What if you held a Blog Carnival and no-one came? Until quite late in the most recent carnival, that’s what I thought I might be faced with.

In the wash-up, only one person besides me proved willing to take the challenge.

To be fair, that’s not a total surprise; I knew it was a difficult one when I posed it. It was, after all, filling a slot in the carnival that no-one else was putting their hand up to post – Campaign Mastery’s “real” hosting will come later in the year. But still, that’s a little disappointing.

Perhaps some people didn’t see how what they did when they knew half (or less) as much as they do now could be relevant. But that was the whole point of the challenge – to turn their legacy content into something fresh and relevant.

It is equally likely that some people were worried that showing how good they weren’t, way back when, would be embarrassing. But you have to remember that other GMs are out there right now with less experience than you had at the time. I never forget that some of these look at my work now and judge themselves against that standard, no matter how often they get told not to. But potential embarrassment is still a valid reason to have participated.

And there may well have been people who didn’t want to mess with the integrity of their memories..That’s a good reason, too.

For that matter, how many of us have records going back that far? Nineteen years or more, in my case, more or less in others. Even if you do, these take time and effort to dig out. You could think of this as article prep time – and it’s an observable fact that blog carnival subjects that don’t require such prep attract more responses. So the topic had that going against it, as well.

I’m sure that some people started, despite these motivations not to, only to discover (as I did) that it’s a lot harder than you think to revise past material. The past tends to sprout tendrils of memory, and it’s hard to know where to stop. And those tendrils and past impressions are in constant conflict throughout the updating process. In a way, it’s easier to update something that’s still active within your campaign, because the continuity of past history both restricts the solutions set to something more manageable and gives you multiple starting points.

When you put all of this together, it’s not surprising that there weren’t very many entries, and there’s no blame to be attached for that.

Hopefully numbers will return to normal for the next carnival. And if that’s the case, then all of the above becomes relevant material to the consideration of future carnival topics by GMs putting their hand up. But there will nevertheless be difficult topics from time to time.

About The RPG Blog Alliance

After all, the membership of the RPG Blog Alliance is much larger than the list of those willing to host blog carnivals. That’s a good thing; it means that if a particular subject doesn’t produce any excitement in the GM, there’s scope for someone else to pick up the slack. Nevertheless, a number of blogs that were regular contributors to the carnival seem to have gone quiet lately, as happens from time to time.

That’s why the current ambitions to revitalize the RPG Blog Alliance by Scot over at Of Dice And Dragons are so important. We need to encourage new people to start blogging, we need to encourage new members to become part of the RPGBA, and we need to encourage others to take part in the Blog Carnival.

The RPG B A’s Identity: a sidebar

The problem now faced by the RPG Blog Alliance is an acute version of the one that’s it has struggled with from day one: when you ask “What’s it for?” no-one can give you a clear and succinct answer. It was a loose coalition of websites gathered together because it seemed like a good idea at the time – I think – that has struggled to find a clear identity and succinct mission, ever since.

As a consequence, no-one’s ever been quite sure of how best to support it. So, I’m starting something with this post – you may have noticed the graphic at the top. If you have something to say on the subject, some idea to contribute, use that graphic – and post a link to the article at the RPGBA site. Make it a nexus of discussion about the RPG Blog Alliance itself – no matter how self-referential that might make it.

So, here’s my vision of the answer: The RPGBA should be a resource available to RPG Bloggers and those who read them. Or listen to them; I think Podcasts have a definite place somewhere in the RPGBA.

Readers/Listeners first: There should be some sort of curated list of the most recent blog posts by participating members. The greatest problem any blog writer faces is letting those who might be interested know that there’s something of potential interest to them out there; the RPGBA should be one of the channels by which this expanse is bridged.

For Bloggers: There should be a list of bloggers who are confident enough in their skills and free time that they can be called on for an emergency fill-in guest post at, say, 24 hours notice. There should be a member’s forum where questions about blogging platforms and plug-ins and infrastructure can be raised and discussed. There should be discussions of taxonomy optimization and other aspects of blogging that are irrelevant of genre or approach to gaming or blog subject matter. There should be sites that are good for free clip art to accompany blog posts. I’d like to see a regular exchange for guest posting, too. The Blog Carnival is part of this side of things as well – a stimulant and conversation starter.

Which takes me back to where I was before I interrupted myself…

There should never be difficulty in filling a slot – rather, people should be lining up to host.

Because with such an active membership, participation rates will also rise.

Carnival Roundup

Which brings me back to the Carnival just concluded. There were two submissions:

• From Campaign Mastery, He Once Was Elves took the Elves, and especially the Elven Prince, from my first AD&D campaign, from way back in 1981, and took a good look at the inadequacies that I wouldn’t tolerate these days – and then reinvented the Prince and his racial profile into an NPC for a modern campaign, named Fenton Cole. The process eliminated those inadequacies and produced a memorable NPC that I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce to any of my contemporary campaigns.
• From Brent Jans, The Renaissance Gamer, comes Argent of Zeif, a reworking of his favorite PC from around the same time, and who he is looking forward to reintroducing as a character in one of his current campaigns.

By now, the Carnival has moved to Codex Anathema, where the subject is The Art Of Customization. It’s a tantalizing subject by Gonz. There’s customizing of rules, customizing of adventures, customizing of plots, customizing of NPCs… and there is the potential for articles about the processes, and the results, and even the motivations. That’s a lot of scope for participation…

For a larger version that I haven’t cropped, click the image. To support the Kickstarter campaign, click .

This article started with an invitation to write a review of RPGSmith. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, all will be clear by article’s end. After an introduction, and a summary of what the product was, the co-founder who made the offer threw in a provocative statement:

“I would like to note that we feel this is much more than a single purpose niche app for gamers, this could be a game changer for how games are played both at the physical table and virtually.”

Now, I normally tune out hyperbole without even being consciously aware of it, or react to it with extreme cynicism. When a TV advert for some food supplement uses weasel hype such as “[product x] may help treat [condition y]”, my initial (and often verbal) reaction is “…but it might not.” Now, I understand why the pharmaceuticals and supplements industries have to be careful about the promises that they make – there simply isn’t room in a 30- or 60-second advert to ring their pronouncements with all the protections and disclaimers that our excessively-litigious modern society demands, and it would hardly make for a positive message, in any event. With any advertising, you can never forget that it’s primary purpose is to get you to buy something, whether that something is a new product, or an existing product, a message, or an attitude – in general, to do something that will benefit the people paying for the advert.

But most RPG writers and GMs have as developed a sense of nuance and cynicism as I do. It comes from the deeper understanding in human nature we have to have to portray the greedy and opportunistic and criminal. They tend to eschew the overblown statement. That makes the excerpted statement singular – either the tip of an unwelcome trend of hyper in RPG advertising, or an announcement of something in which the writer has a genuine belief as a potential (and quite literal) game-changer.

First Impressions

Let me be frank – I had trouble seeing what justified the excitement and the hype; and I was fully prepared to write an article deploring the new depths of hyperbole to which the industry had sunk. If the hype was really unjustified, that’s what you’d be reading about in this article. It was an interesting product, but a game-changer? Maybe in a few small respects, but nothing fundamental. I wasn’t even sure that the convenience that the product offered would be commensurate with the inconvenience of setting it up for use.

At this point, I wasn’t even completely clear on what the product was, what it did. And I have deliberately refrained from describing it so that you’ll be feeling the same way about now, unless you have some prior knowledge.

So I decided to check out the product’s website in search of answers. I soon found enough to intrigue me, but noted that there were several cogent questions that didn’t have answers in the material supplied. I responded with those questions, and David – the co-founder who had reached out to me in the first place – was good enough to put quite a bit of effort into answering them.

As I did my research and due diligence, and the answers to my hard questions started to sink in, the potential for what this product could be, and what the creators intend it to be, started to open my eyes. I’m still not ready to drink the kool-aid, but I’m ready to ask what flavors it comes in.

I have to be explicitly clear – this is not a review of what the product currently is, or even what it could be in the reasonably near future. I am going to assume, for the purposes of this article, that all of the features that the designers want to implement are available, and as easy to use as they sound, and a few that possibly aren’t even on the horizon. This is a review of the potential of RPGSmith, unsullied by real-world compromises – at least until closer to the tail end of the article – about what impact it could potentially have, five or ten years from now.

What is RPGSmith?

The first thing that came to mind when I heard the name were memories of a piece of software from maybe twenty years ago that I never found the time to master, Tablesmith (I did get as far as installing the architecture needed on my old Windows 98 machine, but that’s about it). That’s a program used primarily to generate random tables for RPGs. It has a healthy, even near-fanatical user base out there, happily generating content for each other to use – and pushing the development of the software.

It’s an association that got in the way, at least in the beginning, because it’s not correct. Not yet, anyway.

RPGSmith is a virtual character sheet, when you get right down to it. If you start with that understanding as your bedrock, you’ll avoid much of the fog that I had to fight my way through before gaining understanding.

But it’s a character sheet unlike any that you’ve ever seen before.

Each page is referred to as a Dashboard – and yes, you can have multiple dashboards for a single character. The content of a Dashboard consists of tiles, which display various things like stats, modifiers, spells, and so on. The interface to the dashboard is web-based, so the whole thing functions like an interactive website. There’s a die roller, and of course (being software) it can do all your calculations for you.

The results certainly look very pretty, as the screenshot at the start of this article shows. You can click on the cropped version for a larger image (or click – opens in a new tab).

But it’s not what you’d call game-changing at first glance.

All images provided by RPGSmith. I’ve enlarged most of them slightly.

The Funding Model

What’s more, it’s not a free service. It’s free to players, but not to GMs, and without GMs, it will never be more than a virtual character sheet – with some nice customizability features, and the ability for one person to copy another’s design as a template (and then customize it for their own character).

If there’s one thing that I dislike about the whole thing, it’s this. When the plan for RPGSmith was for nothing more than a virtual character sheet, this makes a reasonable amount of sense; but the evolution of the product is toward a campaign-centric model, and without the GM, there is no campaign.

At the same time, I understand the designers’ problem; they’ve put a lot of time and effort and money into RPGSmith, and not only deserve the opportunity to recoup that investment, but to make a reasonable profit. Making the current version free for players establishes a user-base, and players outnumber GMs at almost every RPG table you can point at. What’s more, the GM usually pays for the supplements and tools used by the group. I have 160-200 immediately to hand (not counting general references and resources), another 400 or so a few steps away, and probably 250 or so beyond those that are actually packed away. Not to mention thousands of supplements downloaded from RPGNow and other online sources.

But now, things are moving in a different (and more exciting) direction. And moving fast – the current version only launched back in December 2018. They’ve barely ticked over the three-month mark – not enough time to really build that player-based foundation, or to get the word out.

And it’s not all that expensive. $50 a year – roughly the same as a core rule-book plus p&h – once a year, which also adds multiple players. And discounts for longer-term commitments to the platform. If you can afford it, for a limited time only, there is also a lifetime subscription.

But, if I were to seriously contemplate making this the central interface to one of my campaigns, I suspect that I would first persuade my players, and then ask that they pay a share toward obtaining the service for all to use – just as we all used to kick in to hire the gaming space our club used, but GMs were often subsidized by the players – because without the GM, there was no game. It only came to A$1 or $2 a week – and at that rate, would have cost more than doing likewise for RPGSmith.

Let’s do the math: assume 4 players and 1 GM paying equally, once a week, for 40 weeks a year – that’s 5x40x$X. You need $50 a year. So $X = $50/200 = US$0.25 a week, each. If you only play once a month, that’s about US$1 a game session.

The first purchase would need to be made up-front – US$10 each would cover it. Most people could cover that – at the current exchange rates, that’s about what it costs per head to get a takeaway lunch. You might need to give people a week or two’s notice out of politeness. After that, everything that you collect goes toward paying the next renewal.

If the GM is to get a free ride on the player’s contributions, we’re talking $0.30 instead of $0.25 a week, and $12.50 instead of $10 for the up-front subscription.

I’m not recommending that anyone arrange things this way – that’s up to individual groups. What I want to demonstrate is the viability of this approach, which in turn shows that there will be other practical solutions.

The History Of RPGSmith

This is not RPGSmith’s first time at the rodeo. Back in December 2015, they launched a Kickstarter to obtain funding for their anticipated development costs, and had to pull the plug when it became clear that they weren’t going to achieve their funding goals.

A lot of soul-searching went into analyzing the reasons for the failure at the time, and those involved in this initial version of the project came to the conclusions (1) that without a functioning prototype, there was little confidence that the product would be delivered; and (2) that people really hated subscription pricing models.

They’ve addressed (2) by reducing the fees dramatically, to the point where it’s a relative pittance. But problem (1) is probably the more serious. David (yes, the same guy who reached out to me) began to refine the specs and commissioned bits of code off his own dime – in fact, off quite a few dimes, and more than a few dollars as well. This time around, they have a demonstrable product, and what they want to fund are enhancements.

There was probably some justification to the hesitance of backers at the time; in his blog post on the subject, David admits that he has personally invested a great deal more than the original fundraising effort was supposed to raise. This was a question that I raised with him, because it wasn’t resolved by that blog post:

Q: The page (I think it’s a blog post) announcing your campaign raises one important question that it then fails to answer. You state that you have actually invested more in code than your original fundraising effort would have raised. Did the excess go on bangs and whistles that weren’t part of the spec that you were fundraising for, or were people right to be suspicious that you wouldn’t be able to deliver? How have you modified your planned fundraising this time around to take those lessons into account?

A: “There were a couple of reasons as to the amount of money spent thus far. In part you are correct that the scope of our most recent development effort is much larger than the original, this expansion was done to better compete with other tools that have come into the marketplace since that initial Kickstarter.

“The other reason is that the original Kickstarter funding amount (and this one too) was never meant to fully fund the whole effort, just to supplement our existing capital.

“A separate reason for the Kickstarter was to test the waters to see if there was a market for this application. At the time we correlated the lack of backers to a lack of interest. We’ve since learned that without having a good Proof of Concept in place, people are very weary to hop on board or believe we can deliver. This time we have a very functional and useful tool already built that would give backers a better idea of what to expect.

“That particular blog post comment was meant to convey that we are committed as we have a lot invested in this effort and not intended to instill a lack of confidence. Perhaps a rewording is in order?”


Actually, I think he was a little shocked that someone could read this interpretation into what he had written. It’s a lesson that most bloggers learn the hard way!

I raise it here as others may have the same impression. The fact is that David was effectively commissioning code for his own use in the form of enhanced functionality, as implied by my question, having falsely correlated the lack of backing with a lack of interest. What that Kickstarter would have delivered would have been a far simpler and less functional application than the one that now exists – though it may well have evolved over time to the current spec, anyway.



All images from RPGSmith.

The Fundraiser

Which brings me to the that’s now underway. This is essential to unlocking the vision of the potential future that I foresee for RPGSmith; it’s designed to link and integrate PCs into a campaign view, with additional functionality for running a game with RPGSmith as a hub.

When you look at the RPGSmith features page, everything that’s on the left-hand side in plain orange boxes is functionality that’s already in the product; everything on the right hand side with the pretty pictures is what the Kickstarter is to fund.

Let’s run through them quickly:

– A high-level “GM’s Campaign View”
– Chat functionality with the option of showing die rolls
– Icon-based display of buffs and effects impacting a character
– create or import tables useful/central to the campaign
– monster generation
– configurable group-view screen with information from multiple characters
– Build and track NPCs
– Collections of Loot which can be distributed to the players when recovered
– Currency and ways for characters to spend their money
– Combat manager
– Inter-character trading of items
– Ability to group specific items like particular shops into towns and cities
– GM can control what the players can see of other players characters
– …and what they can see of the opposition

The Implications Of Success

Aside from a justifiable sense of vindication, and becoming a poster-boy for perseverance, success in the fundraiser is only the beginning for RPGSmith – if everything plays out the way it could. In particular, it will bring the concurrent benefits of a large subscriber base, putting further enhancement on the road-map.

There are a number of carrots for people to sign up – mostly in the form of discounted initial subscriptions. If you want to try the product out for yourself and find out whether it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread for your campaign, this is your chance to do so on the cheap!

Doing so will help fund enhancements that are likely to make it even more useful to you, so it’s not only a win-win for the people behind RPGSmith, it’s a win-win for you too.

The Setbacks Of Failure

The Kickstarter doesn’t really talk about what will happen if this fundraising goes the same way as the last one. It would obviously be a setback, but not necessarily a fatal one.

The difference is that there is a functional product and service there already; David and his gaming group can simply sit back and grow the subscriber base through reviews like this one for a year or two, spreading the word, before launching another attempt.

Or, they could give up on the idea of RPGSmith as a commercial operation and take the whole thing open-source. That wouldn’t be ideal, as they have “Skin In The Game” as David puts it – they have funded getting the project this far themselves, money that will be lost if they take this route. So there would no doubt be considerable angst about the decision.

Or perhaps they could walk through door number three, and sell their IP to someone like Roll20, recouping those costs – but losing control of the project.

Ultimately, the failure of this particular campaign will not be the end of RPGSmith, in my opinion. David and Co have come this far with the project, despite the fundraising failure of 2015; I can’t see them folding up their tents now, whatever happens.

So it’s just a VTT without the TT?

Not really, it’s much more than that. But to see why, you need to stop and think about what a character sheet actually is.

When we start out as players, we think of the character sheet as a collection of numbers that describe our character. When we become better players, we find ways of reading more deeply into those numbers, and start adding additional information that isn’t mere stats.

When you become a GM, you start thinking of character sheets in a broader sense; they are the focal points of your campaign, the most tangible expression of that campaign. That thought often leads us to create bespoke character sheets, in particular to reflect house rules.

Both these perspectives are correct, but limited in their comprehension. It’s only when you start thinking as a Game Designer that the real truth comes out. Character sheets are the player’s primary interface between character and rules system, as filtered through the lens of the campaign.

In and of itself, that doesn’t seem to mean very much at first glance; but it makes a massive difference when you look a little deeper. For example, if you have two different versions of a character sheet, both downloaded from somewhere like RPGNow (where there are dozens of them for a popular game system like D&D), trying to decide which one is better yields different criteria and different standards when viewed through each of these different perspectives on what a character sheet is.

As players, you start with the superficial – the better character sheet design “presents the stats clearly and in an organized manner” – proceed into characterization – “prompts characterization input and presents the results in a way that can be quickly assimilated for play”. As GMs, you think about the way the design “reflects your particular campaign”, “enhances and delivers the flavor and atmosphere of the campaign to the players”, “gets them in the right mood or frame of mind”, and “accommodates your house rules” as they inevitably accumulate. But as game designers, the best character sheet design is the one that “optimizes the interaction between, and accessibility of, the rules to the players.” This design has more space for skills than you want, but the alternative doesn’t have enough? This design makes you look up a table in the rule-book, the other one has a space for you to write the relevant information directly onto the character sheet?

Suddenly, the criteria for which design is best have become at least somewhat objective.

Now, factor in that every character is different. If you’re running a mage, you want your spell list to be easy to access. For any character class without spellcasting abilities, space dedicated to that is a complete waste – and is doubly-counterproductive, because something else useful could be in that space.

But all these character sheets have one property in common: they are static, fixed, unchanging.

You can choose between RPGSmith’s own clip art gallery, upload an image of your own, or even search for an online image – one way or another, you should be able to find the perfect representation of your character.

Dynamic Character Sheets I

RPGSmith is different. It’s Dynamic, and that has four major impacts.

The first is that it means that the Barbarian and the Mage no longer have to compromise optimum character sheet designs to accommodate each other. You can start from a common template and customize the layout as necessary.

Dynamic Character Sheets II

The second is that it means that the sheet content can be dynamic, changing as the in-game circumstance changes – more like a computer-game character interface. Complicated tables and calculations can be carried out but hidden from view, displaying only the part that you really care about – the result.

The same character can have a completely different presentation by day, and by night, for example – reflecting the character’s specific abilities that are available to them at the time – if that’s deemed desirable. By keeping track of the damage the character takes, the system can automatically tell you that you’re stunned, or unconscious, or dying, or delirious, or whatever, AND to automatically apply whatever modifiers result from those conditions.

Dynamic Character Sheets III

As implied by the previous paragraph, the template can be updated to incorporate house rules. If, in your campaign, you want characters to lose half their movement when they’ve lost half their hit points, you can make that happen – without being an uber-coder.

Dynamic Character Sheets IV

Right now, the templates are fixed – you copy a character from someone else and it gives you a blank version, but with all the behind-the-scenes functionality intact. I anticipate the capability of crafting “modules” that automatically check the master sheet for updates to that functionality each time the “character sheet” is loaded. That’s one function that’s not even on the development horizon at the moment, but I see it as inevitable since it means that you don’t have to reenter the whole character each time.

Modules and Master Developers

Even though you don’t have to be gifted at computer coding to implement house rules within RPGSmith, it’s inevitable that some people will be better at it than others. A logical consequence of the “module” development I describe above is that those people will flourish – a better mousetrap, i.e. a more communicative way of reflecting a particular condition can be listed by its creator and added to character sheets by others, copying that specific piece of code into their own master templates, from whence it is automatically applied to player’s character sheets. The individual GM can even ‘tailor’ a “module” to suit their specific needs.

Simplified Rules Sets

Contemplate the impact on an RPG that has been designed to function with RPGSmith. Nine-tenths of the game mechanics (okay, that might be a slight exaggeration) can be incorporated directly into the character sheets for the game; the principles have to be explained within the rules, but not the mechanics themselves. That not only kills min-maxing, or at least maims it, but it severely shrinks the size of those rule-books – and that means that they can cost a lot less in overheads to produce, lowering the price without compromising profitability to the game designer.

Since the designers have to put the design hard-yards in anyway, they can still produce an “offline edition” with all the mechanics and tables intact if they want to – but it might cost $60 instead of $20. The price differences would be profound, would reset the standards in fact – and that would be reflected in the sales.

Mix-and-match rules

What’s more, if you liked the way one game – let’s call it “Cranks and Shafts” – handles its auto-fire rules, since these would be in a module like any other rules segment, you could import those rules directly into the basic “Space Elephants” rules that are to be used within your campaign. You might need to tweak them a little, but half the work would already be done – and instructions within the module would guide you.

The RPG Campaign Distribution Channel Of Tomorrow: A Hypothetical Scenario

Let’s turn on the crystal ball and focus on what setting up an RPG campaign ten years from now might look like. You buy the basic rule-book – “Space Elephants” – for a relative pittance, something comparable to the price of an electronic edition from RPGNow (refer Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 1 of 2 and Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 2 of 2 for a comparison of the considerations that go into the respective pricing).

That gives the GM a set of rules, a set of principles that those rules embody, a basic adventure, and a list of RPGSmith modules, plus a suggested layout. Those modules come with a bunch of nice pieces of eye candy, a “Space Elephants” logo, and half the game rules coded into them, with up-to-the-heartbeat errata and corrections.

The GM reads the material he’s been given (well, okay, he skims it) and gets an idea for a campaign. He logs onto his RPGSmith account and grabs the modules, available as an official bundle – one click, and he’s got them all. He then spends an hour or so arranging them according to the recommended layout (and tinkering with it a bit) and looking over the eye candy – some of which was also in the rule-book, some of which is new to him. Once he has a character template, he makes some notes about the campaign background and the first few adventures in the DM’s module, in particular deciding how many players he can accommodate.

He spends a little more time customizing some of the built-in rules with house rules that he thinks will enhance the unique aspects of the campaign that he has in mind, making notes as he goes, then writes up a campaign blurb with a link to the character template he’s put together.

To identify his specific Space Elephants campaign, he gives it the name “The Ivory Nebula”, and using that as his headline, he posts a notice of a new campaign open for 6 players for 3-6 months of weekly play on a noticeboard reserved for the purpose, adding a number of tags to the bottom that describe the campaign. He also indicates that two specific past players of his should be explicitly invited to the campaign. While he waits for the system to do its thing, he creates a short player briefing with more information on the proposed campaign and the sort of characters that would be suitable.

Those two players, and a number of others who have indicated an interest in the tags, are emailed notification of the campaign opening. Before too long, the GM notices downloads of his template and player briefing, and in a day or two, he has his six players, and expressions of interest from three more. They get automatically placed on a waiting list to join if someone else drops out – a list from which they can opt out at any time.

The GM has one player from Lima, Peru, one from France, one from England, one from the US, and his two former players, one of which now lives in New Zealand, the other still living close by in the same small town somewhere in the US.

Each of them has generated a character, submitted it to the GM, and customized the layout of their character sheets to suit their character’s capabilities and their personal needs. A time sync is set by the GM to tell everyone when the first session will commence (date and time) in their local vicinity…

Whoa – That could change everything!

There isn’t much about the RPG industry that isn’t being fundamentally altered in the above scenario. GMs are no longer restricted by geography – though language would remain a stumbling block. The way games are created and physically distributed is fundamentally changed, and the way games are consumed and administered are radically transformed. And yet, the fundamentals remain the same, comfortingly familiar.

Some of it is functional within VTTs now – but not all of it. Some of it is functional within RPGSmith now – but not all of it. And the two have only a partial overlap. Even if the Kickstarter is successful, and the current list of planned features is implemented, that will still not be enough for the above to become a reality; that would take more enhancement to RPGSmith (some of it on the agenda, some not currently). And then you would need time for the market impacts to influence the industry.

And there would be knock-on effects. Some games would have “Official” distributions through RPGSmith, others might have only amateur “unofficial” packs. Licensing and copyright would have to evolve slightly, though the OGL has shown the way forwards in that respect. Every game that is played using a particular “system” could be designated a play-test by the publishers – if they get reports that eight out of ten GMs have replaced the Psi rules with something else (or just removed them altogether), that’s a fair hint that there’s a problem in that area of the rules. If someone reports strange results from the enhanced healing rules, an errata can be noted and an update released “live” in minutes, hours, or days for all users who want it.

Game rules would evolve a lot more quickly, and probably be released in far more preliminary form. Game development would become more interactive – and there would be little-to-no chance of developers ignoring the feedback they were getting, the way WOTC has admitted they did with 4e D&D play-testing.

The Impact of Real-World Compromises

Okay, that’s the rose-colored glasses view of the future. The reality is that not all these changes are sure of getting through – some are, so far as I know, not even on the development horizon at the current time. Some are, though, and some are logical extrapolations of what RPGSmith either can do now, or will (hopefully) be able to do in the near future.

So this forecast is a case of what the maximum possible impact might be. Let’s take a step back and look more closely at how much of this is plausibly in the pipeline, by quoting some more of the questions I had for David and the answers that he supplied.

Q: Can a blank character sheet be saved as a template and then used as a foundation by other players, or does each have to be customized from scratch?

A: “A default dashboard, or ‘template blank character sheet’ if you prefer, is defined and associated with a given Rule Set level. This is true for all Rule Sets whether created from scratch, added from RPGSmith’s ‘Core’ Rule Sets, or imported from another user’s RPGSmith account.

“You can also create multiple dashboard configurations, hundreds in fact, on the same Rule Set. Each time you create a character and select a Rule Set for the character to be created in, the defined dashboard associated with that Rule Set is duplicated as used at the starting layout for that character.”

So the core functionality is there, it’s only the distribution mechanisms and the integrated RPG publishing/development that is needed – plus the GM/Campaign focus that they are currently trying to implement.
 

Q: Can graphics be uploaded or are you restricted to those provided by the site?

A: “Yes, graphics can be uploaded, or selected from our stock images, or even searched and imported from the web without ever having to exit the interface. This same image interface is used throughout the tool any time you want to insert or change an image. RPGSmith is built with the intent to allow you to customize anything, replace all the images in the provided pre-created ‘core’ rule sets if you like.”

A dedicated zip interface is all that’s needed to “bundle” things, in that case, enabling a consistent base look-and-feel for particular rules sets. That’s an important element in the publishing part of the process that I’ve described.
 

Q: Your website keeps saying things like “nothing else will let you do what RPGSmith lets you do” but I’m still not entirely clear on what the differences are. Lots of hype, not many specifics. Can you provide a couple of examples of unique functionality? What are the features that set RPGSmith apart?

A: “Prior to the launch of the Kickstarter, I would direct you to the features page on our website, the ‘Coming Soon’ section would serve as the current best source of things to come from the Kickstarter and the planned stretch goals. This section on the site isn’t heavy in the details by design.

“For better or worse we’re trying preserve the newness and excitement for a lot of these boons when we launch the Kickstarter. As we just launched the player version this month, we thought it would be better not to showcase the future features we have in store as most people are just discovering the current feature set. We didn’t want someone to feel misinformed if they go into the existing player version and not find what they thought was already included.

“With the significant amount of features in the current released version, we’re challenged enough conveying all of what the app does in a succinct and digestible size. Adding adding a bunch of other features not yet in place we fear would cause confusion.

“To answer your question as to specific examples of the unique features coming:

In-Game Random Shop Creation: “RPGSmith will have what we refer to as the ‘randomization engine’ that will be applied to a number of different features. The ‘RE’ allows a GM to pre-configure a range of criteria into a template that can deployed later with random results in the specified range. Using in-game shops as an example, a GM could create a shop template named ‘Small Apothecary’, in this template he can specify the shop will have:

– 10-20 Items tagged with the word ‘potion’ and the rarity set to ‘common’;
– 5-10 items with the tag of ‘potion’ and the rarity set to ‘uncommon’;
– 1 item tagged with a ‘potion’ tag and the rarity set to ‘rare’.

“Then when the GM is ready to deploy a ‘Small Apothecary’ they click a button, provide a name for this specific shop, and the randomization engine pulls matching criteria from the Rule Set items list generating the inventory for that shop. The GM can also configure a markup/markdown value which modifies the cost of all items in the shop, or this can be randomized as well. The GM can at any time overwrite any of the random elements if they choose, from the markup value to the inventory itself, both at a shop wide or individual item level.

“Once the GM marks this shop as ‘open’ to the Players they can then interact with shops without the GMs further direct involvement. The GM makes the shop available to the players and they can go and purchase, or even sell items (if the item is something the shop would purchase, also GM configured) to the shop and have the currency exchange, inventory updates all seamlessly handled by RPGSmith. The GM can still Role Play the shop owner, and raise or lower costs accordingly if the group ticks the owner off for example. This would streamline a lot bookkeeping, and consequently allow the group to get through more content, and improve the immersion. If this is been done elsewhere, I’ve never heard of it.”

And buying items automatically adds them to your inventory, updating encumbrance, etc.

Monsters: “Also using the randomization engine, the GM can configure a monster template and provide some similar logic. A ‘goblin’ template can be created to deploy a Goblin with:
– 2d4+2 Hit Points,
– AND have a 30% chance of carrying a short-bow;
– OR 25% chance of carrying a short-sword;
– OR 45% change of a dagger;
– AND carry between 1 cp and 2GP.

“Then the GM can deploy 15 goblins and get a unique result for each one. This has been kind of done somewhat with other apps but not to the extent of what we’re planning.”



All images provided by RPGSmith.

Combat Tracking: “The combat tracker is another one that perhaps no individual feature is unique, but I have never seen the total incorporation of all the features pulled off to the extent we have designed. [It has] features like:
– Monster insertion from templates, again utilizing the ‘randomization engine’;
– Assigning color coded teams to easily track sides;
– GM controlled visibility of combatants allows the GM to show or hide turn order of other combatants to the players;
– The execution of monster attacks, spells, all linked directly to the dice rolls or to more details;
– Configuring general initiative settings such as Shadowrun style, re-roll init each round, or group initiative;
– The tracking of round metrics such as in-game time (configurable), real time, round counters, etc;
– Placing traps, effects, or buffs on a round or game time counter that can auto expire or auto activate, or both.

“All of this can be pre-configured and saved as a template to allow the GM to prep in advance.

Encumbrance: “The current player version has what I believe to be a unique feature with regards to container weight reduction and how that effects your inventory weight.”

In other words, if you can fit something into a portable hole or whatever and you designate that as where it is being kept (as a player or GM), it automatically adjusts the encumbrance of the character accordingly.

“Combine that with a ‘condition’ character stat to track encumbrance and you’ve got a pretty nice way to automatically see if you’re carrying too much, based upon a variable derived from a character stat, typically ‘Strength’. All of this is can be created by the user through the interface. This isn’t something we’ve coded behind the scenes, we’ve instead built it through the interface to ensure any user can do the same and tweak the formula.”

You can definitely see the beginnings of what I’ve described. But what about what David foresees?

Q: Your email talks about large-scale impacts on RPGs without suggesting what the impacts that you foresee actually are. What’s your vision of the RPG future?

A: “I envision more automation, more features, and better interfaces to facilitate those. When I GM I strive to achieve as much immersion as I can for the players. Having to pause to look up stats or flip through a book/website to find the details of a spell has been a source of frustration in the past. We’ve built RPGSmith to allow the user to store and retrieve the information they need quickly.

“This is evidenced by the dashboard interface and allowing a user to create tiles linked directly to dice rolls, or spell details, or counters to track numeric values, or simple and rich text, all of which are stored, color coded, shaped, and sized in a method that makes perfect since to the end user, because that’s how they set it up.

“I touch on this in the intro video somewhat; many of the tools in the market place are nice, but single purposed. Or they’re are robust, but the interface is too complex. The good and bad thing about RPGSmith is that it looks simple. That’s bad in that at a glance people may not feel it’s feature rich, but if they take the time to peel the onion a bit, they would see it’s well structured to suit both games like Fate with not many built in stats or records, to Pathfinder which has over 2500 spells alone.

“Perhaps I’m delusional, or overly biased because I’ve poured so much into this project, but I truly believe – given the proper exposure and support – this could really simplify and speed up the non-fun aspects of gaming for people by expanding the tool belt both the players and the GM have at their disposal.”

And perhaps our respective visions aren’t that far apart, at that.

Speaking of ‘more automation’, there’s another feature that I’d like to put on David’s radar: auto-compilation of narrative session summaries.

Let’s say that the GM’s adventure notes contain the following:

“One goblin on guard, smoking a saram – a type of curving tobacco pipe that goblins use.

Actually, this ‘guard’ is an illusion. At the start of each shift, the goblin Sargent casts Invisibility on a pair of guards who position themselves 15 feet to either side of the pre-programmed illusion.”

When the players reach the appropriate point, the GM selects the “One Goblin on guard” line to copy it into his chat session with the players, annotating it as necessary. He ticks a box beside the resulting paragraph in his chat feed to indicate that it is to be made part of the synopsis.

Each of the players then describes what they are doing about the guard. The GM takes these actions on board and describes what happens – ticking first a player response and then his own comments, so that they will appear in the synopsis in that order.

This feature, in other words, lets you select part or all of a line of text in the chat feed and incorporate it into a synopsis of the day’s play, which you can then download and further edit in a word processor if you want. It skips over the irrelevant details and focuses only on the parts of play that will be relevant next week, next month, or next year.

The Inevitable Coming Of Rivals

If you build a better mousetrap, someone will copy it, change a small feature, and start selling it. Or make it out of something cheaper and start selling it for less than yours cost.

If RPGSmith is successful to anything like the extent that it could be, it will indeed be a game-changer, and the various purveyors of VTT services will undoubtedly try to imitate it.

If that happens, I don’t think they will find it all that easy to catch up. RPGSmith would have two huge advantages over any rivals: First, the amount of development that’s already gone in will put them years ahead of the development curve; and second, the ease of customizability is not something that can be superficially slapped on top of an existing interface, it has to be baked deeply into the operational code, or it will be prone to breaking down.

I’m sure that they’ll try, though.

That brings me to the last two questions I posed to David:

Q: There are already a number of online RPG mechanisms out there, like Roll20. Your character sheet seems more graphic than my perception of theirs, and the customization of rules and characters is a definite plus that I’m not sure they offer. Do you hope to lure campaigns over from those platforms, and if so, what is the bait you intend to use? If not, can you foresee some mechanism of integrating the two technologies?

A: “There are a couple of different factors that come into play with this question.

“The gaming style of the group will play a significant factor I think. If you have a more ‘theater of the mind’ game where the GM trusts the player with their roles and upkeep of their stats, RPGSmith is already a great solution even without the GM tools. The style of game that Chris Perkins runs with the Waffle crew come to mind as one that would be well suited.

“Other groups are very tactical in their game and rely heavily on a Virtual Table Top. We do have aspirations to build a VTT, that will be one of our higher stretch goals but honestly we don’t anticipate being able to unlock it with this particular Kickstarter. We do see groups using RPGSmith in conjunction with other VTT solutions which works well due to the fact that RPGSmith is built responsively, meaning it will function with any screen size and orientation. Since you also have the ability to build your dashboard and position tiles where you like, it can fit whatever screen real estate you provide.

“Another attractive quality that I feel has been overlooked by other solutions is the inclusion of independent game designers. There are a ton of game designers out there that put out high quality products, but maybe too small to have a ready integration into these other applications. We’ve already reached out to and are working with a number of these to create Core Rule Sets (pre-configured games) which their customers can add to their RPGSmith account and gain instant access to game content. It’s a great boon to not only be able to provide your customers with a PDF or physical book of their creation, but now they can provide a no-cost method to get their content to the consumer through a gaming application.”

Given the confidence that I have that RPGSmith will continue along this path even if the Kickstarter fails, this answer gives a lot of confidence in that vision of the future…

Q: I can foresee some major impacts on RPGs – liberation from the limitations of geography being one. A campaign could be truly global with players from all over the world. The biggest hurdle to these impacts – and the reason none of the existing platforms have managed to have this level of impact – is the difficulty of finding and recruiting interested players. Do you have any plans for addressing this situation with RPGSmith, or are GMs still required to do the heavy lifting of finding and attracting players? Will there be a campaign marketplace of some kind, in other words?

A: “To me the very core of this industry is connecting people of similar interest to have fun in a collaborative shared experience. We’re all about facilitating this.

“Yes, we will have a marketplace, not only to provide a method for people to share their content (Dashboard creations, Art, Rule Sets, Item/Spell packs, etc.) so that others can enhance their gaming experience, but also to facilitate players and GMs looking to join a group that fits their schedule and interest.

“Speaking personally, this is my hobby, of which I’m passionate. For me the most rewarding thing I could get out of this is providing a set of tools that would make running a game easier and less stressful on the GM, allow players to quickly understand their character in a method that makes sense to them, and ultimately improve upon the immersion, realism, and fun for all playing.”

The gap from now to tomorrow

The first hurdle is the immediate one – the success or failure of the funding campaign. To date, the campaign has raised a little over 6.8% of their target. And most of the backer tiers are relatively low cost, meaning that they will need to sell a lot of them (or have a lot of add-ons from different backers) to reach their target. With 20 days to go as I write, that’s a tall order – but entirely doable if people find out about the project and see its potential.

Most of what I’ve forecast seems inevitable to me, under the circumstances. Even the failure of this particular fundraising campaign, should it occur, will probably not be fatal to RPGSmith. But it would be a delay, and could well force further compromises with reality into existence.

If you want the best possible future for RPGs, you have to at least think about .

This started off as a simple idea for a quick little article. It grew…..

How rulers gain their offices should be reflected in the society around them.

Think about that for a moment.

How rulers gain their offices should also be reflected in the personality and capabilities of the ruler, either at the time of selection, or at some subsequent point in time.

Spend a moment reflecting on that, too.

The gulf between the theory and the practical reality can be huge, and that complicates utilizing those two basic principles in an RPG. Those three thoughts are the subjects of this series of articles (which started out as just one short article). But first, a little context… (You can skip everything that’s indented if you aren’t into politics – though I recommend that you read it).

Appointments with the voting booth

2019 is the year that decides the shape of 2020, far more-so than usual. In less than 100 days, if the announced schedule is maintained, we will have a Federal Election here in Australia, and the deeply unpopular Coalition government will almost certainly be consigned to the history books.

Before that happens, there’s a State Election, which has just taken place. The opinion polls were forecasting a much closer contest for this one, but all the by-elections in recent times had seen unprecedented swings against the Coalition State government, which has been enveloped in scandals and controversy, has a record of poor decision-making and worse explanation of those decisions, and has also been beset by inconstancy of leadership over the last few years.

On the other hand, the current opposition leader is relatively new, has just been the target of some vicious mudslinging, and is what feels like the tenth such leader in five years (though I know, intellectually, that this is a vast exaggeration). Furthermore, the Australian electorate has shown a definite predilection for voting the opposite way in State elections than their intent in Federal ones. So it was considered possible that it could be quite tight, or quite surprising.

Well, the returns are in and the State government – which has shown no competence at leadership – has nevertheless been returned to office for another four years. In the last week, the opposition shot themselves in the foot quite badly, and in a contest this close, that was enough. What’s more, one of the most obnoxiously right-wing politicians in Australian History has been elected to the upper house where his divisive rancor will once again contaminate good order and the process of governing.

A Confusion Of Brexits

Over in the mother country, it’s now 17 days until a hard Brexit that many don’t want. Or maybe it’s 3, or maybe 58 – that confusion is emblematic of the entire Brexit mess. The whole Brexit story is one of self-delusion and wishful thinking – the promise of Brexit was ‘if we quit the European Union, we can transform the country into the land of milk and honey’, but it should have been, ‘If we quit, and have everything go our way in the divorce, we may be able to transform the country into the land of milk and honey’.

And this seductively over-optimistic view was enough to sway just enough people into voting ‘yes’. Unsurprisingly, the EU negotiators were unwilling to cater to British fantasies, and the deal that was eventually struck favored the economically dominant partnership, in particular in relation to Ireland, which actually voted to leave Great Britain in preference to leaving the E.U.

And, because it was not the promised yellow brick road to the land of milk and honey, the deal was rejected, even though it was probably the best deal that was ever going to be struck. Equally unsurprisingly, the EU negotiators were no more willing to indulge the British the second time around. A deal agreement had, after all, been reached in good faith, only for the Brits to throw it back in the E.U.’s face. And then it was rejected again. And a slightly-modified version was then rejected a third time.

Much of this angst is because rejecting the deal suited the petty domestic political aspirations of factions within the British Parliament. But not all of it.

Political Junkies Rejoice

That will be coming to a head at around the same time as those two elections. And by the time they are done, we will be mid-year, and the primaries for the US nominations will be getting seriously underway, the Mueller investigation has just submitted its report but we have yet to see the fallout embodied in the 20-odd sealed indictments still lurking in the shadows, not to mention the many congressional investigations launched by the House Democrats. On top of that, we only have BarrÆs summary by which to judge the findings of the Mueller Inquiry. If that summation is accurate, why wonÆt he release the full report? By not doing so, he only fuels speculation that his summary is more spin than a top.

By the middle of the year, opinion polls will be everywhere and The Siege of Trump will have begun, one way or another û he is too divisive a figure for that not to happen, he is almost certain to face a looming primary challenge from within his own party in the course of the year. I expect him to win that challenge – but potentially at the expense of a further slippage of his approval rating, potentially a fatal one in 2020 given how slim his margins were in 2016.

For anyone with any interest in politics whatsoever, 2019 will be a year to watch, and speculate. Never will there have been so much hot air by so many pundits of so little actual meaning. But a few things will have been decided in the course of the year – so much of that hot air will be about what the results actually mean for the future.

Economic Downturn Ahead

All the major economic indicators bar one or two are pointing toward a global slowdown at the moment. It’s into that context that political events have to be analyzed.

Trump’s Tariff War is having a stultifying effect on the US economy at exactly the same time as middle-income householders are filing their tax returns and the true cost of the Republican Tax Costs are biting. On top of that, there are potential market jitters about the election, and the longer-term effects of the government shutdown earlier this year – which is estimated to have cost the US Economy about 14% of it’s growth, though a little more than 2/3 of that will eventually be recovered, provided that there isn’t another one in the near future. So the US market is already prone for a Recession, and would normally be looking to Europe for some “Stability”.

If they do, they won’t like what they find. Whatever the Brexit outcome, it is sure to be a shock to the global financial markets. That in itself might be enough to trigger a short period of global recession, never mind with all the US economic factors piled on.

That leaves only the Asia-Pacific markets, which are dominated by China, who have already signaled an intentional slowing of their economy. You see, China don’t want to displace the US as the dominant world currency; it brings with it too many pressures and influences from outside their borders, and they prefer to keep strict control over their internal economy.

Wherever people look, then, they will find stories of economic doom and gloom. That will spell opportunities for those whose economies are still strong. During the GFC, Australia’s current opposition party (then government) ensured that the country came through it without even a period of recession – though growth did slow. Admittedly, we had a mining boom under way at the time, and that has since come to an end. But that could well factor into what is already shaping to be a landslide in the Federal Election here – just to bring the whole discussion full-circle.

The Social Impact Of Bad Times

Two opposing themes always manifest in times of economic strife. No, three.

The first is an upswing in lightweight, overtly optimistic, music and entertainment; people like to escape their problems and look ahead to better times. This often means good times for comedies and sci-fi and RPGs.

The second is an upswing in angry, rebellious music and entertainments. Heavy Metal, Punk, Grunge, these genres all have their roots in times of economic distress. Darker tones in movies also do well in such times, because there’s something viscerally satisfying about shouting and rebelling against a society that has seemingly failed people. This can also be a time when RPGs do well, though they often grow grimmer and more violent in tone.

And the third is that those sentiments often express themselves in changes of government, should the opportunity permit. The next general elections aren’t due in England until 2022, and Australia will have just had its election. That leaves Japan, Canada, and a number of European elections in later 2019, and the US Primaries, New Zealand, South Korea, and a great many Eastern European and African elections in 2020.

Depending on how deeply any downturn is felt, and in particular how the US copes under Trump, it might be all over by the date of the US Federal Elections in late 2020 (in which case Trump could well walk it in on his newly-minted economic credentials, and perhaps deservedly so) or they might be the first Depression elections since 1932 which gave America FDR and The New Deal.

The times in which you live always impact your personal life. Always. And any impacts on your personal life tend to find some form of political expression. And that brings me back to the theme of this series.

Past Art

This is hardly the first article on the selection of leaders here at Campaign Mastery.

• Pulling That Lever: The Selection Of Leaders In RPG Societies

was directly about the subject.

• City Government Power Bases was a series by Johnn, each part of which dealt with a different basis of power for a particular government. One of these days, I intend to enlarge that series – I have a list of twelve more to add to the eight that Johnn wrote about, and a 22nd part to tie the whole series back together – and maybe a 23rd on how to use it.
• Phase 5: Surroundings & Environment from the “New Beginnings” series covers Geography, Economics, Culture & Society, Politics, and Races, amongst other topics.

That’s good, because I don’t want this article to be about the selection of leaders or even government types. Instead, I want to focus on the consequences as they should manifest in the lives of ordinary people – which usually includes the PCs, and certainly includes the majority of the NPCs with whom they will interact. And that gives you some sense of how important this is, and why this article – which I started drafting more than a year ago – is probably long-overdue!

Five Accession Methods

To start with, I’ve boiled all the detail that I don’t really want to talk about in this article down into five very broad categories, which form the title of the series: Appointment, Inheritance, Victory, Desperation, and Need.

Every government achieves it’s position of authority through one of these five methods, perhaps two.

Nor do I want to get bogged down (this time) in societal structures (as happened the last time I attempted to write an article on this subject). That also means a great deal of generality in the treatment of effects on citizens.

Each of the five accession methods will be given its own article. After a brief examination of the significance of the accession method, the Impacts on citizenry of a government which achieved its position will be examined under 14 sub-headings.

Because of the generalization involved, these examinations are also fairly brief; there will be room within each subtopic for a GM to customize the analysis to fit his own world and the societies within it. These are just starting points.

So, let’s get started with the first of the five: Appointment.

Appointment

Someone – who, rightly or wrongly, believes they have the authority to do so – has appointed someone to be the head of a government. They have chosen those rulers from the pool of available candidates for a reason – one that may now be out-of-date, or might be still current, or might even be potentially imminent. That reason may or may not be known to the public, who might or might not agree with it if they knew the specifics. The public also might or might not know who the people making the choice are.

Social Impact

All of those potential unknowns need to be answered by the GM, and they have a cumulatively profound effect on the psychology of the common people within the society. This is a society which is profoundly aspirational – either a commoner can aspire to qualify for the pool of candidates, the next time an appointment needs to be made, or can aspire to qualify to the ranks of those who choose.

This provides a stabilizing outlet that can quell anger and discontent – for a while – if there is cause for these emotions. However, they tend to build up over time until they discharge explosively unless relief is given of some sort.

Ironically, the social mobility implied often makes the societies that appoint such governance more aware of class distinctions and less tolerant of them.

Social Expectation

Aspirational societies tend, broadly, to be optimistic, glass-half-full. There is an expectation that the rulers will have the best interests of the society as a whole at heart, and provided that the public feel that expectation is being met, they will be largely content.

Who Chooses?

There are two possible models – appointment by popular acclaim / election, and appointment by some elite or representative group, who may or may not themselves be elected.

The first is what Americans have – a system of electing a head of state and two houses of government. Their choices are made from a pool of potential candidates that are winnowed out through primaries in some cases and open to anyone put up by the party leadership as a potential representative in others. What’s more, while no other options can be seriously contemplated from outside the pool of two (plus running mates) for the Presidency, others can and sometimes do throw their hats into the ring without major party support in the lesser contests.

The second is what we have in Australia. The citizens elect a party, whose leader as chosen by the party in advance is then appointed to the position of Prime Minister. There are two specific situations that need to be understood: Majority and Minority government. Majority means that the party chosen has enough members elected from the different voting regions that they can rule outright in the lower house, where the laws are written. Minority means that they don’t, but have been able to reach an agreement with the “cross-bench” – independents and representatives of minor parties – that results in them having an effective majority. This can mean that the major party with the lower total number of elected representatives gets to form government if they are more capable of reaching such an agreement.

British governments – and those of most of Western Europe for that matter – are almost always of the “Minority government” variety.

It’s also possible that no-one knows who chooses the leader, that we’re talking about some secret council or something. If that’s the case, there will usually be some overt display of some other mode of appointment or even a different mode of accession.

In more ancient times, it was not uncommon for some sort of Council to rule on the eligibility of heirs and claimants to the throne.

Who Chooses Who Chooses?

In most major modern governments, that means that it’s the power-brokers who put potential leaders into positions to be elected that really make the selections. At best, some of the voters get to select from a short list, a process often named “pre-selection”.

These are the people who get to select what “menu items” the people who choose the leaders get to pick from. That’s considerable authority, as was shown in a Yes Prime Minister episode in which he has to appoint a new Archbishop from amongst the candidates selected by the Anglican Church. One of the candidates is extremely mainstream and would perpetuate the system that put him in place; the other is a clearly unsuitable maverick. When magicians do this sort of thing, it’s called a “Magician’s Force”: “Pick a Card,” they say, offering a selection of two. If the mark picks the one the Magician doesn’t want, he tells them that this is the card that has been “spared” by their choice, sets it aside, and performs his trick with the card that he wanted all along.

Quite often, the people who are selected to choose who chooses are selected to perpetuate established forms and norms, continue established and accepted policies and political ideologies. Where those traditions are under challenge, this can maintain the status quo, but if they are not, selecting an ‘enthusiastic believer’ can result in policies being pushed farther than is reasonable, inciting a corrective backlash.

There are two types of politicians who lack the patience to play the long game: the very young and the very old. The Young want to fix everything that’s “wrong” right now and worry about unintended consequences later, while the Old keenly feel the shadow of death at their shoulder and want to complete the task they have set themselves to burn their names indelibly into history; they are worried about their “legacies” and how they will be remembered.

Knowing who was choosing when the last set of choices were up for consideration is often the key to understanding the real forces and trends of history.

For example, if you read the comments above and in the next section regarding leadership and elections, you might get the impression that our system in Australia is quite stable. A glance at our recent political history will swiftly erase that impression.

In 2007, Kevin Rudd was elected for the Labor Party. In 2010, the Labor Party dumped him as leader and his former Deputy, Julia Gillard, became our first Female Prime Minister in what was widely viewed as a coup; surprisingly, he did not resign his position as the elected Member for Griffith, as was traditional. Two and a half months later, their party was successful in winning a second term at the Federal Elections despite popular anger over this change of leadership, much it deriving from surprise and an inability to explain to the public why it had taken place. Three years later, the party were facing defeat at the 2013 elections according to popularity polling; they chose to dump Gillard as leader, who promptly resigned (upholding the tradition), and reinstate Rudd. Less than three months after that, the Party were defeated at the Federal Election and this time, Rudd resigned. It was suspected that throughout his time out of the leadership, he had been destabilizing the government that he had once led.

In his place was elected Tony Abbott of the Liberal-National Party coalition. Abbott quickly made a huge number of extremely unpopular decisions that led to his government losing 30 popularity polls in a row, something that was unprecedented in Australian politics. Three days short of his second anniversary as Prime Minister, he was dumped as leader by the Liberal Party, and replaced by Malcolm Turnbull, who Abbott himself had rolled for leadership of the party while they were in opposition. Like Rudd, Abbott did not resign and was very obvious in his attempts to destabilize the Turnbull government, both directly and indirectly. Nine months later, Turnbull won a narrow electoral victory despite his government not being much more popular than Abbott’s had been. Turnbull’s first elected term was beset by leadership speculation as the government lost opinion poll after opinion poll and endured scandal after scandal, and almost three years later, he faced a new leadership challenge. Although he won that challenge, it was by such a small margin that it was clear to most observers that his government was living on borrowed time.

A week later, the inevitable took place, but Turnbull had spent the intervening time ensuring that those who wielded the knives would not succeed him, instead bringing his Treasurer, Scott Morrison, to the preeminent role. Morrison barely registered an uptick in the popularity polls, and the coalition has continued to lurch from unpopularity to unpopularity, losing by-elections by record margins that astonished everyone. Later this year, as I noted earlier, he will face the electorate’s judgment, and it is widely expected that his party will experience a crushing defeat, bringing a new Prime Minister to power.

But even if that doesn’t happen, count them up: Rudd x2, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison – six Prime Ministers in 12 years, when they are supposed to be good for 6 (or more!) years apiece, based on prior electoral patterns. None of them have managed to go a full electoral term from election to election in that period of time. If I look six Prime Ministers further back, I find myself looking at the elections of December 1971, a full 36 years prior – and the last time Australia saw such a period of political instability.

So here’s the key point: in only one of the cases listed did the former Prime Minister resign after losing an election, the tradition in Australia. That’s one in six. All the rest were appointed by the elected members of their respective parties. Two of the six did go on to win elections, but were then ousted before their elected terms were complete.

To many Australians, it feels like our right to choose our leadership has been usurped by politicians making back-room deals and more than a few have “had a gut-full” of it. Hence the record run of unpopularity numbers I mentioned several times in this sidebar. If you want to understand Australian Politics over the last 12 years, it’s not enough to look at who the leader is – you have to look at who chose the choices.

Duration Of Appointment

How long will the selectee hold the position to which he has been elevated? The usual answers are a span of years (with or without some flexibility), or for life.

Those appointed in Olden Times were more frequently appointed for life – though the appointment itself could profoundly alter the span of that life, both through overwork and hostile measures by enemies of the individual or of the state. When someone’s death is the only way out of what is seen as an intolerable situation, someone’s going to try and kill someone else.

Having a regular turnover of leaders – or just a reaffirmation of popularity – can avoid the need for assassinations. It won’t stop them, but it will reduce the number of attempts – unless the process has been thoroughly corrupted, which is what happens in dictatorships and banana republics.

That’s why the US has Midterms for part of Congress while another part of Congress shares the electoral “bill” with a Presidential Election.

In Australia, things are a little more flexible and complicated. There is a fixed limit to the term of a government – so long and no more – and, it is normally held, a fixed minimum before you will inflame the public with an unnecessary election. As a rough rule of thumb, these are four and three years, respectively. Within that window, it’s the prerogative of the government – within certain constraints – to choose the election date that suits them. There are exceptions – if the government has the same piece of proposed legislation rejected by the Senate twice, they gain a “trigger” for a “double dissolution” – the complete dissolving of both chambers of government and fresh elections for both; and if a government ever loses a vote of no confidence or has a “supply” bill blocked in the lower house, the government is immediately dissolved and the opposition is asked if they can form a government that is actually capable of running the country. If they say ‘yes’, they are told to do it; if they say ‘no’, fresh elections are immediately called, and a caretaker government installed. Quite obviously, both these forms of failure become more likely in the event of a Minority government, so these are often considered less stable than Majority governments.

The other major difference here is that there are minimum terms for Senators. Normally, only half the Senate is up for election at any one time; double dissolusions change that, and so do the dates of the next election to be called. If it’s past a certain threshold, the Senators whose terms are running out have their replacements (if they aren’t re-elected) elected at the same time; if not, these have to be elected separately, at what is considered great inconvenience to the public..

Practical Impracticalities

There are always things that a government can’t or won’t do, for political reasons, even if they are the practical solution to the problems that face them. Politically, they are impractical to implement. At the same time, there are measures that a government will put in place for political reasons, even if they are not a practical solution to the problems that face them, or will even generate fresh problems for subsequent governments to deal with.

Both are examples of Practical Impracticalities.

With appointed leaders, its the leadership that generally gets to decide what’s practical and what isn’t. Quite often, there is a grain of truth in even the most partisan and ridiculous of these policies, but oppositions rarely acknowledge what the current government is trying to achieve with its regulations or lack thereof.

For example, take Environmental Protection policy in the US. It’s entirely possible that the Republicans are right when they claim that the levels of regulation demanded by prior administrations had built up to the point where it was impractical for business to meet their obligations under the system. So, they found a simple solution to the problem: cut out what regulations they could get away with, and cut enforcement of regulations they didn’t think the public would accept being cut. This is pruning your garden with a chainsaw. A better, but far less ideologically practical, solution would have been to simplify the regulations enormously to make them no less comprehensive but less stifling for business to achieve – “The Department of the Environment will produce a government standard hereafter referred to as the US Environmental Standard XYZ, and update it regularly as scientific discoveries warrant. Any excess of pollutants beyond the levels deemed safe in US Environmental Standard XYZ will be deemed excessive and the perpetrators of such excesses will be subject to the following measures…” This rolls a bucket list of specific regulations into one broader one. Instead of 50 or 100 places that businesses need to look to find out what their obligations are, this puts it all into one. But, while this may be a practical compromise between Environmental Protection and Business, it would not have been ideologically practical to implement. Instead, the red tape has been cut at the price of weakening protection. It will be left to some subsequent government to enact legislation that will restore a measure of protection – hopefully in a practical way so that all the gains (and there are clearly benefits to business) are not lost. But that might mean conceding that the Republicans had a point – not something that Democrats usually find politically expedient, either. Protecting the environment is a good thing, but so is cutting Red Tape. The trick is to find a way to do both at the same time.

Whenever a government is appointed, the political stance they hold in terms of what they deem practical and what they deem impractical is also, effectively, appointed. If those choosing the pool of candidates are wise, or partisan, these will be amongst the selection criteria applied – the qualities deemed desirable in a candidate – and so those who are appointed by those making the choices will, at the very least, value those qualities. Should the perception of balance be desirable, it can always be achieved by putting forward a contrasting candidate who also possesses some personal quality or flaw that will make them completely unacceptable at the final hurdle.

Vested Interests

Whenever you have the power to make appointments of substance, you will be expected to take advice on the choices. That opens the door to appointed representatives of various factions, groups, and lobbies. These are then known as Vested Interests.

In theory, you can balance the biases of one against the opposing biases of another, but in practice, one group of related interests will more greatly accord with the partisan perspectives of an individual or collection of like-minded individuals, and will receive a more cordial and fruitful reception as a result. Those with competing interests will naturally seek out those on the opposition side of the political ledger, expecting (not unreasonably) to find them more receptive to their proposals. It only takes a small point of preference or distinction, and eventually positions on every issue can be divided along partisan lines.



A year and a half ago, I pointed out in Influences, Styles, Trends, and Oscillations that any ‘push’ to one side of a balance point produces an inevitable reaction, a counter-force that first drags the pendulum back toward the balance point and then overshoots it.

But real life is more complicated than that. Trends can persist longer than expected, can be stronger than expected, can occur in fits and starts instead of smoothly, can be delayed, there can be a bias to one side or the other, or all of the above at once to varying degrees. Statistically, over time, everything except possibly a bias will even out.

Vested Interests provide a bias. They also try to amplify change when it is in the direction they favor, and minimize it when it is not. And accelerate change when they amplify it, and delay or obstruct it when they don’t.

The Role Of Wealth

Wealth buys leverage and influence. More importantly, it provides the leisure time to manipulate situations. It also provides the educational opportunities that frequently make the wealthy suitable candidates for selection.

In theory, it can be argued, this is beneficial to society as a whole; the wealthy are more resistant to vested interests because their needs are already met. In practice, the wealthy will always favor policies that first, protect their wealth, and second, grow their wealth. That’s because wealth is a form of power, and if someone else has more, that someone can strip you of your own wealth – it might come at great cost, but it can always be done. Jealousies and Rivalries abound in such worlds, and greed beyond reasonable needs is the norm.

Wealth, and altruistic influences, have very little relationship to each other.

Wealth is, in fact, inherently conservative, and thus wealth acts as a bias within the system towards conservatism. The great fear amongst the wealthy of the neuvoux rich is that the latter may have opinions rooted in their more commonplace origins that run counter to the vested interests of the old-world wealthy. It’s a fear that has been amply justified at times. However, it’s also true that such experiences may make the wealthy even more fearful of losing their current prosperity, making them even more archly-conservative.

Selection by appointment is always a complex of competing interests, and the wealthy are the focal points of those interests, at times pulling society in one direction, and at times pushing it in another.

Special Interests

There always needs to be a careful distinction made between vested interests and special interests. The latter are felt but not shared by those with power and authority, while the former have a direct impact on them. Quite often, the two are in conflict, but special interests are treated as a necessary exception to the general rule. For example, the wealthy and conservative nevertheless are frequent donors to charity.

It doesn’t matter whether or not they receive some benefit from doing so. It is nevertheless acting contrary to their general philosophy.

Any special interest can be viewed as being accorded a disproportionate influence in the minds of the individual, and those factors will also find expression in those they appoint in equal measure. You don’t have to have wealth to be inherently conservative in nature; you don’t have to be poor to be fundamentally progressive in attitude. The cliches may be more prevalent, and therefore represent another form of bias within the system, but they are not absolutes.

Moreover, in an appointment oriented system, failures of an appointee to protect a special interest are rarely held principally as a failure on the part of the appointee, but rather a failure on the part of those doing the appointing. “He or She is doing their best, but they should never have been put in this position in the first place” would be a common form of criticism.

Cabinets and Capabilities

The term “cabinet” is one that can mean different things in different political systems. In the broadest definition, members of a Cabinet are afforded a defined specialty and function as a focal point for the perspective of that specialty when it comes to administration and policy. This function requires no great expertise; the cabinet are nothing more than a communications channel for others.

But cabinet functions rarely stay so confined. It usually starts when an administration has a particular agenda and a plan for achieving it; the cabinet are expected to issue instructions to their areas of specialty and manage their part in the “great plan”. Once this is established, there is added value to selecting individuals of some achievement or knowledge of their portfolio.

Such individuals usually have their own opinions on how their portfolio should be managed, and expect to play a more hands-on role. They will expect to contribute to policy as it affects their portfolio. Initially, they will just advise; but before long, they will be creating and implementing policy in any area that they are not overridden. They become powers behind the throne.

When it comes to cabinets, there are always three considerations: Who’s eligible, who’s in charge of the appointments, and how much authority will be delegated to the cabinet member. These factors vary more from political system to political system than a lot of people realize.

In the US, the cabinet is appointed by the President, and can be anyone he likes. They are often treated as supplementary sources of expertise, as a result. It’s also traditional for the members of the cabinet to furnish signed and undated letters of resignation that the president can exercise at any time, and for the cabinet to resign just prior to an election so that the President is spared the ignominy of having to fire them.

In Australia and the UK, the cabinet is comprised of senior members of the governing political party. The specialty element of the appointment is separated, and performed by Ministers, who are often also members of the cabinet. The cabinet thus has less direct power, but often greater indirect power, and is more ideologically driven. In particular, the likelihood of expertise within their policy area is far smaller.

Who Gets Chosen?

All of these considerations influence the primary function of the choosers – selecting who gets chosen. Depending on the political system and the nature of the appointment, the choice may have immediate effect, or might be the subject of some other mechanism such as ratification, election, or voting, either by the general public, by the political party/faction, by a select group within the political party/faction, or by a specific individual. There may or may not be an expectation that the appointment will be accepted, regardless of the individual’s desire to serve. The appointment may or may not be seen as doing someone a favor, incurring an obligation of gratitude.

There is often a compromise between the people those doing the choosing would like to choose and those who can be successful at getting through these processes. Those with a longer view often seek to manipulate the process towards candidates of the general type of which they would approve rather than direct intercession in any specific case. As a general rule, the more direct the appointment, the less the need to compromise.

There are those who would argue that the need to compromise is an asset to the system, ensuring that broad general acceptability is served; there are those who would argue with equal vehemence that the compromise ensures that mediocrity becomes a key selection criterion, to the detriment of the system as a whole.

The View From The Street

Quite often, the ordinary person has no idea of the merits of an individual or the criterion by which they were chosen. Many will be ignorant of who is doing the appointing, and hence where the ultimate authority lies within their system of government. Only when divisive or controversial appointments are considered do they become aware of the process, if at all.

This can have a huge impact on identity politics. It is common in Australia for advertising to expressly target votes for or against an individual leader as though they were the sum total of their political party. In reality, most of the public has absolutely no say on who these leaders are; they are presented as fait accompli to the electorate, who have little or no idea how they got to that position.

At best, the voters in the electorate of the nominal party leader may veto the choice by rejecting him as a candidate, even should his party win government. Beyond that, the voters select a short list from amongst those nominated for consideration by the parties, and that short list then chooses the party leader.

There are three separate considerations at play: perceptions of competence, perceptions of character, and perceptions of affiliation, which carry with it perceptions of policy. In general, only perceptions of character are usually fatal to one’s electoral chances, though occasionally someone will be denied for reasons of abject incompetence even thought they are considered ‘a good bloke’. More often than not, a failure of competence is perceived as a failure of character, i.e. a failure to seek out and implement good advice.

Unpopular Decisions

From time to time, unpopular choices will make their way through the system, and this is more likely to happen with direct appointments. These sometimes happen because competence is valued more highly than popularity, or because of ideology, or as a quid-pro-quo, or even to make someone ineligible for a more sensitive position. Unless the people doing the choosing are well known to the public, and the criteria that they have applied are clearly explained, the popular perception will almost always be one of ideological bias as the basis of appointment, rightly or wrongly, and even when those conditions are met, some will blame ideology anyway.

There is almost always a backlash of some kind to an unpopular appointment. With persistence and competence, sometimes an initially unpopular appointment can acquire public respect and even approval; but one misstep and opposition will once again rise.

You Say You Want A Revolution

if an appointment is sufficiently unpopular, you may get a revolution, or demands for one. Because the appointment mechanism is generally shadowy and indirect, the target is often misplaced, confusing a symptom for the cause – or, in this case, the appointee when it’s the appointers who should be taken to task. Indeed, clever selectors can sometimes cause such occurrences with the view of dissipating built up anger before it becomes so widespread as to impact on them. Appoint an unpopular figure, wait until protests become widespread, then remove the unpopular figure from office, giving the people the illusion that they have accomplished something, when in reality, the status remains very much quo.

The Game Practicalities

Whenever you have a system of government by appointees, it becomes essential for consistency and imparting of the right social ‘bias’ on the game world that you understand the characters of those who do the choosing. That then shapes the choices that they make, which are ultimately what the players, their characters, and the majority of the public see and judge.

The influence of who gets to choose will permeate the game. That can be a good thing for the GM, if controlled and chosen carefully, or it can be a confused mishmash – or, worse still, a train-wreck.

Decide who will get to choose. Decide on the criteria they will employ. Decide on what negotiations and compromises have to be made. Use all of that to create the people appointed. Then feed in the public’s expectations and reactions.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that Appointment is a dynamic process, responsive not only to the perceived needs of the moment, but the anticipated needs of the future – both of which are often swamped in consideration by the needs of the recent past, even if they no longer apply.

And that’s the essential road-map to governance by appointment.

In part two, governance by those who inherit the position. The dynamics are completely different…

Last week, in Into Each Plot, A Little Chaos Must Fall, I discussed the inevitability of chaos in adventures, the cumulative effect of three compounding sources of randomness: Player Decisions (unscripted player-plot interactions), Die Rolls (unscripted character-plot interactions), and GM Thought Bubbles (unscripted GM-plot interactions). In essence, if the last quarter or so of what happens when you actually play an adventure with your group is predictable, you’re doing something wrong!

Along the way, I discussed a couple of important concepts. The classification of adventure elements into eight orderly layers – three from campaign planning, one representing the accumulated experience of the players of events from the campaign-planning layers in previous adventures, two from adventure planning, and two that break down all of the above into individual scenes.

This is on my mind a lot at the moment, because the current adventure in my Zenith-3 campaign is about to come to an end. Act I connected this adventure with previous ones, dealt with a lot of consequences from those past adventures, and with developments in the personal lives of the PCs. It also introduced a number of new developments and problems, some arising out of those consequences. Act II was about the PCs beginning to wrestle these new problems to the ground and reacting to the events of Act I, and deliberately set the stage for Act III, which was the story of the “Pagani Perps”, and how they connected to an ongoing plotline, the “Figure In Black”, which is the focus of Act IV, which is what has to be completed for play this Saturday.

I also wrote about the adventure’s content and how I constructed it, with a multitude of excerpts from the adventure itself, in In The Beginning… Not! – drafting plots from the middle, which is more concerned with the writing process than the playing process, and which employed a three-act structure to describe it.

And that, right there, is illustrative of the chaos effect on plotlines: what was planned as a three-act adventure became a four-act adventure, one game session per act! Certainly, any adventure design beyond any broad outlines for Act IV that I had undertaken at the start of the adventure would have been completely out of date and would need to be 90% rewritten from scratch before it could be played.

But the subject of today’s article are the three sources of randomness and how I handle them, in campaign design, adventure creation, and at the game table. This can be as much as half the job of actually GMing, of telling – no, discovering – an interesting and engaging collaborative story with your players. So it’s a subject of no small importance.

Come with me, as I show you how to add a little order to the Chaos – just enough to put it to work on behalf of the campaign.

Implementing Player Decisions

Player Decisions, which almost always seem like a good idea at the time, are simultaneously some of the greatest sources of predictable chaos and the second-greatest single source of spontaneous anarchy that can befall any plotline.

The ‘predictable chaos’ part of that equation can be managed by anticipating, even deliberately incorporating, decisions by one or more players, and including parts of the adventure that can only be accessed in that particular form and at that particular time as a consequence of one or more player decisions – adventure branch points.

In the article linked to in the caption, I made passing mention of “unplanned plot outcomes”. But these are inevitably going to occur from time to time; whenever a decision is required, no matter how many of the possible choices you think you have anticipated, there’s a chance of an unexpected response. The anticipation is an attempt to manage the risk of this occurring.

But players can interrupt at any moment with a decision, whether you’ve anticipated one or not. That’s the ‘spontaneous anarchy’ part of the story.

How you react to player decisions is the heart and soul of your GMing style. As such, it can be a very slippery subject to discuss, full of exceptions and general statements; many GMs don’t even think about it consciously, let alone analyze the question.

Obviously, if you’ve anticipated a player decision and planned how you will respond to the most likely choices, which is what I try to do in my adventure design, the problem is pre-solved. Players rarely see the angst and difficulty involved, the bullets you’ve sweated in wresting a coherent and satisfying plot out of some of these turns of events, simply because they took the most obvious path; but it’s never an entirely wasted exercise to anticipate and prep for some of these less-likely choices, because it’s still good practice at devising plot threads and twists. For more on this aspect of adventure design, and this subject in general, see Ask The GMs: Giving Players The Power To Choose Their Own Adventures.

So, the focus of attention has to be on the unexpected decision, or the unexpected choice at a decision point. Johnn was the first to address this situation here at Campaign Mastery in Say Yes, but Get There Quick. My response tends to be rooted in a quick analysis of the decision that classifies the decision into one of six categories: Good choices, missed opportunities, misinterpretations, failures of memory, bad choices, and out with the pixies.

1. Good Choices

Good choices are choices that make sense in light of what the character knows. There are two sub-types: those that would still make sense if the character knew everything, and those that would not.

Good choice despite what the player doesn’t know

In the case of the first sub-type, my response is to let the character set about implementing their decision, essentially improvising the rest of the adventure based on what I had planned. The choice made might involve greater difficulties than the path I had identified, or it might avoid some of the complications that I had planned to use as setbacks along the way; so be it. Of greater concern to me at that point in time is how this impacts on the even distribution of spotlight time – some setbacks exist for no other reason than to give a player some spotlight time in overcoming the problem, so short-cutting the problem-solving process in this way creates an obvious imbalance. The other major concern is what the NPCs (especially the villains) know at each point and how their decisions (pre-baked into the adventure) would change as a result. I will frequently try to use this question to generate a solution to the spotlight time problem, if I can think of a way to do so.

The third consideration is “how much of what they don’t know do I need the players to discover en route to implementing this solution, and how do I get that information into their hands?” This is usually looking beyond the scope of this one adventure to the bigger campaign-level picture. On more than one occasion, I’ve put an adventure in place to achieve some campaign-level objective only to have the players solve the immediate problem without ever going near the campaign-level objective; when that happens, I have two choices, and usually have to make a snap judgment between them: either to insert a new adventure into the campaign plan to do what this adventure was supposed to do, or to revise the campaign plan to take into account the failure to meet that objective. Unless it’s something that is absolutely crucial to the campaign, I’ll pick the second choice.

As a general rule of thumb, success should follow a clever choice. It won’t happen very often, so let the player(s) have their moment of glory with good grace.

It should be noted that this is a very different reaction to the one I had under these circumstances when I was just starting out as a GM. Back then, as soon as a player understood the plotline well enough to short-cut the adventure, it would immediately be replaced with something that only happened to look like what had already taken place to this point in play. This had the advantage of making sure there was always plenty of play for the group, but the problem of discouraging clever choices resulting in dispirited players and half-baked plodding from start of play to finish. Why should players make an effort when they will succeed eventually anyway, no matter how faulty their planning?

Although the change in philosophy had occurred some time previously, the first time my players became aware of it was in Magneto’s Maze (described in My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B.A. Felton Moment) when, after a clever move by one of my players (and after a minute of jaw-dropped shock), I regathered my thoughts (pretending to still be shocked to buy thinking time) and let the player succeed even though it short-cutted the entire adventure. I noticed something very important at the time – that even though it (obviously) short-changed the other players at the table of their spotlight time, they derived almost as much satisfaction from vicarious participation in the clever players’ action. These days, I’m quite comfortable in simply telling the player “brilliant move, and not one that I expected – give me a couple of minutes to adjust”). It doesn’t happen often – maybe once in every ten or fifteen years – but I actually consider it a compliment to my ability to craft a coherent game world and rational narrative within that world – and to my players’ belief in my ability to improv, no matter what they throw at me.

Good choice unless you know everything

Things get more “interesting” when the player makes a choice that makes sense at the time, but is a mistake in light of the bigger picture because of things the character is not aware of. Obviously, the result is a plan that is doomed to eventual failure, but not for any reason that the player can currently anticipate. The player will do “A” and expect result “B” – and instead, get result “Q”. This constitutes a first hint that something else is going on that they have not taken into account.

My first mental question when this occurs is “How far can I let this progress before it becomes too late to solve the original problem?”. The second question is, “What happens to the campaign if the original problem isn’t solved?”. If the answer to this question is, “it’s catastrophic”, then it becomes clear that I can’t let the player’s choice continue beyond the point at which it becomes too late to solve the original problem; but, 95% of the time, it won’t be anywhere near that disastrous to the campaign, which gives me permission to let the players fail, if things get that far.

There is, of course, absolutely no guarantee that things will get that far. Every action that the players undertake, every result “Q” that results instead of a “B”, is a hint to them that they have made a mistake and need to rethink what they are doing. In effect, every action in pursuit of their erroneous choice creates a branch point in the resulting adventure that will bring the players back to the original adventure – possibly with more time pressure.

This is still clever play on the part of the player – the choice made was a correct one on the basis of what their character knows – and that needs to be acknowledged by the GM and rewarded. Hints as to the bigger picture that the GM didn’t intend to reveal until later in the campaign are that reward, and they can have long-term consequences for the campaign plan – and that’s something that I have to take into account, moving forward. That happened in the later stages of the previous Zenith-3 campaign, when the entropy drain into Karma’s space-time was discovered (briefly described under “Idea #18 – It’s Electrifying: Portals Are A Planar Battery” in Feel The Burn: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 4 of 4. This discovery took place almost a real-time year before I was ready with the plotline of “Dekhay and Ruin” – and turned the investigation of the phenomenon into an ongoing subplot before I was ready for it. The simplest solution was for the entirely-reasonable investigation to yield no positive results for ‘long enough’ (about 6 months, real-time), then to dribble out hints and clues as to what was going on over a further period of time (another 6 months, real-time). In game time, it was a three- or four- week time-span from discovery to resolution, as I remember it, but the pacing was dictated by the speed of plot. It just so happened that it took about a year for other plotlines that could not be delayed to be resolved, clearing the decks for me to have enough time to write the adventure in question.

In effect, then, the plan of action on the GM’s part when the player makes a choice that is only reasonable if you are ignorant of what the character doesn’t know, is to let them proceed while dropping hints through unexpected outcomes that there’s more to the story than the PC has taken into account, and to continue until the critical point (if there is one) is reached, or the players take the hint.

There’s more information on this subject to be found in Domino Theory: The Perils and Practicalities.

Ultimately, I view this eventuality as a failure on my part as GM – I’ve built something up to a greater immediacy of imminent threat than I should have, haven’t communicated something effectively enough, or have failed to anticipate this possibility in my planning.

2. Missed Opportunities

The proposed choice might be reasonable but miss an opportunity that I expected the players to take advantage of, often because the decision is being taken prematurely, or because the players think that the opportunity entails too much risk. Once again, the default choice is to let the players proceed, but I will be on the lookout for an opportunity to raise the possible missed opportunity with the characters through an NPC or a die roll if and when it becomes reasonable for them to recognize it. Depending on when that opportunity arises, it may or may not be too late to change course, or the player may respond that they “have thought of this option, but…” – in which case, that’s their choice and I’ll deal with any campaign repercussions after the day’s play.

3. Misinterpretations

More serious mistakes are made when the players misinterpret the situation and hence make a poor decision on the basis of this misinterpretation. The theoretically-best solution, and the one that I employed in my gaming for a very long time, is to let the players proceed with their choice and let them discover the mistake the hard way. The problem is that this opens the door to Confirmation Bias – where the players fail to recognize that they have made a mistake until the situation threatens to derail the entire campaign. I discussed this situation extensively in “I know what’s happening!” – Confirmation Bias and RPGs, in which I identified 9 possible responses to the problem and analyzed them, including the five “do nothing about it” options. These days, as a result of that analysis, my first thought is to analyze the proposal in terms of accepting or rejecting option #6, “The Players Are Right” – usually rejecting it, but not always – and my second choice is usually option #7, “Correct the error Immediately,” perhaps in combination with #8, “Die Roll Saviors”. The reason is that if you don’t take corrective action immediately, players tend to lock their misinterpretation in stone, where it will cause future decisions to be made incorrectly as well. I’ve even been accused of ‘reinventing history’ by correctly reciting campaign history without the misinterpretation!

4. Failures Of Memory

Which brings me to variant four – a decision made in a particular way because there’s something the player has clearly forgotten to take into account. When this happens, I immediately give the player a roll to “remember” the missing information – with big bonuses toward success if it’s something the character is unlikely to forget – and if they succeed, I remind the player of what they have forgotten (but that the character has not) before accepting the decision as final. It’s also necessary to give the player room to re-orient their thinking – how much depends on the player; sometimes, that’s best achieved by taking a short break from play, sometimes you can bring forward a scene involving some other player’s character, sometimes you can simply proceed with play. Learning how mentally-agile a player is (and it does vary over time and with experience) and hence how much mental space they need to make such re-orientation, is one of the most critical aspects of getting to know a player.

Special note should also be made of any differences between how flexible the player thinks they are, vs how flexible they really are. You need to accommodate the latter while appearing to accommodate the former, which can sometimes be difficult – the trick is to fill the gap with something non-distracting. Obviously meaningless in-character side-chatter between another PC and an NPC is often the best choice, or having another PC focus on some element of the environment (flavor narrative that tells the other players more about the environment) while the decision-maker is trying to grasp the revised problem and formulate an alternative course of action.

Unfortunately, with some players, by the time they have finished reorienting their understanding of the situation, mild Confirmation Bias has set in, and the only solution they can think of is the one that has just been ruled out – “I don’t know what to do” is the result.

This is a more delicate situation than it may initially appear. If you simply lead the player through the logic that leads to a correct solution, the player will – at worst – think that you are running a plot-train, and – at best – feel that you have taken control of their character out of their hands, causing frustration and dissatisfaction on the part of the player. Neither is all that desirable.

I have to admit that I’m still looking for the best solution to this problem. At the moment, I’m leaning toward a mix of die rolls and involving other PCs or NPCs – in particular someone who can say, “explain the whole problem to me again, from the top,” and who can then put their metaphoric finger on the mental block that’s impacting the player in the spotlight. Solve that, or correct the flawed assumption, and the player in question is usually capable of evolving the correct solution on their own.

It’s unfortunate but inevitable that sometimes, this takes what should have been a snap decision and draws it out to five, ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes of game time. And, meanwhile, the other players are twiddling their thumbs or getting into side conversations (or worse yet, thinking up mischief for their characters to engage in). In truth, players are usually aware that the game has ground to a halt while they try and figure a way out of their problem, and this is likely to add to their frustration.

Again, different players will react to such lulls in different ways. Learning those reactions, identifying which ones are harmful to the game, and finding ways of preventing those reactions before they occur, is another essential part of the GM learning his players’ styles and personalities. This might make the choice of which PC to invoke as a sounding board obvious to the GM – he then just has to find a way to invoke that choice at the gaming table. This is an aspect of the GMing art that I freely confess I’m still learning, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

5. Bad Choices

Some choices are just bad, or silly. For example, there was a time when Stephen Tunnicliff was feeling particularly put-upon. One of his more outrageous schemes (to monopolize the Brazilian coffee crop) had collapsed, flaws in some of his patented technology had emerged unexpectedly, another PC had just dumped on him for re-exposing the game world to a threat that the PCs had only barely survived the first time around through a series of selfish and foolish decisions (a combination of manipulation by the threat in question and an entirely reasonable desire on the PC’s part), and a third PC had just contrived to steal control of his PCs company from him. The response was Stephen at his worst – in the heat of anger he petulantly decided to accept an invitation to appear on the Johnny Carson show and reveal the other PCs secret identities.

When he calmed down, and I explained an aspect of the game rules that he had overlooked (his character had paid character points for the company – if it got taken away from him, either he got the points back or I as GM would arrange for him to either get his company or an equivalent replacement back), he realized the enormity of what he had done. Fortunately, from the moment the PC had made the first foolish decision (the one that led to re-engaging the old enemy, over a year earlier in real-time), I had been planning a solution for when it all inevitably hit the fan, and when he announced his Bad Choice, I had time to conceive of a solution. First, UNTIL had perceived that the character might do something foolish when the stock market manipulations were discovered, and had intervened to cause “technical problems” during the key moments of the broadcast, protecting the other PCs; second, I implemented the plotline that I had been preparing for this (general) eventuality: after the broadcast, thinking that he’d at least gotten some payback, the character had gotten himself drunk (not an easy thing to do with his Constitution, he needed Asgardian Mead to make it happen). In Act I of the consequent adventure, the drunken PC was attacked and killed. In Act II, the character awoke, thinking it was a year earlier, and discovered himself to be in a stasis chamber that he had designed (in game session 7, several years earlier) as a last-ditch life-preserver. He discovered that the power supply had been interrupted as collateral damage from the destruction of his factory about 2 weeks earlier, but that the team had dealt with the threat responsible, and had announced that the character had seemingly been killed. Eventually, the backup energy storage had become exhausted, and the wake-up process had been automatically implemented. He also found that he had vague memories of being struck on the back of the head with enough force to render him unconscious and no memory of being placed in the stasis chamber. Teleporting to the team headquarters, he greatly astonished them by still being alive, and was equally-greatly astonished to discover all the things that “he” had done in the last year. It was subsequently discovered that his research in developing cloned replacements for any team member killed in action – at the heart of a plotline a year earlier – had gone badly awry when his personality-duplication process created an Evil Clone…

That’s how to handle an outright bad choice – immediately begin preparing contingency plans for when the train-wreck can no longer be denied, then give the player in question enough rope. The assumption is that when the player sees how disastrously wrong his choices went, he will avoid making the same mistakes a second time.

And, to be fair to him and his memory, that’s exactly what Stephen did. In fact, he ended up having a lot of fun resolving the various situations his “clone” had gotten him into, some of which turned into pivotal building blocks later in the campaign.

Let me be clear about it – it takes a lot of confidence in the players on the GMs part, and a lot of trust in the GM on the players’ parts, to implement this technique. Early in a campaign with new players, I would be far more likely to treat this as a “Misinterpretation” situation and – if necessary – be far more heavy-handed in putting a stop to things before they went too far. The events described coincided with the campaigns’ tenth anniversary – part of the reason why I had brought so many things to a head at once for the character – so I had the experience in dealing with the players that was needed, and the result was a memorable adventure for all concerned.

6. Out With The Pixies

Some decisions go beyond bad, to the epicly stupid. An example that came up on Quora recently demonstrates what I’m talking about: the poster wanted advice on how to handle a Paladin demanding a DEX check to pluck the eye from a sleeping PC and replace it with the Eye Of Vecna without the prospective victim noticing.

I don’t know about you, but my first reaction on being confronted with such monumental idiocy is to gape and wonder “where do I start?”

To qualify for this status, the decision in question has to be catastrophic for the campaign. So I would start by explaining that this is too much for a simple DEX check – removing the eye would require an attack, and that succeed or fail, it was practically certain to wake the other PC, negating any hope of the character not noticing – in other words, taking the starting point of the proposed plan of action and demonstrating the first major flaw in the proposal as a hint to drop the idea. I would also ask him to think about how he would feel if someone else were to do this to his PC.

If the player persists, deciding to drug his victim for example, I ask where he’s getting the drug in question and pointing out that the PC being targeted has a change at spotting the unwanted seasoning. But I also note that he is the type who won’t take a hint. That’s when I start piling consequences onto the character – even planning such an action is an alignment breach, and would attract attention and penalties from greater powers, who will take an increasingly hard line in telling him “don’t do it”. And if the player, stubbornly, persists, all sorts of creatures who want the magic item in question would start turning up to try and claim it, until one succeeds. If that then means that the Paladin in question acquired a personal quest to recapture the Eye, that’s fine – the campaign is back on track, with a new ongoing plot thread for the GM to play with.

And if the Paladin managed to hold onto the eye despite all this, and persisted in going through with his plan, I would let him attack the PC, let the other PCs wake up in time to prevent the removal of the victim’s eye, and let justice take its course – then thank the Paladin’s player for participating, see you later. Because keeping him in the campaign would do more damage to the campaign than letting him go. I would, however, be quite willing and even eager to talk about what happened and why with the player.

Most players won’t let things get that far. They will take a hint, and discover why it’s a monumentally stupid thing to do, and learn from it.

It’s worth making another point: I will generally not kill a PC unless they are doing something monumentally stupid. “The bathwater’s too cold.” “I throw the toaster into the water to heat it up”. Alarm bells ring…

Random Sources Of Chaos

The second source of randomness is the outcome of die rolls. These always entail the risk of an unlikely result, even if that risk is an unlikely eventuality. If there is no risk of failure, the GM should think about why he’s requiring a die roll at all instead of simply telling the player, “you have enough skill in [whatever] that you succeed automatically”. So die rolls should always be meaningful. See The Nimble Mind: Making Skills Matter in RPGs for more on that subject.

In fact, I always bear in mind the reasons for requiring a die roll when one comes up. These might be “the risk of failure” or “the potential for an improbable success” or simply injecting chance into the adventure so that the players feel the risk of failure.

How you interpret a die roll is always a function of the motivation for requesting a die roll, shaping the course of events thereafter. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Die rolls can be classified into four situations, depending on the outcome relative to expectations.

Expected Successes

When you expect a character to succeed, success simple permits the adventure to continue along it’s expected course. Of course, there’s no need to make it sound as easy as it was; there can be a wide gulf between an objective evaluation of the chances of success and the actual chance put in place by the GMs.

The Adventurer’s Club and Zenith-3 campaigns have very different philosophies on this point, deriving from system mechanics in the ultimate analysis – which is interesting since they both derive from a common system, albeit from different generations of that system.

In the Adventurer’s Club, my co-GM and I are always careful to assess any task in terms of how likely a character of the skill level of the PC should be in attempting the task in question, then applying modifiers to the die roll accordingly. A character of skill 14/- (i.e. 14 or less on 3d6) should be able to attempt tasks that a less-skilled character wouldn’t even think of, with an expectation of success. Even if we don’t make this clear to the players (and we usually don’t), the accumulated psychological impact of successes and failures influences the thought patterns of the player when he’s “in character”, to the point that it becomes possible to reverse-engineer the modifiers and gain an insight into our thinking when the difficulty was assigned. Part of that thinking is whether or not success or failure will hinder the course of the adventure beyond any tolerable level – in other words, do we want the character to succeed for plot reasons?

In the Zenith-3 campaign, the skills are defined in terms of how difficult it is for a character of given standing to succeed, the standings being unskilled/amateur, hobbyist, employable, professional, expert, and genius. Where a character falls within this spectrum is defined by their skill level in the subject. A skill of -35% or less is unskilled/amateur, -34 to -15% is hobbyist, -14% to 15% is enough for the character to earn an average wage or better using the skill, 15% to 60% are various shades of professional, 61%-100% is an expert, and 101%-150% is a genius. Modifiers to the chance (not the die roll) range from -75% to +75% – but the typical modifier for an easy task is +25%, so the system is weighted toward positive modifiers. However, some players have had trouble wrapping their heads around skill values of less than zero being “adequate”, so a planned revision adds 25% to the scores and loses the positive bias in the modifiers. The difference is that individual skill levels don’t have to get taken into account during adventure creation; instead, I decide on the minimum level of expertise required and how difficult it would be for the base someone of that expertise.

Expected successes are easy to deal with. But you always need to be prepared for the unlikely failure.

Unexpected Failures

An unexpected failure should always have an effect on the plotline. That effect could be immediate or it could be delayed, but eventually, the failure will send the adventure down a different path. Planning for this usually amounts to two things – identifying the plot consequences of the failure and finding an alternative mechanism of achieving whatever a success would have done, i.e. recovering from the failure. The failure could be a momentary aberration or hesitation, or it could be a serious misstep with protracted effects. I always assess the consequences of a failure first in campaign terms, second in adventure terms, and finally, in immediate terms:

• • Campaign terms: will the failure lead to a catastrophic problem within the campaign? If so, at what point will it become too late to correct the problem? How can I plausibly let the PCs recover from the failure at or before this point? What is the optimum point, in campaign plausibility terms, for that recovery to take place, allowing for someone to perceive the failure, decide to take corrective action, plan that action, put that plan into motion, and have the PCs become aware of that intervention – all preferably while avoiding a dues-ex-machina?
  • Adventure terms: the list is almost identical to the campaign list, with one notable difference: if it won’t be toxic to the campaign, I’m perfectly prepared for the PCs to have a partial success or even a failure in any given adventure, if that’s warranted – and can be made sufficiently entertaining along the way. That said, such failures are often radioactive to the campaign, or unlikely to be enough fun – and that means that recovery has to take place within this adventure, or a sequel adventure at the latest. The other elements of recovery planning have already been assessed under the ‘campaign’ heading, it’s just a question of timing.
  • Immediate terms: this is hard to describe generally, because it’s so dependent on what it was that the PC was attempting. But failure generally comes in three flavors: qualified success (a GM’s cheat), failure with the potential for an (eventual) second bite at the cherry and some short-term discomfort or trauma, and abject failure with no hope for redemption without active measures.

The great thing about unexpected failures is that the other players are usually aware of the failure, and of the course events were expected to take; after a moment of enjoying the suffering of their fellow-player, they become active co-conspirators to any attempt by the GM to get things back on track. In fact, if the GM doesn’t act quickly enough to instigate a correction, they may take matters into their own hands. That’s all fine, too – the important thing is that the campaign or adventure recovers from the failure, not how it happens.

Expected Failures

Improbable chances of success are a part of life when undertaking challenging things. A lot of adventure planning lies in identifying places where the PCs are unlikely to succeed in direct action and creating a route around that expected failure. A GM has two responsibilities when it comes to expected failures: making sure that the character is not permanently impaired by the failure (or worse yet, killed) – after all, the GMs put him in this position – and making sure that the campaign and the adventure are not permanently impaired by the failure, as described above.

Beyond that, they should convey a sense of “Okay, you’ve tried the obvious and it hasn’t worked – what’s next?”

As with expected success, achieving the expected outcome isn’t a huge problem if you’ve planned properly.

Unexpected Successes

The unexpected success is whole different story. It can shortcut the entire adventure if you let it stand, or even radically reshape the campaign. If a PC in the adventurer’s club campaign decided to assassinate Hitler, and we were foolish enough as GMs to let them make the attempt on a single die roll, no matter how improbable a success might be, by definition there has to be a chance of success – and that must be planned for.

A more realistic example: so you’ve set things up so that a rare plant is needed to heal someone, and the PC with the medical skill wants to make a medicine roll to come up with an alternative treatment. You’ve decided to allow the roll because of the near-certainty of failure, which will then propel the PCs into the main adventure. You announce that the character will need to roll an 18 on 3d6, twice, in order to come up with such a treatment (even though that’s not in the rules – a clear signal that the GMs don’t want you to succeed!) Despite the odds, you make the first roll – a one-in-216 chance – and then gather the dice for the second attempt. Now the GM is nervous – the odds are vastly in his favor, but where lightning has struck once, it can strike again (in contradiction to the old adage). And indeed, once again, the player rolls an 18 – something that will happen only once in 46,656 attempts, according to the odds. The player rejoices, the other players raise eyebrows and exchange high-fives (or their equivalent) with the successful player, and all eyes turn to the GM….

There are a lot of ways out of this bind.

• • The most obvious is a success that the player chooses to ignore because of the in-game ramifications – an alternative treatment that involves the amputation of all four limbs and an 85% chance of the patient’s death, for example. After all, he also knows how improbable his success was. This is the conditional success.
  • An alternative is the flawed success – “You remember perfectly exactly what you read, word for word. However, as you recall the words, you find a serious error in the statements, one that destroys your trust in the information.”
  • A third technique is the costly success, in which the success sets the feel on a path to inevitable success but reveals that the price of following that path is too high.
  • A fourth technique is the illusory success, in which the character appears to succeed but in reality achieves only a partial success – like assassinating Hitler’s body double.

There are others, but they are all variations on the theme of undermining the success to the point of it actually being a failure.

At the same time, it has to be remembered that the character has pulled off a miraculous success, and needs to be rewarded for that in plot terms.

Let’s take that “more realistic example” cited earlier. A success despite the odds might result in the character being completely convinced that there is no other course other than retrieving the rare plant, but knowing a way of eliminating contaminants from the plant so that the side-effects that would normally result from the treatment will not do so in this case. What’s more, a paper describing this refinement to the process – after the fact – will earn the character a tidy sum and be a genuine advance in medical knowledge, bringing with it civic honors and recognition.

It’s entirely reasonable to anticipate a medicine check under the circumstances. For the sake of the adventure, it’s a roll that the GM has designed to fail – but there’s always an outside chance of success (or there’s no point in having the character roll), and that means that the GM has to plan accordingly. It doesn’t have to be extensive – the couple of lines given above are a reasonable example – but you need to be ready with an answer.

Unexpected Die Checks

In fact, the only time when a GM can justify being caught short by an unexpected outcome on a die check is when the GM wasn’t anticipating a die check at all.

This is frequently the result of a player announcing an unanticipated course of action (see earlier in this article) and the GM insisting on a die check to see whether or not the action is successful (regardless of whether or not it will have the desired effect). Sometimes it’s the result of the GM forgetting a character capability, and sometimes it’s a consequence of the player applying an ability in a way that the GM hasn’t thought of “I cast Blade Barrier down the purple worm’s throat – what happens?” (an actual example from the latter days of the Fumanor: The Last Deity II campaign).



It’s at times like this that I fall back on the hierarchy pyramid, last shown in The Language Of Magic: A Sense of Wonder for the Feb 2019 Blog Carnival – again, in an entirely different context – that was first proposed in Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs (Jan 2011) and re-examined in The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules (April 2014).

* What do the official rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
* What do the house rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
* What seems the most “realistic” given the base assumptions of the campaign world?
* What seems the most appropriate interpretation given the genre of the game?
* What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the adventure plot?
* What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the health of the campaign?
* Are there any practicality considerations that should be taken into account?
* What is the interpretation that will produce the maximum fun?

Remember that any subsequent answer overrules one that’s already in place – the house rules trump the official rules, “realism” trumps the house rules when they are inadequate, genre trumps “realism”, plot needs trump Genre, campaign needs trump the needs of any one plot, practicality of implementation trumps everything else, and fun trumps all.

Beyond that basic principle, the usual considerations apply.

Readers should also find Narratives Of Skill: How To ‘Improv’ Outcome Descriptions In Advance to be useful information in this context.

The Purest Anarchy

It has been said that no adventure survives contact with the players. It has also been said that the GM is just a special category of player.

Given that players are the source of two of the most omnipresent kinds of randomness, the truth of the first statement seems amply demonstrated. This section is proof that – at least in the context of the first statement – the second statement is also true.

GMs go off-script regularly. And repeatedly. Usually for what seems like good reasons at the time. Some of the time, the reasons are, in fact, valid! More often than not, though, they are either a very bad idea, or an idea that won’t be properly executed because the GM hasn’t prepped properly for it.

One of the most frequent causes of offense is the misplaced explanation. Something is said or done in the adventure that isn’t explained at the time, and a player interrupts the GM with a question. He frantically checks through the surrounding text, only to find no explanation. So he makes one up on the spot. A page or two – or perhaps, a paragraph or two – later, the explanation around which this part of the adventure has been built surfaces, and contradicts the explanation the GM has already given. And suddenly, he’s in trouble, and his adventure is in a state of anarchy – whether it’s obvious on the surface, or not.

The next most frequent source of GM-induced anarchy is the flash of inspiration. The GM is part way through the adventure when he suddenly has a blinding insight into how he can make everything more dramatic, more exciting, more interesting, more fun! And, without properly thinking through the ramifications, he changes course abruptly, throwing away whatever is contradicted by the rest of the prepared adventure if not the whole thing entirely. This, of course, is just asking for trouble.

Studies have shown that rushing increases the rate of human error eleven-fold. I’ll say that again: decisions made in haste are eleven times as likely to be flawed or otherwise poor decisions. Now, GMs are used to making quick decisions under time pressure – but so are the military commanders and pilots that were the subjects of those studies. Amongst those not so trained, the rate can be even higher – as much as twenty-five times as high according to some sources, due to the stress involved alone (Reliability and Maintainability and Risk, by Dr David J. Smith, 7th edition, Appendix 6). What’s more, after 1 minute in an ongoing emergency situation, the error rate rises to ninety times the base, showing the effect of panic. The first task in any such circumstance is to get control of the situation so that the error rate of subsequent decisions is reduced to the high-stress value or better, a significant improvement! But Douglas Adams said it best, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Don’t Panic! (the link is to an omnibus edition including all five books in the series).

I tend to classify these spur-of-the-moment brain-bubbles on a scale with eight divisions, though it’s important to note that you can only correctly classify them after the fact unless someone points your idiocy out at the time – I’ll offer an example or two of that as we travel. The eight divisions are:

1. Second-Skin Decisions
2. Wallpaper Decisions
3. Enhancing Decisions
4. Neutral Decisions
5. Decisions Of Inconsistency
6. Obstructing Decisions
7. Derailing Decisions
8. Catastrophic Decisions

Second-Skin Decisions

Minimalist prep often means that you have to invent characterization details on the spur of the moment to give an NPC color. Those are second-skin decisions, and they tend to be relatively harmless – noteworthy only when they fail for some reason.

Cliches will leap to mind at such times, but must be spurned lest your characterization be cringe-worthy; but, at the same time, you can’t make the character too unusual or you’ll distract from the substance that they are present to provide within your adventure. But avoid either of those extremes and you’ll usually be fine with such decisions – and the worst that will usually happen is that the character will be a disposable throwaway, personality-wise.

But sometimes you’ll forget that the character has already appeared in the game – “Greetings, Mon Ami! And ‘ow can I assist you today?” “Wait a minute, didn’t you have a Scottish accent last time we met you?” Whoops. On rare occasions, you can (literally) make the error a throwaway piece of characterization: (Texan accent) “Why, Ah surely did, pardner! Jest gettin’ in some practice for this-here radio play ah’m doin’ next week.” (No accent) “So, what can I do for you?”

Suddenly, the nobody is a voice actor with a gift for accents. Characterization, done.

This trick won’t work all the time – if the error is of a more factual nature, you may be in trouble. But it’s one to keep in your back pocket for the times when it is useful.

When it won’t work, my number-one solution is to admit that the player raising the question has got me – a minor mistake that can be easily overlooked and isn’t too disruptive of play, but that humanizes me as a GM, making more serious errors more forgivable – if they don’t happen too often.

Wallpaper Decisions

Every campaign has a look-and-feel built into its subtext that the players absorb almost subconsciously. All it takes is the GM deliberately varying his vision of various staples and fixtures, especially of architecture and social behavior, in his own mind – that will then ‘wash into’ and color his descriptive language, and the behavior of the NPCs, and that will be absorbed almost subconsciously by the players.

“Like every village you’ve ever seen within this woe-begotten kingdom, the streets are crudely cobbled and dirty, the roofs are soot-stained and low, rising abruptly to a peak above the chimney, the walls are plastered in faded colors, and the locals who aren’t dirty are covered in grime and filth. You’re sure that they bathe religiously at least once a decade. A serving-woman with greasy hair beneath her off-white cotton cap made of scrap linen tosses kitchen garbage and a pot of a soup with something green floating in it into the street, where it lies in a steaming puddle before slinking away.”

Wallpaper decisions are spur-of-the-moment “enhancements” and “refinements” to this look-and-feel. Sometimes, that’s exactly what they are, making the game world richer for their incorporation; sometimes, they simply perpetuate the established flavor; and sometimes, they will conflict with it – and make no mistake, there’s a big difference between contrasting with the established flavor and conflicting with it.

A contrast is self-justifying by the difference between specificity and generalization. Not all places, even in such a run-down setting, will be uniformly dank and dingy; some will be better, and some worse; it’s all relative to the baseline. A conflict is a contrast so striking that such a justification would ring hollow; to make it plausible in this context, it needs to be justified in some equally-exceptional way. When you do so, it transforms an Inconsistency in the game-world’s characterization into a deepening and enriching addendum.

The only way you can tell that this justification has been successful is when the players accept it and begin to construct a generalized statement about the exceptions that demonstrates that the exception has been integrated into their world-view.

For example, I might describe a typical inn one way (hessian lining totting away under the floorboards to capture spilled ale creating a perpetual odor of stale socks throughout the common areas) and one particular inn as being spotlessly clean, immaculately presented, with timbers fitted to near-perfect tolerances and rich tapestries upon the oaken walls. Especially if the exterior doesn’t look all that exceptional, this contrast is so strong that it simply doesn’t belong in this setting. So, it needs an extraordinary justification – at the time, if possible. “It’s run by an Elf, a refugee from the Silverwatch Reaches.” If the player’s response is, “Okay, from now on we’re only staying at Elvish Inns if we have any choice in the matter,” and in the next village they visit, they ask “Is there an Elvish Inn here?”, then they have bought the justification and integrated into their world-view of the campaign. If their response is “it makes a nice change, but are they charging arm-and-a-leg prices?” then they haven’t really bought into the justification, and the world-view has been muddied just a bit by the exception.

Such are the rewards – and potential penalties – of making wallpaper decisions on the run.

Enhancing Decisions

Reinventing campaign history, game-world relationships (especially political or economic ones), pseudo-scientific principles, campaign metaphysics, villain motivations, and the like on the fly are all “Enhancing Decisions” when everything works perfectly. And something far less attractive when it doesn’t.

We all have to do this from time to time. We’re confronted with a hitherto-undiscovered plot hole and have to wallpaper over the cracks right now before they can derail play. We create something spontaneously to fill a particular need or desire (“The Imperial Capital of Korea”) and then have to make sense of it.

When it works, it makes you look brilliant. When it works really well, maybe you even are brilliant. When it doesn’t, though, it can be catastrophic to verisimilitude for months or even years to come. The most dreaded phrase a player can ever tell a GM when he isn’t courting it is “I just don’t buy it”.

Dealing with such problems can be a complex problem, and is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, let me refer you to my (still unfinished) series, The Elephant In The Gray Room, which addresses such problems in escalating order of seriousness.

Neutral Decisions

These are theoretically possible – I think. I’ve never seen one. Decisions that aren’t designed to address a deficiency of character, plot, prep, system, or setting, or to improve one or more of these things? Talk about your black cats at midnight in coal cellars that aren’t actually there – good luck in finding one.

Actually, let me take all that back – there is one situation that I can think of that could qualify. It’s when you identify a plot hole before you get to that part of the adventure, and so drop in a replacement or supplementary explanation for whatever is going on that avoids the hole; your goal is not to ‘improve’ anything, it is to substitute something for an equivalent of equal value (by all standards that can be applied) that has some sort of logical or inherent problem.

Decisions Of Inconsistency

Once you pass below the “neutral decisions” limbo bar, you’re into problem territory. It doesn’t matter what your motive was in indulging the moment of madness, it has created more problems than it has solved, and it’s only a question of severity.

The least cataclysmic outcomes are decisions that produce an inconsistency in a character or a character’s behavior beyond that which can be explained through rational means. A character can’t be generous one week and greedy the next; a civil war can’t be won by one side one week and by the other the week after – unless a mutable history is part of your game setting, of course! – and so on.

At the very least, there needs to be an explanation, and that’s where you find the decisions that fall within this category (if the consequences are more severe, like unraveling a character’s motivation for a particular action, you may need to take stronger steps). Such explanations can be delivered more or less as an aside to a subsequent conversation being role-played. “Leonora’s been giving everyone a hard time this last week, her husband left and took the kids and it’s really soured her outlook on life. I hope she gets back to her old self again soon.” The sooner you insert such an aside, the better and the more plausible it is; if it’s part of the same adventure or even the same day’s play, that’s ideal. But, before you can drop-in such a narrative point, you need to identify the need for it – and that requires recognizing the inconsistency or having it pointed out to you.

And if it’s too late, the affected adventure has come to an end and a new one started, in which the inconsistent character has no role? Well, you can either alter the plot by inserting a subplot that has not purpose other than patching the inconsistency, or you can choose to wait until a logical opportunity presents itself within the campaign. Remember to take the logical passage of time into account if you choose the latter course – “Hi there, good to see you again. I’m sorry if I was a bit of a pill last time – a family crisis and I’m afraid I took it out on everyone. All good, now!”

That’s not to say that you can’t employ a more powerful solution from one of the categories below – just remember the information I gave on error rates earlier, and plan it carefully! Maybe Lenore was being mind-controlled….

Obstructing Decisions

An obstructing decision is one that makes sense in the context of the Adventure but imposes a road block on a subsequent part of the campaign, usually by preventing or inhibiting some consequence at the campaign scale. At the very least, this requires a subplot to alter the situation in-game such that the consequence is “back”.

That becomes a lot more problematic if the players correctly identified that consequence as an outcome of the situation if they didn’t intervene and deliberately chose actions to avoid the outcome that the GM desired but that they did not. In such cases, a single subplot probably won’t be enough, you’ll need to implement a more significant solution. You will need to construct a circumstance, or more probably a chain of circumstances, which convinces the players that the outcome you want is inevitable and that at best they have delayed that inevitability, and that’s beyond the scope of an obstructing decision.

Derailing Decisions

Slightly more serious are decisions that you realize after the fact will derail the adventure you’re currently playing. That’s for two reasons: first, the players will almost certainly react immediately to the flawed brain-bubble’s content, entrenching it within the campaign; and second, because you don’t have time for leisurely reflection and planning, you have to make a decision on what to do right now.

Of course, this isn’t the worst-case situation, even within this category; worse by far is when the players react to the moment of madness by calling you out. Why? Because (a) this engages your natural defenses; and (b) because you are more prone to either entrench the mistake within your own thinking because of (a), or to invent something else on the spot to resolve the problem. 90% of the time, either response will only make things worse. This is where those error rates really come into effect.

Okay, so there’s a big difference between a real emergency and a plot-execution error in a roleplaying game. For most players and GMs, their emotional involvement will still be high enough that reactions will be similar, if not quite as intense. Pilots and racing-car drivers train in simulators to prepare themselves for emergency situations, checklists are used because snap judgments in a crisis are suspect, and more checklists are employed because we tend to skip over important things in routine situations, and so on. Fire departments and police train all the time to make better decisions in emergency situations, and the military invented all this training. The GM may be in a lower-stress environment, with less of significance riding on his decisions, but all his training has to be acquired on-the-job. So I think it’s justifiable to use the same 11-fold factor for all those situations.

That means that as soon as you become aware of the problem, you have to stop play and call a five- or ten-minute break. This takes the urgency and stress out of the situation and gives you some time to think. Go somewhere where you can’t hear the players, who will probably commence a side-discussion if your group is like mine, and think.

Priority #1 is to protect the campaign. Priority #2 is to salvage the adventure if you can. Note that protecting the campaign doesn’t necessarily mean slavishly following the master plan that existed before the mistake; by throwing part of that plan away, or substantially reinventing it, you may be able to mitigate the effects of the mistake. Protecting the campaign might mean embracing the mistake, making it canon, even if that means completely revising the rest of the adventure and a future part of the campaign.

The first thing you need to do is therefore to analyze the consequences of the problem that you’ve created. Only then can you begin to assess potential solutions. I’ve examined such solutions in detail in The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 3 of 5: Significant Repairs and, to a lesser extent, The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 4 of 5: Major Structural Repairs.

Catastrophic Decisions

Some spur-of-the-moment decisions are just catastrophic, or (hopefully only) potentially so. The more serious the problem, the more justified you are in employing radical solutions to fix the problem; that’s the whole premise behind the “Elephant In The Gray Room” series.

When you become aware that you have just inflicted a potentially mortal would upon your campaign, the first step is to get it on life support. That might mean shutting it down for a few weeks, or it might mean inserting a number of standalone adventures of no campaign significance. If you’ve got any ideas, this is a great time to drop in some adventures that create plot seeds for a sequel campaign!

The next step is to perform triage on the campaign. That can be as drastic as completely throwing away the master plan that you’ve been using and completely revising the remainder of it, or it can be less severe – if you are lucky.

I like to develop, and have on standby, “cataclysm plans” that are designed to completely reinvent a campaign, as an outcome preferable to destroying it completely. A friend and fellow GM with whom I used to correspond sporadically about 20 years ago encountered a problem of this magnitude, dropping an arcane device into his game world that would have corrected the one vulnerability of his major villain and leaving that villain unstoppable. When he realized his situation, he asked me for help. As I recall, we had about six weeks before he had to pull the pin on whatever solution we came up with.

I told him to go and invent a new campaign with the same PCs and a variant on the current villain, and to presume that half-way through it, the PCs had all been exposed to some sort of mind leech that wiped their memories. I would create and send him the outline of an adventure which would transform campaign A into campaign B. In Act 1 of the resulting adventure, I destroyed the game world completely; in Act 2, I justified the survival of the PCs; in Act 3, they discovered who had destroyed the universe, how, and why; in Act 4, they were confronted with hobsons’ choice: re-knit the tangled skeins of reality together in a slightly different and unpredictable manner, or unleash the universe-killer on other worlds. Predictably, they would choose the first option. In Act 5, they would implement their choice while dodging the opposition – an entity they couldn’t hope to defeat directly, but who they could “undo” indirectly. The whole thing was rooted in a couple of throwaway lines in the campaign background that he had provided for the first campaign, which everyone (including him) had assumed was a mixture of poetic license and references to one particular being, the God Of Evil. I simply decided that they were all wrong, and that they really referred to a long-forgotten threat that was about to stage a big comeback.

And so it was that the characters in question found themselves in a new game world, with some superficial resemblance to the old one (same maps) with no idea of who anyone was, or who their characters now were, or what they had done in the past (but perfect memories of a past world that no longer existed). Campaign B resumed as though they had been playing it all along, with the players scrambling to work out who was who and what was going on. And thought it was all part of the plan from day 1 because of the tight integration with the old campaign’s background! Only when the campaign wrapped up did the GM reveal the true story to them.

That’s the scale of surgery that might be needed to navigate your way through the problem you’ve just inflicted on yourself. Or you might be able to get away with inserting a new adventure, or a new layer of plot, to solve the problem.

Catastrophic problems have catastrophic consequences and sometimes require catastrophic solutions.

This article is all about how you cope with, and control, the causes of randomness within an adventure, and the inevitable chaos that results. By far the most dangerous – by virtue of being unplanned and unplannable – are “brilliant ideas” and “moments of inspiration” on the part of the GM, especially because these are likely to be relevant to the situation at hand and implemented without sufficient thought and care, on the spur of the moment.

These moments of madness can be positive and beneficial to the campaign and the adventure, and when that’s the case, all is well. But each carries the inevitable risk of the other side of the coin – and the coin itself is weighted by virtue of haste. You are eleven times more likely to get these decisions wrong than to get them right.

The obvious solution is to decide that you aren’t going to implement any of these brain waves. That solution not only contradicts human nature, it risks making the campaign a sterile place that can’t react to unexpected choices by the players, or worse, that denies the players agency within the campaign. So buckle up and prepare to ride the whirlwind; chaos in your RPG is going to be with you for a while.

I received a very kind offer of free sample merchandise at www.paperlesspost.com to try out their products and processes and review them for Campaign Mastery. I had hoped to find things that I could re-task – a virtual parchment to use for maps and scrolls, and so on. Unfortunately, their products seem to be too mainstream for that sort of application (bet that’s the first time they’ve had that complaint!), geared more for creating custom virtual invitations and the like, so I declined the offer. But I wanted to say a public thank-you in this footnote, and put the service on readers’ radars in case it’s of more value to you.

A Narrative Evolution Of Reality

I construct very detailed plotlines for most of my campaigns. There are:

• Primary Campaign-Level Plotlines that permanently shape or reshape the context within which all the individual adventures take place. Usually consist of tent-pole Events and paradigm shifts within adventures, and are often describable as the outcome of a string of adventures, and some adventures are all about the primary campaign-level plotline. Ultimately, these are the campaign, at least as the GM will later summarize it, everything else is window dressing and interaction and filler. Some or all primary campaign-level plotlines will not resolve until the end of the campaign. Lots of the rest of the campaign does nothing but build up to these moments.
• Lesser Campaign-Level Plotlines that are designed to play out in the form of subplots and situations within multiple adventures that, if placed back-to-back in a narrative format, would tell a single story. These are often turning points for characters and the triggers for primary campaign-level plot developments. These often have a more personal, single-PC focus, though some can affect the whole party.
• Minor Campaign-Level Subplots that are more restricted in immediate scope, more transitory, and generally less significant in the short term, but which are capable of a longer-term impact that is significant, played out a little at a time over multiple adventures. These may be character turning points, but are generally more akin to experiences that deliver the character, a little sadder, wiser, more battered and bruised, but otherwise unchanged, out the other side. Sometimes described in a derogatory way as “color encounters”, these are more about the PC displaying personality as it is than about changing that personality.
• Campaign-Level Contextual Flows that define the relationships between adventures in any way not explicitly deriving from a Primary Campaign-level plotline. For example, adventure #7 might introduce a villain, adventure #9 might provide more information about that villain but that is not its primary focus, and adventure #14 is about a crisis precipitated by that villain. Adventure #10 might foreshadow that crisis with no apparent connection to the villain that will ultimately be responsible for it. In the other adventures, the villain is simply a presence lurking in the background with no involvement deriving from the GM’s plans – the villain might still be dragged into a plotline by the players!
• Adventure-Level Plotlines are the units which, in total, comprise the campaign. While the campaign plan might call for a lot of random stuff to “just happen” as set-up for other campaign events in the future, that isn’t particularly satisfying; adding a plotline that can be taken to a resolution provides a framing device which can contain everything else. Adventures consist of acts and acts consist of scenes and encounters and narrative and decision points.
• Adventure-Level Subplots are vignettes within an adventure that are unrelated to the plot of the adventure, or have an indirect relationship at best, but which define context for the immediate status of one or more PCs during the commencement of a more significant phase within the adventure or act. These vignettes may be wholly self-contained scenes, or may join together to form a broader narrative that is nevertheless resolved by the end of the adventure or act.
• Significant Scenes and Encounters are scenes or encounters that relate to higher-order plot structures – they advance an adventure plotline or a campaign-level plot or subplot. These are the “important moments” within an adventure, though they may not appear all that important at the time.
• Passing Scenes and Encounters are scenes or encounters that do NOT relate directly to higher-order plot structures. As such, they advance minor campaign-level plotlines, adventure-level subplots, or provide campaign-level contextual flow.

Connecting Threads

On top of all that, there are connecting threads that bind all of this together. The most obvious are the ongoing personal histories of each of the PCs, but there are also ongoing threads connecting the histories of significant NPCs and sometimes progressive changes to social, technological, political, economic, military, medical, or scientific developments, or natural (and sometimes unnatural) phenomena.

Schematic Of An Adventure’s Contents

Now, I’m not suggesting that every adventure will contain something from every one of this multitude of layers. But most will have most of them, and the absence of something is almost always for a plot reason – catapulting the players directly into an action sequence for pacing purposes, for example.

Adventure Planning

I track layers one and two in a master plan, which is incredibly complicated to explain – I’ve gone into it in detail on a couple of occasions here at campaign mastery. That master plan also contains incomplete and brief hints as to the content of layers 3 and 6 for individual adventures – this might be the name of an adversary or encounter, for example. They use a code to connect to a very long list of adventure developments synopsized into a single line, which in turn point to a more substantial treatment that is used as a guideline. The synopsis is gospel, because it describes how this piece of the campaign-level plot ties into the others to tell a broader story (broader than any one adventure); the more substantial treatment (which was used to generate the synopsis in the first place) can be varied to better fit into the adventure or to tell a more interesting/exciting/thrilling story.

I have multiple sources that are used to derive the layer 6 content – player wishes, some random tables that I put together, the thematic content of the adventure, logical developments following other recent events that are not otherwise catered for, and inspiration during the writing process.

Sometimes, to protect the integrity of the adventure, campaign-level material that was not originally intended for this adventure has to be brought forward – that happened with the whole “rogue behemoth” plot sequence a few adventures ago, because Behemoth was the logical solution to a plot hole that I hadn’t anticipated. Which meant finding out what he had been up to lately…

In a nutshell, I have a broad outline and a number of “mandatory” drop-in scenes to “seed” into the adventure.

Detailed Planning

Converting that into an adventure means outlining the adventure in successive iterations – acts, then scenes, then scene content – encounters and locations and narrative and so on, generating props and reference materials, etc.

At each point, I’m looking at nothing more than a bullet point and a few words – a line or less. This is a work order, nothing is finished.

Adventure Writing

When I start running a new adventure, I generally have two sessions worth of material written. In between each game session, I try to write another full session’s worth of material, but don’t stress if I come up short, or if the players get through more material in a given game session than I expected. As a result, by about midway in a four-plus game-session adventure, I have only half a game-session in reserve, or less; and from the end of session three of a five-session adventure, each day’s play consumes all of the prepared material and sometimes a little more.

This might seem like I am not allocating enough prep time to the campaign, but that’s not the case. You see, the start of adventures tend to be relatively fixed, but as the adventure proceeds, player decisions and choices tend to accumulate and can steer an adventure in entirely unexpected directions.

Allocating my game prep in this way not only makes my adventures more responsive to players choices and actions, it gives me more time to get ahead of the curve on the next adventure.

As a general rule of thumb, using 12-point type, players in my Zenith-3 campaign will generally get through about 14 pages of material per game session. With two more players in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, less one serving as co-GM, we generally only get through 7-10 pages of 12-point material. Though there are times in both campaigns where 1 line can consume a significant fraction of a game session – “combat ensues”, for example!

In Actual Play

So, it’s the big day. It’s time to put into practice all the planning, and implement the plotline that you have crafted. And you know I never stray from the prepared material, no matter what, right? Where did that hollow echo suddenly come from?

Of course I diverge from that material. Players – pardon me, characters – make decisions. Dice get rolled. Some character interactions are so much fun that they get extemporaneously expanded; others are not as entertaining as expected and get curtailed. Players indulge in conspiracy theories and misunderstandings and poor assumptions, and make decisions based on these failings.

Actual play is an anarchic compilation of personal interactions at the game table that superficially resembles what was planned to some degree. Some of that prep will be incorporated verbatim, some of it will be modified on the fly, and some content will be created out of whole cloth.

That might sound like justification for doing no prep at all – simply operating off that list of bullet points, or even less. And that’s exactly how I run the Zener Gate campaign – it’s 99% improv. But I’ve found that the results are often superficial, and hold your campaign hostage to how “good” you are on the day. Doing more substantial prep incorporates depth, gives time to polish narrative and descriptions, gives me multiple opportunities to be on top of my game, and gives me solid material on which to base whatever actually comes out of my mouth on the game day.

To pluck an example from D&D/Pathfinder, my synopsis might say something like “Tavern, reeks of Elvishness, four sullen solitary patrons, barman.” The next line goes on to talk about the barman and how the players can advance the plot by interacting with him – in no greater detail. Now, it’s an old maxim that’s as true of RPGs as it is fiction writing, “show, don’t tell” – which means, in this case, writing a description of the place in such a way, and with appropriate content, that the players might synopsize the description as “The place reeks of Elvishness” – I don’t want to have to employ the phrase, I want to demonstrate that it’s true. I don’t know about you, but coming up with such a description is something that is better done in advance and in careful detail and not off-the-cuff.

So prep is still important; I simply use it as something other than railroad tracks.

Three Sources Of Randomness

The anarchy that I described earlier is an amalgam of three sources of chaos and the consequences of their manifestations at the game table.

• Player Decisions can be thought of as unscripted player-plot interactions.
• Die Rolls can be thought of as unscripted character-plot interactions.
• GM Thought Bubbles are metaphysical chaos manifesting at a macroscopic scale – the equivalent of a butterfly flapping it’s wings somewhere.

One or two instances of such chaos can easily be accommodated. But as they accumulate, the effects multiply, becoming more and more unpredictable:

Combating that chaos is the reason I try to stay “just ahead” of the players in the campaign, instead of miles in front. In effect, I’m rewriting the rest of the adventure to take into account the accumulated chaos and anarchy – and in the process, neutralizing it.

But this article isn’t so much about what I do after the fact; it’s about how I handle that chaos at the game table and what specific prep I do to anticipate it.

Which is a subject that I’ll be addressing in Part 2, “Into All Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall”, next week!

The March 2019 Blog Carnival challenges GMs to revisit and re-purpose material from the first half of their career behind the scene. For Campaign Mastery’s first entry (I have another in mind but might not have time to write it) I’m going Waaaay back – all the way, in fact, to my very first AD&D campaign, and to my original notes on Elves made in the day.

And then, I’m going to update them and re-purpose them.

Part 1: The Elves That Were

Elves have very long lives, and this gives them great patience and tolerance toward individual failures of character, but far less tolerance for institutional behavior that violates their sense of right and wrong and what is appropriate. They tend to take the long view in their dealings with other races. The only race that approaches the Elven lifespan are Dwarves, and Dwarves focus almost completely on the current moment; “solve tomorrow’s problems, tomorrow” is a popular Dwarfish saying that absolutely infuriates Elves.

These traits mean that Elves hate being forced to rush into actions or decisions, preferring to take a long time to discuss possible alternatives, consequences, and choices. If at all possible, they will spin out this process until the problem solves itself – and an elvish maxim is that most problems go away if you wait long enough. Elves can be decisive when they have to be, but they hate and resent it.

No-one can be grim and serious all the time, and all Elves have their playful side. This manifests as a greatly refined sense of aesthetics; every elf seeks to master at least one type of art, whether that be sculpture, design, or poetry. Elves include as ‘arts’ many things that others do not consider artistic subjects at all – from the design and casting of spells through to the recording of history. They are also possessed of a deep well of sentimentality that their arts attempt to reach into and stir.

Halflings in particular have learned to prey upon this sentimentality, being reminiscent of young Elvish children – but where the elvish child will outgrow this phase and turn serious in a mere decade or so, Halflings perpetuate their innocently-blatant hedonism all their lives. Elves can rarely refuse an earnest request of a Halfling.

Elves are, as a general rule, extremely courteous to others; wrapping insults in great subtlety (another popular art form), especially in a form that non-elves would perceive as a compliment. Despite their differences with Dwarves, and the offense they take at the obnoxiousness of Orcs, the most popular targets for this wit are humans, both as a race and as individuals. Elves consider humans to be arrogant without just cause, decisive when caution is warranted, self-serving when altruism is appropriate, inconstant, egotistical, and of minimal worth. They regard the human sense of humor as crass and their art as ribald. It perpetually surprises them when they encounter exceptions to this perception – aesthetic and artistically-inclined humans, or those who manage to combine decisiveness with awareness of the society that will be around them or their descendants decades hence – and romantic attraction and entanglement inevitably follows in some form.

Elves live in trees, or so it is said. In reality, they make their homes within the trunks of trees that they grow and shape to their wills, creating hollow spaces within, and enlarging the size of the trees so manipulated as necessary. It is sometimes said that you can recognize an Elvish forest by the unnatural size of the trees within and improbability of two trees demanding such diverse climates being found side-by-side. The Elvish throne room and royal apartments are located within Lehandra, the largest living tree in the world, which stands a full 3000 feet high and has a trunk that at it’s base measures more than 200′ across, of the birch species. Ropes descend from the upper branches where a constant lookout is maintained, and some of the branches are large enough and broad enough to contain, within their hollows,.dungeons or guest quarters. The smoothness of the Trunk makes it almost impossible for non-elves to climb.

It is also said that when an Elf dies, if no other should inherit his tree, that tree will soon wither and die. Elves refuse to confirm or even discuss such matters, regarding them as personal and privileged and you’re a typical human for even asking.

The current ruler is Cerith III, former court jester, and a distant cousin of Patrus IV, his predecessor. Twenty years ago, a terrible plague swept through the Elvish population. In response, the King sealed the cities until the disease burned itself out, well aware that he was signing the death warrants for up to one-half of the Elvish population, despite the best efforts of Elven Clerics. He did not realize that the disease was resistant to their abilities, or that as a result, his own family would number amongst the victims. Elvish diplomacy has had only one priority since – to conceal, by any means necessary, the resulting vulnerability.

Some retrospect

Most of the areas in which I now see shortcomings in the preceding section fall in the last three paragraphs. The “Elvish Forest” concept presages the treatment of Lothlorien in the Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy by several decades, though there are some obvious similarities – but it now seems confused, as though I started with one idea and then switched to another. Nevertheless, players from my Fumanor campaigns will recognize some of the nascent thinking shown here.

But it’s the plague that now troubles me, as a writer and GM. Okay, so let’s assume that only 3% of the Elvish population are clerics of sufficient level to cast Cure Disease. And that the average number of them that they could cast is 3 per day. That’s 9% healed in a day, maximum. Really nasty diseases have a virulity – a chance of catching the disease from someone who has it – in single digits percent, or less. Diseases that kill their hosts too quickly tend to die out themselves. A really contagious disease might have a 4% infection rate.

So, one infected person who goes about their daily routine might meet 100 people in a day, resulting in 5 infected people, including the original. The next day, the first person is feeling poorly, and goes about an abbreviated daily routine, producing one more infected person from 25 contacts. The other 4 people feel fine and each meet 100 people, creating another 4 infected people each, or 16 in all. That gives us a total of 5+1+16=22. Except that there is almost certain to be some overlap between them, especially in relatively isolated communities. So the real total is more likely to be 20. On the third day, patient zero dies. Patients 2-5 feel ill, have an abbreviated schedule, and only infect one more person each. Patients 6-20 feel fine and spread the disease to four more people each, less overlap. That’s maybe 40 more cases, between them. 20-1+4+40=64 cases. Day four, cases 2-5 die. Cases 6-20 feel ill and maintain an abbreviated schedule, and infect maybe another 10 people, allowing for overlap. The remaining 44 spread the disease to a maximum of 176 people – but by now people are becoming aware that others are dying, and are taking extra precautions, and there’s still the question of a perpetually-shrinking pool of potential victims like innkeepers and merchants. In reality, you would be unlucky to get even 60 new cases. So that’s 64-4+10+60=130 people. Day five, and cases 6-20 die, and cases 21-64 feel ill, and everyone’s scared to death. Those cases are isolated – infecting no-one – and the remaining 66 mostly maintain an abbreviated schedule if they go out at all after learning they had contact with someone who’s now in isolation. Better to go hungry for a day than to catch something fatal. So their chance of infecting someone else is probably around 1/8th of what it was – so instead of 264 people infected, it’s about 25. 130-14+25=141. Day six, and cases 21-64 die, and isolation for everyone becomes mandatory, enforced by police and fear. At best you’d get 1-2 new cases. 141-43+2=100. The trend is clear – with no magical healing intervention at all.

Now let’s throw in some magical healing. On day 2, person one feels ill and is cured. So patient #20 never gets ill at all. On day 3, four more people feel ill – but there’s at least 100 people, and that means that there are at least 3 healers capable of curing an average of 3 cases each, so they still aren’t stretched. But that would be enough to tell the clerics that something was going on, and by day 4, civil containment measures would be ordered. Day 4, and 16 people feel ill; 12 of them get cured. More clerics are sent for. From the progression, they would even have some idea of how many more clerics they might potentially need! Day 5, and the other 4 of the 16 die. You don’t have to do the math; even in the time of the ancient Greeks, they knew that one person could catch an illness from another (even if they had the mechanisms involved all wrong), and that you should isolate the sick. It won’t be long before the disease is contained or burns itself out.

What’s needed is a longer infectious period before symptoms show up, and probably a longer time period all round.

Even back then, I could see this – and so I grafted in the notion that the disease resisted clerical healing, without explaining how or why. Today, that invokes the concept of antibiotic-resistant bacteria; back then, there was no such concept. What there was the concept of was bio-warfare, and the prospect of manufactured diseases that resisted treatment. That would mean that someone would be responsible for the creation and spread of the disease, and a huge bounty would be placed on their heads by the crown. This, in turn, would stimulate interest to the exclusion of everything else that was going on at the time. Meanwhile, the royal family would receive the best care and advice and be amongst the first in line for any treatment, palliative or curative. The whole premise of putting a jester on the throne falls apart.

The more you attempt to explain the why and how of the disease’s resistance, the more blatant an attack this all becomes, and the more strongly the disease would factor into the lives of people in the modern era – i.e. when the game was set. It didn’t.

That in turn requires not only that the disease be resistant, and far more infectious, but that this resistance abruptly goes away, allowing the disease to be stamped out. That sounds like the sort of thing an adventuring party would do – especially in pursuit of that huge bounty I mentioned – and so I would, these days, look a lot more closely at the how and why of the disease, have a responsible individual, and have a legendary party hunt that person down and end the grip of the disease, all in the campaign backstory.

Let’s apply some reinvention

Anyway, the goal isn’t just to revisit the past, it’s to revise it into something completely different. I happen to know that at a future point I will need a cold and ruthless politician in my Zenith-3 campaign – starting reasonably soon, in fact – and there’s enough commonality between that description and the racial profile given for Elves that the one could be used as a reasonable template for the other.

I don’t want to refer to this guy as “the politician” or “this guy” throughout, so I’m going to start by giving him a name. For campaign purposes, a British name would be preferable. Fenton Cole sounds like a solid, neutral, name, believable in a politician.

Fenton Cole was the class clown in his early years. All that changed at the age of 16 when his parents and only brother caught a rare tropical disease and Fenton became the sole heir of the family fortune – a small but noteworthy collection of stocks and bonds, and a declining family business which he had no interest in running. Accordingly, he asked for the business to be sold by the estate’s executors and the proceeds added to the family trust. Placed in the care of an Orphanage, he quickly came to hate it and all forms of socialized care. Throwing himself into his studies, he surprised everyone by graduating first in his class shortly before his 18th Birthday, when the first installment of the trust became available to him. Each year that followed would bring another slab of cash, until – at 25 – the entirety would come under his control.

He then attended Oxford university, studying economics, politics, law, and business. During this period, his political position firmed as he drew himself closer and closer to the right wing of the Conservative Party. Upon graduation, he head-hunted the smartest of his fellow graduates and started an IT business.

Cole had studied his business history well, and was of the opinion that the climate was ripe for a new revolution within the business sector. In particular, the producing mobile-phone apps aimed squarely at optimizing business processes, just as – prior to Microsoft and Bill Gates – the computer had not been seen as a business necessity. Although moderately successful, this enterprise never succeeded in developing a “Killer App”, something that would be viewed as ubiquitously necessary by business. His programs were too slow and had insufficient capacity.

In those early years, he faced and fought off numerous legal challenges from both ex-staff and rivals, which he fought both vigorously and ruthlessly. At a trade show, he was discussing a hi-fi app with another businessman – and rather bored with the conversation, from all accounts – when the other man explained the concept of a separate pre-amp with all the controls and a power amp which supplied the muscle. As a way of structuring audio processing units, this had been around since the 1950s, hitting the peak of popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but never completely fading from view. Nevertheless, it was an obscure concept by the time Cole heard of it, and had an epiphany.

His vision: Mobile devices as the “front end” that controlled everything, and home or business computers with minimal interfaces as the dedicated “muscle”. This would put the full computing power of the centralized device in the hands of the end-user without wasting resources on networks and the like, and reducing the cost significantly. This would also permit him to gut the mobile device, reducing its cost to the consumer substantially. In combination, by eliminating the redundant overlap in capabilities, he could undersell a competitor by more than 40%. Integrated collaborative software that permitted multiple remote “controllers” to be linked to a single device or network proved the final piece of the puzzle.

He knew he was onto something when both Microsoft and Google came sniffing around with offers to buy his company and it’s intellectual property. Rather than make enemies of them, he chose to draw negotiations out, and with every passing month, the recompense he could expect to receive ballooned. It was only when demand began to outstrip the manufacturing capability that he could bring to bear that he sold a one-third interest to each party, retaining the last third for himself.

With this capital and the resources at his disposal, he began a career in conservative politics as something more than a mere contributor. Slowly, he has worked his way to stand one step behind the current leadership, and is poised to elevate himself still further.

Okay, that’s a nice, coherent personal history of someone with little spark of originality and superficial real-world competence finding success on a grand scale. But it doesn’t say much about the character’s personality, which should derive from these formative elements. This is something that I have nevertheless kept in mind throughout. It may also have been noted that there isn’t a lot of resemblance between the material on Elves presented earlier and the above – that’s about to change, too.

Fenton Cole has great patience and tolerance toward individual failures of character, but far less patience for institutional behavior that violates his senses of propriety and decorum. He doesn’t begrudge funding necessary services, but demands accountability and that the services so funded deliver on their respective mandates as efficiently as possible. He tends to take the long view in his dealings with other nations, and will frequently castigate them for their shortsightedness.

He hates being rushed into actions or decisions, preferring to take the time to discuss possible alternatives, consequences, and choices in depth. If at all possible, he will spin out this process until the problem solves itself and he publicly holds the opinion that “most problems go away if you wait long enough”. He can be decisive when he has to be, but he hates and resents being painted into a corner. It is sometimes expected that this practice encourages factionalism within his administrations, but once a decision has been taken, he is ruthless in demanding loyalty to the policy, the party, and himself – in that order. Behind the scenes, he is cold and ruthless, asking no favor and granting none.

No-one can be grim and serious all the time, and Fenton is known to have his playful side, though he indulges it only as a calculated measure. While this once manifested as a source of practical jokes, these days it usually presents as a delicate sense of aesthetics. He has turned his hand at one time or another to almost every type of art, with extremely variable results. The choice to which he returns, time and again, is oil painting, but he has experienced enough of the alternatives that he is comfortable discussing them with other practitioners of those arts, and they with him; this celebrity cache makes him a popular guest at dinner parties and television programming.

At least in public, Cole seems possessed of a deep well of sentimentality that is exhibited in dealing with those experiencing difficulties. He strongly believes in holding out a helping hand to those in genuine need, while demanding accountability for what is done with the assistance that is provided. It is sometimes alleged that he holds a particular soft spot for the Irish, lamenting the past divisions within that nation.

Cole is, as a general rule, extremely courteous to others; he likes to offer barbed compliments and to damn with faint praise. When presented with a piece of legislation which he intends to oppose, he will, for example, scrutinize it closely before remarking that it “appears to be well laid out” or “the full stops are in an attractive font” before proceeding to rip the proposal apart on policy grounds. He is well respected within political circles for always making his criticisms substantive and never superficial; he is always good for talking points that those opposed find difficult to refute.

So, what we have here is a well-spoken advocate for the conservative position who absolutely believes in his party’s position – and isn’t afraid to say so if he thinks they are wrong. He has to be dragged forcibly into any compromise, but will staunchly protect and defend such compromises when he finds them necessary.

A politician who would be respected by his enemies, and who could plausibly be about to rise to the leadership of his political party – who can be and will be draconian and ruthless in the ways that I need him to be, plot-wise, who is that most dangerous of opponents – someone who believes he’s right. Exactly what the doctor ordered for my campaign! Only you and I know that he used to be an Elf…

The February 2019 Blog Carnival is being hosted by Sea Of Stars, with the subject of Making Magic Wondrous.

This wasn’t an easy subject, because I’ve already done so much in this area regarding magic items of various types. I suspect others may have found it so, too, because entries are thin on the ground at the moment, with about a week to go (it doesn’t help that this is the shortest month of the year).

After thinking about the question for a while, I found myself wondering if the biggest part of the problem wasn’t the language that we use in describing spell effects in games, i.e. the way we interface with the game mechanics.

Hierarchy

In Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs (Jan 2011) I defined a seven-step pyramid of game content, and analyzed in the sections that followed. In April 2014, I reexamined the issue in The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules, including analysis of an alternative hierarchy that others had proposed. Ultimately, I stood by my original, but it really was a decision only possible by splitting hairs. The difference: reality might say that a properly-maintained and prepared weapon will fire reliably – but if it is better (read “more fun”) for adventure or the campaign for the gun to misfire, then hang it all, it should misfire, and my original formulation allows that while the variant does not.

So this is my guideline whenever relative importance of one campaign element becomes important (from base to the top):

• Official Rules
• House Rules Trump Official Rules
• Simulation (i.e Realism) Trumps Rules
• Genre Trumps Simulation
• Plot Trumps Genre
• Campaign Trumps Plot
• Gameplay (i.e. Practicality) Trumps All

Notice where that puts Mechanics and Physics – at the very bottom. This supports the theory that what we have here is a case of Official Rules trumping genre – when they clearly shouldn’t. Specifically, trumping that aspect of Genre that contains the Wonder of Magic. The mechanics make magic predictable and controllable and relatively precise.

If these theories hold water at all, then the problem stems from the clinical accuracy of the casting process and the repeatability of spellcasting outcomes – from treating magic as though it were a chem-lab or physics experiment in the first place.

That took my memory back to my first-year classes at University; the first subject of the year was error in measurement.

In essence, the more complex the phenomena being explored, the greater the sources of error in any measurement. The more gross and generalized the measurement method, the more subject to rounding error you are; the more sensitive and specialized the measuring equipment, the more other sources of error influenced the result.

Either way, you could never escape experimental error within a given set of results; it was only through repeated experiments under a variety of conditions that true trends and relationships could be discerned and the errors discarded.

These graphs demonstrate what I’m talking about. On the left is a graph of a single set of results that a student might obtain in the lab. Very few of the crosses fall on the theoretical relationship line shown in blue, but most are close to it – there is one outlier where some error was clearly made in recording the reading. With multiple sets of readings, say from four different students, as shown on the right, confidence in the theoretical result skyrockets. It’s very easy to see the trend – even though all four of the results contain an outlier just about as extreme as that of the first set of results.

In terms of the actual measurement of any one reading, though – and this is the important point – it could be anywhere within a margin of error of the true reading, high or low. And it suddenly occurred to me that this could be the solution, or at least part of it – creating some fuzziness about that game-mechanics “perfection”.

The “-ish” Principle

Every spell has a stat block consisting of various numbers. Casting Time this, range that, effect the other, and so on. What I’m suggesting is that these describe the theoretical outcome, reasonably accurate as the average of a number of measurements but not all that reliable “in the real world”. In effect, each of the numbers should have an “-ish” attached to them. The stat block says “Range 40 feet “? Then it should be read “Range 40-ish feet”. The stat block says “Duration 5 rounds”? Then it should be read “Duration 5-ish rounds”.

The “experimental errors” that the “-ish” represents should scale with the numbers – I think roughly 1/3 of the number would be a reasonable margin of error, especially since (with the larger numbers), there will be a bias toward a central result – which is more or less the predicted result. To be fair to players, there should be at least a 50/50 chance of bettering the standard result.

base	x 1/3	fuzz	resulting range, average
1-3	x 1/3 = 1	-1+d2	result = 1-4, average = base+0.5
4-6	x 1/3 = 2	-d2+d3	result = 3-8, average = base+0.5
7-9	x 1/3 = 3	-d3+d4	result = 5-12, average = base+0.5
10-12	x 1/3 = 4	-d4+d5	result = 5-16, average = base+0.5
13-15	x 1/3 = 5	-d6+d8	result = 8-22, average = base+1
16-21	x 1/3 = 7	-d8+2d6	result = 10-32, average = base+2.5
22-27	x 1/3 = 9	-d10+2d6	result = 14-38, average = base+1.5
28-33	x 1/3 = 11	-d12+3d6	result = 19-50, average = base+4
34-39	x 1/3 = 13	-2d6+3d8	result = 25-51, average = base+6.5
40-45	x 1/3 = 15	-2d8+4d6	result = 28-67, average = base+5
46-51	x 1/3 = 17	-2d10+3d8	result = 29-73, average = base+2.5
52-60	x 1/3 = 20	-2d10+4d6	result = 36-82, average = base+3
61-75	x 1/3 = 25	-3d10+5d6	result = 36-102, average = base+1
76-90	x 1/3 = 30	-3d10+5d8	result = 51-127, average = base+6
91-105	x 1/3 = 35	-3d10+d20+3d6	result = 65-140, average = base+5.5
106-120	x 1/3 = 40	-2d20+7d6	result = 73-160, average = base+3.5

Of course, there is a simpler way: (-3d10+5d6)%. But that needs a calculator. Or does it?

Roll separately, every time?

The table above is the sort of idea that sounds good on paper but doesn’t work very well in practice, because unless all the stat values associated with the spell are astonishingly equal, different scales will apply to different numbers. In an ideal world, that sounds fantastic – this time, you get extra range but shorter duration, next time you get half range and double effect, and so on and on – but it’s not practical to do a fresh set of rolls every time a character casts a spell, for each and every variable.

Roll Once!

Far simpler to roll once using the “simpler” roll above, then either pull out the calculator – or a simple spreadsheet where you enter all the critical values from the stat block and the multiplier and it calculates them all for you at the same time – or simply roughly guesstimate the results.

But this requires a rule regarding rounding. To keep things simple, always round up.

For example, let’s say you get +14%.

• Base Value 1Î114% = 1 and a bit = 2.
• Base Value 5Î114% – well, 10% of 5 is 0.5 and half that is 0.25 so it will be a little under 5.75, which rounds to 6.
• Base Value 25Î114% – same trick: 10% is 2.5, half is 1.25, so 28.75, round to 29.
• Base Value 80Î108% – let’s change it up with a different result. eight eights are 64, so 8% of 80 is 6.4, giving a total of 86.4 which rounds to 87.
• Base Value 95Î108% – ten percent of 95 is 9.5, and 1% is 0.95. So we have 95+9.5-0.95-0.95 – or 95+10-1-1+a bit, or 104.
• Base Value 6d6Î108% – you can either increase the number of dice or increase the total rolled. The second is more accurate but the first is more viscerally exciting for the player, so that’s the way I would go. ten percent of 6 is 0.6 and 8 percent is less than 10, so it’s going to be 6-point-something dice – which rounds to 7.
• Base Value 10Î83% – let’s work a couple in the other direction. This gives a result of 8.3, which rounds to 9.
• Base Value 30Î83% – this seems a bit trickier. But 3 eights are 24, so the 80% cuts the 30 to 24. Three percent is roughly 1/7th of 20, and we’ve cut the result by 6 representing 20% of the base, so the three percent is going to be a little under 1, giving a total of 24-point-something which will round to 25.

Most of these I was able to toss off without a moment’s hesitation; the arithmetic is really very simple, and the “round up” makes a lot of things simpler..

Okay, so we can now make spell specifics fuzzy. There are a couple of bonuses to think about – you can simulate areas conducive to the casting of a particular type (or school) of spell simply by varying the roll. Ditto magic in general. Or areas where magic is harder.

Ditto for the casting environment – there’s nothing to prevent you bestowing an item that once a day gives a bonus to the result die roll (use d8s instead of d6s, for example). Or if the mage performs some sort of “warm-up” like drawing a magical circle to “focus his power” or “concentrate his mind”. These all add flavor, and flavor is what the mechanics have been lacking. Equally, some magical effects may make other magic types harder to cast.

For simplicity’s sake, I suggest altering the d10s for general “casting difficulties” and altering the d6s for “environmental effects” that affect the one mage specifically.

Is the “Ish” principle enough?

I don’t think so. Making the game mechanics a little fuzzier and less reliable is a partial solution but that alone won’t bring out the magic in spellcasting. We need to make some room for the narrative that will actually evoke the sense of wonder that we are trying to create.

Time For Narrative

Where can we find this room? Descriptions of spell effects are one place. Descriptions of what happens when the spell is cast is another. Descriptions of the act of casting are another.

Spell Effects

Too often, we (as GMs) fall into the trap of simply describing the results of a spell-casting. There are times when the increase in pacing and consequent intensity of experience make this a preferable choice; what we need to do is embed in the player’s minds the wonder of magic at those times when this isn’t the case, so that they will appreciate that the same things are taking place at the more intense, action-filled, moments, but that you are exercising your right as GM to take narrative shortcuts. In other words, we need to establish the wonder of magic, whenever we can.

Nevertheless, our options for invoking the wonder of magic through spell effects is somewhat limited by the descriptions of the spells. Certainly, this can do part of the job, but only part of it. Relying on this alone makes it obvious that the “wonder of magic” is a tacked-on afterthought, and not a fundamental of the game.

Casting

The interval between casting a spell and the effects of that casting manifesting are usually only an instant unless the spell description states otherwise – and this is a nuance that most authors give no thought to when writing those descriptions. Nevertheless, there is probably room for a limited palette of effects.

Rays can lance out in intense or bright colors – even black can be more vivid, more palpably there than the surrounding darkness, for example. Except where the spell itself suggests otherwise (Rays) or even states otherwise (as is the case with Fireballs), I suggest one effect for each “school” of magic, thus providing a unifying factor. Evocations may require some sort of power “reaching out” to the target like tentacles; Divinations may wreath the hands in writhing mist; Transformations may involve a visible “shock-wave” emanating from the caster, and so on. Get creative, but be consistent, and keep it simple – you are only describing an instant in time, an almost subconscious impression, nothing more.

Once again, because of these limitations, the utility of these contributions is limited. At best, they can perpetuate an already-existent sense of wonder; they are not enough to create one.

The Act Of Casting

That leaves, by the process of elimination, the Act Of Casting as the place that must carry the greatest burden of invoking a sense of wonder. How long does it take to start casting a spell?

Under the premise that you started casting the spell when you declared the action, and it went off just before your next action, I used to give myself a full turn for this. But a lot of that time was wasted, and I faced vociferous protests from my players.

House Rules to capture a Sense Of Wonder

Thus, we arrive at a conclusion riding the horns of a dilemma: The current rules structure of D&D, Pathfinder, and (in fact) most other fantasy RPGs don’t provide the space needed to create a sense of wonder. Even without implementing the “-ish” solution, we are going to need to invoke the grim specter of House Rules to carve out that room.

Casting Time Increase

To start with, let’s forget applying the “-ish” solution to casting time. This will be complicated enough without that.

Instead, let’s add the spell level to the casting time, in whatever unit of measurement is specified by the spell, or initiative number if not specified.

Sidebar: Higher Initiative?

In most game systems, a higher initiative total is better, and you count down from high to low. This high initiative numbers get to act first. This is clearly advantageous in surprise rounds, but you can argue that in regular rounds, the chance to act after you’ve seen what other characters are doing is a more accurate reflection of supposed advantage, and hence you should count up from 1 to whatever.

In an ideal world, the optimum would be to count up for action declarations and then count down for action implementations, but this creates so many problems that it isn’t practical. In fact, separating declaration from implementation is sufficiently problematic that I advise against it in the strongest possible terms.

And, if you don’t do that, then the best compromise is the high-to-low countdown of initiative numbers.

It matters here, because the casting time change is in the direction of the future – if you are counting up then you can simply add a positive modifier to the total to get the casting time. If you are counting down then you have to subtract the modifier to get the same effect, i.e. the spell “goes off” a certain number of combat actions later.

This provides time for the GM to impart flavor text designed to create the required Sense Of Wonder. In fact, the more powerful the spell, the greater the sense of wonder and drama that the GM has time to impart.

But it also makes spells a lot easier to disrupt or counter. If an enemy spellcaster has his initiative number between the casting mage’s action and the spell activating (at which point it’s too late), he can use his action to counter the spell. High Initiative Numbers – if they are just a little higher than everyone else and not a LOT higher – can actually become detrimental to a mage. Low numbers – after everyone else has acted – are far more useful, preventing interference.

And that has the additional benefit of reducing the impact of any power imbalance that exists between mages and more physical characters. Mages become more the “knockout punch” at the end of a round and less of the “preemptive strike” that clears the battlefield before anyone else gets to act. It’s a side-benefit, but a worthwhile one.

Casting Time Reduction

Next, let’s throw Mages a bone: Every 3 caster levels above the minimum required to cast spells of that level reduce the casting time by 1 until the originally-specified “official” time is reached.

This operates on the theory that the Sense Of Wonder, once imbued into the process, will become part of the “culture” of the game and need less reinforcement as it becomes an established trait of the campaign (and, in a wider sense, of the GM running it). It also suggests that the ability to cast a spell is something different to mastering that spell. Furthermore, it gives GMs yet another variable that they can tinker with in response to environmental conditions, permitting still greater integration of characters into environment.

“-ish” Manipulations

I would recommend implementing the “-ish” principle House Rules separately, and only once these casting time manipulations have become part of the campaign. But, when you do, you can further reflect the increasing “Mastery” of a spell by applying the reduction in casting time penalty, x10, as a reduction in the degree of variation – or, if complaints are already high from your players, only to those in which the spell effect is worse than base.

But I have a better use for the “-ish” principle under these circumstances: Restoring to players the option of base-time casting, and giving them greater flexibility and control over their spells.

What if the impact of the “-ish” principle were what happens if the spell is cast in the base time, and reduce proportionate to the extra time specified by the House Rules above?

If, for example, the net change in casting time is -5 initiative numbers, then taking the full 5 initiative numbers gives you a fully reliable spell as per the book. Taking only 3 initiative numbers extra means that 2/5 of the “unpredictability” remain.

This means that spells would be at their most “chaotic” when first acquired, and that reliability would be an expression of improving Mastery. Because the “chaos” is just as likely to result in an improvement, it also means that Reliability is achieved by compromise – you sacrifice the opportunity for a fortuitous benefit in order to avoid a disastrous penalty.

I’ve already recommended using the simplified “one calculation fits all” method, and not the more precise but time-consuming line-item-by-line-item variation. These changes only amplify the cost of the line-item approach, while being equally simple to apply to the “one calculation” option. Something else to bear in mind.

A compensatory additional advantage

An additional House Rule can further compensate Mages for any inconvenience. If any spell that requires a “touch attack” can be successfully ‘locked on’ by a touch in any of the rounds between casting and the spell activating, it permits additional house rules that overcome the rise in ACs that make this type of attack impractical for mages, restoring this type of spell to usefulness.

As an example of this kind of house rule: Within the spell’s casting, “touch attempts” may be made at the rate of one per initiative number, with the number rolled on the d20 (without modifiers) subtracting from the target’s AC. He can wriggle and dodge, and may be successful for a while, but can he keep it up for long enough when all the Mage needs to do is touch him?

Let’s say the mage has four extra beats in which to cast his spell. His foe has AC 43, in magic, class abilities, armor, and agility bonuses.

• On attempt #1, Initiative count “Casting+0”, the mage rolls a 12. Not enough, he misses. AC 43-12 = 31.
• On attempt #2, Initiative count “Casting+1”, the mage rolls a 9. Still not enough to hit AC 31, he misses. AC 31-9 = 22.
• On attempt #3, Initiative count “Casting+2”, the mage rolls an 11. Almost enough to hit AC 22, but not quite. AC 22-11=11.
• On attempt #4, Initiative count “Casting+3”, his last chance, the mage rolls a 10 and just barely hits, laying a touch one his enemy’s arm.

On Initiative Count “Casting+4”, the spell activates and takes effect.

If this seems to much

If this seems to go too far, you can reduce the impact by specifying that damage inflicted upon the mage during these rounds acts as a distraction and effectively adds to the target’s “Touch AC”. It thus becomes a race between the mage’s attempts to touch the enemy and the enemy and his allies trying to prevent it from happening. Or maybe it’s +1 per dice of damage inflicted – it doesn’t have to be much since the effect persists throughout the attack attempt.

Going Further

What if extra casting time could be spent to increase the modifier but in a guaranteed positive way? Use the full amount and you reduce variability to zero; continue, and you can get up to a +100% beneficial variation.

Under these rules, if 5 initiative numbers of casting, plus the declaration round, are needed to cast the spell – so that if you start casting it on initiative number 17, it will take effect on initiative number 12, the mage would have the option of taking up to another 5 initiative numbers (with all the risks entailed) to restore the full variability but guarantee that it would be applied to his benefit.

This gives Mages a genuine reason to accept these House Rules and rewards them for giving the GM the time he needs to capture that elusive sense of Wonderment.

A more extreme variation

What if, instead of initiative numbers, the addition was “number of acting characters taking their turns”? This erases the whole imbalance between high and low initiative numbers created earlier; now it doesn’t matter when the mage acts, his spell won’t activate until there have been a certain number of opportunities for it to be disrupted or for its intended target to go away.

This is metagaming, pure and simple – it’s elevating the playing experience over the rules, and over any semblance of realism. It’s expressing Genre and Campaign (and potentially, Plot) as superior to those things – which is entirely permissible according to the hierarchy shown earlier, provided that practicality is not excessively compromised.

One Line To Rule Them All: A Solution in Three Parts

These rules – or something else that does the same job – make it clear that sufficient time can be carved out for the GM to get expressive. The question remains, what to put in that time? It’s clearly going to be narrative in nature, but it will also need to be consistent and responsive to the casting conditions. I have three pieces of general advice to offer, and then a more specific solution – but one that is inherently customized to the vernacular and vocabulary of each individual.

Advice: Repetition Is Death

Whatever you do, don’t make it boring. And repetition to the point of predictability is boring.

This is actually a bigger problem than it seems, because you also want to be consistent, and the two are frequently at odds with each other. The solution is to aim for a consistent overall “look and feel” but with the freedom to be experimental and creative within that framework.

Advice: Don’t decouple cause from effect

My second piece of advice is to ensure that what you’re describing has some relationship to the form of the spell that will eventually manifest. This “couples” the sense of wonder with the consequences so that when the players think of the effect, the sense of wonder is also invoked. Cumulatively, this can do so much of the work for you that only a little reinforcement is needed at higher levels.

I remember playing some of the early computer games – when the opportunity arose for a character to gain a new spell, I would enthusiastically grasp at it, eager to see how it was going to be depicted or represented visually within the game environment. That’s what you have to create on the part of your players – and then you have to deliver on the implied promise of a sense of wonder.

Advice: Make it feel Magical (and increasingly Epic)

Which brings me to my third piece of general advice. Spend some time – as much as necessary – focusing on the poetry of your narrative – the content more than the delivery. If the content of what you are saying is enough to convey the desired sense of wonder, it won’t matter what the real-world conditions are when you need to deliver it, the sense of wonder will be communicated – whether it be whispered in total silence or shouted over the heads of rambunctious convention-goers or card-players.

Content Solution Part 1: Environmental Element

When I approach the question of how to “manifest” the magic, I always start by contemplating the environment and how it might be modified. Casting a heat or fire-based spell? In a hot environment, you might feel the heat draining from you in the direction of the mage. In a cold environment, you might feel a warm glow coming from the mage’s hands. In a dark environment, the glow might be a visible fiery red or yellow, in a brightly-lit environment the mage might be suddenly covered in moving shadows reminiscent of rising smoke – even though no smoke is actually visible.

Content Solution Part 2: School Element

This is always a verb, and describes the process by which Part I becomes Part 3. But not just any verb – make yourself a list of verbs that are both broadly applicable and interpretable, and yet convey some inherent mystique.

Swirl. Spiral. Project. Thunder. Rush. Suck. Radiate. Arc. Surround. Clouds.

Those are all good – some better than others. I like to restrict each one or two of these verbs to a single school of magic – and, furthermore, if I have enough of them on tap, to distinguish the Class “X” version of each school from that of Class “Y”. This helps convey a difference between the two despite the fact that their game mechanics are virtually (or completely) identical.

Avoid verbs that are synonyms for anything already on the list.

It also helps if the ones that are more stimulating to your imagination are chosen for the schools with the greater number of spells to be described. But that’s a nuance that will take time and expertise – and which will be different from one GM to another. Your vocabulary is not my vocabulary; the only certainty is that both our vocabularies can be improved.

Content Solution Part 3: Spell Effect Element

The final part of the three part solution is to connect what you’ve got to some intermediate stage that leads to the already-determined “casting” language or to the spell effect. Divination spells may open a “window” or “image” that conveys a sense of traveling through a long tunnel. To the unimaginative, this may be clouds, or abstract swirls (which therefore require no description); the more ambitious may describe impressions of sky and terrain and earth and trees and the occasional slightly-startled beast, gone too quickly, or stars streaking past. You get the idea.

In combination

Environments are usually unique, especially in combination with the other elements. The School element provides the consistency that was demanded earlier. And the spell effect element provides variety as well as unity of descriptive narrative with the rest of the spellcasting process. In effect, this generates a “mini-story” within a story of the casting of the spell. This happens and then this happens and then the spell’s effects happen, and all of it is inexplicable by any known physics – and it’s that which creates the Sense Of Wonder.

March 2019 Blog Carnival Anchor

This is not just Campaign Mastery’s submission to the February blog carnival, it’s also the anchor post for the March carnival, which I have stepped up to host, having thought of a subject.

The title this month is “Echoes Of Yesteryear”. GMs, Divide the number of years that you’ve been GMing by two, then find at least one NPC or plotline or article (or a PC from one of your campaigns) or whatever that is that old or more – and revisit it. That could be a rewrite, an update, a variant, a reminiscing – but do SOMETHING NEW with it, and preferably something relevant to today.

In my case, I started GMing in 1981, 38 years ago – so I’m looking for something from the year 2000, long before Campaign Mastery started….

I hardly ever start plotting a story or an adventure at the beginning. There’s too great a chance of chasing yourself down a blind alley when you do so.

The First Pass: Back To Front

Instead, I leap ahead to the next significant development and ask “what do the star(s) of the story – the PCs in an RPG – need to know in order to get there?” and “how can they find that out?”.

Working backwards in this fashion ensures that the plot has greater coherence and a rational linearity, the very definition of “the shortest line through the story”.

It’s also the quintessential definition of a plot train.

Each such leap into the future naturally defines what I think of as an Act within the overall adventure.

The Second Pass: Front To Back

Once I have the ‘most direct line”, I look for all the places where PCs have to decide what to do next. I have already defined the ‘best’ choice that they can make, but have to assume that they won’t necessarily take that course.

This defines branch points within the adventure. Once these have been flagged and highlighted, they have to be considered individually – a branch point at which there is only one obvious choice is no branch point at all.

In fact, I want to ensure that there’s at least one alternative choice that is at least as likely, based on what the PCs know and what they don’t at that point in the adventure, especially if they make different assumptions to fill in the gaps in their knowledge than the correct one.

If there are no such obvious alternatives, I have to then create such alternatives, and then map out a route from that branch back into the “direct line” that gets the overall adventure back on track.

The Third Pass: Back To Front and back again

The only reason this pass starts in an ante-temporal direction is because I’m already close to the end from the second pass. This pass is an analysis of estimated spotlight share amongst the different PCs, and a notation of anyone who’s at loose ends at any point in the adventure on any of the identified branches.

If an adventure is viewed as a series of extraordinary events in a continuum of ordinary lives, taking otherwise mundane events from those ordinary lives and amplifying them in terms of the attention paid to them provides a neat solution to anyone shortchanged by the spotlight-time tally. In fact, I will often ensure that everyone gets at least one ‘personal life’ scene in the beginning of an adventure, just to establish a baseline of normality for the character. (I also work hard at ensuring that the actual seeds that will sprout into the adventure look just like these personal scenes most of the time – which means the players can never dismiss a ‘character scene’ because they never know which ones are important).

So, once I’ve reached the head of the adventure, I create a list of “fill-in” events to equalize the spotlight time, then work out when and where to drop them into the plotline – noting that any that follow a branch point have to be present on all branches from that point.

Not All Subplots Are Created Equal

Some of these “personal” plotlines take on a life of their own when examined closely, requiring multiple scenes before they’re complete. That usually requires the insertion of additional “personal life” scenes for the other characters, interweaving with the main plot. The over-sized plot thread becomes a short-term framing device around which the other PCs take over the spotlight. Depending on the timing, this interleaving may even necessitate the subdivision of plot sequences focusing on one or more of the other PCs.

It follows that as soon as I’ve finished the third pass, inserting personal scenes, the first thing I have to do is repeat the third pass.

Ultimately, this breaks the act into a series of scenes described in extremely brief bullet-points.

Example

I’m going to illustrate this by highlighting and breaking down the current adventure in my Zenith-3 campaign. Because we haven’t finished playing this yet, I’m going to have to obscure certain parts that are still to come. But it will still demonstrate the impact of this process more clearly than any other example I can conveniently lay my hands on.

To start with, here’s the original outline of the adventure.

Title: Figures In Black
Theme: a series of confrontations with figures in black clothing, some unrelated & coincidental.
Game Date (start): Monday, February 13, 2056.

Background (selected unresolved plot threads from previous adventures):

1. A mysterious figure in black has been harassing Blackwing and creating super-villains to confront him.
2. Each such confrontation weakens Blackwing, as does any use of his powers.
3. Something has overpowered spells that directly affect the target beyond the capacity of even expert mages to control.
4. Religious Zealots amongst the American Religious Ultra-Right, egged on by the Vatican for political reasons, have been harassing the PCs through sermons and religious messaging, even to the point of creating super-villains to oppose them.
5. There is a small but growing undercurrent of political opposition to the team for all sorts of reasons, publicly led by a Congressman who the team exposed as corrupt and possibly powered by the wealthy and influential parents of a Cyber-gang, the Chrome Tigers.
6. The Bright Cutter has been exploring a hobby – hologram sculpture – and a personality quirk as a practical joker has manifested in the process.
7. The team have recruited a top-notch bureaucrat to function as their political adviser and want his opinion on who to recruit as a Press Liaison.
8. The team have contracted with Holo (a digital super-villain) to wipe all copies of the Mutagenic Drug recipe released onto the net by U.N.I.T. (a government agency) using funds provided by Voodoo Willy (another super-villain) in return for a yet-to-be-disclosed favor from team member Vala.
9. Various members have spent the time on hobbies and interests and can now buy the associated skills, moving on to other activities.

Here’s the adventure summary line(s) from my master plan, rearranged slightly so that they can be presented full-sized:

I then turn that plan outline into a list of content for the adventure:

Specific Content (for this adventure):

• RV#29 – Team Encounter: Wraith – tread water in the Figure In Black plotline (BW 15+18).
• BC01 – Conclusion: Hobby Plotline
• V07f – media reports that catholic churches and catholic-owned businesses are being harassed by Z3 fans, St B needs to calm things down without political damage.
• BW15 – is notified that his probation has been rescinded following the recent review, sentence reduced for good behavior.
• V02e – the Chrome Tigers pretend to be Z-3 fans and attack a string of churches. Grand Tour in hypercars?
• BW15+18 – The Figure In Black plotline continues. Immediately after, there is a development in the Magic-goes-wild subplot, which might be just a coincidence of timing! If not, Z3 can only surmise that whoever was behind it has achieved their purpose – whatever it was.
• + RA12 mana pickmeup (ongoing subplot series, the + means to drop it in anywhere appropriate and repeat if there is good reason)
• VP#64 – Team Encounter: give the team a moment of heroic unity at the fade-out, entire confrontation takes place off-camera between adventures.

Right away, I can see from this synopsis that this adventure will revolve around Blackwing. There’s one team encounter at the start and another at the end, and a pair of encounters in the middle that may or may not be whole-of-team encounters. St Barbara gets one feature moment, and it can be assumed that Runeweaver (the team mage) will also get one in the aftermath of the continuing Figure In Black plotline.

And yet… the observant may have noticed the orange color of the three plot threads at the bottom of the plan, and the fact that neither DP05 nor SB07 are listed as being part of the adventure, according to the synopsis. This is a useful observation because it shows how much tweaking of even a well-established plan goes on after the fact. According to the plan, it’s the encounter with the Chrome Tigers (which is about to happen, in-game) that is the feature conflict of this story, the Blackwing plotline is supposed to be just another solo encounter with the Figure In Black or some agent empowered by him, and the encounter with Warhammer is to take place in an entirely different parallel world (the one from which most of the PCs originate).

Instead, I’ve juggled schedules, chosen to downplay the confrontation with the Chrome Tigers, play up the Man In Black plot, accelerating it’s conclusion dramatically, and filched an encounter from the next planned adventure with the intention of using it as a bridging device.

That’s as a direct result of the desire to avoid a potential anticlimax, and the desire to make these adventures slightly more self-contained, learning from the lesson provided when the PCs encountered the-villain-who-shall-be-called-Mortus-in-these-pages.

Beyond the material in the synopsis, and the ongoing thematic material of the team interacting with the bureaucracy that has been placed in an oversight position above them, and engaging in the politics of the setting, everything else in the adventure stems from past campaign events as modified by PC responses to those events.

Note also that unless specifically stated (it usually isn’t, but is in a couple of these cases), the events can occur in any order within the adventure. They can even occur simultaneously.

I started by breaking the material down into acts:

ACT I: Pre-Adventure: The skills from hobbies,some backstory, and the encounter with Wraith. Background Developments and consequences of past adventures. Personal Stories. “Ordinary Life” & Bureaucracy dominates.

ACT II: Valentine’s Day. Hobby Subplot. Payback for the Favor comes due. The Origin of Voodoo Willy. Conclude the Hobby subplot. Intro the Chrome Tigers plotline, which dominates the Act. Personal stories interleaved with developments in the Chrome Tigers plotline to increase the sense of time passing in between. Discuss Media Liaison with Karlos Green. Other PCs gradually become aware of the Chrome Tigers plotline. Valentine’s Day Gifts.

ACT III: Confront the Chrome Tigers. Figure In Black plotline becomes dominant. Personal Stories. Team Meeting (already played – we had some time to spare). Summons to Villain. End Adventure.

Side note: I sometimes name Acts, and sometimes not. It depends on how much time I have spare, and whether or not I want to use the title to manipulate the expectations and intensity of the players, i.e. get them into the right head-space.

Now, obviously, I can’t go into ACT III, because that’s what we’re up to in-game. But I can talk about Acts I and II.

I want to avoid getting too specific, however, for a completely different reason: if you aren’t a player, it’s likely to get boring, fast. So, instead, I’m going to present it as a set of bullet points – the same bullet points (approximately) that I used to plot these parts of the adventure. In other words, I’m going to try to stick to the point of this article. Abbreviations: St B = St Barbara, V = Vala, RW = Runeweaver, BW=Blackwing, De=Defender, BC=Bright Cutter.

ACT I:

• 1. Team (RV#29): Breakfast Muffins, Blackwing’s case review, alert – bank robbery, wraith, team initial moves / stock responses, the crane collapse. PCs deal with the emergency, pursue and capture the villain, capture the amulet empowering the villain, blame the Figure In Black.
• 2. Team (BC01): meeting to debrief after the mission is somewhere deep in a holographic forest.
• 3. St B (BW15): Advised of a forthcoming unscheduled visit by a senior prosecutor from UNTIL’s Legal Division. St B is requested to ensure BW is available.
• 4. BW+St B (BW15): Conversation mentioned in 1 resumes. Lots of reason to worry.
• 5. St B: Meeting with Karlos Green. How is the Political Adviser role going to function? KG offers some general advice – how to avoid painting themselves into political corners. Puts long-term decision of which political faction to ally the team with on St B’s agenda.
• 6. De (BC01): Signing Birthday Cards that turn out to be Holograms, complains to St B
• 7. RW: RW decides on whether he wants to learn old-world whittling or full-on artistic carving.
• 8. St B (V07f): Media reports that Catholic Churches are being vandalized and catholic-owned business harassed by out-of-control Champions fans unhappy at the anti-Champions stance of the Catholics. St B has to figure out how to respond.
• 8a. St B / Team (V07f): OPTIONAL: Karlos Green, if consulted, lays out an official response. All team members available to hit the airwaves immediately and be interviewed by anyone who’ll take their video-call to get the message out.
• 8b. St B (V07f): OPTIONAL: If St B remembers it, she can use her anti-pollution power to clean off the paint graffiti on the church door, giving the media a visual that will generate publicity for the team’s message.

Notice that where a scene is a continuation of a previous scene, it has the same scene number – so 8 is followed by 8a, 8b, and so on – unless there is a change of location. This becomes an important tool in the interleaving in Act II.

• 9. V (BC01): Vala leading a tour group through the Knightly Building (the team’s HQ). They reach the souvenir shop when the fire sprinklers let loose, creating panic. It’s another of BC’s holograms.
• 10. V: Fan Mail.
• 11. St B+BW+RW (BW15): Colonel Rothstein of UNTIL arrives and the trio have to drop everything to meet him.
• 12. V+De (BC01): BC attempts to use a Hologram to convince the Lavender Gang they no longer need to be in “protective custody”. One appears to be having a heart attack in response. BC impersonates Security to ask if he should summon an ambulance. PCs react to the immediate situation.
• 13. Others (BW15): Rothschild advises that BW’s sentence has been reduced for good behavior and he is now officially on Probation. Other restrictions have been lifted, and he is now free to hold team Office.
• 14. V+De (BC01): The two deal with the situation in the cells. De will insist on making a formal complaint.
• 15. V (privately): Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. As an alien, she may not understand the history or reasons for them, but the practice is clear. The targeting / romantic aspects, however, are not understood by Vala. Get a decision from V’s player on how she will proceed.
• 16. RW: Kira (the Knightly Building’s AI) acquaints RW with the Vehicle Fleet allocated to the Champions as a result of a remark by Karlos Greene.. Kira proposes a policy for the team’s utilization of the vehicles.
• 17. St B + De (V07f): Rothschild is fare-welled. De proposes a Police Liaison Training Program as a result of something Karlos Greene remarked.
• 18. St B: End the in-game day with a short dream sequence showing how much St B has on her plate (as team leader) at the moment.

END OF ACT 1.

In fact, we not only got through all of the above, but part of Act II on the day in Question, and had enough time left over to play part of a team meeting from Act III. One of the reasons for this was because one of the players was away that day, reducing the time lost to interaction between players.

This is Good News for interested readers, because it means that I made far more careful notes than usual, and turned those notes into a PDF for the absent player to read, and can share that with you all!

Th synopsis makes for interesting reading because it shows the adventure veering off at different points as the PCs made decisions that I hadn’t anticipated and how the consequences of those would be folded into Part II.

It also shows how I developed the adventure from those bullet points, assembling narrative and illustrations, analyzing options, and being ready with alternatives where it was important. A good adventure in an RPG is like a dance between players and GM: in this one, sometimes it was a waltz, sometimes a ballet, and sometimes, a line dance.

The other thing to be noted is that scene numbers have continued to evolve. As written, they weren’t in the nice neat sequence shown above – they danced, too, as scenes were shuffled this way and that in search of a better narrative flow and smoother distribution of the spotlight time available. This will become more evident in Act II, where I haven’t done this sort of cleanup.

ACT I:

• 19. St B+Team (BC01): BC uses his holographic trickery to make the Breakfast Muffins appear two feet to the left of their actual location. Schedule the meeting already role-played, and run through the team’s planned activities for the day.
• 20. V: Vala attends the patient whose treatment is the price demanded by Voodoo WIlly. Institution and Case background & history. The latter is full of holes and inconsistencies and the case is so delicate that she can’t afford not to have the whole story. Describe mental scan results and treatment options.

That’s as far as play got on game Session 1 (plus the meeting from Act III). We would have gotten about as much done in Session 2, but the time spent on extras (part of Act II and the meeting) was taken up in the absent player reading the synopsis and getting up to speed.

Which means that everything that follows was rewritten as necessary to expand on or allow for decisions made by the players.

• 20a. V: V meets Voodoo Willy, gets the truth about Miranda Abelard’s condition, and in the process, the origins and true name of Voodoo Willy. The origins and generations of Mutagenic Drugs. The relationship between Willy and the team edges closer to a full alliance.
• 19a. St B (BC01): St B has the difficult conversation with BC about his practical jokes and hobby, both of which have gotten out-of-hand.
• 27a. St B (V02e): Intro the Chrome Tigers plotline as notification of three perps in 400 mph hypercars being pursued by NOPD and Louisiana State Troopers.
• 21. RW: Intro Bear Lake and Tulimaq Arju, a genius sculptor who takes on a small number of students for a course in woodcarving of his own design. RW is accepted into Tulimaq’s class for Beginners.
• 27b. St B (V02e): Perps get through St Charles before police were finished setting up the roadblocks. Highway Patrol officers attempted to close the border but could not do so in time. The original pursuit has to break off as the Perps are now in Texas.
• 22. BW: BW is playing tour guide today. Encounters an eight-year-old Goth named Naomi who is extremely excited by the presence of her favorite team member.
• 27c. St B (V02e): Perps outmaneuver the Texas police and literally drive around the roadblock set up to capture them by leaving the main roads.
• 23. St B: Meeting with Karlos Greene to review the effectiveness of the Media Blitz, and – unknown to him – sound him out about his becoming a member of the team.
• 27d. St B (V02e): The meeting is interrupted by an update. The police have a new interception planned and are taking their humiliation personally.

It’s worth mentioning that, as hoped, by this point, all the players were following the story of the pursuit intently, even though their characters weren’t involved.

• 23a. St B: Karlos Green discusses the Criteria by which a Media Adviser should be selected. St B can’t help but agree with his assessment. He then recommends Kira (the AI that runs the team’s Headquarters) for the position.
• 27e. St B (V02e): The suspects use a plasma cutter of some sort to literally carve a passage through the roadblock and cross back into Louisiana. Expectation is that they will soon head into Arkansas; the plan is to block the road with heavy machinery somewhere between Shreveport and Little Rock.
• 23b. St B: Karlos reveals the truth behind the extraordinary number of signatures required of the team and how you have to be careful with what you say to Kira. He then gives St B another decision to make.
• 27f. St B (V02e): The Perps blow through Shreveport, do donuts on the lawns of the Holy Trinity Christian Church, and race off in a completely unexpected direction, oblivious to the roadblocks set up to block them. Louisiana State Troopers are again in pursuit but the difference in vehicle speeds is 240mph. Missouri forces based in Jackson are preparing for a showdown, with the full intention of showing their neighbors how it’s done.
• 23c. St B: Give Karlos a communicator and raise the question of a membership. Karlos won’t commit himself, asking 5 questions that show that it won’t be the easy answer to the problems he had previously raised that St B thought it would be. He leaves.
• 27g. St B (V02e): Details of the past actions by the Perps begin to emerge. Cybernetic weaponry; and targeting a variety of churches and religious symbols like statues. There’s a hint that the three are taking it in turns to plan the attacks, and distinctions of style are becoming evident. It is also confirmed that they are doing their best to tease the Champions into joining the hunt.
• 21a. RW: Tulimaq’s first class. Intro two of the other students – Jack Hasquittuk and Endless White Cloud. The first is wearing an Ankle Monitor and the second, a patch from the British Columbia Correctional Service.
• 27h. St B (V02e): It is discovered that the hypercars have undergone Hover-conversion when they literally fly over the top of the roadblock. Lots of schadenfreude from those mocked by the Missouri forces earlier. Perps are now heading for Alabama. The Alabama State Police haven’t learned from the Missouri Experience, boasting of blocking the road with big rigs loaded with “red-blooded gun-totin’ good ol’ boys”.
• 25. BW: The tour continues. More emo interaction with young Goth Naomi.
• 27i. St B (V02e): Confirmation that all the targets attacked by the Perps were religious. Perps then blow through Tuscaloosa 30 mins ahead of schedule causing all sorts of speculation on how they managed to exceed nine-hundred mph. Given the surprises that the Perps have employed thus far, no-one doubts that’s what they have done. Except Kira, who picks up on an overlooked fact: the maximum range of the Pagani MaktigSlopstrims is 850 miles when driven at maximum efficiency, not flat-out. Conclusion: prepared lookalikes were lying in wait and the original trio have now gone to ground. A further clue to the identities emerges because the total cost of the escapade rises dramatically with the addition of three more identical hypercars, to 54 million Imperial Pounds. But meanwhile, law-enforcement is becoming increasingly rattled and shrill; an ordinary police scanner would be all the Perps need to once again humiliate a branch of law-enforcement.
• 26. BW: At the end of the tour, Naomi begs BW to ‘turn himself into something scary,’ not knowing that each time he uses his powers they grow weaker. BW to figure out a way out of the situation.
• 21b. RW B (V02e): The woodcarving lesson continues as Tulimaq shows his skill. RW should be deeply impressed, write accordingly. Preview lesson 2, which will already take RW beyond where he originally wanted to go.
• 27j. St B (V02e): Remind St B that everyone else is away doing something else. Attempting to gather the team and intercept the Paganis would only add the team to the list of those humiliated. Certainly, law enforcement don’t want any help – this has become a matter of pride and bragging rights to them. The team are viewed by regional police as being a federal agency who swoops in somewhere, takes over an investigation, and takes all the credit. Emphasize the relationship as it stands and the role in changing it of the Police Liaison role. St B discusses the Media Liaison role with Kira, who accepts.
• 28. BW: Gets back from his tour guide duties. Outline his options for the evening, let him choose. Expect him to choose to check in with St B and become “officially” aware of the pursuit.
• 29. RW: After visiting the hardware store and an art supplies shop the team know from V’s studies of oil painting, RW returns to the base. Outline his options for the evening, let him choose. Expect him to choose to check in with St B and become “officially” aware of the pursuit.
• 30. V: V gets back from the hospital in Rochester. Through her psionic links to the others (muted while she concentrates hard on something else, like treating her patient, or deciphering Voodoo Willy’s hypertalk), she is aware that BW has had an awkward afternoon, RW is procrastinating doing something out of a deep-seated fear of failure, and St B is agitated about something. Get a decision as to what she’s doing. Expect her to choose to check in with St B and become “officially” aware of the pursuit.
• 27k. St B (V02e): Perps are heading for Chattanooga and new attempts at a roadblock are being made – technically, over the border into Georgia, though they seem inclined to look the other way. Kira reveals that she contacted the Alabama State Troopers to advise them of the significance of the cruising range of the Hypercars and get them searching for the original trio of what are become known as the Pagani Perps. Sheriff Tost is calling back to confirm what “that sweet little lady on the phone done told us”.
• 27l. Team (V02e) 7:05PM: Those members who chose to do so now check in with St B. Expect her to put their evening plans on hold, giving her a strike force if and when she chooses to intervene.
• 27m. St B (V02e): 7:21PM The Pagani Perps are five minutes overdue at the roadblock and appear to have vanished. Police are going to give them another 5-10 minutes and then have to reopen the road.
• 27n. St B (V02e): 7:54PM With the roadblock disbanded, the Pagani Perps blow through Chattanooga unopposed, hightail it to Nashville (blowing out all the amps at a concert being held at St Peter’s Church Of The Sacred Country Singer and head west before law enforcement could respond. They are now heading for Memphis. That lies just within the range of the Paganis if they are the second trio – but Kira suspects the delay was caused by another changeover, bringing the cost of the operation to 91 million pounds – even though the Pagani Perps could recoup most of that by selling the cars afterwards. The Governor of Tennessee then calls out the National Guard, who put missile-carrying fighters in the air with instructions to pursue and attack the vehicles as long as they are within Tennessee jurisdiction. Expect St B to intervene. Begin discussion of who the Pagani Perps are, based on the clues so far.
• 27o. St B (V02e) 8:25PM: Kira is still running through a long list of those who could both afford to mount this attack and might benefit from humiliating the Champions, but none of them sound “right” so far. The cars turn out to be equipped with some sort of scramblers that made the missiles go haywire; they had to be detonated midair by their operators, none of them come close to hitting the target. The National Guard tried dropping bombs from helicopters but had no hope given the speed of the hypercars. Kira now has enough information to begin extrapolating pattern to the Chase. She suggests that a third changeover will occur in less than 2 hours. She suggests discussing the question of team intervention with Chief Raven of the NOPD, because he will probably know many of his counterparts personally.
• 29. BW 8:30PM: Check in with BW if he isn’t in St B’s office; determine based on prior decisions by himself and St B.
• 27p. St B (V02e): Conversation with Chief Raven. He approves of any sensible policy. St B may also raise the Police Liaison proposal. He likes it. St B decides to appoint Blackwing to the position because he’s an ex-cop and gets on well with the Police. She informs BW of his new task. At 8:37PM, the Media finally catch up with the Pagani Perps story, broadcasting live footage of the trio blasting through Memphis. The Pagani Perps obligingly put on a show.
• 30. RW 8:39PM: Check in with RW if he isn’t in St B’s office; determine based on prior decisions by himself and St B.
• 27q. St B (V02e): Kira works her way down the list of possible suspects to Matthew Muller’s “Church Of Christian Science”, which should spark discussion. Logical conclusion should be “Not his style”. The entry Muller on the list sounds a lot more plausible, even with the investment up to 120m pounds – the Chrome Tigers. Expect this possibility to be seriously discussed.
• 31. V (V02e): Check in with V if she isn’t in St B’s office; determine based on prior decisions by herself and St B.
• 27r. St B (V02e) 8:43PM: The Arkansas Police set up a roadblock using absolute radio silence, using trucks stuffed full of cinder-blocks. The three vehicles have stopped, line abreast, 500m away from the roadblock and appear to be considering their options. Give St B the option of sounding the alert and joining the roadblock.
• 27s1. Team (V02e) 8:45PM: OPTIONAL: If St B chooses to intervene, it all goes horribly wrong when the Paganis charge the roadblock, teleporting out at the last second after releasing a magic-based teleport scrambler. Count through events second-by-second. When the team attempt to leave: modify 27s3 below.
• 27s2. St B (V02e) 8:48PM: The Perps teleport through the roadblock as per 27s1. The use of Teleportation takes this outside any reasonable local jurisdiction and demands team intervention; V, RW, and De should inspect the scene immediately, and that means BW and St B should go as well.
• 27s3. Team (V02e): Effects of teleport scrambler. Remind St B of a sealed record from the parent team about a teleport scrambler they encountered, one of only a handful of occasions when the team has taken extra security over and above the usual. As soon as the team get through the teleport scramble (probably taking damage in the process), BW’s surface (a dimensional interface) begins to heave and bubble and ripple uncontrollably. Let the team react, let RW confirm a magic-based Teleport and that the scrambler means there is no way of knowing where the Pagani Perps have gone.
• 28. Team (V02e+BW18): Return to Knightly Building to await further developments. Some rogue thought will nag at RW but he can’t pin it down. Get decision on how he’s trying to bring it to the surface. V leaves unobtrusively to implement the decisions made in 15. Karlos Greene wants St B to update him. De has an idea for a safe way to test BW’s loss of abilities, if BW is willing. Expect a yes.
• 29. St B (V02e): Karlos suggests that when the team go after them, he live-streams the confrontation – live-streaming so that everyone can see it’s unedited and totally genuine. If the team make the take-down sufficiently forceful and dramatic, it will go a long way toward discouraging others who might like to interfere in the Champions’ good name for their own purposes. NB: Not live won’t cut it – this needs to be all-or-nothing. But it’s a risk.
• 30. V: Part 1 done. Now for Part 2.
• 31. BW+De (BW18): Explain the testing methodology to BW. It’s all about secondary effects – casual strength leaning against a wall, measuring finger stiffness when stretching the hand, and running a finger down a tray of tiny foam balls.
• 30a. V: Part 2 done. On to Part 3.
• 32. RW (V02e): RW trying to nail the important stray thought – improve based on the technique RW chose. Roll, expect failure.
• 30b. V: Part 3 done but trickier. Sounds of exasperation from behind the door. And hitting a pillow. And banging a head against the wall. And muttering auto-hypnotically to themselves. Part 4 to go – fortunately, the target is distracted and elsewhere.
• 31a. BW+De (BW18): Give BW the bad news. STR 1/4; Claws 1/10; Armor 1/5; Arthritis; shape-change 1/3 (i.e. triple difficulty and time); and margin of uncertainty around the dimensional interface of almost 1/2 a mm. De has no idea how much that last can grow before BW dissipates completely! The only good news: BW has been weakened so much that the final confrontation can’t be far away – and there will be one, the FIB still wants something from BW.
• 30c. V: Mission complete, now lay low and wait for results.
• 32a. RW (V02e): All methods he’s tried will (almost certainly) have failed. Try one more – this one works. The rogue thought: “Slithering Ice slowly sliding down the spine from neck to base while an ice-pick pierces the right-hand temple and you walk on red-hot ground glass in a great-circle perpendicular to ‘down’.” This is the mnemonic reminder of the Arcane Pattern of the Man In Black’s devices that he has devised, a description of how they made him feel. And he’s been trying to bring it to mind because the arcane “aftertaste” of those items matches the aftertaste of the Chrome Tigers Teleport.
• 33. St B (V02e): No sooner has RW finished reporting his findings to St B than her monitor beeps. The Pagani Perps are back, spotted doing 300mph through Little Rock. Arkansas State Police seem to have withheld this info from the team, noses perhaps out of joint by the teams uninvited involvement in the case. They have commandeered some hypercars of their own, and are in close pursuit. Kira suggests ignoring them and working with the Oklahoma State Police – the Perps are not a little under 26 minutes from the state border. The Arkansas police are supposed to turn back when the Perps leave their jurisdiction but don’t appear in any mood to play nice. Give St B a choice of actions. Roleplay decision process in real time.
• 34. RW: When St B summons the team, he finds the Valentine from Vala. Let him decide how he interprets it and how he will respond.
• 35. St B: After summoning the team, she heads for her quarters to change into a fresh uniform. At the front door, she discovers a Valentine from Vala. How is she going to interpret it and how will she respond?
• 36. BW: When St B summons the team, he finds the Valentine from Vala. Let him decide how he interprets it and how he will respond.
• 37. De: When St B summons the team, he finds the Valentine from Vala. He thanks her mentally as a fellow non-human, but suggests that it was inappropriate as he doesn’t consider her a potential mate and doesn’t think she thinks of him that way, either,” informing Vala of her misjudgment.

Reality Check

Here’s the hard reality: without some sort of augmentation, five or six of the Chrome Tigers would be a fair fight for ONE of the PCs. Only three of them? No way. So, who could augment them? Dr Vossen, the “Monster Maker,” could, but wouldn’t – he’s ethical, at least within his own terms of reference. Mathew Muller might be able to, but wouldn’t willingly do so – the Tigers are not his followers, and it’s not his style. Lance Andrews, the former Behemoth, could – but if he were around, he would be targeting the team with something a lot nastier than a bruised ego and possibly-damaged reputation. The Figure In Black, by a process of elimination, is the best answer.

And that means that they can’t be the climax of the adventure – just a stepping stone. Which confirms the impression from the initial synopsis, and toward which I was writing all along.

It’s also worth noting that about 1 decision in 3 was an unexpected choice by the PCs. The other 2 in 3 decisions either went the way I expected them to, or at least went in a direction I had prepared for. If I had to, I could discard the planned adventure at any point and improv based on what I have outlined above – St B came very close to intervening immediately after the Texas debacle, for example – which would have simply brought forward the teleport-and-scrambler, because that’s the whole objective of the crime spree from the point of view of the Figure In Black – weakening Blackwing further.

So there it is – a real life example (well, 2/3 of one). I hope it wasn’t boring to readers and that you got something out of the techniques that I employ!

As a final point, I employ basically the same technique when improvising an adventure on the fly – divide the adventure into acts, synopsize each act, then use that “destination” as the foundation for everything that happens.

I’m writing and uploading this week’s article in advance because right in the middle of the time when I’m supposed to be writing, I have a medical treatment scheduled.

This article isn’t my first choice to fill the breach – I planned to present something on politics within RPG settings- but it bogged down, mostly because I started doing all the things that I said I wasn’t going to do within it; despite my spending most of Saturday on it, there was no way that it was going to be finished.

I’ve been holding on to the article below for quite a while, actually. It was written eight or nine years ago and held to be modified into the introduction of a book series that Johnn and I were planning at the time.

Well, the book series didn’t happen. And the subject seems appropriate given the circumstances described above. Enjoy.

It’s always a little annoying when people tell me they don’t have time to do things. There are only a couple of simple rules to follow in order to have more than enough time.

Rule 1

The first rule is time management. When I take on a new task, I work out how much time it is likely to consume in total (or in a given period of time, for an ongoing task). Then I look at how much free time I have to devote to the task. Dividing one by another tells me whether or not I can commit to the task, and how far in advance I need to start work in order to have it finished in time.

Rule 2

The second rule is to multitask whenever possible. While watching the TV, I will have my computer up and running so that I can write during the ad breaks. On Australian TV, that generally means that 12 minutes an hour can be spent on something while ostensibly doing something else – but because I’m able to devote a little thought to the writing task, and work out more or less what I am going to write during the next ad break before I actually get there, this work is actually done at a higher efficiency standard than would be the case if I were just doing nothing else. I think faster than I can type, so let’s say that this gives me an extra 15 minutes of time in each hour.

Rule 3

The third and most important rule is to do a little each day, at each opportunity.

If I can devote 30 minutes a day to something – which I can achieve by watching 2 hours of TV a day! – that’s 3 1/2 hours a week spent on it. Since there are roughly 52 weeks in a year, that comes to 182 hours a year, equivalent to more than 4 1/2 weeks of working a 40-hour week on the task!

If I can sneak an extra hour a week into my schedule, that alone is worth 52 hours a year, or more than a week of normal time spent working exclusively on a project.

Game Prep Scheduling

So let’s look at Game Prep. I spend more time – an average of 6 hours a week – on Game prep – than I do on most other specific activities. In general, that’s one 3-hour block of time (an evening) and 6 half-hour blocks (each other day) – the 30 minutes on game day being last minute revision. So let’s call it 5 1/2 hours a week. If I work a 40 hour week, spend 2 1/2 hours a day on other things, sleep 9 hours every night, spent 6 hours a week actually playing, and do nothing else, how many campaigns could I actually (in theory) run?

Well, the total cost in time of running a game is 11 1/2 hours/week, including actual playing time. Work is 40 hours/week, sleep adds up to 63 hours, and miscellany consumes 17.5 hours/week. Each week is 24×7=168 hours – so that’s 168 – 40 – 68 – 17.5 hours of time available for gaming, or 42.5 hours. Divide that by 11.5 and you get 3.7 campaigns. So I could run one game on Friday Night, one on Saturday, and one on Sunday, and still have a little time left over each day – while matching every hour of play time with an equal hour of game prep.

That requires campaign prep while traveling to work, and while eating, and – well – while doing just about anything else. So it’s a fairly extreme example.

Assumption Validity Breakdown

Most people don’t need 9 hours of sleep, but they do shower and talk to friends and family on the phone, and so on – activities which almost certainly add up to an hour a day, possibly more. So as rules of thumb go, this is not a bad one.

Three-point-seven games a week. If you take up another activity – perhaps you like going out to the movies once a week, or going to a restaurant, or whatever – you might have to drop one. If you have kids, you might have to drop another 1-point-6 – that is the equivalent of more than 2½ hours each and every day spent doing nothing but being with the kids, something most families don’t even come close to! That STILL leaves time to run 1 game a week, matching game prep and playing time hour for hour!

What most people mean when they say they don’t have enough time is that they don’t have enough time available in a contiguous block – they can’t spend 6 hours at a stretch on the game. That’s fine – make it an afternoon, and play for 3 hours. It also cuts your prep time in half, from 6 to 3 hours – half an hour a day on the days you aren’t playing.

Lost Time

And the other thing that most people will say when they claim not to have enough time is that they don’t know where the time goes. Well, I do: If you waste 5 minutes an hour for the 16 hours a day that most people are awake, that’s 80 minutes a day, or 9 1/3 hours each week, or about 485 hours a year. that’s 12 working weeks at 40-hours-a-week! Twelve Working Weeks a Year! How much could you do with Twelve extra working weeks each year!? Well, run an extra 4.5-hour-a-week playing time campaign, for a start…

The good news is that the power of geometric expansion also comes to your rescue on the other side of the coin. If you can find ways to waste just 2 minutes less each hour – by being better organized, or better prepared – that’s 194 hours a year more in your pocket, or almost an extra 5 working weeks of free time!

Practical Solutions

So, let’s look for a few practical ways to find you two minutes an hour over the course of a 16-hour day.

1. Plan things. I try to plan everything – from what I’ll watch on TV and when, to when I’ll do grocery shopping and how long it should take and what I want to buy. I’ll even include an allowance for treats and specials so that if something catches my eye, I don’t have to think about it, just add it to the shopping cart. This also saves me money in the long run – my last shop was A$252, but I had A$290 budgeted for it. That $38 isn’t a lot, but it’s WAY more than my usual disposable income – and will add up to about A$440 if perpetuated over a year. Not enough for a new refridgerator should I need one, but enough for a new 29-inch TV with money left over should one be needed, to put that into perspective. In terms of time, this has to save me at least 5 minutes a day, more probably ten.
2. Don’t waste time deciding what to eat at mealtimes – have a list prepared in advance for the week. That saves me two minutes a meal, or eight minutes a day (I’m on a four-meal-a-day diet regimen). It might only save you six minutes a day, though.
3. Take regular breaks from whatever you’re doing – 5 minutes an hour is a reasonable minimum. Then think about what you have to do in the next hour during that break – break it down, plan how to use your time, etc. While this won’t help if you’re serving customers all day, because your time is responsive to their demands, in most lines of work the savings through efficiency will be more than double the time lost. But, let’s be pessimistic and say that only saves you 2.5 minutes per working hour, and that since you’re obligated to stay at work from time X to time Y each day, that half of that gets chewed up by the clock. That’s still 1.25 minutes an hour for 8 hours, or 10 minutes a day.
4. If you use PT to get to work, let’s talk about what you do while waiting for the bus or train, or travelling on it. If you can do that for 5 minutes less per trip, and spend that time thinking about your game and coming up with ideas for your next session or next adventure, then invest 2 minutes at the end of it making some quick reminder notes, that’s 10 minutes per day (less 4 minutes) equals 6 minutes a day. And your prep will be more efficient when you get to it, which has to be worth at least another couple of minutes per prep hour, or a minute a day.
5. Do you read books? Silly question for most people reading this, I guess. So here’s a harder one: do you wait until you’ve finished your current book before deciding what to read next? Blair does. If he reads three books a week, and takes five minutes each time for this selection, that’s 15 minutes a week. If, instead, he planned his entire week’s reading at once, i.e. what his next three books were going to be, that’s maybe an eight minute task – leaving 7 minutes a week gained, or a minute per day. (If it takes him ten minutes instead of five, and three-books was a 12-minute task, that’s 18 minutes a week saved, or about 2.5 minutes a day).

Let’s run some totals: 5+6+10+6+1+1 = 29 minutes a day, a shade under the 32-minute target. 10+8+10+6+1+2.5 = 37.5 minutes a day. Likely average: 33 minutes a day or so. Target achieved.

These are trivial changes to make, with just a little effort, and I’ve done my best to be conservative in estimating time savings. These measures could easily save double or triple these conservative estimates – but I’m assuming that some people will drive to work and those savings won’t be applicable to them, so the average should come out about right.

So don’t tell me you don’t have the time, unless you mean it. Tell me you can’t manage your time, or that interrupted routines make planning impossible, or that your time is already over-committed to something to which you give a higher priority: those I can believe, and respect. Those are what I mean when I say I don’t have the time.

Health Considerations

One additional impacting factor that I didn’t take into account in the preceding article is health. There was a time, about a decade ago, when I could easily do twice as much in a week as I do now, if not three or four times as much. At one point, I was able to invest 80 hours a week into game prep and rules writing, on top of a 40-hour a week job and watching at least 4 hrs of TV a day!

The losses are in little bits here and there – things that I would previously have categorized as wasted time. The need to get up and walk around for a minute or so, regularly. Taking a little longer to get from task A to task B. Not being able to walk as fast or as far. Struggling to do basic things at times like washing clothes and cooking a meal or even making a sandwich. Sleep Disruptions and consequent mental fog.

I rarely if ever say it, but sometimes when I say I don’t have the time these days, I mean that I don’t have the health.

In the course of compiling the Blogdex – an ongoing task at this point! – I became aware of a category that had never been dealt with properly at Campaign Mastery at any point of our ten-year history, that is at the same time, a vital skill for a GM to have up his sleeve.

I am, of course, referring to Writing Dialogue and Oratory.

Dialogue Vs Oratory: The Difference

Dialogue is an exchange between the speaker and the target or targets, generally with back and forth. between the two. When one of the two is a PC, which is most of the time, you need to be flexible and responsive to whatever the player inputs into the conversation; but it’s still helpful to pre-script your side of things for reasons that will become apparent as we go along.

Oratory is a prepared speech; while a PC may interrupt it, the speaker can choose whether or not to ignore the interruption. Generally, you are simulating the combination of an expert speaker and a professional speechwriter, while being neither of these things yourself.

In general, though, the process of writing the two is the same; the differences are of objective and degree, not of kind.

The Mutual Objective

From a meta perspective, from the GM’s point-of-view in other words, both have a single objective that must be achieved and several secondary objectives that are nice to achieve – and these priorities are the same in both cases.

I’ll get specific in terms of what those objectives are a little later. Right now, they would be an unnecessary distraction.

The Process In Common

What’s more important is that this commonality means that the writing process can be the same for both.

As usual, I have broken the process down as precisely as possible. In most real-world usage, many of these steps would be paid little more than lip service, and a scant minimum of that; I often blow through these steps in a mere second or two. In particular, steps 3-5 frequently get blown aside, and steps 7-10 can often be compressed into a single treatment.

But there are exceptions; sometimes, one of steps 3-5 will be rather more important than is usually the case, and require a considerable effort and time investment; and the depth of engagement in steps 7-10 depends entirely on the importance, from a plot/game point of view, of the content to be conveyed.

Significantly, this means that the process when improvising is the same, if even more abbreviated and truncated and run on instinct. I might only spend a few seconds doing so before the character I’m playing starts to speak, but I’ll cover essentially the same mental territory in this period, however superficially.

1. Know The Speaker

Step 1 is always to know who is doing the speaking. That simple statement carries a huge amount by implication: we’re talking personality, attitude, opinions, race and place of residency, speaking style, and more besides. In the real world, I often cheat by using the time spent describing the speaker (before they say a word) in fixing this overall image in mind

2. The Deliverable Content

Step 2 is always to know what you want to convey. Every vocal performance in a game by the GM has, or should have, a purpose – even if that purpose is to stall or obfuscate for as long as possible without saying anything of significance.

3. The Content To Be Implied

There is usually content that you would like to deliver by implication if you can convey it. Step three is to identify what that content is in this particular case. Such content falls into four sub-categories: Emotional Context, Contrary Content, Private Opinions, & Party Lines.

• Emotional Context conveys the mood of the speaker. Particular intensity may or may not convey the reason for the emotional context if the cause is some element or aspect of the primary content.
• Contrary Content is difficult to convey, but oh-so-meaningful when you pull it off – it’s when the speaker is conveying a contradictory message at the same time as they are making the “official position” clear.
• Private Opinions are unofficial opinions that are conveyed in addition to the “official line” being delivered. These can be more sophisticated than a simple contradiction – it could be “I’d like to go further, but it’s not up to me,” for example.
• Party Lines – Even harder is conveying the impression that there is a different personal opinion on the part of the speaker to that expressed by the primary content while not indicating what the point of difference is, but that the speaker is functioning as the good little soldier and doing his exact duty regardless of any personal opinion.

As you can tell, reading these descriptions, they are in order of increasing difficulty, with Contrary Content and Private Opinions pretty equal in trickiness.

4. English? Foreign? Or Not So Much Of Either?

When the speaker uses English or Common like a native, it takes virtually no time to tick this box. When that’s not the case, it can take a little longer. You have multiple options, and need to use your knowledge of the character to select between them, then consider changing your answer if the language issue is going to get in the way of providing the primary content.
Choices are: straight English, accented English, straight English with some foreign words, accented English with some foreign words, or fully foreign language with or without a translation opportunity.

If the PC being spoken to also speaks the foreign tongue, I tend to rule out all but the straight English options, though the occasional foreign term that is unfamiliar to the PC might still appear (for more on how I handle accents, see The Secret Arsenal Of Accents).

Note that the choice isn’t being applied just yet. We’re still making decisions about how we’re going to achieve our objectives.

5. Modes Of Expression

Many languages have specific ways of expressing various thoughts. These are often just the ticket to signify the native language of the speaker even if the main message is delivered in perfect English. If the first thing a speaker says is “Mon Dieu!”, there are only a limited number of places he can come from. “Gott In Hiemel” is even more specific, as is “Boy Howdey!” When one of these can be inserted into the delivery, it permits a greater use of English for the rest of the message, easing the burden.

6. Choosing A Voice

This is the really vital step. Most of the preceding steps are signposts to help in this selection.

Choose an appropriate character from the many that you know well to be your “vocal coach”, the voice that you are going to try and replicate in your writing style and possibly in your delivery as well.

Quite often, those characters will have characteristics or added content that is immediately associated with them.

This is a vitally-important shortcut to embedding style and personality in dialogue, and even more important to getting your oratory to flow properly.

Of course, there is heavy emphasis on the word “appropriate” in relation to the choice. I would love to be able to outline a sequence of logic for this, but there are simply too many variables.

All I can say is that “appropriate” is defined as being someone who will deliver the message you want to convey in a style that is appropriate to the character that is delivering the message under the circumstances that will apply at the time. Actually choosing who that might be is largely a matter of instinct and artistry.

IF I have time (and sometimes that’s a very big “If”), and the passage to be written is important enough to get right, I will review a specific example of the vocal coach in action – an episode of a TV show or a chapter from a movie on DVD..

7. First Draft: ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Content

Okay, it’s time for a little technical stuff and then we start writing. There are three types of content to any written dialogue or oratory – “Soft” content, “Hard” content, and stage direction. The GM needs to be able to identify one from another at a glance.

Exactly how you do this will depend on the technology that you employ for your writing, and what it’s capable of. Different fonts, different font weights, different font sizes, highlighting, text boxes – I’ve seen them all, used them all, and found most of them to be equally effective after a little tweaking and getting used to the presentation method.

The key is to be as consistent as possible so that translating words on a page into utterances from the GM is as smooth and successful and instinctive as possible – in other words, designing your writing process to optimize delivery performance.

So, to some definitions:

• “Hard” Content is content that you don’t want to rephrase because it delivers the essential message that you have to deliver (that being the whole meta-level reason for the vocal exchange/utterance in the first place).
• “Soft” Content is content that adds all the other deliverables to the speech. It can often be changed or adapted on the fly. Note that it doesn’t have to be a full statement; it’s quite permissible to have a line of dialogue or oratory in which the second half is hard and the first is a soft preamble. It’s also quite acceptable if necessary to have two or three variations on Soft Content to choose between – always remembering that whatever you don’t use is wasted prep time.
• Stage Directions are reminders and instructions to the GM on just how he is to perform the vocal. Usually as short and simple as possible, frequently a single word, and often enclosed in brackets – my preference is to use square brackets for the purpose, but that’s up to you – so it might be [softly] or [slowly] or [whispered] or [angry] or whatever.

Now that you understand the format, go ahead and write your first draft.

I always start with the “hard” content, by asking “how would [vocal coach x] deliver this information in a dialogue/speech?”. I then write the soft content around and in-between the hard content, doing my best to anticipate when one or more players will interject or even asking specifically for reactions from affected individuals. You have all the tools already discussed to assist you.

8. ‘Listen’ to the Voice

It’s entirely possible to create two or three perfectly polished statements that are completely and utterly incompatible even though they are – in your mind – derived from different elements of a single performance.

For example. an angry utterance, followed by an even angrier utterance replete with polysyllable words, followed by a calmer conclusion that contains a dearth of such words. The flow of the emotions seems reasonable – someone losing their temper and then getting a grip – but the structure around which those tones are wrapped is entirely incongruous. Even if you have defined a character whose phrasing and diction grows more precise when they get angry – and there are such people – they don’t suddenly show an inclination for a multi-syllable vocabulary.

Far better for the weight of monosyllables to be in the angry middle statement, where words can be fired out in abrupt and clipped fashion, as though each word was a new opportunity to lose it. That expresses heightened anger.

Even worse is when you try out your chosen “voice” and it just doesn’t suit the material. It doesn’t matter how good the source might be, it just sounds like they’re telephoning their performance in; the dialogue or oratory is limp and lifeless. It’s McDonalds when you ordered Filet Mignon.

When you have written a first draft, try to deliver the whole statement as you intend to do on the day. If you stumble at any point, start again from the beginning. Unless you can deliver your lines correctly better than two times in three, and especially if you stumble at the same place a second time; if anything doesn’t sound right, doesn’t ring true (that’s supposed to); if there’s anything clumsy or unwieldy about your delivery of the lines, or the way the lines connect to each other; then you need to revise your draft.

9. Revision & Repeat

It follows that you will need, from time to time, to replace or revise what you’ve written. It doesn’t happen more often than, say, two times in three. Sometimes, that’s simple, sometimes it really is hard work – especially if there’s a mismatch between what you want to say and what the vocal guide wants to permit you to deliver. When that happens, or the less extreme problems, there is a clear sequence of revision, repair, and re-test.

That sequence:

• If you know the problem, fix it and go back to step 8.
• Change/Revise the “soft” content and go back to step 8.
• Change/Revise the Mode of Expression and go back to step 8.
• Change/Revise the “hard” content without changing the essential message and go back to step 8..
• Choose a different “voice” and start over at step 6.

10. The Final Rehearsal

I always like to then go away for a day or two – but can usually only afford half-an-hour or so – before having one last rehearsal, a final “systems check” – if the speech to be delivered is important enough. With this final rehearsal, I purposefully pretend to have players interrupt me in the middle of the longest paragraph, second-guess what is to be said, and think about how the speaker will cope with that.

The Uncommon Process: Special Oratorial Demands

Oratory – making a good speech – is a much harder thing to do well, even in pretense. The writing process is the same, but every aspect of the process must be more precise and accurate. You can take fewer liberties with the hard content. The choice of ‘vocal guide’ is even more important. Your writing must rise to the simulated occasion, too. Most difficult of all, you have to hold the attention of a group of restless players who are also only pretending to be interested.

Whatever the length of the speech as it would be delivered in real life, you have 1/4 of that – at best. Under no circumstances should your speech take more than 5 minutes, and 3 is preferable. You achieve this by picking out the important parts and delivering the rest in narrative synopsis.

There is often a minimum length if you have information to impart in the course of the NPCs exposition. Despite this, you have to find some way to break it up and enhance player engagement.

Way back in Lessons From The West Wing II I mentioned an episode of the TV show, “Somebody’s Going To Emergency, Somebody’s Going To Jail“. Most of that article is derived from the C-plot of the episode, about maps and their psychological and social impact; back then, I barely mentioned the B-plot, in which one of the characters is instructed by the White House Chief Of Staff to go meet a bunch of protesters complaining about Free Trade. Once at the meeting, he engages with a female police officer who is there to protect him. After taking control of the meeting, he can’t resist lecturing them on how to do it right. Nevertheless, he attempts to get them to raise a concern for discussion, after predicting that nothing will come of it. One makes a point that may or may not be reasonable; the rest of the room erupts in cheers and chanting, never permitting the character (Toby) from responding. After another scene or two, he synopsizes the ‘tricks’ of good speech-writing for the officer before resolving the point raised by the protester (and a whole bunch of them that they never got to raise).

In fact, the whole series is full of good writing for intelligent characters. But I don’t want to get too far off-track. If you’re interested, you can still get the complete series of The West Wing from Amazon, though numbers are getting scarce and prices going up; you’ve probably missed your best chance at a bargain.

There are other speeches in movies that are worthwhile in terms of studying oratory and how personality mixes with it. The “Greed Is Good” speech by Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (link is to the cheapest copies on offer at Amazon at the time of writing). Many of the speeches / monologues / extended dialogues with “Larry The Liquidator” in Other People’s Money (link is to the version most widely-available at Amazon, numbers are very limited). Most of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s dialogue in Yes, Minister (book (quite affordable), or DVD Box Set (VERY limited numbers)) and Yes, Prime Minister (book (plenty of affordable copies), or DVD Box Set (some affordable copies – grab one while you can!)) (As a final alternative, both TV series are available in a single box set with very limited copies but still relatively affordable, Region-2, requires multi-region DVD player & TV).

The less important a speech is, in game terms, the less reason you have to present anything more than a soundbite or two – a “grab” on the evening news, for example. The more important a speech is, the more important it is to take the time to get it right, in roleplaying terms, which often means writing more of it than you need and then cutting ruthlessly.

Delivery Technique

Time-shift. It’s game day, and time to present your polished prose to the players. All your prep efforts, above, have been leading to this – if you blow it, all that work has been wasted! Which means that it’s time to discuss delivery technique.

Before Opening Your Mouth

Before word one, there are two things that you have to do.

The first one is to relax and forget the pressure to “get it right” – those are the sort of things that lead to mistakes being made. Instead, tell yourself that there’s no harm done if you make a mistake, you’ll just fix it and move on. The players know you aren’t a skilled politician, you’re just pretending. Take your time (there’s a tendency to speak too quickly in these circumstances, or to miss important words or lines) and get it close enough to right. Plan to throw in little narrative asides to cover anything that you miss.

The second is to fix your “vocal guide” in mind. You are about to do your best to pretend to be him or her pretending to be the character that is speaking.

Priority One: Communicate

I mentioned earlier that you had a number of priorities to keep in mind – and now is the time to do so. The first priority is to deliver the ‘hard content’ accurately and in such a way that the information reaches the listening players. Depending on the circumstances, that might require foregoing everything else in favor of volume.

Priority Two: Communicate

Priority two – less only than priority one – is to deliver the content that you want to imply.

Priority Three: Communicate (are you noticing the theme here?)

And your third priority is to represent the speaker, using the soft content and any modes of expression. This is mostly delivering his or her personality in an accessible form to the players’ attention but there’s a little more to it than that – you want to bring the character to life in a way that you can achieve repeatedly, preferably at a moment’s notice (assuming that this character can, and eventually will, recur).

When To Breathe

Try to only breathe at the end of complete sentences, because players will often treat these pauses as invitations to interrupt. Fortunately, you listened when I advised you to prepare for that, right?

Pace & Tone

It’s really easy for your intentions in this department to get lost in the shuffle. It’s better to be redundant by providing a narrative impression than it is to maintain the flow of the performance except when delivering the “hard” content.

I’m rubbish at putting on fake voices, and know it – so I rely on Pace and Tone and the little accent touches to do the hard work. You can, too. Above all, avoid lecturing the players, even when delivering a lecture in-game!

Final Advice

I have two pieces of final advice to offer on the subject.

First, be aware of the difference between nuance and subtlety. Nuance is the fine manipulation of what you are saying and how you are saying it, but nevertheless making overt changes. It’s all about control and finesse. Subtlety is about using layers of texture to communicate more than is apparent on the surface. The latter is often lost when you have to speak up loud enough to be heard over other noises, while the former can often be preserved, at least partially. Sacrifice those overtones that you have to, in order to succeed in higher priorities on the day.

Second, be aware that it isn’t necessary to load everything into one passage of dialogue or speech. If each contains some element directed at a secondary or tertiary priority, the effects of these will accumulate and compound – so long as they are compatible.

We all know how to speak to someone else. Make that your starting point.

A Note regarding the lack of examples

I was originally going to include at least one example in this article, but have never found a really satisfactory way of letting people see the creative process. If I could have explained the process more clearly, it might have been possible, but right now, any example would have more holes and more exceptions than you could poke a stick at.

Nevertheless, I would have included some “finished examples” – if I hadn’t done so already, in the article where this subject was last mentioned in any serious way, Basics For Beginners Part 10 which includes numerous ones and further advice on formatting your words.

On A Completely Unrelated Topic

Those who get their news about new posts through Google+ should be aware that in early April, two months from now, Google is beginning to shut the service down and delete all files that are held by its service aside from photos.

I’ll continue posting notifications about new articles for as long as I can, but it’s time to start thinking about alternatives. I always post announcements through my twitter account @gamewritermike (though I also post a lot of stuff that isn’t RPG related there) and also through a Facebook page that exists for no other purpose (Campaign Mastery on Facebook) – but that doesn’t seem as reliable, it won’t even show me the last 2 weeks’ posts. Or you can subscribe directly to the blog and get announcements direct to your email inbox from the top of this page (hopefully all that is still working, Johnn set it up years ago)!

Whatever you choose, you will need to take action soon, so it’s time to start thinking about your options.

Over the Christmas break, and for some weeks prior, I read “First Contact” by Ben Bova and Byron Preiss, and three or four times in the course of doing so, I found myself mentally yelling at the page, “that makes no sense”.

There are some logical errors in the assumptions upon which SETI is founded, and even more in the understanding of SETI by all but the most dedicated casual observer. A correction to these radically reshapes the theory.

Certainly, the general public has no idea of the limitations or constraints imposed by even the accepted theory, never mind the corrected version that I will be discussing today.

Now, I’ve met only one gamer who wasn’t completely certain that we were not alone, and eventually would find ourselves in some kind of first contact situation. This was the universally-prevalent opinion amongst all the gamers I know way back in the early 80s, when SETI was only just becoming respectable in the popular zeitgeist.

The Drake

Our guide through the technicalities of SETI, and the spine of this article, will be the Drake Equation. In its currently accepted formulation, that is:

(Actually, I have to admit that the above resolves a great many of my complaints about the formulation as it was presented in the book – but not all of them).

History of the Drake Equation

It’s always worth remembering that the Drake Equation was never intended to be anything more than a conversation-starter at the first meeting about SETI intended to organize the meeting program on a rational basis.

What’s Wrong With The Drake

Okay, that all seems reasonable on the surface of it. The most fundamental problem with the Drake Equation is not apparent at a superficial glance.

The problem: half the equation deals with the probability of such life existing, the other half with the probability of our detecting such life. By conflating the two, many otherwise reasonable thinkers and researchers have confused the two purposes, making assumptions about the terms of the equation that impact it’s functionality.

To see what’s up, and get closer to a meaningful answer to the question of how many intelligent species there are in the milky way (or any other region of space sufficiently large to permit statistical treatment), the easiest approach is to discuss each of the terms in the equation in succession.

Rate Of Stellar Formation

This was originally estimated at 1 per year, and has now been refined to a rate of 1.5-3 stars per year.

Actually, in it’s original formulation, as I have seen it presented elsewhere, this has been replaced with a completely different term – the number of stars which could potentially have planets. I suspect that the change was made because the final factor in the equation has a unit of years, so there needs to be a “per year” somewhere in one of the other terms to cancel it out. This is one example of the confusion of the two purposes to which the equation has been put interfering in its capacity to do either properly.

The way I always saw the Drake was a “logical onion” – peeling away those locations that for one logical reason or another did not have such a civilization from amongst the total pool of contenders to determine the number of civilizations that probably existed. Such a view of the equation makes sense with an N* (number of candidate stars); it doesn’t make sense with an R*.

It’s getting ahead of myself a little, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’m going back to the old formulation. After all, why should the current rate of stellar formation have any relevance whatsoever to the number of stars that were created in the past – say, around the birth-time of our own sun?

Number Of Eligible Stars

There are an estimated 250 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, according to Google – give or take 150 billion, which is something that I’ll get back to in a moment. For a start though, this is a very question-begging answer. The British and most other commonwealth countries have a different meaning (million million) for ‘billion’ to the US (thousand million); is this answer in the US meaning of the term, because Google are American, or has Google detected that I am in a commonwealth country and used the local term for Billion? It’s only a thousand-fold difference, after all.

To find out, I had to run a second search, for the term Billion, which brought up the interesting factoid that the British officially adopted the US terminology in an attempt to avoid confusion, all the way back in 1974 – though unofficial old-form usage continued for decades after, and even now, when someone says “Billion” you almost always have to ask what they mean.

So, 250,000,000 stars. Maybe 400,000,000. Or maybe 100,000,000. That’s an extraordinarily broad range! The exact figure depends on the number of very-low-mass stars, which are hard to detect, especially at distances of more than 300 l.y. The other problem is the galactic core – it’s so bright, and stars rub shoulders so much in that part of the galaxy (some are less than 1/10th of a light-year apart!) that the total is simply impossible to calculate. And that’s completely ignoring the presence, now thought confirmed, of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy, which has consumed vast numbers of those stars – and it’s always worth remembering that we can’t observe the situation as it is, only as it was, as I explained in Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in RPGs.

But “First Contact” solves this problem in a reasonably simple manner – the radiation is so great in the Galactic core that there is no chance of life surviving there. So let’s rule the core out of bounds and only consider the spiral arms.

Right away, we run into a problem that few astronomers ever seem to mention – part of those arms lie within the “light shadow” of the core, so we can’t see them completely, either. On top of that, there are all sorts of stellar phenomena – dust clouds, stellar nurseries, and what-have-you – in, and in-between, the spiral arms – and one arm can get in the way of our seeing another.

This diagram from Wikipedia illustrates what we really know as opposed to what’s educated guesswork. The dashed areas are hidden from us, and extrapolated from what we DO know, with varying degrees of accuracy. Notice that the galactic core throws a huge “shadow”, blocking direct observation of a huge wedge of the galaxy.

Our best guess is that for this purpose they contain 2/3 to 3/4 of the stars in the Milky Way.

Which brings us back to that more-than-somewhat-rubbery guess as to how many stars are in the milky way. The fact is that every time there has been a revision to the number of stars over the last century, it’s been upward, so a higher figure seems more probable than a lower one. If we apply the smaller fraction to the larger estimate, and the larger fraction to the “real” estimate, and then average the results, it may be hoped that some of our errors will cancel out and at least give a workable number.

The result: 227,222,222,222. Call it 220,000 million for convenience.

A lot of these stars are going to be too young to have planets, or are too energetic for life – it’s the same thing, so far as we’re concerned. Many of them will be too cold. A lot of early SETI work restricted the range to reasonably sun-like stars, and also excluded binary and triple-star (‘trinary’) systems, because the then-prevailing theory was that planets couldn’t or wouldn’t form in such systems. This excludes about 98% of stars.

That was back in the days before we found ways of actually detecting exoplanets. These days, it’s routinely assumed that the percentage of stars which have planets is close to 100%. But that doesn’t address the temperature concerns.

If we look around our solar system, though, we quickly find that those concerns are somewhat overblown. There are three factors that aren’t being taken into account.

• Planet-sized moons close to giant planets can generate internal temperature through tectonic action.
• Our profiles of life are based on what we know of chemistry, which is evolving all the time. I was taught, for example, that there were four states of matter. A fifth, super-cooled, was later added. Now there’s a sixth. So our knowledge of chemistry, which currently defines only two possible chemical “profiles” for life, is still evolving.
• It’s already well-known that atmospheric pressure changes melting and boiling points, anyway – so the potential ranges of planets on which life might form is far larger than is often thought.

So I’m putting brown and red dwarfs back on the list of potential life-bearing sites. They aren’t supposed to be excluded at this point, anyway, according to the Drake Equation. That, in turn, puts 80-90% of the previously-excluded solar systems back into contention. Let’s call it 85% – and throw in that 2% that everyone agrees on.

That means that N* should be 191,400,000,000.

Fraction With Planets

The original estimate was that 1/5 to 1/2 of the stars in the galaxy would have planets. Actual surveys and the number and variety of stars that have been found to have exoplanets has exploded that estimate. This is now considered something close to 100%, as I mentioned earlier.

What has to be remembered is that in order for us to detect an exoplanet, the plane of its orbit has to put the planet in between us and its star at some point – or it has to be so massive that we can detect the gravitational “wobble” that it produces. That means that unless there’s some cosmic principle that we haven’t yet figured out, the alignment of planetary orbits is going to align with the rotation of the parent star, which is known to be pretty random relative to Earth – one complete dimension is almost completely ruled out.

That’s perhaps as much as 1° out of 360° – which would mean that were only finding 1/360th of the exoplanets that are out there for us to find. It could be even less. And yet, as of 1 January 2019, there are 3,946 confirmed planets in 2,945 systems, the most distant of which is 2,540 light years away (an unconfirmed exoplanet is claimed for another star more than 5,000 light years removed from us, and we are finding suggestive hints of exoplanets in the Andromeda Galaxy and quasar RX J1131-1231, 3.8 billion (there’s that word again!) light-years from earth.

Of course, the farther away a star is, the harder it is to detect anything..But there are almost certainly as many planets out there as there are stars, if not a substantial multiple of that number.

Our Onion remains 191,400,000,000.

Planets That Can Potentially Support Life (per star that has planets)

The original SETI conference worked with an estimate of 1-5 planets that can potentially support life, on average, per star with planets. There have been a number of attempts to reduce this over the years. Astronomical surveys have suggested that the correct value is 0.4 – using very pessimistic and earth-like definitions of life. There have been suggestions that the correct number is 0.1 times the average number of planets in a solar system – which, while interesting, begs the actual question. This is a number in heated debate at the moment, as cosmologists try to understand what Hot Jupiters do to the process of planetary formation and stability.

Proponents of SETI continue to set a lower value of 3-5 on this number, pointing out that our Solar System has five.

The more planets we find, the more likely it is that there will be more planets to find, and that some of them will be rocky, small enough, and within one of the habitable zones. But even without that, the factors pointed out above mean that those are not the only planets that could potentially support life.

Trappist-1, for example, is an ultra-cool red dwarf 39.6 light-years from Earth. It is known to posses 7 planets, 3 of them in the liquid-water temperate zone. The other 4 are also considered potentially habitable as they all posses liquid water somewhere on their surfaces.

A huge number of astronomers and lay-people either assume that the conditions have to be earth-like to support life – yes this is the only model that we have that we know works, but that’s not enough to say that it’s the only one that can be – and even if it is, the point made earlier about pressures still applies; it isn’t necessary that the environment be all that earth-like for it to happen.

Putting all this together, I’m inclined to set the minimum value at something like 2.5 – One for the environmental conditions that we know work, and 3/4 each for the variations that we suspect work but aren’t sure of.

If this work was to be scientifically-rigorous, though, what should happen is that star populations get subdivided by spectral class, enabling each set of conditions to be independently assessed. It might be, for example, that conditions within the habitable zone of a red dwarf supply enough less energy that life – the next factor – is considerably rarer on such planets. Whilst things remain lumped together, geocentricism perpetually invades thinking on the subject.

Anyway, that lifts our Onion to 478,500,000,000 – a strange onion, this, where an interior layer can be larger than the one that surrounds it!

The Incidence Of Life

This is thought to either be very close to 0 or very close to 1, depending on who you ask. We have no data other than that of earth.

So let’s try and formulate some.

It’s now well-known that if you stuff the atmosphere of primeval earth in a bottle and run an electric current through it, or expose it to sunlight, or do any of half a dozen other things to it, you end up with the building blocks of amino acids after a while. If conditions are right and we persist long enough in waiting for it to happen, some of those are going to find the right configuration at the right time to form actual amino acids.

Again, if we take amino acids and provide food and energy and mobility and enough time, the probability approaches certainty that eventually something that is simpler than a bacterium, but is nevertheless life, will emerge. We’re mixing billions of amino acid molecules together billions of times for billions of years – even a small chance eventually becomes near-certainty, so long as conditions are remotely hospitable to the chemistry.

And we have already defined the conditions under consideration as being hospitable to life.

The uncertainty remaining is one of “What is enough time”? Here once again we become enveloped in anthropic bias. We have only the one example to look at.

Or do we?

Organic molecules have been found on Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, and in fact these may be more prevalent than first thought. [Scientists] from NASA and the University Of Chicago simulated the movements of 5,000 ice grains like those in the asteroid belt prior to the formation of Earth to over a million years in the turbulence of the solar nebula, which tossed them about like laundry in a dryer, lofting some “high enough [so] that they were being irradiated directly by the young Sun.” High-energy ultraviolet radiation broke molecular bonds, creating highly reactive atoms that were prone to recombine and form more stable – and sometimes, more complex – compounds.
(Excerpted from The Building Blocks of Life May Have Come From Outer Space.)

This is obviously a far more challenging environment for life than a primitive planet earth was – but even so, the first part of the process was achieved. If that environment had persisted, or those molecules found their way to a more hospitable environment, they would have had every chance of developing into full-blown life.

That’s a second data point but one that leaves us delicately poised, because they didn’t actually become life. We have one example that says yes, and another that says “maybe”. So let’s apply a relatively conservative factor of 0.75 for this factor.

Our Onion shrinks to 358,875,000,000.

Intelligence

Here we again need to apply a caveat. By “Intelligence”, we’re talking about too-using and/or abstract reasoning. i.e. an intelligence that we can communicate with. Dolphins and Whales are intelligent enough that we haven’t yet learned to speak their language – but they don’t seem to use that intellect fir anything important from our abstract-reasoning tool-using perspective. The octopus displays incredibly sophisticated problem-solving capability, but it’s even further removed from what we consider intelligent.

This is even more controversial than preceding factors. The original SETI discussion set this to 100%, defining intelligence as inevitable. Those supporting this position employ similar logic to that used in the preceding sections. Others argue that the presence of “only one intelligent species” means that it happens very rarely, and this factor should be extremely low.

I’m personally inclined to having a foot in both camps on this issue. Yes, the chances are low and require the correct stimulation and opportunities, but there are so many opportunities for it to happen that the most pessimistic options seem improbable. If you compare the length of time that life has existed on earth with the length of time that higher life forms have existed, you get a ratio of 0.084-0.141 (depending on which estimate you use of when life appeared and how you define higher life); that’s an average of 0.225, a long way removed from 1 (inevitable), but a lot higher than some of the cynics have suggest (1 in a million or billion).

If we use this admittedly geocentric value, our onion drops to “only” 80,746,875,000.

On the other hand, if we use early man as our yardstick of higher life forms and intelligent life, we get a much smaller number – 0.00276.

That drops the onion to 99080706.5.

But I’m going to use still another value, by defining intelligence as the capacity to send and receive radio signals – 123 years ago. That’s a ratio of 0.00000002674, and re-skins the onion down to just 9596. Call it 10,000 for convenience.

Civilization

This has the advantage of setting the next value at something close to one, which is otherwise another controversial value. Once again, I’m hoping that some of our errors cancel out.

So we have 10,000 civilizations out there happily broadcasting radio waves – at some point in time.

Not so fast, cowboy! There are a lot of fudge-factors in the above. The number of stars along could drop this to a couple of thousand. A more conservative estimate would be 1,000. A really conservative estimate would by 200.

Lifetime

Which brings me to the factor that most disturbs and annoys me. It, like everything else has been, SHOULD be a factor, that is to say a fraction that is yes, and a fraction that is no, leaving only the ‘yes’. For me, this is where the Drake Equation breaks down.

Fraction of civilizations that don’t blow themselves up? Okay, that’s a start. Fraction of civilizations that don’t get wiped out by some cosmic calamity or an asteroid strike or whatever? yeah, that’s a factor to think about.

“How long a civilization lasts” seems totally counter-intuitive in this context.

Replacing this with “fraction of a radio-capable civilization’s lifetime that they are actually broadcasting” gets us somewhere interesting.

Everything else has been about the number of civilizations out there that we might be able to detect. This is all about trying to say “the percentage of those civilizations that we can actually detect” – but it’s usually not described that way.

Two ways to detect E.T.

There are two ways that we can detect an alien civilization through their manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum – the first is listening for a message they have sent us, and the second is detecting their radio ‘noise’.

Distances Between Civilizations

Before we can reasonably analyze either of them, though, we need to get some impression for the average distance between these civilizations.

The milky way is roughly 150,000-200,000 light years in diameter, giving it a radius of 75-100,000 light years. But most of that is outlying material; in terms of the parts we’re interested in, it’s about 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years thick. But that thickness is the average for the whole thing, and the core noticeably bulges; about three times the thickness of the arms. We also need to exclude that core from our calculation of the plan area of the disk if we hope to get a volume. Looking at the galactic cross-section, the core is about 1/5th of the total diameter across, so about 20,000 light-years.

When I do that, I get an average thickness of the disk section of 926 light years, and a toroidal area of 2,400 million pi – so the arms contain roughly 7 million million cubic light years.

That means that each of those 10,000 (if there are that many) would have roughly 700,000,000 cubic light years each, on average. If you imagine two cubic bricks, corner to corner or side-by-side, each with a civilization at it’s center, you get an impression of the arrangement. Exactly side-by-side gives the minimum distance between them, corner-to-corner gives the maximum, and half-and-half gives a rough value for the typical distance. 700 million cubic light-years is a cube about 888 light years on a side.

The minimum: half of 888 from #1’s brick and half from #2’s adds up to 888 light-years – no surprise there.

The corner-to-corner is 1256 light years. The in-between is a lot harder to work out in timely fashion, but the average of those two number isn’t far off:1072 light years. I suspect the correct answer will be a little on the high side of that, based on the 3-d geometry I roughly sketched out, so I’d say a little over 1100 light years would be about right.

1100 light-years away? They’re right next door! Why haven’t we heard anything?

Not so fast, cowboy! At only 1,000 such civilizations, each would have 7000 million cubic light-years of space. That’s a minimum of 1913 light years, a probable maximum of 2705 light years, and an average of 2309 light-years.

At only 200, each would have 35 thousand million cubic light-years to play in. That’s a minimum of 3271 light-years, a maximum of 4626 light-years, and an average of 3950, near enough.

Of course, this being a statistical result, anything up to three or four times or five these numbers is absolutely reasonable – if others are closer, to bring the averages down. Even ten times are plausible, but wins us the galactic loner-for-life tag. That gives us potentially 5500 light years for 10,000 civilizations, 11545 light-years for 1,000 civilizations, and 19,750 light years for 200 civilizations.

Those numbers are significant. If a civilization 5500 light years from us invented radio at the same time we did, we’ll detect it – 5,377 years from now, at best! In the year 3358 BC, an equal span of years away, the Naqada culture was ruling in Egypt, Cuneiform was new that century, there was an Irish burial mound erected for a child, Enoch disappeared and Methuselah was in charge – according to the Hebrew Bible.

The Communications Window

That’s all a bit awkward if the average lifespan of a civilization is, say, 300 years. It means that our 300 years has to match up to their 300 years less the distance between us. If the nearest is only 50 light-years away, we could have 250 years of productive conversation before time ran out for one of us. Maybe 5 messages back and forth. If 100 light-years, that window is down to 200 years, and we’re only likely to get 2 messages exchanged. At 1000 light-years, they had better have had radio in the time of Ethelred The Unready. And at 5500 light-years, they would need to have been capable of showing Methuselah a trick or two.

Based on the duration of 60 earthly civilizations, the average lifespan of a civilization has been calculated as 420 years. Based on 28 that are more recent than the roman empire, the average falls to 304 years – determined by the same scientist. Food for thought!

The farther away a civilization is, the longer our civilization needs to last if we are to have contact with them.

That brings us back to our two methods of contact, having gained some feeling for what the distances could be – and hence, the times. The first is to detect a signal deliberately sent out by them, and the second is to detect their byproduct electronic noise.

SETI, quite frankly, pins all its hopes on the first. And on them doing all the heavy lifting, too.

Sending A Message

We’ve never sent a radio message to a nearby star. What makes us think that an alien civilization would send us a signal? Especially before there was any way to know if there was intelligent life here?

But let’s set that aside, and assume that they aren’t like us in this respect.



Based on an image at https://www.seti.org/

When you look at radio noise by frequency, from which you want your signal to stand out (assuming you’re sending one), there’s a rapidly-descending wall on the left, caused by electrons in the milky way’s magnetic field, and a series of peaks and valleys on the right caused by the different molecules in Earth’s atmosphere The result is a noise “trough” from 1 GHz to 10 GHz.

For a very long time, then – almost as long as we’ve had radio astronomy – this “trough” has been targeted as a likely set of frequencies for interstellar communications. Personally, I’m not 100% sold on that, based on my once being told that this was due to absorption of the noise by Hydrogen clouds in space – if that’s the case, then this might be the last frequency you chose – but I’m not 100% sure the information I was given was correct, either.

But even so, there’s a problem, and a huge one: Doppler Shift.

Solar systems and the like barrel through space at a fair old rate of knots. If they happen to be coming toward us, every frequency is blue-shifted, moved up the frequency band. If they happen to be moving away, there’s a red shift.

Our sun, for example, is moving at around 43,000 miles per hour in the direction of Vega, and this speed is not in any way unusual. That means that anything under 86,000 mph closing speed and 86,000 mph receding speed is quite believable – two stars that just happen to be moving more or less straight toward, or straight away from, each other.

Now, in terms of the speed of light, those speeds aren’t all that spectacular. The difference is 0.013%, either plus-or-minus – but that can be enough to throw it out of the detection band. Because it would mean recalculating the correct frequency for the motion of every star observed, SETI relies on the aliens sending the message to have adjusted the frequency of their transmission to allow for Doppler effects.

Why are we so special that they would do that? Unless they had already determined that there was intelligent life here – despite our deliberate policy of not telling anyone?

And then the third shoe drops – if they send a message using FM, SETI won’t receive or understand it. all their efforts are bent toward constant-frequency transmissions – that’s AM or digital. They leave FM to the hobbyist, mainly because it’s difficult and relatively expensive, and SETI has always had to be done on a shoestring.

Incidental Transmissions

When the layperson thinks about SETI, even the relatively educated one, they think about picking up the radio “noise” that’s leaking out from the planet. We use so much electromagnetic communications, more every day. And that stuff leaks, despite the best efforts of engineers to contain it.

They want to keep signals confined to the purposes for which they were transmitted because anything else is wasted power, and wasted bandwidth.

One of the earliest TV signals to be broadcast was Adolf Hitler opening the 1934? 1936? Olympics in Berlin. That signal is now arriving at any star that happens to be 80 light years away, more or less.

Throughout the 20th century, our digital noise increased in intensity. It has since started to either stabilize or decline, as more signals are being carried digitally through optic fiber, or more precisely aimed using dish antennas. That’s how we can still be in contact with Voyager 1 even though it is now in interstellar space, the most distant man-made object at 13.2 billion miles away.

So, if we were to use our best (at the time) radio telescope equipment, and point it at a star (and a planet) that (distance) years ago was emitting just as much radio noise as we were (at the time), from what distance do you think we could detect enough of the signal to recognize it as having an intelligent origin?



800 light years vs 5500 light years. The 800 is more than a speck, but that’s about all you can say for it.

Eight hundred light years.

At best.



Let’s go back to the scale of the milky way again for a moment. The measurements shown on the diagram to the right are in thousands of light-years. We’re talking a bubble that’s less than ONE thousand light-years.

Ah, but our equipment has no doubt improved vastly since then. Unfortunately, we’re up against the inverse-square law. To get the 800 out to 1600, we need a 400% improvement in our equipment. Against a background that is increasingly hostile to radio astronomy, which is a whole other story I don’t have time to go into. An eight-fold increase might just about do it.

But our general broadcast emissions are dropping off as our technology improves. There was a period of peak noticability, and now we’ve started to fade, from a radio signal point of view. By now, that eight-fold increase won’t cut it – we would need a 10- or 12-fold improvement just to stand still. The signals are so much weaker, with so little “spill”.

Which brings us back to the question of a receptivity “window”. We’ve had radio for 123 years. We’ve had TV for 80-odd years. We’ve had STRONG TV signals for maybe 60 – but we started “the great fade” about 30 years ago. That window, for a civilization right on the edge of reception, was only about thirty years.

The Panic Merchants

I started thinking about writing this article somewhere around August-September last year, when I spent a couple of very interested days reading articles on “where are all the ETs?”

You see, the longer the period of time that passes without our detecting someone, the more extraordinary it starts to look. As a result, there has been a great deal of thought lately that’s gone into the question of why we aren’t finding them, if there’s anyone out there. Some of the analyses and speculations were absolutely fascinating, and frequently cause for considerable alarm – if the SETI enthusiasts’ estimates of 100,000+ alien civilizations within the milky way are to be believed. Others were more benign in nature.

I’d love to point you at the discussions, but I’m no longer sure of the URLs.

But, I think that the factors that I’ve pointed out in this article go a long way toward explaining the radio silence. And to those, I can add one more.

The Principle of Mediocrity states that there’s nothing exceptional about where we are in terms of the physics and chemistry; the natural laws that apply here, also apply out there. That has often been interpreted as meaning that if there are 500 civilizations out there, roughly 250 will be younger than ours and roughly 250 will be older.

I submit that this application is a nonsense. When you toss a coin for the 250th time, there’s still a 50-50 chance that it will come up heads. When you roll a die for the 250th time, it’s still just as likely to come up 1 as it is 6 (wear notwithstanding). Someone has to be first, and assuming that it’s not us is assuming that there is some reason that we can’t be first, and that is a violation of the Principle of Mediocrity.

Statistically, the odds are that we aren’t first – but someone wins the lottery.

But, let’s postulate that we aren’t first, we’re in fact third. One of the others is on the far side of the galaxy from us and we’ll probably never even know they were there. The other one is a mere 30,000 light years or so from us, so far beyond our ability to detect them (and vice-versa) that we may as well not exist – each from the point of view of the other.

The Chance Of Making Contact

Let’s get back to the Drake Equation. What I think should replace the last term in it is The chance of making contact. This is obviously a value that adds up, year on year. You can state that it’s the average chance of success in any given year multiplied by the lifetime of the civilization doing the listening/sending. Our units work out – we have years, and we have per-year.

But what the preceding discussion makes clear is that the chances are NOT very good. They improve vastly if we have nosy neighbors who stop in (metaphorically) to say “hi” and welcome us to the neighborhood and take a good long look at the drapes while they’re here. We aren’t that type.

We show up, and draw all the blinds, and then spend all our time peeking out through the corner of the window to see if anyone’s watching us. We’re the paranoid nutters and ax-murderers of the neighborhood, the ones always described as “very quiet, kept to himself”, the survivalist convinced that the end is nigh. At best, we’re the neighborhood cat lady.

Maybe if we were more welcoming, we would be more welcome.

But, setting that aside, what actually are our chances of making contact, defined as “hearing a signal that may or may not have been meant for us?”

Well, how do SETI searches usually work?

For a period of time, we take a good close look at one particular group of targets. For perhaps a few hours, we’re paying attention to a single possible target – and then we have to move on to the next. When it comes time to plan the next search, the SETI community are spread so thinly that the main objective is not to waste time on redundancy; “Someone checked Beta Hydri last month / last year / a couple of years ago. Nothing. We’re better off looking at a star they DIDN’T examine.”

But the signals are almost certainly so weak that unless they were deliberately signaling us, we have a very good chance of not picking up anything. And it’s no good for them to be signaling us NOW – if they are 200 light-years away, they needed to be signaling us 200 years ago, when there was virtually no chance of them knowing there was anyone here to hear them.

It follows that the chances of a message being sent our way increase with every passing year. But if we don’t happen to be looking in the right direction in the right way at the right time, we will never know the phone was ringing.

That all means that the chance of making contact is still rising – not because of anything we’re doing that’s all that much more than we were already doing, but because the wave front of those strong TV signals is still out there, expanding, and so is the aliens’ wave front of strong TV (“Buy Grimklakk’s Chelating Cream for a smoother finish!”) heading our way. The odds of us being dead-center in the middle of the range of current civilizations are just as great as the odds of us being the first – and either way, we’ve been listening for a while now.

Once a decade is the maximum frequency with which any given star can be assured of being checked, on average – there are some that are conveniently located and are checked more frequently, and some that are not, and which are checked more rarely. And when they are checked, we’re talking a few hours of observation, at best.

So that’s 2 hours every decade. That would probably be enough to pick up an incidental leakage from someone that was close enough – but for anyone outside a 1,000 light-year bubble, we’re reliant on them sending a message at the exact right time. So we have two chances to calculate, one for each detection method, and the total gives us our chance of detection.

Leakage

Peak signal period is an estimated 30 years. We’ve been listening for about 50. We’ve had radio for 123. Our detection methods are good for 1,000 light years.

1000 light years, as a sphere, has a volume of 4/3 pi r cubed – call it 4,200,000,000 cubic light years. The milky way is 7 million million cubic light years. So the ratio is 0.0006 – per decade. SETI started back in 1980, or close enough to that – so we’re coming up on 40 years of it, i.e. 4 decades. Our accumulated chance of detection from leakage is 0.0024, or 0.24%.

Signal

We have to assume that there’s a signal sent to be received. 70% or so of the galaxy is open to our radio telescopes, so I’m going to assume that we can potentially pick up 70% of the civilizations that are out there, however many there are. At least, we could, if it weren’t for that pesky speed of light limitation.

We’ve been listening for about 40 years. So assuming there’s a signal to detect,, we can detect it today if it comes from 40 light years and was sent when we started listening. 40 years is a trivial, a minuscule speck – if I tried putting a 40-light-year bubble on the 800-vs-5500 above, it would have been about 2.2 pixels across!

But things are not quite so dire. We don’t know L. L might be 1000 years – once you become technologically advanced. So if the people who were first got radio 1000 years ago, their signals could be picked up tomorrow.

Heck, L might be five thousand five hundred, for all we know. It seems improbable, but not implausible.

But let’s say that the pessimists are right, and societies only last for a few hundred years. That 300-year block of time is an expanding hollow sphere centered on where the civilization sending it were located, when they sent it. It’s a message in a bottle. There might even be a hundred thousand of them, as the Police song’s lyrics suggest. If they started send radio signals 500 years ago, the outer edge of the sphere is 500 light-years out at this point, and the last goodbye is 200 light-years out.

The moving window is moving in perpetuity. So the correct fraction is Nx10x2/L divided by the number of hours in a year. At an L of 300, that gives us 0.0000076 per civilization – so, at 10,000 civilizations, we get 0.076 per decade. And, as I said, we’ve been looking for 4 decades – so 0.304, or 30.4%. But, before anyone starts doing high-fives, there’s a catch.

That’s assuming that there’s a deliberate signal being sent specifically to us. We need to factor the likelihood of that happening as well. There are roughly 512 G-type stars within about 100 light years of earth. Let’s assume a similar number of F and K stars – the three stellar types considered most likely to have earth-like planets and hence earth-like life.

That gives 1536 stars within 100 light-years. If we were to signal another star without knowing there was intelligent life there, we probably wouldn’t go much further out than that. If we spent 40 years signaling – a number very deliberately chosen – how long would each of those 1536 stars get? 365.25 x 40 = 14610 days. Divide that by 1536, and you get 9.5 days each.

And, as already pointed out, if we aren’t listening for the ten days that are our turn? Bad luck.

We’ve spent 40 years listening, but we spread ourselves a little thinner – about 10,000 stars have been examined at least once in that 40 years. 365.25 x 40 / 10,000 = 1.461 days.

So the final calculation is 30.4% x 9.5 / 14610 x 1.461 / 14610 = 0.00002 – per cent. Or 0.0000002.

The total

0.0024 + 0.0000002 = 0.0024002. If we multiply 10,000 civilizations by that fraction, we get 24.002.

We could have detected as many as 24 civilizations by now!

But, if we multiply 1,000 civilizations by that fraction, we get 2.4002.

We could have detected as many as … two?

And, if we multiply 200 civilizations by that fraction, we get 0.48004 – get back to me in about 50 years…

…all of which completely ignore the possibility that we are a lot closer to being the first to invent radio out of the 10,000 or 1,000 or 200.

But that’s just an assumption – we’re equally likely to be at the tail end of the queue to get into the party.

But there’s still another caveat. As you can see, the chances of accidental detection of leakage are WAY higher than they are from a deliberate message – there are just too many stars in the sky for blind chance to bring two strangers together. But here’s the thing: most radio astronomy surveys are not routinely analyzed for ETI signals, or at least, they weren’t. So we may very well have picked up those 24 signals from 24 neighboring alien races – and not noticed any of them.

We can state with confidence that 40 years ago, no-one in the 100 closest stars had radio technology. Beyond that, the speed of light kills the chances of a message having been received.

None of which doesn’t mean that one couldn’t be detected tomorrow. The odds are just as good as today, if not infinitesimally better. But in looking for deliberate signals, the SETI community are looking for the black cat in the cellar at midnight. If they keep it up long enough, and the black cat is really there to be found, they could succeed. But the odds are slim.

There’s certainly no need to go all Chicken Little – not yet. There’s ample reason for us to have failed to find extraterrestrial intelligences, and no reason to think they aren’t out there waiting to be found. But if the nearest one really is 5500 light-years away, we might have to look for a LONG time.

I got a bit carried away with this illustration, I think. 6 worlds, 5 different astronomical backgrounds, 7 lightning bolts. You might not be able to see everything that’s going on at this small scale – but click on the image to behold its’ full 1280 x 1280-pixel energy.

Because I was able push the latest mega-update to the Blogdex out a day earlier than expected, I’ve had time to work on this article for the January Blog Carnival.

I love a good, provocative turn of phrase, a coupling of words that stimulates the creative juices, tantalizes the imagination, and makes you think of things that had never occurred to you before. This month’s Blog Carnival, hosted by In My Campaign, is built around just such a phrase – “Divine Worlds” (well, technically, it’s “Divine Worldbuilding”, but…).

What could this mean? My imagination’s been firing whenever I give it room to fire up ever since I heard it.

Well, the “Worlds” could be literal, or figurative, or even metaphoric. And the “Divine” could indicate a property of the worlds in question, or possession/ownership of them, or the creation of them, or just a relationship between them – one that might be just perception or might have some basis in fact, or might be complete fiction. By my count, that’s 18 combinations.

Well, I’m not going to explore all of those possibilities, for the main reason that my imagination has been obsessing about just a couple of them.

Interpretation I:

The Gods created the planes of existence either directly or indirectly so that each being could find a place to dwell that reflected and suited their nature. Now, for some unknown reason, they are secretly making a whole lot more, a discovery that has been made by accident. The PCs are sent to investigate, as have a number of equivalent groups from other planes.

Why might a whole bunch of new worlds be needed?

Interpretation Ia:

Possibility #1 – there’s something wrong with the old ones. Perhaps they are flawed in design and about to break down – the sort of thing that happens when you build in haste. But the Gods discovered the problem too late, and not all the new worlds will be ready in time; people may have to get used to strange new neighbors.

And, if not everyone can be saved because the new worlds aren’t finished, it will naturally occur to those who are not to be chosen to take someone else’s place – by force if necessary.

Let’s further surmise that the world-building process increases the capacity of the new worlds with every passing moment. All hope will not be lost until the existing worlds actually break down completely.

That means that the odds of your being chosen to survive will increase with every one of your neighbors that you eliminate. And, since the Gods will logically choose their followers and adherents first, the more pious someone is, the bigger the threat they pose to your survival.

This is a recipe for genocidal warfare internal to each plane of existence.

Of course, just because an environment isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that you can’t survive there, at least long enough. So this is also a recipe for inter-planar warfare of an equally-genocidal nature, and an almost-complete breakdown of all societies in existence.

Of course, the more gentle and enlightened, the more the citizens will have expectations, and the faster they will break down. Or, to phrase it slightly differently, the more authoritarian the society, the more it will resist collapse through the use of force and intimidation when compared with a more gentle social structure.

That means that the more violent societies will be the last to be able to field whole armies, against an opposition that has largely gone to pieces, socially, with everything to gain by doing so and nothing to lose.

Small wonder that the gods would have tried to keep all this quiet for as long as (in-)humanly possible.

This is obviously the outline for a campaign in three phases. In the first phase, the PCs discover what is going on, encounter other groups making similar investigations, some of which will be friendly and some hostile, some knowing more than the PCs, and some less. This lays the groundwork for the campaign trilogy, and it is also where it is most vulnerable in terms of believability. A number of questions remain unanswered, and concrete answers would be needed.

1. How were the new worlds discovered, and by whom (from the PCs perspective?
2. What is the creation process?
3. Why would the Gods not intervene to prevent the discovery?
4. What are the early signs of the imminent breakdown?

Question three can at least be answered relatively easily – the creation process might be taking all the Gods’ efforts. Anything less will reduce the number that can be saved. But that answer holds further implications – virtually all clerical magic stops working as soon as the Gods discover the situation and begin world-creating. That would get noticed in a hurry.

Most religious groups would initially look for blame within themselves. Perhaps they had done something to offend the Gods, or failed to do something, or failed to stop something being done. Hardliners and reformers would crawl out of the woodwork, only to be confronted by Progressives who argue that the faithful were not so much abandoned as “left behind”. The religious and theological upheaval would be a small taste of what was to come.

After things had settled down somewhat, internally, the next group to blame would lie outside the congregation. Mages in particular would be targets, since their working of magic without faith undermines the credibility of the faith. Sorcerers can at least be described as possessing “a gift from the gods”.

As was the case when Lolth was apparently killed in the backstory of my Fumanor: The Last Deity campaigns, some high-ranking churchmen would organize the use of mummery to keep the faithful convinced that they had not been abandoned. The Drow, of course, had a downtrodden group of male mages and illusionists to assist in this deception. I’m quite sure that when everyone else started blaming mages, some religious authorities would offer them sanctuary – conditionally.

The last thing that religious leaders would want or tolerate, under these circumstances, would be anyone attempting to blame them. Some sort of Inquisition, a secret police, would be urgently formed. Perhaps certain “Holy relics” can act as a power source in the gods’ stead – such would make dandy symbols of office, and permit the Inquisition to defuse some of the worst skeptics: “You see? The Gods are still there, still answering our prayers. No need to spread Heresy. So you had better shut up, if you know what’s good for you. You won’t get another warning.” Rogues and other sneaks would naturally gravitate into this service as well.

At the same time, the church would start recruiting small, elite, armies to act as bodyguards for the church leaders, and as muscle to prevent any other church pointing the finger at this congregation as the source of all woes.

That means that the churches would already have the core of a decent Adventuring Party ready-made. Cleric-Inquisitor, Rogue, Wizard, and one or two Prime Meat-shields.

But you can go further. Having such groups on hand, a prudent church would seek to use them as investigators to find out what the real problem was and end all this speculation. They would train the best of the best, equip them as well as they possibly could (under the circumstances), fill them in on the truth behind the catastrophic breakdown of the faith (as described in the campaign background), and send them out to investigate. Their mission: fix the problem if you can, but above all else, find answers and return with them.

So that’s our PCs, sorted (in fact, the group bears an uncanny resemblance to the group assembled in Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire)!

The PCs can then investigate the failure of the Gods to “perform on cue” and eventually discover the world-building, and the reasons behind it (the imminent breakdown of the current planes of existence). Of course, other groups are also making the same discoveries. Phase I of the campaign would more or less end with a lecture from one or more of the Gods on the importance of secrecy, and the anarchic collapse that is coming. But, no matter what the PCs decide to do with the information they’ve obtained, the word will get out – someone will report back to their superiors, who will realize that the residents of their plane are to be partially sacrificed to enable some of the residents of some other plane to survive, and the word would leak.

Phase II of the campaign starts with the rise of anarchy and civil war – more or less everywhere. This breakdown was already the trend, as phase I made clear. The PCs find themselves in the thick of it, discovering plots and sabotaging armies and cutting supply lines and backstabbing allies who were about to back-stab them, and deciding whether or not to go along with war crimes (read: commit acts of genocide as ordered by their superiors – some will, some won’t). If the PCs won’t, that means they have to turf out the current leadership and lead a morality-based revolution of their own.

And all the while, in the background, the signs and portents and side-effects of the progressing breakdown of the plane of existence itself would add urgency and perhaps a touch of surrealism to this dystopian vision.

Phase II would end with the arrival of the first planar invasion force.

As stated earlier, this would be from a martial world, a society in which force compels obedience. A lawfully-aligned society, in other words, and probably an evil one, to boot. Right away, that points to the Devils, but that seems too obvious to me (besides, I have bigger fish for them to fry a little later). But whoever this group are, they won’t be the last.

It would be as though you were this isolated group having your own little war with a neighboring tribe when World War II washed over the top of you without warning. Until then, only the most learned of your people even suspected that their might be other tribes out there.

Phase III forces the PCs to look at the bigger picture, and places them in position to make decisive differences in that bigger picture. They won’t achieve that by main force, but by diplomacy and intrigue and subterfuge and alliances and the gathering of intelligence. Which dominoes will they push over, and which ones will they glue down – and will that be enough to keep them standing? Especially when the table on which they have been placed is experiencing it’s own instabilities – reality is continuing to break down, remember!

The climax of Phase III is when the PCs, in the middle of a critical situation, are suddenly evacuated by the Gods to their new home, they are amongst the lucky ones. And facing a whole new set of invasions – why attempt to conquer a burning building when you can go for the real prize, the brand-new home that’s almost finished, over on the far side of town?

Of course, this means going up against the Gods themselves, a prospect that would scare off most of the “weaker” groups. But not the Lords of Hades and Princes of the Abyss (or is that the other way around? never mind). Suddenly, the stakes are raised yet again, and the bigger picture shown to be just part of an even more sweeping landscape.

There would be strong temptation to make this a whole fourth phase of the campaign. I would strongly resist that urge, simply because there is too great a similarity between this and what’s already happened in Phase III. Instead, make this the epic climax of Phase III – in which the PCs start to plan and create the structure of society that will emerge after the breakdown. They should be prepared to throw existing assumptions out the window, making sacrifices and hard choices to get there. Perhaps the Elvish Forests can be largely preserved – but only on one of the outer planes – though a number of permanent bridges can be erected between there and the forests of New Earth. Perhaps the price of achieving all this is that the Dwarfish Tunnels have to go – but some of the Dwarfish populace can be saved, residing aboard vast ships made of enchanted Elven timber that sail the void between the worlds.

Again, there are two options that the GM should choose between – either the emergence of Devils and Demons is an inevitability (however changed their circumstances might be in the new cosmology), or the PCs will have to discover that there is a necessity to their existence – which means that the GM will have to have figured one out in the first place.

Personally, I would plan speculatively on the latter, and keep the former in my back pocket as a fallback to be employed if I couldn’t devise a sufficiently compelling reason. And my thoughts would probably start along the lines of the existing devils and demons being redeemable, however unlikely that might be – something that could not be guaranteed about their inevitable replacements. This takes the GMs conflict and makes it part of the fabric of the game world – the PCs either preserve (some of) the Devils They Know, or take the chance that what arises in their place will be even worse.

And, of course, the Epic Finale is the final collapse of the old reality and the PCs and their fellow Saved desperately holding off the doomed invaders from the old.

This, to me, is an outline for a campaign that would be always intended to go Epic. It starts big, with all theology blighted by Iconoclasm and Heresy and Schisms, with attendant social upheaval, and only gets bigger from there. Part II, in retrospect, is a bit of a “calm before the storm” compared with the grandiosity of the revelations of Part I and the inter-planar scope of Part III – but it’s deeply personal, which should raise the intensity enough that the PCs won’t initially notice.

Interpretation Ib:

All of that was built on one possible answer to the initial question posed, but that’s not the only way things could go.

Possibility #2: It’s a Divinely-generational thing. The current Gods are aware that their time is running out, and they need to start building up replacements. The problem is that for whatever reason, the current crop are barren – perhaps they are consuming too much of their vital essences catering to the needs and whims of clerics (and fighting off the privations of those who would do them harm, like Devils and Demons). So they are building this enormous divine Power Pack, which they will colonize with a handful of the ignorant, who they will Convert. In these (unstable, temporary) Paradises – one new plane and subject populace per Deity – populations of the newly-faithful should boom.

That in turn will give the Gods a temporary boost, sufficient that they can create their heirs. Of necessity, these new faithful will be sacrificed in the process – but because they have been raised to expect that, it’s a sacrifice they will make, willingly. Ultimately, to claim their own divinity, the children will need to overthrow and usurp their parents’ power, just as their parents had to do long ago (this is starting to remind me of the Greek Gods and the Titans).

How would you raise and educate a new generation of Gods? Tell you what, I’ll get back to that in a moment.

There are all sorts of directions I could take this concept in, in terms of a campaign. I could have the PCs be the younger deities without the players knowing it, for example. Or they might be residents of the “Sacrificial Lambs” who are starting to question the blind loyalty to the Gods of their parents, as young people often do. Or they could be from the “Old World” and curious about what the Gods are up to. Personally, I think I could have the most fun with the first answer, but your mileage might vary.

So you’re a PC in this campaign. You wake up one morning in a strange place, with no memory of who you are beyond your name, and a minimal amount of practical expertise of some sort – a first level character with amnesia. Your mission is to make your way in the world, to survive and prosper, and to ultimately regain your memories.

Nor are you the only one – there are three or four others, perhaps more, all in the same place and same situation.

From Day One, it becomes clear that you are being persecuted by the Gods. If you make a minor mistake, you are punished mercilessly. If you fail to learn a lesson quickly enough, you are punished mercilessly. If you fail to stand up for yourself, you are punished mercilessly. If you do stand up for yourself when in the wrong, you are punished mercilessly. And there are endless opportunities to do all these things that come out of the woodwork whenever you even look in a given direction.

And yet, from time to time, there are random acts of kindness, and goodwill, and charity. And, should your life ever truly be threatened, some sort of miraculous intervention will “just happen” to take place. You are a divine plaything, a favorite toy. Or so it seems.

At night, your dreams are of living in paradise, of standing in judgment over others, of being the deciding factor in life-and-death situations, and of never quite measuring up to the expectations of your parents, who you can never quite picture. Strangely, you seem to learn (i.e. gain XP) from these experiences (mini-adventures), no matter how fanciful or bereft of context they might be.

Some of your number fall, or despair, or just give up and settle down to an ordinary life, or repeatedly fail an important lesson, or demonstrate abject stupidity (from which nothing, not even Divine Intervention, can save you). One or two become cold and cruel, or yield to temptation – not petty stuff, serious.

Eventually, there are only the PCs and one or two others from the original group left, and they have achieved skill and power enough that if they work together, they could conceivably bring down a Deity (probably a minor one). That night, their dreams reveal who their parents were, and who they really are, and that they were raised in luxury and wanting for nothing, only to be turfed out on your ears one morning and your memories erased.

Everything that you have experienced since has taught you (1) to be resentful of the treatment you have received at their hands (you were right, this is personal); (2) to believe that you can do a better and fairer job; and, (3) taught you the necessary skills to perform the tasks of a Deity. Or rule a kingdom. Or run a major business.

Under those circumstances, you would be fully expected to show up to lay claim to your birthright – by force, if necessary. Which it will be. Once you’ve started taking over from one God, you can’t stop there, because the old guard will stick together to oppose you. So you overthrow the Gods, and appoint yourselves in their place.

Only then do you learn the whole truth – that all this was done deliberately, to prepare you to take over and compel you to do so when the opportunity arose. And only then do you learn of the uncounted numbers of faithful who were sacrificed ruthlessly to bring you into existence – the final revelation that transforms the old Gods into villains.

“Any shortfall in your numbers will eventually be filled in the natural way of such things, until the demands on your time and attention are all being met. And then, one day, you too shall become barren and find your potency waning, and will have to prepare a new generation.” is the final advice of your parents, discovered after this moment of revelation, inscribed onto a memorial to the faithful who made this ultimate sacrifice. “Having orchestrated this act of barbarity, we are no longer deserving of being the Gods of the faithful of this existence. And so we do this, knowing that it will set in motion a sequence of events in which we will be judged and found wanting, and punished accordingly. And we do this, willingly.”

But the campaign isn’t necessarily over at this point. For the Gods to have reached this point, they must have become aware that they were letting little things slip, and little things sometimes grow into big things. There is, quite frankly, a considerable mess to clean up. Let them go wild with divine might and authority, reordering the material worlds into paradises. Starting with what to do with those children of the Gods who didn’t measure up. The PCs have been raised to sit in the Big Chairs, it’s only fair for them to have the “fun” of doing so for a while.

For how long? Well, I mentioned that one or two NPCs had survived, and suggested that some had turned cruel and heartless; the implication is that at least one of the NPCs falls into this category, and will begin scheming to take the ultimate power all for himself. He starts by killing the other NPC Deity, or coming close to it, before the deed is discovered. Once the PCs sort out this mess, the campaign can end.

But that’s not the only way all this could go. The PCs might discover the truth BEFORE deciding what to do about their parents, and BEFORE the ultimate sacrifice has to be made – giving them the choice of sacrificing someone ELSE, instead. Or flat-out refusing – prompting the Gods to start committing atrocities that the PCs can’t stand for. The whole purpose of this campaign is for the PCs to challenge and overthrow the Gods themselves – with the willing connivance behind the scenes, of those Gods.

Interpretation II:

Some worlds are Divine, others are not. There is a Spiritual Cosmology in addition to the Secular one that most planar travelers see, the details of which are a closely-guarded secret shared by the different Churches and Faiths.

This ordering of the heavens binds planes together and interconnects them in ways only the most theologically-wise can comprehend, even dimly. Much that is strange and mysterious to the secular world – like souls, and travel to the afterlife when you die, and the relationships between Gods and Demons and Devils, can only be explained correctly by taking these spiritual channels into account.

And sometimes, the Gods act in mysterious ways because of the imperatives implicit in this spiritual reality.

What might such an interlinking permit?

Why not a direct communications link to the souls of the faithful – so that when a member of the faithful says that they hear God speaking to their very soul, they are being literal and not figurative.

It could also provide the pathway along which the soul proceeds to judgment after death. Of course, like all courts, this one is a little backed up, so there is a limited window to recapture or intercept the soul, either fueling Necromantic magics, or returning the individual to pseudo-life as an Undead. Indeed, if the departed had sufficiently strong motivation, he might break off the path and make his own way “cross-country” to return as a ghost.

Judgment implies that not everyone gets into the final reward. Rejects may be sent back for another try, or have a punishment conferred for a period of time before they are paroled, from which state they may eventually earn their way into heaven by helping others, or they may be condemned to eternal punishment in the service of a Demon or Devil.

This unlocks a whole new perspective on those – races, for want of a better term. I spoke earlier of the need for a Necessity for their existence – well there is one example; the Devil Lords and Demon Princes are of the Gods, and punishing those sent to serve as their underlings simply harnesses their antisocial proclivities for the general welfare of all, while giving them someone to exercise their worst tendencies against. They LIKE being cruel, and torturing others – this satisfies them while bettering society as a whole. And, should the supply of new victims ever run low, they can always pay a visit (or send underlings to do so) to the “mortal world” to stir things up with a temptation or two. It’s what you call your basic “win-win”.

So far, not a whole lot has changed in terms of the surroundings and trappings of a typical game – but there’s a different context, and a slightly different flavor.

The key point to emerge so far is this: that the gods are sometimes compelled to do things that seem cruel or capricious for reasons that surpass mortal understanding – whether they want to, or not.

That seems a fertile ground that a campaign could grow from – because inevitably, there will come a day when a God will say, “I will not! There must be a better way!”

The instruments charged with divining and executing that better way? The PCs, of course.

In a way, this gets them to the tail end of the previous idea without their having to earn their “reward” – and with none of the power that is required to solve problems without a lot of hard work. It’s a justification for throwing the PCs neck-deep into problems of the GMs devising for which they are hopelessly unprepared and expecting them to be able to muddle through, anyway – a sort of James Bond in D&D – “In their majesties’ divine service”.

But the time will come when they have to pay the piper for all this fun – they are getting a hair slower, or want to raise a family of their own, or simply want to settle down and enjoy life, or soon will, in the eyes of the Deity or Deities to whom they answer, and they know too much.

And there’s only ever been one answer to people who know too much, and it’s not very satisfying for the people in that position. Suddenly, we go from being 007 to being Jason Bourne….

So, there you have it: three campaigns (and a few variations) built around just TWO of the sixteen possible interpretations of the phrase “Divine Worlds”. There are sure to be at least fourteen more…

Bonus: Interpretation III

This article was done, and done early – or so I thought. But this morning, in the shower (where I often have some of my best ideas), a fourth interpretation grabbed my attention. So here it is.

This campaign idea uses the term in the possessive sense – these are the worlds that are subject (at least nominally) to the Gods’ will. There may or may not be others that are not so subject, such as Hades. But lately, the mortal inhabitants of those worlds have been growing more and more secular in their beliefs, treating the Gods and their intercession as though it were their right to command. Quite frankly, it’s not on, and the Gods have decided to go all Biblical on their asses and remind them just who’s in charge around here.

As always happens when the Gods decide to let themselves get ticked off at something, they drew lots to choose one who would be the messenger that explained what was happening, and why, to the mortals. This time around, that “honor” went to Alice, the goddess of field mice and lesser creatures, the meekest and most innocuous of the Gods, who absolutely detests confrontations and argument of any kind.

Alice is small and shy, in charge of many small creatures – birds and butterflies and field mice. Nothing so nasty – her turn of phrase – as the insects or spiders, they have their own icky God looking after them. Nothing so big and impressive as a bull – though cows usually fall within her domain. Nothing so useful as Dogs or Cats, either. But Mice and Rabbits and Squirrels and Butterflies and Lambs and the like, yes.

Any miracle that she wishes to work has to manifest through one of these creatures, but she doesn’t do very much of that sort of thing. Fortunately, she’s resourceful and creative, even if she is so darned nice that you’d never imagine her causing trouble for anyone – she’s more likely to hide in the corner.

To help her, she has been given a number of Apostles to advise her, spread the word, and function as her agents – the PCs and some NPCs. There should be a kobold, a human, an elf, a dwarf, a halfling, a gnome, a lizard man, and an orc or bugbear or something of the sort. First come, first served – and character class is up to the character.

When these are gathered – and they start off scattered only for the Goddess to gather them all together at the start of the campaign – and compare notes, they will find that they are all exactly the same age, relatively speaking.

As soon as they are gathered, the rest of the Gods get down to business, inflicting punishments and plagues and the like, even while Alice is explaining things to her chosen – perhaps the term would more accurately be rendered, “bequeathed” – Disciples. These are the cast-offs of the other Gods, the subjects they are most comfortable doing without, the representatives of their races they didn’t want – except in the case of one or two of the more muscular Gods, who wanted to show off, and one or two of the more serious gods, who, well, took the task seriously. So the Elf and one of the more exotic choices are elite representatives of their races, but any players choosing those races won’t get told that until after they choose.

The Elf gets to roll two extra dice during stat generation and can distribute the resulting points to any of their primary stats. The other “elite” member gets to roll one extra die for each stat but can’t swap the points around.

Unknown to any of the players, there’s a hidden “extra” stat – call it “Divine Muscle” if you like. This is their power to cause miracles when they want to – it’s equal to 150 less the total of their six primary stats. Alice is meek and humble, remember, and empowers other such people disproportionately. Each of these points may be traded in for a clerical spell level at will – but once used, they are lost until the end of the adventure, and even then, 1d6 of the points are lost permanently. So the characters will start off with huge Divine Muscle but lose it as they grow more capable themselves.

But every miracle has to be centered around one of the creatures subject to Alice (including the Apostles – buff spells will work). And each adventure is convincing another cynical and obstinate population to reform their ways.

The first targets will be relatively easy. Then they will get more difficult and complicated. The GM should get creative. Along the way, the PCs will encounter those who would promise one thing and do another, and those who couldn’t tell the truth if it lay down beside them, and the corrupt, and the evil, and yes, those who feel threatened and would do them harm, and those who smell an opportunity and try to take advantage of the situation. The most obdurate and stubborn and complicated races will come last – when the PCs are most experienced, but at the same time, when they are at their weakest in Divine Power. On top of that, each population will have been subjected to one or more plagues or punishments, agonies that only the Apostles can heal with their Miracles – very selectively – and each will have it’s own internal theological issue for the Apostles to solve. That might be Iconoclasm, or Heretical beliefs, or theological corruption, or believing their own race to be superior, or secularity, or pig-headed stubbornness (Elves and/or Dwarves, I’m looking at you for that one).

The Kobolds should be fairly easy – they’re easily intimidated and used to bowing to authority. Orcs won’t be much harder; they aren’t easy to intimidate, but again have a very hierarchical structure that they obey implicitly. Halflings tend to be simple folk, but getting them to actually do something might be a problem. Gnomes are too clever by half, and way too cynical, and probably too difficult to follow the Halflings directly; you might need to insert a couple of easier targets from amongst the more exotic and difficult races. From there, things should only get more exotic for a while – the Giants and the four Elemental Planes, for example – then the Elves/Dwarves, then the Dragons, and finally and most complicated, contradictory, stubborn, willful, deceptive and treacherous of them all, Humans.

This is a campaign that would work well for youngsters, with the problems becoming more difficult as they mature over the course of a few years – which would work as a once-a-month deal. If your players are older, start by emphasizing the light comedy embedded into the concept and let things become grimmer and more serious as the campaign unfolds.

And that’s what I thought of in the shower.