their entire church or tower on their backs…). These days, that artificial color is known as Mauve, and the die is now commonly known as mauveine by chemists (Tyrian Purple was richer and darker in tone, more what we think of as the color of dark grapes).

But the poster-child for this principle is Salt. So essential to life that it was also traded as a currency, Salt is hardly rare – though salt from seawater contains dangerous impurities and needs to be refined before it is safe to consume. Again back in Phoenician times, its worth is now believed to have been equal to that of gold, by weight (though some historians are not certain of this). Salt’s value lay in its ability to preserve meat and fish; any value as a flavoring was secondary (though it is worth noting that pepper, which has no value except as a flavoring, has also been used as a currency). Some historians suggest that Roman soldiers were part-paid in salt, from which derives the old saying of people being “worth their salt”. So ubiquitous was the practice – in part due to the ultimate extent of the Roman Empire – that the word “Salary” actually derives from the Roman word for Salt.

The obvious world-building questions

There are some obvious questions that most established readers will expect me to raise at this point. Some of them would have occurred to almost anyone who’s reading this. Nevertheless, any given post is always some reader’s first, so it’s worth asking them explicitly, anyway:

• What is valuable in your world that isn’t, or isn’t known, in ours?
• Why is that commodity in demand? What’s it good for?
• Who, in particular, wants it?
• Where does it come from?
• Who makes/mines/obtains it?
• How is it obtained? Is that particularly difficult or dangerous to do, and why?
• What has to be done to it to transform it into its valuable form?
• Who has money and who doesn’t, as a result?
• How much is this commodity worth?

I’ve highlighted that last question because it seems to be a critical question, and the only one that can’t reasonably be invented off the top of the GM’s head. It’s also the most complex question there, because the value has to reflect all the other answers and more besides.

But, before I get any further into that, it might be helpful to add to the state of confusion with one or two quick case studies.

A Confusion over Platinum

The impact of demand vs supply in terms of determining the value of a commodity is highlighted by the confusion over the value of platinum.

Supply first: Platinum is 16 times rarer than gold, and is found in nuggets of similar or smaller mass.

Specifying weights actually adds to the confusion experienced by most, simply because these elements are so heavy. A cubic cm of gold weighs 19.32 grams, and one of platinum weighs 21.42 grams. As a comparison, steel is approx 8 grams per cubic cm and water is 1 gram per cubic cm. To get oz per cubic inch, multiply by 1.73 to get gold=33.4, platinum=37, steel=approx 14, and water = 1.73 oz per cubic inch.

So a 12″ x 1″ x 1″ bar of steel would weigh about 168 oz, or a little over 10 lb. The same bar, if gold, would weigh 25.05 lb, and if platinum, 27.75 lb – the same as two-and-a-half of those iron bars (plus another quarter-bar for platinum).

Ten such bars are roughly 250lb and 280lb, respectively.

Saying that coins made of these, and other materials, are all approximately the same weight and size, makes zero sense until another word is introduced into the subject: adulteration. That’s the practice of mixing common or “base” materials – usually nickel, tin, or lead, or some combination thereof – into the coin material and then politely ignoring the fact.

According to D&D 3.x and 5e, 1 platinum coin is worth 10 gold pieces. From rarity alone, it should be 16, but maybe the presence of subterranean races has made platinum easier to find.

D&D 4e sets the value of platinum at 100 gold pieces.

As I write this, platinum is worth US$845.10 per oz, and gold, US$1222 per oz – in other words, platinum is 69% as valuable as gold.

Wait a minute – 69%, not 16 times? Or 10x? Or 100x?

The price of gold is clearly inflated by demand. Part of that demand is industrial, and part is economic – gold being the commodity in which most countries keep their treasury reserves. How big a factor is this demand?

Well, on rarity alone, if platinum is worth $845.10, gold should be worth one-sixteenth of that – $52.82 per oz. Instead, it’s worth more than 23 times as much.

Okay, so let’s assume adulteration, and use the straight rarity value since the only demands in fantasy times are coinage and jewelry. How much precious metal is actually in D&D coins?

This sort of calculation would be relatively easy if we specified the adulterating substance used – lead, say, or tin – and if the game rules didn’t specify that both size and weight were the same. But that fact means that the adulterated coins have the same density, and since gold and platinum weigh different amounts, and one is worth many times the other, that requires the adulterating material to be different in the two coins.

Let’s say (for the sake of argument) that the weight of both coins is 1.
Platinum is 16× the value of gold, so there’s only 1/16th as much precious metal by value in a platinum coin. So the other 15/16ths has to be something else – and gold is heavy. Not quite as heavy as platinum – and that means that the adulterating material has to be something just the right amount less dense than gold. Steel would be too light. We need something that’s 19.32 × (19.32 ÷ 21.42) = 17.42 grams per cubic centimeter in density. At 18.9, the closest match I can find is Uranium – no, I don’t think so. Next best would be a mixture of 26.4% lead and 73.6% tungsten (11.34 and 19.6, respectively). Except that Tungsten was only identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Lead, of course, was well-known in Roman times, so that part of the formula, at least, is practical.

Of course, the magical coating of steel with Tungsten Carbide might be great explanation for plus-whatever weapons. So we can meet the rules specifications by stating that platinum coins are 69% ground-up plus-one weapons….

Copper Currency

Many nations used copper currency in the 19th and 20th century, including my native Australia. I still have a couple of US pennies from my visit there, as keepsakes. Inflation has killed off many of those coins; the price of producing the coins outstripping their value; the 1?ó and 2?ó coins were withdrawn from circulation in 1991, and the government has debated killing off 5?ó coins on a number of occasions in the 28 years since.

In medieval times, the time period upon which most fantasy and fantasy RPGs are based, copper currency was rare. Copper pieces did exist in some cultures, but were disliked or even despised by the commons.

In Britain, the common currency was based upon a pound of silver, (hence “pound sterling”) which was divided into 240 equal portions to create pennies. For smaller transactions, making change, etc. pennies were cut into halves (hence the “halfpenny”), quarters, sixteenths, or even (rarely) thirty-seconds.

The material of which these “copper coins” is made also makes them something of a misnomer in many places. Australian copper coins were actually 97% copper, 2.5% zinc, and 0.5% tin, which is pretty close to “truth in advertising” compared to other currencies.

Contrast that with the US 1?ó piece, which prior to 1982 was 95% copper and 5% tin & zinc – but which is now a zinc core comprising 97.5% of the coin and a copper plating comprising the remaining 2.5%. There is actually more copper in the nickel (75%) than in the modern US penny – and still more in the modern dime (91.67%).

Things aren’t much better across the pond: until 2008, the British penny had the same composition as Australian ‘copper’ coins (actually bronze). In 2008, the Brits shifted to copper plated steel. The ratios aren’t cited on Wikipedia, but we can guess from the US values – 97.5% steel, 2.5% copper.

At least with the more valuable coins, the precious metal incorporated constitutes a significantly greater value than the adulterating material – except, perhaps, in the case of platinum (see above). With copper coins, that ratio is quite likely to be very close to even.

True Value

But that brings me to a truth that stock market investors and economists understand very well – but few others appreciate: the value of a currency is whatever we agree that it is; it is more properly measured in terms of the work that it will do, i.e. its buying power.

When the US was on the gold standard, the value of a dollar was fixed – it was always worth so much gold. Floating the dollar was one of many measures undertaken by FDR to combat the Great Depression. From that time on, the value of a dollar depended on what it would buy you – when the material being bought is a foreign currency, it’s called an exchange rate. You can, in fact, estimate the value of the USD by the impact that its strength has on exchange rates – there was a period following the GFC in which Australian Dollars were at parity with the USD, or close to it, because Australia dodged the worst of that economic crisis through astute handling of our domestic economy and a timely stimulus response. These days, it’s back to being worth around 0.66-0.68?ó US to each AUD. This value changes depending on local economic conditions (boosts it if good, reduces it if bad) and the strength of the US Economy (reduces it if good, increases it if bad), so the exchange rate is a reasonable index for how the local economy is doing relative to the US standard. Since the 66?ó value is about what we expect, anything better means that Australia is doing well.

The same is true, in my book, for every price quoted in a source-book – this is the “theoretical” value of the item, i.e. what you would expect to pay for it. The reality on the ground might be very different.

Which reminds me of an episode of the West Wing, in which the President’s private secretary is considering the purchase of a new car, and it is revealed that she intends to pay the “Sticker Price” – even though that factors in room for the salesman to negotiate and is actually inflated above the true value of the car. Car salesmen expect to have to “do a deal” for less than the advertised price, in other words – a distinctive example of the difference between a “theoretical” value and the “true” value.

The Rarity Matrix

I’ve devised a fairly simple – some might say, oversimplified – system called the Rarity Matrix which makes it quick and easy for the GM to decide what the value of any commodity should be. This takes into account, in general terms, every essential factor that I could think of. What’s more, by noting the constituent measures that combine to define that value, a rich background for that commodity can be derived – one that goes a long way toward hinting at the answers to some of those other questions, or that can simply add to the plausibility and richness of the substance as an element of a campaign.

These are actually fairly easy to construct for yourself on scrap paper as needed – the following is just an example.
 

Rarity Matrix Scarcity Index Demand Index 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 – 1 -3 -2.75 -2.5 -2.25 -2 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 – 0.75 -2.75 -2.5 -2.25 -2 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 – 0.5 -2.5 -2.25 -2 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 – 0.25 -2.25 -2 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 0 -2 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 0.25 -1.75 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 0.5 -1.5 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 0.75 -1.25 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 1 -1 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 1.25 -0.75 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 1.5 -0.5 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 1.75 -0.25 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 2 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 2.25 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 3.25 2.5 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 3.25 3.5 2.75 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 3.25 3.5 3.75 3 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 3.25 3.5 3.75 4

Before I get into meanings and usage, you should understand what the table content is and how was it derived. The value in any cell is the total of the row and the column index values, -2.
The only other thing that you have to do is pick a base value and a starting point on the table to represent that base value. I’ve picked index values of one and one, as you can see; which gives a value of zero in the table. This could represent 1 silver piece, 1 gold, or 100 gold; that’s up to you, the table doesn’t change with scale. (I was originally going to pick 2 and 2, but this choice gives more room for greater values).

The table can be extended indefinitely in any direction.

The Scarcity Index

The first step is to estimate the scarcity of the commodity to be valued relative to the base. Shift your column one to the right for each increase in rarity, or one to the left if the substance is more common than your base.

The first step covers materials that are 1.5x rarer; the second 3x rarer; the third, about 6x rarer; and every 4 steps is 10x rarer. These multiply – so to get about 16x rarer, it’s 4 steps + 1 step = 5 steps (10×1.5=15). That’s where we would find platinum, if gold was our basis.

The Danger Shift

Shift the column to the right to represent how much more dangerous it is to gather/acquire the material. Gold mining is a physically challenging task, with some danger involved, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as diamond mining, for example. 1 step would be “just a little more dangerous”, 2 would be “significantly more dangerous”, and so on. Potentially, up to 8 steps could be made this way – gold mining vs stealing dragon scales from the original owner, for example. Once again, and in compound with scarcity, this can move you off the scale to the right or to the left.

Note that the scarcity might already reflect, in whole or part, any possible danger shift. Don’t count it twice; isolate the two factors as best you can.

The Scaling Shift

The best way of shifting scales back to a value actually shown on the chart is to change units of measurement, a scaling shift.

This is fairly easy with metric measurements – 12 steps to the right changes from grams to kilograms, 12 steps to the left from kilograms to grams. You don’t need to specify, because this also scales perfectly.

It gets a little trickier with non-metric measurements (and there are rather too many of them to list here). So let’s pick a couple: Pounds to Ounces: There are 16 ounces in a pound, so that’s five steps to the left, while going in the other direction is five steps to the right. There are 14 pounds in a stone, so that’s also 5 steps. There are 143 stones in a tonne – so that’s 4+5=9 steps. Just reverse the direction to reverse the change in scale.

Let’s be clear on what this says: the ultimate result is 1 [unit 2] of the material to be valued is worth so many times 1 [unit 1] of the base material. The two units start out with the same scale, lb for lb, oz for oz, and so on. So, with platinum, the scarcity shifts the value 5 columns to the left, but going from lb to oz shifts it back five columns to the left – so the comparison so far (assuming danger levels are about the same) is “1 oz of platinum = 1 lb of gold”.

Tip: Another very useful attribute of the table: steps up are the same as steps left, and steps down are the same as steps right! That’s by virtue of using a consistent increase in both columns and rows, and one reason I did the table this way. It’s just too convenient a trick to ignore.

Tip #2: It’s often advisable to leave this until last, or to perform only a partial adjustment at this point. Try to keep yourself to the middle of the chart, if you can, for maximum flexibility.

The Demand Index

The other axis deals with the demand for the material. There are more possible shifting factors here, and some of them are a little more arbitrary. The first step is to estimate the level of base demand excluding the factors considered separately below – practical uses, superstition-based uses, use as a common currency, and official policies/laws regarding the material. These shifts are up or down (up indicating a reduced demand, down an increased demand).

Few materials will change very much, but one major factor that isn’t included on that list is portability. Spices, Salt, Rare Dies – these have all been worth their weight in gold, which gives them a high portability. If you use gold as your basis, then that doesn’t produce an automatic shift, but if the commodity being valued lacks that portability – lumber, for example – then steps up would be indicated.

The Practicality Shift

If there is a practical use to the material that no other material can satisfy, as shown by the analysis of gold price vs rarity, it can increase the value of a commodity by a factor of 24. This moves the demand down the page (i.e. increases it). 24 is more than 15, so we’re looking at 4+2=6 steps down the page for anything so extreme. Few materials are in such demand for practical applications in a fantasy/medieval culture.

If there is a practical use to the material that no other material can satisfy quite as well, halve the number of steps. If there is a practical use that other materials can satisfy as well or better, subtract one or two from the halved total (two if possible) – just don’t decrease the demand to less than it was before making the practicality shift.

The Superstition Shift

Some cultures believe Rhinoceros Horn is an aphrodisiac. This causes them to be assigned huge value on the black market (because trade in them is illegal). Part of that value is due to the direct danger posed by hunting a very big and sometimes bad-tempered animal; part of it is due to the indirect danger of capture, prosecution, and imprisonment; and part is the value attached by this belief, regarded as superstition by most in the modern day. Well, the two danger components should be reflected in a Danger Shift (as described earlier); the rest belongs to a Superstition Shift.

A Superstition Shift moves a value measurement downwards on the Demand Index, effectively increasing demand.

1 space = +77.8% (or less)
2 spaces = +216%
3 spaces = +462%
4 spaces = +900%
5 spaces = +1678%

The pattern of increase might not be immediately obvious, so let me point out that 900 + 778 = 1678, and 778 is ten times 77.8.

Therefore, 6 spaces should be 10×216+900=+3060%.And, when I do the math, I get +3066% – close enough.

The Economic Shift

If a commodity is used as a medium of exchange, i.e. a currency, that automatically increases the desirability of that commodity. People who otherwise might not have wanted it, now have a perfectly legitimate reason to do so – and that group might outnumber those who would already have wanted it, quite substantially. This is reflected in an Economic Shift, usually down the table (increased demand).

4 spaces = exclusive currency, meaning that no other medium of exchange is used by the society.
3 spaces = one of a select group of currencies – the normal D&D/Pathfinder situation.
2 spaces = a common currency used unofficially in addition to an official medium of exchange.
1 space = an unusual/minor currency used unofficially in addition to an official medium of exchange.

Of course, if the basis is a medium of exchange and the commodity is not, even if it could be, then the adjustment is in the other direction.

The Incentive Shift

I struggled to find a suitable name for this impact on demand and failed to find anything more suitable than “Incentive Shift”, which doesn’t really explain anything. So let’s try and clear up any confusion: from time to time, Governments have attempted to cultivate interest in developing/finding certain resources by declaring them tax-free or partially tax-exempt. This naturally encourages the citizenry who can afford to do so to convert some of their cash resources into the commodity, increasing demand for it. As more of the resource is found, assuming there is more of it to be found, supply will increase, reducing the value, so as investment strategies go, this is strictly short-term, but it can be extremely lucrative in that short-term. The longer the period of time that passes without such new sources being discovered, the greater the risk that the “incentive” will be removed.

The second factor that should be contemplated under this topic is similar – if there is a suspicion or expectation that demand will shortly increase substantially, there is an immediate increase in the desire for the commodity. Wheat, if a drought is expected (and again if one is actually underway or worse than forecast), for example; steel, if war seems imminent; and so on.

And of course, in third place, is the unsubstantiated but pervasive wild rumor.

Put all these together to estimate an increase in demand using the Superstition Scale as a basis.

Commodity Value

Okay, so you’ve moved left and right and up and down on the table like a drunken sailor. The greater probability is that you’ll have moved down and right, if at all, unless a differential in scale has been necessary to keep your movements “within bounds” of the matrix. The result is that you have ended up with a number in a cell.

That number is the result of taking all those factors into account and applying a liberal degree of fudge factor.

It is the value, as stated earlier, of 1 [unit 2] of the commodity, relative to 1 [unit 1] of the basis. Actually, that value is x10 to the power of the result.

That sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It isn’t.

• Write a 1.
• Look at the whole number that is part or all of the answer. If it’s more than zero, write that many zeros after the 1.
• If it’s less than zero, move a decimal point that many spaces to the left – which means writing one fewer zeros than the whole number.
• Now look at the part after the decimal point, if any.
  • If it’s 0.25, write “1.778×” in front of whatever you’ve already written.
  • If it’s 0.5, write “3.1623×” in front of whatever you’ve already written.
  • If it’s 0.75, write “5.6234×” in front of whatever you’ve already written.
• Perform any calculation to get the value of a commodity relative to the base commodity, in the units specified.

Hint: you are best of guesstimating the scale of the eventual value and using that as your basis. If you expect the price to be in Silvers, start with 1 silver. If you expect it to be in the tens of gold, start with a basis of 10 gold.

An example

Let’s work a practical example: a rare wax created by giant bees that is especially efficacious at neutralizing poisons when a small quantity is added to boiling drink or food being cooked.

Base value: 1 gp.

Initial position: 1,1.

1. Initial Scarcity (relative to gold in this case): +5. The value 5 to the right of the starting position is 1.25.

2. Danger Shift: +4. Giant Bees, individually, aren’t much more dangerous than many other creatures – though they could kill a serf or a child – but they don’t come individually, they come in swarms of 20 or more. And they can fly.
The value that’s 4 to the right of the 1.25 is three across and one down (to stay within bounds), giving 2.25.

3. Scaling Shift: To give myself a little room to move, I’m going to shift from 1 gp weight to one 100th of a gp weight – that’s an 8-space shift to the left, and brings me back to a value of 0.25.

4. Base Demand: This substance would have great portability, even more than gold, so I am going to shift the value two spaces down, from 0.25 to 0.75.

5. Practicality Shift: This stuff isn’t a cure-all, or a total preventative. But there is still very definitely a practical purpose, and one that nothing else matches. That’s up to six steps down. However, a cheaper alternative does exist: food tasters. So that’s half the 6 steps = three. Three steps down from the 0.75 is 1.5.

Of course, that’s assuming that the stuff really does what it is supposed to do. It might just be a superstition. But this is a fantasy game, and fantastic substances and cures and treatments are par for the course, so I’m going to say that the assumption is correct. So let’s talk superstitions.



Image by Csaba Nagy from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

I can easily accept that it might be believed that a dose of this stuff would ward off colds and chills and help prevent wounds from becoming infected – whether it really would or not. That would fit with the modern mind considering it a antibiotic, so players would also be prone to accept this; the GM might know better (it’s magical, not medical) or may not have made up his mind on the subject yet. That doesn’t matter; the belief alone needs to be taken into account when assessing the demand for the product. So, while it’s not a vitality potion or youth potion or anything like that, it’s still pretty good stuff if the superstitions are correct; I can’t see it having only a 2-space increase for this factor, nor can I see a 4-space increase as making sense. Right in the middle is a three-space increase, so that sounds good (and it also matches the impact on demand of the actual proven effect of the stuff). Three steps down from the 1.5 becomes 2 steps down and one right, giving a value of 2.25.

6. Economic Shift: This stuff might be rare, but it’s also going to be fairly fragile. I can’t see it being robust enough to be a medium of exchange. But Gold is a currency – one of a set. So I now have to move three spaces UP the chart because the basis of comparison has demand factors that don’t impact the commodity. Three steps up from the 2.25 gives me a value of 1.5.

7. Incentive Shift: I can believe that the nobility might put a bounty on this stuff in terms of tax relief. It’s too dangerous gathering it to try and make it a royal monopoly, so they have to accept that half of what it’s found will be expended by the superstitious, leaving only half for those with a reason for their paranoia. There is, however, no reason to expect that demand will suddenly increase, and there are no wild rumors circulating about it, so that’s the only source of an incentive shift, and it’s going to be mid-sized – two steps sounds about right. Two steps down from the 1.5 gives me an ultimate value of 2.

8. Commodity Value:

• Write a 1.
• Look at the whole number that is part or all of the answer. If it’s more than zero, write that many zeros after the 1. In this case, it’s a 2, so write two zeros: “100”.
• If it’s less than zero – it’s not.
• Now look at the part after the decimal point – there isn’t any.
• Perform any calculation – there isn’t one.

Result: So, the end result is that 1 one-thousandth of a gp in weight of this stuff is worth 100 gp. That’s probably a single dose. This seems completely in line with magical potions, which might be guaranteed to work, but cost more.

But what if:

Example 2

I’m not going to work this example all the way through. I just want to give an example of the final step which has something after the decimal point:

8. Commodity Value:
Matrix result = 1.75

• Write a “1”.
• Look at the whole number that is part or all of the answer. If it’s more than zero, write that many zeros after the 1. In this case, it’s a 1, so I write one zero to get “10”.
• If it’s less than zero – it’s not.
• Now look at the part after the decimal point – in this case, .75.
  • If it’s 0.25 – it’s not.
  • If it’s 0.5 – it’s not.
  • If it’s 0.75 – it is – write “5.6234×” in front of whatever you’ve already written, giving “5.6234×10”.
• Perform any calculation: “5.6234×10” gives 56.234. If the units were 1 gp and 1/10th of an ounce – about right for an exotic perfume, say – then a bottle with 1/10th oz of perfume in it would cost 56gp, Two ounces worth would be 112gp, and so on.

But what if:

Example 3

A third example again restricted to the final step, to demonstrate working with a matrix result less than zero:

8. Commodity Value:
Matrix result = -1.5. This can happen when there’s a scale shift that doesn’t go far enough.

• Write a 1.
• Look at the whole number that is part or all of the answer. If it’s more than zero – it’s not.
• If it’s less than zero – it is, it’s minus-one – move a decimal point that many spaces to the left plus one – which means writing one fewer zeros than the whole number. So I have to write 0+1=1 zero and then a decimal point in front of them: “.01”
• Now look at the part after the decimal point – 0.5 in this case.
  • If it’s 0.25 – it’s not.
  • If it’s 0.5, write “3.1623×” in front of whatever you’ve already written. So I get “3.1623×.01”.
  • If it’s 0.75 – it’s not..
• Perform any calculation: “3.1623×.01” gives 0.031623 as the result.

Obviously, this is not a very useful result – it might be 1 pound of this stuff having a value of 0.031623 gp. There are two things to do: change the scale, and change the currency for something smaller.

Stones are a unit of measurement rarely used except when it comes to human weights, these days. A better choice would be to say that 100lb of this stuff costs 3.1623 gp – which can then be translated into gold, silver and copper according to the values in whatever game rules you are using. So this is sold like bags of concrete.

Exponential math

This system works by virtue of the mathematics of exponentials – I’ve done it all by base ten, so ordinary Logs and ten-to-the-x give simple results.

10^n × 10^m = 10^(n+m).
10^n ÷ 10^m = 10^(n-m).

But the system hides most of this complexity from the user.

So, if you have a × b × c ÷ d, you can work it by getting the log of each item (a, b, c, d) and calculating e = log(a) + log(b) + log(c) – log(d) and then working out 10^e.

That’s exactly what the system does – with all the mechanics under the surface.

Just thought people might want to know.

Practical Usage

Look, most of the time you won’t need to use this system – you can simply pluck a value that seems reasonable out of thin air using established prices as a guideline and a precedent. If you have to, you can use the values given here as a basis for adjusting those values – if something, say “Moonwood,” suddenly becomes more dangerous to gather, the single factor is all you have to change, and the rest works itself out. You can apply this system in part, not just in whole.

It’s a resource – use it to expand your repertoire and put some structure into your price-list.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about valuables and how much coins might be worth. Those looking for more might find the following to be useful:

• Coinage in Fumanor: Windows into a campaign background
• How Much Is That Warhorse In The Window? – Pricing Of Goods in D&D
• Loot As Part Of The Plot: Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot
• Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: The Value Of Magic
• Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables
• The Bargain Arcane: Selling Magic Items

When you create an RPG adventure, what’s the first question you should ask?

This very issue became a factor when my co-GM and I set about writing Adventure 31 for the Adventurer’s Club Campaign a week or two ago.

The First question should not be how you get the PCs involved.

It should not be how the adventure will end.

It should not be what is going to happen in between.

It should not be who the villain(s) are, other than as dictated within the broad idea.

No, the first question should be “What role is each PC going to have within this story?”
Answering that question gives you the answers to several of those other questions.

In Adventure 31, the basic idea identified the major villain and one of the PCs as focal points of the adventure. That villain had a past antagonistic relationship with another of the PCs, but there was no certainty that the PC would bring that second PC into the story.

Making that a virtual certainty changed the basic plot slightly, increasing its’ depth and connections to past events in the campaign. It also highlighted a logical flaw in that basic idea, which required a further extension to resolve.

This extension plus the logic of what the villain would do under the circumstances gave us the key to involving a third PC.

Determining how to integrate a fourth PC required a further extension, one which made the ultimate outcome of the adventure take shape.

With four of the five PCs now actively involved, the likelihood of the fifth being called in by virtue of the bonds of friendship and alliance was sufficient that we considered it a near certainty.

As a result of asking the correct first question, the adventure itself was much more clearly defined, and ready to be broken down into logical plot sequences.

One of the plot elements that we have worked very hard to incorporate from the very beginning of the campaign was that each PC should have a pre-programmed opportunity to contribute to the outcome.

This has shaped encounters and NPCs in ways that we would not otherwise have even thought of, let alone contemplated.

It doesn’t matter if your campaign is a star vehicle or an ensemble cast, ensuring that each PC at least has a key skill or conversation – with backup plans in case they blow it, where there is a risk of that happening – and can lay claim to at least part of the overall achievements of the team, and that any spotlight rotates regularly and frequently, ensures that every player can engage in the plotline and take part in the fun. Creating that certainty is a critical part of the GMs job – flub it, and it doesn’t matter how technically brilliant you might be at other parts of the assignment, your campaigns will always only be mediocre at best.

Every player that you add makes this harder to achieve, week in and week out.

With one player, it’s easy; they are the entire focus of your attention. With two, it’s fairly easy, as well – you just have to ensure that one player doesn’t monopolize your attention.

The first real difficulties tend to emerge with three players, and at this scale, they are fairly minuscule. Four players makes things a little more difficult again. With Five players you really have to work at it, but it can still be done, and the same can be said for six players.

Seven players, and even with all the help you can get or give yourself, one person is likely to be a fifth wheel. What’s more, this only needs to happen once or twice for it to become a self-replicating rut.

Every PC brings something slightly different to the mix – different skills, different attitudes, different capabilities – and each of those traits is further distinguished from their neighbors by the skills, attitudes, and capabilities of the player controlling the PC. We have one player who hates mysteries and detective plots, because he doesn’t feel very good at them (even though he loves them in literature, especially Sherlock Holmes). It doesn’t matter what it says his character can do, the player struggles with them.

So we not only ensure that there’s at least some action-adventure element for that player to engage in, we never throw a mystery into that PCs life without orchestrating the involvement of another PC ‘just to lend a hand’ at the player level. With the occasional exception (which this player tolerates, because he knows it will be a temporary situation), this formula has kept the campaign vibrant and active for more than a decade.

The next time you are confronted with a problem in plotting the next day’s, week’s, month’s, or year’s play, before you start asking (and answering) questions, take a moment to ask yourself what the first question should be. Get that right and you not only save yourself a heap of trouble and barricade off a lot of blind alleys, you improve the end result while investing less effort.

As bargains you, there aren’t many that get better than that.

It’s September again (already!) and that means that Campaign Mastery has its regularly-scheduled hosting duties for the Blog Carnival (The one back in March was an ‘extra’ because no-one else stepped forward to host, and I thought of a topic). So what have I got to offer this time around?

Places Of Exotic Reality

Describe a scene observed around you as it’s equivalent somewhere or somewhen else, ready to be dropped into a campaign.

You could go back in time, switch genres, visit a strange plane of existence, whatever. Imagine that construction site as expanding the City Of Brass, that highway as a caravan trail through a mountain pass. And yes, something you might see on TV counts.

The objective is to produce a pool of “mundane” splashes of color text, flavor text, drop-in scenes or even encounters that GMs can use to populate their games.

They could be targeted at one of your campaigns, or at a generic campaign of some sort. Extra kudos in advance if you visualize the same sequence for more than one environment or genre, or if you can encapsulate the differences between two campaigns within a single piece of exposition.

Let’s have a couple of examples and some meaningful content for readers, what do you say?

1. Major Highway, Traffic

Let’s start by looking out my front Window. I’ve described what I’m looking at when I do so – see A target of inefficiency: from Dystopian trends to Utopia for my tirade on the subject from a little over 4 years ago – today’s purpose is a little different. Suffice it to say that this is a major thoroughfare (but not the largest) within the medium-large (by American standards) city that is my home, Sydney. Across the road is a church, St Albans Community Anglican Church, which not only offers traditional services but also (unusually), regular services in Sudanese.

A long string of covered wagons, many painted in garish colors, stream down a narrow path of proven ground across the rocky ground. Some, infected with “Go Fever”, rush past others, jockeying for position, striving to be the first to reach their destination. Others, close to overloaded, struggle to keep up. Some carry many more passengers than would seem necessary or even prudent; others, inefficiently, seem to have only a single driver on board. Few notice the shrine hidden amongst the rocks in their obsessive desire to get to where they are going; if they did, they might realize that it marks the presence of other strangers to this land, who may be long-gone or may be contemporary, for all the drivers know. Were they paying it attention, it might have served to forewarn them of the dangers and difficulties ahead; but they pay it no heed.

There you have it – a perfect little vignette, with a slightly ominous hint of trouble ahead, that’s all that’s required. These are so short – and not all of them will even be this lengthy – that every contributor should be able to post at least half-a-dozen. Fewer if you work one up into a full encounter, of course.

Oh yes, I should point out that the above works equally well in an SF setting describing a “wagon train to the stars” – just replace the “across the rocky ground” with “through the endless void of space”, and so on.

2. Mass Shooting

Tragically, I see that there’s been another mass shooting within the US. I’m not going to identify which one, because the bulletin makes the point that the situation there has now reached the point of averaging one per day – which is way too many, in my opinion, to be tolerated. But be that as it may, it begs the question: what’s the equivalent in a generic D&D/fantasy campaign?

Owen Proudfoot is a mage on the edge. Chamber of commerce dues, unrest among his Apprentices, overdue Baronial, Ducal, and National taxes, marital disharmony, annoying neighbors, a government that seems intent on picking on him and other “little guys” like him, and unreasonable demands by prospective Patrons that have eroded his ready cash to meet all these demands. The final straw comes as one of the local constabulary stops him to point out that the wheel on his wagon is insecure and needs repairs; without waiting to find out why they are interfering in his life again, something snaps within Owen and a malicious demand for destruction wells up within him. The constable is his first target, a well-placed fireball almost incinerating him and half of the temple behind him; another targets the tavern full of wenches wont to tease passersby with their wanton charms, especially those who cannot afford them. Once he has yielded to the impulse within, Owen doesn’t know how to stop; another fireball brings down the entrance to the tavern, sealing both floozies and customers within the burning building. By now, bystanders have realized that a madman is stalking the streets, and turned to flee; a lightning bolt is faster than the swiftest can run, and the eventual body count rises to thirty-two. Your party stands within the range of the unruly mage, but behind him and out of his line of sight – for now.

What are you doing?

My sincerest condolences to anyone involved in the latest incident – or the one before that, or the one before that, or…

And I include the perpetrators, whose thinking has become so corrupted with hopelessness and/or indoctrination that they find this to be a valid response.

3. Construction I

Recently, a new block of flats has been constructed across the lane out my back gate. Another is almost completed at one end of that lane, perhaps fifty feet away, perhaps a little more. If I turn the other way, I reach a larger road, across which lies another new apartment block complete and full, and a more substantial structure complete with interior garden under construction. There are another fifty-three developments that I personally know of within a 2.5km (1.5 mile) radius that have either been completed in the last year or are presently in development, many of which I pass every week.

As a result, construction (in general) has been on my mind quite a bit, and so I now present five different takes on the subject…

First, one appropriate to the Rings Of Time campaign, one very reminiscent of old-school AD&D…

It’s clear that everyone knows their role in the elegant dance that is unfolding around you. In a covered pavilion, the future owner sketches rough ideas in words or scrawls of what he wants, visions that are then interpreted by artists. When the owner approves of these interpretations, they are passed to the architects, who modify their designs to incorporate these desired features, employing whatever means are necessary to achieve stability and solidity in the resulting structure. Each alteration is then handed to a site foreman, who translates it into a work assignment and hands it off to a specific job foreman, releasing as many workers as are necessary to complete it in a timely and efficient fashion. That job foreman divides his workforce into those assembling materials and those incorporating them into the structure, whether it’s enlarging the base of a tower so that it can support the larger features demanded by the owner, or adding more columns withing the structure. All involved know that they will be paid substantial bonuses in gold should they beat the deadline initially established by the architects, and that any demand which would make that target unreachable will bring about an automatic renegotiation of the contracts with a penalty payment to the workers if it goes through, encouraging the owners to restrict themselves to only the most essential deviations from the original plans. It’s astonishing what almost-unlimited gold, backed by loans from the vast Draconic Horde, can achieve….

It doesn’t matter what is being constructed, the process scales – only the number of workers changes. The PCs intended to construct strongholds for themselves, and that meant building the housing for the workers they were recruiting to their banners, and the infrastructure that those workers required. They had plenty of gold to dedicate to the purpose; this is the basic system that they came up with to recruit experts, settle them, and employ them.

4. Construction II

And now, a similar scene more appropriate for Fumanor, where Magic went from a forbidden art to an almost-ubiquitous demand in a few short years, thanks to the PCs.

Early in the morning, construction resumes. A dozen mages summon Elementals and supervise their work. Some transmute earth that has been roughly pre-shaped by the human and Orcish laborers into stone, others sculpt and face the stones into finished blocks with an inhuman perfection, under the keen supervision of a sharp-eyed Drow, carefully bundled up and gauze-wrapped against the glare of the sun. Air Elementals carry the block into position, while water Elementals mix and shape the mortar that will bind the rocks together. Still another group of Elementals transform yesterday’s mortar into stone. When this group of mages exhaust their daily limit of summoning spells, a cleric steps forward to bless their work on behalf of the Gods, and a new shift follow.

In winter, fire Elementals keep the site free of snow, while more water Elementals keep it all dry by diverting the falling rain toward themselves, held aloft by more air Elementals. They all know that they will be paid as much as would any human worker for their efforts, regardless of how long each would take respectively to complete them; and that the funds held in trust for them by the crown could then be called upon in exchange for favors from the courts, or the attention of specific individuals as befits their needs.

Notice the difference that different societies and social standards make? This is significant because the two campaigns had players in common…

Intermission

5. Construction III

Next, let’s visit the Elemental Plane Of Fire, the City Of Brass more specifically….

One of the greatest surprises that awaits all who travel to the City Of Brass for the first time is that heat management is a serious concern in the design and construction of everything within the city. This results from the fact that brass, although much harder and stronger than copper (one of it’s principle constituents), has a lower melting point than that reddish element – 900-940°C (1650-1720°F) vs 1085°C.

The frames of buildings are thus constructed of soft copper with brass inlays, and have nothing to do with structural rigidity, the usual purpose of such frames elsewhere. The rigid elements that actually form the structure are brass of various thicknesses, molded and shaped and manufactured on-site, with indented channels that are then filled with strips of copper which connect with the framework to conduct away heat that would otherwise soften or even melt the walls.

The carving and molding of such panels, and in particular the mounting systems to be employed and the thickness chosen for the panels is the most delicate and important task facing the architect within the city. Specific instruction and permits are required, and builders are held criminally liable for structural failures in their work.

Of late, the “hot” architectural trend has been the incorporation of decorative radiator panels protruding from walls or extending upward from roofs or downward from basements, or some combination. The latter are cast in situ from molten copper and permitted to cool in place to allow ample room for the radiators to expand or contract without weakening the rocky surface upon which the city stands. One or two innovators have even used such systems to create systems for the delivery of luke-warm water within a building, an unheard-of extravagance previously….

The inadvertent transmission of excess heat during construction is one of the greatest concerns of builders and craftsmen within the city. They are, after all, generating temperatures sufficient to melt copper, which in turn are hot enough to boil raw zinc. Streets within the city are laid out such that every building faces one large enough for casting processes to be carried out without endangering the surroundings. To supplement and bypass closures of these main thoroughfares, a network of smaller alleyways can be found connecting one road to another.

This regulation was not always in place, and in the city’s oldest quarter, buildings have been constructed in such a way that the alleys form a maze. Every now and then, the rulers of the City contemplate mounting a project to raze and reconstruct the old quarter, working from the outside in, but the cost, the presence of the capital building in that quarter, and the added protection provided by the Maze which must be traversed to reach it, eventually outweigh all other considerations.

This is more of a location within the greater location, or perhaps a scene with a guide explaining what a visitor is seeing when they come across such a construction project. I think I got a little carried away with it, but it all just fell into place as I was writing…

Sources:

• Melting points, boiling point of zinc: Google
• Comparison between copper and brass: DifferenceBetween.net
• How Brass is made: Quora

6. Construction IV

At much the same time as ideas started coming to me for the preceding section, I thought of something for the Elemental Plane Of Water:

Construction in the Elemental Plane Of Water is, ironically, in the shape of bubbles, added one on top of another, with holes where they touch to permit entrance and exit. Most have a flattened surface at the bottom for the convenience of “walkers”; “swimmers” consider it a mark of superiority that they don’t need such concessions. The core framework is a coral-like growth that is constrained by a process of hardening the liquid water into a more solid pipe-like shape; the coral’s growth is then stimulated until it fills the resultant cavity. The hardened-water “pipes” are then removed and replaced with curved panels, which permit a thinner layer of the coral to grow in between, completing the basic shape of the structure.

When the coral is thick enough to sustain both itself and the desired weight to be carried by the structure, the molds are removed and the walls coated in a soft jelly-like material in liquid form upon which the coral can feed. They are then clad in a tougher gelatinous substance which forms the exterior surface of the wall or floor. More of the softer material is then forced into the space between this cladding. It must be regularly replenished throughout the life of the structure.

As the building ages, the coral will grow into the softer gel but be constrained by the tougher membrane, growing stronger and more resilient. Textually, every surface in a Plane Of Water habitat is like touching Turkish Delight, or walking in a partially-deflated air castle – you can just feel the surface yielding a little beneath your weight.

Similar techniques are used to manufacture furnishings of both solid (coral) and soft (membrane/gel) variety, including planters and other decorative features – think “soft aquarium” (without any kitsch toys or props).

There are some visions of the Elemental Plane that include no solid surfaces whatsoever. I sometimes go that way, and sometimes have “plumes” of underwater “sand-bars” which have a clear up-down orientation in their immediate vicinity. The above vision clearly fits better with the latter, though by removing the flattened surfaces for “walkers” and related content, can be adapted to suit the former. What’s your pleasure?

7. Construction V

There’s a lot of in-game material that I could excerpt and place in this section to pad the article out. I’m not going to do that; for one thing, it’s too specific to this particular campaign. Instead, I’m going to (briefly) discuss the philosophy behind the construction sequences from this campaign, just to display the variety of material that can fit under the umbrella of this Blog Carnival..

I’m a big believer in superheros growing so accustomed to having their powers that they find mundane ways to employ them in their everyday lives. My players, in contrast, feel that their abilities are exceptional and special, and that such applications cheapen them; and, moreover, that this distinguishes these “acquired” abilities from inborn and natural capabilities. Both points of view are equally valid, but means that “mundane” applications of powers only happen when I deliberately write them into the plot sequence.

I’m careful to respect the player’s attitude, most of the time, and between us, this tension has yielded a balanced perspective between the ordinary and the extraordinary that permits excursions in any direction on the issue. In particular, I’m careful to only write in mundane usage of paranormal abilities when this adds to the plotline or to the player’s engagement with the plotline.

So it was when the group were called to assist with the construction in orbit of a replacement for the parent team’s headquarters – I included a diagram of the layout as a giveaway in Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies, a work of which I’m still very proud – I thought about things from the Parent Team’s point of view. They would not have called the PCs in because they were warm bodies to perform the labor of construction; there were many more such available from the Earth below. No, the only reason to call them in was because of the extraordinary things that they could do – their powers. So that was the way I wrote the sequence – the super-tough shape-changer forming precision molds from his own body, the energy projector and the mage helping melt metals to be shaped in those molds, the team’s more acrobatic member leaping from piece to piece to maneuver them perfectly into position, and so on. Mundane applications of their powers to the problems of construction in zero gravity.

I had metagame motivations for the plot sequence of course; it advanced the status of the parent team, began acquainting the players with the layout and construction of the new facility, and laid the groundwork for a later adventure set on the resulting space station. It also gave me an excuse to dig a little deeper into trans-dimensional travel and block a couple of potential game-breaking applications by throwing in some complications that would make future adventures more interesting. The alternative was an arms race between the PCs and their enemies to exploit those game-breaking applications, something that I judged unpalatable.

The questions raised by this short essay are fundamental issues that every super-heroic campaign has to wrestle with. Nor are any other genres in which exceptional abilities are available to either PCs or NPCs, like D&D, completely exempt from them – and the “Fumanor” and “Rings Of Time” examples earlier in the article demonstrate how profoundly they can impact on a campaign.

Intermission 2

8. Football

I saw (briefly, because I don’t enjoy the sport) a report on progress toward the grand finals of the Australian NRL which talked about the rivalry between two clubs and their coaches, and I thought, ‘what a silly way to settle one’s differences’.

Bargaining and Diplomacy on Acheron are muscular affairs. Where negotiations are being conducted between ordinary individuals, some contest of prowess is used whenever a bargaining position is contested to settle the matter, with the challenge being set by whichever side is demanding concessions from the other. If neither side meets that criterion, a neutral arbiter and scorekeeper may set the terms of conflict.

Where the individuals are wealthy enough to do so, or the bargaining is between leaders of larger forces – be they tribes, bands, or nation-states – they may employ a dedicated team to challenge on their behalf. It is judged better to settle disputes with others on the game field when already engaged in a war or two – and everyone there is always engaged in at least one.

Most of these challenges resemble a traditional game played in the real world, with the addition of weapons. Ball games will frequently demand maces or hammers without spikes, for example (so that the ball is not damaged). Unless explicitly required, ranged weapons are generally forbidden to contestants; the excitement is not in the victory but in the defeating of the opposition, and ranged weapons inhibit the actual clash between the two.

9. Weather Report

As part of the same news-break, I saw a weather report, which explicitly mentioned the possibility of what is now a category-4 storm but may be a full-blown hurricane by the time it makes landfall, now bearing down on Florida.

Located at the intersection of the Elemental Planes of Air and Water is The Microplane of Storms. A 100-mile radius (160 km) disk of farmland, rimmed on one side by mountains, and sloping gently away from these high points, this plane is beset by violent weather phenomena. Locations within are not beset by a single storm, but by a succession of weather events. Air and Water from the elemental planes mix at the edge, carried into the upper altitudes as the land is warmed by something analogous to the sun, which orbits high overhead and breaks through the storm-clouds at least once a day. Currents then carry it to the mountains, where it cools and forms new storm cells, which gradually release their water content on the lands below. These form rivers, which run down to the edge, ending in a succession of waterfalls that return the water to the Elemental Plane from whence it derived.

All this makes the land ideal for agriculture, if not for the constant risk of hurricanes and tornadoes and the like. Nevertheless, settlers have found a home there, employing storm cellars and the like to ride out the harsh weather when it’s necessary. Travelers need to be more wary.

That’s little more than an idea seed for each individual to build on as they see fit.

10. Political Analysis

One TV program that I always watch (time-shifted as necessary) is Insiders, which analyses Australian politics for the week and often brings forth events or perspectives that hadn’t occurred to me. Such is the reputation that it has garnered over the years since its’ 2001 debut that a good showing is considered make-or-break on a politician’s career, and it’s scarcely possible to regard yourself as well-informed politically in this country without watching it regularly. So, I watched it today, and as I did so with this article in the back of my mind, a thought came to me…

It’s Round Table Night at the Scarlet Raven, a Local Tavern and weekly event, in which invited pundits expound on the events of the week within the city, and sometimes beyond. These pundits, chosen for their ability to articulate and debate, are usually bards, and it is usual for one to present matters from the perspective of the nobility, one from that of the administration, and one from the perspective of the larger businesses within the community. Occasionally, someone will speak up for the military or the commons, but these are less frequent. The Host and Moderator is always Barusmus Kasseed, the owner of the Scarlet Raven. The Commoners, Wealthy, Pious, and Nobles all crowd the tavern to hear the debate (it’s usually standing-room-only), and reactions from the audience are often used as a gauge for the popularity of different proposed measures and the import of different issues. Every now and then, riots have broken out within the Tavern, following which only watered-down ale is served for a few weeks or months during the event and its lead-up hours of business. Others have attempted to emulate the evening, but have not been popular enough to sustain the expenses involved (three professional bards – four if you count Kasseed) for long enough to build sufficient credibility, or have been too partisan in their approach to resonate with the collective inhabitants of the city…

Over to you all…

So there’s my ten contributions. Including the context, source, and commentaries, they average 380 words apiece, and that’s a reasonable target to aim for. Now, it’s over to the rest of you to add to this beginning! As always, I recommend the double-step of linking back to this anchor post (usually but not always generates a pingback) and dropping a line in the comments section below linking to your contribution. And have fun stirring those creative juices and learning how to transform the world around you into grist for your particular mill…

This is being posted a day early, for two reasons: One, today marks the start of this Blog Carnival, and two, I have errands to attend to during my normal writing time tomorrow. I intend to post a shortish ‘regular’ article later in the week for those who miss my usual “depth” – exactly when will depend on how long it takes me to write, relative to how much time I have free to work on it.

UPDATE OCTOBER 2019: What If They Held A Blog Carnival And No-One Came?

I’ve always suspected that this might happen eventually – there were a grand total of *No* submissions for this blog carnival. Which is a shame, because the accumulation of resources from multiple sources was one of the chief assets that was expected to result.

The technique for creating mundane events and scenes of daily life within a campaign remains a valid one, but the absence of other contributions means that the only examples other GMs have to appropriate for their own campaigns are the ones that I have provided above.

In hopes of promoting the technique, under the circumstances, I’ve decided to make this post the round-up as well as the anchor, another first for the Blog Carnival!

Until next time, have fun at the game table :)

0. Preliminaries

Combat is a central aspect of almost every RPG, but most GMs are not as familiar with Tactics and Strategy as the forces they command within a game would be.

That’s a problem, but the situation becomes even more untenable when GMs become aware that a basic knowledge of tactics can broaden their repertoire of challenges, their palette of choices – both in terms of environment and in terms of opposition.

I can’t help but think that broadening the options available for the GM to select between will inevitably make the game more challenging and more interesting for players.

So that’s what this article… Field Manual…. is intended to provide – an education in basic Tactics and Strategy.

Before we get started, though, I need to mention the terminology that I’m going to use. Most discussions of this type refer to “Strength” as an abstract measure of combat capability or as a form of attack or defense that a particular individual or group of individuals can utilize particularly effectively, such as in “Meet Strength with Strength” or “There’s Strength in Numbers”. That works fine most of the time, but RPGs have usurped the term to refer to an individual’s Muscle Power specifically. So this article will use the term “Might” where you would normally read “Strength” in the non-muscle-power senses of the word: “Meet Might with Might”, “There’s Might in Numbers”, and so on, just to avoid any possible confusion with the Stat.

1. Tactics Vs Strategy

So let’s start at the very beginning: What’s the difference between Tactics and Strategy?

Tactics is small-scale – “winning” one skirmish or encounter. Sometimes a Tactic is even smaller, aimed at achieving some intermediate goal that it is believed will enhance the chance of victory in the long term, or which might even be necessary to create the opportunity for victory.

Tactics are what you use to win one hand of a card game, or one round of a board game – or to lose only the hands/rounds that you don’t care about.

Strategy is large-scale. It usually consists of a series of tactics and assignments that attempt to cause the achievement of a specific goal.

If Tactics are about winning one hand, Strategy is an approach to winning the game.

Right away, you can see that there’s a lot of overlap and fuzziness about the differences.

In RPG terms, you can think about Tactics as the combination of maneuvers and actions that permit a collective “you” to have the maximum impact on the enemy in a single round of combat, while Strategy defines the terms of engagement (when and how you can attack, when you should withdraw, etc), the overall objective, and how you will use tactics to achieve it. It might dictate that one particular enemy be rendered ineffective as a priority, for example, as a critical step in defeating a group of enemies.

Notice that I didn’t say “defeat” in that last sentence; it’s often enough to simply neutralize or minimize the effectiveness of the target.

2. Tactical Fundamental 1: Attacks

There are two fundamental tactical considerations that have to be considered if you are to be tactically effective. The first of these is the concept of an attack. The general rule to achievement of victory is to Apply Might against Weakness.

Every force has some attack mechanism that is its most effective choice within the terms of the tactical environment. Identify each attack mechanism and what the enemy can do to resist that mode of attack and compare the differences between these pairings. Identify the biggest difference and you have chosen the basic tactic that you will employ – or would have done, if that was all there is to it.

3. Tactical Fundamental 2: Defense

The second consideration is the other end of the longsword: defense. Your tactical choices should restrict the enemy as much as possible to a selection that causes the enemy to apply Might Vs Might, or better yet, Weakness vs Might. This is often the most difficult part of combat to achieve – so much so that most amateurs don’t even consider it, simply pulling out their biggest gun and pulling the trigger.

Often, you may need to apply a series of tactics to remove attack options from the enemy, or even from both sides, one at a time, before actually engaging in direct combat. If you aren’t all that effective in an attack mode, you probably won’t miss it.

4. Tactical Fundamental 3: Response

Both sides in a conflict want to “win,” though “winning” might have very different definitions for each side. Furthermore, both sides are assuming that the other will oppose their achievement, their “win”. This can often be a false assumption, but the assumption is considered valid until proven otherwise by both sides; many conflicts are actually unnecessary, were the two sides able to discuss their mutual goals. Such communications are frequently impossible, because knowing what an enemy is trying to achieve is a significant advantage in trying to defeat them, not something that should be given to a potential enemy lightly.

So it is that assumed conflicting goals produce combat. It’s always intelligent to assume that the opposition have their own plans for achieving their goals, and will set about implementing those plans even while you are doing the same thing. Again, they will probably disguise their objectives as best they can so as to keep you in the dark.

Part of what the commander of any military force actively engaging the enemy in either the strategic or tactical sense is to anticipate what the enemy might do, and how to counter those actions, and to be able to react and alter your own planning if the enemy does something that you haven’t anticipated.

It is sometimes said that “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, so prevalent is the need for such reaction. It would be more correct to say “no inadequate planning survives contact with the enemy” but that admits to a tactical failure which is not easily made; the common formulation of the aphorism is offered as an excuse by the amateur.

5. Conditional Variations

No rules can be hard and fast, no tactics will be universal. The environment plays a huge role in determining outcomes. So much so that one source suggests “the winner of any conflict or military engagement will usually be the faction that best utilizes the environment to their advantage, all else being reasonably close”. Note, not equal, even “reasonably close” is good enough.

• Conditions can minimize, mitigate, or cap the might that the PCs can bring to bear.
• Conditions can minimize, increase, or cap any vulnerability that the PCs enemies might wish to exploit.
• Conditions can minimize, mitigate, or cap the might that the PCs enemies can bring to bear against the PCs.
• Conditions can minimize, increase, or cap any vulnerability that the PCs might wish to exploit.

Any one or combination of more than one of the above might be present in any tactical situation.

It’s not enough to simply contemplate an environment, you need to translate that into a tactical awareness, an appreciation of what those conditions will do, and what they can do, to the tactical determinations already discussed (in sections 2, 3, and 4).

5.1 Relative Tactical Grading of Might

It’s going to keep coming up unless I address it, so let’s briefly contemplate a Relative Tactical Grading of Might. I’ll be drawing on some limited wargaming/boardgaming experience for this (RPGs don’t often go into it because they are more focused on the individual). As a general rule:

• 5:1 is decisive, higher is more so.
• 4:1 and 3:1 are strongly advantageous and will probably result in victory for the stronger side, only the cost in lost lives will vary.
• 2:1 will probably bring about a costly victory, but there’s room for luck to reverse the results
• less than 2:1 can go either way.

Defensive Structures and Terrain and other environmental factors act as Force Multipliers, effectively increasing the Might of those who have them. How large a multiplier is more subjective on the part of the game designer and historian. For example, some historians rate castles as 4x multiplier, others as 5x; and some say that unless you can achieve at least 10:1 force ratio, the castle will not fall, adding the concept of a threshold to the mix.

I think that’s probably getting too complex for this discussion. Let’s just call it a 4x multiplier and see where that gets us.

In effect, that means that:

• to be decisive, you need at least 20:1.
• between 20:1 and 12:1, you will probably win eventually, but will lose a lot of your force in the process.
• between 12:1 and 8:1, you will probably achieve a costly victory (i.e. losing more than 2/3 of your forces), but there’s room for luck to reverse that result – and if it does, the other side will have their losses reduced by the force multiplier from 2/3 to 2/12, or 1/6. Which means they won’t be weakened very much at all.
• between 8:1 and 4:1, the battle can go either way.
• less than 4:1, the advantage and likely victory go to the other side.
• If they have 25% more force than you are attacking with, the defenders will score a decisive victory, and your forces will be probably be routed.

That all seems reasonable, so it can now be used as a yardstick. A steep hill might be worth x2 to the force atop it. So might a fortified wall. A palisade might be worth x1.75. A gentle slope, x1.5. How much might a moat be worth – one just enough to create sticky, clinging mud underfoot? The purpose of a moat isn’t to stop enemies, it’s to slow them down enough that archers can fill them full of holes, while preventing the use of siege towers (which are basically boxes full of attackers at the height of the walls). I could entertain arguments for effectiveness of everything from x4 to x10, but would probably say x6 or x7.5 is most reasonable – assuming there’s a castle wall on the far side to use as an archery platform!.

5.2 The GM’s advantage

The GM has a huge advantage – he creates the tactical situation that he wants to be present. The players have to adapt to whatever the GM provides them, unless they can somehow change it.

If the GM is an “honest” administrator of his game, he will adhere to a couple of ground rules:

• The tactical situation has to make sense, in terms of the surrounding environment;
• The choices that any NPC forces make have to be consistent with the tactical and strategic expertise of the NPCs and their general level of intelligence;
• The NPCs objectives should reasonable, given the culture to which they belong, and achievable – if everything goes their way, at worst;
• The Effective Might of the NPCs, taking the tactical situation, environment, and the enemy they expect to confront (which might not be the PCs) should be as close to reasonable as they can manage.

But, bearing those restrictions in mind, the GM has huge latitude to make things interesting – and to make things “interesting”. And that permits the formulation of a couple of really simple tactical guidelines.

6. Weaker Enemies

If the enemies that the PCs are to confront are weaker than the PCs in some respect, use conditions, terrain, and tactics to increase the effective might of the enemies and/or weaken the PCs.

7. Stronger Enemies

If the enemies that the PCs are to confront are stronger than the PCs in some respect, use conditions, terrain, and tactics to restrict the effective might of the enemies and/or strengthen the PCs.

8. Force Projection

Take your GM’s hat off for a moment, it’s time for a little more applies-to-everyone theory.

Military planners use the term “Force Projection” to describe the capacity of a military body to be effective outside of their territory. For RPG purposes, I use the term to refer to the effective damage that can be inflicted after everything is taken into account and relative to the enemy’s capacity to absorb that damage. So:

Chance of successful hit (%)
× number of strikes in a time period
× average damage / successful strike
÷ individual target’s average capacity
÷ number of targets
= Force Projection within 1 time period.

This yields a simple number that compares combat effectiveness of different tactical choices. It’s often more work than it’s worth if performed at the gaming table, but if done as part of prep, can yield useful information. In particular, the difference between your force projection and that of the enemy can be illuminating.

Let’s try it with some actual numbers and see what we get.

A character has a low-damage +2 weapon or a medium-high damage non-magical weapon. The enemy has an estimated 20 hit points and there are 6 of them. With the low-damage weapon, he has a 60% chance to hit, gets 5 strikes a minute, and does an average of 4 points of damage; with the high-damage weapon, he has a 50% chance to hit, gets 3 strikes a minute, but does an average of 12 points of damage. Which is his more effective choice?

Low-damage weapon: 60×5×4/20/6 = 300×4/20/6 = 1200/20/6 = 60/6 = 10 per minute.
High-damage weapon: 50×3×12/20/6 = 150×12/20/6 = 1800/20/6 = 90/6 = 15 per minute.

The high-damage weapon is more effective.

But wait – what if the high-damage weapon couldn’t be used until the targets were within arm’s reach, while the low-damage weapon could be used at range at a reduced chance to hit?

Well, it depends on what the specific values for range and accuracy drop-off (also known as range interval) are. But I find it more useful to abstract the situation a little more and instead of actual ranges, to think in terms of range intervals, which are defined as causing -10% chance to hit, cumulative.

Since the base chance to hit with the low-damage weapon is 60%, that defines 50%, 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% as the range intervals.

10×5×4/20/6 = 50×4/20/6 = 200/20/6 = 10/6 = 1.6667 per minute.
20×5×4/20/6 = 100×4/20/6 = 400/20/6 = 20/6 = 3.3333 per minute.
30×5×4/20/6 = 150×4/20/6 = 600/20/6 = 30/6 = 5 per minute.
40×5×4/20/6 = 200×4/20/6 = 800/20/6 = 40/6 = 6.6667 per minute.
50×5×4/20/6 = 250×4/20/6 = 1000/20/6 = 50/6 = 8.3333 per minute.
(60×5×4/20/6 = 10 as previously calculated.)

Add all those together, and you get force projection of 25 before the high-damage weapon can even strike. What’s more, the less-important numbers are the first to drop off, so even if the enemy starts at only the 30% range, you’re still going to get 20 of that 25.

Switching to the high-damage weapon at close range might require you to forego the 50% round. That’s a fairly large hunk of effectiveness to give up; to replace that lost force projection, the battle has to last 8.333 / (15-10) = 1.6667 minutes after all forces are within melee range. That’s minutes, not rounds!



Image by SilviaP_Design from Pixabay, background by Mike

There are a lot of variables involved, but on this basis, you could map out a fairly effective combat strategy for this character. It’s “use the low-damage rapid-fire weapon until the targets are two range intervals away. Assess the number of remaining enemy; and estimate how long it will take to defeat them in melee with the heavier weapon; if the answer is less than two, continue with the rapid-fire weapon.”

What if the rapid-fire weapon couldn’t be used once the character was engaged? Well, for a start, you would have to say that the game designers had never seen the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, to have included such a stupid game rule. But let that go, and assume that they have done it for game balance reasons – which, in my book, beats realism seven days a week and twice on game day. If that’s the case, then the 10 vs 15 comparison was comparing apples with oranges, and is no longer meaningful. In fact, the “10” becomes strictly hypothetical, because the weapon can’t be used at that range. The true maximum force projection of the weapon is 8.3333; any enemy still standing when you reach that will have to be taken out with the heavy melee-weapon.

Mobility clearly becomes a factor. If you can move enough to give an extra shot with the low-damage weapon at the 50% range, that’s clearly worth doing. If you can move enough to keep that distance between you and keep peppering the enemy from a distance, that’s even better – especially if they don’t have ranged weapons. All movement rates are relative to that of the enemy.

That’s the way to handle Force Projection: start as simply as possible and incorporate one complicating factor at a time, refining the tactics that result.

A lot of the time, you can more or less proceed on instinct. For example, it’s always better to weaken an enemy if it can be done at little or no cost; so if the enemy don’t have a ranged attack and you do, take advantage of it, but make sure that your forces are ready and waiting when they get into melee range.

9. Put Yourself In Enemy Shoes

Putting the GMing hat back on, how can you use what you’ve just learned? Well, you can determine the most effective tactics for your NPCs to use with a little more insight, for a start. Equally usefully, you can determine what will be the most effective approach the PCs can use in the situation – be that to charge and close to melee as quickly as possible, or to respond with counter-fire, or some combination. You can assess what each member of the party is bringing to the resulting combat equation, and identify any weak links that you can exploit.

Remember the two tactical guidelines that I offered earlier? You can target your use of conditions and circumstances to alter the relative might of the forces that the PCs have to confront – remembering that intelligent enemies will choose the most advantageous combination of positioning and strategy that they can, given what they may or may not know about what the PCs can do.

10. Range vs Melee

There are other tactical considerations to think about, as well, in terms of altering the tactical situation. I’ve already touched on the first of these – range. If you can hit the enemy and they can’t hit you, you’re likely to win the fight. If you can hit the enemy more often than they can hit you, that’s generally good too, even if the damage that you inflict is less. Understanding force projection enables you to determine whether or not a greater damage delivered in fewer hits gives one side or the other the advantage – and hence whether or not range gives one side or the other a strength or a weakness.

11. Unexpected Axes Of Attack

This is always a good one when you can pull it off.

It generally requires hidden forces and a sacrificial group of NPCs to act as “bait”. As soon as the “bait” sees the PCs, they start to fall back, raking the PCs with ranged attacks as they go; if the PCs pull out ranged weapons of greater force projection than the NPCs can muster, they turn and run.

Most PCs will be inclined to pursue; and that can leave them vulnerable to a surprise attack dropping from the ceiling on ropes, or using blowdarts from the river, or simply hitting the PCs from both sides and behind as soon as they have oriented themselves for a frontal attack.

Quite often, this is most effective when it is targeted at a PC who represents a specific point of vulnerability – in D&D terms, that’s often the mage, occasionally the rogue or cleric. Aim to remove a key point of strength from the enemy, or exploit a point of weakness.

12. The Role of Mobility

I’ve also touched on this already, but it bears thinking about. A more mobile force has an inherent advantage over a less mobile force – so if the PCs are more mobile, luring them into a tactical situation that reduces that mobility can be an effective tactic. If the NPCs are more mobile, think about how they would exploit that mobility.

Of course, there are three elements to mobility: speed, terrain, and maneuverability.

• Speed is obvious and the simplest element, so much so that the others are often ignored.
• Terrain can be handled in either of two ways, or as a combination of both: it can cap the speed that can be brought to bear, or it can reduce the speed that can be utilized effectively. Especially slippery or clinging mud, or broken ground with lots of treacherous-but-small elevation changes, or slopes, or ice, or buried vines that can be pulled tight by hidden reinforcements, or something that limits visibility, or smoke (which limits both visibility and respiration – it’s hard to fight effectively when you’re coughing uncontrollably). There are lots of choices here, so think very carefully about Mobility. Special attention should be paid to creatures who fly, and who are therefore unaffected by the terrain that ground forces have to contend with. Webs and vines can impair these creatures mobility, however – which can make a more powerful creature vulnerable to the PCs. None of this should happen by accident.
• The third element of Mobility is Maneuverability – the ability to change direction more quickly than the enemy. You can see this element on display in all football games regardless of code, and often in conflict with greater speed.

There are often secondary considerations to contemplate – size and weight.

• Sometimes bigger characters have the advantage – if they can get up to speed, they may be able to bull their way through light resistance. At other times, space will be confined, and smaller characters will have the advantage. Contemplate a series of 4′ deep pits, just large enough for a goblin to get into; now equip those goblins with spears and cover with a camouflage. Large characters can get themselves trapped in such a pit, giving the goblin in the pit room to slash at the PC with a knife but otherwise taking them out of the battle; those who don’t fall into a pit can be attacked with spears with relative impunity because the goblins are below out of arm’s reach unless you’ve got a pole-arm; only a small character can hope to dive into one of these holes to fight it out, mano-a-mano, with the creature inside.
• Greater weight is never an advantage unless coupled with both mobility and with increased size, when it can help in the “bulling through” mentioned previously. The rest of the time, it slows a character down, costing them mobility. Lighter characters, on the other hand, may be able to cross weakened bridges and the like that will simply collapse under the weight of a typical PC.

13. Many attacks vs few attacks

When people write about there being “Might” in Numbers, what they are really talking about is there being Might in the number of attacks. More attacks are better then less, all else being equal, is what they are trying to say, and one way of getting more attacks is to present the enemy with greater number of attackers.

If you have ten enemies who can attack in a given period of time, and they have a 60% chance of hitting, that means that in any given period of time, six of them can be expected to hit the target. If they are dividing their attacks against two targets, that’s three each. Are they dividing their fire? Or would it be more effective to target a single threat and hope to remove it from battle?

I once divided a goblin raiding force who knew that they were going to be attacking these specific PCs, who divided into five squads (one per PC) and proceeded to develop plans targeting each individual – in a coordinated strike. So they threw nets over the fighters, employed smoke grenades against the mage, used lassos to disarm the cleric while hurling sling bullets from multiple directions at him, tossed an immobilizing glue on the rogue, and I forget the tactic used on the fifth character. Three were captives in one round, the fourth was down two rounds later, and the fifth almost made a narrow escape only to be stopped by knife-blades at the throats of the rest of the party. Of course, it wasn’t too long before the captives broke free and created all sorts of havoc amongst the raiding force, who made the fundamental mistake of letting the PCs communicate with each other and coordinate an escape plan, but it shows the value of tactics – and of multiple attacks.

But here’s another way to think about the whole question: “Many” attacks can be dispersed and have cumulative effects; “Few” attacks need to be specifically targeted. If you have limited opportunities to strike, you need to target the most effective targets to strike at. This is the whole concept of a “surgical strike” in a nutshell; it avoids (to the maximum extent possible) the collateral damage that results from a more generally-dispersed attack. In anti-personnel mines and terror attacks, the priorities are inverted; you want more generalized damage.

It follows that you should always prefer many-attack modes unless you can identify and attack specific targets to achieve a specific purpose – all else being equal.

13.1 The Lightness Of Numbers

There can be a natural inclination, when attacking a small group with a greater number of attackers, to divide the attacks amongst the target. Doing so might yield 5 or 6 attackers per PC, for example. This is a tactical mistake. Greater numbers of combatants for a given collective power level require each to be a less-effective combatant, so 5-6 attackers might not be enough to bring a PC down; this enables the PCs (who will generally be able to take out a combatant each in a round) to reduce the attacking force by 6. The next time, it’s 4-5 attackers per PC – which in many cases still won’t be enough to bring a PC down. So another 6 attackers fall, and now it’s 3-4 attackers per PC, and most PCs for whom this sort of fight is fair and balanced still won’t go down. Next round, the attackers are down to 2-3 per PC, about 1/3 of the original force, having achieved (relatively) nothing – a morale check is certainly warranted at this point, and the battle only goes downhill from there.

It’s far more tactically sound to accept that every PC you don’t target will take out an NPC and to use the entire force to bring down one or two PCs in the first round. Let’s say two go down – that leaves three. So the next round, instead of 25-30 attackers, you have 22-27. That’s still enough to take down another PC. The other two PCs take out two more of the attackers, leaving 20-25. That’s still enough to take down one of the PC heavy-hitters, though it might take a couple of rounds – so 4 attackers down, and 1 PC. That leaves one single PC to fight off 16-21 attackers; and it’s the PC who should probably be facing a morale check.

What counts is the number of attacks that the PCs have, collectively, relative to the number of attacks doing average damage it will require for the PCs to remove a single enemy from the battle – and vice-versa. If you’re facing an enemy with 140 hit points and you only do 3.5 on average per attack, that’s 40 attacks to take them down. If you have 20 attackers trying, with one attack a round, and they have a 25% chance of hitting, that’s effectively 5 successful attacks in a round. So it will take eight rounds to take down the PC even if you don’t lose a single attacker while doing so.

In those eight rounds, the PC will probably get 2-3 attacks a round, for a total of 16-24. If he’s got a 70% chance of success, say, that’s effectively 11-17 attacks (roughly), and if it takes three hits on average to take out an attacker, that’s 3-5 or maybe 6 attackers. Then there are all the attacks by other PCs; these are likely to do between half and 3/4 as much, each, assuming none of them are fighters. If there are three other PCs, that’s 3-6×0.5-0.75 x 3, or 4.5-12. Adding in the original 3-6 gives 7.5-18, or an average of about 12. It will cost more than half the attackers to take out the front-line fighter if you only start with twenty, and one attack a turn.

But that’s still a heck of a lot more effective than 2/3 of the attacking force wiped out for NO PCs down.

Of course, the reality in combat is a little different. Each PC would ‘pin down’ one enemy, preventing them from attacking the target (but enabling them to attack that PC). When the PC took the ‘pinned’ attacker down (by getting enough attacks on them), they would proceed to ‘pin’ a second attacker, and so on. So in reality, the attacking force would be even less effective than the theoretical one described, luck notwithstanding. Conclusion: Twenty attackers with one attack a round each is not enough to threaten this party, but there are too many of them for this to be a quick fight – which makes this a fairly tedious and boring fight.

40 attackers, and two attacks a round? That’s twice as many and twice as many attacks per, and probably boosts their chances of a successful hit by 5 or 10% as well. So they would be a smidgen more than four times as effective, and that eight rounds is suddenly 2 rounds, maybe three. If luck goes their way, they might take down the entire party by focusing their attacks on one target at a time; if they only do average well, two badly-wounded PCs will be left at the end of the fight, desperately trying to save the lives of the rest of the party, if they can. This indicates slightly more than a fair fight, the balance has swung markedly in favor of the attackers. “Fair” is probably 32-34.

The lesson to take away is that there is only weight in numbers if you have enough numbers to create weight, and that if you’re relying on the weight of numbers, everyone should pile on as much as possible. “United we stand, divided we fall” – unless each division is enough to take out their target before they are killed off in turn.

How many? Just to get a sense of the numbers required, we need 32 to reliably take down our 120-HP fighter. If there are two more characters at roughly 3/4 of that combat effectiveness, that’s 32×2×3/4, or 48 for the pair. One more character at about half the effectiveness of the fighter is another 16. That’s 96 attackers before the “split up amongst the party” becomes effective. You might get away with fewer, but it would be taking a chance of failure. 96 vs 32 is 3:1, so the “divide attacks amongst the party” is 1/3 as effective as focused targeting.

As GM you can exploit this – if pitching a weak foe at the PCs, give them a unified target; if throwing an encounter at the PCs that’s stronger than they are, divide it’s attention amongst the PCs at least some of the time, and you effectively weaken it considerably.

14. Hidden Resources

PCs fighting a bunch of slightly weaker NPCs is a lot of fun for the PCs – until the NPCs pull out a potion of mass healing or some such other hidden advantage. It’s all well and good for the PCs to have access to such things, but not half as much ‘fun’ when the enemy uses them, too. Or maybe there’s a magical field that grants everyone who is wearing one of “these” armbands a bonus to hit – at least for a while. Or the enemies have hidden allies who are casting healing spells in their directions.

Most GMs find tracking ammunition usage to be too much work – see He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Servomech: User-friendly Encumbrance in RPGs for a more practical way of doing so – but an ammo cache is practically the very definition of “hidden resources”.

15. Knowledge

Not all knowledge can be translated into a combat advantage, but when knowledge does have tactical benefits, it tends to be a game-changer. Knowing that three rounds after the volcano gurgles, burning mud will erupt from certain fissures and cracks, is definitely a combat advantage.

Probably the most useful knowledge in tactical terms is knowing what alterations your forces have made to the combat conditions – where the hidden pits and tripwires are, and so on. The next most useful knowledge is what the opposition’s goals are; being able to frustrate those ambitions if you’re going to be defeated anyway is a quite satisfactory form of spite.

Using knowledge in a combat situation is a two-fold problem.

First, what knowledge might confer an advantage?
Second, what advantages can the attackers wrest from the situation they find themselves in?

As a GM, these are always useful things to have thought about in advance because what’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander – if the PCs have appropriate skills or knowledge, they should receive the appropriate benefits.

16. Dirty Tricks

Unless you start invoking “rules for the conduct of combat” – which are appropriate to some genres and not others – there are limited things you can do that might fall into the category of “dirty tricks”. Deceptions and subterfuge, of course, always qualify – making it look like there are a lot more of you than there actually are, for example. I once made my players totally paranoid with a group of giants cloaked in illusions of being Halflings – they lured the PCs in by looking relatively helplessly outmatched, baited the hooks by swallowing flasks of water, and releasing the illusions. The PCs were convinced that they had used potions of polymorphing, and that they were still Halflings on the inside, and that the transformations would wear off in time. This deception placed them at a number of tactical disadvantages.

Outside this range, all dirty tricks are designed to do one of two things in the tactical sense:

• Delay and occupy the PCs while the enemy maneuver and attack; or
• Delay and occupy the PCs while the enemy attack and maneuver.

There’s a subtle difference between the two; the first is all about getting into position to attack more effectively, while the second is about attacking and then retreating to a position where you can defend more effectively.

Finally, there’s confusion. The side that is less confused (because they know what’s causing the confusion) is always at a tactical advantage.

17. Tactical Diversity vs Focused Development

What is it better to have: a well-developed diversity of attack options of lesser effectiveness, or a relative paucity of options but greater effectiveness with the few options that you do have?

The combat effectiveness of “superior” enemies in most game designs does not increase at the same rate as overall combat capability because some of that effectiveness is diverted to greater diversity of tactical options. This is as true of point-based constructions as it is in games like D&D.

While it’s generally more accurate to think of the stack of abilities by effectiveness as a pyramid, with the total combat effectiveness represented by a fraction of the total area of the pyramid. It’s often easier to understand if you “lean” the pyramid so that one side is vertical, as shown to the right. Note, too, that not all these are combat abilities; the main ability at the base of the pyramid probably is, but the others are generally more diverse.

I think of such stacks as “Swiss army knives”, a tool for most every need. The trick is always to choose between them when the pressure is on (my advice in that regard: slow down and take your time; you aren’t the monster and don’t have to pretend to be as familiar with what it can do as it would be). This is a foe that is rarely without something that they can do in any given situation, but they will probably have to do it multiple times to be effective.

The alternative is to focus on a narrow group of abilities. This makes you more effective in a limited range of situations and more likely to be helpless outside of that range.

Now consider these alternatives in a tactical sense. The first character can try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else; they can keep characters guessing about what they will be hit with next. Tactics for such encounters are about preserving options and maintaining flexibility, not getting pushed into a corner (physically or metaphorically). The second character is about altering the tactical situation until it matches one of those limited group of options.

18. The Bigger Picture

By now, most people will find that their head is buzzing with details in swarms, and the big picture has become almost completely obscured by fogs of confusion, forgotten.

GMs should never make a tactical decision without reviewing it before it’s final for its impact on the bigger picture.

I don’t care how many d6 you can inflict on the fighter; if that doesn’t advance the primary goal, forget punishing the meat-sack punching bag and pick something else to do that does advance your primary goal – unless the attacker is of a species that is prone to losing it’s temper or getting caught up in the moment, of course.

19. The Value Of The Temporary Imbalance

“Timing is everything” or so they say. When applied to tactical conditions in an RPG, this provides interesting opportunities to the GM:

• additional strength conferred in a temporary manner;
• protection to a vulnerability that only lasts a short period of time;
• windows of vulnerability…

There are all sorts of potential twists waiting to be explored!

As for how and when they should be explored and exploited, I employ the Ultimate Tactical Blueprint.

20. The Ultimate Tactical Blueprint

How do you apply and employ all these thoughts, ideas, and principles? You have to keep in mind the bigger picture that lies beyond even what the combatant wants to achieve, and that is the metagame objective that you have, or should have, as GM: to entertain, and be entertained.

Think of combat as a story that has yet to be written, and ask yourself, “how can I make this fight more interesting? How can I make it more dramatic?”

Everything else is just a means to that end, a detail that can be exploited on occasion to achieve these objectives. Making weaker foes more significant through tactics makes them more interesting and more viable. Making stronger foes more available for encounters increases the variety of encounter that you can present, making the game more interesting by incorporating more interesting things in it. And everybody wins when you achieve that.

Have you ever watched a repeat of a show that you once enjoyed and thought, “this hasn’t aged well?”

Have you ever re-read a book that you enjoyed in your youth, only to discover that the magic just wasn’t there any more?

When you listen to old favorites on the radio, do they ever sound passe, because they just can’t conjure up the excitement and enthusiasm that they once did?

Do old movies take you back to a simpler time – or are they just slower and duller than today’s blockbusters?

Why do we think RPGs don’t suffer from the same fate?

Today, I want to talk about campaign aging – first, because I have campaigns that are old enough to experience the symptoms; second, because I routinely future-proof my campaigns to permit longevity if everyone wants them to continue; and third, because this preparation actually improves a campaign in the short- to-medium-term, making these useful techniques to implement, even if your campaigns never last more than a few months.

And the place to start, obviously, is with human biology.

Human Aging

From a biochemical standpoint, life consists of a myriad of chemical processes, all of which come and go with lightning speed. Of these, one of the most significant is the creation of new cells to replace worn-out ones according to the DNA blueprint. This happens constantly, and more quickly than most people imagine.

There are 50-75 Trillion cells in the human body, and over a 7-10 year span, every last one of them (with one or two exceptions) will be replaced. Some cells don’t even last that long – Red blood cells live for about four months, tops, while white blood cells live on average a little more than a year. Skin cells live about two or three weeks. Colon cells have it rough: they die off after about four days. Sperm cells have a life span of only about three days, according to LiveScience.com.

The exceptions I mentioned: brain cells aren’t replaced when they wear out, and it’s possible that the same is true of damaged nerve cells, especially those in the spinal chord. There are clearly limits to the process, too – if an organ, digit, or limb are removed, they don’t grow back.

Human aging is die to a number of complex processes. One of these is believed to be the accumulation of errors during DNA replication, a necessary stage in the creation of replacement cells. This is certainly one of the primary causes of cancer. In addition to direct damage to the function of the organ that has a cell replaced with a defective copy, there may also be secondary effects that compound with that damage.

For the last 200 years or so, medical science has concentrated on one principle aim: avoiding the onset of death. Diseased limbs and organs are removed and replaced if possible, and if not, a replacement part is manufactured. We have learned how to transplant organs from one body to another. We’ve learned about blood interactions and diet and toxicity and the way poisons work, and a whole host of other notable achievements. Every time we’ve advanced the point of onset of death, new conditions have been exposed, and treatments devised.

I have been prescribed medications not because there was anything dangerously wrong, medically, but because my blood pressure was just a little bit high and my heart rate a little too fast. These are preventative measures aimed at avoiding a cardiac event, not at actually treating one. I also take a number of medications because there are some conditions that increase the risk of serious problems – so I lower my cholesterol and my blood sugar, and infuse my body with specific nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, that I seem to find it difficult to absorb as part of my regular diet.

In one episode of The West Wing, it was stated that overwhelmingly, the first symptom of cardiac failure is death. Well, that’s no longer true – not completely, anyway. But most people don’t get tested, because the tests are time-consuming and expensive, and the expertise needed to interpret them is rare and even more expensive.

Such care is designed to help me live to a ripe old age by avoiding death, and controlling conditions that can (and have, in past eras) led to death. Very few of the medications that I consume daily are aimed at improving quality of life, but there are a few of those, too, designed to mitigate the symptoms of aging.

That’s what medical science aims to do: to prevent death and crippling conditions, and to prevent symptoms and injuries from impacting quality of life more than they have to.

RPG Geriatrics

With that as a framework, a guiding metaphor, lets consider an RPG campaign.

Ongoing gaming processes are the equivalent of ‘life’ – so long as players turn up, make decisions in response to the situations described by the GM, and inject random numbers through dice when necessary to measure the effectiveness of an action resulting from such a decision, the campaign can be said to have a pulse – to be alive. More important are the equivalent of higher brain functions – those ongoing routine functions might be the equivalent of a pulse, but it’s the stories and adventures that they facilitate that constitute a meaningful life.

Extending the ‘life’ of a campaign simply means avoiding premature campaign death and sustaining the quality of the ‘life’ experienced by the participants. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Let’s set aside the questions of ‘quality of life’ for a moment and focus on the needs of sheer survival. Exactly what kills campaigns, and what can be done about it?

Avoiding Campaign Death

So, what kills campaigns? Aside from a number of traumatic events that can put an end to a campaign overnight – the equivalent of a massive stroke or coronary or accident – what we’re talking about, more than anything else, is simply age.

Campaigns age the way people do – through the accumulation of plot and personal errors, compounded with the side effects of these errors. These rarely disrupt the ongoing ‘heartbeat’ (though badly mismanaged house rules and relationships can do so); no, they make it harder and harder to produce coherent plots that aren’t cookie-cutter repeats of something you’ve already done.

There comes a time when the GM has run every interesting plot, employed every plot twist, plumbed the depths of all the significant characters, and is just going through the motions. When that happens, the campaign is doomed – it’s only a question of how quickly the axe will fall. While it more frequently occurs gradually, the well can run dry very suddenly, so let’s add ‘the loss of GM interest’ to the list of traumatic events.

Quite often, the players will reach the point of giving up before the GM even gets that far, simply because there’s a narcissistic thread in all of us that encourages us to love our own creations that little bit longer and harder. If you run an RPG and no-one shows up, repeatedly, that campaign is (usually) dead, some extraordinary coincidence notwithstanding. While it’s not universally true, it is generally too close to truth for comfort that any given player is only really interested in his character. He will tolerate the plumbing of the depths within another character, but only if he gets his fair share of the spotlight along the way. Or maybe the plots or the GMing style are just a little too familiar to the player, or simply focus on things that the player isn’t interested in.

It doesn’t have to be as extreme enough that the player gets bored, either – you just need enough disinterest that other activities and opportunities take priority in the players’ mind. If offered a choice, they don’t choose your game.

Real life can kill campaigns, too – losing key players or key characters with minimal or no warning due to circumstances. Have you ever had a player announce, totally out of the blue, “I’m moving to [country X, thousands of miles away] next week to become a stand-up comedian?” I have!

How about “I’m getting married and my wife doesn’t like me playing RPGs?” That’s yes again, in my case. Or “I’m moving to another city because it will be a healthier environment for my unborn child?” Or “I’ve gotten a job in another city and have to leave next weekend?” Or “[Player Name] has passed away from a sudden heart attack?” I’ve had all those, too.

Without players, there is no campaign. These are definitely traumas that can kill campaigns, too.

But it’s not enough to simply avoid campaign traumas. Old age gets us all in the end, if nothing beats it to the punch.

There are all sorts of metaphors that could be employed at this point. ‘Campaign Errors are like cholesterol, blocking the campaign’s arteries’ is one. ‘Campaign errors are like DNA replication errors; some are benign, but others are malignant, breeding still more complications and errors, until the Campaign is overwhelmed,’ is another.

But make no mistake; errors in an adventure can kill a campaign quickly or slowly, or they can simply linger until something else commits the deed.

Traumatic Events

Before looking at slow deaths, let’s deal with the more traumatic sudden-death syndromes that can occur and how to treat these problems.

The loss of a key player

Most of the campaigns in which Stephen Tunnicliff was a player have continued, one way or another. There are three that have not. One is simply on hiatus, waiting to resume when everyone has the time available. The other two were terminal cases.

In the Rings Of Time campaign, Stephen was one of only two players, and the entire campaign was geared toward the ultimate objective shared by those two. Take him away and the campaign would be like a chair with one leg missing – you could stay upright on it for a while, with an effort, but the collapse is inevitable.

The other victim was the Shards Of Divinity campaign. Stephen was not the only player, and not even the focal player of the campaign; so it was thought that it could continue. But Stephen was the “life of the party” within the campaign; enthusiasm (both mine as GM and that of the players, equally) simply waned until it died.

Death is not the only reason a campaign can lose a key player. All those other traumatic player losses that I described earlier didn’t kill the campaigns in question. In some cases, the character simply wasn’t essential enough; in others, a solution was found in which another player took over running the PC; or one PC was killed off while another took their place. In still other cases, a scheduling solution permitted play to continue more intermittently, or even regularly.

Ultimately, to survive the death of a key player, the GM has to do two things: (1) Identify what made the player so essential to the campaign; and (2) find a replacement who will bring those same qualities to the game. Both easier said than done, but no-one ever promised it would be easy.

Of course, if you make some preparations in advance, it can make the whole job a lot easier. I’ll get to those measures as they come up.



Photo by Niels Kolb from FreeImages

The loss of a key character

This happens one of two ways: (1) You lose the player as well as the character, but it’s the latter loss that is campaign-critical; or (2) The player gives up the character, but is willing or even eager to stay in the game. What makes the losses critical in both cases is that the character in question was the focal point of too many of the GM’s plans.

Here, you have a few more options to consider. You can replace the character as the focal point of those plans; you can keep the character as an NPC; you can arrange for a new player to take over the character (with the former owner’s permission); or you can replace those plans, effectively throwing away most of the old campaign plan and creating a new one that stretches forward from this point of in-game time. Or even some combination of the above.

It’s important to distinguish between a character’s mindset and the capabilities that he or she brings to the team. The first is very hard to replace, the second is trivially easy.

Something that I learned from Babylon-5: for every character, no matter how central, have an exit plan, a way for them to leave the spotlight, either permanently or for a very long time.

If one of the players in my Superhero campaign, Zenith-3, were to decide to call it quits, or got tired of the character that they are running. I would be able to cope. I have an exit plan in place for each of them. To pick one at random, let’s say that Nick left; he runs a mage, Runeweaver. Now, Runeweaver is too complex a character for anyone to simply take over, so that would also remove a character who is central to a lot of my plans. Some of those central roles would be taken over by another character, sometimes a PC, sometimes an NPC. Some would simply retreat into the campaign background, in-game events like any other. Some might be simply dropped completely. But the campaign would survive.

The loss of a key foundation

This only happens when playing in a contemporary time and place, or a contemporaneous one.

Scenario 1: Let’s say that you were playing a cold-war spy campaign in the 1980s. Suddenly, the Berlin Wall comes down and the Soviet Union breaks apart. A key piece of your campaign foundation has just disappeared from under you. This leaves you with only a couple of solutions: Continue on as though nothing had changed, putting your campaign into (effectively) a parallel world from that point on; or incorporate the new events into your campaign, even though you don’t know the whole story and who the real players behind-the-scenes are, and possibly never will.

The first puts your campaign’s narrative above that of the real world, the second means that you are left without an antagonist – a role that you will have to fill.

You only have until your next game session to decide. Your choice will have repercussions for the campaign that will persist until its ultimate conclusion, so we aren’t talking trivialities, here.

Wouldn’t thing go smoothly if you had realized, back when you were first thinking about the campaign, that this might happen in some way, and had devoted a little thought along the way to the decision? You need not have actually made a decision yet – but at least you’ve thought through the alternative choices and have some idea of how the campaign will evolve as a result.

Scenario 2: One of the features of the TORG system was that all games were (supposedly) being played in a shared reality, with a newsletter keeping GMs abreast of developments elsewhere. While this might work for isolated adventures, with very limited continuity, it really is catastrophically lethal for a campaign. For example, you might build your entire campaign around the character known as The Gaunt Man, one of the primary villains of the game world that comes with the system. What do you do when some other group somewhere snuffs him?

I saw this potential problem coming right away, and since I intended to run a campaign, and not a string of unrelated adventures, I ditched the association. I made my decision in advance, and built the campaign around the consequences of that decision. Game supplements published afterwards and new material from the game company could either bend to my will, or be disregarded within my campaign.

Official TORG brings in the Incan space gods? Sorry, not happening. TORG officially kills off the Gaunt Man? My version is alive and well and sends you his regards. TORG officially rewrites the Cyberpapacy by having it invaded by the Pulp Realm? Mine remains as it was, thank you kindly. If you give me an idea or resource I can actually use, I’ll gleefully incorporate it; but if it doesn’t fit, it’s gone.

The same decisions have to be made: reflect the changing reality in your game or put your game above the source material.

I can be reliably expected to adopt the latter approach, every time. The same hard line also applies to third party supplements for game systems – I’ll incorporate them on my terms, or not at all.

As shown in Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Doppelgangers, to make “The Complete Guide To Doppelgangers” (a game supplement from Goodman Games), work in my world, I had to write a sequel that was even longer than the original. They make a great 1-2 punch, though, and you need to buy the Goodman Games supplement to use my add-ons.



Photo by praise139 from FreeImages, cropped by Mike

The loss of player interest

This is completely lethal to a campaign, but it usually results from campaign toxicity that has built up over time.

That means that there have usually been warning signs that have either been ignored or that went unnoticed. If you detect and act on those warning signs, this trauma never results; if you wait until things reach the ultimate conclusion, it’s usually too late.

But it’s usually the case that these toxic problems completely blindside the GM, who is under the impression that everything is right on track; that’s because he is looking at the big picture through rose-colored glasses. Some GMs become prickly and precious when their hard work is criticized; again, a natural reaction.

Therefore, a GM needs some means of diagnosing the health of their campaign from an objective perspective, but that’s easier said than done. The best indicators of health that I have noticed are when the players say or show that they had fun, or very interesting, or unexpected, or that they enjoyed the session, or keep coming up with ideas and thoughts about their experiences even after the session has wrapped, or engage in extra activity outside of the game like sending emails with questions. If none of those things are happening, it’s time for the GM to look more closely at the campaign because it may be ill.

If there’s a problem, it could come in a great many forms. Perceived or actual favoritism, a Players vs GM mentality, a lack of sufficient rewards, perceived or actual railroading, personality conflicts, a toxic playing atmosphere, rules problems, plot problems, and ideological conflicts are just some of the many possible issues.

Whatever the problem is, you have to identify it and take immediate action to expunge it from your game. That can be trivially simple or it can be tremendously difficult, such as asking a player to leave. Every circumstance will be different, so I can’t offer much in the way of meaningful advice.

The loss of GM interest

When you eat the same food, day after day, you eventually get sick of it. When that happens, you might try some variation on the same food, or you might look for something completely different with which to replace the boring old meal, whatever it was. Sometimes, you will eventually go back to the old choice, when you tire of the replacement, and possibly of the replacements’ replacement.

Other times, you can simply discover that you don’t enjoy eating something anymore that you used to love. I get that way with chocolate, especially white chocolate, for example. I went through a phase of hating pumpkin – it lasted about 14 years.

The psychology of why we like what we like and why those preferences change is poorly understood and incredibly complicated. Fortunately, for my needs within this article, it suffices to say that it happens.

So it is with campaigns. Sometimes, you just need to take a break from the same old thing before you can resume it; most of the campaigns I run take most of December and most of January off, 6-8 weeks a year in total. Given that they occur monthly, some will miss one session, some two.

Even so, it’s possible for the GM to simply run out of breath in a campaign without warning. At other times, it can be exhaustion caused by bingeing.

I’ve learned the hard way that if you run a campaign one day a weekend, write that campaign on the days immediately before and after, and work on the rules of that campaign throughout the rest of the week in between, by the time six months is up, you will be tired of that campaign and everything associated with it. Every day per week off that you can take adds 6 months to the time before that exhaustion point is reached. At best – write the day before you run, and do no work on the campaign in between – that gets you two-and-a-half years of constant weekly play before fatigue sets in. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Running that campaign every second weekend and replacing it with something completely different in tone doesn’t just double the number of years before fatigue sets in, it quadruples it to ten years.

Once-a-month play can get it as high as twenty or thirty years, or more, because you are no longer binge-consuming the same thing, day after day after day.

But inevitably, sometimes the GM just loses interest one weekend. He simply can’t be bothered any more. That often occurs when the campaign that has resulted is not what the GM pictured when he started it; I’ve seen campaigns grind to a complete halt because the players took over and dictated that they were going to be doing something else within the game than what the GM expected.

When this happens to you, it’s time for drastic action. There are several solutions of increasing severity:

1. Take a break for a weekend and play something completely different.
2. Introduce an “Elsewhen” alternative campaign thread that you can explore whenever you need some more substantial relief.
3. Shut down the campaign for a fixed period of time and run something completely different in the interim. Make sure that you players know that you’re feeling burned out and need a break, and that the campaign will resume on such-and-such a date.
4. Inflict catastrophic change upon the campaign such that it is suddenly something completely different to what it was. Caution: there is usually no going back.
5. Shut the campaign down for a LONG period of time, usually indefinitely. I’m talking about a decade or more. If you don’t scratch it for long enough, the old itch will eventually return. You will probably then need to revamp it into a sequel campaign, most of your players will have other commitments or have dropped out of gaming entirely.

I’ve never tried the “catastrophic change” option, but I’ve employed all the others when the need arose.

The final tale of a GM losing interest happens when it all starts to feel more like work and less like play. Preventing this requires drastic action – you need to find a way to take the prep needs down several notches, even if that means surgery on the campaign – because it’s generally solo activities that feel more like indentured servitude and not the actual playing time.

Again, sometimes a break can be all you need to recharge those batteries, and sometimes you may need to take even more drastic action to rekindle your enthusiasm; the recommended treatment is very much an intermediate solution.

The Roads To Recovery

Catastrophic campaign death is not inevitable; it can be avoided. If you leave it to the last minute to do so (and sometimes there’s no helping that), it can merely result in the campaign getting very sick for a while. Uncover a problem quickly enough, and it may not even be noticed.

Quite often, though, what doesn’t kill you still leaves the campaign convalescent, limping along for a while. Make no bones about that, and be prepared to consider putting the campaign on “light duties” or even “bed-rest” for a while. The roads to recovery can be long ones, full of unexpected bumps, twists, and bruises.

Lifetimes

Whenever the subject of campaign longevity comes up, someone always raises the question of what a campaign’s typical lifetime is, anyway. My stock reply is that no-one’s ever done the statistics so no-one knows.

Well, that’s not good enough for Campaign Mastery. So, here are my thoughts: Some campaigns are quick – no longer than a single adventure or a single session’s play. Sometimes, that’s even by design. Others are long-lived, experiencing multiple generations in comparison.

It’s my belief that the product of a campaign’s lifespan in adventures, multiplied by the number of campaigns with that lifespan, equals the division of one dumbbell curve by another, as a measurement of the probability of any given campaign having that lifetime.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? So, let’s say 6d6 divided by d6 (it’s not, but it’s a good start). The lowest result on the 6d6 is 6, and the highest result on 1d6 is 6, so the lowest result of the resulting probability curve is 1. The average of 6d6 is 21, and the average of 1d6 is 3.5, so the average result will be 6. The maximum result of 6d6 is 36, the minimum result of 1d6 is one, so the maximum of the divided die roll is 36.

This is a curve that peaks early, and then has a long rightward tail of low-probability outcomes. Mapping out the resulting curve can also show a secondary (much smaller) peak of probability or even more – this example actually has three, indicated by arrows on the graph below. Note that I’m not saying that this is the exact probability curve of campaign longevity, only that I think it probably looks something like it.

This actually makes more sense if you think of it as a series of scaled dumbbell curves compounding together. You see similar results when you cross-reference age against mortality rates in olden times, though perhaps not this exaggerated. And that’s the key – it indicates that there are a series of thresholds that a campaign has to cross to gain access to the next phase of longevity.

What exactly these thresholds are remains open to debate. Clearly, one of the first is design intent – if you only intend a campaign to last one adventure, it’s not very likely to extend very far beyond it (there are exceptions). What the other challenges are, and precisely when they occur in the course of a campaign’s lifetime, is uncertain.

As a campaign ages, two forces compete for superiority within the campaign, and it seems likely that balancing these will be one of the last thresholds that has to crossed. These are Degeneration and Rejuvenation.

Degeneration

Degeneration is how I describe the atrophy that occurs as plot and character options are taken off the table because they’ve been done already. This not only makes the GM’s job more tedious, it makes it harder to create adventures that engage the players, and puts increasing stress and strain on verisimilitude. It has all sorts of toxic effects on the campaign as it is experienced at the game table, in other words.

The distinction is important; the GM might have all sorts of original ideas, but if the road to them lies in a channel of boring, the campaign could easily shoal out before it ever gets to those interesting ideas. Or the GM might have all sorts of interesting short-range ideas but none of them seem to go anywhere substantial. Any campaign that lasts long enough will almost certainly experience one, if not both, of these problems in phases.

Rejuvenation

Rejuvenation combats degeneration by introducing new situations, new ideas, new contexts, new cast members, and new relationships. They not only make the players look at what you are currently offering in a new light, but can force reevaluation of the old, and even make it new again. If carried out in such a way that the past remains consistent, it builds incredible depth into the campaign; if it forces an inconsistency into the past that has to be resolved, it causes it throw out offshoots of plot that create breadth. Both are good, and both directly counter the trend towards degeneration.

The Slow Death

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so it is said. Sometimes, that might be true – if you learn from the experience and adapt to the changing reality. Traumatic events that don’t kill you right away can return to finish the job if you don’t modify your circumstances – or don’t modify them enough.

Each of us has a line that we will not cross, in terms of modifying our behavior, because crossing that line would sacrifice too much quality of life. Mere existence is not enough. It may be selfish, when viewed from the perspective of family and friends, but there are times when it’s right to be selfish – or right not to be. Every wrong answer in this area is someone else’s right one.

So it is with campaigns. There’s only so far you can go in preserving the life of a campaign before it is no longer recognizable – and so many of these life-extending acts involve ad-hoc surgery, that never fully heals, that the patient can easily die on the operating table from the induced stress of the surgery, anyway. Like doctors, we’re bound to try, up to the point at which the effort becomes futile – but that point is different for every GM.

Proactive Anagathics

It’s not enough to simply avoid these problems, but it’s a start. Preventative maintenance is intended to keep a car from breaking down, just as preventative medicine is intended to keep the body from breaking down.

In the latter quarter of the 20th century, it became popularly recognized that activity was necessary for the maintenance of biological longevity potential and realization of that potential. The phrase “use it or lose it” has been in common circulation ever since. Even more recent revelations that some of the exercise forms that were most popular at different times could be counterproductive in health terms for certain individuals and certain conditions has not mitigated this common advice.

Management of my diabetes would be a lot simpler if my back injury did not restrict the activity levels of which I am capable so severely, for example. When I was younger, I used to walk the 12 km (about 7.5 mile) route shown below from gaming every Saturday, with a 125kg (approx 275 lb) pack on my back. Google’s estimate of 2 hrs 37 minutes is a little optimistic, it used to take me 3-4 hours (I did once manage it in 2 hrs 45m, though) – because I could only afford to use public transport one way and eat on the day. These days, I struggle to walk more than 150-200 meters (about 500-650 feet).

Map produced using Google Maps, data ® 2019 Google. Click on the image to open a larger, more legible version. I’ve highlighted a number of iconic Sydney locations that were close by, just because.

As a result, I’m keenly aware of the impact of minimal exercise, and of doing what I can to at least maintain my current fitness levels.

Campaigns are a little different, in that the routine activities don’t do anything in particular to increase the “health” of the campaign; they do nothing but keep the “heartbeat” ticking over. That’s because a campaign is a collection of stories, (or possibly one larger story) and those activities are just means to the end of generating that story through interactions – characters & rules, players and GM, players and Characters, PCs and NPCs, PCs & environment – the list of interaction types goes on and on.

Variety of interaction is the campaign equivalent of keeping active, of exercising to maintain or improve health and fitness. Every piece of advice that you can think of regarding exercising for health applies – sometimes only as a metaphor – to variety of interaction in this context.

But, just as I take vitamin supplements and the like to enhance my quality of life, so there are other measures that can be taken at a campaign level. On their own, they aren’t to ensure good health, but in conjunction with Variety of Interaction, they can ward off or assist in the management of various health crises along the way.

Continuity Resets

I think of these as “checkpoints”, moments of stability in the story of the campaign. When you reach a checkpoint, you declare what has been to be as canonical as anything in the campaign background, fixed and relatively immutable. If something goes catastrophically wrong, you can simply fall back to the state of play as it was at the last continuity reset and proceed from there.

How canonical should a campaign background be? is an obvious followup question. Without going into it too deeply – this is already a long article (5800 words and counting) – I treat a campaign background as past issues of a comic book. Anything within can be altered or rewritten as necessary provided that such changes in continuity would not have been obvious to the participants of the past events at the time – but that this should not be done whimsically, but always to achieve a definite and deliberate purpose within the context of the campaign’s future from the point of continuity alteration decision onwards. In other words, consistency matters, too.

A continuity reset point doesn’t mean that the past is untouchable – it simply represents a decision on the part of the GM that events prior to that point will only be changed with good reason, and therefore constitute an anchor to which the players can attach the campaign.

Prep

Last week’s article noted that good prep was essential to good improv. Good prep is essential to just about every campaign activity, to be honest; but this incorporates activities that a lot of GMs don’t think of as prep. Things like thinking about the campaign, about how different characters perceive campaign events and the world around them, about what can be done to permit PCs to experience parts of the campaign’s potential that they haven’t yet tapped, about what stories you can tell using the building blocks already in place, and so on.

Good prep is like detox for your campaign, cleaning the gunk out of clogged arteries, finding new facets of the established campaign elements to explore, and creating an inventory of unused ideas in the back of your mind to call on when you need them – whether that’s to add sparkle to a planned adventure that you are writing or to feature when drafted in at the last minute as in improvised sequence.

Plot

Players, like readers of books or audiences for visual entertainments of all sorts, will forgive an awful lot if the plot is good. My players would agree that most of the time I don’t shine when it comes to portraying an NPC in-game. I can’t do much to change my voice, for example, and am moderately awful at accents. Because my plots receive a lot of care and attention, though, these flaws are overlooked.

Having a solid plotline that you understand completely means that when things threaten to go off the rails, you know where the overall story has to go, and can start looking for high roads instead of the now-blocked low road. So long as the roads all lead to a sensible and entertaining resolution of the plot, who cares? Do you really care how the PCs get from A to B, so long as they do so? Sure, if they follow the trajectory that you’ve anticipated, you can use some of the extra polish that you’ve prepped, but that is just icing on the cake.

No plot is complete until you know how it is going to end. I don’t start exposing one to the players unless I have already visualized a likely outcome and how that will impact the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about an encounter, with the ‘adventure’ being the bigger picture in question, or an adventure or significant plot development, with the plot arc being the bigger picture, or a plot arc with the overall campaign being the bigger picture – the principle scales.

Structure

At a superficial glance, you might think that my Zenith-3 campaign is very similar in structure to the Adventurer’s Club campaign. The differences are subtle, and easily overlooked – but they have a cumulative impact that makes the two campaigns quite different.

The Zenith-3 campaign entwines the lives of the characters within, through, and around multiple plotlines. Each player character has his own plotline, connected by virtue of his sequential experiences and interactions with characters. In addition, there are group plotlines, and a game world plotline, all arranged in a Master Plan that connects everything that happens, and everything that happens does so for a reason – even if that reason is simply because it sounds like fun.

I’ve described the structure of the campaign before, as best I could – but when I thought of this article, I conceived a new way of expressing it, almost as an infographic or a flowchart.



It starts with an overall story. I then create a long list of plot threads that can run through that overall story, either shaping it or being shaped by it, or both, in the form of campaign notes. Using the overall story as a guide, I can determine when each of these plot threads should start and when they should finish. The overall story only takes place within these plot threads, so it’s important that there be relevant plotlines for each part of the overall story.

I then break each of those plot threads into discrete series of events, shown on the graphic above as the “plot breakdown”. The effect is to break the plot thread into smaller pieces that fit together perfectly to create the totality of the plot thread.

When the time comes to write an adventure, I extract all the contemporaneous pieces until a clear adventure theme takes shape. The campaign plan tells me which pieces to select, acting as an index, and looking up those individual pieces within the plot breakdown for that plot thread gives me the content of the adventure. But, as isolated pieces, there is no narrative flow; only when assembled into such a narrative structure does the adventure take shape.

The resulting structure designs the required level of longevity required to complete all the plot threads into the campaign.

I actively tinker with the structure and plot threads throughout – if an event doesn’t make sense in terms of the narrative flow, it may be delayed, if a future event does make sense it may be brought forward. The internal sequence of events can be manipulated. Both of these manipulations are represented in the diagram above.

All these effects take place in the planning stage, a rough synopsis of what will be in the final adventure. The operational principles are, (1), that no event occurs in isolation – NPCs (and PCs) have to react to it, and that reaction is an intrinsic part of the event for all that it follows the event or revelation in question, and may in turn trigger other events or create the conditions for those events to have the desired impact; and (2), that no Primary Character should be doing something without the other Primary Characters also doing something at the same time. Which means that if Blackwing gets on the communicator to the team leader, St Barbara, the conversation always has a context, always connects through into the personal lives of the characters concerned.

I also want to draw special attention to the columns in the “Campaign” plan (blue background) labeled “Implied Plot Threads” and “World Plot Threads”. Implied Plot Threads integrate anything that the player has said that he wants his character to do with external events that exist only to add to that character’s personal plotline. World plot lines exist to advance time within the campaign world and include everything from political developments to public holidays to sporting milestones. These keep the game world from being static, and make the environment feel more alive.

I see that there’s one term used above that I haven’t fully explained – a “Primary Character” is any PC, or an NPC that is being treated as a PC by the GM. Some GMs don’t like such characters, I find that they have too many advantages to be ignored. The only thing these NPCs lack is a player; and that only if you define the GM as a “non-player”.



Image by stokpic from Pixabay

Planning

The relationship between plot and planning is akin to the relationship between strategy and tactics – one is big-picture, the other is smaller-picture. Strategy can be defined and described by the tactics that are arranged in a deliberate structure to achieve the goal of the strategy, which includes anticipating the enemy and what they will attempt to do.

I do most of my planning during the process of transforming an adventure outline into a playable written adventure. That’s when I (and my co-GM in the case of the Adventurer’s Club campaign) determine that I need an NPC to do X or a description / visual image to do Y (sometimes, these visuals are only essential in some permutations of what a PC might do, and may appear to the players as superficial fluff if that permutation doesn’t eventuate, but there’s nothing wrong with the occasional fluff that helps the players visualize their world!)

The process of creating an adventure for the Adventurer’s Club campaign demonstrates how profoundly planning can impact a straightforward plotline, just by taking into effect character capabilities and personalities.

The differences start at the structural level – adventures for the AC campaign are self-contained story ideas, sometimes with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end; they aren’t part of a cohesive narrative, though they do remain part of a continuity.

When the time comes to write an adventure, we break the adventure down into logical steps or stages. These aren’t quite Acts and they aren’t quite scenes (because they may include multiple scenes in multiple locations), though we call them scenes for lack of a better nomenclature. In the example below, there are 19 such scenes, which are assumed to feature all PCs (and usually do – but we aren’t afraid to divide the party if that makes more sense).

We also touch on the personal lives of the PCs so that they are always doing something when the main plot comes calling. Those are illustrated by the smaller color-coded blocks at the top of the diagram below. You can see that most of the PCs have three-scene personal plotlines, but “FO” has four, simply because that’s how many it took to resolve the little mini-plot that is taking place in that PC’s personal life this time around.

These personal plotlines usually precede the main action – though there have been times when we’ve put them in the middle, or omitted them entirely. While they don’t often add to the main plot, they are never permitted to detract from it.

It’s important to note that this is not an example invented for this article, it’s the actual adventure that we have almost finished writing, and which we expect to start in early October. It should take two or three sessions of play to complete, bringing us to the December break in play.

A real-world example from the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Click on the image to load a larger, more legible, version.

The lower part of the illustration depicts how the adventure pieces have been arranged to create the finished adventure.

At first, everything looks sensible – the opening chapters of each character’s mini-plots occur in a sequence that makes narrative sense, running across the page. It should be noted that when actually written, “DH1” was longer and larger than the other first scenes, as reflected in the diagram. That’s followed by the second row, where SZ2 is larger than the other second pieces of the preliminaries.

The third row is where we begin to segue into the main plot of the adventure. We decided that a different sequence of characters getting their scenes made more narrative sense, but otherwise there are no surprises. To express this, the row has been split into two sub-rows. This double-sub-row ends with the All-PCs start of the main adventure.

The fourth row is where things start to go crazy. SZ4? FO4 and 5? CF4? DH4a and 4b? EB4? DH5, 5a, and 5b? Where did they come from? When we wrote the second scene of the main plot, we realized that only one PC was involved – and so we extended or subdivided the other PCs personal plotlines accordingly. That’s what happens when the pieces of the plot get sequenced into a narrative. This row is effectively split into five sub-rows, and they all lead into main plot scene 2.

You can interpret the rest for yourself. Following the principle that each PC should have some story happening to them or around them at all times, the focus wander from one PC to another as they experience their individual plot sequences. You might also note that main plot scenes 5 to 12 and 14-15 have been subsumed completely into individual characters’ plot sequences. Among other things, this shows that each of them has a role to play in resolving the overall adventure. There’s also an “all PCs scene 20” and “all PCs scene 21” thrown into the plotline simply to tie up loose ends in a player-satisfying way.

It might seem that there’s no room for player input, that the script has been written in advance, but that’s not actually the case; in some cases, we could state that one character’s capabilities or personality made them a near-certain choice for certain activities, but in others, we were less certain. The structure of the adventure is completely accommodating of any decision short of non-participation that the players choose to make; the plot developments are derivations of the logical steps required to resolve the plot. In fact, some of the scenes are marked optional because we weren’t sure if they would take place at all!

It’s entirely possible that players may force us to skip certain scenes because of their choices, or to play some scenes out of this planned sequence; that quite often happens. This narrative is structured to accommodate our best guesses; we’ll go off-script if the players make other choices.

It’s important to realize that both arrangements are telling the same story. The only difference is that the second adventure has been customized for the PCs in the campaign and for the logical progression of time.

Detailed planning like this isn’t everyone’s boat; I don’t do it for the Zener Gate campaign, and I get even more convoluted in plotting the Zenith-3 campaign. These choices are not capricious; they are a combination of deliberate choice and responding to the desires of the players.

It should be noted that each style of adventure yields a definite “normal adventure format” – in the Adventurer’s Club, that’s individual plotlines leading to an all-PCs main plot; in the Zenith-3 campaign, it’s individual plot threads combining to tell a broader narrative, with personal events and world events forming connective ’tissue’ in-between. Every campaign develops such a “format” (in the Television series sense). It might be teaser, title sequence, plot development, complication/reversal, victory, aftermath – a classic dramatic structure – or it might be something else, but one emerges in every campaign (there are times when that can be turned to advantage, and times when you can gain an advantage by deliberately violating it – useful if advanced plot techniques you should always be aware of).

If campaigns age because plots become increasingly complicated by the past, especially the accumulated weight of plotting mistakes, such planning structures and techniques greatly diminish the chances of “playing yourself into a corner” by letting you discover the problem in time to do something about it. Never complain about writing yourself into a corner – because you got there in time to avoid the problem. Things are far worse when you “improv” yourself into a corner.

It follows that careful planning and plotting is just as useful in avoiding Geriatric Disease of the campaign as they are for successful improv.

Exit Plans

I’ve already touched on this, so I’ll just briefly mention it again. For every campaign, you should have an exit plan for every PC, every player, and every major NPC (because you never know when one will get accidentally killed).

In fact, you can define a “major” NPC as an NPC whose death would adversely impact on the campaign, or would have done so in the past.

So, you now have all the tools that you need to prolong the life of your campaign and keep it fit and healthy even when it gets a little long in the tooth. That means that it’s time to take a look at the consequences and implications!

The Social Consequences of Lifestyles

When we’re young, medical advice is (generally) all about treating traumatic and unusual events. As we age, visits to the doctor become a regular occurrence for most of us, and the emphasis slowly shifts to chronic conditions and their management. Similarly, lifestyle advice shifts from creating advantages or opportunities for the participant to minimizing the constraints that restrict life.

Another way of phrasing it is that when we’re young, medical advice concerning lifestyle changes are aimed at prolonging life, but when we age, the goal shifts to prolonging quality of life. In general, lifestyle alterations change when we can be expected to die, and what will kill us (absent traumatic events).

There is a certain degree of delaying the inevitable when discussing such measures, giving rise to complex medical issues – for example, When do the measures we undertake to extend life begin to cost us more in quality of life than we gain?

Of course, it will vary from individual to individual and from measure to measure. Giving up Pizza is a lot easier for most people than giving up sugar. Some people will find it easier to give up sugar than caffeine, for others the relative difficulty might be the other way around. But the general rule remains: if you accept the premise that mere continuation of existence is not enough, and that quality of life matters, a decision that you will probably have to make repeatedly as you age is whether or not the gains are worth the price. And, when the price is unacceptable, is there are satisfactory compromise that will yield a significant amount of the benefit?

So it is for campaigns. Beyond a point, the costs can outweigh the gains. A sensible campaign plan will have a number of natural end-points. If your campaign plan doesn’t have such potential end-points already, you might like to consider inserting ‘natural’ endings into your master plan.

Endings imply the natural question of what comes next? What happens after? In essence, you have four choices.

• Same campaign & characters, different players.
• Same campaign, different players, new characters. Implies some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Similar campaign, different characters, probably a mixture of old and new players. This hits the ‘reset’ button, kills off plotlines that had become tedious, but still draws on background and other material from the old campaign, in effect making it a sequel campaign. An in-game explanation for the transition is required, which is often some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Different campaign, different characters, may or may not be the same players. In other words, start a new campaign and lose the old one.

Sometimes, it’s better to let a campaign die a natural death and move on to something else.

Campaigns are a story

I’ve stated a couple of times already in this article that Campaigns are a Story, or a series of stories. But I want to briefly look at the consequences and implications, especially in terms of campaigns aging.

Every story has an optimum length. You can only make that optimum shorter by cutting plot threads out, or longer by adding more. You can think of this as a campaign’s natural “lifetime”; if it ends before reaching that optimum, it has died prematurely (and usually traumatically); if it ends after reaching that point, it’s been on life support for a while and lingered more out of force of habit than substance. I’ve experienced both outcomes.

But, just as we are medically concerned with quality of life, so we have to be concerned at the campaign level with “Quality of story”. When a campaign lives beyond it’s natural limits, it’s quality of story that suffers. Individually, the adventures may be fine, even excellent or inspired on occasion; but the sense of purpose that held the plotlines together is missing, and that begins to show. Death is inevitable.

Your goal, when designing a campaign, should be to match the optimum lifespan as closely as possible to the optimum duration of reliable quality of story. This lets the campaign go out on a high.

Of course, that’s a really difficult thing to determine in advance. Personalities and creativity and skill and interest levels and Character investment and all sorts of other things come into it. None of these are fixed quantities, they change over time, most of them for the better. So quality of story will not only go up over the course of a campaign’s lifetime, the duration during which you can sustain an acceptable quality will extend. How much better will you get? Unknown – and, in part, it depends on how good you already are.

How much of what you do well is the result of experience, how much is expertise and training, and how much is inherent instinct? The first increases automatically with practice, the second increases only with an effort to improve that is sustained over time, and the third can only be better understood and accessed.

I grasped these points fairly dimly when I was planning the first Zenith-3 campaign (the current one is a sequel with mostly the same characters). Since I couldn’t predict how much more experienced or skilled I would be at the end of it, just that I would be both, I built some slack into the plan, some padding – adventures and plot threads that could be incorporated into the campaign to extend its lifetime or ignored if they would extend its life too far. I knew what the last three adventures in the campaign would be, because these tied up all the plot threads established at the start of the campaign in a huge climax; but how far removed those would be from the preceding “scheduled” adventure was unknown. As things turned out, it was about two years, real time, maybe three. That’s a lot of padding, even in a 13-year campaign.

That was also the time that I was planning the current Zenith-3 campaign – not a coincidence; I had been stockpiling ideas throughout the preceding decade. Some of those ideas were appropriated for Earth-halo padding; most of the rest became the source material for the new campaign.

Not all padding is evil; this is padding for good effect.

Campaigns on Life Support

So your campaign is treading water, barely holding it’s head above the waves and about to go under for the third time? It’s a campaign on life support. That means that you are artificially pumping up the excitement with tales that grow more outrageous and exaggerated with every outing. You don’t know what’s coming next, only that it has to equal or better the last day’s play in grandiosity. The PCs are too capable, able to solve anything less with trivial effort.

And yet, for some reason, you don’t want to end the campaign – not yet, anyway. Maybe because you haven’t yet created a replacement to your satisfaction, or because you’re waiting for a particular rule-book to be published, or because your players haven’t yet seen the writing on the wall and insist on continuing.

You have two choices to try giving your campaign a new lease on life: Heroic Measures and Radical Surgery.

Heroic measures means throwing away everything that the players think they know about the campaign and replacing it with something that only presents a superficial resemblance of the old background. Then hitting the players between the eyes with the difference, without warning. In effect, it’s shoving the old players into a new campaign that you haven’t fully worked out yet. It usually starts in cataclysm and only gets more violent from there.

“The gods are fakes under the control of a demonic presence from outside reality and the afterlife is the gaping maw of that presence. It has consumed and perverted so much positive energy that the barriers between reality have begun to break down. The PCs awaken one morning to great cracks in the sky through which different planes of existence are leaking…”

Think Epic, then double it.

Radical Surgery forces all the existing PCs to retire, a new batch of villains to emerge from the woodwork, and the players to start over in the same game world with novices – first level characters, in D&D parlance. This keeps more of the current game intact, but provides fresh avenues for exploration.

Use radical surgery if you still have unknowns in the campaign, things you haven’t played around with – whether those be draconic social structures or the recipes of lava giants, the truth about fey or the hidden secrets of beholders. Or whatever. If there’s still unused source material, in other words. Use Heroic Measures if you need to throw the old out to make room for new source material.

There’s no guarantee that either approach will save the campaign. And there’s no going back from either. Both are very much voyages into the unknown.

All things must end

Inevitably, one way or another, every campaign will end. If you follow my advice in other articles, you’ll finish it in a blaze of glory, an exclamation point that will transform the campaign into a monument to your creativity and skill as a GM, a Norse Ragnarok or Biblical Armageddon.

Implicit in both is the question of what comes next? What happens on the day after Infinity?

Every ending implies a new beginning. The trick is to manifest the transition in a graceful manner. That never happens by accident; it’s a happy chance that the actions and processes that enable it also enhance the campaign along the way.

Last time we played my superhero campaign, the players got through all the material that I had prepared and polished with more than an hour of playing time remaining. (I thought that I had prepped enough – but, oh well…)

While I had some vague ideas about what was to follow, I hadn’t yet put them into coherent form.

Nevertheless, I was able to improv those vague ideas into an entirely acceptable day’s play.

We’ve all been caught in that position before – forced to choose between improv and letting the players down.

I’ve written several articles on improv gaming for Campaign Mastery in the past, and for those looking for technique tips, I commend them to your attention. Just type “Improv” in the search box at the top of the page.

For this article, I want to look a little deeper than technique into what’s necessary to make improv a success.

You see, in the days that followed, those vague ideas all fell into place, crystallized as from a super-saturated solution by the improvised play part-session. Everything made perfect sense, including the parts already played.

It is entirely likely that if I hadn’t admitted the situation here, the players involved would never have been certain that what happened wasn’t what I had always intended.

1st Requirement: Ideas

I’d already spent time thinking about what I could do for both this part of the adventure and several subsequent ones that are to follow, generating ideas in isolation and brainstorming possibilities. I simply hadn’t found the right connecting thread with which to tie them all together, yet.

That meant that I had limited the scope of the improv required, at least to some extent. Less to create out of whole cloth means less to go wrong.

2nd Requirement: Characters

I had already defined and named most of the NPCs that would be involved.

This is an area that I am not good at improvising, so having the building blocks already worked out to some extent meant that I was again constraining the scope of the material to be invented to areas in which I was strong.

The lesson is that when all else is equal, prep the material which is of greatest importance and with which you have the most trouble inventing on the spot first.

3rd Requirement: Interactions

One of the many thoughts to which I had subjected the ideas mentioned in (1) was contemplating how different PCs might interact with those ideas and vice-versa.

Ideas and encounters aren’t just things that happen, they have to propel not only the main exterior plot but, through interaction with the characters involved, enable them to advance their own individual plot threads in some fashion. This gives them gravitas and relevance to both the characters and the campaign.

This is an especially important standard when it comes to random encounters and wandering monsters in D&D. Each encounter should be viewed as an opportunity, not just as a random happenstance.

4th Requirement: Context

I already knew the overall shape of the campaign, and of this plot thread within the campaign, and the goals that these encounters were to satisfy within those contexts.

That helped refine the ideas by telling me what could be accepted as is and what needed tweaking to conform to the requirements. In other words, I wasn’t starting out completely blind; I already had some idea of the ‘shape’ of the plot needed.

5th Requirement: Training

I’ve read a lot of stories, of all lengths, and watched a lot of TV and movies. More usefully, I’ve digested and analyzed what I was seeing and reading. What’s more, I had practiced constructing relevant reviews of such material.

For example, here’s a review I wrote about a movie called T3rminal Error, which was published by a site that offered free DVDs for those willing to write short but literate and useful reviews:

T3rminal Error (Flashback Entertainment) 95 minutes

Reviewed by Mike Bourke

There’s an art to getting maximum enjoyment from a “B-” movie. It involves deliberately overlooking the odd moment of wooden acting or poor direction, seeking out the humor that would be there if the second-rate effects and sets were deliberately second-rate, and plugging holes in the plot with your own imaginative speculations. The less of this work you have to do in order maintain your engagement with the plot and the characters, the more successful the B-movie is; in other words, the key is to adopt a different critical standard to that which you would employ when judging an A-grade movie.

‘Mars Attacks’ lampooned B-movies from the Science Fiction genre by deliberately making one as a comedy; in just about every way I can conceive, it could be and should be honored as the ultimate primer in how to go about this art. Which brings me to “T3rminal Error” starring Michael Nouri, Marina Sirtis, and Matthew Ewald. Judged by A-movie standards, this would not score terribly well; judged by B-movie standards, it’s excellent. I first came across it in my local video store when they were offering 7 $2-a-night movie-rentals for a week at $10. I went through a LOT of B-movies at the time! But this one stood out, for reasons that will become clear as this review proceeds, and which led my to buy the DVD when I spotted it.

The plot is fairly straightforward – embittered ex-employee creates an evolving virus contained within a sound file to exact revenge on his ex-boss. In the tradition of all B-movie killer viruses, this one quickly gets out of hand, growing and evolving at computer speeds to become ever more deadly, intelligent, and self-aware. It’s up to the ex-boss (Nouri), his wife (Sirtis), and his son (Ewald) to escape the virus before it kills them.

This is an action-drama first and foremost. At the time, computer viruses were not often contained within sound files, and there were no computer viruses that could evolve or adapt to security measures. Neither of these facts are true, 4 years later. And while it’s improbable that even a virus evolving at computer speeds could achieve sentience as quickly as this does, and especially not while maintaining its basic nature and purpose, it’s not completely implausible. So plot-wise there are no major holes, though there are a few niggles here and there, but it’s fairly predictable and just a little cheesy – one of the defining characteristics of a B-movie.

Then there’s the acting. Sirtis, in 2002, was just coming off years of regular work on Star Trek The Next Generation and had appeared in at least 3 Star Trek movies. Calling her “an accomplished actress” is not unreasonable. Surprisingly, young Matthew Ewald seems almost as casually-competent in his role. Which leaves Michael Nouri… While he gets some great lines at times, especially when dealing with a long-time associate stuck in wheelchair, there are times when his performance comes across as a little wooden. He gives the distinct appearance of being somewhat uncomfortable with his dialogue and its technical terminology. In other words, Syrtis and Ewald deliver performances far superior to typical B-movie standard. And, by the way, that technical terminology is mostly used correctly, something that is rare for even big-budget movies, let alone B-grade ones. Where it isn’t used correctly, it’s because the movie was just a little bit in advance of developments that we have seen arrive; the concepts were right, but the terms that have since been attached to those concepts in real life aren’t the same as those used in the movie.

There are no extras. Picture is in standard 4:3 television aspect ratio. Sound is Dolby stereo. Production values are as good as B-movies get, which is pretty high, if rarely cutting-edge in any respect.

By B-movie standards, this is A-grade entertainment – eminently watchable action-adventure. By A-movie standards, it’s a long way short of cutting the mustard; but don’t let that stop you from giving this disk a turn in your player. So long as you know what you’re letting yourself in for, you won’t be disappointed.

Feature: 6/10 (9.5/10 B-standard)
Picture: 8/10
Sound: 7/10
Extras: 0/10
Overall: 6/10 (9.5/10 B-standard)

PS: Checking around, I’ve discovered that this DVD has a different cover in the US, and has also been released in some markets as “Peace Virus”.

All that means is that I’m used to deconstructing and reconstructing stories, and have thousands of them filed away in the back of my memory somewhere – a treasure-trove when you have to come up with something in a hurry.

6th Requirement: Experience I

I have lots of experience in generating ideas and structuring/refining them to fit a defined plot requirement. While you can do so without that experience, it makes shortcuts possible (that effectively increase available thinking time) and makes you more aware in advance of potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.

7th Requirement: Experience II

Coupled with that, I also have a lot of experience in implementing an idea on the spot and making sense of it later – and of what can go horribly wrong when you do so. Again, this permits greater efficiency of process and greater awareness of dangers and the best way to evade those dangers.

The two types of experience are not the same, but they do add to and enhance each other. One teaches technique, the other editorial review and rationalization. Applying the techniques on the fly and as you go makes the ad-hoc material more substantial and more correct, as though it had been pre-planned; applying the editorial review teaches how small picture elements relate to a big picture, and the rationalization techniques can then be applied to the selection of those ‘small-picture’ elements to have them contribute to the big picture you want – it doesn’t do you much good if your picture elements are painting daffodils while you wanted them to be assembling an Eiffel Tower.

8th Requirement: Time

I can’t emphasize this enough – all of the above had been done well in advance, and I had tackled the question of what would come next even if a sufficiently-developed thought had not yet been derived to answer that question.

In other words, I had set time aside to come up with the answers, and had primed my internal think-tank to focus on the problem by reminding myself of the parameters and plot objectives and the pieces I had to work with. It was just that the thinking time had not yet yielded anything satisfactory.

When you present the subconscious with a problem, it tends to keep working at it. Strange associations may form with material you are watching or reading (or may not); eventually, seemingly from out of the blue, you will have a flash of inspiration.

This process takes time. When you haven’t had enough time to complete it, and hence have to improvise a solution, you still have the benefit of the time spent trying to solve the problem; these create a kind of instinct for what should be there.

Normally, when you recognize the results for what they are, you take the time to test the logic and implications (and so on) of the plot element. When you’re improvising, you don’t have time for that, you have to trust in that instinct; and the longer you’ve been trying to think of an answer, the sharper those instincts will be.

9th Requirement: Effort

It does little good to just sit around, waiting for an idea to present itself, during that time; you have to actively work at it. You have to ask yourself the question that you are trying to answer repeatedly whenever you have an odd moment to spare; ask it as you’re going to bed, as you’re in the shower or bath, while you’re eating lunch – and then spend a minute or two trying to think of an answer or a different approach to the question. If no answer is forthcoming, set the question aside – until your next opportunity to mentally poke the problem.

The subconscious is easily distracted, and if you don’t refresh the problem’s priority by regularly returning to it, it is all too easy for it to be put into the too-hard basket – the round one, by the door, that gets emptied every night.

If that happens, you will get to D-Day and find nothing but silly ideas that don’t make sense, don’t achieve the story goals, and won’t cut the mustard. And then you really are in trouble. So you’ll probably go with one of them anyway, and deal with the fallout later.

Like the time the PCs in an early D&D campaign of mine were confronting a Black Dragon of enormous size (courtesy of a random mixture of potions that it had swallowed – the PCs hoped to poison it, or blow it up, or something). The party mage, who fancied himself an alchemist, stepped forward with the foolish notion of somehow neutralizing the mixture and returning the dragon to manageable proportions.

I hadn’t anticipated that possibility, hadn’t spent any thought on it whatsoever – a mistake, in hindsight – and the only idea I had was a silly one, but I went with it anyway. So the dragon swallowed him whole. Next session, I had to make sense of this and get the PC back in the game.

The alchemist realized that he was in the Dragon’s stomach, with the potions, many still in their bottles, and was able to mix some of them with certain herbs in his backpack (with suitable effort in the form of rolls) to construct an extremely strong emetic. Result: the dragon projectile-vomited up not only the alchemist but the potions as well, both opened and unopened, ending the effect of the unstable potion miscibility, and making it feel unwell-enough that it retreated from the battle, a bit more wary of swallowing humans wearing funny clothes in the future.

The Tenth Requirement: Trust

The last requirement is the toughest one of the lot, especially after you’ve been burned by throwing out a silly idea and having to scramble to put some sense back into things, later. You have to have developed trust in your instincts – not blind faith, mind you; you still have to be aware of how far your trust can extend, so that you can recognize the bad ideas that lurk beyond it for what they are. This trust is a constantly-changing thing, and it can be game-system and genre- sensitive.

You can only develop trust in your instincts when you’ve done the hard yards and met all the other requirements that I’ve listed, because they are the foundations of prudence, inspiration, and good instincts.

And you never know when you’ll have to rely on your instincts, so it behooves us all to make them as good as we possibly can. Even to the point of running an atypical campaign on the side to sharpen one or more of these requirements.

This is an article inspired by a bus stop.

As I got off the bus at my stop the other day, I briefly contemplated the fact that I had two different routes to choose between. I always choose one over the other as being faster than the alternative, despite having to wait for a ‘walk’ signal at the corner. If I chose the other direction at the Bus Stop, I would be able to cross the street without waiting. It’s not much farther – so why do I consider it the slower choice?

To start explaining, here’s a rough diagram of the street at the bus stop:

And here’s a rough diagram (not quite right in proportions) of the two routes:

In truth, the two are a lot closer in length than these illustrations make them appear. But that’s all right, this is good enough for explanatory purposes.

I always choose Path 1 and never Path 2 (unless forced to by circumstances).

It’s not because of length. It’s for this reason:

Path 1 involves a lot less uphill walking. The downhill is also shorter, but that’s not really a consideration in comparison. Even with a 2- or 3-minute wait at the lights (which I don’t always have, it should be noted), Path 1 is a little faster than Path 2 and a LOT less work.

I really don’t like sloping, hilly, ground. My knees work a lot better on flat terrain (they don’t like stairs, either – going up or down. It’s a question of cartilage – I have almost none in my knee joints, it’s been squeezed out like toothpaste from in between, pushing the kneecaps out and up at the same time.

So, anyway, I got off the bus, contemplating the two paths, and then realized that there was a potential post for Campaign Mastery in the thought.

Sloping Ground

You see, most GMs don’t like sloping ground in their games, either. They are complicated to describe, they add content without substance to descriptions of areas, they are (relatively) boring. “You enter a 20′ x 30′ space with a curved alcove at the far end of the room, which slopes 5 degrees up from right to left and 10 degrees up from far end to alcove….”

They are proverbially difficult to map, both for GMs and for players, so much so that KODT did a whole 5-page strip poking fun at the knots of precision you had to tie yourself into way back in issue #6 called “Wherever You Go, There You Are”, reproduced in Bundle Of Trouble #2 (which is still available, I think). This was offered as a series of webstrips in 2003, but sadly, no longer seems to be available.

In summary: A gaming session with a complex dungeon means that someone has to be doing ‘Mapping’. Bob complained that he was sick of doing the mapping. Dave and Brian both turned it down and tried to convince Bob that it was his duty. Sara volunteered, saying she did not mind the chore. Dave responds, “No Offense, Sara, but you take way too much time mapping. Besides, you didn’t bring your French Curve or T-square.” In the end Dave is made to do the unwelcome task, but his mapping skills are so atrocious that the Knights keep falling into the same 10′ spiked pit, though it takes quite some time for them to discover this. soon find that the dungeon isn’t riddled with spiked pit traps, but that they’ve been going round in circles and repeatedly falling into the same pit. When the realization sinks in, they confront Dave and examine his map:

…which leads to the inevitable outcome:

In truth, player mapping also introduces all those complexities of description, as well; the GM not only has to be prepare ‘sloping ground’ content, he has to communicate it clearly to the players. “The floor rises by 7.5 degrees for the first 50′ and then falls by 6 degrees for the next 60 feet.” “I’m a 3’2″ halfling, can I see over the ridge?” “Ummm…”

So why should a GM consider it?

Three Reasons To Bite The Bullet

I’ve got three reasons. How good they might be depends on a whole host of factors. One or more of them might be compelling for you. At the very least, this states what you are sacrificing in return for the benefits of clarity and speedier presentation of the tactical situation in-play.

1. Slopes are natural

Flat ground anywhere doesn’t happen by accident. Slopes are natural and normal. Even on ground that is nominally flat, minute slopes are present and cause rainwater to collect in streams and rivers, cutting channels and forming banks. The slopes might only be a tenth of an inch in a mile, a millimeter or two in a kilometer, but they are nevertheless there – and many places have ground that slopes far more seriously and notably.

2. Higher Ground

Not all changes in floor elevation take the form of slopes. There are steps, shelves, and all sorts of other descriptive terms that can be applied to the landscaping. One of the reasons for such variety in descriptive language is because differences in elevation proverbially confer a combat advantage. So instantly recognizable is the concept of higher ground that I was able to use it for the title of this article and everyone would have instantly understood the subject.

3. A Grasp Of Complexity

Players often like black-and-white simplicity. “Is this proposed act an alignment violation?” “What’s the difference between good and evil?” “Is it as simple as Us Vs Them?”

Real life isn’t like that, as many GMs have pointed out in discussing the D&D alignment system. Alignment should not dictate or confine choice of action, it should merely classify those actions. Alignment should be more robust than a single choice; instead, it should drift, naturally, this way and that. Characters can, and should, take decisions when pushed into a corner (physically or metaphorically) that they would not normally countenance.

A GM who can cope with sloping ground and the complexities that it entails is probably a GM who is flexible enough to cope with nuance and shades of gray, and the richness of characterization that it unlocks, and vice-versa.

Of course, a whole different standard applies to running games for kids and younger teens. But, from an adult perspective, a GM who can cope with sloping terrain is more likely to run a complex and interesting game. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s a good starting point.

Is Higher Ground really such an advantage?

Of these three, the tactical considerations seem the most important in a number of ways. And, since I dislike relying on proverbs that may contain little more than a grain of truth, I think that motivation requires closer examination.

Mythbusters

Sometimes, the challenge in researching a particular subject is finding relevant information. At other times, it’s separating the wheat from the chaff. This is one of the latter occasions. A quick Google search immediately yielded a vast number of websites to use as sources, from which I quickly cherry-picked eight for closer examination.

Let me start here: In “Star Wars Special 2: The Myths Strike Back“, Mythbusters investigated the validity of the line from the third Star Wars prequel in which Obi-Wan declares that Vader has made a mistake and let him claim the higher ground. I always liked that line, because I saw a double meaning to it – the physical, and the moral, making it nicely symbolic of the whole “Light Vs Dark” theme of the entire franchise.

In an interview with the L.A. Times in 2015, Adam Savage said, “There are plenty of military reasons that higher ground is great, but most of them are about being an army. High ground allows you to see your opponent coming. It allows you tremendous advantage in a battle, but Obi-Wan says it as a one-on-one thing. So the first thing we wondered was, ‘Does this matter in sword fighting?’ …we reached out to some sword fighters, (and these were fencers who used double-edged weapons as medieval reenactors) and none of them had solid reasoning or referred to some tactic where the higher ground is always better.”

Their testing argued that in a lightsaber duel, higher ground did not present a convincing advantage. Lower ground won 26 duels, higher ground 24. But I found it significant that the weapons involved didn’t weigh very much, that many of the victorious blows were touches on legs and ankles that might or might not be lethal against armored enemies when using traditional weapons (which do have significant weight), and that a touch was enough to disable, maim, or kill with a lightsaber – significantly more effort would be needed with those traditional weapons.

In a “What’s New With Phil And Dixie” strip in the back of a Dragon issue, many many years ago, it was suggested that the best way to simulate real combat from a fantasy game in real life was to get two telephone directories, hold them out at arm’s length, one in each hand, and bang them together with the arms outstretched as hard as possible for five minutes.

It’s a harder test these days, because most telephone directories are now online, but if you just try waving a hardcover book around at arm’s length for a few seconds, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a LOT harder than it sounds.

In short, I was far from convinced that the Mythbusters results could be extrapolated to cover all situations.

Historically

From Wikipedia’s page on High Ground:

“The military importance of the high ground has been recognized for over 2,000 years, citing early examples from China and other early-dynastic cultures who regularly engaged in territorial/power struggles.”

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, military leaders are advised to take high ground and let the enemy try to attack from a lower position.”

The whole point of castles and forts was to elevate troops into positions where they could strike the enemy more easily/effectively than the enemy could strike them.

“…Getting the high ground is not always advantageous. In the Battle of Jieting of the Three Kingdoms period of China, Shu Han forces occupied a hilltop, which Cao Wei forces soon surrounded and isolated the Shu forces from water supplies and reinforcements. The Shu forces suffered a humiliating defeat, and the Shu northern expedition had to be aborted.”

This brings up an important point – the degree of elevation change is significant. The answers change with elevation beyond the reach of melee weaponry. Or do they? Another question to be explored as I proceed. I’ll save it for ‘fired weapons’, because it seems most relevant there.

An RPG Player’s Answer

One of the websites that came up in researching the subject was Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, where “user4000” wrote, way back in 2012:

“I just don’t understand how attacking someone from higher ground is an advantage in melee combat. I always think of two examples where I can’t see this to be an advantage.

• “Example 1: A kung-fu fight in a room. If I stand on a table but my opponent doesn’t, how is this an advantage? I increased the reach between us, punching him requires me to bend, and a kick coming from higher up is not harder to block or dodge.
• “Example 2: In a sword fight, a knight is on a rock. You can strike me from above, yes, but I can strike your legs more easily. Again, you’ll have to bend over to block and attack. Again, the reach between us is increased.

If small opponents get bonuses to attack and defense because they’re small, what sense does it make that becoming ‘taller’ (i.e., having higher ground) suddenly gives me an advantage over you?

Most systems I know give you an advantage if you are on higher ground – why?

The most popular of the 5 responses was from a regular user of the site, Tynam:

“I’ll deal with your first example first: standing on a table in that situation is not particularly an advantage. It’s also, therefore, very unlikely behavior for a martial artist. (Not counting Feng Shui players). Standing slightly up from your opponent, on the other hand, is an advantage for many of the reasons below. It brings your kicks to better target points with less effort, while costing you nothing.

“Historically, however, standing on tables or fighting indoors is an unlikely scenario. Let’s discuss the more common swordsman (or in your example, armored knight) fighting uphill against similar opponent. In this case the higher-ground advantages are huge.

“(To help make examples clearer: our swordsmen are on a hillside. Tom is higher up, Lowry is lower down and facing uphill.)

• “The assumption that Tom needs to ‘bend over’ to block is false. The leg guards work perfectly well while standing in a normal fighting crouch, regardless of the origin height of the attack – it has to be at Tom’s leg height regardless. At worst Tom ducks slightly.
• “Lowry, on the other hand, gains defense for his legs but loses it at the head, and loses access to attack Tom’s head. Is this a fair exchange for Lowry? No! (Hint… which would you rather lose, leg or head?)
• “Endurance matters! The defense advantage for Tom is large. Tom needs to guard his legs and abdomen more… some of the least tiring guards, because your arm drops low. Lowry needs to guard his head more… needing him to lift the weight of his weapon more often. And he has to block against greater force, because Tom has gravity aiding in the downswing.
• “On this theme, gravity is Tom’s friend. Most styles use more cuts down than up, for a reason – those cuts have more power with less muscular effort. (And for the beginner, cuts down are also easier to execute and to feint with.) Lowry also has to lift the blade more to perform equivalent cuts and thrusts.
• “Footwork matters! In a duel both fighters move in all directions. Stepping backwards uphill leaves you less likely to trip than stepping backwards downhill. And more likely to catch yourself before dying. (In a massed formation during battle the rules are different, but that applies to most things.)
• “Balance matters! If both are competent, neither fighter will particularly lean forward or back… or they’ll lose. (Tom ducks down, not leans forward, to strike the head.)
• “Reach really matters… but only to the key target points. All else being equal, on a mutual thrust, Tom hits the head while Lowry hits the calf. Guess who’s limping away from that fight?
• “For armored knights with swords the situation is even worse, because the legs and chest are very hard to injure on a man in harness. (That’s what the armor is for, after all.) The good target points on a suit of plate armor are mostly upper body. (Although this match is historically unlikely outside competitions; poleaxes would make more sense, and are slightly more even because of the leverage advantages they grant.)
• “Vision matters! As wraith808 correctly says, looking up is harder than looking down. And it’s a lot harder if you’re wearing a helmet. Lowry has to work harder to keep his eyes on Tom. And can more easily be distracted by attacks coming at the head.
• “Speed matters! When Tom attacks he’s closing the distance downhill, with gravity aiding his strike. Lowry is climbing to do the same.

“All this only applies if the height difference is a couple of feet, or a not-too-steep-hill. At more than that this isn’t a swordfight as such; Tom is hacking down at a climbing opponent.

“This is a summary of a complex issue… but the purpose of game mechanics is to summarize complex issues. A flat bonus is not an unreasonable representation of this effect.”

That seems fairly comprehensive and definitive. Nevertheless, there are a few things to add to it.

Advantage Q1: Stabbing Weapons

Pikes, spears, polearms, and swords are some of the staple weaponry of fantasy gaming.

Thrusting down, gravity pulls on the arms, and the armor on them, and the weapon, increasing the effect that it has. Whether or not the addition is enough to overcome head protection is different question; but you have a better chance of success with that assistance than without it.

When thrusting upwards, gravity is your enemy – and you will probably have to elevate your arms above the horizontal, so you not only have to fight gravity, you have to fight it harder. The weight of your arms, and their armor, and the weapon, all have to be pushed upwards with force against the power of gravity, repeatedly.

For an unknown number of thrusts, the benefits might be minimal, but over time, they would become overwhelming. Fatigue matters!

Even if your combat system doesn’t track fatigue, it seems only reasonable to reflect this situation with a bonus – initially, for all the reasons listed by Tynam, but inevitably for all those reasons plus fatigue.

Advantage Q2: Slashing Weapons

This is probably the most ubiquitous weapon type in fantasy gaming, if you include crushing weapons that are wielded in a similar manner, like morningstars, maces, and hammers.

Analyzing these has to be done separately by stroke type; while overhead blows are spectacular, there is often less muscular effort involved in a horizontal strike or ‘sweep’ (and they tend to be harder to dodge and faster).

So, an overhead strike: you have all the effort involved in getting the head of the weapon over your head and swinging downwards. But, once you reach that point, gravity does the rest; all you have to do is hold on. If time is an issue, you might achieve greater effect by continuing to add muscle power to the blow, but you are probably better served by saving your strength and simply steering the downward blow toward your enemy.

The greater probability is that your blow will land on the head, shoulders, or back of your enemy. Head is bad; shoulders not much better; a blow to the back is probably the best choice, from your enemy’s point of view. Better still, they might be able to use a shield to protect themselves – but that involves lifting that to head height or more and holding it there, a considerable physical effort. When he attempts to strike back (he is going to fight back, isn’t he?), natural human kinesthetics means that the shield will be lowered as a counterbalance, increasing the thrust and speed of the weapon. Nevertheless, the vital organs of his foe are more likely to be accessible by only the tip of his weapon and not the blade; so the effectiveness of most weapons is diminished by the design under these circumstances. And then, the shield has to be raised again.

Higher ground definitely seems to confer an advantage in this situation.

How about with horizontal sweeps? This seems a little more problematic. The uphill character is fighting gravity to hold his weapon horizontal, even if the weapon is designed to be used this way – for example, a scythe. But “horizontal” might be something of an oversimplification; I can easily believe that you would start with the weapon slightly elevated, would send it along a somewhat-horizontal arc, with a rising follow-through, like this (vertical scale exaggerated):

Gravity assists with the strike, and – assuming that enemy flesh or armor doesn’t bring the weapon to a complete stop – then slows the stroke to a stop and then commences returning it to the ready position ready for the next stroke.

Once again, we have gravity working in favor of the character on the higher ground. Even if the converse is not true (depends on the weapon), that’s still an advantage; only the scale would vary.

Advantage Q3: Thrown Weapons

Thrown weapons are an easy one. You get increased range from elevation, and therefore, diminished range from a lack of elevation. It doesn’t matter too much if you’re talking darts or grenades.

Advantage Q4: Fired Weapons

For this one, I’m going to defer to a Quora answer from Bob Kinch to the question “Why is having the ‘high ground’ a tactical advantage in a gunfight?”. Bob is a former soldier, Combat Engineer, and Competitive Marksman in the Canadian Armed Forces with 42 years experience. His answer is:

“It’s so important that when the pre-eminent historian of his time, Liddell Hart, wrote his seminal book about what the Germans did during WW2, he called it ‘The Other Side of the Hill.’

“The reason that officers got horses, wasn’t because they were lazy, but [because] it allowed them to see over top of the front ranks and see what was going on beyond it.
Hills work like that too.

“Lets pretend you and I are fighting and you are on the top of a hill. You can duck down, go on the left side, pop up, fire a shot, swing around to the right and shoot again. I can only shoot at your head. You can shoot at my entire body.

“Am I fighting 1 soldier or 2, or 10?

“If I’m wounded, you can shoot me again. If you’re wounded, you can bind your wounds, and I won’t even know you are hurt.

“If I see dust behind you, are you being reinforced or are just kicking up dust to fool me? (Rommel used that trick in the desert) If I get reinforced, you can see it from miles and leave. And I won’t know it until I get there.

“And yeah, fighting uphill sucks. An old Arctic warfare trick is to throw water on the snow, so now you are fighting uphill, on ice. You can’t fight well and I know where my kill zone is.

“Your grenades fly farther. My grenades fly shorter.

“You can see exactly where your artillery lands. I can only guess about mine.

“I think you see the point.”

Once again, that seems like a fairy comprehensive and definitive response.

Several of those advantages only scale with greater height. If your enemy is at the top of a castle wall and you are not, you’re in a very bad place. Those on the top of the walls can rain anything from molten lead, boiling oil, or arrows down on you. Elevation again increases their range, while reducing yours, so you will be under attack for some period of time before your attacks can even reach the enemy – assuming parity of weapons and that they open fire as soon as you come into range.

Accuracy becomes a little harder to judge, though.

One of my favorite computer games many years ago was a golf simulation. Like most such, there was a meter that moved when you actuated a stroke which you stopped when it indicated that the stroke would be made with the power desired. Firing at an “uphill” target is like playing that golf game with the meter hidden – you can only estimate with each shot how far you are pulling the bow back, and minuscule variations are amplified through ballistics into considerably larger deviations. Only the most expert of archers can hope to deliberately hit a target; the rest simply fill the air above the target with arrows in the hope that they hit something worthwhile when they land.

Those attacking ‘uphill’ have the same problem, compounded by reduced range.

Of course, the final extract from the Wikipedia page quoted earlier should not be forgotten; elevation is not the be-all and end-all; siege techniques can still produce an eventual victory. But it’s not easy and not all that dramatic.

Advantage Q5: Tactical Awareness

This was explicitly raised in the answer from the RPG Stack Exchange, and mentioned in passing in a number of other sources. Height makes it easier to get an overview of the current tactical situation, permitting resources to be targeted where they are most likely to be effective. Most tactical simulations adopt an overhead perspective for a reason!

The Short Answer

Having considered all the possibilities, the only viable conclusion is “yes”, elevation confers a marked advantage in combat; the only questions are ones of magnitude.

Revisiting The Issue

But that brings me back to the question of whether or not GMs should worry about slopes and elevations – are they, in fact, too important to be set aside so casually?

Definitive answers are hard to come by, when discussing broader areas of game mechanics and GMing style, but I think that the demonstrated importance of elevation makes a solid argument for this answer, too, being ‘yes’ except when contraindicated by genre and setting.

The realism, for example, might get in the way in some superhero campaigns, or could contradict the combat ‘rules of genre’ in a pulp campaign. Those are cases in which elevation effects should be restricted only to the most overt. Spiderman’s swings can always defy gravity enough to get him to another rooftop, at least in an urban environment; in fact, I remember one issue in which he had to pursue a villain into the suburbs, finding himself a fish out of water in the new environment.

But we have now reached the point where GMs need to have a good reason, one that they can clearly articulate, in order to justify this simplification of real world geometry. Slopes and steps and shelves and all the other mechanisms of the rise and fall of natural and artificial elevations should be the default, not the exceptions that they are now.

Simplifying Implementations

If elevation changes can no longer be obfuscated out of descriptions and deemed an unnecessary complication, then the only thing to do is to look for ways of simplifying our way out of the complications that ensure from it’s inclusion.

There are four ways that I can see of doing so. If mishandled, they can be mutually exclusive, but managed properly, they should go a long way to alleviating the problem.

The Trivial Change

In smaller areas, or in appropriate terrain, you can define elevation changes as negligible. One thing that I like about this approach is that it implicitly defines elevation changes under other circumstances as not being negligible, making this a ‘soft’ way to introduce the new approach into a game.

The big difference is that this has to be done as a deliberate choice by the GM, not as the default assumption. That’s a subtle change, but an important one.

The Fixed Angle

The next technique for simplifying elevation issues is to exclude anything more than a foot or two as a separate tactical issue. You can then define these as relative to a base of fixed angle across the entire area to be mapped.

For example, you might define the ‘natural slope’ as being 1′ every 100′ from one side of the dungeon to another. To all intents and purposes, and local variations notwithstanding, there is a significant slope but in any local region of the map, the terrain is effectively flat.

You could measure the slope from one corner of the map. Or from a specific high- or low-point within the bounds. That’s up to you. So long as you don’t provide exact measurements, just subjective impressions, you marry the realism of incorporating slopes and tactical considerations to the abstraction necessary for simple terrain and roleplaying action.

What’s more, this can be used to permit more extreme slopes for dramatic effect. Picture a dungeon in which there is a 20-degree downslope:

Such a slope would leave the players in no doubt whatsoever that any room which was flat would have been constructed that way deliberately. Of course, humans tend to do that sort of thing automatically; other cultures might have different ideas. In particular, I can see Dwarves as being “respectful of the earth” or some such, justifying some pretty immense slopes.

How immense? Well, the steepest grades that cyclists traverse in the Tour de France are about 20%. That’s a percentage of 45 degrees of incline. Twenty percent of 45 degrees is about 9 degrees. So this angle is more than twice as steep as something a cyclist using muscle power would try to ride over.

But, at the same time, the steps in my apartment climb at an angle of a little under 45 degrees, a little more than 30. Call it 40° for convenience. These are fairly typical steps, as you might find in any staircase. The change in elevation each step represents is a little more than half the length of my foot, to put it another way.

So the slope of the proposed area is only half of that. It’s not an area full of stairs up and down. You could just about manage this as a sloping terrain. The lower your center of gravity, the less trouble you’d encounter – so Dwarves and Halflings and Gnomes are just fine, the latter positively scampering back and forth. But the tall man-folk and elves, that would be a far less convenient story. Twenty degrees is quite enough to turn an ankle… and anyone who’s ever done that will know how much it can handicap you.

Or you could designate every room as being flat and level, and every corridor as being inclined by a 50- or 60-degree angle – a very steep staircase. Does it matter that every room is at a different elevation within the dungeon? Not particularly – but it puts a lot of earth above and below, which is good for the soundproofing, don’t y’know? So you can commune with nature in privacy?

The Changing Level

In fact, that’s my third technique – abandoning any concept of the flap plane of the map representing a flat plane on the ‘ground’.

Once you grasp this concept, there are all sorts of things you can do with it. Different levels in towers and lighthouses. Rooms and dwellings in a great tree with steps spiraling around the trunk. Rooms in which gravity twists along the length of the chamber until horizontal to the original ‘ground’ level. Space stations with “gravity plating” at odd angles.

The stepped approach

But my biggest trick for making elevation changes manageable is the Stepped Approach. This states that no slope is significant until it creates an elevation change of x (inches or cm, that’s up to you). As a general rule of thumb, 6 inches or 5 cm are the usual amounts I work in. When the slope makes that much difference, there is a “virtual step” which runs the full width of the exposed terrain – except on that line across the battlemap, it can be considered flat.

Depending on the slope, that might divide the room into bands of 20 feet, or 10 feet, or 50 feet, or even be like contours on a physical map of elevation, twisting and contorting into curved lines:

For the price of a few seconds thought when it comes to environment design, this really does present the best of all possible worlds – this is a very complex slope that has been reduced to a simple set of elevation changes. (For the record, this is a temple or alter (depending on the scale) that has been carved out of the side of a mountain, taking advantage of a natural fold. There may well be a hidden cave at the upper end. Of course, you have to climb up the slope to the altar/temple. This quick demo map took me less than half an hour to create – and five minutes of that were because I kept making a mistake on the layers, and drawing my elevation markers in the wrong places.

Depending on the scales chosen, each step might be anything from a few inches to a foot or two, and my usual six inches sits comfortably right in the middle of that range. If you wanted to make the place seem even more alien in design, you might even decide that these were actual steps, deliberately carved into these strange curves and preserved pristine.

The Final Word

Slopes and steps are underused in environment design for RPG adventures, and there is no good reason for it. The techniques described will open a third dimension to your creativity, if you let them. Go forth and slope!

And remember – the long way is the way with the lengthier uphill section. By which I mean that if you get used to handling slopes with smaller examples and situations, larger and more complex elevation situations can be taken in your stride; save this element for when it makes a huge difference and you can find yourself overwhelmed.

Like most things in life, you have to learn how to do the simple things before you can cope with the most difficult examples, but if you master the fundamentals, you can muddle through just about anything.

If you want to start a conversation with a tabletop gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on GMs fudging die rolls. Everyone has an opinion, a theoretical best-practice policy, and everyone has a preferred approach in the real world – and the two don’t always match. Some people even have different preferences when they are a player compared with what they do when they are GM!

In my Quora feed the other day, I came across an answer by Dave Rickey to the question “How do game designers engineer luck into video games?”. Dave is a video game designer, so he is well-qualified to answer the question. I found his words so interesting that I reached out for permission to reprint them here, which he was generous enough to approve. I’ll be back afterwards to discuss the relevance to tabletop RPGs.

How do game designers engineer luck into video games? Answer by Dave Rickey, Game Designer, Reformed Contrarian   We cheat. Seriously, the Random Number Generator (RNG) is only the beginning, we do all kinds of things so you can feel like you’re having ‘good luck’:   Often, it is impossible for you to be one-shotted by hand held weapons. Maybe we hard-cap the damage you can take from a single hit, or you can’t be dropped below X health by a single attack.   1a. Warning Shot variation: AI’s first attack always misses.   Artificial Stupidity: The lower your health gets, the worse the AI gets. They stop taking cover or dodging as well, make dumb pathing decisions, etc.   Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The lower your health gets, the more the AI misses.   3a. Conservation of Ninjitsu variant: The more attackers, the worse their aim.   There’s a hidden buffer in your health meter, so when you look like you have a sliver of health, you actually have quite a bit.   We drop more health packs/potions or ammo when you really need them.   If something is pure RNG (Random Number Generator), we fiddle very low odds in your favor: minimum 10% chance when it really should be 1% or less.   Or we force a success when you have X number of sequential failures (usually related to the inverse of your chance, to break ‘losing streaks’)   And so on. People love feeling like they ‘beat the odds’, so we stick our thumb on the scales, usually in ways they can’t see. And many things that are perfectly reasonable from a systems or narrative design PoV just aren’t fun to experience. Getting to spin and take out the enemy that just shot the wall next to you is fun. Barely surviving a tough fight you numerically should have lost is fun. Perseverance in an upgrade ‘crafting’ roll that gives you a cool weapon is fun. Feeling like you are lucky is fun.   So we cheat.

 
Okay, so let’s talk about these in a Tabletop RPG context. I’ll keep my numbering the same as Dave’s so that you can match my commentary to his “tricks of the trade”.
 

1. one-shot kills can be hugely entertaining for a player when he’s the one inflicting them, and promote screams of outrage when a player is on the receiving end. Hard-capping the amount of damage inflicted can be trickier to achieve in a Tabletop RPG unless you couple it with a one-shot weapon that must then be discarded – which usually gives one or more PCs a free shot while the enemy changes weapons, a factor that should be taken into account when deciding what the cap should be. See also “Altering The Combat Equations”, below.
    
   1a. Warning Shot variation: I like to use this approach when I want to boost the tension at the table. Giving the enemy a really nasty weapon that does horrible things to the landscape beside/behind a PC or other obvious threat and that they will never get to use at full effect again is a great way to amp things up – if used sparingly. It gets fairly obvious fairly quickly.

    

2. Artificial Stupidity – I prefer to use “Induced Desperation” or “Touch Of Panic” versions of this idea, because “artificial stupidity” tends to get noticed by players and can cheapen and undercut the desired sense of victory and achievement. “Induced Desperation” means that one of the PCs gets in a “lucky shot” on a miss that affects something the NPC is worried about, or that they are up against some sort of time limit that the PCs don’t know about; it causes NPCs to make mistakes, fire wildly, or choose to attack another PC without administering a coup-de-grace. You need to really sell this through narrative and roleplay or it becomes obvious.
    
   “Touch Of Panic” works the same way, but implies that the NPC is worried about something that the PCs don’t know about (because the NPC appears to be winning) – something that transforms a potential victory into a potential loss. It’s all well and good inflicting 10 points a round (or whatever) but nowhere near as good when you need to do 20 a round in order to finish before reinforcements arrive, or your power pack runs out of juice, or whatever. The core of the concept is that however successful the NPC appears to be, they are also battling some sort of clock – and while they may be winning the first fight, they are losing the second, which induces Panic and wild attacks that often go astray. Once again, this needs to be sold properly through narrative and roleplay to be believable. Another variation that can work is the “Premature Coup-de-Grace” or “Premature Gloat”, both of which permit the almost-defeated to get a free kick in – which can sometimes be enough to turn the tide.
    

   For example, I once hit the PCs with a Big Bad who they knew was almost unstoppable because of his affinity with the legendary weapon he wielded, and indeed he whittled through their ranks like wheat from chaff, not stopping to administer killing blows because he had to move on to the next enemy. Finally, the last PC was almost at his mercy when he made the mistake of counting his chickens before they hatched – he went for a Premature Coup-de-Grace, which gave the first PC he had “defeated” the chance to knock the weapon out of his grasp, which in turn gave the almost-defeated character a free shot at an obviously-vulnerable spot. Weakened massively, he fought gamely, but one by one the other PCs recovered and rejoined the fray, and eventually the bad guy went down. Knocking the stuffing out of the PCs with an obviously superior and intimidating enemy raised the stakes enormously, and the turning point inverted the odds, calculated on the assumption of the results from the initial battle.

    

3. The Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy gets a little obvious when you don’t have a lot of action to distract the players. But there are ways… See “Altering The Combat Equations” below.
    
   3a. Conservation of Ninjitsu variant Good one, if you can avoid it becoming obvious. Video game designers have the advantage of being able to test their fights repeatedly to see whether or not they are too tough; Tabletop RPG GMs don’t have that ability, and have to go with their best guesses based on prior combat performance. See also “Altering The Combat Equations” below.

    

4. A Hidden Health Buffer is a clever solution for a video game but not one that will work very well in a Tabletop setting where a player is responsible for tracking the Health of his character. If you can persuade your players to let you track all the damage without announcing how much is being inflicted, just telling you what their current total is at the start of combat, it can work – but good luck getting them to go along with that.
    
5. Extra Health Buffs: These are more frequently handed out just before they are likely to be needed in a tabletop RPG, a practice that can cause problems if they aren’t needed after all and start to accumulate. Avoiding this problem requires the GM to keep careful track of how many the PCs already have, because asking how many healing potions characters have just before they find more makes your intent blindingly obvious. I overcome this difficulty with a prior combat encounter which requires a character to use one or more healing potions, giving the GM to ask how many the character has left, and get the same info from the other players. This enables the “cache” to be discovered to be adjusted in size.
    

   That reminds me of a fun moment from long ago: Healing potions in this campaign were usually kept in a bottle of particular shape, so that you could find one in your pack by touch without taking it off (an idea I got from the unique shape of the traditional glass coke bottle). On this occasion, the PCs discovered a treasure cache which included one of these bottles – but when they opened it in the middle of the next battle, all that was inside was a note from a well-known brewer of such potions which read, “I.O.U. 1 Healing Potion – Dabny” (not the name of the Brewer)…

    
   Extra Ammo Refills: TT RPGs are notoriously bad at tracking ammo, for all sorts of excellent reasons. It’s not that there aren’t rules for doing so, it’s just that they are so damn tedious. So this can only be used in selected situations – such as Cinematic Combat – when the entire “Running out of ammo”/”Discovery of ammo cache”/”Reload at the last possible second” sequence can be delivered in narrative form. Sometimes, you can use a “dud” to reduce the amount of ammo a player thinks he has in order to induce this whole sequence. This works by eliminating the paperwork overhead and preserving only the intensity of the situation.
    

6. Fiddling The Odds: see “Altering The Combat Equations” below.
    
7. Forced Success after X sequential failures: this can be a lot more difficult to pull off in a Tabletop RPG because the mechanics of arriving at a chance of success are not hidden beneath the surface, as they are in a video game. It’s a lot easier to do the inverse: Forcing failure on an NPC after X sequential successes. But that brings me to…

Altering The Combat Equations

Any combat equation has four parts: Roll, Modifier, Probability of Success, and Effect. You normally have the same set of equations for the enemy, as well, though the specifics will vary. Of these, for the player’s attacks, the roll is known to the player, the modifier may or may not be known, the probability of success is known if the modifier is known, and the first-order direct effect is known – any interpretation or secondary effect is usually the GM’s province – but needs to be credible, according to the primary effect. That makes that equation difficult to manipulate.

Which leaves the enemy’s attacks. Of these, the player may or may not know the roll, won’t know the modifier (but will probably notice severe inconsistencies in it), usually won’t know the probability of success, but can estimate both it and the modifier from repeated attacks, and needs to be told the effects, both direct damage and secondary effects, though they will know the rules as they pertain to their character – making secondary effects a minefield to be manipulated very cautiously.

So, if you want the capability to manipulate the flow of combat in your game – even if you don’t use it, or don’t intend to – you need to take some active steps. First, you have to keep something hidden from the players. In terms of player attacks, that can only be the modifier to their combat rolls and the probability of success; you will have to do all the mental arithmetic required and announce simply “hit” or “miss” before moving on to effects. You can’t make the die roll for the player, and you can’t hide the modifier if you announce what the character needs to hit, because it’s simple arithmetic to get one from the other.

Now, the only way that you can actually hide the combat modifier is by adding more ingredients to the mix than just the combat bonuses that the character gets automatically. There are two ways of going about that – keeping all the modifiers together, or dividing them into two separate categories. The first choice requires the player to announce his combat bonuses at the same time as he announces his roll; the second permits him to apply his combat bonuses to the die roll and simply announce the total. But it also means that the GM needs to explicitly think of the “additional modifier justification” as something outside the control of the player – and it has to be there with every roll. For example, if you justify it under the heading of “environmental effects”, you need to be able to articulate those effects and their environmental causes every time.

However you approach it, the simple fact is that this means more work for the GM. Which is just one of many possible reasons that a GM might choose not to do it.

Which leaves only manipulating the enemy’s rolls. If you do this without also doing the same thing for the PCs, you must never let the players suspect that you are being anything other than scrupulously fair; because you are leaving yourself wide open for accusations of GM Bias against the PCs, and an extremely unhealthy us-vs-him mentality can arise.

Nevertheless it can easily be done – but it once again means hiding something from the players. Arguably, and ideally, it requires hiding everything from the players except the outcome – “Hit” or “Miss” – and the effects (“…doing 25 damage and stunning you for d6 rounds, I’ll let you roll…”). To explain why, let me tell you a little story…

The Discovery Of Manipulations

The more intelligent and analytical the player, the harder it is to conceal any manipulation of the combat equation from them. I once played with a lawyer (not a rules lawyer, I hasten to add) who could, after three or four attacks by an NPC, predict roughly what the modifiers of that enemy were, what the chances of success were, and could therefore predict what I had rolled – then alter his tactics accordingly. This was back in the days when I hid my die rolls behind a GM screen. It made him a very challenging player to GM for.

If the GM makes his die rolls in the open, it’s even easier for predictions – and becomes even more obvious when the GM is fiddling the odds. The key to doing so, I’ve found, is to create a dynamic environment in which some change in circumstances leads the player to expect that one or more of these known factors will change – and that the change will be unstable. That could be an environment filled with smoke or fumes, or a walkway that can collapse at an importunate time, or any number of such things.

You could even regard these as small-scale dues-ex-machina, but that’s generally overstating them – if that label can be applied, whatever you have in mind is probably too extreme. For example, a creek that just happens to flood at the right moment to knock an enemy off his feet momentarily is going too far.

There’s nothing wrong with occasionally going to far, either. But you need a curtain behind which to hide as you pull these levers – a secretive die roll after each round of combat, for example, supposedly to see when the flood arrives, plus some justification for the flood like obvious high-water marks. You can also get away with a lot more if the cure seems to be almost as threatening as the enemy supposedly was – so also sweeping PCs off their feet, demanding saves against drowning, etc, makes this seem less like the GM intervening and more like the GM adding a maraschino cherry of a challenge on top.

The Philosophical Debate

There’s also the deeper philosophical question of altering the odds at all. Some groups would rather the certainty of letting the chips fall where they may, others might prefer the GM to provide a safety net. I have a long-established track record of not killing PCs unless they do something stupid. I don’t generally include things like a savage playing with the controls of a nuclear reactor – the savage has no context in which to determine that this is a stupid thing to do. A character from the modern day – no matter how illiterate – has no such excuse. But he or she also has the capacity to make more rational and purposeful adjustments to those controls – which is not the same thing, and provides no justification for a “stupidity kill”.

Ultimately, there’s a lot of room under this heading for different answers, all of them right from some perspective and all-but-one of them wrong from other perspectives. Answers could range from doing everything in the open, to hiding as much as possible but never manipulating the results (and let the dice fall where they may), to only manipulating results under defined circumstances, to only manipulating the results for one faction, to a more egalitarian approach to manipulating the results.

One of the other comments to Dave’s answer speaks to exactly this point – Hahn Ackles wrote.

There’s a huge ideological divide here, as you no doubt well know.

I’m a very narrativist GM myself, much like you describe, but over on the Pathfinder forums I have debated with some people are way far on the other side. I’ve spoken to people who say that fudging dice is morally wrong, people who roll everything out in the open and even freely tell their players target numbers, etc. It’s very fascinating what different people call fun and what hills people choose to die on.

The reasons that game designers play with the odds is to ensure as entertaining an experience as possible. Tabletop games have different tools available, but the same broad objective. It is useful to consider the techniques that they employ to see what can be transferred into our form of gaming.

And again, huge thanks to Dave Rickey for giving me permission to quote his answer to the Quora question, and to Lawson Shepherd for asking it in the first place. You can read the other responses to the question at this link.