This article was originally published by Johnn Four as an extra for Roleplaying Tips entitled “Five Things About Feats”. He recently decided to sunset it, but I think there’s still life in the old girl yet. So, when he offered to pass it back to me for revision into a CM article, I didn’t hesitate.

This article is timely in that I’m still trying to get the Blogdex finished by the end of the month – I’m deep in the middle of an 80,000 word -plus- update at the moment, and finding that the demands of ordinary life – shopping, game prep, etc – are beginning to bit into available time.

Recently it became necessary for me to review several collections of Feats for inclusion in my D&D 3rd Edition campaign, and in the process, I was struck by a number of similarities between the Feats being offered from different sources. Reflecting on these common patterns gave rise to some more general thoughts on the nature of Feats in the d20 systems in general. Realizing that others might also find these observations, deductions, and opinions to be of value, I have compiled them into the following analysis.

Part I – A general classification system for Feats

Feats come in a number of basic flavors. One way that can be used is “Official” vs “Unofficial” content, but that’s too simplistic to be all that useful – the game designers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas (or bad ones for that matter). A better system is as follows:

• Enhancement Feats – these take an ability that a character has, and make him better at it. The original ability may be restricted in terms of who has access to it.
• Avoidance Feats – these let a character stop an opponent from doing something they would normally be capable of.
• Extension Feats – these let a character do something they are normally forbidden to do.
• Customization Feats – these let a character do something extra when they succeed in a given task, but often do nothing to make it easier to carry out the task. If the “something extra” is particularly spectacular, they may even make it harder.
• Clarification Feats – these take a situation that is a little murky in the rules and define, as part of the feat, both a normal way of handling the situation, in addition to containing one of the above types of Feat.

Any of these types of feat can be game unbalancing, giving too great an advantage for what they cost. Some may be unintentionally unbalancing; others are intended to let the characters who have taken them get away with murder. I have seen one feat on the internet, for example, that lets a character subtract hit points from his own total and add them to the damage done by any attack, regardless of whether or not the attack hit. So there is another type of classification system for Feats: “Good” ones and “Bad” ones (from the GMs perspective, of course)!

But which ones are good and which ones bad? How can a GM tell the difference? What standards should be applied, what criteria?

Part II: Good Feats Vs Bad Feats – some definitions

In seeking to define the differences between a good feat and a bad feat, let’s start by listing all the possible good things that a feat can achieve. The perfect feat:

1. benefits the character that takes it
2. is unique
3. clarifies rules gray areas
4. extends or enhances campaign background
5. does not assume campaign background elements that may not be in place
6. individualizes characters
7. applies in a variety of situations
8. is specific in the benefits that it brings
9. is simple to apply
10. is consistent in level of benefit in comparison with existing feats, and/or
11. has some other redeeming value

While it’s fair to say that a feat that does not achieve ANY of these is a Bad feat, there are obviously going to be gray areas in between – feats that have some, but not all, of these characteristics. I have yet to see the perfect feat! That said, a feat does not have to be perfect to be perfectly acceptable. It follows that any proposed feat has to be considered in terms of each of these criteria, and that failure in any specific respect may or may not constitute a down-check for the feat.

Part III: Assessing Feat Criteria: 11 Questions

There are 11 questions (the number is just a coincidence) that can get to the heart of a feat and its value, and they are as relevant to D&D 4e and 5e as they are to the game system for which they are designed. With a slightly more metaphoric eye, the same questions can be applied to any game ability that is considered, whether that’s a new super-power or a new spell.

Q1. Does the feat benefit the character that took it?

If a feat holds no value to the character, they won’t take it, that much is self evident. But there is an equally-important distinction to be made here – there is a HUGE difference between benefiting the character who takes the feat and penalizing everyone who does not, and that difference is not as obvious without a little deep thought. Ultimately, a feat of the latter type encourages everyone to take it, making characters less distinctive. Even a feat that everyone of a certain class or type has to take goes too far in this respect. No matter how good a feat might be in other areas, a failure with respect to this criteria is an automatic rejection, in my book. The rejected feat, if it has enough other virtues, might provide the inspiration or even the foundation for an original feat, but in its original form, the feat is as dead as a dodo.

Q2: Is the Feat unique?

If a new feat is exactly the same as a pre-existing one, why do you need it? That’s the obvious question. Once again, though, there is a deeper issue to be considered in this section, and it derives from the obvious answer to that question – that you can only take most feats once. Game systems break when pushed too far (like most things in life); that’s the reason that restrictions on the number of times a feat can be taken exist in the first case. Having a feat that gives exactly the same benefits as another feat pushes the system, potentially beyond its breaking point. Once again, this is grounds for an immediate rejection.

But, there are cases where this is not quite so clear-cut. A feat that gives a benefit under specific circumstances is not the same as one that gives the same benefit under different circumstances, or is it? This is one case where the devil is in the details, particularly if a third feat, or class ability, or whatever, lets the character change the circumstances so that they overlap. If the referee is completely convinced that the two sets of circumstances can never overlap, then despite the same benefit, the two feats are unique and distinct. If the referee is uncertain, he has a harder assessment to make. His choices are to permit one feat but not the other; to permit both and risk an overlap; or to actually amend one or both feats benefit descriptions to specifically prohibit stacking of the benefits.

These are not easy choices. If the arguments given above are held as valid, the “take the risk” option is obviously unsatisfactory. If only one of the two is to be excluded, which one should get the green light and which should be erased? That answer can be a relatively easy one if the circumstances of one feat completely contain those of the other – the choice is then between a broadly-applicable feat or the more specific version – but this is not often the case. In general, it’s better – and far easier – to adjust both feats to specifically state that the benefits do not stack with each other, and then reassess them both. In addition to the usual questions, there is one very specific question that should be asked in this circumstance:- “is there any clear benefit to taking one feat over another in the general case”? A yes answer again gives a reasonable basis for rejecting one feat over the other. A no answer permits each feat to be considered on its merits.

Q3: Does the feat clarify the rules?

Some readers may ridicule the entire concept of a rules clarification existing within a feat. The rest of us know better. A good example is a feat from Fantasy Flight Games “Monster’s Handbook”, which spells out a procedure for Playing Dead. When a feat offers a rules clarification as part of it’s description, the first question to be addressed under this criteria of judgment is “do you agree with the rules clarification, or do you have a better way of handling this subject?”. Work very hard at answering this question objectively; it’s very easy to fall in love with a house rule because you wrote it! If you don’t like the feat’s suggested rules change/clarification, then you have only two choices: Change the feat to suit the way you’re handling that aspect of the rules, or reject it out of hand. If, on the other hand, the suggestion embodied by the feat is an improvement on the current situation, or is something you hadn’t even thought of before, then the feat can be assessed on it’s own merits – but the fact that you already like the way the author’s mind works is certainly an encouraging sign.

Too encouraging! It can be easy to overlook flaws in the feat if you’ve been prejudiced by the rules clarification. The correct procedure in this case is to completely reassess the feat, under the assumption that the rules clarification is already in force. (Heck, if the clarification is that good, the change should be in force immediately!) It might be that the clarification was written on a good day, suggested by some other GM’s handling of the situation, while the feat itself was written on a bad day. By taking the rules clarification out of the picture, you can be more objective about the rest of it.

However, where a feat contains a clarification that makes sense, it’s a good indication that there are grounds for SOME sort of rules dealing with the subject. So even if you don’t use the original, you should make the effort to have SOMETHING, even if you have to write it yourself.

Q4: Does the feat extend or enhance the campaign background?

Once again, this is not something that many feats embody. But there are a few that have this attribute, and when it exists, it should be considered extremely carefully. One example is a feat that makes translating spells from one spell book to another when the mages are of different races. Right away, this feat extends not only the campaign background but also the rules that interpret that background into game mechanics, – stating that by default, mages can’t translate spells from one race to another, which implies that each race has it’s own unique style of magic. Why, it’s even possible that each school of magic actually originates with a different races’ mages!

The implication is that there should be some sort of racial modifier to spells of the given type when cast by the race in question – again, something that can easily be expressed through the introduction of a feat available only to members of that race, or a feat that lets others gain the same advantage as the race in question. What if a race’s pre-existing modifiers are merely the most overt and obvious manifestations of these potentials? What if these facts have been lost, but are awaiting revelation in some long-lost tome? This one hypothetical feat has sparked enough concepts to completely reinvent the campaign world!

In fact, I have seen several “new character classes” and even “new races” that could be better described as existing types with one or two additional feats, something that really shows the power of the Feat as a conceptual tool. A combat-oriented character class with lots of abilities pertaining to the riding of Dragons, which is how this class travels, and which is it’s sole point of uniqueness? Why not just describe the pertinent class abilities as a series of Feats, and list membership in the social organization “Riders Of The Wyrm” as one of the prerequisites?

Suddenly, Wyrmrider Mages and Wyrmrider Clerics and all sorts of other combinations become possible, extending the background far beyond the original fighter variant). Several of the feats in the various Faerun supplements fall into this category.

Assessing this kind of feat can be extraordinarily difficult, because they connect to the campaign and the rules in so many ways and in so many places – so much so that maybe its a subject for a whole separate article sometime! But, in general, the principles used to assess rules clarifications can be brought to bear here. The first step is to extricate the feat from the campaign elements, and to assess each on their own merits – if that’s possible. You are under no obligation to accept the whole package!

Either way, lets start by looking at the campaign elements. Do they contradict things already established within your campaign world? Do they contradict plans you have for the future?

A “Yes” to either question is an almost-certain repudiation of the background elements at least, or of the whole package if you were unable to extricate the rules elements.

Rules issues should be considered for all feats, whether or not they fall into this particular characterization. Broadly stated, the rules elements are the proposed amendments to the art of the possible within the rules, and the consideration that comes under this criterion’s heading are how those rules integrate with the campaign and its history.

Does permitting the feat enable or a contradiction in campaign history, for example by opening the door to a more sensible solution to past problems? For example, a feat that permitted mass healing of disease by clerics would fail this test if a plague were an integral part of the campaign history.

Does the feat create an easy escape clause from a problem that is currently endemic to your campaign world, or that is central to current or future scenario plans? Feats that can cause these sorts of problems vary from the obvious to the very subtle. A feat that prevents misunderstanding of magical communications is trivial, so narrow in scope that it will certainly fail later tests – but if you intend to have a war start because of a misunderstood communication, the existence of this feat will certainly complicate the GMs situation.

In a nutshell: is the campaign world better off if this feat is excluded, not because it’s inherently bad in general, but because it’s specifically bad for this campaign? If yes, regardless of the acceptance or otherwise of campaign elements contained within, or inspired by, the feat, it’s gone.

But it’s always worth noting these things – in writing – for future reference and for future campaigns, and because thinking about them helps inspire new ideas – for campaigns, for scenarios, for character motivations.

Q5: Does the feat mandate the inclusion of new campaign elements?

In some ways, this has already been addressed in the previous discussion, but the forced inclusion of campaign background elements is one of my pet peeves. To a very large extent, this is my biggest criticism of the D&D rules in their current form; each racial description contains sociology and personality traits that are almost inextricably entwined with the rules. Ditto each class description, even more so. These are things that should be in a wordbook or campaign setting, NOT the core rules. But, setting that to one side, if a feat makes certain behaviors easier or makes sociological assumptions, for example by assuming (or stating outright) that elves – or Dwarves, or whatever – have certain abilities or attributes, it deserves to get a more rigorous scrutiny. If I don’t want mages to be able to do create scrolls, I do away with the scribe scroll feat – which means that any feat that lists scribe scroll as a prerequisite, or that has anything to do with scribbling spells on or into anything, is immediately suspect.

The questions raised in this section are more about the underlying assumptions of the feat and the applicability of those assumptions to the campaign world, than they are the more overt ingredients discussed in question 4. The time to consider those issues is when the review from that question is still fresh. The hard part about this area is identifying those underlying assumptions. These essentially come down to two areas – the requirements to be met in order to qualify for the feat, and the circumstances under which the feat will be beneficial (which is not the same thing).

So let’s look at the requirements. What do you have to do to meet them? Is a feat required that is not normally taken by the character class? Or a skill? Will the feat be useless or unnecessary or redundant by the time the qualifications are met? And, ultimately, what assumptions about the campaign world do the requirements make, and how viable and appropriate are those assumptions?

And then there are the circumstances under which the feat will be beneficial. Is there an alternative that could be called on that would be equally valid on such occasions? Is the feat only useful for a given race, or a given class – or a given class from a given race? Alternatively, does any character meeting the requirements for tracking the feat automatically gain benefits all the time from the feat? And finally, one of the most significant questions of the section: does the feat change or eliminate one of the defining characteristics of the race or class?

The answer to any of these questions could be enough to reject a proposed feat out of hand; it could be reason enough to accept the feat as written; but, it mostly likely points out flaws in the design of the feat. These flaws could kill the notion, but if they don’t, they will define what if anything needs to be amended or clarified at this point of the review process in order to make the feat acceptable.

Q6: Does the feat individualize characters?

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In so many games, characters are more distinctive at low levels, when they have differences in what they are good at and what they aren’t; as the characters grow in experience, they gradually grow towards archetypal examples of their character class, good at everything the class represents and at least capable in others.

To some extent, adding more feats to the list of choices available solves this problem, or seems to, and that’s one reason why every GM worth his salt is always going to at least look at any new feat that gets put under his nose. In reality, this is only deferring the problem – possibly to beyond the planned retirement point of the characters, but possibly not. It’s always easier, in some ways, to craft adventures for established characters, whose interactions can be predicted, whose capabilities are known, whose responses can be anticipated.

Some feats encourage specialization, and hence individuality. In particular, feats whose value to a character is based on that character’s ability in one very specific area; and to some extent, given a limited pool of characters in play at any given time, these work to create individuals. After a while, though, you begin to notice that these are simply archetypal sub-types of a given character class with different personalities; the capabilities are the same.

Combating these tendencies and trends are the concept of Prestige Classes – classes that, like feats, have significant requirements in both a gameplay and a characteristics sense. But the introduction of a new Prestige Class is a Very big deal. every feat must be re-scrutinized in the context of a character of the Prestige Class type, for example, because any prestige class brings with it the risk of game imbalance. every Prestige Class carries inherent extensions to the Campaign world, introducing new character dynamics, organizations, reactions to the same, and so on – all the baggage given such tight scrutiny under criteria 5 and 6.

As a side note, a lot of players assume that if it’s in the DMG or some other official publication, it is automatically available, and that if they meet the game mechanics requirements, all they have to do is take a level in the Prestige Class. One even once suggested that doing so then made it the GMs responsibility to put in place the implied social requirements, i.e. the gameplay requirements. Disabuse players quickly of any such notions! Any prestige class must be explicitly permitted or refused in advance, and the GM should ensure that players have to actually work towards achieving one, in more than the game mechanics sense. The players should plan their advancement, and make sure that the referee knows their plans, so that if a particular requirement has to be met, he can put the potential for it in place; and if a prestige class is not permitted, the referee can ensure that it is quite impossible for anyone to meet the requirements, so that there can be no accusation of bias in letting one character have something and not another. But, I digress….

Some feats go further than simply encouraging specialization, they encourage individuality. Feats that can have multiple different effects, amongst which the character has to choose at the time of taking the feat, for example – if it can only be taken once. Feats that explicitly prohibit certain combinations of classes and feats, or that specifically prohibit the taking of alternative feats. Feats that use their requirements to mandate the taking of other feats. Make no mistake about it, restriction may be irritating – but it’s a good thing in the long run. If you have 7 character classes, each of which has 3 or 4 archetypes, each of which has 3 different character development paths in terms of prestige class opportunities and 8 different paths in terms of a linked series of feats over many levels, you have 252 or more distinctively different character types even before races and personalities are taken into account.

While that much variety is almost certainly a pipe dream, GMs can work actively to create it. Whenever you look at a new class, prestige or otherwise, consider making its class abilities a linked series of feats. You can use prerequisites to exclude certain classes or races; or to mandate that the feats individualize a certain race or class, to control the pace of development within the feat series, to effectively create a new archetype within some or all of the character classes. And, of course, there are some feats that already do this.

As usual, there’s a downside, some danger to watch out for. In this case, beware of feats that let one character class do something that is the unique province of another character class. Don’t let it, in other words, act to reduce the individuality of characters. (The same thing applies to a Prestige class!)

Such feats are always worth close examination, and considerable effort on the part of the GM to make them compatible with the rest of the campaign. So far, a lot of these criteria have been focused on the negative, examining reasons for rejection. Feats of this type, in contrast, demand that you look for ways to keep them. That’s not to say that they can’t be dangerous in terms of making the character TOO good at something – or at too many things. Which brings us to the next criteria:

Q7: Does the benefit apply in a variety of situations?

The more narrowly focused a feat is, the more dangerous it can be, by pushing part of the system, or the roleplay, beyond breaking point. If a character makes a substantial investment in being good at something, they will try and use it as much as possible. They will try to change circumstances into situations that permit the use of the ability, because it gives them an edge. The personality of the character will slowly change, to justify all this – and the new personality will then be used to justify further enhancing the character’s capabilities in the given area.

As a rule of thumb, the more narrowly defined a benefit, the greater that benefit becomes. I have yet to see any feat take this trend to a blatantly absurd extreme, but I have seen some come close. Where a skill can be used for several things, but the character only cares about one of them, any feat that enhances that skill’s use specifically and explicitly in that way risks issues of game balance.

A friend of mine often makes the point that if you ask a referee 10 times for something that gives them +10, they will probably say no, but if you ask for ten different things, each of which gives +1, they will probably get at least 3 of them, and possibly more. Throw in rephrasings and alternate justifications, and over time, the character will get that +10. Or more. That’s the danger of narrowly-defined benefits.

Whenever I examine a feat that is so narrowly defined that it will be useless most of the time, I always ask myself what I’m missing. Is there some class ability or racial ability, or whatever, that will, or can, become truly overwhelming in this situation? I was once presented with a proposed feat that enabled a cleric character to use his ability to turn Undead to “turn” (i.e. make flee in fear) the living worshipers of deities to which his deity was opposed, provided that he was standing on ground hallowed to his deity, by making “the wrath of God” apparent to the foes. But, the mage of the party was carrying items that enhanced any fear attack that the character made, and had a feat that let him synergize with the cleric to add his INT bonus to any other character’s skill checks and rolls. And another member of the party had a class ability that automatically sanctified the ground for a given radius around him. (NB: I was not the GM). Add all of that together, and you can soon reach the point where on any roll other than a 1, no sentient enemy could come within 60′ of the party if the party weren’t ready and waiting for them. On the surface, the feat presented was not all that unreasonable, but the compound of effects was such that the party would quickly become near-invulnerable. They could loot dungeons and ruins with near-total impunity to gain the treasures within, treasures that would only add to their overwhelming might. Even taking one of the three elements of the cocktail produced an ability that was just too strong to be permitted.

Particularly dangerous are feats that introduce a new type of bonus, or a bonus of an unspecified type. Be especially wary of bonuses that imply that they are of a given type or for a given reason; as a rule of thumb, assume that these will be interpreted by at least one player in the most favorable way possible. This is what makes the Bard class so dangerous, as several GMs have found to their utter despair – they generate Morale Bonuses, a new category of bonus that therefore stacks with everything else. Is a “blessed weapon” bonus the same as a “sacred” bonus? Assume the worst and act accordingly – Beware the over-specific!

Q8: Is the feat specific?

Having waxed reasonably eloquent (I hope) on the dangers of feats that are too specific, we have the other side of the coin: feats that are too general. One website I have visited contained a feat that gave +1 to everything per level, provided that the character remain honorable – with scant definition of what that meant. The requirements mandated that only characters of 10th level or more could take the feat. A strict interpretation of the feat as written meant that on taking it, the character would get +10 to all rolls and checks – saves, skill checks, attack rolls, damage rolls….. the list goes on. Looking more closely at the context of the feat, it became clear that this +1 was to apply only to levels of a specific 5-level prestige class, suggesting that things were not so bad as first thought – but this is still a HUGE benefit to ANY character. Too big, in fact!

There are two good reasons to reject feats that are too broad (of which the above is an extreme example). The first is that the more broadly-defined a benefit is, the more likely it is to stack with other benefits from other feats – and that is something that you have to keep a very close eye on, as explained previously. The second is that it acts to reduce the uniqueness conferred by more specific feats. Instead of a +1 on all attack rolls, why not half-a-dozen feats each giving +2 to a specific attack maneuver, or to a specific weapon type? The more specific a feat, the more it encourages the creation of other feats. Reject the generic!

Q9: Does it over-complicate things?

This is my weak point, I have to admit. Things that look completely functional on the page turn into a dog’s breakfast when used in play. For example, I introduced a skill called Piety that was, to a priest, the combined equivalent of a spell points system and a measure of how faithful the cleric had been to the tenets of his faith. On paper it looked fine, and I was preparing a list of feats that would enhance various aspects of its use in play; but in play, it bogged things down terribly, the players hated it, and it has been a miserable failure. As a result, the Piety skill – and the feats – are about to join the scrap heap.

As a means of self-control in this respect, I have come up with a rating scale for how much additional complication a rules change incurs. Modifying that scale for feats gives the following REVISED AND UPDATED Table:


1-6	Base complexity of the game system where 1=simple and 6=complex. Most versions of D&D/Pathfinder are 3 or 4 depending on how much experience you have with the system. I usually use 3.5 for the purpose.
+0.5	add a fixed number to a reasonable static number, every time.
+0.5	add a fixed number to a die roll, every time.
+1	add a die roll to a reasonably fixed number, every time.
– 1	if a required die roll is one that you always have to make anyway.
+1	for each circumstance or condition that must be met for the action to take place that will not AUTOMATICALLY be satisfied by everyone who qualifies for the Feat.
+1	for each circumstance or condition that must NOT apply in order for the Feat to be used.
+1.5	for each additional die roll required to use the feat.
+2	each additional thing that the feat or ability lets you do that you normally can’t do.
+2.5	each thing that the feat or ability stops opponents from doing, that they could normally do or be expected to do.
+2.5	for every additional variable that has to be updated more frequently that would have to be tracked anyway.
+2.5	for every additional variable that is added to the game system and has to be updated when a character gains levels (or on other infrequent occasions).
+3	if every use of the Feat or ability requires additional explanation, discussion, or interaction with the GM.
+4	for every additional variable that is added to the game system that has to be updated every 1-3 times per game session (or on other regular occasions).
+6	for every additional variable that is added to the game system that has to be updated every combat round (or on other frequent occasions).

When you rate a feat for complication, the lower the score, the better in terms of simplicity, but the more prone to being overgeneralized the feat is – scores of 1-5 tend to be fine. Middle scores then to be a little more complicated, but are more likely to have substantive issues within the text, or to be excessively narrow in definition – scores of 5-8 are concerning, and 9-10 are worrying. High scores tend to have real risks in terms of the substance, real issues in terms of the assumed facts, real dangers and rewards in terms of additional campaign elements, and extreme concern over the complications that will be introduced. Any score over 10 sets my alarm bells ringing.

But the level of complexity is not enough, in and of itself, to reject or approve a feat. These results must be interpreted in the context of what contribution the feat makes. No matter how good feat might be, at anything over twelve points I would look at simplifying the proposal.

Q10: Is the feat Excessive?

A number of the issues raised have had elements of game balance concern. This section is the bottom line on how good the feat is, based on the benefits given by preexisting feats. For example, the Players Handbook lists a feat that gives a +4 modifier to one specific skill, and a feat that gives +2 to two different but specific skills. It has feats that give +1 to specific kinds of rolls, like attack or damage rolls, where there is only the one type of roll to be made under the given circumstance, and others that give +2 to rolls where there are multiple different rolls that could apply, like saving rolls. If a feat lets you do one thing that’s normally forbidden, under one specific circumstance, it has reasonably low requirements; if it lets you do multiple things or has multiple circumstances under which it applies, it usually has at least one and more often 2 prerequisites (frequently other feats). If a feat is specifically more useful to a given character class, its power level reflects the rate at which characters of that class gain levels, and hence, gain feats – fighter feats tend to be less spectacular, individually, than mage feats, unless they have requirements that are extremely difficult to meet. Metamagics will typically allocate a low level spell to the sort of power level where you might expect to find a spell of the given power level once the metamagic is taken into account – a doubling of one simple numeric value is +1 spell slot, eliminating a requirement is +2 slots, replacing a variable with a fixed number equal to its maximum is +3 slots, and completely overcoming a major restriction like casting time is +4 slots.

Using these pre-approved feats as guidelines, it can soon be determined whether or not the feat is excessive. The +1 per level feat mentioned in question 8 clearly violates these guidelines – a sure sign that it needs amendment or outright rejection.

Initiative and other tightly-focused variables

Specific mention should be made at this point of Feats that enhance a single aspect of character activity all the time, especially those which offer an advantage in determining initiative. Since Initiative is only rolled once per combat, it can be suggested that feats which add +1 in this area are less powerful than a feat that adds +1 to an attack or damage roll. Don’t believe whoever is making the suggestion!

The tactical advantage that can result from always or even frequently going first in combat is worth at least +1 on each attack – the correct method of analyzing the benefits of such feats is ‘how large a combat bonus can result from permitting the character to act first?’ Going first may permit the character to reach cover, conferring up to 90% automatic miss chance when attacked by missile weapons. Consider how much additional AC the character would need in order to reduce the chance of a hit to 4/-, and you might perceive a different value for such a feat!

Then consider the reduced effectiveness of mages and the like due to damage that may be inflicted before they can act even once. Think about the additional options that the character has in combat by virtue of acting before the opposition can do anything to stop them.

The conclusion is clear: +1 to initiative is substantially more massive than a mere +1 to hit, which can easily be countered by any of innumerable adds to AC! Worse, feats that add to initiative always seem to stack, and never seem to have ANY conditions that have to be met – they are ‘always on’. Another way to look at +1 to initiative is to count the number of levels that a character needs to achieve in order to get +2 stat (and hence +1 to the stat bonus) – usually 8. How many +1’s to the base combat value does a character get in that many levels? Again, usually +8, and an extra attack in some rounds to boot!

It’s also possible that a feat is under-powered, not giving enough to justify its being taken by a character until they are running short on ideas and should be thinking about retirement!

Q11: Does it have some other redeeming value?

I won’t pretend to have covered everything in this discussion, and certainly not to have covered the issues exhaustively. There is always the potential of a feat having some other virtue that I haven’t thought of. For example, it might make the GM’s life easier in some fashion. It might explicitly ban something the GM doesn’t want anyone to be able to do, or make possible something that the GM wants people to be able to explicitly do. One example is a feat I created that lets characters creating Undead give those Undead additional character levels – at the expense of their own. It might encourage something the GM wants to encourage, or discourage something that he wants to discourage. All these are virtues that might not necessarily be covered in the analysis thus far.

Part IV: The final assessment: Approve, Reject, or Modify?

So, having looked at just what value a feat has, and what the penalties for inclusion of that feat are, you are now in a position to make a rational choice about that feat’s inclusion. Some of the sections raised the potential for positive aspects of a feat – new character development options, new campaign directions and ideas, and so on. Others discussed grounds for objecting to a feat.

In making a final determination, I will go over a feat for a second time. If the feat has something positive to contribute under a given heading – be it a rules clarification, a new background element that I like, a character development path, or simply scope for character individualization, or whatever – I give it a + sign, one for each. If a given section dwells on the negative, grounds for rejection or modification, and the feat falls fowl of one, I give it a minus sign, one for each. If a feat has no pluses, its gone. If a feat has two or three negative signs more than it has positives (or worse), it’s probably not worth the effort to salvage – extract any worthwhile bits and use them in some other way. But, if it has some virtue, and only a couple of negative factors, I look at the complication score. If that is high, then again, steal the good bits and forget the rest; if it’s not, then perhaps it’s time to start tinkering.

Let’s be frank – almost any feat sourced from anywhere beyond the PHB will need tweaking. There are exceptions, but they are just that. Each minus sign is a weakness in the feat’s design that you should try and eliminate. If it’s too general, make it more restricted; if too strong, reduce the benefit; if too complicated, try and reduce the work involved. Look at other ways of handling a feat – for example, using combat bonuses in the same way that metamagics raise the spell slot, to confer some advantage in battle, instead of making something possible outright. Do the same thing with skill DCs – raise the DC required but let the characters do something special if they succeed. Throw incongruous aspects of the character together – a feat that is triggered when your attack bonus is higher than a character’s INT bonus. Look at building choices into feats – and consequences of those choices. Try to base a feat on the things that are happening anyway under those circumstances, instead of adding an extra task.

And leave yourself open to ideas. For every 3 feats you approve, even if you have had to modify them to make them acceptable, you will probably think of another one all on your own. While feats are normally player-centric, think about specific feats and how they might apply to NPCs, or to creatures of various kinds. That having been said, never permit an NPC to have anything that you would be unwilling to let a PC have!

Part V: Closing Thoughts: some unusual feat applications

Feats can be taken by just about anything. Most GMs think of imbuing a feat into a magic item sooner or later; but how many think of imbuing a magic item with a feat that empowers the item, not the character wielding it? Feats that are only useful when lots of characters have them, for armies? How about a Druid’s Grove? Or a mountain range? Castle Walls?

Any feat can be treated as a magical effect – and that gives rise to a mechanism for using feats in unusual places and unusual ways. Creating specific feats for these different applications – assuming that everything is sentient on some level – can open up new worlds of thoughts and ideas. Caradras, The Cruel – with “Summon Snowstorm” as a feat? Why not?

Why not, indeed….

Whew! Updated at last! The logo for this article (and any similar ones that come along) took a LOT longer to complete than I expected – and I’m afraid the results of rushing still show a little. Sorry for the late posting, I’ll try and get my act together for next week!

image courtesy pixabay.com/905513

I’ve thought long and hard about how to display this post. The problem is that on the home page, for a while, you’ll be able to see it – and then scroll down far enough, and you’ll find the questions. I thought about trying a javascript “show hidden text on click” option but wasn’t sure enough of what I was doing or how to do it. That left me with two rudimentary approaches, and I’ve decided to employ both – for a while.

First of all, if you are sight-impaired and want to attempt the questions BEFORE the answers are revealed, click on this link right now.

For everyone else: The questions are below, followed by the answers – in black text on a black background. Left-click at the start or end of one of the boxes and you can highlight the text, revealing the answer. Or, you can click on this link:

                                                                   Answers Page

…. and you will be taken to a “hidden” page here at Campaign Mastery with both questions and answers in black on a white background – meaning that you can see all the answers at once. The choice is up to you.

When the two drop off the front page of the blog, about three months from now, I’ll quietly replace the “black” with “white” on the blog-post version and get rid of the hidden page, editing these instructions accordingly.

 
How many did you get right? Hope everyone had fun with this change-of-pace!

New years are about new beginnings, about punctuating the year that was, to separate it (however artificially, however optimistically) from the year that is to come. This article is about new beginnings, and being aware of the options you have, but it might not seem so, at first. Bear with me….

One of the hardest concepts in mathematics for a lot of people to wrap their heads around is the maths of infinity. That’s because infinity is weird. No, I mean really weird.

Let’s start with an easy one:

i.e. any number multiplied by infinity gives infinity.

Infinity is already infinitely large, it can’t get any bigger.

But if you divide both sides of that equation by infinity, you get “any number equals one”, and that makes no sense whatsoever. The only alternative is to decide that infinity divided by infinity gives infinity!

How about this:

i.e. any number added to infinity is still infinity.

This happens because infinity is not just the biggest number that you can think of, it’s – literally – infinitely larger than that. It’s easy to show that logically, that also means that infinity divided by any finite number is still infinite.

A little standard algebra turns the last equation into:

i.e. it doesn’t matter how much you take away from infinity, there’s still an infinite amount left over.

In fact, you can subtract any finite number from infinity without making a dent. Actually, you can do so infinite times and you’ll still be left with infinity.

A little thought turns that into:

– not zero as would be the case when subtracting any finite number from itself (are you starting to get a glimpse of how weird a concept “infinity” actually is, yet?)

There’s only one way to sum up that last equation: all infinities may be infinitely large but they are not the same size. And with that, we’re through the looking-glass.

An Empty Reflection?

Some might be tempted to say that nonsense results just mean that “infinity” doesn’t really exist! Certainly, physicists get really uncomfortable whenever infinity symbols start turning up in their calculations, because they have never been able to come to a consensus on the issue.

My first year course in calculus at university had a fair amount of focus on “trends in dependent variables described as a function of an independent variable, as the value of that independent variable approached infinity”, something that I mentally summarized as the “ultimate trend”. This turns out to have all sorts of applications in the real worlds of physics, biology, and geology (amongst many others), as well as being of interest mathematically.

That must mean that “the trend as x approaches infinity” must mean something real, and so infinity itself has to have some sort of real meaning, even if it’s just an abstract ideal like “Absolute Zero”.

Which means that infinity is real, and all those head-scratching calculations are real. “But surely you can’t prove the suggestion that infinities are different sizes?” comes the last gasp of sanity, fighting pluckily over in the corner. Well, let’s see.

plot to same scale of y=one half of 2 to the power of x, y=x, and y=the square root of x, respectively.

Here are the graphs of three different mathematical functions. We all know how these work – you pick a number on the horizontal (x) axis, go straight up or down until we find the curve, then straight left or right to the vertical or (y) axis to read off the result. All three of these trend toward y=infinity as x approaches infinity.

If you plot all three functions on the one graph, to the same scale, you soon find that three points are automatically defined: 1,1 is the only spot where all three cross one another, two of them also converge on 0,0, while the third crosses the y axis at 0,0.5. That gives two points for each of the curves, which in turn enables them to be scaled and positioned perfectly.

In fact, the equivalence defines a boundary region – at any point in between an x of 0 and an x of 1, a real result can be obtained using the function. Outside of that range, it’s not so certain. The third curve simply doesn’t exist for values of x less than zero, and the first keeps getting closer and closer to a y of zero but never quite gets all the way in that region. But it’s the region to the right on the x axis of this defined point that is of most interest, because somewhere on that line is the “point” of infinity, at which point the function result is the trend as x approaches infinity.

So, if I put all three graphs together like that, and put a mark on the x axis greater than one and say “this represents infinity”, you get this:

the same three functions on the one graph

And, since we already know that the results of all three functions are infinity at the point where x=infinity, you can immediately see that all three give “infinities” of different sizes. And, in fact, you can confirm that by making another mark even further to the right, also labeling it infinity, and looking at the resulting infinities. You could almost say that “infinity greater than infinity” is both true and false at the same time – but that’s not quite right; the problem is that you can’t glance at them and say one is larger than the other, you need something else to give them context. So it’s more accurate to suggest that, like Schrodinger’s Cat and other quantum states, the outcome is simply unresolved.

You can even derive, from this set of functions and the infinities that result, all those calculations of infinity that I described earlier – proof that I’m not making this stuff up. Infinity is real, and really strange.

Infinite Combinations In RPGs

Most GMs and game designers never spend time thinking about infinity. And that’s a mistake, because the mathematics of infinities are vital to running an RPG.

Let’s say that you decide to run an RPG Campaign. You have an infinite array of possibilities in plot and character, and the first thing you have to do is cut that infinity down to size.

You start by choosing a genre, or a game system, which defines a genre for you. That takes away the infinite number of options that are unique to all those other genres. So, what you’re left with is infinitely smaller than the infinity that you started with – but it’s still infinite. You can never subtract a number from infinity and be left with a finite number – infinity just doesn’t work that way.

Every choice you make defines your campaign’s constituent building blocks more clearly, excluding still more of the possibilities of character and plot. But always, the number remaining is still infinite.

In practice, it can be argued, none of that matters. A whole bunch of those remaining possibilities will be virtually indistinguishable from each other. Use one of them for an adventure and you exclude not only that plot, but all those variations that are too similar to it.

In other words, you can, in this case, subdivide infinity into some finite number of categories, each of which will be infinitely large, but each of which has common elements that will distinguish one infinity from its neighbor.

If your category definitions are too broad, you violate the axiom that makes them useful – because you can run more than one adventure from the ‘category’ and have them be sufficiently different from each other to be acceptable.

The Lesson Of Infinity for GMs

That matters, because a lot of people don’t come up with an adventure and then classify it within their taxonomy; they pick a broader category that has not been represented for a while within the campaign (or at all), choose a sub-category that sounds interesting, and use the description as a starting point, a template, for the design of the adventure: “I think I’ll do a heist plotline next, that sounds like fun…”

It’s all about the way you think about the different types of adventure that you can run. Too narrow a definition yields adventures that are potentially too similar to each other being permitted – boring! – while too broad a classification structure fails to isolate the discrete combinations that will be of greatest interest. Neither is particularly helpful.

So, the next time you’re creating something new – be it a campaign, or an adventure, or an encounter, or an NPC – pause for a moment to review your mental taxonomy. Is your system of thought too narrow or too broad? Are you, in fact, making it harder for yourself?

Infinities demand respect. Anything less, and the finite eventually breaks down under the burden, like a campaign that’s run out of ideas.

This image combines “sunrise-1756274” by pixabay.com/qimono, “stars-1246590” by pixabay.com/Free-Photos, “fireworks-1885571” by pixabay.com/nosheep, and text rendered using cooltext.com, with compositing and additional editing by Mike.

This image combines “Christmas background 3762099” from pixabay.com/AngelaRoseMS2, “background-2909020” from pixabay.com/monicore, and text rendered using cooltext.com, with compositing and additional editing by Mike.

There’s a long tradition of TV shows doing Christmas episodes. These are Christmas themed in some way, often by having the action occur over the holiday period, and if necessary are out-of-continuity or even non-canonical. This has led to an equivalent pattern occurring in some RPG Campaigns.

Christmas adventures are often much harder to do well than they appear from the outside.

“Peace On Earth and Goodwill To All” – where’s the adventure in that!?

No, in an RPG, Christmas usually means that the world around the PCs is going to Hell in a Hand-basket, and it’s up to the PCs to solve the problem just in time for December 25th.

And yet – derailing plots that are taking the world to hell in a hand-basket is probably what the PCs do most weeks of the game year, anyway. It’s not that much of a celebration, is it?

That usually means that what you end up with is a typical adventure that has been marinated in excessive seasonal schmaltz and Christmassy kitsch.

For me, the ultimate expression of the spirit of Christmas, the ultimate exemplar, is what has sometimes been called “The Christmas Miracle” or the Christmas Truce.

The Christmas truce was a series of widespread but unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of World War I around Christmas 1914. It was early in the war, which had entered a relative lull as all sides reassessed their strategies in response to developing stalemates.

Foreshadowing the Truce

The groundwork for the truce had been laid during the pre-Christmas week, when French, German, and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. This in turn had been foreshadowed by patterns of fraternization that developed as the ground war bogged down into the trenches of the western front. Both sides’ rations were brought up to the front lines after dusk, and soldiers on both sides noted a period of peace while they collected and consumed their food. By 1 December, a British soldier could record a friendly visit from a German sergeant one morning “to see how we were getting on”.

Despite relations between French and German units being generally more tense, the same phenomenon emerged, despite denunciations of the practices from both sides’ commanding officers. In early December, a German surgeon recorded a regular half-hourly truce each evening to recover dead soldiers for burial, during which French and German soldiers exchanged newspapers.

Other truces could be enforced on both sides by weather conditions, especially when trench lines flooded in low-lying areas, though these often lasted after the weather had cleared.

The proximity of trench lines had made it easy for soldiers to shout greetings to each other. Men would frequently exchange news or greetings, helped by a common language; many German soldiers had lived in England, particularly London, and were familiar with the language and the culture. It must be remembered that the warring parties, especially the English and Germans, had been friends and allies and both sides had been dragged into the conflict through a domino-chain of entangling alliances.

Several British soldiers recorded instances of Germans asking about news from the football leagues, while other conversations could be as banal as discussions of the weather or as plaintive as messages for a sweetheart. One unusual phenomenon that grew in intensity was music; in peaceful sectors, it was not uncommon for units to sing in the evenings, sometimes deliberately with an eye towards entertaining or gently taunting their opposite numbers.

There was a general mood amongst the troops of “live and let live”, as a result. Infantry positioned close together would stop or resist overtly aggressive behavior and often engage in small-scale fraternization, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes. In some sectors, there would be occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades, while in others, there would be a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in full view of the enemy.

German and British troops during the Christmas Truce of 1914, uploaded to Flickr on December 25, 2017, by Cassowary Colorizations, used under the Creative Commons Attribution Generic License version 2.0 terms.

Christmas 1914

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, men from both sides ventured into no man’s land to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, while several meetings ended in carol-singing. Men played games of football (‘soccer’ to Americans) with one another, giving one of the most memorable images of the truce.

Peaceful behavior was general but not ubiquitous; fighting continued in some sectors, while in others the sides settled on little more than arrangements to recover bodies. Still, roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the unofficial cessations of hostility along the Western Front. The first truce started on Christmas Eve 1914, when German troops decorated the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium.

The Germans placed candles on their trenches and on Christmas trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols. The British responded by singing carols of their own. The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were excursions across No Man’s Land, where small gifts were exchanged, such as food, tobacco and alcohol, and souvenirs such as buttons and hats. The artillery in the region fell silent.

British and German soldiers fraternizing at Ploegsteert, Belgium, on Christmas Day 1914, by homo mundi [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or less.

The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently killed soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Joint services were held. In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, continuing until New Year’s Day in some.

Aftermath

The events of the truce were not reported for a week, in an unofficial press embargo which was eventually broken by The New York Times, published in the then-neutral United States, on 31 December. The British papers quickly followed, printing numerous first-hand accounts from soldiers in the field, taken from letters home to their families, and editorials on “one of the greatest surprises of a surprising war”.

By 8 January pictures had made their way to the press, and both the Mirror and Sketch printed front-page photographs of British and German troops mingling and singing between the lines. The tone of the reporting was strongly positive, with the Times endorsing the “lack of malice” felt by both sides and the Mirror regretting that the “absurdity and the tragedy” would begin again. French and German reporting was more muted and even critical, even while the spirit was lauded in an abstract sense.

Reflection

No spontaneous truce on this scale had ever occurred before, and none has ever happened since.

The other night, I was musing in my bed, half asleep, when I suddenly wondered why that was.

In 1915, a few units arranged ceasefires but the truces were not nearly as widespread as in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting truces. Soldiers were no longer amenable to truce by 1916. The war had become increasingly bitter after devastating human losses suffered during the battles of the Somme and Verdun, and the use of poison gas.

Okay, the soldiers on both sides had ample reason to be bitter in 1916. And military commands have become more passionately bloody-minded since; the era of gentlemanly behavior toward an enemy was on its last legs at the start of WWII. And the major conflicts of western nations since have been with enemies with vastly different cultures, in Asia and the Middle East; perhaps they don’t recognize the Western Christmas traditions or consider it a Holiday celebrating peace and hope.

Those all seem likely contributions to the singular nature of the event. And it took a tremendous amount of trust in, and respect for, the enemy; it might simply be that on every other potential occasion, the combatants were simply too paranoid.

Yet, having said that, it suddenly seems about as unlikely as the Christmas Miracle itself. All of them, every single time?? Naaah. There must be still more to the story.

Over the century-plus years that followed, society has become more secular and less religious. Does this decline in spiritualism itself make the Christmas Miracle less likely to ever occur again?

Outrages

Certainly, Christmas itself has been morphing over the years into a more secular holiday, despite persistent and consistent attempts to preserve the spirit of the season in the young of every generation. Inch by inch, in small increments, the wowsers and killjoys have been eroding it. There have, in recent years, been attempts to ban nativity scenes on the grounds of political correctness (“Christmas spirit ‘under threat from PC brigade’ “, The Telegraph, UK, 10 December 2007; “Some men of straw are lurking in the manger“, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 Dec, 2006), but the actual success of such attempts in France and Belgium in 2017 (“French Court Bans Christmas Nativity Scene In Public Buildings“, ChristianPost.com, 18 November, 2017, and “Belgian town removes Christmas nativity scene in case it offends Muslims, gays and victims of church abuse“, The Sun, 10 February, 2017) sparked global outrage. Okay, some of those sources are not legendary for the reliability of their reporting, so take those with a grain of salt, if you must; but I’ve been seeing similar news stories for more than two decades.

Everything from Christmas Carols to Christmas Light Displays have been threatened, and in some cases banned. It doesn’t matter that in the wake of the outraged complaints, most of these bans have been revoked and renounced; the point is that they have been occurring regularly – from Connecticut, in the US, to towns in Victoria, Australia.

This climate of Christmas being under attack is so pervasive that it has led to pranksters making hoax claims about bans that have gone viral. Certainly, one home in Victoria has been forced to close its Christmas light display because the numbers that it was drawing led the state government to classify it as a tourist attraction, requiring crowd-control measures and public liability insurance to be paid by the homeowners. They can’t afford to do so, and so the popular display has been canceled.

With every diminution of the more Spiritual side of Christmas, crass commercialism assumes a greater share of the ‘meaning of Christmas’, and the spiritual overtone of “Peace On Earth” that I referenced earlier also diminishes.

Need

War isn’t going to go out of fashion as a human endeavor anytime soon, and that means that the need for a moment of Peace remains as vital as ever. If Christmas is losing its connection to the principle of Peace, becoming more secular and commercialized, perhaps we, as a culture, need to seek out a replacement, one that is also secular in nature so as to insulate it against such decline.

Spaarnestad Photo SFA007001826, Armistice Day, uploaded to Flickr 10 November, 2008 by the Netherlands National Archive from the Spaarnestad Collection (photographer unknown), showing a German soldier lighting the cigarette of a wounded English Soldier. No known copyright restrictions.

One possibility is Armistice Day. In Australian RSL (Returned and Services Leagues) Clubs (who use their profits to support and commemorate serving and ex-service Defense Force members and their dependents – membership is seen by some as a way to show their support for the military services and those who serve in them without endorsing participation in any given conflict), there is always a minutes’ silence called for at the start of the 11th hour of the eleventh day of November.

Armistice Day is always secondary as a commemoration to the Australian Services to Anzac Day, which is observed on April 25 every year, and is a public holiday to boot. I told the backstory of Anzac day in A Legacy Of War back in 2015. Lately, there has been a considerable push to expand the scope of that commemoration with ceremonies, speeches, and other public events, in an attempt to rejuvenate the day. So far, that movement hasn’t yielded much, but each year the movement seems to grow a little stronger.

It has its advantages – it’s recognized pretty much globally (Germany is an exception but there is a similar national day of mourning that occurs on the Sunday closest to 16 November; it would not require much, in terms of procedure, to align it with the other national days), so it’s already international in scope.

And yet, Armistice Day is more about mourning the dead, a somber counterpoint to the celebrations of Anzac Day or the equivalent in other countries. It’s NOT about Peace, save that the peace declared is necessary to permit such reflection. In terms of context and nuance, the two occasions are totally at odds, heading in two completely different and naturally-incompatible directions.

Nor are there any other such secular Holidays that it seems appropriate to encumber with a celebration of peace, that seem compatible with the desired purpose.

Except one.

Christmas Redux

The Christmas Miracle happened. It’s a part of Secular History.

If we are losing contact with the spirit of Christmas, surely a celebration of the Christmas Miracle and the broader theme of global peace would be a fit and deserving substitute that would rejuvenate at least that aspect of the season’s significance?

That’s what redux means – “brought back” or “revived”.

Christmas Tales

So, to that end, I’d like every GM reading this to ask themselves,

• What shape would a Christmas Miracle analogue take in your game world?
• What are the forces stopping it from happening?
• How can they be overcome? By the PCs? With a Deus-ex-machina up the GM’s sleeve if he needs it?

…and there’s your Christmas Adventure. It’s the same basic formula that Terry Pratchett used in “Hogfather”.

Wait one – a deus-ex-machina?

These are normally unforgivable, unusable, undesirable plot devices exploited by the lazy and symptomatic of writing incompetence. But it’s (falsely) said that there’s an exception to every rule, and in this case it happens to be true. You see, what a Christmas story really is, is a celebration of the spirit of the holiday season at a metagame level. And that makes certain metagame stunts that are normally intolerable, fair game – because they are also metaphenomena. Or, to put it another way, you can get away with it because it’s Christmas and Christmas Miracles are part and parcel of the seasonal DNA.

Whether Christmas is part of your faith or not, I invite you all to join me in celebrating Peace, remembering the Christmas Miracle, and mourning the fact that it hasn’t been replicated in any other conflict.

Season’s Greetings from Campaign Mastery!

Image courtesy pixabay.com/GermanLopezR,
Stars, shadows, & highlights by Mike

One of the side-effects of some of the medication that I’ve been prescribed is that I have unusually vivid dreams. Some of these have solved plot problems in my games, others have suggested articles for Campaign Mastery (almost word-for-word), some have just been fun. Perhaps unusually, some have been serial episodes, continuing a dream sequence begun months or even years earlier.

Until I began taking this medication, I rarely remembered my dreams on waking, and the few that I did recall persist in my memory for decades. For example, when I was about 12, I dreamed that I had worked out how to fly, superman-style. I can still remember vividly the effortless push at the small of my back, the sensation of soaring out over the front yard at my Grandmother’s home, the visual stimulation of chasing the sunset as the last rays of sunlight ascended skyward through the clouds…

As a result of both these phenomena, I tend to pay attention when I dream. Which brings me to one night last week, when I was making my final plans for this tenth anniversary. I dreamed that I was attending a Christmas party at Stephen Tunnicliff‘s, accompanied by a number of mutual friends, and he demanded that I “bring out the Trivia Quiz”. I replied that since I hadn’t expected to be at the party (true, since he died of a heart attack some years ago), I hadn’t prepared one. He, and several of the other attendees, insisted quite pointedly that this was not good enough, so I shrugged, said, “if you insist,” and got on with creating one on the spot.

(When the gamer’s group with whom I played, the NSW Wargamers, were meeting at Woodstock, a council building that we rented for playing RPGs and board games, I produced a number of trivia quiz tournaments that ran alongside the games being played – each week, I would put up ten or twenty questions, and after everyone had submitted their answers, post the results and the correct solutions. There were even times when people who had no game to play would turn up just for the Trivia Quiz! So there is a past association between the quiz and RPGs. And Stephen regularly hosted both Christamas and New Year’s parties. Anyway…)

Upon awakening, I immediately scribbled down a couple of questions. And then a few more. And then some more. And… well you get the idea. So, in memory of my friend, here is The Great Campaign Mastery Trivia Quiz! Answers will be posted in about a month.

Some of these are easy, some are very obscure or even fiendishly tricky. Some are fantasy-oriented, some sci-fi, some derive from RPGs, some from media, some from real-life science or history – and some from Campaign Mastery. Maybe.

[Evil Chuckle]

The best I can manage without looking things up is 38 – and I wrote the darned thing!

So have fun, and Season’s Greetings from Campaign Mastery!

Oh, PS: I’ve randomized the question sequence. Getting one question right won’t give you any help with the next…

The Questions:

So, there they are! Fifty questions ranging from the easy to the malevolently difficult. You won’t solve all of these with Google…

Image by pixabay.com/3dman_eu

One problem. Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one? This is the Dual Competence rules problem.

Another problem. One character has the Skill needed to solve it, another who doesn’t – but who has to actually do the work, acting as the eyes and ears of the first. Is the second character a help or a hindrance? To what extent? This is the Two Places At Once rules problem.

A third problem. Two characters, one with the relevant skill, one with a related skill. Both need to work together to succeed.
This is the Combined Competence rules problem.

A fourth problem. There’s a large weight to be lifted, or a heavy door to break down. It’s going to take the efforts of more than one character to achieve the desired result. How do you correlate their attempts into a straightforward success or failure? This is the Universal Shoulder-To-The-Grindstone rules problem.

A fifth problem. It would normally need two or more characters acting in a coordinated fashion to solve it – but the only character in the vicinity is on his or her own. How much more difficult is it to find and apply a solution? This is the Two-Is-Less-Than-Many-Hands problem.

Most game systems ignore these questions entirely, putting them into the too-hard basket, especially when you realize that the one set of procedures/rules (ideally) have to handle all five problems. Is that even possible?

I have to admit that this article has sat around unfinished – practically un-started, to be honest – for the best part of a year because I found the subject matter so daunting. Well, it’s not going to get any easier just sitting there, and if it’s a daunting subject for me, how much more problematic must it be for a GM with less experience? So I’m biting the bullet…

These are all instances of the correlation of two skills or abilities possessed by different characters combining in some way to achieve outcomes that are more difficult, or even outright impossible, for one alone. They are the sort of problems that crop up with great regularity in real-world play – from two characters combining to research something in a library, to multiple characters searching a room, to a craftsman and an apprentice working together to make something (the latter presumably under the direction of the former), to a team trying to move a football from one end of the playing field to the other.

Typically, the only aspect of rules which is in any way similar that is addressed by rules systems are the existence of Flanking rules for Combat, and these often feel tacked on or superficial, mostly concentrating on the question of whether or not the rules apply in a given case. Little or no profound thought is spent on exactly what the impact of achieving flanking actually is – if for no other reason than anything other than outrageous oversimplification quickly bloats out with variables that distinguish one situation from another.

Not exactly a template to be considered analogous to a solution to these other problems, then.

Potential Solutions

Most GMs will quickly come up with five possible solutions. Those with any knowledge of probability and a little time on their hands will usually think of a sixth. I’m going to add a seventh to that list that would only occur to anyone with some familiarity with D&D 5e (actually, I’m dropping it into the list at a point where that seems appropriate).

These are the building blocks of solutions to the problems posed at the start of the article. Which one provides the best solution to a specific problem, and whether or not a common one-size-fits-all solution can be identified, will need to be determined after I’ve taken a hard look at these potential solutions. It’s even possible that none of these solutions will be ideal, or even workable.

The possible solutions are:

1. Add skills/ranks/stats/stat modifiers together, one player rolls for both characters?
2. Add a fixed bonus/penalty if second character makes their roll.
3. Add a scaled variable bonus/penalty if the second character makes their roll.
4. Add a capped bonus/penalty if the second character makes their roll.
5. Second character success confers advantage to the first; both must succeed.
6. Multiply chances of success?
7. Multiply chances of failure?

Add skills/ranks/stats/stat modifiers together, one player rolls for both characters?

This is an obvious technique when it comes to stats, such as multiple characters combining their strengths. Many GMs then extrapolate the same approach to the other questions by combining other numeric variables. And yet, while on the surface, this seems like a sound approach, it is easily demonstrated that it is incomplete and inadequate as it stands.

Contemplate a tug-of-war. If simply adding the strengths of the different individuals on each side together and comparing the totals were all that was involved, the same team would win every time – or, if evenly matched, neither would ever win. Clearly, this doesn’t happen in real life – so there clearly needs to be some kind of die roll involved, and that propels us into the realm of one of the other answers.

Nevertheless, the concept that some numeric value associated with a character may be applied to another character, perhaps in scaled or modified or capped form, may be a vital one and is worth noting for future reference.

A second problem stems from the perfection of the act of totaling values in this way. There’s no loss for redundancy of effort, no wastage from overlapping efforts. Again, it seems unlikely that this matches real-world experience, though it does suggest a possible nature for the required variability – that when numeric values accumulate through mutual effort, the total contribution of an individual represents a theoretical maximum, with reality being a fraction (large or small) of that theoretical total. Another principle that might be important!

Add a fixed bonus/penalty if second character makes their roll.

This seems to answer most of the skill-related problems raised, at least at first glance, and for a long time, this was the approach that I took. I even extrapolated backwards, applying this principle to attempts to combine stats.

Without bogging too deeply down in mechanics, lets look at how it functions: Character 1 has the greatest expertise or greatest contributing stat. He has, say, a 60% chance of success. Character 2 has a considerably small contribution to make – 40%, say. The concept would be that if character 2 succeed in his low-probability attempt, he confers a bonus to character 1’s attempt, and if character 1 also succeeds, then the group effort as a whole succeeds. The bonus could be as little as 5% or 10%, or as much as 35% or 40%. Assuming a d20 roll, those are the equivalent of +1 through to +8, the latter being as much as the character has to give.

How to decide what the bonus should be? Well, in this case – assuming we’re talking D&D/Pathfinder – I would fall back on a principle that I have noted previously in the scale of bonuses from magic items and feats. As a general rule, these confer +2 to a stat (i.e. +1 to a stat bonus) or 2 lots of +2 to separate skills, or one lot of +4 to a single skill. This works because it implies a focusing of the effects – +1 to all abilities deriving from a particular stat, or +2 to a narrowly-defined subset of related abilities, or +4 to a single specific capability. I’ve even inferred from these relationships that it should be theoretically possible to confer +1 to four specific, related, skills in the same way – something that’s proved useful as a theoretical model from time to time – or even +2 to one and +1 to two others, all more or less equivalent.

Well, this is clearly one specific application of the principle of combining abilities, so I would argue in favor of +4, or +20%, being the fixed contribution.

So far, then, so good. But the whole structure is about to come crashing down. Why? The bonus conferred is all-or-nothing. It doesn’t matter if the second character’s chance of success is 10% or 55% (having defined it as less than that of the first character) – if the character is successful, the first character gets +X to his chances. In the abstract, this seems reasonable, but it trivializes the contribution of the second character in a way that might not sit well with players over the long term. What’s more, there’s no capacity in this system for incompetence to get in the way. If a character with a chance of success of only 10% tries to help out, there should be at least some risk of them being more hindrance than help.

Part of the problem is that there’s a limited window for improvement to the first character’s chances – in the example cited, that’s only 40%. If the first character’s chances were 80%, there would only be 20%. Less, if the system defined a given natural result as an “always fails”, which some do.

So, for these reasons, the results seem inadequate to reasonable needs. We may need to look further.

But there is a variation to consider before we abandon this line of thought altogether. The second character’s attempted assistance could simply provide a fixed bonus to the first character with no need for the second character to roll at all. This interprets the assistance rendered purely in terms of its effect on the capabilities of the first character, and is a far simpler solution in real-world play.

It doesn’t take much thought to discover the flaw in this arrangement, however. Taking our example of 60% again, character 1 is 40% away from certain success (or 35% away from near-certain success if that’s as close as he can get). If each character assisting is worth +1 on d20, then he simply recruits 8 (or 7) of them. If they contribute +2, he needs 4 assistants to succeed every time (or almost every time). And it doesn’t matter how incompetent those assistants are, how ham-fisted or feeble-thumbed. Even a total incompetent only needs 20 assistants to be perfectly capable. I’m sorry, that just won’t cut it.

But this does extract a valuable principle – each participant in a shared activity needs to make a roll of some sort to determine their contribution to the group’s success. And, ideally, they should contribute a greater risk as well as a greater potential for success.

Add a scaled variable bonus/penalty if the second character makes their roll.

One solution to these needs is to measure the amount by which the second character succeeds, then apply that amount – perhaps scaled – as a bonus or penalty to the chances of the first, who is then rolling for the ultimate success or failure of the group activity.

This certainly answers all the objections raised about the preceding solution, which is why this is the model that I eventually settled on for both my 3.x house rules and the official rules of my home-brew superhero campaign. But it might not be the final word on the subject; it’s simply a workable solution.

A key question must be what scaling to apply. First, should any scaling be linear, or non-linear in nature? Linear involves simple mathematics, non-linear makes extremes far less likely and seems more realistic as a result.

If the 2nd character only succeeds or fails by a small amount, something close to a 1-to-1 scale seems appropriate – succeed by 1, add +1; succeed by 2, add +2; and so on. But from the +3 point onwards, that seems to grow too large, too quickly. That argues against the use of a simple scale.

My instinct would be to double intervals. So, succeed at all, and you get +1. The interval between no success and some contribution is 1. Double that to get to the next threshold and you can see that success by 2 or 3 yields +2. Double again, and success by 4, 5, 6, or 7 yields +3. Double once more, and success by 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15 gives you +4. And success by more (on a d20) might give you +5. Similarly, failure could yield -1 all the way down to -5.

Suddenly, the competence of an assistant matters, but is not all-important. When you bring in multiple assistants, however, even this starts to look a little extreme. So how about tripling the intervals instead? Succeed by 1 or 2 and you contribute +1. Succeed by 3-5 and you contribute +2. Succeed by 6-14 and it’s +3. Succeed by 15-20, and it’s +4. And you have to allow for the possibility that another of the multiple assistants will fail by a similar amount.

There are other options. My aforementioned superhero campaign rules double the number of assistants needed for a potential bonus. The number who succeed in their checks is the number who contribute. At one point, I looked at using the total margin of success by all of them as a percentage of the accumulated potential margin to determine the fraction of the potential contribution actually passed on. Practical considerations – a team of 100 researchers under the direction of a chief scientist would have required 100 skill checks – put the kibosh on that notion. Instead, I chose the option of differential thresholds of skill, which is a little more complicated to explain. In a nutshell, it divides the “assistants” into ever-growing “bands” of competence, and doubles the number of each more-incompetent band required to equal a single member of the next less-incompetent band, while placing a cap on the number who could occupy a given band (which also doubles).

You could have 1 Grade-1 Assistant, 2 Grade-2 Assistants are the equivalent of a second Grade-1 assistant, 4 Grade-3 makes a single additional Grade-2, 8 Grade-4’s make a single additional Grade-3, and so on. Maximums are 1, 4, 16, 64, 256, 1024, and so on. Each band is 25% wide in skills (the system is d%-based). So, if the lead researcher has a 60% skill, Grade-1 assistants are those with skill between 35-59%, Grade-2 are 10-34%, Grade-3 are -15%-9%, and so on (the system sets 0% as the minimum skill needed to employ a skill to a professional standard, and the total skill range is -140% to +140%), so Grade-3 are university students and new graduates, and Grade-4’s are secretaries and janitors and the like.

Your first grade-1 assistant can add 20%, each successive equivalent to a grade-1 assistant – or, more accurately, given the maximum populations stated, each grade-2 assistant or equivalent can add +10% (up to a maximum of +10Î4=+40%). Each grade-3 assistant or equivalent not already contributing can add +5% (up to a maximum of +5Î16=+80%). In theory, each grade-4 assistant or equivalent not already contributing can add +1% (up to a maximum of +1Î64=+64%), but there is a maximum modifier permitted within the system of plus-or-minus-150%, and assistant grades 1 to 3 (or equivalents) already account for +140% out of the +150% cap.

Of course, there’s nothing to prevent you having more grade-4’s than can contribute – or even splitting your forces (i.e. making your grade-1 a researcher looking into some separate problem). You can have assistants that are almost as competent as you are, or a lot more assistants that are barely fit to wash your beakers out, or any combination in between.

Something like this is necessary when institutional research becomes possible and relevant, i.e. in Sci-Fi and Superhero campaigns (but even there, I have it apply only when absolutely necessary; the rest of the time, I’d use a modified form of the first system). In a Pulp campaign, discoveries are made at the speed of plot, and maverick lunatics are just as likely to come up with impossible-to-replicate results as a world-class university professor. In anything more primitive than the pulp era, the number of assistants you can have is so restricted by economics and politico-social structures that simpler models are adequate.

The takeaway of greatest significance is that any hope of a “universal solution” should be regarded as pie-in-the-sky.

Getting back to it, then, we seem to have an adequate answer for D&D/Pathfinder and other similar Fantasy Games, and for Pulp games for that matter. There may be better answers, but at least we have a fallback position.

Add a capped bonus/penalty if the second character makes their roll.

Rather than a non-linear scale, perhaps the idea of a linear scale can be salvaged by adding in a cap to the advantage or penalty. At least, that’s the question that quickly occurs. But capped to what? +2? +3? Anything more, and you might as well not have the cap. Frankly, this doesn’t really add anything, and enthusiasm for it as a solution is likely to quickly fade.

Second character success confers advantage to the first; both must succeed.

This is an interesting idea drawn straight from D&D 5e. If the assisting character succeeds in his roll, he gives the second character a mulligan that he can exercise in the event of failure, and perhaps a small bonus if he succeeds by a relatively substantial amount – say, +1 if the assistant succeeds by 6 or more.

What’s immediately missing from this formulation is the question of incompetence. But we can modify the notion to provide it: If the assistant fails by a certain amount or more, he confers an anti-advantage upon the main character attempting whatever it is. Balance suggests that it should match the threshold to the added bonus – so this might require a failure by 6.

What’s an anti-advantage? Well, “advantage” lets you re-roll – once – if you fail. So an anti-advantage forces you to re-roll – once – if you don’t fail. Or, you could phrase them, respectively, as rolling 2 dice and choosing the best result or the worst – they mean the same thing.

This solution even scales to accommodate multiple assistants, if you’re lucky enough to have them. Two assistants, say: the following combinations are possible: 1) Bonus+Advantage from both; 2) Bonus+Advantage from one, Advantage from the other; 3) Bonus+Advantage from one, Anti-Advantage from the other; 4) Advantage from one, Advantage from the other; 5) Advantage from one, Anti-Advantage from the other; or 6) Anti-advantage from both.

The two options available are clearly either “advantage stacks” or “advantage doesn’t”; the first scales more genuinely, the second is more consistent with normal 5e practice.

The option 1 outcomes for the 6 combinations listed would be: 1) Double Bonus+2 re-rolls if needed; 2) Bonus+2 re-rolls if necessary; 3) Bonus, no re-rolls; 4) 2 re-rolls if necessary; 5) you’re on your own!; and 6) 2 re-rolls must succeed before overall success can be achieved. Overall, there is a substantial benefit to having multiple assistants, but it comes mostly from evening out the risk of one of them failing.

The option 2 outcomes for the 6 combinations listed would be: 1) Double bonus +1 re-roll if needed; 2) Bonus +1 re-roll if needed; 3) Bonus only; 4) re-roll once if needed; 5) you’re on your own; 6) must re-roll once if you don’t fail the 1st time. That’s three of the possible outcomes that give a re-roll, and two of the remainder that confer no penalty.

Personally, I would choose to simplify the mechanics by choosing option 2.

The flaws in this proposal are those that are inherent in the Advantage-re-roll mechanic, which I analyzed back in 2012 in On The Edge: Implications of the D&DNext Advantage mechanic. In a nutshell, the lower your chance of success, the less benefit you get out of a re-roll because you are still likely to fail the second time around; the higher your chance of success, the less benefit you get from a re-roll because you are less likely to need one, and the maximum benefit (worth +25%) comes at an 11-or-less chance, but so does the maximum penalty from the other side being advantaged. In other words, the game system both rewards and punishes mediocrity disproportionately. If you are highly skilled, you have less need of advantage and are less concerned with the other side having advantage, and if you are very poorly skilled, neither will have much of an impact.

This makes it very hard to work out exactly what a character should need to succeed in any attempt to do anything, at least in comparison to a simpler mechanism. Presumably, if you’re playing 5e already, you’re used to doing so, in which case this might be your ideal solution by virtue of the consistency with the rest of the game system.

For anyone else – interesting idea, but no. The downsides are too great, and the fact that it would bear no resemblance to the game mechanics used elsewhere in the game system are a distinct negative.

Multiply chances of success?

When I was very much younger, an even younger player who knew just enough to get himself into trouble suggested that this was the way to go. I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now, and some simple examples will show why. Let’s look at the effects for three different main characters (50%, 60%, and 80% chance of success) with (a) no assistance; (b) a 10% assistant; and (c) a 50% assistant.

Assumption: attempting to do a 2-person job single-handed is worth +2 to the target number, i.e. -10% chance of success. (Note, however, that I would normally use a +5 value – this will be shown to significant later).

Aa: 50%-10%=40% chance of success.
Ab: 50%x10%=5% chance of success. Red flag #1.
Ac: 50%x50%=25% chance of success. Red flag #1.
Red flag #1: The main character is better off with no assistant.

Ba: 60%-10%=50% chance of success.
Bb: 60%x10%=6% chance of success. Red flag #2.
Bc: 60%x50%=30% chance of success. Red flag #2.
Red Flag#2: Having an assistant minimizes the benefit of greater skill.

Ca: 80%-10%=70% chance of success. Red flag #3.
Cb: 80%x10%=8% chance of success. Red flag #1. Again.
Cc: 80%x50%=40% chance of success. Red flag #1. Again & Again.
Red flag #3: the higher your skill, the more relatively insignificant the penalty for not having enough hands becomes, so the less you need an assistant – not that you ever DO get any positive benefit out of an assistant.

It’s simple mathematics, really: if you need to succeed with both rolls, the fewer the rolls you have to make, the more likely you are to succeed. To determine the chance of succeeding on all rolls when that is what’s needed, multiply the individual chances of success together.

Unfortunately, this kind of throws some cold water over every suggested solution, even the standby one – because they are ALL of the “both rolls need to succeed” variety other than the already-rejected simple-modifier-for-assistance model. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Multiply chances of failure?

No, the correct mathematical approach to any set of rolls in which only one of them needs to succeed is to multiply the chances of failure together to determine the net chance of failure.

Let’s run those same series of calculations from the previous section over again, and you’ll see what I mean.

Aa: 50%-10%=40% chance of success.
Ab: 50%x90%=45% chance of failure = 55% chance of success.
Ac: 50%x50%=25% chance of failure = 75% chance of success.
There is a definite benefit to having an assistant and it is proportionate to the skill of the assistant.

Ba: 60%-10%=50% chance of success.
Bb: 40%x90%=36% chance of failure = 64% chance of success.
Bc: 40%x50%=20% chance of failure = 80% chance of success.
With increasing skill, the benefits of having an assistant diminish…

Ca: 80%-10%=70% chance of success. Red flag #3.
Cb: 20%x90%=18% chance of failure = 82% chance of success.
Cc: 20%x50%=10% chance of failure = 90% chance of success.
….but never vanish entirely.

There’s a lot more work, because first you have to convert chances of success into chances of failure, then do the multiplication to get the net chance of failure, then convert that into the net chance of success. But it gives the right answers.

So it’s impractical as a solution, but provides an appropriate answer in principle.

The question now is, is either the above or the discredited “multiply chances of success” relevant to that default answer, or to the “industrial scale” answer that I placed in the sidebar?

At first glance, the answer may appear to be ‘yes’ with respect to the “chances of success”. However, closer examination shows that the question is mis-phrased. It’s only ‘yes’ if the question is to maximize the likelihood of success AND capitalize on it. The fact that the assistant can fail and the overall task still be successful means that the two rolls are decoupled, and so neither of the models of coupling rolls – multiplying chances of success, or of failure – are relevant.

The Partial problem perspective

Part of the reason why I (and probably you) feel like we’re groping our way towards a solution is because we haven’t actually defined exactly what “assistance” means. Does it mean making it easier for the main character to solve the whole thing? Does it mean solving (or attempting to solve) a smaller part of the whole, one that is commensurate with his relative skill?

There was a time when the latter set of possibilities would not even have occurred to me; GMing TORG expanded my horizons enormously. In particular, as I have stated before, TORG divides tasks into simple and complex. Simple tasks can be performed by a single character executing a single die roll, or even by simply stating their intent if the GM is feeling generously-disposed. Complex tasks are things like evading pursuit in a car-chase, or defusing a bomb. The key distinction is usually the tension that can result from only achieving a partial success with a single successful roll – if the tension doesn’t ramp up, it’s not worth making it a complex task.

Complex tasks are divided into four stages. These can all be the same difficulty, or the difficulty can vary – a lot depends on the GM’s ability to divide the overall task into four processes or procedures in his own mind, then assess them individually. Nor do all these tasks have to be completed by the same character – genuine team efforts assume new dimensions when assessed in this light.

So, under most circumstances, I would lean towards the “Partial Problem” perspective, with the Assistant or Assistants solving only one of them – and, should they fail to do so, with the main protagonist of the situation having the opportunity to salvage the situation.

A related thought presents itself, however: Can the protagonist improve his chances of success by dealing with the remaining three processes or procedures individually? How can you decide what the right difficulty levels should be?

Well, depending on the circumstances, the protagonist may or may not be able to recover from a failure by the assistant. if he can, then the die rolls are still decoupled; if not, we’re back at a situation in which both phases need to be successful, a coupled roll in which each of the sub-rolls must succeed.

In the latter circumstance, the probability of success overall is equal to the product of the chances of success of each of the stages. If you want the PCs to have a 50% chance of success, or think that that’s appropriate to what they are trying to achieve, then the formula is a% x b% = 50Î100. If b% is, say, 20 – defined as the % chance of the assistant helping to solve the problem – then a% = 250%. But a% is, under the TORG model, comprised of 3 more rolls – call them a1%, a2%, and a3% – and those also have to be factored in. Let’s say that a1% is 75%, and a2% is 60%, then a3 x100 = 250Î100/75/60, or 20/36 – roughly 56%.

But a better approach is to work with target numbers. If the entire task has a target number (a DC) of, say, 40, then you can say that “a1 x a2 x a3 x b = 40Î20Î20Î20”. And, as soon as you see it laid out in that way, you can see that anything over DC 20 in a2, a3, and b reduces the twice-as-high DC of a1. So setting two of them to DC 25 gives DC 40Î16/25 = DC 25.6 – you could call it DC 25, or DC 26 if less charitable. So, to get an overall DC 40, the assistant has to make one DC 20 check and the protagonist three DC 25 checks.

Multiplication of four numbers is difficult to do in your head, though, and if you throw in some division as well… it would be far more preferable to find some approximation that used addition and subtraction, even if it were less accurate.

Fortunately, there is something that will do the job: Overall DC = the sum of all (individual check DCs minus 10). So, if there are to be four checks, and the target is DC 40, the calculation is a1+a2+a3+b-40=40. So any combination that adds up to DC 80 would be satisfactory – something like 25, 25, 20 and 10, for example.

This is superior because these are absolute targets, and the chance of success then incorporates individual skill levels. You can even leave it up to the protagonist how much responsibility he is going to allocate to the assistant, or can define the targets yourself.

The upshot is that we now have multiple viable solutions to the problem, and we can pick and choose between depending on the circumstance and needs.

Reassessing the Five Questions

So, let’s take another look at those five questions and see where we end up.

The Dual Competence problem

Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one?

Okay, the two may have the same skill, but they won’t necessarily have it to the same degree. Mathematically, if the second character’s skill or stat roll is less than half that of the more proficient character, the latter is better proceeding alone unless he needs help – in which case, this is really a Universal Shoulder-To-The-Grindstone problem.

All of our potential solutions apply.

• Second character success gives a scaled bonus to the overall task:

  The critical decisions that the GM needs to make is what the relative Difficulty targets are going to be, because his roll is assessed in terms of degree of success or failure, which then provides a modifier to the protagonist’s roll.

  • Setting the assistant’s roll low means he is more likely to confer a bonus to the protagonist. However, it probably means that the protagonist’s roll is going to be against a harder target. Setting the roll high means that it’s extremely unlikely that his contribution will be helpful; that might be appropriate for an extremely technical task, but most of the time, it will be counterproductive in terms of game-play. In either case, this is still dividing the overall target DC into two rolls of unequal size.
  • If the assistant’s target is 12, and the overall target is 15, the assistant is accounting for just 2 of that overall total (12-10=2).
  • That leaves 13 for the protagonist to contribute, which sets his DC to 23. However, if the assistant does well, he could potentially give the protagonist a +5 bonus, effectively dropping the DC target to 18. If the protagonist already has stat bonuses of +4 and another 4 in relevant skill ranks, that would give him a better than 50-50 chance – he needs 10 or better on his die roll.
  • Compare that to the no-assistant alternative: DC 15, less 8, is 7. So the protagonist would succeed on a 7 or better – IF the GM didn’t penalize the DC because the character is attempting to do solo what should be the work of two people. A penalty of +2 to the DC leaves him slightly better off solo than using an assistant; a penalty of +3 leaves things evenly balanced; a penalty of more than +3 makes the assistant a better bet.

• Second character success confers Advantage to the protagonist (with a bonus if success is great enough); second character failure by a like amount confers Disadvantage to the protagonist.

  Once again, the critical decision to be made is in the form of the relative Difficulty targets. These establish whether or not the protagonist has Advantage, which can markedly impact on his chances of success (depending on his ability and the Difficulty that he has to achieve).

  • Setting the assistant’s target is more involved using this system. If you set it relatively low, you are more likely to confer advantage on the protagonist, and the commensurate increase in his target number makes that more beneficial. If you set it relatively high, you are more likely to confer disadvantage on the protagonist, but the commensurate reduction in his target number may make that less significant. On this occasion, it’s the “low assistant target” that is more appropriate to a highly-technical situation, and – unless some such consideration was in play – I would do my best to achieve a balanced outcome, i.e. one in which the assistant had a 50/50 chance of success.
  • If the assistant has +2 in stat bonuses, and +1 in skill ranks, a target of 14 would require a roll of 11 or better – which is 50/50 by definition. Once again, we need to split the overall DC of 15; 15=(a-10)+(14-10)=a-6 So a=21, and that’s the DC for the protagonist.
  • Half the time, the assistant will confer advantage on the protagonist. He has +4 from stats and +4 from skills, so his first roll has a target of 21-8=13 (or better). If he fails, (60% chance), he needs to hope that his re-roll salvages the situation; 60% of the time, it won’t. 60% of 60% is 36%, so his overall chance of success is 64%. If the assistant did well enough to also confer a +1 or +2 bonus, those numbers become 55% of 55% (=30%, 70% success) or 50% of 50% (75% overall success chance), respectively.
  • Less than 25% of the time, the assistant will confer a disadvantage. His target remains a DC of 21. There’s a 60% chance that he will fail immediately; if he doesn’t, there’s a 60% chance of a 40% chance that he will fail on the second roll, or 24% So there’s a total of 84% of ways that he can fail, leaving only a 16% chance of success. The success or failure of the assistant is close to make-or-break.
  • Without the assistant, the protagonist faces a +5 DC for attempting the task solo on the overall target of DC 15. So he needs 12 or better on the die roll, and has no second chances. The character is slightly better off not having an assistant. However, if the assistant gains just one or two more skill ranks, the increased likelihood of having advantage – or, more likely, the reduction in the DC target of the protagonist – more than compensates.

The Two Places At Once problem

One character with the Skill to solve a problem, another without – but who has to actually do the work, acting as the eyes and ears of the first character. Is the second character a help or a hindrance, and to what extent?

This throws a number of complications into the mix. The “protagonist” is now the lower-skilled member of the pair, possibly even having no skill at all (relying on native stat rolls). I have the vague memory that this automatically confers Disadvantage in 5e. On top of that, the character with the skill has visualize the situation from the protagonist’s description without being able to see what’s going on for himself, which has to be worth at least +2 and possibly more to the difficulty, and then has to issue clear, concise, and timely instructions to the protagonist (another +2 or more), who needs to comprehend them (+2 or more to the protagonist’s roll). The rest is the protagonist devising the correct solution and the antagonist correctly implementing it, which is to say the normal rolls.

Frankly, if the party gets out of this with the protagonist only getting +2 difficulty and the adviser only getting +4, they should count their lucky stars. Once again, the technicality of the task is a major consideration – if the task is extremely technical, +5 and +10 might be more appropriate, if it’s not, the +2 and +4 beckon. In between yields in-between numbers.

So let’s assume +3 and +7, respectively. Which means that we can disregard those complications until the last minute, and simply treat the task as a normal one.

• Second character success gives a scaled bonus to the overall task:

  This works exactly the same as it did above, assuming the same overall and relative DC base targets – but the roles of protagonist and “assistant” are reversed.

  • So we have a protagonist with +2 and +1; and an “assistant” with +4 and +4, who is taking the bulk of the base difficulty. If the overall DC is to be 15 (ignoring all those complications), that gives base DCs of 12 and 23 respectively, just as last time.
  • Once those numbers are known, we can apply the additional complications (DCs of 12+3=15 and 23+6=29, respectively), and then start to contemplate the outcomes.
  • A DC of 29 means that the assistant needs to roll 21 or better to succeed. So a foul-up somewhere along the line is inevitable. The vast likelihood is that the assistant will confer a -2 to -4 penalty to the protagonist, on top of everything else.
  • A DC of 15 would normally require a roll of 12 or better. If the penalty from the assistant is -2, that goes up to 14; if -4, it goes to 16. So the scale of the problem is such that it is possible to succeed – but difficult.

  But, if I was running a PC in this situation, I would anticipate the difficulties and do whatever I could to ameliorate the situation. If I could take extra time and double-check everything, I would make a point of it. If I could simplify the complexity of the overall task, perhaps being less ambitious, I would. In fact, I would probably overcompensate. This holds the potential of eliminating or even reversing those penalties, increasing the likelihood of success.

  And, as a GM, if I were to put characters into this sort of situation, I would ensure that I had provided the opportunity for characters to react in this way. I would rather the characters attempt something moderately difficult and succeed than attempt something more ambitious and die trying when it wasn’t necessary.

  It’s also worth pointing out that this all postulates a situation in which the expertise of the “adviser” is critical to success. If it’s as simple as draining the sump and filling the gas tank with sand, the degree of expertise required goes way down, and the overall difficulty should plummet accordingly.

• Using Advantage/Disadvantage

  Once again, and with the concluding caveats still in mind, this is also exactly the same as last time up to the point where we start resolving outcomes.

  • Base DCs are 21 and 14. With modifiers, they become 27 and 17. Looks like the GM didn’t buy the amelioration arguments, assuming that you’d be doing that sort of thing as much as possible anyway.
  • DC 27 means that the more-skilled “remote assistant” needs a 19 or 20 to succeed. So there is a slim chance of conferring Advantage. However, there’s a much greater chance of putting the protagonist at a Disadvantage.
  • DC 14 means the protagonist needs 11 or more to succeed. If he has Advantage, his net chance of success is 75%; if he is not at Disadvantage, it’s 50%; and it’s 25% if he is. The “value” of the assistance is critical.

The Combined Competence problem

Two characters, one with the relevant skill, one with a related skill, have a problem to solve. Both need to work together to solve the problem.

Once again, we have a similar basic situation, but with a different penalty to ascribe. What’s the penalty for only having a “related” skill?

With the basic system, it’s just another modifier to be applied to the “assistant’s” roll.

This might be handled differently according to the option chosen – depending on whether or not unskilled use automatically confers disadvantage and whether that precludes the possibility of also having Advantage.

Normally, Disadvantage would simply cancel out Advantage. But I would contemplate making an exception in this limited case, because if you don’t, employing an assistant cannot possibly confer a benefit to the character. Preserving the utility of having assistance demands thinking outside the box, and crawling out the bottom is the easiest way to go.

So, assuming that we do that, we now have to work out how to handle double Disadvantage (one outcome) or both Advantage and Disadvantage (another outcome).

The first is simple – add another d20 and you still have to take the worst, which is the same (in probability terms) of meaning that you need a third roll to be successful before you succeed.

The second is a little more complicated. There are two approaches: advantage first, or disadvantage first. I suspect that these will have a marked impact on the overall outcome. (I went ahead and calculated it, and found a huge difference – advantage first gives about 4.3% chance of success, Advantage second gives about a 24% chance of success.

So the question that you have to ask yourself is which one is more in keeping with the spirit of what’s going on? Given that the chance of success is about 20% with neither advantage nor disadvantage, and that it’s good to be generous as a GM when it doesn’t cost you anything much, I would go with the Advantage Second model. But that’s up to you.

The Universal Shoulder-To-The-Grindstone problem

There’s a large weight to be lifted, or a heavy door to break down. It’s going to take the efforts of more than one character to achieve the desired result. How do you correlate their attempts into a straightforward success or failure?

This introduces yet another class of issue. Most of the time when Strengths need to be combined, it’s to achieve some third-tier effect – like lifting something, or everyone joining forces to use a battering ram. And those effects are usually non-linear and only related to the other numeric variables by implication.

The Hero system fairs better than most in this respect – every +5 to a stat doubles all the derivatives of that stat, so if STR 10 can lift 100kg, STR 15 can lift 200kg, and STR 20, 400kg. That makes an increase predictable – if, eventually, too large to be plausible. But that’s easily fixed: you simply specify that having the assistance of a second character who successfully makes a STR check adds bonuses to the collective strength index as though it were a bonus to a skill roll or their total personal lift value, whichever is greater.

And, if it works that simply with one game system, why not with others? Well, it’s not quite that simple.

For a change, I’ll pull out the Pathfinder rule-book for this example. Let’s say that we have a character with a stat bonus of +2 helping a character with a stat bonus of +4 – which keeps our examples consistent. Those are the equivalent of STR 14-15 and STR 18-19 – call them 14 and 19, respectively. Let’s further assume that the lower STR character is starting with a light load and the higher STR character with a medium load. That means that the assistant is carrying 58 lbs or less (45 sounds reasonable), while the stronger character is carrying between 117 and 233 lbs (200lbs will do). More importantly, the maximum load that the STR 19 character can bear is 350lbs, so he has 150lbs of capacity left, while the maximum for the weaker character is 175lbs, leaving a capacity of 130lbs.

If the pair are confronted with a 200lb boulder that they have to relocate out of their way, it’s too heavy for either one alone. They might attempt to split it in two, but it stubbornly refuses to cooperate. The only solution is for them to work together. 200lbs is well within the combined carrying capacity of the pair, so you would expect this to represent little difficulty.

Work out the maximum result that the character can get, Divide the maximum heavy encumbrance of the character by the result. You only have to do this once for a character; the results won’t change unless the character changes his STR. What it gives you is a number of lbs per STR DC of +1, starting at zero. So, work out the DC (rounding up) for what the character is currently carrying – this won’t change unless the character’s load or STR changes, either. That gives you the DC for them to make a Stat check. As usual, the results then convey a bonus or penalty. Now do the same DC calculation (if you haven’t already) for the other character. Determine their STR DC. They get to make a check, with the bonus from the assisting character(s). Multiply the weight per DC by however much the stronger character succeeded by. Adding that to the amount they are already carrying gives you exactly how much the pair or group can lift.

So, STR 14, 45 lbs out of a maximum of 175. The character has +2 modifier, so the maximum he can get on a STR roll is 22. Divide 175 by 22 – roughly, it doesn’t have to be exact – 175/22 is roughly 88/11, so 8 lbs per +1. Which gives his current load of 45 lbs a DC of 6 (with a few pounds reserve before the next increase). The character makes a STR roll and probably succeeds – quite probably by a reasonable margin, though with any particular roll, who knows? Let’s say that he gives +3 to the stronger character on this particular roll.

Our stronger character: STR 19, 200lbs out of a maximum of 350. The character has +4 modifier, so the maximum he can get on a STR check is 24. Divide 350 by 24 (roughly) and you get 350/24 = 175/12 = 88/6 = 44/3 = 16 1/3 lbs per +1. Call it 16 lbs. This gives the current load of the character a DC of 200/16 = 100/8 = 50/4 = 25/2 = 13. He makes his STR check and succeeds by 6, plus the +3 from the weaker character, for a total of 9 – which, between them on this attempt lets them handle 9×16 = 135 lbs. Not enough to lift the boulder, but certainly enough to move it a little, perhaps rolling it to one side. Note that the problem isn’t really the assisting character; it’s the size of the load the stronger character is working with. If he sheds his armor and pack, dropping the carrying capacity that he’s using, he also reduces the DC he has to achieve, which in turn increases the amount by which he succeeds.

Or perhaps you think that the final calculation should be based on double the margin of success, and/or the contribution by the assisting character should be doubled. These are your House Rules, you can rearrange them as you see fit. You could even decide to forego the whole notion of a STR roll and simply add the unused carrying capacities of the two characters together in such cases – but there’s still that darned tug of war….

The Two-Is-Less-Than-Many-Hands problem

A problem would normally need two or more characters acting in a coordinated fashion to solve it – but the only character in the vicinity is on his or her own. How much more difficult is it to find and apply a solution?

Well, this is a question that we’ve answered a couple of times already in the course of the discussion, albeit by applying one of two arbitrary values – +2 difficulty, or my personal recommendation, +5 difficulty. Per “pair of hands” that should be used, but aren’t.

The Standard Tests

There are five standard tests that I use whenever I think deeply about this sort of thing (and turn those thoughts into House Rules). Between them, they make sure that I’ve got the practicalities nailed down pretty well. This post is already extraordinarily long, so I’m just going to hit the high points of each.

The Sneak Test

Five PCs, all trying to sneak across the room at the same time. If one fails, they all fail. Having them roll individually is the obvious approach – but it presumes that none of them can help any of the others. What if character #1 dislodges something that would fall to the ground with a loud clatter (a failure) – but character #2 is in a position that lets him or her attempt to grab it and set it down quietly? Interpret that into game mechanics using your chosen game system and apply to a couple of randomly-chosen typical characters. Make a note of any additional House Rules you come up with – for example, characters who succeed might pay their resulting “bonuses” into a pool that can be used to offset failure by another character, so that a sufficiently catastrophic noise can’t be prevented, but anything less might. The choices are yours.

The Lift Test

I’ve already shown you this one – a boulder too big for two characters to handle, given the load they’re carrying. You might like to look at an even larger boulder with three or four characters instead, because this is the sort of thing that’s likely to be a group activity..

The Man Those Oars Test

Another group activity, but this has a double-sting to it. You don’t need great strength to man an oar; it’s more important to get the timing right, matching your counterpart on the other side of the vessel. You also don’t want to get out of sync with those in front and behind. So it’s rather more complicated and comprehensive than it first appears.

The Football-Pass Test

This is another whole-of-party test. Each member in succession is to receive an object (the football) and carry it a specified distance forward past 2-6 characters trying to intercept them, then “hand it off” to the next PC – who will have to have read the plans and motion of the character with the football well enough to be in position to receive it. The more poorly they have done so, the more difficult the roll needed to take possession. The goal is to get the football the whole length of the ground.

The Crossword Puzzle

Two characters are attempting to solve a crossword puzzle. They’ve gotten all the easy words, between them – and are now trying to figure out the more complicated ones. Use a real crossword for added realism. Bonus: work out a way in which the roll determines how long you can research the subject on Google.

The very ordinariness of these potential applications go to showing how universal this problem is. You don’t have to adopt my solutions; you just need to find a satisfactory answer. Finding your own techniques and mastering them is therefore something that should be a priority for every GM. Because the one thing that you can state for certain is that before too long, these rules will be needed – and probably in relation to a problem that you’ve never even thought of. That’s just the way these things work.

Even with the considerations described at the start, I almost didn’t write this article today. You see, last night I thought of a new category for the Blogdex, one that to the best of my recollection would have absolutely no articles to populate it, even though it is a very common occurrence. I was tempted to write that article, instead…

Updates Björn Arnold, in the comments, has quite astutely pointed out a couple of omissions. Some hasty research later, here they are. Aid Another Rather than the 3.5 rules, I looked at the Pathfinder version on the basis that it was more likely to be current and in use. “You can help someone [succeed] by making the same kind of skill check … If you roll a 10 or higher, the character you’re helping gets a +2 on their check.” There are a number of restrictions, the most significant of which is that the character aiding another has to be capable of solving the problem or challenge on their own (presumably with a successful skill check at an improbable DC, or why don’t they just solve the problem in the first place). This is typical of the limited attention devoted to cooperative actions in RPGs, an inadequate gesture in the right direction. It’s full of holes. The the DC is high enough, a character can work miracles on a successful roll – “I run across the sunbeam until I’m on top of the thief then jump on top of him” stuff. So either the restriction is totally irrelevant, or the GM is required to enforce a double-standard and hope that no-one notices that high-DC successes only only count as successes when he “wants” them to. It’s too restrictive. “The same kind of skill check”? Please, as though there were only one way to skin a cat. If that were rephrased to “Only abilities that the GM deems appropriate can be used in an attempt to aid another. A skill check of the same kind is always considered appropriate,” then the situation would be much improved. Consider: Character #1 is attempting to burst through a gathered crowd of Undead to place a holy symbol on the altar. Character #2 attempts to Aid Another by using his Turn Undead to make the gathered crowd hesitate and rear back, even though he is not capable of Turning them all.” That sounds utterly reasonable to me, and reasonably clever, to boot. It’s inflexible. One size of difficulty fits all, and the benefit is always +2 if you succeed, no matter how much or how little ability you have to contribute. It could be seen to punish competence – “If you roll a 10 or higher” is vague. If that’s a straight die roll and not a fixed DC target, then the rules make the DC for Aiding Another effectively equal to 10 + your skill level and stat bonus. I don’t think so. In the alternative, it’s too easy. A DC of 10 means that even with a single skill level and no stat bonus, a character needs only to roll a 9 or better to succeed, which they will do more than half the time. A character with +8 in skill and stat bonuses only needs to roll 2 or better, and will come as close as you can get to automatic success. Frankly, that’s why the benefit has to be so trivial. All right, to be fair, at low levels – up to level 4, say – +2 can be a significant boost. But to your 16th-level whatever? This is a symptom of a lot of games that comes from insufficient variety in playtesting. Most playtesters will play a game the way it’s supposed to be played, i.e. characters start at 1st level and have to work their way up. That means that by the time the playtest concludes, either the characters have advanced way too fast, or higher levels have hardly been tested at all. Most game companies don’t even realize this is a problem, so they don’t do anything about it. Another question arises: Stacking limits. “Aid Another” bonuses either stack, or they don’t. If they don’t, only one character can ever aid another, denying the conceptual existence of the 3-man job. If they do, it’s far too easy to just keep throwing warm bodies at an impossible check until enough of them succeed to give you +20 or +40 or whatever. Both answers are irretrievably flawed. Conclusion: Aid Another is not a good prototype for rules on Collaborative Efforts.

“Skill Challenges” from D&D 4e Caveat: I’m not a 4e expert, I’ve never played the system, so the following is strictly from a theoretical appraisal of the mechanics as described on the WOTC website. The GM defines a problem or situation as an encounter requiring a certain number of successful skill checks before the encounter is resolved in the PCs favor. If they accumulate a certain number of failures before achieving that target, it ends in a PC failure. The GM also nominates which skills are most applicable to the situation (the Primary List) and a number of lesser skills that may be able to contribute to a solution (the Secondary List). Skills on the Secondary List must achieve a “Hard DC” while those on the Primary List must achieve an “Easy DC”. Anything the players want to try that’s not on the Primary List are automatically considered to be on the Secondary List unless it is utterly brilliant (which some interpret as being ‘capable of solving the situation with a single die roll’, i.e. aborting the entire Skill Challenge). The GM is entitled to consider any roleplayed action or ability use other than a skill as an automatic success or an automatic failure towards the respective totals. On the face of it, an interesting concept, with a lot of things to like about it. It took a little while to digest it, but then the flaws began to make themselves apparent. It’s inflexible. Some solutions may be far more viable than others and should count for more than one success. The rules as stated break a problem down into N equal steps, of which N-F must succeed (where N is the number of successes needed to “win” and F is the number of failures needed to “lose”). It then insists that each of these stages must be resolved separately – you can be 5/6ths of the way to success but that doesn’t make the final step any easier. It’s anarchic. There’s no need for a rational and coherent plan; a character can do anything he wants, even something that would arguably make matters worse, and it still counts as a success if he makes his skill check. At the same time, no matter how “right” a character’s intended action is, if they don’t have the skill to perform it on their own, it doesn’t count as a success. It’s easily abused and encourages cliche behavior instead of roleplaying. Once again: as a character, you have a choice: go with what the GM wants you to use to resolve the situation (easy DC), even if that’s not your character’s style, and no matter how bad you are at it, or you can go with your strengths, no matter how irrelevant or harmful they might be to the situation (hard DC), because you are more confident of making a hard DC in an area of competence. At low levels, this might work; at mid-to-high levels – as soon as you have 10 skill ranks in something – the whole system starts to break down. It’s inflexible in other ways, as well. It locks the GM into one of two black-and-white outcomes, success or failure. You might as well be using a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Real life isn’t like that, and neither is a well-run RPG – there are all sorts of halfway houses in between. Perhaps you get offered everything you’ve been trying to bargain for – but at a much higher price than you really want to pay, for example. It’s an overbearing solution. The system imposes the adventure author’s preferred solutions onto the players and penalizes them for thinking outside those channels. On the positive side, however, the players are free to contribute anything they think might help the situation (assuming they are playing it straight and not trying to exploit the mechanical failures described) and they will be assessed even-handedly – even if the system is prejudiced against them. That’s more than most game systems manage – just take a look back at “Aid Another”. But, last – and the worst failing of all – this system turns what should be a roleplaying situation into a die rolling situation. Despite the interesting elements – which take a more holistic view of the party as a whole than most game systems, which are focused exclusively on the individual – this is an abysmal solution to the problem with some minor saving graces.

When the Blogdex was first published, it was brilliant. It made it easy to find the exact article I wanted to refer to, enabling rich cross-linking that would lead the reader to other relevant content and began creating a broader overview from the individual articles. I’m sure that it performed a similar service for those readers who found it on the site.

When the Blogdex was first published, it was a nightmare. It was so large a document (38,475 words if you don’t count all the HTML formatting; 62,352 if you do – 107 pages of content) that it broke all sorts of systems and subsystems – everything from the RSS Feed on down.

As time went by, it became less useful and less frequently consulted as the content that wasn’t indexed grew as a percentage of the total.

At around the time of the 750th post, it became almost obsolete; the articles I was cross-linking to weren’t on the index, they were too recent. I thought seriously about updating it – which was (long-time readers may recall) the original plan – but was daunted by the structural complexity and the sheer amount of work involved, and circumstances that would not accommodate either of those considerations.

I wasn’t about to let that get in the way this time around. I’ve been planning for this for about a year, now. I had other ideas as well – but they were let go when the planning and organizational requirements threatened to make the Blogdex untenable. For example, a roll-call of podcasts and webcasts, with their advice to GMs, similar to the one I did for bloggers in A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration. Well, that will have to wait for the 1250th post, due around the end of October, 2023. After all, I’m not just celebrating the 10th Anniversary milestone, significant as that is – I’m also celebrating the 1000th post here at Campaign Mastery that has meaningful content! Again, the most appropriate way to do it that I can think of is by updating the Blogdex, and in the process, celebrating those past 1000 posts!

The Usual Review – extended

It’s traditional, when these milestones come around, to provide some site insights. So, in it’s ten years, Campaign Mastery has seen 1,371,092 page views by 546,475 visitors who have been to the site 809,475 times. There have been 1009 posts (including this one), producing 5517 approved comments, 295,218 spam (and counting). The average visit lasts almost 1.75 minutes and the average visitor has been to the site almost 1.5 times.

When you factor in the number of visitors who drop in, realize “this is not the site I’m looking for” and exit almost immediately, those numbers are huge. 74.42% of visitors fall into that category, accounting for 406,687 visitors, visits, and page views. That means that the remaining 139,788 actual readers have provided 964,405 page views over 402,788 visits, the numbers shoot way up – 2.9 visits to the average reader, and 2.4 articles (pageviews) read per visit.

And those are articles of substance – the average is currently estimated to be around 4,200 words (down from 4,450), so 1008 articles is 4,233,600 words.

If you figure that the average visit time of those who depart right away is 10 seconds, which seems reasonable, the average visit length for the rest works out to 6 min 21.4 seconds. Or, to put it another way, 78,970,762 seconds have been spent by visitors actually reading the content. That’s 914 days, 19 min, and 22 seconds, if they did it consecutively with no gaps, 24/7. A smidgen over 2.5 years. If it only happened 8 hours a day, that’s 7.5 years. If it was 8 hours a day, five days a week, that’s 10.5 years – about 6 months longer than the site has even existed!

Another “measure of success” is that our security systems stop about 6,500 attempts to hack the site every month, totaling more than 350,000 over the life of the site. I don’t know if that’s higher or lower than others, and I’m not sure that I want to know!

Comparisons

It’s worth comparing the numbers above with those from the 750th post. Since then, there have been: approx 350,000 page views and approx 220,000 visits.

A more recent snapshot was included in Beginnings And Legacies, the New Years post at the start of 2018. Since it was published, we’ve had 43,982 visitors, visiting 58,059 times, and viewing 80,464 pages. That’s over roughly 11 months of the current year.

These are all numbers to be proud of, and I am. There are literally hundreds of visitors who have come to Campaign Mastery more than 500 times. There are tens of thousands who have been more than 100 times, and about 100,000 who only pop in occasionally but who have been back more than once.

But, looking over the last few years of the history of the site, one thing is clear:

The Ennies Cast A Long Shadow

You can get a better idea of how Campaign Mastery is, and has been, traveling if you look at the graphic below.

The first thing you notice is the big clump of high numbers on the left-hand side. The red line is the average traffic to the site (number of visits) before the Ennie nomination, at which time the growth rate was about 4% per annum; the Green line is what they immediately went up to (on average) when Campaign Mastery won Silver. For almost two years, this 50%+ boost to readers continued, and then – as abruptly as it came – it stopped.

A little further to the right, you can see the effect of merely being nominated. I still get a few visitors every day from the list of nominees.

The second thing that there is to notice is that with the exception of those months on the left called out for Ennie-related boosts, the average each month has been fairly consistent. Sure, some months have been low – October 2017, and October-November 2018 – but there have also been a number at the average or better, and the Ennie-nomination months were way better. And even during the Ennies-win boost, November and the months to either side of it were noticeably lower in visitors. It’s just something that seems to happen every year.

The red line was just below 10,000 a month; the blue line is just below 12,000. And, when you track the weekly values, and do the math, growth is still about 4-5% per annum. Campaign Mastery, from the standpoint of readers, is doing just fine.

The Immediate Future

So Campaign Mastery is ten years old – how do I plan to celebrate? And how am I going to get around the problems with the Blogdex?

I have feature articles planned for December 10th, 17th, 24th, and 31st. There may be other surprise pop-up articles as well – I neither confirm nor deny.

But the Big Birthday Project is going to be the Blogdex.

• You may have noticed that “The Best” has been replaced by “Blogdex” in the menu at the top of the page. “The Best” is now considered a special subcategory within the Blogdex. (Actually, I bet most of you haven’t. The menu is like the furniture, never noticed unless it collapses.)
• Starting 2 days from now, and continuing daily, I will be adding a page to the Blogdex every day. Each page contains a master category (and there has been a little reorganizing since the original Blogdex).
• At the same time, I will be posting these pages contents here at Campaign Mastery as posts.
• That means that the last one will go up on December 23, if all goes according to plan. But I’ve got the rest of December as margin for error. And most of January, if I need it – though I would rather spend that time preparing my campaigns for 2019 play.
• These posts and pages will initially be seeded with the content from the first Blogdex. They will be updated daily with new material until the Blogdex is up to date. I calculate that I’ll have to do 2.4 months worth per day to finish at the end of the month. I’ll try to do 3 to build up a cushion and let me take a few days off over the holidays.
• Because I’ve slowed the publishing rate of late, there will be an acceleration towards the end – right when the overheads of having to update many pages will really be starting to bite. This is not a coincidence.

You read that right – for most of the month of December, there will be daily updates to Campaign Mastery, or near-daily.

Resetting The Official Post Number

I’ve written before about the problems in counting posts, here at Campaign Mastery, most recently in the introduction to “If Wishing Made It So“, which was – technically – the 1000th post. The problem is that there are a number of posts that I don’t think count toward the site’s mission, which I analyzed in great detail in the original Blogdex, and which I will recapitulate a little later in this post.

An announcement of “No post today” should not count (that’s happened just 2 or 3 times in 10 years). If the site limits (as they were at the time) force an article to be broken up into several posts – it happened – and those were published virtually simultaneously, it should count as one and not three (or whatever). Extraordinary announcements – be they about service difficulties or Ennie nominations – shouldn’t count. And so on.

All told, there are 10 or 12 posts that shouldn’t count by a reasonable definition of function. And perhaps another 4 to 6 that shouldn’t count by stricter definitions, and another half-dozen or so that maybe shouldn’t count under the strictest and most pedantic of definitions.

So, if this is officially post 1009 – which it is, according to the system software – then the corrected number is 999. Or 997. Or 993. Or 991. Or maybe just 979. And the real 1,000th post could happen next week, or at the end of the month, or in January, or February, or March, if I publish at the rate of 1 a week.

With the four feature articles planned, the “technical” count will go up to 1013. With 16 additional Blogdex posts, it will hit 1029 by the end of the year. So, here’s the plan: The final post of 2018 will be officially designated the 1000th. Any shortfall that a strict count would produce will be more than compensated for by the multiple Blogdex posts. And whether they count as one or as sixteen – who cares?

A restatement of purpose

As part of the original Blogdex, I analyzed the mission statement of Campaign Mastery – it’s at the top of every page, right under the blog title. I thought it appropriate to recapitulate and update that section of the original for this post.

Expert advice on creating and running exceptional campaigns

That mission statement contains four key pieces.

Expert Advice

I’ve been active in this hobby for approaching forty years, and I’ve seen and done a lot in that time. This magazine/blog (‘magablog?’) exists to pass on what I’ve learned, and any new thoughts, discoveries, and insights that present themselves as I continue to game and grow. There are so many posts tagged “DM Advice” that it no longer shows up in the tag cloud – 595 of them.

Creating

There’s an emphasis on creation and creativity. One of the most frequently-used categories here is ‘The End of The Rainbow’, which is the term I coined to symbolize inspiration and sources of inspiration. Any post so tagged is one that contains plot ideas that you might be able to adapt to your own adventures and campaigns, if not incorporate outright. As of this writing, 335 posts have been tagged that way.

Running

It’s not enough to make something great, you have to be able to use it, and use it well. Otherwise, what’s the point? So the second major strand of discussion is using whatever you’ve got, and how to do it as effectively as possible, or providing tools for readers to use. There are more than 160 posts devoted to writing, more than 200 dedicated to tools & techniques, and more than 150 to running encounters (note that some of these overlap!) – enough that practicality is a third key strand of content.

Exceptional

Well, at least, I hope so. I strive for a depth of article that few blogs can match. Others might be more profound, or more insightful, or more easily-read; my goal is to write articles that are both comprehensive and evergreen. While I will often tag posts with a particular game system, such as D&D, that usually means that the content can be specifically applied to campaigns using those game mechanics – not that it is or should be considered restricted to those game systems. Very few articles at Campaign Mastery could not be tagged “Universal”.

The other aspect of uniqueness that helps make Campaign Mastery stand out is my style, which is as close as I can get to my conversational style. That’s one of the tricks that I use to achieve my ability to write quickly, and it’s something that I learned from the non-fiction of Isaac Asimov. It means that I employ more words than are strictly necessary, but those words flow out far more quickly than they would if I strived for a more succinct mode of expression. It’s my ongoing hope that it also makes the articles easier to read as well.

The Mission

So that’s what I aim for with Campaign Mastery. But that all comes at a price. The more content there is in an article, and the depth I strive for generates a lot of content, the more inadequate the introductory paragraph/section becomes as a synopsis of the whole.

On top of that, I’m not afraid to digress if it seems interesting enough, relevant enough, useful enough, or important enough. Several times, people have told me that they later discovered that they had given up reading an article too soon, because there didn’t seem to be anything of value to them within it – and in the process, missed a tip that would have greatly benefited their games. Others, who skim articles, often report shooting straight past the meat of the article. I do my best to call these asides out in a very visible way, but sometimes it’s simply not enough.

The real price to be paid is time. It takes me a lot of time to write an article for Campaign Mastery – sometimes more than I really have. It takes a lot of time for people to read those articles. I recognize that doing so is an investment of a very precious commodity, a GM’s time, and so I try hard to reward that investment.

These considerations have all played into my thinking about Campaign Mastery beyond the tenth anniversary.

The future of Campaign Mastery

I abandon a lot of ideas and half-finished articles because it becomes clear that they simply won’t fit Campaign Mastery’s publishing timetable. Over the last year, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to lift those constraints. Some have worked, others have been partial successes, one or two have achieved only abject failure.

The Campaign Mastery Guarantee

With the possible exception of outside forces beyond my control, I will commit to publishing a new and complete article once a week, just as I have been.

Beyond That Promise

The rest of the time I have available for Campaign Mastery will be spent working on one or more articles that have fallen into the “too much time” trap. When these are complete, one of two things will happen – they will either be inserted into the regular publishing sequence, pushing back the article next scheduled to appear (or maybe the one after that), or they will be held aside for publishing in a low- to mid-priced e-book (depending on the content and page-count). Once I’ve largely caught up (and heaven knows when that will be), I’ll start taking published articles here at Campaign Mastery and updating them for e-book publication, too. And, for the record, I consider US$2 or less to be low-priced and US$5-10 to be mid-priced). At last count, I had almost 70 of these half-complete projects underway.

And, from time to time, I might post something extra “mid-week”. But this will be an exception, not a rule.

In particular in e-book terms, I’m looking at the 24 remaining parts of the Diversity Of Seasons series. These take about a day per season per location, with 1 season for 7-8 locations contained in each post. If I could work on CM seven days a week, that would be barely manageable – but I can’t, so these take 2-3 weeks each to complete. The current plan is to post twelve-to-fourteen more of these here at Campaign Mastery – finishing Winter, and covering Spring, Summer, and Autumn for those locations whose Winters have already been featured – and to put the remaining 10-12 into a mid-priced e-book. When I get that far, the plan will be to alternate – one “post” for the e-book, one long-term post for Campaign Mastery.

But, before I get to that, there’s another epic post to complete. It’s so big that I might have to publish it as a free e-book or even an e-book bundle. Or I might split it into four or five or six parts (even though it really needs to be read more-or-less as one continuous document or you tend to get lost). It’s that big. To be honest, I haven’t figured out how to best manage it yet. But I’ve been working on it for more than a year, and want to see it done, so that’s my priority.

Changes To The Blogdex

I’m planning to incorporate a couple of changes into the Blogdex as I go.

• One or two of the categories have been slightly redefined – “Rules” has become “Rules & Mechanics” and now includes RPG Theory, for example.
• There will be a couple of new categories – “Places” and [Ongoing] “Campaigns”.
• Some of the campaigns will have new sub-categories – I’m going to add “Time Travel” to the Genre Overviews, for example. Some existing categories will be renamed – “Problems” will become “Problem Solving”, for example.

Other changes will occur as a result of the content – if something just doesn’t seem to fit the existing subcategories, that indicates the need for another subcategory. Growth will be organic, just as it was in the original.

How to use the Blogdex

At the top of each page of the Blogdex is a menu panel. You can get to any page of the Blogdex from any other page. Each button on the menu leads to one of the subcategories of the Blogdex. To use the Blogdex, simply decide which category is most likely to contain the article you want to find, and click on the button that goes with that category. The master page also lists the subcategories for the whole index structure to help you. Right now, the only links that are active are to and from The Best. That’s where those daily updates come in.

Once you get to a category page, you will find a definition/description of the category, a list of the subcategories, and the page content. Some subcategories are further divided so that related posts are grouped together. Decide the subcategory or subcategories that you want to check, and scroll down to it. I am investigating the possibility of using anchor tags, but these all have to be done manually, and I’ve never worked with them before.

When you get to the right subcategory, scroll through looking at titles and descriptions until you find what you are looking for. Posts are NOT necessarily listed in date sequence. Again, the purpose is to collate related posts into clusters. Each entry includes one or more paragraphs of description. Some series may have a single entry that links to each part of the series, or to the first part, or to the series index page.

Where items are relevant to several categories or subcategories, they will either be drawn out into a dedicated sub-category, or redundant entries made. Better to list a post two or three times than not be able to find it when you want it.

So, that’s the plan. I’ve spent the last two days intensively working on the graphics, layout and HTML that will bring it to fruition, and suspect that I have one more day of work on that front, and then it’s all about content….

 

10,000 random points mapped 100 at a time (100 frames taking 2 seconds to play). Genuinely random results appear to contain clusters of results and results forming straight lines, both of which we instinctively consider non-random events.
Image by CaitlinJo via Wikipedia Commons, Licensed under CC3.0 for use with attribution.

701 492 537 313 432 835.

191 489 361 702 127 659.

723 296 032 553 407 934.

Those all look like fairly random strings of digits to me. How about:

333 333 333 333 333 333?

Or
022 022 022 022 022 022?

Or
123 450 123 450 123 450?

Or
000 000 000 000 000 001?

Because the human mind detects a pattern, it rejects implicitly the possibility of achieving that pattern by random means. But all these random strings of digits are equally probable; I’ve simply cherry-picked outcomes that play to human perceptions or misperceptions, to prove a point.

In AD&D’s DMG, there was a random dungeon generator for solo play. Great for giving a new GM the chance to wander around the rules and get to know them; lousy for any other purpose. This was truly random and uncontrolled; you were just as likely to get a 40′ x 40′ room with 1 Skeleton in it as you were to get a 10′ x 10′ room with a family of Black Dragons.

The concept of randomness is fundamental to RPGs, as I have explained in past posts. The primary method by which GMs inject randomness into their games in a reasonably controlled manner is by using die rolls.

But it’s not the only way. There are mathematical functions that can be used to generate strings of random numbers on computers, and those have been adapted into various die rolling apps and contrivances over the years – starting, from memory, with Dragon Bones, long ago.

How Random is Artificial Randomness?

How random are these random numbers?

They aren’t, not really. But then, neither are any of the numbers I showed at the start of this article. They were all generated by playing around with my desktop calculator app and then throwing away any leading digits and the decimal point.

A mathematical function provides a consistent result – give it exactly the same inputs, and it will give you the same result, time after time, completely predictably. The key words here are “exactly the same inputs”. Computer random number generators all rely on a “seed value” but various values can be applied to it so that the results appear random.

If you use some sort of semi-random value as the seed, the output quickly approaches a good simulation of randomness – for example, the last 4 digits of the time since the year 1980, in seconds.

For these pseudo-random results to be of use to us in any practical sense, they usually have to be interpreted, and that’s where things once again can get sticky. There are a couple of lessons that I had to learn the hard way.

For example, let’s say we’re trying to simulate a simple d6. The random number generator spits out a value between 0 and 1 – a long string of decimal places.

The easy and obvious answer is to multiply our random number by 6, and then lop off any decimal points. But, if you do that, the first thing you’ll see is a whole heap of 0’s and no 6’s.

Okay, so you have to multiply by 5, lop off the decimal points, and add 1 to the result? Because a d6 produces results of 1 to 6, not 0 to 6, right?

Let’s say that our initial random numbers are – by pure coincidence – 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, repeat. This spreads the outcomes evenly in probability across the range 0-1, doesn’t it?

Put those into our d6 simulation, and we get 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, repeat. That doesn’t look like a very even distribution at all, does it? 3 and 6 are simply not coming up often enough. And understanding why starts to get very complicated.

A fair assumption would be that it’s because of a rounding error. So, you decide that what you have to do is round the results off and not just throw away the decimal points. And this looks good at first, but that impression doesn’t survive.

It’s because we’re collapsing ranges of outcomes into a point, and our rounding-off function makes those ranges unequal. And, on top of that, because we’re mapping one scale onto another, we can still get rounding errors.

You see, people are used to thinking of numbers as this precise thing, and sometimes they aren’t. Numbers can be downright fuzzy when you get right into it. What people really mean (but don’t realize it) when they say “one” is “any number greater than the minimum threshold for an approximate value of 1 and less than the minimum threshold for an approximate value of 2”. Changing the rounding only changes the thresholds.

No, the real problem here is that we’re taking an infinite range of decimals and squeezing them into too small a set of finite values separated by thresholds – and that computers have no capacity for dealing with fuzziness.

Implications Of Fuzziness in Random Numbers

This is hugely important in computer games in which money rides on the outcome. Any sort of bias is totally unacceptable. It’s slightly less important in computer games that have in-game buy-ins, and slightly less important again with computer games that cost you nothing but time. And, at that same level of importance, we also find all the RPG applications, where these principles also apply.

Any table which does not map individual results to singular outcomes can be described as containing thresholds at which the next outcome applies and intervals between thresholds. In fact, ANY non-infinite non-recursive sequence does so, whether it be die rolls in series or randomly-generated digits in sequence, or some device intended to simulate one or the other..

I know a number of GMs who (back in the day) refused to permit Dragon Bones to be used at their tables because they didn’t trust the randomness of the outcome to be evenly distributed across all the possible results. And while this appears a somewhat paranoid perspective, to be fair (and as I hope I’ve shown), the subject can be a LOT more complicated than it first appears.

Minimizing errors

The more decimal places we carry our random number to, the smaller the resulting rounding error. This is good, because it means that we can reasonably simulate such real-world things as dice and slot machines and weather patterns and roulette wheels and what-have-you. With enough sophistication in the interpretation engine of a game, we can even simulate human behavior within a limited context – AI opponents in racing games, for example, can make decisions and even mistakes, just like a human player.

It all comes down to the interpretation of the results. And that brings us squarely back to RPGs.

The Relevance to Applications of Randomness

There are two real applications of random numbers in an RPG. The first is to select between possible outcomes of an action, i.e. to incorporate the fuzziness in outcome caused by innumerable un-enumerated variable factors. Some will bias the likely outcome one way, some the other, but the final result is a definite outcome. This is the application of die rolls to resolve attack attempts and skill rolls and the like.

And the other is as a decision-maker. If the alternatives are sensible, then this can – in theory – work. But, quite often, the alternatives are not equally-sensible, or equal in probability, and the end result is an AD&D Random Dungeon, where sometimes results are believable and sometimes they strain credibility beyond breaking point.

Yet, there can be no doubt that if we don’t throw a little randomness into the picture, the results are inherently biased. Does the villain think of the solution to the conundrum being presented by the PCs? If the GM can’t think of one, the villain obviously can’t – but what if there is a solution that’s obvious to the DM?

Well, what’s sauce for the goose, as the saying goes. Make a roll to see if the villain thinks of the way out. Or, if he’s smart enough to automatically succeed on such a roll eventually, make a roll to see how long it takes.

This is constraining the outcomes into sensible ones and then randomly selecting between them. But trying to simulate everything this way slows the game to a crawl and, worse, relies on the GM being cognizant of all the possibilities, all the time. That’s an unrealistic expectation.

One way to counter it is to roll the dice and then work out an interpretation – even, possibly, just what you were rolling dice for. In other words, roll the dice and then free-associate with the result relative to the highest and lowest possible rolls.

I’m not a big fan of this. What if you have no ideas? What if your ideas suck? What if your ideas are stuck in a rut? What if you risk becoming (gasp) predictable?

Your imagination only has to fail once and you can find yourself in big trouble. Better by far to have some notion of where the villain wants things to go, and roll for how far he is able to advance his plans – then free-associate with that.

What this all boils down to is knowing when to apply some randomness, and when not to. You could call it directed randomness, or confined randomness, or even planned randomness – but my preferred term is constrained randomness.

Why? Because that relates everything back to the skill checks that we’ve already decided are completely acceptable. And, just as you don’t require a PC roll to do up a button or tie his shoelaces, it implies control over the circumstances and restraint in the outcomes being selected between to amongst those that move the game forwards.

So, Randomness is not always a good thing?

Let’s take another example. Something is about to happen to one of the PCs, you don’t know which.

One option is to simply roll for which one it is going to be.

But a far better approach would be to consider which of the players has had the least to do so far, and which will have the least to do for the rest of the days’ play as far as you can tell, and choose the player who scores lowest in both respects. This is metagaming – but it’s metagaming to spread the spotlight a little more evenly.

A third alternative would be to choose the PC target who would interact in the most entertaining way with whatever is going to happen, enhancing the vicarious entertainment for everyone at the gaming table. Again, metagaming for a positive purpose.

In my book, choices 2 and 3 have it all over choice 1. The only thing the first option has going for it is that it looks “fair” to the players. So “roll” and collapse the outcome to your predetermined choice. This is sometimes known as a Magician’s Force.

When you play blackjack or roulette or whatever in a casino (virtual or real), you have a simple objective – end the game with more money than you started with. It won’t always happen; the odds always favor the house. But they all want you to have fun getting to whatever the outcome is so that you’ll come back and try again. And it goes without saying that the games have to be absolutely fair, or customers will walk. Even the perception of non-randomness could be a major problem for this kind of business – so they have good reason to make sure that they really understand randomness.

The analogy with roleplaying games couldn’t be clearer.

Of course, beginners tend to favor games with simple rules. That’s so that they can make mistakes that are obvious enough to learn from them, which in no way describes even a simple RPG. And, to be fair, most games these days are designed to optimize the payouts if you know what you’re doing – even slot machines such as those offered by NetBet slots.

On a multi-line slot machine, how much do the odds improve with each additional line? Which configuration of bets results in the best odds of winning more than you have spent? Or at least of minimizing losses on this pull of the handle or push of the button so that you can have another chance with what’s left?

There is also the phenomenon described as beginner’s luck. Or, to put it another way, non-random randomness.

Wikipedia’s brief article on the subject lists a number of explanations for the perceived phenomenon, some of which I must admit had never occurred to me. But RPGs add one more: the GM going easy on a new player (whether or not you should do so is a subject for another time). The key point to be made here is that randomness is inherently fuzzy unless you make it your business to delineate its significance.

The Principles Of Randomness

All this can be boiled down to a few simple Principles.

1. Only apply randomness when you know what the outcomes are that you are selecting between.
2. Only apply randomness when all possible outcomes drive the game forward.
3. Know when randomness is best applied to a PCs actions and when it is better to assume an outcome.
4. Avoid using randomness to make decisions; make decisions, then employ randomness to determine speed, or success of implementation, or overlooked factors.
5. Always know what the random numbers mean.

Randomness doesn’t have to be your enemy. In fact, it can be your friend. Letting a PC make a skill check and being ready and willing to accept whatever the outcome is because you can still navigate the game forwards regardless of that outcome, has a wonderful way of letting the players feel in control of their characters, for example, even though you may know better.

One of the most subtle lessons that Beginners have to learn is how and when to apply randomness – and how and when not to. There will be subtle nuances to the practices any given GM adopts, and this forms part of the foundation of the ephemeral but very real thing, that GM’s personal style.

But, just as with an RPG, knowing the direction in which you are heading enables you to steer your way more quickly and unerringly to that destination. Knowing that you have to learn to remove the fuzziness from your randomness makes it easier to pay attention to that, and grow in your mastery more quickly.

It’s sometimes said that probability is a statement of ignorance as to the outcome. The same is true of any black box in which initial conditions go in one end and an outcome emerges from the other. Probability is actually a set of tools for trying to guess at the inner workings of such a black box. Randomness is a black box; using it intelligently, putting it to work for you, means connecting it up to outcomes. You don’t need to understand randomness to be a good GM – but, as with most things, the more you know, the more you can tweak the results to achieve your goals. And when your goals are for everyone to have fun at the game table, that’s a good thing.

This is a suprise extra bonus post to commence the tenth anniversary of Campaign Mastery in style! There will be other surprises as the month unfolds.

I hadn’t intended to post another article on Randomness so soon, but a confluence of several different factors made it an appropriate choice. The message content is significantly different. So I don’t think anyone will have a problem with it.

And it seems somehow appropriate, given the history of the site, that I post something before the 10th anniversary officially starts. After all, for the first month, we were posting articles but not telling anyone outside of a select circle of reviewers that we existed – so that when we did go live, we appeared to hit the ground running.

Well, I can’t use that trick, this time around! But a sneaky extra post – that I can do!

Perfume bottle and splash of freshness by pixabay.com/Sponchia

Today I want to share a simple technique for elevating your narrative text.

It requires you to follow just two rules:

1. Ignore the sense of sight for as long as possible.
2. Don’t use a noun or a verb unless you have already described the object using rule 1.

Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? But let’s give it a try:

A D&D Example

Echoes trace the shape of a large room. A grinding mechanical noise from the right is punctuated by the clunking and clanking of some sort of clockwork mechanism powered by the gurgle of running water. From somewhere in the distance comes the sharp metallic tang of treasure or blood. Your blood runs cold and your heart skips a beat as a moaning whisper emerges from two rows of human skulls suspended from ceiling chains, causing the hairs on the back of your neck to stand on end. You’re certain there’s something hostile in the shadows…

Now, let’s try it without the techniques described in those two rules:

You enter a large room; your torches can’t illuminate the corners or far end. Your eyes can just pick up a golden gleam in the distance. There’s a water-wheel powering a clock set into the right wall. A series of human skulls is suspended from chains in the ceiling. Every time the clock advances with a clunk, they emit a moaning whisper. Something moves in the shadows…

The scenes are the same. There’s nothing wrong with the second description, which I’m sure most GMs would have used without a second thought. But it lacks the mystery, the menace, and the poetry of the first, and that’s because describing scenes without recourse to visuals, engaging the other senses of the PCs, compels the use of evocative language that stimulates the imagination.

I think that’s worth the 27 extra words, don’t you?

It works with any genre, though the effectiveness can vary. To demonstrate, let’s try a Pulp example, with the straightforward visual version first:

A Pulp Example

The water shimmers in the moonlight by the docks, casting harsh shadows within which almost anything could be hiding. From one of those shadows comes a burst of light as a suspicious character in a trench-coat lights a match on the sole of his shoe before bringing the flame to a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth. For a moment, the end glows red before the match is extinguished, ground beneath a heel, and the figure vanishes back into the recesses of cargo waiting to be loaded onto the African Freighter.

You should note that I have deliberately made this as evocative as I possibly can, emphasizing the dynamics – the motions and changes – within the situation. In particular, the NPC is not part of the furniture, some static fixture – he is doing something, even if the PC observer(s) don’t know what it is, beyond the superficial.

Now, let’s try rewriting that scene using our two rules:

The salty tang of the air lingers about the rotting timbers of the old docks. Waves crash softly against the pylons and reflect the harsh moonlight that plunges much of the surrounding area into twilight. Every nerve is stretched taught as you reach out with all your senses to penetrate the gloom. Suddenly, the sound of a match being struck against the sole of a shoe is followed by a dazzling burst of light beside one of the crates, followed moments later by the acrid scent of burning tobacco as a trench-coated figure ignites a cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth. The deck creaks as loading cargo aboard the African Freighter continues; there is the soft squeak of a leather shoe as the shadowy figure turns and vanishes behind the crates awaiting the attention of the ship’s crew.

Although it appears considerably longer, in fact there is just a single word’s difference in word-count between the two. While the first is easier to imagine, visually, the second places the listener/reader more clearly into the scene. And the second provides the additional information that cargo is currently being loaded onto the “African Freighter” – the first gives the impression that this is not yet occurring. That gives a sense of a more compressed timescale, i.e. that the players have less time to act than they may have thought – and that’s usually favorable to the Pulp genre.

If I were to further polish the second version, I might throw in something about “the distant voices of the crew, stifled by distance and a settling mist on the way to becoming a fog” – for the added atmosphere and the verisimilitude of not implying that they are functioning in an improbable and suspicious silence. Or – depending on the situation – I might make a point of noting the absence of those voices, just to clarify the situation and elevate suspicions amongst the players.

Use sparingly

Of course, this will get old quickly, and the technique works especially poorly in deliberately static scenes. Sound requires motion to generate it (most of the time – electronic systems providing a notable exception). In fact, the absence of sounds and scents can imply mechanical efficiency – “A robotic cleaner glides silently across the carpet, lifting stray dust particles into its flattened bowels” – so don’t bother looking for footprints.

Here’s the thing: once players are embedded into a scene, it takes serious reliance on game mechanics to break the mood, especially if you reinforce it with a single non-visual reference when that seems appropriate. So use this technique early in a scene and then resort to mostly visual cues as the players interact with the setting. A skill check won’t shatter the mood – only combat, or a break in play, will do that, though it can erode away if not refreshed occasionally.

This is a good thing, because most of us find this to be a far greater stretch, creatively. It does get easier when you get into the habit, and it does function as a reminder to engage the other senses from time to time – a reminder that is often timely. In general, it requires you to think more about the scene, and it forces you to add dynamic, changing elements to what might otherwise be a still life.

Extra Senses

Extra Senses can be an additional problem, but that’s nothing new; you almost-certainly already have the problem of their not being shared by everyone, and have hopefully evolved techniques to get around the issue. What’s that? How would I do it?

The simplest approach is to tell the players that if they want to play Character X, who has the extra sense, to tell them all of what it reveals to him, that will make noise that others could hear, but you will assume the character is doing so automatically unless he indicates otherwise before it is too late – then append that description to the narrative generated using the technique I have described.

Even if this is a telepathic “noise” that those not attuned to it can’t hear, this uses one of the allowable senses – sound – to function as a delivery vehicle for the added sense.

A secondary technique that can be effective if employed consistently is to describe the findings of an additional sense in visual terms – the only thing that is so described when applying this technique. Making a deliberate exception for the extra sense elevates it above the “purely visual,” psychologically.

A secondary benefit to either of these approaches is that they streamline the process, and provide a consistent approach that ensures you are rarely caught off guard by “You forgot that my character has [x]” syndrome, while still permitting the character to retain control. All that has to happen is for you to then leave off the relevant paragraphs until the character with the extra senses acts. Then you can give them the additional information and let them act accordingly.

Yes, this is a compromise; ideally, you would be able to tell the PC with the extra sense everything that they detect in private and let them decide what to share with the rest of the table, but in practice this doesn’t work very well much of the time. Where there is the possibility of a character acting in a controversial manner, of course, you have little choice.

What does work is to develop a specific lexicon to describe a particular extra sense. This is the sort of effort that only needs to be done once, or once in a campaign if you are prone to redefining the nuances of extra senses from campaign to campaign like I am; the longer the campaign lasts, the more that effort will pay off.

It may be useful to assume that each race that possesses an extra sense accesses and interprets it a little differently, creating nuance that the players will rarely if ever actively notice – but that adds enormously to the depth and immersiveness of the campaign. Personally, I tend to think about that sort of thing when I’m developing a race’s presence within the campaign in detail and ignore it until then (or until I need it because of some spell or magic item).

A useful way of developing those lexicons is to examine the effect of the different color filters provided by photo-editing software. As you will have seen from past examples –

• The Remembrance Of The Disquiet Dead: A Spooky Spot and Campaign Premise (2013)
• Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative (2014)
• Stalking Fear: The Creepy in Non-creepy genres (2016), and
• Footprints of Fools and Wanderers: The vagaries of Marching Order (2017)

– the effects of these can be quite astonishing. There are three basic approaches to contemplate:

• Duplicate Image – in which you make a copy of the image in a new layer and then use it as a filter to manipulate the base image;
• Manipulated Image – in which you make a copy of the image in a new layer and then distort or manipulate it in some way;
• Imposed Image – in which you apply some other image as a filter to manipulate the base image or part thereof.

And, of course, there are combinations of the above, and considerations of the severity of the impact of the change (most often determined by the opacity of the upper layer).

I could offer some examples at this point, but I think I’d rather save that for when I have more time to create a tour-de-force of image-manipulative techniques.

Additional Narrative Resources

This, of course, is hardly the first article that I’ve offered to assist GMs in polishing their narrative. Here’s a roundup of several related articles that may be of assistance:

• A Picture Should Be Worth 1,000 Words (2010) (which also shows off some more of my photoshopping/art techniques and efforts)
• The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs (2013)
• People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs (2013)
• Adjectivizing Descriptions: Hitting the target (2013)
• The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative, a 6-part series (2014)
• Stealth Narrative: Imputed info in your game (2015)
• Taking advantage of the sensory hierarchy (2015)
• I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization (2015)

(As you can see, it’s been about 3 years since I wrote anything on this topic – so this article can be described as “It’s about time!” – I hope it’s been worth the wait!)

Based on two-faced man by pixabay.com/ambroo, photoediting by Mike

…at least, I hope it’s new. As I wrote, a strong sense of deja vu crept over me, and it started to sound awfully familiar. But a careful search of past posts failed to turn up anything…

I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply threw away the excess; these days, it’s my practice to give these away for free to the readers here.

On Saturday, I was talking with the players in my Zener Gate campaign about Ian Gray’s new Fantasy Campaign before play commenced for the day. As he described his new campaign, I suddenly came up with a very novel idea of my own, one that has nothing to do with his – so I can quite happily reveal it here.

In actual fact, this is not one campaign, but two that have to be run contemporaneously. Players may be in either or both campaigns, but it would make things more interesting if there was a less than 100% overlap the rosters. Both are Fantasy campaigns, but could be adapted to Superheroics or Sci-Fi.

D&D could be problematic as a game system with editions for which Epic Levels are not available (i.e. 4th ed and 5th ed.) 3.x would work just fine, but you might need to adapt The Epic Level Handbook from WOTC before you could run the campaigns using the Pathfinder game system.

The First Face Of Janus

The first campaign is high-to-epic level. The PCs are agents of the Gods, a task force devoted to furthering the Gods’ will, protecting Heaven & the afterlife, and the souls that abide there, confronting the Gods’ enemies, undoing the handiwork of those enemies and disrupting those enemies’ schemes – sort of a divine “James Bond” campaign.

The overall campaign objective of the PCs is to ensure the Primacy of the Gods, because the Gods empower mortals and shelter their spirits after death, harvesting power in the process, which is used by the Gods to empower more mortals. In a way, then, all clerical magic is the will of the ancestors with the Gods more as “Guiding Middlemen” than the ultimate powers.

The Gods have a number of enemies that the PCs of this campaign will have to contend with. There are those who would supplant them and harvest soul power for their own benefit; there are those who suffered when the Gods made some mistakes in the remote past, and who hold a grudge time can never erase; there are some whose ancestors held positions of power within reality but who were evicted from these roles when the Gods created the universe as it now is; and there are those who are philosophically opposed to what the Gods are doing.

It is very much the design intent of this campaign that the mortal realm be extremely remote and irrelevant to the campaign; its just there. This campaign should occupy a grander stage of strange metaphysical places and planes of existence.

The Second Face Of Janus

The second campaign is low-to-mid-level. The PCs are just ordinary people trying their best to make ends meet and – if it’s not too much trouble – make life a little better for themselves and others. There are a number of social forces that strive to exert control over everyone within reach, from the Church to the Local Nobility (and ultimately, the King or Queen). To this end, draconian punishments are meted out for trivial offenses; fleeing this oppression, the PCs have become outlaws and scofflaws and bandits. Some are good people, others are rogues, but most are just ordinary folk swept up in something beyond their control.

The Nobles, both local and overall, are appointed by Divine Right, and backed by the Church and their Holy Magics. The Rebellion was little more than an annoyance until a drunken friar discovered that Clerical Magic was not forbidden to those who went outside the lines of standard Theology. In fact, most of the edicts of the Church are intended to do nothing more than keep themselves in Comfort and Safety, protected by the armies of the Nobles that the Church imbues with political Authority. Some churchmen, to be fair, believe earnestly in the Holy Scriptures; but most are hopelessly corrupt.

With this discovery, the Rebels began to discover Purpose. And so they began plotting, and training, and now are ready to begin recruiting allies of their own, in a (perhaps quixotic) quest to overthrow the whole corrupt mess and cleanse the True Faith of the demons that have corrupted it.

What Neither Group Knows

Events in the Mortal Realm mirror those in the Divine, and vice-versa. In Campaign One, the PCs are the authorities dealing with enemies of their own making; In Campaign Two, the PCs are the rebels created as a reaction to the overbearing of the Authorities.

The players are likely to put this together in reasonably short order, however. The Divine Agents plan an ambush, and the Rebels are caught in an ambush. The Rebels capture an important magical heirloom and ransom it for the release of an important figurehead, and a Celestial Kraken attacks the Afterlife and escapes, stealing one of the Capstones Of Reality, demanding the release of the Spirit of his Ancestor that it may continue its’ cosmic journey, interrupted so long ago by the Gods. And so on – you get the idea.

The PCs are literally, their own worst enemies, and are doing half the GM’s work for him….

Both groups have laudable goals, even essential ones, especially when the Divine Agents learn that the Gods hold all creation together by the force of their Wills, and victory for their Enemies could mean the destruction or enslavement of all.

Which makes it seem like, if only one faction can win, it is the Gods and their Divine Agents, and the Rebels should be sacrificed. This decision is far more easily reached if the roster of players is the same in both campaigns, which is why I recommended that there be at least some players in one campaign but not the other.

Then the Rebels learn that the apostasy of the Church threatens to undermine the power of the Gods; the Rebels can’t lose, or it could mean the destruction or enslavement of all….

Metagaming, Metagaming, All Is Metagaming

Once the Players in both campaigns realize that both factions have to “win” their respective campaign challenges in order for any of them to “win”, despite it being apparently impossible for them to do so, expect them to start metagaming the two campaigns with a vengeance.

Let them.

This is, in fact, what the whole campaign is about. The PCs will have to go beyond what any of them know about the game universe and the physics that underlies it, will have to find a way to change “the rules of the game” (in a social, political, and metaphysical sense), and may in fact have to overthrow the Gods themselves in order for any of them to have a lasting success in their respective campaigns. They will have to redefine what Victory is, and what it means, in order for both groups to achieve their objectives!

And it will have to work at the small scale, in the Low-to-mid-power Campaign, as well as in the more cosmic high-to-epic-power Campaign.

The ultimate solution will probably be Diplomatic in nature, stitching together fragile agreements between natural enemies and compromising on long-cherished ideals and – possibly – removing those who are obstructionist to these terms. Because both sides winning (in one sense) will also mean them losing (in another) – the specifics are up to the PCs to devise.

That’s where the campaign supposedly ends, but any event that upsets the status quo in either facet of reality will also disrupt the fragile peace. A natural disaster in the mortal world; invaders from the “outside”; a hot-headed younger generation of Divine Enemies…. there’s LOTS of scope for sequel campaigns.

Of course, you will never achieve that same level of through-the-looking-glass elevator-down-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach surprise of the big plot twist, but that doesn’t negate the challenge posed by the enforcement of Symmetry between the two faces of Janus.

Bonus Content: A Cosmic Phenomenon

Another idea that I had during the course of the same conversation, that is rather too small to make a post on it’s own, is the arcane equivalent of “Old Faithful”. A place that “casts” a spell as reliably as clockwork, sometimes to greater effect, and sometimes to lesser. What you choose to do with this concept depends on the spell you choose as the “eruption”, but whatever you choose will have a profound impact on the underlying “physics” of how it works and where it is – and don’t forget to think about what people might be able to do with the phenomenon / location. Think strategically….

‘Young’ by pixabay.com/werner22brigitte

It’s a funny thing, but once you’ve thought of two or three tips on an important subject, other thoughts on the same subject start crowding in. This was going to be a quick article listing a handful of tips, things that I always keep in mind when creating an NPC, but then the ideas started flowing…

Some are broad guidelines, some are things not to do. Still others are character elements that I normally consider must-haves. As more tips crowded into the available writing time, of course, the depth with which I could explore each naturally diminished, so I can only hit the highlights of most of them.

Everyone has a different approach when it comes to creating their characters; these are techniques that work for me, but they might not work for you. But hopefully at least one or two can be added to your regular routine, and there may be exceptions to that routine when they can provide an extra helping hand.

So here are ten of my best tips for creating NPCs!

1. Never Forget The Character’s Purpose

I always make sure that the NPC serves the plot or relationship purpose for which they have been created. And the first step is always to make sure you know what that purpose is. It might be to deliver information to the PCs, it might be to do something, it might be to function as an antagonist or an ally – every NPC always has a purpose to fulfill. Anything more that you get out the character beyond that is a bonus.

Bonus Tip

You can never tell which NPCs will become regular fixtures within the campaign, aside from those deliberately designed to do so. So I never assume that an NPC is going to be a throwaway; they are all designed with the potential to grow into a more substantial role within the campaign. That way, when I need a character three adventures from now, I start by revisiting the ‘throwaway’ NPCs from the past, with a view to reusing one if I can. This not only builds continuity and verisimilitude into the campaign, it makes it feel like its all one world, even if players aren’t aware of how you’re working this magic. On top of that, it can save me a lot of prep time!

2. Never Start With The Numbers

There was a time when the first thing I did when creating an NPC was to reach for the dice to generate stats. Quite often, that meant patching the character’s role within the campaign or replacing it entirely. Misfitting between stats and function can spur great creativity from time to time, but it can also lead to horrible malfunctions. These days, I never roll dice for stats, and stats are often the last things that I generate if I do them at all – refer Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep.

3. Appearance Is Important

There are two things that I always try to use to tell the PCs who a character is. The first is Appearance; I’ll get to the second, later.

That means paying a lot of attention to minor nuances and broad impressions. It sometimes means photoshopping additional elements into a character portrait – for example, a union organizer’s badge onto a cap or shirt pocket. On one occasion, I had to replace all the buttons on the shirt being worn in a photograph to convey the nuance that I wanted.

Other times, I’ve been able to employ cultural icons to shortcut the process of identifying the character, for example using an image of J.R. Ewing, as played by Larry Hagman on Dallas, to represent an eccentric Romanian Lawyer in the mid 1930s. Instantly, the character became an Americanophile, affecting his attitude, his speech, his patterns of behavior. Perceptions of the character also immediately shifted into the twilight of morality, which is what we wanted; the NPC was there to (metaphorically) sell the PCs a gift horse, and we wanted them to be looking into it’s mouth, counting it’s teeth and legs, and looking for the fly in the ointment of something that seemed too good to be true – basically, because it was. Creating the attitude that would lead the PCs to discover the rest of the adventure was the purpose of that NPC, and getting the appearance right served that purpose (and gave the NPC a lot of free color).

Things are a little more difficult if you don’t use images to depict your characters. It’s easy to take descriptions so far that by the time you get to the end, the players have forgotten the beginning. You have to condense the heck of descriptive narrative, and you have to actively seek out other ways of delivering important bits of information.

4. Always Have A Handle

Something I always do is make sure that I have a handle on the NPC by deliberately building one in. This is a shortcut to getting into character, often a more succinct synopsis of who the character is. It’s often informed by the purpose that the character is there to serve. Anything else can be tossed aside except that purpose. (See 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly for other tips in this area).

The key point I’m making with this tip is to do whatever you can in the design and construction process to make it easier to get into character quickly when you have to play that NPC.

Tip 9 has a test to use to measure how effectively you can get into character in advance, permitting design tweaks before the NPC appears in play.

5. Look For Ways To Be Distinctive

Distinctiveness gives players a handle with which to relate to the character quickly, making it quicker and easier for them to roleplay interactions with an NPC. I always try to anticipate group-conversation scenes in which the NPC might appear and make sure that the NPC will “stand out” in some way from that group; this is a further function of distinctiveness that is subtly different from the first. The two are not fully interchangeable, though sometimes the one mark of distinction will achieve both.

I’m not great at giving different voices to NPCs, and nuance is often lost when gaming in a crowded situation, so I have to achieve most of my efforts in this direction in the form of speech patterns – which can be more subtle – and the occasional badly-faked accent. I’ve developed techniques that aid in the latter, which you can find discussed in The Secret Arsenal Of Accents.

6. Don’t Be Abnormal If You Don’t Have To

It’s very easy to shade an NPC into a caricature. If that’s what I’m deliberately aiming for, fine, but most of the time what I want is something rather more “ordinary person” – even if what I’m creating is a religious fanatic or ninja assassin or whatever. This acts as a brake on distinctiveness, preventing it from getting out of hand.

7. Subvert Cliches More Often Than You Represent Them

When I rebooted my superhero campaign back in 2001, I began what is now an 18-year crusade against cliches and cardboard-cutout characters. Several articles here at Campaign Mastery have addressed the issue, but it started with the character creation guidelines issued to the prospective players of the rebooted campaign.

It forced the players to stretch beyond their previous experience, but it says something that most of those players are still players within the campaign and that at least two of those early characters are still active in the campaign (though one has had multiple ‘owners’ through the years) – and that those characters are still growing and evolving, while remaining true to their core personalities.

Nevertheless, a cliche that is implemented with a clever twist is often faster and easier to create than a completely original character, and there are times when that’s a necessary shortcut, or an appropriate choice. And, on at least one occasion, an NPC deliberately invoked a cliche to mislead the PCs as to his true nature and motivations.

My rule of thumb is to make sure that I break the mold more often than I use it as a template. My ‘good guys’ almost always have some shady corner somewhere – it might be in their backgrounds, or in their personality, or just be a potential to go too far in certain circumstances. Very few of my antagonists have no bright spot, or (at least) the capacity to claim to have one. And both are inextricably affected by circumstances as the character perceives them. Which keeps them fresh and dynamic. The day that stops being the case for a particular NPC is the day to start thinking about that character’s imminent retirement (though I’ve usually laid some preliminary plans in that direction, anyway, just to be on the safe side).

Something that I will take quite a lot of time over is getting the PCs to trust an NPC if that’s appropriate, especially if the NPC is initially perceived as an enemy. It takes time to build a relationship like that; only when that status can be metaphorically ticked off does the character get to advance to the next stage of their plotline.

Don’t be afraid to play a long game. Design characters to evolve and grow into what you need them to be, whenever you can. It pays big dividends in the long run.

8. Better Than A PC?

One trap to look out for is creating an NPC who is better at something than the PCs. There are times when that’s fine – creating a villain who has to stand up to the entire group of PCs, for example – but there are times when it’s demotivating to the players. In particular, I never create an allied NPC who is better at the PC’s shtick than the PC is, without also saddling them with a crippling shortcoming of some sort.

9. The TV Tests

Record a TV show that regularly has dialogue between two characters whose personalities you know well. Playback that section of the show, pausing after each character says something, and then reply in the persona of an NPC that you’re creating (translating anything that doesn’t fit the milieu into a statement that does). If you have to stop and think about it, the character is insufficiently delineated in your mind.

Next, find another section of the recording that meets the same criterion. This time, predict what the other character will say in response and what your NPC would say in response to THAT. This tests the speed with which you can get into character. If you can’t immediately respond in character, your ‘handle’ (see tip 4) is inadequate.

These two tests are simple but surprisingly comprehensive. As a general rule, they will push the character in the direction of simplicity and cliche, so it becomes an acceptable design technique to deliberately go too far in the preliminary design process, then simplify and ‘clean up’ until you reach a satisfactory compromise between distinctiveness and playability.

One word of warning regarding this technique: when using a character in play, you will usually have other things on your mind and may be more mentally ‘tired’ from hours in the GMing chair. I used to be able to GM for 20 hours straight; these days, I’m exhausted after about 6. Part of that is being better at the job, more focused, and playing to a higher standard, but part of it is getting older, and part of it stems from increasing physical infirmity that has to be overcome.

None of those debilitations is in effect when running the test, so make allowances and don’t mislead yourself into a false sense of security. Run the test just before heading for bed, when you’re tired, or make sure that you precede any appearance of the NPC with a rejuvenating break.

10. Start Telling The Story With The Name

This is the other half of the story that commenced with Tip #3. You have virtually total control over the name of the character; sure, you can pick some vaguely-appropriate name that has no significance whatsoever, but you can also use the name to tell the players quite a lot about the character.

Ethnicity, Social Class, Self-Image, and even Personality can be expressed – at least in part, and in a preliminary way – by the name and by the way the NPC gives the name.

Picture a well-dressed NPC, slightly youngish, who has just been asked his name or put into a circumstance where offering it is culturally appropriate. The character takes a deep breath, sighs, and says in an almost-regretful tone, “My name is Galahad Jones.”

Right away, you can tell that the christian name is distinctive, and that the character finds the name to be a burden to live up. He would have been teased mercilessly as a child. He is naturally inclined to be a good guy, but feels hemmed-in and unable to be human because of the name and the pressure that it places on him. If he ever does find a situation that enables him to fully let his hair down, he’s likely to go way, way too far.

Or perhaps the character draws himself erect and announces with a sniff, “I am Harold Hawthorne-Sainsbury the Fourth, and don’t you forget it. You may refer to me Sir H.” Instantly, you know that we’re talking about a flake off the extreme upper-crust, British, possibly American, an exerter (and demander) of privilege and possessor of a deep-seated insecurity (this is skirting very close to a cliche, however, so use this one with caution).

Or, for a third example, the character grins, sticks out his hand, and announces “Bradley Hawthorne-Sykes the Third – call me bud! Good ta meetcha, buddy!” – the character expressed is at odds with the formality of the name, and indicates a character who is so comfortable with his social rank and its privileges that he doesn’t need to grind them in the faces of everyone he meets. He also sounds like someone who genuinely enjoys people and tries to meet them all from a standpoint of equality and respect.

That’s a lot to get out of so little.

Good NPCs should be rich, fun to play, and interesting to encounter. They should fulfill their plot functions with flair and style. The interesting thing is the way so many of these desirable attributes help make the others easier to achieve.

Second Bonus Tip

Oh, one more thing while I’m in the vicinity – no NPC exists in isolation. They all carry part of the campaign background with them, and – if they get the chance – make that background accessible to the players. Of course, for some NPCs, that is their sole or primary plot function, but even when that’s not the case, I always try to take advantage of the opportunity that the NPC presents in this area. Just something else to keep in mind when creating your NPCs!

Image provided by pixabay.com/Wokandapix, cropped by Mike

This article has been in preparation for a very long time – since May 2017, in fact. I hope it proves to have been worth the wait…

While there is no such thing as “winning” in an RPG, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t success, and that not all success is created equal. Some success may not be desired, some may not be desirable, some may be hard-earned, while some may come naturally. This article will seek to understand success in its myriad forms and then apply that knowledge to the RPG concept to see what can be made of it.

Because it’s a field that I know quite well, have thought about extensively, and that a lot of people can relate to, I am going to undertake my initial analysis through the prism of popular music. Bear with me, I don’t have a road-map…!

Popular Success

The foundations of this article were laid when I remembered some interviews from 70s, 80s, and 90s TV in which various performers rubbished the notion of seeking popular success. The phrase most commonly used was “selling out”, and it’s one that always irks me. It implies that it’s easy to be commercially successful, and that it requires less artistry and/or depth and is more formulaic.

There are 52 weeks in the year. Pop charts have been maintained, in one form or another, for more than 50 years, and are typically refreshed on a weekly basis. That means that at most over that time period there have been 2600 number one singles on the top-40 charts (or their equivalents).

In fact, turnover tends to be a lot slower than that; while a few tracks make it to number one only to be dethroned the following week, many remain ascendant for two, three, four, or more, weeks. If we set the real average at a conservative 2 weeks. Because the estimate is conservative, the number will almost certainly be crowding the lower end of the scale. It’s not unreasonable to use a nice, round, 1000 number ones for the time period.

For every number one hit, there are at least 40 more (and more likely, 400 or 4,000) acts who would like to have had that measure of success with a song released at around the same time. The intensity of that desire may vary, as would the price of achieving it, but the desire is nevertheless there.

At best, then, any given single has a one in forty (or four hundred, or four thousand – how many songs hit the global market in any given week?) chance of making it, of being the most popular single of a given week. That, to me, doesn’t make it sound particularly easy.

On top of that, every #1 artist has had “sure fire” hits that crashed and burned, while some successes have come right out of left field. While formula may make you a successful artist, with regular top-40 appearances for a while, it’s rare to ride one all the way to the top of the charts. That generally requires something extra, something more than mere formula.

Commercial success is never anything to be ashamed of, either for the artist or the purchaser. It’s hard to achieve, and harder to achieve consistently, and harder still to achieve better than anyone else in a given time period. Having a number 1 – in anything – means that more people liked your product than anything else in that particular time period.

The RPG Equivalent Of Popular Success

There are a number of measures of success that could be considered the equivalent of a measure of “popularity”. Anything from having a waiting list to join the campaign, through to players gushing with enthusiasm to third parties about the campaign, could qualify. But for my money, before you can identify the true equivalent, you need to amend the terms of reference. An RPG isn’t a one-off purchase, which is the case with a hit single; it’s more like a subscription service that players and GM pay for with their social time. To me, that means that the true equivalent of a popular success is having players who will move heaven and earth to attend, be sincerely regretful if they can’t, and who show up, week after week, month after month, on time and ready to play.

And as with popular music, there are those who might decry the rigidity of an organized schedule, who prefer the spontaneity of friends simply deciding to enjoy a fun activity together for a few hours. I’ve known at least one GM who ran an “open house” campaign – come one, come all, show up at the designated time and be assured of getting a seat. His games were anarchic but very dynamic, often with one set of players working to advance one in-game agenda while others pursued completely unrelated goals. But that sort of game is rare and rarely long-lived; for most, having a regular group that can be relied upon to show up to play at regular times, is the ambition.

Artistic Success

In some ways, you can trace the artist-vs-commercial success to the dysfunction within the ranks of the Beatles, and in particular the Lennon-Vs-McCartney stoushes for which the band were famous in the late 60s. In other ways, you can trace it back further, to the Beatles-vs-Rolling Stones debates of half-a-decade earlier. Artistic credibility and artistic integrity have always been seen as running counter to commercial success. And in still others, the roots trace back into other media and earlier eras; famously, A. Conan Doyle grew so tired of the popularity of Sherlock Holmes undermining his other literary endeavors that he attempted to kill the character off.

Artistic Success can be divided into two types of achievement: Content, and Trend-setting.

Content Success is what Lennon and other “serious artists” often aspired to – or claimed to aspire to. It’s the success of communicating something beyond mere entertainment value, whether that be opposition to war, promoting ecological soundness, feeding the hungry in a drought, raising awareness of some issue, or simply using your music as a vector to create awareness of a social position not actually expressed in that music. Others find this sort of thing pretentious; and there is a middle ground.

Trend-setting is devising new instruments and new musical forms and structures and styles that create a new genre or sub-genre to which many other artists then connect and further. Punk, Ska, Disco, Prog-Rock, Metal, Rap, Hip-Hop, Blues, Reggae, Country – name a genre and there will be artists who were at the forefront, and artists who steered that genre into new directions, redefining what the Genre was or could contain. Often, the public are dragged into acceptance of these changes only reluctantly, as when Bob Dylan went electric.

A third variety of artistic success is the Crossover, in which an artist forges a link between two disparate styles or genres, gaining acceptance in both. To some extent, crossover artists are a fiction; most styles and genres are a spectrum, with individual works (and to some extent, individual artists) tending to occupy a given niche within that Spectrum. Thar position will have some elements in common with other examples from their genre, and some elements that are as distinctly different as day and night. And each such position will also have elements in common with niches within other genres, permitting the artist or individual work to explore this common connection.

It could even be more accurate to suggest that each style and genre comprises multiple spectra, one for each trait that is not definitive of that style and genre, and the crossover artist simply brings an unexpected combination to public attention.

The RPG Equivalent Of Content Success

Because I strive to make each campaign distinct and different from all the others that I run or have run in the past, I could be accused of chasing Artistic Success in it’s Content form.

There are some GMs and players who want nothing more than a dungeon-bash, devoid of deeper meaning or heavy conceptualizing. While I’m happy to throw those in as a bit of variety, and to help with the timing (giving plots time to mature before they land on the PCs’ backs), it’s not the style of campaign that I usually offer. You could argue that the Zener Gate campaign is the closest I’ve come to running the mindless dungeon-bash, and I wouldn’t argue – but I tend to think of it more as episodic “capsules” of meaning, not as being devoid of deeper meaning. And, given my personal tastes and the way my mind works, I won’t be surprised to find deeper plotlines emerging from the mix.

I’m a big advocate of aiming for uniqueness in the content of any given campaign, and have been so throughout the almost ten years of Campaign Mastery. There are many different reasons, ranging from differentiation in the players minds to discovering new ground to explore in your stories and characters as a consequence of that uniqueness.

The RPG Equivalent Of Trend-Setting Success

Trend-setting is a harder notion to quantify into an RPG analogue. Inventing a new genre or reshaping an existing one is so rare that it doesn’t fit, and besides, is more often achieved by game system design than by individual GMs.

That doesn’t mean that there can’t be stylistic elements that emerge from one campaign and sweep the world, or seem to. Isometric maps were one such. Dungeon Tiles were another. But these are rather smaller than genre-defining.

Campaigns face two hurdles that prevent this kind of success. The first is that most campaigns are too small to encompass an entire genre, though one might be an archetype or prototype. Campaigns have only a limited number of players and a single GM and simply cannot change the world very easily. The second hurdle is that most campaigns lack the scope to be genre-defining or -redefining; there simply isn’t enough material published, let alone gaining widespread acceptance, to exert that level of influence.

Game systems have a far easier job of clearing both hurdles. The first is simply a matter of popularity, which can come from innate innovation, through a connection to a popular pre-existing franchise, or in any number of other ways. The second is that by definition, a game system incorporates its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world that the game system is supposed to simulate, and hence the game system itself can easily become an exemplar of a new genre or sub-genre – if the authors are sufficiently creative.

That creativity can itself be a spur to success, assisting in the clearing of the first hurdle. But you need both – something original to differentiate the new from the old, and sufficient resources and popularity available on a sufficient scale to enable new creators to add to and expand on the new genre that results. And it’s HARD to do, and even harder to do well.

The RPG Equivalent Of Crossover Success

This is rather easier to achieve, because it means taking an element of one genre and treating it in the way that another genre would be expected to treat it. Nor does popular success need to follow in order to achieve a successful crossover; it can be enough that a few adherents like the results.

Take TORG for example. It had a logical, functional, spell-design system – so much so that when I wrote software to automate the process, I had more trouble getting the text editor designed to incorporate design notes into the description and other text-based fields of indefinite length to work properly than I did the basic mechanics of the system. This was the sort of plug-in modular design that you might use for designing classes of space ships, trading speed for cargo capacity, so as to achieve a consistent standard of technical capability, but the TORG system applied it to something that was strictly fantasy in nature – Spell Design.

It remains, for me, the gold standard of spell construction systems, because it inherently provided consistency of effect levels relative to the inputs and casting efforts required. It did that without effort because that was baked into the design system itself.

By applying a consistent game physics to my superhero campaign, way back in the early 1980s, I achieved another crossover success.

If you write a horror adventure set in the Old West, regardless of the game system, you can measure the success of the crossover by the usual standards of success that would apply to any adventure – is it logical, playable, fun?

Image provided by pixabay.com/3dman_eu, background and shadow by mike

Performance Success

Still another form of success is that of the virtuoso, who makes an instrument do something more than was thought possible. The two greatest developments in instrumentation over the last century or so have been the synthesizer and the electric guitar, and both have had their ‘geniuses’, for example Kraftwork, Vangelis, and Jean Michel Jarre (synths); Hendrix, Clapton, Satriani, and Eddie Van Halen (electric guitar). I don’t pretend for a minute that those lists are exhaustive!

And yes, a second form of performance success can be defined as Perfection in Reliability – someone who delivers exactly the same performance, night after night, day after day, year after year. A performance can be perfect, i.e. without flaws or errors, and yet not be considered a virtuoso performance. Indeed, that’s what a lot of acts look for in their rhythm sections – they want a solid foundation upon which to build, rather than someone who will compete for the limelight or even detract from their own performance.

The RPG Equivalent Of Performance Success

I know I’ve written about the short-lived cyberpunk campaign in which I was a player on an earlier occasion. The plots were pedestrian, the GMs grasp of the game physics superficial, his understanding of the internet even less developed, his grasp of organizations and the logic they employ almost cartoonish; yet people, myself included, came back for session after session until he chose to kill the campaign out of dissatisfaction with the aforementioned problems, especially the first, mainly through having insufficient prep time to meet his own standards.

The reason? He excelled at bringing NPCs, both pre-planned and off-the-cuff, to life. Each was given a unique and distinctive voice and vocal pattern and, when appropriate, accent, and he never forgot one. It was like playing an RPG with Mel Blanc – except that none of these voices was in the least cartoonish. He could even hold conversations between three or four different NPCs, switching effortlessly from voice to voice.

When he first did it, all our jaws hit the ground. From that moment on, you could not have pried us out of that campaign with a crowbar and hydraulic arm. We barely noticed the deficiencies other than as passing irritants, so compelling was the virtuoso performance going on around us. It was compelling and fascinating in equal measure. When the players discussed it amongst ourselves afterwards, we soon reached agreement that none of us could even come close to that level of performance – ever.

At the same time, it challenged us all to up our games. If we couldn’t match that GM’s performance in that respect, we could hone our skills in other areas to at least try and match the overall standard of his campaign. I focused on plot, and verisimilitude, and creativity, because those were the areas where my strengths lay. Others focused on characterization and narrative flavor, or on historical accuracy, or on a wild left-field kind of free-wheeling loopiness and unpredictability.

Because that’s what exposure to genius does – it forces you to lift your game.

Conceptual Success

Another form of success is being able to successfully link smaller stories into a larger narrative or theme. Artists as diverse as The Who (Tommy), Genesis (The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway), The Foo Fighters, and Pink (The Truth About Love) have achieved it. Pink Floyd have two to their credit: Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall.

Understanding this type of success requires some knowledge of how record production works. At the start of recording, the artists play ‘demo versions’ of their ideas. The producer chooses the tracks that he feels are (potentially) the best or most interesting, refines them sonicly and stylistically with the performers, records the resulting performances, culls any that don’t live up to the standards, repeating the process until enough are completed to fill the required album length. He then arranges them in a compelling sequence to create the album. In the process, the producer leaves his own personal imprint on the sound.

Integrating a conceptual element adds new requirements to the mixture that increases the difficulty of each of the other steps. The primary goal shifts from making the best individual pieces of music possible to telling the story or exploring the theme as comprehensively as possible. If artist and producer are not careful, this results in some pieces of the whole being weaker than others, i.e. of a lower artistic standard. A conceptual success has avoided this flaw, which implies a great deal of extra work and creativity in crafting installments of equal strength and merit; some tracks may have been achieved easily, because they were the best ideas in the first place, but others will have started as weak tracks and have to have been rewritten and redeveloped endlessly to achieve this standard.

I automatically discount soundtracks from this unless they are entirely or almost entirely comprised of original musical performances; taking individual slices of otherwise available music and marrying them to a particular moment in the narrative means that for each ‘spot’ to be filled, hundreds if not thousands of performances can be considered. Success in terms of the narrative is externalized to the production team of the movie, TV series, or stage performance, not the creative musical artist.

The highest caliber of conceptual success lies in adding something new to the understanding of the subject matter by the audience. Tommy is a tale of success against the odds and the price that fame can exact; The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway deals with the loss of innocence and the corrupting influence of merely existing in a non-innocent environment; The Wall deals with the process of becoming an individual and suppressing emotions that detract from social conformity until they bring the individual to the breaking point.

The RPG Equivalent Of Conceptual Success

There are at least three ways of looking at Conceptual Success in RPG terms.

The first lies in the strength and depth of the concept itself, which expresses itself through the campaign background and game mechanics through which the concept is to express itself. For example, you might come up with the concept of an evolutionary life-cycle of souls, based on a generalization of the concept of reincarnation, blending concepts from several real religions. Expanding on that concept and integrating every possible consequence and ramification into the campaign and its mechanics achieves this type of Conceptual Success.

The second views an adventure as analogous to a single concept album, and the disparate activities of the GM – from integrating the plot concept with the specific PCs involved in the campaign to every nuance of presentation – to individual tracks. If everything meshes perfectly, you have successfully translated the premise of the adventure and its plot developments into a conceptual tour-de-force.

The final alternative views the campaign as the concept-album equivalent, and individual adventures as the building-blocks of the campaign. You could even describe the second method as shaping the perfect tree, while this method demands perfection in the shape of the forest while ignoring the shape of individual trees except as they influence that desired outcome.

Which brings me to a truism that some of you may not have recognized.

Every author focuses on his own strengths, because that’s where the bulk of his good ideas lie. I’m strong at plots and plotting, and at narrative and depth, so a lot of the articles that I write focus on ways of doing these things better – in this context, at aiming for a Conceptual Success. In fact, I have produced several articles aimed distinctly at achieving one or another of these forms of conceptual success. I’m always looking for (and frequently finding) new ways of describing the concepts and principles at the heart of my techniques in the hope of making clear to those readers who didn’t ‘get it’ from those already written.

You will find, in comparison, relatively few articles on creating characters and characterizations – I’ve presented my best techniques in those articles and have little more to offer on the subject, at least until some fresh insight smacks me between the eyes.

Blogs, in turn, appeal to two types of reader. There are those who share the same strengths as the author, and hence the author is ‘preaching to the converted’ about technical details and processes and nuance; and there are those for whom the author’s strengths are their weaknesses, and they discover a technique from the ‘expert’ to improve their games. And there is a third kind, if the author numbers analytic capacity amongst his skill-set – those who read the author for inspiration, understanding, and (occasionally) provocation. If I write an article on how to design encounters, for example, you might agree with virtually none of my approaches – but are nevertheless challenged to look at your own methods and the inherent shortcomings that they entail, in the process becoming better in one of your own areas of strength.

If a blog doesn’t appeal to you even if it’s a subject that you are interested in, it could simply be that it doesn’t tell you anything new because you are already an ‘expert’ in those aspects of the GM’s craft. That doesn’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with either the blog, its author, or you as a reader – just that you don’t happen to need what that author is offering. You might find their next post stimulating!

Logically, if you can articulate why you enjoy reading a particular RPG blog or blog post, you may discover something about your own strengths and weaknesses as a GM (or whatever your role happens to be). And that’s true even if you simply like the writing style of the author – because it provides samples that you can objectively analyze, which leads you to the same sort of revelations.

Image provided by pixabay.com/Papafox, cropped by Mike

Human Success

Such success is also possible on a smaller scale, down to the individual track. There are some performances in all our lives which have opened our eyes to a new awareness of ourselves and the way we are constructed. These are most commonly in the romantic or melancholy mode, occasionally in the social mode, and rarely in any other. I could offer examples of each, but this is inevitably a personal choice; what awakened awareness of some aspect of being human to me might not have had the same effect on you; it may have come too late or too soon, or simply been beaten to the punch. And some people may never have had that particular revelation, or may have learned the experience directly rather than in the form of a musical revelation.

There are those who claim that exploring ourselves and expressing what he finds is the ultimate responsibility of any artist. Those are the artists who strive for Human Success.

The RPG Equivalent Of Human Success

At first glance, you might have the impression that there is no RPG equivalent of Human Success; this hobby is, or should be, all about entertainment, after all, and any insights or self-improvements that occur should be serendipitous and not the result of deliberate designs on the part of the GM.

I exclude the application of roleplaying as a therapeutic practice, obviously, though there can be overlaps.

Such a first glance ignores how much of ourselves we unwittingly incorporate into our games. Let us say that from somewhere – it doesn’t matter where – you gain some new insight into human relations. Even if you don’t deliberately make that new insight the center-point of an adventure or encounter, which – in their excitement, many people will do – that insight cannot help but color the situations and options that you offer to the players in encounters and situations henceforth. Anything less is to deliberately inject a false note into your GMing, a character or scene that just doesn’t ring true, when you know better.

I can’t see any rational GM deliberately sabotaging his game that way, can you?

The term “paradigm shift” is sometimes over-used, but – however subtle it may be – that is, nevertheless what has occurred as a result of your new insight; you literally can’t look at things quite the same way ever again.

A consequence is that, as writers and GMs, we become ever more stylistically “Locked” as these insights accumulate. When you’re ignorant, you have no idea how things are likely to eventuate, and so are open to overly simplistic approaches to the situation presented. There is a freedom and flexibility conferred by ignorance. Once you are no longer as ignorant, you know more about why certain approaches to problems should not work, and hence you narrow the solution set to the problem, which accordingly becomes more difficult for your players to solve.

They, in turn, have to shift their mind-set, and will do so after an indeterminate period of groping for a better approach. Most of the featured NPCs in my Zenith-3 can be (and often are, by my players) viewed as puzzles to be ‘unlocked’ before the players can get to the heart of why they behave the way they do. Once that puzzle lies open before them, the possibility of finding common ground and meaningful compromises becomes open, so that conflict that seemed inevitable is averted and an enemy is transformed into an ally. At the same time, some characters with whom the PCs had a superficial concordance have been transformed through circumstance and choices made into someone with whom the PCs cannot, in good conscience, continue to call a friend or ally.

So far, in the campaign, four enemies or former enemies (Holo, E-III, Thanos, and Defender) have become allies or friends, another (Dr Heinrich Vossen) has become a respected neutral party (the PCs don’t fully agree with his agenda but have been forced to concede that if he’s right, he’s doing the right thing in an ethical way, despite external appearances), another enemy has discovered common cause with the PCs (Voodoo Willy) – and a major ally (Behemoth) has become an irreconcilable enemy. On top of that, there is an organization, UNIT, that started off as an enemy and has polarized even more strongly against the PCs even while some individual members have become allies; and another organization, IMAGE, who started as allies but which are increasingly showing themselves as antagonistic to the PCs best interests, not through malice, but through well-meaning bureaucratic interference.

(The real villains of the campaign have yet to reveal themselves; I’m still moving chess-pieces around the metaphoric board).

All of which seems to undermine my earlier confession that characterization isn’t one of my strong points, I have to admit. But it doesn’t come naturally to me; what does come naturally are the plots that yield these outcomes. The NPCs were then designed (or re-designed, in a couple of cases) to fit the potential plot outcomes.

Flagpoles

Similarly, there are pieces of music that perfectly encapsulate some personal milestone in our lives, and that thereafter perpetually have particular significance bestowed upon them in the eyes of the individual. This flagpole might be shared amongst many others, or might be a work so obscure that hardly anyone has ever heard of it. Commercial success, simply because it puts a work in front of more people’s ears, is more likely to produce a flagpoles, but there are always exceptions. Each of us compile a ‘personal soundtrack’ through our lives in this way, often without recognizing it. But a flagpole is always recognizable after the fact; hearing that tune or passage of music immediately takes us down memory lane to the flagpole, a turning point in our lives.

The RPG Equivalent Of Flagpoles

This is a difficult one. It’s trite to suggest that we’re looking for flagpole events in the lives of the PCs – encounters or whatever – but nothing else comes immediately to mind.

That’s because there is an element of serendipity to a performance achieving this personal significance – “the right song at the right time” – that cannot be attributed to the artist or production process.

To identify the true RPG equivalent of Flagpoles, we need to dig a little deeper. What makes a particular tune a Flagpole?

Well, the reaction of the listener is vital. A potential flagpole can only manifest as an actual flagpole if it is, in fact, “the right song at the right time.” So, while the artist is not responsible for that actualization, he is responsible for creating the potential for it to occur.

So, what is that potential? It’s the capacity for an emotional resonance – and the transformation in question is simply a deeper connection between that resonance and the listener that is triggered by the circumstances in the listener’s life.

Which makes it clear that a flagpole need not actually be contemporaneous with the events to which the resonance connects; the association can be after the fact, if the tune happens to perfectly sum up some aspect of the individual’s life and emotional state at one particular time.

The transformation from potential to actual makes flagpoles deeply personal. You can’t reveal one without revealing some aspect of the individual’s life through the connection.

I could reveal a couple of mine – one that few would ever have heard of, but that captures a bleak perspective with hope nevertheless in the distance that was appropriate for me at the end of 1981, another that many would recognize that stems from a time about a year earlier, or a third that would give completely the wrong impression.

What’s more, it would be possible to infer relationships between the events symbolized by these flagpoles to construct a narrative around my early life – an accurate one in one case, and a completely inaccurate one in another.

I’m choosing not to go any deeper into those matters, not for reasons of privacy, but because it would take us too far off topic

So, a flagpole is a potential emotional resonance that forges a deep and persistent relationship with an individual. It could be a triumph, a melancholy, a wistfulness, a sorrow, a sense of friendship or companionship or optimism regardless of the odds – any emotional state that a person can experience.

Flagpoles need not be musical; in times past, a line or two of poetry, or a snatch of narrative from a novel, or identification with a character from a play or story, have all been flagpoles for people.

(Indeed, this is a shorthand that I sometimes use to inform players about an NPC – simple telling them that this or that has a particularly deep significance to the NPC, so long as they recognize the reference, tells them something about the character).

The artistry lies in creating that potential for resonance with the listener by perfectly capturing an emotion in some media form or another.

Contemplate the phenomenon of the “favorite character” – refer The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites – and realize that there must have been a singular moment within the campaign when that character went from being just another collection of stats and personality traits to be a favorite of the player.

It’s creating the circumstances where it’s possible for that to occur that is, in my opinion, the true RPG equivalent of a ‘flagpole moment’. And not saying “no” at the critical moment.

One of the responses to the article to which I’ve linked, Jeff V, relates just such a moment in a Call Of Cthulhu campaign, in which – against all the odds – a PC shot Nyarlathotep in the head. Jeff was clearly the GM of the game, and would have been perfectly within his rights to say something like “the bullet enters the head and mushrooms into a cloud of red mist as it passes clean through. And then the cloud freezes in place and the gaping wound begins to close.” This is Nyarlathotep we’re talking about, after all. But he didn’t get in the way of the moment.

Jeff also makes the point that this is the ONLY time he has ever seen such a moment arise by chance; every other time, he has had to carefully contrive to create the potential for the moment to occur.

Which is why this is the perfect RPG analogue of the flagpole moment.

Documentary Success

This is the final category of success that I am presenting, and it’s one whose title and definition have morphed and changed considerably.

Like any aficionado, I have heard a number of live albums through the years; a few manage the task of putting the listener in the moment and making them feel they were ‘there’ even when they weren’t. Most are failures in this respect, and provide nothing but an inferior rendition of a piece of music.

That was my starting point, but the concept was broadened while writing the section on Flagpoles, above, by the realization that some pieces of music succeed in capturing the essence of a moment, era, or event, and being able to present that essence to others even if they didn’t experience it first-hand. Were I to list a few examples, I have no doubt that there would be surprises amongst them, music that many have never heard of; others would be well-known.

Obscurity convinced me that such examples would be a wasted effort; were Campaign Mastery a Music blog, it might be a different story. My proudest moment as a composer comes in having achieved Documentary Success in capturing the emotional impact of 9/11 as I experienced it, to the point of having some who actually lost loved ones in the event tell me that I helped them come to terms with the event and begin the healing process with my music, that I had created for them a Flagpole Moment.

The RPG Equivalent Of Documentary Success

There’s an equivalent phenomenon that I’ve only experienced perhaps a half-dozen times in my 38 years as a player and GM. In fact, at an average interval of about six-and-a-third years, I’m probably about due for another one.

It’s when every player at the table is so deeply in-character and in-the-moment that they become seamless, reacting as though they were their characters. It doesn’t last, and is usually broken when one of the players needs to consult his character sheet for something – the bubble is punctured by game mechanics, in other words – but for that short time that it persists, it’s magical, because it means that the game world has truly come to life for the players. This is the ultimate artistic achievement for a GM – well, one of them, anyway.

When you look over the totality of the possibilities, it should seem that several of these forms of success lie within your grasp at any given moment. Even contemplating them has brought out a number of tips and tricks to bring them closer to reality. But, even if you never get there, or have not achieved any of them so far, the very effort of trying for one or more of them can make you a better GM.

Image provided by pixabay.com/geralt

Targeted Self-Improvement

But that raises a difficult question: which of them should you prioritize? Should you aim for the one that you find the most difficult, or the one that you feel closest to achieving?

Every GM will have a different answer. We all have strengths and weaknesses; aiming for the one that’s most difficult is an attempt to improve capabilities in which we consider ourselves weak, aiming at the one that’s closest is playing to our strengths.

For my money, you should always try to achieve them all, but priority has to always go to what you’re closest to achieving. Once you have done so, or are sure of doing so, however, it drops to a point further down the list, and something else becomes “closest”. Eventually, your efforts will naturally migrate from your strengths to the things you’re only “okay” at; the effort improves your capabilities in that department, and then – succeed or fail – you can move on.

This continual self-assessment dovetails attempts at self-improvement with the things that you’re already good at; this not only keeps your confidence as a GM at a sufficiently high level, it keeps your players satisfied. After all, it’s your strengths as a GM that have presumably drawn them to your gaming table and that keep them coming back for more.

It’s similar to running a business – generating invoices may not be your strength, you may be better at getting customers in the door – but if you’re a sole proprietor, you’d better generate invoices anyway, or you won’t be in business very long!

“But I don’t know what I’m good at,” and “But I’m not that good at anything,” come plaintive wails from the back of the auditorium. So? Even if the pinnacles of success described are far beyond your grasp, you will still be closer to one or two of them than the others. Use this discussion as a diagnostic tool. There will be some things that you find to be easier than others; that, too, is indicative.

And, even if neither of these informs you of what your strengths as a GM are – it can happen in the case of extremely inexperienced beginners, or those who have never thought in these terms before? Then assume that they are all within your grasp. After all, if you haven’t learned what you’re doing, you haven’t learned any bad habits yet, either – and losing one of those is a LOT harder than not being sure of what to do and muddling through, anyway.

Even in such cases, however, I’m sure that one or two of these forms of success will appeal to your personality more than the others. Use that to set your initial priorities, in the absence of any other guide.

Decide what form of success you want to achieve, and work on achieving it while playing to your strengths, and the simple fact of thinking about how to go about bettering yourself in this respect will improve you as a GM. The tools for understanding your GMing style and directing your efforts at self-improvement are now yours; the rest is up to you.

Above all, never be discouraged by failure. You learn more by analyzing these than you ever do from success that was achieved through a lucky combination of circumstances. If you do stumble into a winning situation, congratulations and enjoy the feeling for as long as it lasts – but be aware that if you don’t know what you did to achieve it, you don’t know what will kill the goose laying these golden eggs. Every time you succeed, you have to start working to succeed again. Success is a fleeting pinnacle, but the effort to achieve it is satisfying in and of itself.