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.

Progress reports are located at the bottom of the article.

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….

 

Update 5/12/2018 Layout finalized, HTML markup devised, main page uploaded, “The Best” page uploaded, this article completed and uploaded for publication just after midnight.

Update 6/12/2018 Layout revised, HTML markup revised accordingly, “Genre Overviews” page created & uploaded. Nov 2013 posts indexed, new sections added to Blogdex. Projected completion 1 day behind schedule.

Update 7/12/2018 Layout revised & simplified, HTML markup revised completely, “Genre Overviews” page updated to new design, “Campaign Creation” page created & uploaded. Dec 2013 posts indexed, new sections added to Blogdex. Projected completion 1 day behind schedule.

Update 8/12/2018 Despite losing most of the day running Dr Who, “Campaign Plotting” page created & uploaded, most Jan 2014 posts indexed, new sections added to Blogdex. Revised HTML structure quick and easy to work with, efficient. Planned Anchor Text test. Projected completion 2 days behind schedule.

Update 9/12/2018 Anchor text attempt not working, abandoned efforts rather than waste time. “Rules & Mechanics” page created & uploaded. Section for Campaign Tone added. Indexing completed for Jan 2014, Feb 2014, and part of March 2014. Projected completion 1.5 days behind schedule.

Update 11/12/2018 “Metagame” page completed and uploaded. Malformed links corrected on all pages (both published and unpublished. “Publishing” page renamed “Publishing & Reviews”, button unchanged. Indexing completed for March 2014 & half of April 2014. Cumulative total 26,684 words, not counting the Blogdex home page (354 words) or The Best (1679 words already published). Projected completion 2 days behind schedule.

Update 12/12/2018 “Players” page completed and uploaded. Added a new section, “Adventure & Plot Ideas” to the Adventures page. April 2014 indexed. Projected completion 2 days behind schedule.

Update 13/12/2018 “Names” page completed and uploaded. Discovered a number of entries that had been misfiled into the “Names” page and relocated them to the correct sections. Added a new section, “Copyright” to the Publishing page. May & June 2014 indexed. Projected completion 2 days behind schedule.

Update 14/12/2018 Added new sections for “Characters In General”, “Actual PC Examples”, and “Actual Villain Examples” to the Characters page. “Characters” page then completed and uploaded. July, August, & most of September 2014 indexed. Projected completion 1.5 days behind schedule.

Update 15/12/2018 Re-titled an existing unlabeled section to “General Articles & How-To’s” on the Game Mastering page. Completed and uploaded the “Places” page. September & October 2014 indexed. Reassessed projected completion based on indexing only 2 months per day until all pages uploaded to January 8.

Update 16/12/2018 Added a new section, “The Role Of Players” to the players page. Completed and uploaded the “Campaigns” page. Indexed the remainder of 2014. All scheduled work (Pages: 12/18 now published. Indexing 2014-2018: 20% done) completed for the day. Cumulative total 56,030 words, not counting the Blogdex home page (now 371 words) or The Best (1679 words already published). Estimated completion: revised estimate unchanged.

Update 18/12/2018 Although no progress may be visible, quite a lot has been done behind the scenes, and will show up as a monster update tomorrow or Thursday. I’ve found that it’s easier to index related posts together, so I’ve been working on “The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative” (5 parts) and The “New Beginnings” series (10 LONG parts, 5 done), and restructuring the “Adventures” page ready for uploading. The work done is enough to consider the Blogdex on-schedule.

Update Very Early 21/12/2018 There’s a lot to get through… Moved “Adventure Structure and Writing” to the top of Adventures section list. Moved “Puzzles & Mysteries” to follow “Encounters” on the Adventures section list. Created subsections for the two series mentioned in the previous update. Completed indexing the “New Beginnings” series. Restructured the Blogdex. All series with more than 2 parts not already in a subsection will be moved into a subsection of the single most appropriate page, and use a “filled” hex icon not an “open” one. Other sections of the Blogdex will contain either links to individual posts within the series or a “See Also” notation pointing to the page containing the subsection. Reformatted content in the Genre Overviews section to the new standard. Further pages to follow every day or two. This change will add another 8 days to the publishing schedule. It will also slow indexing to one month per day for a while, adding an additional 6 days to the estimated completion date, which is now Jan 24. Added new sections for Campaign Concepts, Campaign Philosophy, and Campaign Theme to the Campaign Creation page. Renamed “Structure & Writing” section “Structure & Formatting” on the Adventures page. Added new section “Stress & Exhaustion” to the Game Mastering page. Added new section “Research” to the Fiction & Writing page. Renamed “Prep Scheduling” section to “Prep Management” on the Game Mastering page. “Adventures” page completed and uploaded (old layout). Jan 2015 Indexed. Feb 2015, Apr 2015, May 2015 all 1/2 indexed. Mar 2015 partly indexed.

Update 21/12/2018 Created subsections for the “Lessons From The West Wing” first article series, the City Government Power Bases” series, and the “Casual Opportunities For Priests” series, updating Page 2, Campaign Creation, to the new format. Added new section “Writing Oration and Dialogue” added to the Fiction & Writing page. “Game Mastering” page completed and uploaded (old layout). Most of Feb 2015 Indexed. Started Indexing “Some Arcane Assembly Required” series. Note that these items have NOT been uploaded to the Blogdex, and will form part of a larger update over the weekend (lost time gift-wrapping or it would have been done).

Update 22/12/2018 Created subsections for the “Some Arcane Assembly” series and the “Character Hooks” series. Updated Page 3, Campaign Plotting, to the revised format. Unnamed “General Writing” section formally entitled “Writing – Adventures, Fiction, & Non-Fiction”. “Fiction & Writing” page completed and uploaded (old layout). Feb 2015 & March 2015 Indexed. Uploading held pending major weekend update.

Update 23/12/2018 Created subsections for the “This Means WAR!” series, the “Rules Mastery for Dummies & Busy GMs” series, and the “All Wounds Are Not Alike” series. Renamed “Alternative D&D Healing & Damage Rules” to “Other Alternate Healing & Combat Rules”. Updated Page 4, Rules & Mechanics, to the revised format. Added a new section, “Creating Locations” to the Places page. “Publishing & Reviews” page completed and uploaded (old layout). April 2015 & May 2015 Indexed save for the “Further Thoughts On Pacing” series, which extends into June 2015. All indexed content Uploaded, confirming that the overhead from updating that content is now more than 2 hours and rising, and that this time can productively be better spent doing more indexing. Therefore content updates will be done in large batches from now on. I promised a big weekend update – how does an additional 39,228 words since the last tally suit you? Tomorrow is Xmas Eve, and the next 2 days are officially “days off” – except that I have a post for tomorrow ready to upload!

Update 26/12/2018 Didn’t get anything extra done over Xmas but did get a much-needed battery-recharge from the time off. “Examining Psionics” moved to a dedicated subsection of the Game Physics section, Metagame page. Updated Page 5, Metagaming, to the revised format. “Assassin’s Amulet” page completed and uploaded (old layout). Just one page to go! “Further Thoughts On Pacing” subsection added and removed (see below). “Swell and Lull” series excerpted into a subsection dedicated to “Campaign Pacing” in the Plot Sequencing section of the Campaign Plotting page. “Further Thoughts On Pacing” added to this subsection. Upload scheduled for a major update in the next few days. May 2015 indexing completed & June 2015 Indexed. Upload scheduled for a major update in the next few days.

Update 27/12/2018 Updated Page 6, Players, to the revised format. “Miscellania” page completed and uploaded (old layout). The Blogdex is structurally complete! “Props” section of the Metagame page renamed “Props & Handouts”. New section “Player Agency” added to the Players page. July 2015 indexed (save for one entry in the “Basics For Beginners” series, which extends through to March 2017, and technically isn’t finished yet – there are supposed to be three more parts still to be written and published! Upload scheduled for a major update in the next few days.

Update 28/12/2018 Updated Page 7, Names, to the revised format. Indexed half of the series “Basics For Beginners”, the equivalent of a month’s posts. I’d have gotten more done, but got sidetracked. Upload scheduled for a major update over the weekend.

Update 30/12/2018 Found a way to get anchor links working – for the first link only. Still contemplating how best to use it. Updated Page 8, Names, and Page 9, Places, to the revised format. “Focusing On Alignment” series excerpted into a dedicated subsection. “The Characterization Puzzle” series excerpted into a dedicated subsection. “We All Have Our Roles To Play” series excerpted into a dedicated subsection. Completed indexing “Basics For Beginners”. Edited the ALT tags on all menu graphics to make the blogdex more user-friendly for the vision-impaired. Added “Player Types” section to the Players page. Over 32,500 words uploaded to the Blogdex.

Update 18/1/2018 I’ve been promising a monster update to the Blogdex, and here it is! Real Life and Game Prep have begun to bite into available time, but even so there’s been a huge amount of progress. Updated Page 10, Campaigns, and Page 11, Adventures, to the revised format. Partially updated Page 12, Game Mastering, likewise. August, September, October, November, and December of 2015 Indexed. Jan 2016 half-indexed. Dec 2015 was a key date, because that included the 750th post, the half-way mark in the project. Added “Other Reviews” to the Publishing and Previews page, amongst others. “Creating Ecology-based Random Encounters” series excerpted into a dedicated subsection, amongst others. Populated the Campaign Synopses section with subsections for just about every campaign I’ve ever run. Brought those sections up to date (starting from zero!). Note that this involved reviewing all 750+ posts indexed to this point, including their comments sections, for Each Campaign (all twenty of them)! — It wasn’t enough for an article to mention or be about the campaign, it had to include a description of some in-game action. Brought the “Actual PC examples” section up to date (starting from almost zero), organizing the PCs according to campaign. Note that this also involved reviewing all 750+ posts indexed to this point, including their comments sections! For EACH PC – all 55 of them! Brought the “Actual Villain examples” section up to date (starting from almost zero). Note that this also involved reviewing all 750+ posts indexed to this point, including their comments sections! So far, there are 17 of them. In total, that’s 7,360 posts that have been reviewed in addition to the indexing listed above! Commenced adding clarification/explanatory notes to the start of many sections. This will be ongoing, but not every section will get one. Noticed myself adding some additional tips and tricks and advice to the Blogdex that has never appeared in any article on the site. That’s right, the Blogdex now comes with “Added Extra Value!” Over 72,770 words uploaded to the Blogdex. The total (not counting the home page or “The Best”) is now 203,531 words. The largest individual page (by a LONG shot) stands at more than 43,000 words! Commenced planning how to integrate continued work on the Blogdex with other activities. Bottom line is that work on it will continue until it’s done. Only the pace will vary. Restructured the main index page to use one column instead of two, mainly to better fit all those campaigns and PC lists!

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!

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!)

…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….

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

Nothing says “organized randomness” like a fractal image!
This one is courtesy pixabay.com/Shabinh,
cropped and color-enhanced by Mike, and looked so gorgeous that you can get a larger version by clicking on the thumbnail.

Anarchy.

Chaos.

Flexibility.

Uncertainty.

Control.

Challenge.

Unpredictability.

All of these words can be used to describe the influence of Randomness within an RPG. Every GM uses randomness in all seven of these ways, the relative significance being the primary variant. But why do RPGs contain a random element?

Randomness in RPGs derives from two sources, neither of which can by considered truly random, as you will soon see.

Player Choice

The one thing at the table that the GM has, theoretically, no control over, is the players. In practice, there is the GM’s understanding of the psychology of the players, of the characters that they are playing, of how the player plays the PC; there is knowledge to some extent of how the PC will react to a broad range of triggers and conditions, and can manipulate mood and situation to play on those factors to at least some extent. So player choice is never purely random, even though it may sometimes seem capricious (at best) to the GM.

The better the player, the more he will hone in on some “inner truth” about each character that they play, which they can use as a foundation and guiding principle, ensuring greater consistency of characterization over many sessions. Sometimes, a less-skilled player will find a character that simply “fits” their psychology like a glove, subconsciously finding that “inner truth”; such characters are very likely to become a favorite of the player in question.

And sometimes, no matter how experienced and capable they may be, an experienced player will be unable to find that “inner truth” at the core of a character, and will consequently struggle to roleplay them either effectively or to their satisfaction.

The more consistent the characterization, the more predictable it becomes to the GM, and hence the more control the GM has over this aspect of unpredictability at the game table.

Such control can never be absolute, however, because of the presence of the second source of randomness.

Die Rolls

Die rolls are employed to collapse the quantum uncertainty of an outcome into a finite resolution of uncertainty. If the game mechanics are d20 based, there are 20 possible outcomes of any given die roll; modifiers may shift those possible outcomes one way or another, but there remain just twenty possible results.

That can, of course, change if some exploding die roll mechanism is incorporated into the rules, but let’s keep this discussion simple.

Right away, the randomness of any outcome can be seen to be restricted to just those 20 discrete possibilities. For the additional flexibility and scope of randomness, some game systems are percentile based; others employ non-linear probability to achieve greater variability. I’ll get into that in a moment.

In practice, in many cases, the degree of variability actually collapses still further. Success or Failure – a binary state, almost certainly of unequal probability, but nevertheless a simple yes-or-no proposition. Some GMs add interpretations of degrees of success or failure as a rules refinement to overcome this simplicity when the situation is suggestive of more than two possible outcomes. Others subdivide a task and require appropriate checks for each subdivision.

If, for example, the character is attempting to bake a cake, you could divide this into ingredient selection, ingredient mixing, baking, and decoration. Get any one of them wrong and the end result may or may not be edible. But – unless it’s particularly important, or one of those steps presents an unusual challenge for some reason – most of the time, the same results can be achieved with a degree-of-difficulty measure.

That means that if a character succeeds by 10, their outcome will be just a little more appetizing than a character who succeeds only by 5. The only thing that a character who just barely succeeds will be confident of is that the cake won’t accidentally poison those who eat it.

Another way of handling these nuances is to ignore margin of success and instead apply modifiers to the roll. A master baker’s minimum standard of success is going to be a lot higher than that of an unskilled home baker for whom edibility is the primary objective. That is easily simulated by “raising the bar” by one every time the master baker adds X to his skill level. X could be two, or three, or perhaps four. I don’t recommend it to be more, or less, than that (out of twenty). This modifier determines success or failure according to different criteria than the simplest such meaning. You can even have a rule that, above a certain skill level, that simplest such criteria is always achieved except on a critical failure.

The psychology of the character should also factor into this discussion. A perfectionist will have a much higher standard of success than the ordinary practitioner. “It’s light, moist, delicious, and beautifully decorated.” – “Yes, but the bottoms dried out just a little too much, the baking tray was too close to the heat, so the cooking is just a little too uneven. I’m ashamed to put them forward for others to eat.”

In the non-linear probability model, the fact that some outcomes will occur with lower frequency. This can be seen when you plot the probability by outcomes of various dice rolls.



Graphs generated using AnyDice.com

The graphs to the left show the probability of outcome of 1, 2, 3, and 4d6, stretched horizontally to the same size. As you can see, 1d6 is a flat or linear probability (as you would expect), 2d6 is a straight line up and another down, peaking at the mean result of 7, 3d6 is a somewhat imperfect bell shaped curve, while 4d6 gives a very smooth bell curve by comparison. That means that with multiple dice, extremely low and extremely high results are quite improbable while outcomes close to the mean are relatively likely. The more dice you add, the greater the likelihood of a “central” result, a fact that I took advantage of with the “additional dice against a moving target number” mechanic in my Zener Gate rules.

It can take a while to intuitively grasp the impact of an nDx roll’s probability curve, whereas a flat roll can be instantly understood by almost everyone, making a linear system easier for beginners to get a handle on. Once you do, you can generally operate with reasonable ease, but you do need to shift mental “gears”.

Since nDx gives access to a limited number of low-probability outcomes, enabling a match to be made between a target number and the significance of success in achieving that number, that is more nuanced than a linear curve of similar size in terms of outcome range. The minimum percentage chance of an outcome on d20 is 5%, by definition. The minimum percentage chance of an outcome on 3d20 is 0.46% (3 or 18), and the next most improbable result is 1.39% (4 and 17), and the one after that is 2.78% (5 and 16). Only at the 6 and 15 results do the probabilities roughly match – 4.63%. The “missing” chances have to go somewhere, and the place they go is on results closer to the mean (10.5) than 6 and 15. Results of 10 or 11 account for 1/4 of the outcomes, and results of 9 and 12 are almost as likely at 23.14%.

But the collapsing into known possible outcomes mean that while the outcome in any individual case might be unknown and unknowable, in terms of the outcomes, these are very much predictable – and a good thing, too, because it enables creation of adventures that can encompass a range of outcomes.

Those are the only two mechanisms by which randomness enters the game. Everything else is under the direct control of the GM. And, as you can see, by changing definitions and difficulty settings, or by the manipulation of the players, even these are under the indirect control of the GM to at least some extent.

Which leaves out answer to the question of what purpose randomness serves within an adventure on very shaky ground. It must serve some useful purpose, or why bother having it?

So, what are the possible uses, given these new facts?

Image courtesy pixabay.com/TheDigitalArtist,
cropped and enhanced by Mike.
Once again, a larger version is available by clicking on the thumbnail!

Giving Players The Illusion Of Freedom

A cynic is sure to suggest that one possible purpose is to give players the illusion of being free to act as they see fit. Determination of success or failure is down to the die roll, an independent arbiter, and not the capricious whims of a GM. Die rolls, in other words, provide a metagame mechanism by which players can seize control of the game from the GM, or at least attempt to do so.

Empowering The Players

This posits a very adversarial relationship at the gaming table though. A less adversarial function that amounts to the same thing would be the GM willingly yielding an element of control over the game to empower the players, giving them confidence in their control over their characters.

Die Rolls For Everything?

Taken to its extreme, players might be permitted to roll dice, or be asked to roll dice, for absolutely everything that their characters want to do, down to whatever level of minutia the GM sees fit. “Make an armor roll to put on your left boot. Okay, now make another one for the right boot…”

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet, I’ve been in games (very briefly) that operated in exactly this manner, if not quite to this extreme. In fact, the very premise of task subdivision derives from such interpretations of the presence of die rolls within an RPG. The difference is that task division separates a complex task into multiple logical stages that can be clearly articulated and the impact of their success or failure on the ultimate outcome can be interpreted by the GM.

Derailing the Plot Train

This is one of the most important functions of die rolls in a game. By injecting a source of unpredictability as to outcome, however shaped and controlled by the GM, they enable the deliberate derailing of plot trains.

Instead of saying “no”, the GM says “It probably won’t work, but roll…”

The problem is that a failure to succeed is sometimes interpreted by a player as the GM manipulating the circumstances to ensure that the dice say ‘no’ for the GM, acting as a proxy for his will. That brings us back to that issue of “Illusion of freedom” again.

The illusion of a plot train is just as damaging to a campaign as a plot train. The only solution is to permit the dice to fall where they may at least part of the time – and make sure the players know it.

The dice, in other words, won’t do your job for you. It’s your responsibility to avoid plot trains, through your choices, through listening to the players, and occasionally risking a little anarchy slipping through the cracks.

Anarchy

This function of randomness within an RPG actually relates directly to the events that inspired the entire article. Since they’re relevant, the time has come to relate the story (in very compressed form, I assure you).

On Saturday, the adventure opened with the characters in the middle of an emergency. I started by relating to them how things got to this point – a villain, confronted in a reasonable way, tactically, with the characters doing the sort of thing that they would have predictably done anyway, but things didn’t go according to plan, resulting in the emergency.

How the players chose to deal with this emergency was up to them – I followed my usual maxim of “where there’s one solution to a problem, there will be others,” and – in fact – the solution they came up with was much better than the one I was prepared to offer if they were truly lost – and if they rolled well enough on an appropriate skill.

With the emergency resolved, they had to come up with a plan to deal with the villain responsible, which was actually the point of the whole encounter, which was part of a much larger picture that’s been building up in subplots for several adventures now. It took only seconds for me to recognize that the players were coming up blank.

I could have had someone make a die roll, but instead chose a non-random approach: an NPC offered a plan that was (a) in keeping with his personality as the players have come to see it; (b) tactically sound; and (c) within the group’s capabilities, giving everyone something to do. Accepting the plan was purely the PCs prerogative – sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t (and sometimes the plans are deliberately designed to contain unacceptable shortcomings or risks so that they will be rejected – the NPC isn’t just a mouthpiece for the GM to tell the players what to do). But, in this case, the plan sounded (and was) reasonable, if a little left-field, so they accepted it.

And then one of the players repeated a line he had used earlier, and which is a common one at my gaming tables: “tell us where the plan goes wrong.”

According to my adventure plan, it didn’t. But I saw an opportunity to inject a little anarchy and derail any perceptions of plot trains, so I had the team’s leader (chosen by the other PCs) roll on behalf of the team. If that roll had been good enough, the plan would have succeeded as described, but that wasn’t the outcome; the die roll indicated that it was about 66% successful. Since the plan had five steps, I decided that it was stage 4 that failed, chose a rational cause for that failure to have occurred, and presented the PCs (effectively) with a new problem.

If the PCs failed to solve that problem, I was prepared to let the villain escape – the anarchy factor, because I would have to come up with a new encounter with him on-the-fly – but immediately after devising the problem, I saw a solution that would enhance the credibility and viability of the main plot function of the adventure (in scenes that we have yet to play). This was only possible because one of the usual players was absent on this particular day, due to ill-health, and I happened to be wearing the “Runeweaver Hat” at the time, i.e. I was running the PC as an NPC. So he offered a solution to the problem that worsened a long-term problem being created by the villain ultimately responsible and left it to the team’s leadership and the player whose character would be directly affected to choose whether or not to accept the proposal – with no certainty on the player’s part that it would work, of course.

He did, and play proceeded.

As you can see, a little anarchy can be a good thing, prompting player engagement and permitting the occasional refinement of the “big picture” on the fly. If I had thought of it in advance, I might have scripted the entire encounter the way that it eventually played out – but I didn’t. Instead, I let the players AND myself think on our collective feet.

Challenge

Which also illustrates the challenge that randomness can provide the GM – not every random factor can be anticipated, or should be. Keeping the main plot more-or-less “on course” is the challenge, or modifying that main plot to incorporate unexpected changes in circumstance.

The players won’t always notice that you have done so, but even the occasional appreciation of such changes reinforces their perception (correctly) that the PCs, and the choices that the players make for them, do ultimately make a difference. And that makes the game more fun for them, and for the GM, both directly and vicariously.

Problem-solving is a routine challenge for the players. Permitting the occasional spur-of-the-moment bout of problem-solving by the GM brings the two roles closer together, and directly tears away at any perceived player-vs-GM adversarial relationship.

Flexibility

Deliberately incorporating a controlled level of unpredictability into a game forces the GM to be more flexible in his planning, and that gives him the scope for greater flexibility at the gaming table.

Players who read my adventure plans after the fact are astonished at three things: How much of it has been planned in advance, how much has been deliberately set up in past adventures or to feed into future situations, and how much of what some might consider “the important bits” has not been planned.

I’ve spoken of this before: if you can get contextual inference to do the “big picture work”, such as consequences of the fact that an adventure is even taking place, then you can be indifferent as to the outcome of that adventure once it is underway. Again, this neutrality affords you flexibility and gives the players license to be creative.

Control

At the same time, in most adventures, there are critical moments (which often seem to be of superficial significance at the time), beats that I need the adventure to hit in order for the big picture to continue evolving according to my larger plans.

Randomness through die rolls, controlled by the techniques described earlier, and
coupled with the manipulative techniques and triggers described, permits steering of these moments within a narrow range of possible outcomes. Setting situations up so that either outcome serves your purpose in different ways can be difficult, but smart players recognize that a die roll can fail, and are prepared with both back-up plans and with arguments that enhance their likelihood of success in the first place.

The incorporation of some genuine anarchy provides an effective camouflage for these moments. And, even if they notice at the time, most players are prepared to let such moments slide, first because they are of only superficial significance at the time, and second, because they are confident that when they do snowball into significance, the players will be given greater flexibility in how to respond.

You only get that level of trust on the part of the players by earning it. Every piece of deliberate anarchy that you court in a campaign can be thought of as money in the “credibility bank” – ‘funds’ that you then draw on when you need to.

At the same time, I put a lot of research effort into my adventures. Once again, every measure of credibility that you can incorporate adds to the willingness to let something slide, for the sake of the adventure, when you inevitably mess up. Keeping a positive balance in both “accounts” earns you brownie points for when you really need them. And that’s a form of big-picture control, too.

Predictably Unpredictable In A Controlled Way

I try to be predictably unpredictable in my adventures. Plot twists, but not all the time. Things planned only vaguely. Multiple option branches within a limited range of possibilities. Player flexibility and the occasional injection of anarchy – as much to enhance my own enjoyment of the game and the challenge of running it well, as to provide entertainment for the players. But all controlled and confined to the immediate situation or to longer-range circumstances that I can work around, to the ultimate benefit of the big picture that’s taking shape and evolving in the background.

Randomness is the tool that enables all of this to occur. And that more than justifies its presence within an RPG.

BONUS CONTENT!

This is a section that I was going to drop in wherever it seemed to belong but which, at the end of the day, didn’t seem to quite fit anywhere; it’s just a little bit off to the side of the main subject of this article, but too good to ignore, and not large enough to spin off into its own article.

D&D Combat is described not as simulating every blow exchanged, every parry and thrust, but as representing the cumulative result of many individual attempts to inflict harm upon an enemy.

That definition is at odds with the variability of linear probability die rolls. You can even argue that 3d6 provides too much variability.

A far more realistic simulation of this principle could be achieved by defining the success of a combat interaction as the % that the attack value represents over the sum of the attack value and the defender’s armor class, then multiplying that by the damage roll, or even multiplying it by the maximum damage that can be inflicted.

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: 10/25 = 40%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 40% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 5 vs an AC of 25: 5/30 = 16.66%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 17% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 20 vs an AC of 10: 20/30 = 66.66%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 67% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.

If you still felt it necessary to have some randomness, add the same d6 roll to the attack value:

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 4: [10+4]/25 = 56%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 56% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6: [10+6]/25 = 64%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 64% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1: [10+1]/25 = 44%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 44% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.

If you still want to preserve the extreme results of a critical or a fumble, you could use an exploding d6. This works as follows: if you roll a 6, roll again, and add 5 to the result for every additional die rolled. If you roll a 1, roll again, and subtract 5 from the result for every additional die rolled.

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 1 for a total of 5+1=6: [10+6]/25 = 64%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 64% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 3, for a total of 5+3=8: [10+8]/25 = 72%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 72% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 6, then a 4, for a total of 5+5+4=14: [10+14]/25 = 96%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 96% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 6, then a 6, then a 2, for a total of 5+5+5+2=17: [10+17]/25 = 108%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 96% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 4, for a total of 4-5=-1: [10-1]/25 = 36% – and a fumble.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 1, then a 6, for a total of 6-5-5=-4: [10-4]/25 = 24%, and a fumble.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 1, then a 1, then a 2, for a total of 2-5-5-5=-13: [10-13]/25 = -12%. If I were writing this game system, I would have this damage be inflicted on someone on the attacker’s side – PLUS a fumble.

If that makes fumbles and criticals too frequent for you, you could employ a d20 check as usual to confirm. But, since it minimizes the significance, you could probably achieve the same result by requiring a second exploding result before a formal critical or fumble was declared: so a 6 then a 6 gives you a critical but a 6 then a 5 just gives you a better hit; a 1 then a 1 gives you a fumble, but a 1 and then anything but a 1 simply gives you a worse hit. That makes the chances 2.78%, a little over half what they are in the d20/pathfinder system.

The effects of gaining attack levels aren’t so much in overwhelming damage, it’s in the reliability of that damage. Being able to do 35 points or whatever every – single – turn – is usually more valuable and a more reliable indicator of expertise than someone who might do 60 points if they get lucky, but might only do 10.

But the major reason I like this as a variant combat system for d20/Pathfinder is the impact on the mage/fighter game balance. Let the ever-flashy mages roll all their dice in an attack – they might get lucky, they might not. But against a fighter with lots more hit points who is repeatedly hacking away 20 or 30 HP every round, sometimes more, the fighter will win at least as often as he loses. Think about that.

Refinements are possible. Do you add any STR bonus (or DEX bonus for bows) to the damage before or after you apply the percentage shown? I can see things working either way. The latter does mean that you can literally achieve ineffectual blows with low strength.

It’s always fun to play with randomness!

As I said, not directly relevant to any of the discussions of the main article – but too interesting not to throw out there, anyway.

There’s a show that I like to watch now and then on a local Free-To-Air lifestyle channel called “Rescue My Renovation”. It appeals because it not only explains what was done wrongly but the correct way that it should have been done, and why.

This presents practical information that I’ve found useful from time to time in both real life and behind the GM screen (I never forget that every one of the techniques employed was a lesson learned the hard way at some point in the past).

Host John DeSilva comes across as personable and a genuinely nice guy, a “favorite uncle” who just happens to be a builder.

I’m not a handyman by anyone’s measure. My father, brother, and brother-in-law are far more in that category than I would ever claim to be, and my uncle is an honest-to-god builder, but I’ve picked up enough from hanging around them every now and then, and from shows like this, that I can quite happily deal with any construction-related situation that comes up while in the GMing hot seat.

The show is from the US’ DIY Network, part of the Discovery group of channels, and quite deservedly received a solid 7.7/10 on IMDB. I’m always a little suspicious of the “reality” of “Reality TV”, but all the indications are that this one is absolutely genuine. There has also been some criticism of renovations performed by the DIY Channel’s former incarnation, but none of that has landed on the doorstep of this particular program.

It’s pity that the show seems to have very quietly vanished after the 2014 season – never formally canceled, just not being filmed any more (more than anything else, that tells me that the DIY Renovation craze of the last 2-3 decades is faltering, but that’s just a side-note).

In this particular episode, DeSilva recited what is practically his mantra – (paraphrasing”) there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. The right way is demolition, get your framework right, call in your specialist services (plumbers, electricians, etc), floors & walls & ceilings, and finishing – paint, decorations, furniture, and so on.

My first thought was that this wasn’t completely true, and had even been violated a time or two on the show. That’s because it didn’t make mention of two additional services that aren’t always needed but are critical when they are involved: Architecture and Design.

And my second thought was that there are lessons here for the creators and GMs of RPG Adventures. In fact, a number of different areas of application immediately tumbled forth into my consciousness, one after the other, making this article all-but-inevitable. But, before I get into those applications, let me expand a little on that first thought.

Architecture

The construction methods of most homes are well known and don’t actually need architectural design – you decide the dimensions and layout of the rooms, which gives the dimensions and overall shape of the construction, lay out your foundations accordingly, build everything with an ample margin of safety on your tolerances, and simply apply all the lessons of practicality that have been mastered over the centuries when it comes to this sort of thing.

There are three occasions when architects are still required. First, when there’s some problem with the site that needs to be fixed or accommodated that will compromise a straightforward design; second, when you want to achieve something fancier than a robust, sturdy, design, including pushing the boundaries of what is permitted by the local government with authority; and third, when the resulting building needs to be certified for use by the general public – department stores, shopping malls, petrol stations, and the like, or for other special purposes (everything from prisons to opera houses falls into this category). And “problems with the site” can include spanning the borders between two or more such local governments – all of whom must be satisfied.

The reasons architects aren’t really needed (aside perhaps from satisfying Local Governments) for most basic constructions and renovations is that the structures and designs are fairly standardized, and so the loads and methodologies can also be standardized to a large extent.

Minor variations are easily accommodated by that ample margin of safety that I mentioned – If the frame can support two-and-a-half times what it is normally going to be called upon to bear, variations in design, layout, and construction can generally be accommodated without a second thought. An experienced builder will even know when the design limits and safety margins are in danger of encroachment and call in specialists before their own reputations are endangered.

In fact, commercial construction operates in a very similar way – decide what the loads are likely to be and then build in an ample margin of safety. It’s when these margins are eroded by compromises that buildings become unsafe.

This was driven home by a recent episode of another TV show, Seconds From Disaster, dealing with the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, which collapsed in 1995. You can read the Wikipedia page to which I’ve linked for more details, but, in brief:

• The building was originally designed to be an apartment block, but during construction to create a large department store.
• Substandard concrete was used for ceilings and walls.
• Column strength was compromised by a reduction in size from the 80-90cm indicated in the design to 60cm to maximize floor space. In addition, in part to save money, they contained only 8 steel reinforcing bars instead of the required 16, reducing their load-bearing capacity by about 50%.
• Floor slabs were incorrectly constructed, with their strength compromised by placing the reinforcing steel mesh 10cm below the surface instead of the normal 5cm – which doesn’t sound like much, but actually makes a big difference to their strength and to the loads being transmitted to the columns, effectively reducing the strength of the structure another 20%.
• The columns were deliberately spaced as far apart as possible, again to maximize floor space, a decision that also increased the load each had to sustain
• The original design was for four floors, but a fifth floor was added during construction. Originally intended to be a roller skating rink, during construction the decision was made to convert it to contain eight restaurants. In South Korea, restaurant patrons are seated on the floor, so this change required the inclusion of heating elements within the floor, dramatically increasing their weight.
• As a result, the columns were supporting approximately four times the weight that they had been originally designed to take. Eventual collapse was inevitable, needing only a trigger event to set events in motion. Things were made worse when the columns were cut back to make room for fire suppression systems installed around the escalators.
• That occurred when three 15-tonne air conditioning systems were relocated on the roof by placing them on rollers and dragging them to their new location. But it would be another 2 years before the progressive failures led to the ultimate collapse; in that time it was inspected by city officials a number of times and certified as safe, the last time just a couple of weeks before the collapse.
• There were ample warning signs on the day of collapse (early signs were noted more than two months earlier, before that final inspection) and both the Building Engineer and Manager recommended that the building be closed, only to be ignored by the building’s owner, who insisted that the store remain open. At the time, it made profits of about US$4 million per week, and was used by an average of 10,000 customers per day. This was about 5 years after construction was complete.
• 502 people were killed and more than 1500 trapped during the collapse, which took just 20 seconds to unfold. The investigation triggered a comprehensive review of constructions within South Korea, which found that 1 in 7 high-rise structures needed rebuilding, and 4 out of 5 needed major repair work. Only one in 50 was deemed safe. The Owner of the department store was jailed for 10 1/2 years for criminal negligence. His son and the CEO of the business was jailed for 7 years for corruption and accidental homicide, and 21 others including 12 city officials.

What I find most astonishing and enlightening is the fact that despite these multiple, willful, and flagrant compromises of the load-bearing capacity of the structure, it stood for 5 years. That speaks volumes about the scale of the margin of safety required of modern construction. While I’m sure that the standards are not as strict when it comes to domestic dwellings, there’s a LOT of room between “barely strong enough” and the commercial building standard.

Interior Design

It’s not entirely inaccurate to state that the architecture determines what a space can be used for, while the Interior Designer decides what it will be used for, as well as what it will look like. Whenever an interior designer has been called in on Rescue My Renovation, it has always been at the beginning of the project, for two very good reasons:

1. The more time they can be given to tweak and refine designs, the better the final result is likely to be, especially if there are problems to be overcome or unusual requirements to be satisfied.
2. Determining their base requirements before work commences permits all subsequent stages of the work to be guided be the desired end result. If additional structural reinforcement is needed at some point – a beam running across a wall, for example – it is a lot easier to incorporate it before you put the walls up.

The more fancy features are to be incorporated, the more critical (2) becomes. You don’t simply drop an interior courtyard and water feature into the design and expect a happy ending!

RPG Relevance Pt 1: Adventure Design

The entire process of construction – which is exactly the same as that of renovation, save that the latter has the additional initial stage of demolition – is analogous to the normal process of designing an adventure.

• You start by determining the structure that you intend to follow.
• You then determine roughly what the content will be for each structural component;
• …and then you create whatever content you require.

You may be guided through this process by a desired plot situation, or a desired stylistic objective, or can simply put things together guided by the stylistic traits of the genre.

For example, in my Zenith-3 campaign, adventures comprise two different primary structural elements. The first is personal development for the PCs, interpersonal relationships, roleplay-dominant scenes, background developments, and so on. The second is the major plot of the adventure. In terms of game sessions, I will normally aim for a ratio of 1-2 to 1, measured in game sessions, of these elements.

The simplest possible structure is to have all the “Personal” plots take place, evolving the background, the characters, and their personal soap operas, into a new situation, and then the major plot – like walking through a series of vestibules, waiting rooms, and the like, before reaching the living room.

Major Plots are almost always designed to connect to one or more PCs personal plots, and may also incorporate significant background evolution. The last adventure, for example, contained three or four game sessions of personal plots and a two-session main adventure, which significantly advanced one plotline of one the PCs and included a minor advance in a group plotline. The other PCs weren’t just along for the ride; they all played a part in determining the outcome and got their equal share of the spotlight, but one PC was the obvious focus of the adventure.

The next adventure, which I’m in the process of writing at the moment, has three structural elements, the first of which has already been dealt with in-play. You can describe this additional phase as housekeeping – decisions on future directions for each of the PCs. Next weekend (if all goes according to plan), we will enter the personal-plots phase of the adventure, much of which is built around the ramifications of decisions taken in past adventures. It will then segue seamlessly into the major plot, which – from a PC perspective – will (at least initially) appear to be just another of these personal plot-lines (that’s a favorite technique of mine, it means that the players can never tell what’s going to be significant so they have to pay attention to everything).

In isolation, the personal events are just things that happen, that show the ongoing Personal Lives of the PCs. When the campaign first started, each adventure was typically separated by 2-3 game weeks of time; currently, the interval is 1-2 game weeks. As the campaign continues to ramp up, that will become 3-7 days, then 2-5 days, then 1-4 days, 0-3 days, 0-2 days, and finally 0-1 days. As the campaign approaches its climax (assuming we get that far), there may be multiple adventures in succession over a single game day.

Even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, this impacts the players perception of the lives their characters are leading. Right now, pacing wise, they are reasonably comfortable. That will change.

This inevitably alters the balance between the personal plotlines and the main plots, shrinking the first and expanding the latter. Over time, there will also be an increase in suffusion between the two.

‘Suffusion?’ you say? What’s that?

You’ll note that there’s nothing about the duration of the main plots in preceding paragraphs. Sometimes these are a single concentrated incident, sometimes they are a succession of events in close sequence, and sometimes there are inevitable pauses and gaps and delays – but a person doesn’t stop being a person just because they are in down-time during a major plotline. Which means that I can occasionally sprinkle a main adventure plot with “personal developments” that may or may not be unrelated to the main plot.

I deliberately referred to the ‘personal lives’ content as holding no greater significance in isolation a little while back. That’s because when you view them collectively, themes and trends can be detected – because life is not a random assortment of ups and downs, there are identifiable highs and lows and patterns. It’s more like the pattern below:

Well, actually, that’s a bit too regular and predictable. Life is even MORE like this:

Sometimes, these highs and lows deal with a single individual, sometimes they are spread across a whole group, and sometimes they are something in-between. The only thing that you can say is that, over time, and ignoring other factors, they will tend to average out to a consistent level of some sort. If we were talking about a happy, healthy, moderately wealthy individual, that average would be on the plus side of the ledger; if not, it might be on the negative.

We’re talking about PCs here, so stability is a meaningless concept. Instead, their lives will lurch from success to catastrophic failure and back again, and the only certainty is that tomorrow will be different! But there will still be highs and lows, trends and events that buck them. Or, at least, there should be; the term “comfortable PC” should be an oxymoron if applied to anything other than a strictly temporary situation. Life should be calm only because it’s winding up to deal a haymaker!

These trends can happen accidentally, but many of my plotting techniques are aimed at controlling and directing them, to “suffusing” my smaller plots with broader narratives.

Those clued in, mathematically, will recognize the base graph shown above as being the sum of two sine curves of differing period and amplitude – one small and fast, the other larger and slower. These are analogous to individual plot developments in the life of a PC and to trends and larger plotlines affecting those specific events. Since there is always going to be some “splash” from one PC’s plotlines affecting another PC, there should in fact be at least two more such components PER ADDITIONAL PC, and then there are the individual major plotlines of each adventure, and the even broader plotlines that link those together.

But the techniques by which this incredible complexity is achieved are simple and straightforward, and the equivalent of what an interior designer does during the construction of a room or building. You can even extend the analogy by considering each major character – every PC and every NPC treated as a PC – as a room and the entire campaign state – the campaign as it is at any given moment – as the totality of all those rooms. The totality of the campaign, from start to finish, is the story of the “construction” and “redecoration/re-purposing” of the entire building.

The first step in creating an adventure is to decide on the structure for that particular adventure. Once that’s done, you’ve defined the “spaces” that need to be filled. Some of these will be essential narrative elements, and I then add more to more-or-less equalize the spotlight time across the different PCs.

I know what most of those essential narrative elements will be because I’ve broken a single plotline – large or small – into smaller pieces. Putting these in place within the adventure is the equivalent of putting up the walls and flooring. I rarely go so far as to include specific dialogue or flavor text; those are the “finishing” stage, the painting, decoration, and furniture.

Sometimes, if I’m in need of direction, I will select a graphic or visual image or concept – a piece of furniture – and frame the rest of the “room” around it. More usually, the plot defines what I’ll need, and I go out and look for it, or create it from scratch. And sometimes, there’s an ongoing give-and-take back-and-forth.

RPG Relevance Pt 2: Campaign Design

I don’t think I need to spend a whole lot of time belaboring this point; quite obviously, designing a campaign is just a matter of scaling up the processes used in designing an adventure.

The fundamentals are still designing a structure, applying elements to the specifications resulting from that design, and then creating details of those elements to decorate and finish the design.

The major difference is that these are – or should be – all designed and intended to change over time.

It’s always my preference to avoid showing the campaign elements the way that I want/need them to be for the main campaign; instead, I show them the way they used to be and show the PCs the events that transform them, having those events impact on them in the earlier phases of a campaign. This not only makes the players feel like part of the campaign world, it gives the major campaign events poignancy and direct relevance to the players – it gives them Gravitas.

It’s important to realize that the more of your design work that you can complete at the Campaign level, the less you have to do at the Adventure level. This is important because you can usually delay the start of a campaign until the design work is finished, but it’s more effort – and more dangerous – to delay the start of an adventure until it’s finished, or to start playing it without having finished creating it!

Another analogy that occurred to me at about this point in thinking about this subject is that genre is analogous to architectural style. This not only influences the structure and shape of the building, but defines what furniture and decorative elements are or are not appropriate within. These rules can be broken, if the need is sufficient, and these deviations can even shed new light on genre elements by exposing them within a new context through the resulting contrast. But you have to know what you are doing, or you will be relying on a lot of serendipity in your designs.

RPG Relevance Pt 3: System Design

That chain of thought led me to the third aspect of relevance: RPG system design.

If the genre of the game is considered to be the architectural style, the functions that the system is designed to facilitate, and their relative priority, can be thought of as the framing infrastructure – the timbers and beams and foundations that define the shape of the structure.

Characteristics, Characteristic Checks, saving rolls, combat mechanics, a skill system, experience systems, and archetype expressions (character classes in D&D, for example) – these will be common to almost every game system, present in one form or another.

Those with the highest design priority will be the richest and most detailed, while those with lower priority will tend to be more vague and generalized.

Other design priorities may be embedded – a magic system, a technology system, interplanetary or interstellar travel, cosmological principles, a particular look-and-feel. If a Star Trek game system felt like you were running a Battlestar Galactica campaign, you would consider that design a failure because it did not convey the essential flavor of the source that you were aiming for, just as a Star Wars campaign that felt like a Terminator or Jurassic Park movie would be wrong. Some of these will be defined by the genre, others may not.

The actual substance of each of these game system elements is akin to the decoration and finishing of the rooms in a building. Ideally, they will work together in harmony, and will be practical, functional, spaces. In practice, there’s always at least one room that’s a little bit clumsy or awkward, over-decorated or even ugly.

The redecoration/renovation motif is relevant, too; quite often, you can replace one piece of the design with something else. The only thing that you have to do is make sure the doors and windows match up – the inputs from other design elements, and the outputs to those elements. If you wanted to, for example, you could replace all the character races in D&D with something else. Or change the character classes. Or replace the Saving Throw system. Or tweak the Combat system. Or whatever.

Conclusion

In almost every respect, then, RPGs are analogous to construction, and the methodology that has evolved to produce habitats and structures that don’t collapse around our ears can be applied to the hobby to its betterment.

You can not only construct better, more reliable, adventures, you can understand those adventures more clearly – enabling more rapid and purposeful ad-hoc invention and intervention when necessary (the equivalent of emergency repairs)!

You can construct better, more effective, campaigns, that are more engaging and more entertaining while requiring less work to maintain, because you more clearly understand campaign structure.

You can construct better, more efficient, more flavorful rules systems and subsystem tweaks, because you not only have a more holistic understanding of the way game system structures interact, but can more readily isolate one structural element from another. You can see more of the connecting threads behind the set designs and, from them, derive a deeper understanding of what the designers were trying to achieve.

And all of that can only make you a more effective GM in the final phase of RPGs, without which all of the above is meaningless – play. Which makes the game better for everyone involved. Amply justifying the time spent on this subject – writing it, on my part, or reading it, on yours – I think.

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds and burden of inspiration.

* for various reasons, there are any number of posts that shouldn’t get counted, in my opinion, like being forced by the technology to publish an article in three simultaneous posts because of its length – which happened early on. Depending on which posts you consider eligible for counting, the “True” 1000th will fall in December… or January… or possibly March…

I don’t know about anyone else, but my first thought upon encountering the number 1001 is to remember Scheherazade’s stories, and that leads me to think about Arabian stories in general, which leads me to Genies, which leads me to Wishes. So that’s the potted history that’s in back of this article.

GM Role

Nothing reveals the GM’s role in an RPG as “the arbiter of reality” more sharply than the sudden intrusion into the game as a Wish. Depending on how old-school your campaign style is, this could quite literally change everything.

More recent incarnations of game mechanics have tightened the reigns, to the point that a Wish seems underwhelming and over-sold, promising big things and unable to deliver. Starting from 3e D&D onward, the spell – whether granted by an item or by the spell-caster’s own abilities – increasingly seems unworthy of the name.

Such “Wishes” are detrimental to the sense of wonder, of fantasy, that should be inherent in the genre, at least in my opinion.

And yet, this whole question is inextricably entwined in one of the oldest complaints about the D&D game mechanics, that of the game imbalance between Mages and everyone else at higher character levels. Part of the assorted attempts at resolving that complaint, both official and unofficial, that have been instituted through the years, inevitably involves a catastrophic neutering of the power of a Wish.

My general inclination is to reject this neutering, at least in part. It’s my contention that since the GM dictates the availability of wishes in items, a better solution is to divide the problem in two – “Wishes”, as per the spell, can be as constrained and limited as the needs of game balance dictate, while rarity and difficulty of creation can be used to constrain the impact of more powerful “Wish” items.

The name “Wish” for a Mage Spell is thus revealed to be a matter of Wishful Thinking, a pun that sealed this attitude to the subject in stone as soon as I conceived it.

But, at the same time, this is – potentially – letting the genie out of the bottle. Some constraint and restraint is required, or a Wish is the equivalent of giving a monkey a buzz-saw and inviting them to “do their worst”.

Three Primary Considerations

When a Wish is made in one of my campaigns, there are three questions that have to be answered before any adjudication of the results can be possible. These are Campaign Damage, Hubris, and Balance.

1. Campaign Damage

Will granting the wish inherently damage the campaign, for example by providing an easy answer to one of the central dilemmas that the entire campaign is intended to resolve?

The more “high fantasy” the campaign is, the more this becomes a problem, an irony that is not lost on me!

2. Hubris

Will granting the wish inherently elevate the PCs to a position greater than that of the Gods? Or, to rephrase the point, if all it took was a wish to solve the problem then don’t the PCs think the Gods would have thought of that already?

No problem defined as being too great for the Gods to solve with a wave of their hands is subject to direct solution through a Wish.

3. Balance

Will granting the wish inherently elevate one individual PC above his peers in deliverable game power to an excessive extent?

“I want +20 Armor and Sword!” – No, no, no, no, no. Not going to happen.

“I want +10 Armor and Sword!” – will happen ten minutes before the first.

“I want +50 to my Hide In Shadows!” – getting closer to the mark, but still – no.

“I want my sword to have 1 inch per character level range so that I can hit targets at a distance.” – Hmm, interesting, let’s talk….

Ways Of Saying No

There are lots of ways of refusing an unreasonable request. At the GM’s discretion, any or all of these may also burn a “charge”, i.e. a Wish – too bad if you only have one!

1. Outright Denial

The simplest and most direct is simply to say “no”. But, having gone to all this trouble to inculcate a sense of wonder into the campaign, an arbitrary and outright denial that punctures that bubble of suspended disbelief seems counter-productive; an argument that I have heard advanced for adopting the “weak Wish” proposals from the outset.

2. Temporary Change

It’s far more satisfying to reinforce that sense of wonder by having the transformation requested occur – for a while. And to remind the PCs that sauce for the goose is also good for the gander – if the PCs use this as a temporary power-up, so will their enemies.

Of course, it won’t be necessarily obvious that the change is only temporary…

3. Delusion

In one campaign that I ran, making a wish that was beyond the power of the Wish to deliver simply caused the character making the wish to be subject to the delusion that their wish had been granted – Monkeying with the character’s sanity being the only way for the Wish to actually deliver the request.

My thought is divided on the question of whether or not the players should be informed of this in advance. It would largely depend on the social attitude towards those who were “strange in the head” in the culture, and whether or not the PCs would have had the opportunity at some past time to observe such an individual. “Old Frederick, he got one of them wish thingies, and wished to be King Of The World. Hasn’t been quite right since, going around in finery and issuing meaningless orders and imagining that people fall over themselves to obey.”

At a metagame level, players should be aware that attempts to rort the system risks bringing the wrath of the GM down upon their heads, and that this is not a good idea. But some people just can’t help themselves.

4. The Rules Lawyer

I normally eschew “rules lawyer” approaches to problems. But if a player asks for it, I’ll unleash both barrels. On one occasion, a player who was granted a wish submitted his request in writing, with 16 typed pages of detailed specifics of the request’s fulfillment that would not constitute the granting of the Wish in the opinion of the character making the wish.

This for a request that, if presented in a straightforward manner, I would have had no problem fulfilling.

You see, there was a movement in the 70s and 80s that cast the players and GM into adversarial roles; a notion that the GM should be doing his level best at all times to kill off the PCs, and anything was fair game if it avoided this fate. The rules, and in particular a strict interpretation thereof, was the player’s only defense. This, despite an outright statement in the GM’s Guide that the rules as published were only guidelines and suggestions, and the GM was free to interpret or rewrite them as they saw necessary.

Of course, abuse of that authority led to greater demands by players to control their own destinies, for the GMs to be forced to adhere to the rules, and for the rules to be sufficiently comprehensive that the GM would not be required to make arbitrary decisions.

I don’t hold to that principle at all. Instead, I adhere to a variation on the original old-school approach – “the GM is free to interpret or rewrite the rules as they see necessary for the betterment of the game.” The game is not served by denying players the ability to do anything not explicitly permitted by the rules; it is not served by capricious or hostile rules interpretations. The purpose of the game is not to “win” – it’s to have fun, and the players and GM are engaged in a cooperative effort to that end.

Three pages of legalese is a violation of that principle. It was certainly no fun to read it, and would have set an unwanted precedent to let the player get away with it. Nor was it appropriate for the INT 14 character to have submitted such a wish!

Almost immediately, I spotted a major hole in the reasoning of the player. Putting it on paper took no more than 1/4 of a page. I then handed it to the player in question and gave him a choice: submit a simple request that didn’t assume that the GM was an enemy power, or I would rule based on that 1/4 page response (to the character’s severe detriment), and to go away and think about his choices for a week or so.

These days, I am even less tolerant. In essence, if you act as a rules lawyer, on the basis that you will not only ruin my fun but that of everyone else at the table, you are asking for it with both barrels.

5. The Monkey’s Paw

The nastiest way to say no – and what I mean by “with both barrels” – is to go full-blown Monkey’s Paw on the PC. And then run a mini-adventure in which the crippled and maimed PCs quest for another Wish with which to undo the first.

As a general Rule Of Thumb

If a wish doesn’t violate one or more of the three Primary Considerations, I won’t reject it. Even if it does, I may use one of the alternative rejection methods, depending on the results of considering a fourth issue: How Much Fun Will It Be To Grant The Wish?

The answer falls into three categories:

• None or minimal – rejection if a violation, shrug and say OK if not. But try to persuade the player to make a different choice.
• Fun for a while, but not in the long term – rejection via method 2 if a violation, shrug and say OK if not. When it stops being fun, I can give the player the chance to rescind his wish, or provide another Wish to undo the effect.
• Fun, fun, fun – rejection via method 2 if a violation, evil grin and ready agreement if not.

The Scale Of A Wish

Because I always think about the scale in terms of answering the question of just what can be done with a Wish, especially an item-borne wish, long experience has shown me that the scale of the wish has a big bearing on all four considerations. When I aggregate all the possibilities into a master list, I end up with a 12-step scale.

1. The Cosmic Wish

The most likely to violate Principles one and/or two, this is a substantial reordering of the game universe. But it’s also an invitation to the GM to be at his most creative, so there’s always an off-chance that I’ll say ‘yes’ – though that “yes” might bear an uncanny resemblance to a “Monkey’s Paw” refusal, at least at first.

There is a fairly predictable pattern to the way events would unfold. First, the player would achieve whatever his direct intent was (a good thing, from his point of view). Second, negative consequences and ramifications would begin to be observed, leading others to discover the reordering of nature. Third (if it hadn’t been undone already), positives would be discovered, showing that the change isn’t uniformly good or bad, just different.

It’s a key element of human nature to notice the negatives first, unless blinded by optimism, but it’s dangerous to reject a policy simply because some negatives have been observed; the question has to be whether or not the change on the whole is better, worse, or neutral, and that can’t be done without identifying the positives. Most people won’t wait, and substitute an ideological bias one way or the other, leading to a false appraisal.

Often, this is because the negative effects will happen more or less automatically, with no need for action, while the positives will require some effort to achieve. The benefits are potential, in other words – and manifesting/achieving them thus becomes another thread within the campaign, potentially unveiling a whole new opposition force, upending established alliances, and – in general – upsetting the apple-cart of predictability.

BUT – and it’s a big one – you always have to ask the question of why someone else doesn’t use a Wish to restore the status quo. That leads into complicated issues of Destiny and Causality that might not be everyone’s cup of tea to contemplate. The simplest answer is simply to state that no Wish can ever completely undo the effects of another, and that resistance to change increases with each attempt to rewrite reality – and don’t worry about why.

2. The Divine Wish

In my campaigns, the Gods are limited in some respect. Omnipotence and omniscience don’t work well as campaign premises – something that I wrote about back in 2010, in A Monkey Wrench In The Deus-Ex-Machina: Limiting Divine Power (and don’t miss the discussion in the comments!)

That means that it might be at least theoretically possible for a Wish to impact at a Divine level – replacing one Deity with another, for example, or elevating a PC to Divine status. Assuming that you can skirt any problems with the three Principles, this simply opens new cans of worms for any PC who didn’t realize that in some respects, Gods in my campaigns are going to be as circumscribed as humans, if not more-so!

Indeed, one of the driving factors throughout the history and in-play time of my Fumanor campaign was Lolth’s attempts to ascend to True Godhood, because she had never made this discovery, and the PCs recognized it as a consequence of opposing some of the machinations she had set in motion.

In the Rings Of Time campaign, this was also true – but this time, it was the PCs, having been used by “The Gods” to do their “dirty work”, who determined to claim the rewards of Divinity. After all, they had done the work of the Gods already.

But it’s more difficult to evade the Principles at this scale. Not impossible, though.

3. The Planar Wish

A wish that affects just one plane? Theoretically possible, but there would be domino effects and repercussions that would need careful study before you could be sure that one of the three Principles would not raise a veto. If inspired, though, this is the sort of thing that I had in my with rejection method number 2.

4. The Civilization Wish

Wishing a change to an entire specific race? Again, possible – but this is quite likely to impact on Principle number 1, or simply not be fun, at least after a while. So it’s something that I would have to think very carefully about before granting.

Wishing that all Gnomes grew an extra inch in height? No problem. Wishing that the Drow reformed? Big problems. Wishing that Elves respected human leadership? Hmm, maybe. Wishing that Dwarves were less stubborn? Maybe. Wishing that humans discovered gunpowder? That’s more problematic – how do you know what Gunpowder is or can do, to wish for that? Wishing for humans to have an additional racial advantage to bring them more in-line with the Demi-human races? Assuming that potential problems with Principle 3 can be avoided, that might be possible.

The devil is in the detail.

5. The National Wish

Instead of an entire race, how about one particular Kingdom or Tribe? For example, if one Tribe of Orcs is known to be more willing to negotiate in good faith or be opposed to war, Wishing for that Tribe to be ascendant over the others might be completely reasonable – and raises an entirely new question for a GM to ponder: “How long does it take?”

A wish may not be able to get there directly, but may be able to start a domino chain of events that leads to the desired result. Directly elevating that Orcish Tribe, for example, might be beyond the power of a Wish, but starting a Civil War that would eventually have the same result might not be.

Of course, should such a Tribe discover – after gaining that ascendancy – that it was the result of PC interference in internal Orcish Politics would not only fracture the tribe, politically, but probably start the War that the PCs were trying to avoid. But the temporary respite might be worth it.

It’s in putting such options on the table that Wishes achieve their ultimate value in an RPG – providing they haven’t been neutered.

6. The Regional Wish

With each reduction in scope, the likelihood of a Principle 2 violation recedes, while the likelihood of a Principle 3 violation grows. A wish that affects only one geographic region, such as a bountiful harvest, or a Gold Rush, brings this point into sharp relief. In fact, it’s fairly difficult to imagine a Hubris violation at this small a scale. If the Wish were limited in duration, I would be even more strongly inclined to grant it – for example, “I wish for good weather for the next two weeks”, or “I wish for it to rain on your city for a year and a day”.

7. The Local Wish

Actually, I would regard that last one as a “Local Wish” – one affecting just part of a geographic region. These rarely have much impact beyond flavor, and that makes them eminently grantable for the most part. One still needs to keep a weather eye out for domino effects, especially if affecting a Capital City or vital Trade corridor.

One can also strike trouble with overreaching in some other respect – “I Wish for this fortress to be Impregnable” is asking for trouble of the Monkey’s Paw variety – some virulent disease that devastates the population would lead most invaders to bypass such a fortress without attacking, for example.

8. The Family Wish

With the Family Wish, the danger of a Principle 3 violation becomes ascendant, though targeting the wrong family might still incur Principle 1 problems, and I can still envisage potential overreaches – wishing that your family was the Royal Family, or that you were Heir to the Throne, for example. On the other hand, if I can think of enough additional burdens and consequences of interest – if I can see ways of making it fun, in other words – there might only be Principle 3 dangers to consider.

This brings up an important principle that hasn’t been mentioned so far (and note the lack of capitalization): balance can sometimes be achieved in the face of an overreaching wish that would otherwise produce a Principle 3 violation through the imposition of additional life complications for the character. This, in essence, plays Principles 3 and 4 off of each other. The key to resolving such possibilities is whether or not they would result in one character receiving a disproportionate share of Spotlight Time.

9. The Personal Wish

With the downsizing of a wish to this scale, Principle 2 violations (Hubris) largely fall away, but the potential for Principle 3 problems (Imbalance) becomes acute. Nevertheless, this can be a viable solution for some campaign problems – a player takes multiple levels of a particular class with laboring under a misinterpretation of the class mechanics, for example, and wants to trade them all in for levels in a completely different character class. Provided that power levels are equitable, this would be a perfectly satisfactory application of a Wish.

Class and Ability synergies have to be carefully watched, however – if one class permits a character to always attempt a Reflex Check for half damage, and another grants the ability to always take no more than half damage after a Reflex Check, the combination represents a significant power upgrade for the Character.

Often, decisions at this scale are the subject of negotiated compromises instead of outright verdicts. The guiding principle is always the 4th – more fun for everyone is the goal.

10. The Sub-personal Wish

Rather than affecting the whole of a character, Wishes at this scale affect just one attribute or aspect of the character. The considerations are very similar to those of The Personal Wish, but are less likely to result in problems.

I have a set of rough guidelines that I follow. If the character has a positive stat modifier, a single wish can raise that stat to 18 (sometimes 20, depending on the campaign); if not, it can only raise the stat to 14, and a second wish is needed to get to 18. Thereafter, a single wish increases the stat to the minimum required for the next highest stat bonus.

Similarly with magic items: if the original item is +0 or +1, it can become a +2 item. A +2 item can become a +3, a +3 can become +4, and +4 can become +5. If the game system progresses beyond that limit – Pathfinder does, from memory – so does this principle.

11. The Potentiality Wish

When you reach the top of the scale, you enter the realm of the Potentiality Wish – that is, wishing for an item or ability to have the potential to exceed that threshold. In D&D (3.x), that means +6; in Pathfinder, I think it’s +11.

The wish has two effects: it enables the item to be enchanted to that degree, and it ensures that there is someone out there, somewhere in the game world, with the skill and expertise to so enchant the item. I make no promises about who they might be (ally or enemy), or what might have to be done in the form of a quid-pro-quo to earn their cooperation, or how much it might cost the PC.

Another way to think about Potentiality is that the player has wished for an Adventure with one particular reward to be written into the campaign narrative. Every other aspect of that adventure is the province of the GM.

12. The Mechanical/Trivial Wish

Sometimes-contributor Ian Gray takes his Wishes down to an even smaller scale – he wishes for just +1 to one particular attribute or item at a time. His reasoning is that the GM is far more likely to grant such requests (while not paying attention to the total being achieved), and is far less likely to “monkey” with the outcome.

I discussed this at greater length in The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency about 6 years ago (how time flies!) but that article then moved off on a different tangent to this one.

What is your default position?

Some GMs have a default position, when it comes to wishes, of saying “no” unless it can be shown that there will be no ill-effects. This reflects the woeful restriction of Wishes in the game rules, the unnecessary sacrificing of genre and flavor for practicality, and an admission that the GM either lacks the time, enthusiasm, or imagination to properly scope out the potential consequences and assess them.

Other GMs have a default position, when it comes to wishes, of saying “yes” – provided that the request is on an approved list. This is almost as bad, and for exactly the same reasons.

My default position is to say “maybe – let me think about it for a minute.” And then the actually spend that minute in deep thought about the consequences, the campaign, and the Four Principles that I have described in this article. If there’s a problem, can it be mitigated? If there’s a reason to say “no”, can it be worked around? Can fulfillment of the Wish be delayed until that objection is no longer a problem? Is there a means of saying “yes?” and coping with the consequences?

Ninety times out of a hundred, that 60-second review will produce a definitive outcome, ranging from a “yes” to one of the five ways of saying “no”. Occasionally, it will lead to a “I’m inclined to say…” either yes or no, followed by a “but,” and further discussion. On rare occasions, I may have to say, “I need to give it more thought.”

That’s the virtue of the four principles – and the flexibility provided by multiple ways of saying “no”. They cut through the fog, by posing specific questions and prompting productive lines of thought.

Ultimately, when you boil the first three Principles down, they are all reflections of a potential to reduce the amount of fun at the game table, making them specific derivatives of the fourth and final principle – and that’s why the fourth can occasionally override the others, showing a path through the valley of “no” to the signpost that reads “yes”.

Forget about saying “yes” or “no” by default. “Is it more fun?” should be the gold standard of decision-making at the game table, the question that overrides all others, and you can usually get there by compromising. This is just one example of how that can be put into practice.

I know a number of former GMs who gave up the job. Some of them reverted to being players, some of them occasionally still dabble in the big chair, and some were so traumatized by the experience that they gave up RPGs entirely.

There are always three parts to the equation that dictates a GM’s longevity.

The first is the amount of work required and the GM’s capacity for completing that work in a timely fashion while maintaining some sort of personal life beyond RPGs. No GM should ever be put in a position where they have to choose between family and an activity with friends, and if one is, most of the time you can expect the activity with friends to be the loser. And, even if things never get that far, stress resulting from overwork can force the GM to abandon his role, anyway.

The second is the degree of skill with which the GM executes the various tasks, both in-game and prep, that comprise that game function, and his ability to recognize and acknowledge that skill. A GM who feels, rightly or wrongly, inadequate to the demands placed upon him by the big chair, will often take any excuse to abdicate his role, if necessary by shutting down the campaign and beginning a new one with a different concept, game system, and possibly even genre. This outcome is still more likely if the GM is, in fact, inadequate in the estimation of the players concerned; their lack of support can discourage the GM before experience gives him the chance to rise to the standard demanded. Of course, the standards applied by the players may be unrealistic, or the GM might even be genuinely swamped by the demands being placed on him. It can be hard to judge. And, of course, the still more-likely prospect may be that they are somewhere in between these extremes.

My co-GM’s experience in the early days of the Pulp Campaign is relevant. Although extremely knowledgeable in a number of fields – in fact, of us all, probably the most knowledgeable in those fields, including genre knowledge – his ability to execute a campaign was not up to the same standard.

This had previously killed off a Traveler campaign when the players wanted more information about the different factions in a civil war before committing themselves instead of diving in up to their necks, and were insistent on peaceful trading in the meantime. He could not find a way to engage us in adventures; his entire campaign plan was predicated upon us choosing a side in the war and actively engaging in the military campaign.

After a couple of okay-but-not-brilliant adventures, frustrations were beginning to mount in the Pulp Campaign. In particular, his plan to backstop the players and fill any gaps in their capabilities with ultra-capable NPCs, a lack of expertise in the game system that showed no signs of improving and which led him to continually over- or under-estimate how effective his NPCs would be, and the sheer number of players (9 or 10) – which resulted in none of them receiving an adequate share of the spotlight – had the campaign on the rocks.

All the players acknowledge that they were at the point of pulling the plug. Some were intending to give it one last chance to improve, others were already prepared to pull the pin.

That was when I stepped into a co-GMing role. I had virtually zero genre knowledge, but knew how to string plotlines together into bigger pictures, knew the game system, and how to solve most GMing problems. I was able to put together a coherent concept for the campaign that emphasized the collective power of the PCs and minimized the individual capabilities of the NPCs, was able to put some depth into the plotlines and incorporate them into a more sweeping plotline, and able to provide the expertise needed to challenge the PCs without overwhelming them. What’s more, I was able to expand the adventures to encompass the palette of capabilities of all the characters. As some players left the campaign because they weren’t in love with the genre, we were better able to focus these efforts on those who remained, and so ended up with a stable line-up.

We’re currently running through the 31st adventure since we teamed up, and working diligently on the 32nd, which we expect to begin early next year. We’re also into our 12th year of co-GMing the campaign, so it’s gone from a near-death experience to extreme longevity!

The third critical factor is the amount of fun that the GM extracts from the process. What floats their boat, ticks their boxes, and keeps them happy to invest the kind of effort that’s required to create a campaign to modern standards?

That’s the subject for today’s article.

Itches to scratch – Prep

There are two parts to GMing – prep and play – and they are about as different as chalk and vulcanized rubber. Prep is the 90% that players rarely see; but for some GMs it is the reason they get up in the morning and think gaming.

RPG Prep is creating plots and situations; creating characters; creating locations; contingency planning; and may also involve creating maps, props, flavor text, research, psychology, strategy, and big-picture conceptualizing.

Inevitably, there will be parts of this cocktail that appeal more than others, and parts that any given GM does better than others, and parts that they perform more efficiently than others, and the likelihood that any of these attributes coincide is vanishingly small, but happens more often than some might think.

That’s because the things that we’re good at tend to be performed better and/or more efficiently, both because we’re more inclined to devote our full attention to them, and because our skill in performing those tasks is part of the reason why we enjoy them. It can convey a sense of being in control of an otherwise uncontrolled melee of competing demands for our attention.

When Practical Solutions fall short

Equally, there will be some approaches to the craft of GMing that work for a particular GM, and some that fail miserably, no matter how objectively practical the approach might be. A good example is Johnn Four’s “5 room” systems – while I can appreciate the practicality, having tried the approach a couple of times, I found that for me, they sucked all the fun and coherence from my prep, turning it into something that had to be done rather than something that could be enjoyed for its own sake. It felt like the process was in control, not me.

Waning enthusiasm for game prep is a sure sign that your prep system isn’t scratching your personal prep “Itch”.

Johnn has also tried my techniques, and found that while he started strongly while utilizing them, he was unable to sustain coherence and output in the medium-to-long term; his campaigns escaped his control, and his enthusiasm for them waned in proportion. He needed a more loosely-structured approach that nevertheless suborned everything into a consistent pattern – the “5 room” system that he now espouses.

Once again, waning enthusiasm is the key indicator.

Every GM is different, and every GM needs to find their own solutions. That creates good blog content, because the only certainty is that your solutions might fit others. I can share my techniques and Johnn can share his, and we’re both right – and might both be wrong when it comes to the needs of “GM Johnny”.

Moreover, exposure to multiple techniques means that you can cherry pick what you need to get you past a particular creative “hump” or problem. You learn something even if the overall experience is negative and your response is, “I’m never doing it that way again!”

The conflict between Need and Desire

My process, in a nutshell, is to create a to-do list and then prioritize the items on it. Some may generate new entries or alter existing ones, so the list is always growing and evolving.

I divide the list into “must’s” and “desirables”, estimate how long the must’s will require (minimum) to complete to a minimum acceptable standard, and make sure that I allocate at least that much time to them. That automatically adds “Polish [X]” to the list of “desirables”.

Of course, I’ve added refinements and complications that suit me to that process, but that’s what the essentials boil down to – making sure to do the essentials to the minimum acceptable standard and then spreading what free time remains on the remainder, selected by value to the adventure and how much that process scratches my personal itches.

That means that some parts of the GM’s task are forever being neglected by my prep, but I know I can live with that because if I couldn’t, it would be on the “must do” list. For example, having some idea of what a villain can do with his powers is a “must” for my superhero campaign, actually translating that into game mechanics is close to the bottom priority of the “desirables” list, more often not done than complete. I trust myself to be able to improv a translation of concept into game mechanics during play, and find I get more “value” (both in polish and in fun) from polishing the abstract concepts.

I’ve described my planning process and some other techniques in previous articles, most notably

• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity (task list and prioritization process);
• The Ubercharacter Wimp: Plotting within your PCs limitations (a tool for the faster creation of featured NPCs);
• Creating Partial NPCs to Speed Game Prep (a process for the rapid construction of non-featured NPCs, without personalities);
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC (creating personalities quickly, either in advance, or at the game table – which goes well with the preceding article);
• It’s Not Like Shooting Sushi In A Barrel: A Personalized Productivity Focus For Game Prep (a more abstract and theoretical foundation that eventually became the Game Prep process described in the first article listed).

There are a couple of problems with this technique.

1. All your “itches” might end up in the “desirables” column.
2. Itches that make the “musts” tend to be front-loaded into the start of game prep.
3. You can easily overindulge because you enjoy what you’re doing.

1. It all feels like work

If all the parts of game prep that you enjoy end up on the desirables list, your game prep is a list of chores that have to be finished before you can go and play – if you get any “play” time at all.

Every now and then, you can cope with this, but it’s not sustainable, even if it is the “responsible” approach.

Now, I’m not smart enough to solve the problem of work-life balance to universal satisfaction, and this is just another reflection of that social issue. But I have a solution to this particular problem – distributing the “musts” throughout the available prep time, and – in the process – leaving a little room for indulgence in the daily or weekly schedule.

For example, if you have a total of 10 hours a week to devote to game prep, and the “must do” list for the current adventure you are working on requires 6 of those hours, that leaves 4 hours for fun. You can either spend all six of those hours up-front, making sure that the “musts” get done, or you can decide that for every two hours spent on “musts”, you will spend one hour of the available prep time on a “desirable” that scratches your personal itch. That uses up half the time allocated to ‘desirables’ before the ‘musts’ are complete, technically violating the principles of the prep structuring process, but it’s a lot more sustainable over the long term.

The real problem, which I can only partially solve through efficiencies like “Partial NPCs”, still arises when there isn’t even enough time to complete the “musts”. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

2. That’s the fun part over with

A similar problem arises because of the natural human tendency to prioritize the tasks that we enjoy most, when all other factors are identical. If you apply that tendency to the list of “musts”, it’s easy to see that you will do as many of the fun parts first as you can – and then find the rest of your game prep to be a chore.

The solution, once again, is to deliberately distribute the fun and the work – and, in fact, to prioritize the “work” over the “fun”, as that provides an incentive to get the “work” done.

That’s not always possible, because of the principle of “dependence,” which I haven’t mentioned so far. Simply put, it means that some tasks depend on the output of other tasks, and so can’t be carried out until the dependent tasks are complete. The prioritization process is vastly complicated than the elegant model described by the earlier synopsis because of this factor.

There are only two ways of approaching this problem – either you do all the dependents first, regardless of the prioritization sequence with “fun” as an incorporated factor (the top-down approach) or you create some jigsaw pieces without knowing whether or not they will fit (a bottom-up approach).

The choice for me is a simple one – if I have ample time in hand (“Musts” consuming 50% of the available prep time, or less), I’ll go with the bottom-down approach because there’s time to completely redo a jigsaw piece that can’t be hammered and filed to fit. If time is tight, the more serious strict dependence must be followed.

But here’s a fun fact that shows the underlying complexity of the whole situation: with a little discipline, the more you indulge the “fun when it’s scheduled” bottom-up approach, the easier it becomes to do so. The solution is to save and index discarded jigsaw pieces.

Let’s say you have an idea for an interesting location. Normally, you shouldn’t spend time on it until you finish outlining the plot and know whether or not it’s going to be needed, but if you have the scope for some self-indulgence, if it turns out not to fit the plotline, you can save it for an occasion when it does match your needs.

The more you indulge in the bottom-up approach, the more leftover puzzle pieces you stockpile against future needs, so the smaller the risk entailed in future indulgence. Of course, the more such puzzle pieces that you stockpile, the more dependent you are on your indexing process to quickly find what you are looking for.

3. The Danger Of Overindulgence

Self-indulgence at any time leads to the potential for overindulgence. In this case, that usually takes the form of spending more time on a list item than the minimum needed to produce something of playable standard – simply because you are enjoying working on what you creating at the time.

This is actually both a manifestation of, and a cause of, “Can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome, where you loose perspective on the bigger picture and begin to obsess about the details of one part of that bigger picture.

You can actually reach the point of counter-productivity – the more details you load into a list item beyond the necessary, the greater the danger of incongruity and incompatibility between the details and that bigger picture.

The self-discipline required to avoid overindulgence is the price you pay for permitting distributed ‘fun’ prep. Everyone will have their own line that they should not cross, and it won’t be a fixed thing for any given individual over time, either. To guard against over-indulgence, the best solution is to end each prep session with a review of how what you have done fits into the whole. You will soon recognize when you have over-indulged – and when such indulgence begins to threaten your capacity to complete the other items on your “must” list.

Personally, I punish myself for any over-indulgence by insisting that the extra time spent eats into the time reserved for other social activities. I might have to forego watching a TV series that I enjoy, or stay home and work instead of going out, or getting up early, or whatever. It’s important that it be an activity that I would enjoy so that it’s an actual punishment.

Itches to scratch – Play

For some people, prep contains the only parts of GMing that they actually enjoy; running an actual game is the price they pay for the stimulation needed to trigger prep. Some of these people spend all their time designing adventures and campaigns and never actually playing them!

Other people go so strongly in the other direction that they would (and do) eschew prep almost completely, relying on their capacity to improv. (While I can do that, I find it too stressful; but it’s better than not GMing at all).

Most people fall somewhere in between these two extremes. And that means that there are some parts of sitting behind the GM screen that they enjoy and some that they don’t, or don’t enjoy as much. Interpreting rules and dynamic rule creation, depicting multiple characters in a session, communicating persona or plot, being the center of attention or the ringmaster – these are all aspects of being a GM that may constitute an “itch” that the process of GMing scratches.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the amount that you relish what you may be doing has no impact on your performance. There are NPCs that I’ve played that were strictly mechanical, by-the-numbers, resulting in an at-best adequate performance, and others that were so joyous to depict that I threw myself into the part, chewing the scenery most entertainingly. Players notice the difference. It can even change from week to week – this week, a smarmy official might be the big winner, next week a crazed scientist or mage.

Isolating and analyzing different activities comes far more naturally when prepping for a game session than it does when actually running a game session. That’s because such analysis and it’s documentation represents additional tasks at exactly the time when we’re already maxed out.

The only acceptable methodology is to review your memories of the events of the game session, perhaps aided with a prompt or reminder of some kind, such as a recording of play or log of events, both in- and out-of-game. Although not as visceral and in-the-moment accurate, this can at least provide the basis for some generalized appraisal – and more detailed analysis can be misleading, anyway – see, for example my comments on relishing playing particular NPCs a few paragraphs ago. If one of those showed up on a given day, “roleplaying NPCs” might get quite a high score, whereas on a day when none of them front up, “roleplaying NPCs” might get quite a low score. Only when that pattern is correctly identified can you think about functional strategies for increasing your enjoyment of your time behind the GM screen.

With a reasonable understanding, however, you can start adapting your GMing style to scratch your in-game “itches” more frequently and mitigate or change the elements you don’t enjoy as much.

Vicarious Engagement

One source of pleasure behind the GM screen that is often overlooked, and which deserves special mention, is Vicarious Engagement. This occurs when the players are engaging in the material you have prepped for them and clearly having fun, and you can vicariously enjoy the entertainment you are providing.

This is far more powerful than most people realize, because it feeds back into virtually every other aspect of GMing. If the players are having fun, they will be more tolerant of rules interpretations, they will react more strongly to the NPCs who are supposed to elicit reactions, they will immerse themselves more fully in the plot and in their character’s reactions to the circumstances in which they find themselves, they will be more forgiving and tolerant of the GM in general.

If, on the other hand, they are not having barrels of fun, that also feeds back into everything the GM does. They will be less tolerant of the need for rules interpretations, they will be more blase even toward provocative NPCs and frankly dismissive of those not designed to elicit a strong reaction, will not display heart-felt reactions in any event, will go through the motions rather than engaging with the plot, and will be less forgiving of anything and everything.

There are two sides to every coin, and it’s easy to see the negatives without appreciating this feedback/amplification effect. Having fun is infectious, and misery loves company; use these truisms of human psychology to your advantage. And contemplate this scenario: if you are able to fake your own level of enthusiasm enough to push your players onto the “enjoyment” side of the above equation, the principle of vicarious engagement can feed back to you to make the pleasure that you were feigning genuine, even if only to a lesser degree.

This same process has often been recommended for those feeling down – forcing yourself to smile has the same chemical effects within the brain as actually enjoying yourself, and those in turn make you feel better. It’s ten-cent pop psychology, but it works to at least some extent, and any improvement is a good thing!

A Log Of Labors

The best approach is to maintain a log of your activities over a couple of game sessions, both prep and in (reconstructed) play. That will give you some indication of which situations come up most frequently, and permit you to assess which ones you derive the most satisfaction and pleasure from – and that’s the basis of reasonable steps to improve your satisfaction with all aspects of your GMing.

Nor should you fall into the trap of thinking that the two are disconnected. They aren’t – inadequate prep of NPCs, for example, leads to greater improv, which may lead to either greater or lesser enjoyment from those NPCs behind the GM screen. The optimum strategy in your particular case might be to prepare less, not more.

What makes you Itch

Another way to look at it is to assess, as dispassionately as possible, your GMing strengths and weaknesses, then modify your prep and GMing style to maximize the value of the first and mitigate the second.

Find your itch, and scratch it. You will be a better GM for doing so, and it only takes flipping a few elements from negatives to positives to radically alter the overall balance within a campaign.

Not that you should perform this kind of postmortem all the time. It’s too distracting and self-obsessive for that to be good for you. An annual check-up is usually enough, plus (perhaps) a review a month or so after implementing any changes to see if they’ve had the desired impact.

If you have more fun at the game table, there’s a preponderance of probabilities that your players will, too. If your players have more fun at your game table, not only will your game be strengthened, but you are more likely to enjoy it too. Scratching your itch is a win-win. You won’t find a better bargain than that!

There are lots of good reasons to have a strong supporting cast in an RPG.

They permit interactions which reveal or highlight aspects of a PC that otherwise might get an infrequent airing, for one thing.

Trusted NPCs can serve as proxies for the PCs, or can supplement their skill-base.

Or, fourth, they can facilitate plotlines and subplots that would otherwise be impossible to deliver to a PC.

It’s the latter function that I want to focus on in this article.

The Splash Vector

There are any number of situations in which there’s a reasonably obvious right-or-wrong decision to make.

Sometimes, there may be more difficult choices on offer, in which a player character can be presumed to exercise due caution and do their homework, because of that degree of difficulty.

“Disasters never ‘just happen’,” as the tagline from the Canadian documentary series Seconds From Disaster reads; “They are a critical chain of events…” Break the chain, and the disaster doesn’t happen, or doesn’t have as severe an impact (depending on how late in the piece that opportunity is taken).

In essence, it takes a minimum of one error or circumstance to create the potential for disaster, and at least one more to transform that potential into a manifest reality. Even then, there may be multiple opportunities to discover the imminent catastrophe and mitigate, minimize, or even avoid it entirely; these have to be avoided if the catastrophe is to become both inevitable and to exact it’s maximum toll.

Which is what the GM usually wants to flirt with – the deeper into this chain that a twist can be inserted to turn catastrophe into disaster averted, the more dramatic the situation is, and the deeper the architect of that salvation has to become immersed in the plotline.

Last-minute escapes are more thrilling than situations which are easily averted.

The decisions involved in these chains of events also deserve some scrutiny. These are either overt actions or failures to act, and – if overt – can either be what would normally be the correct choice (but isn’t, for reasons unknown to the protagonist of the story), or can be an incorrect choice of action; either will deepen the crisis to it’s next stage. Even the right action taken too late, or not taken strenuously enough, can transform the danger of a potential disaster into an actual disaster.

But here’s the thing: if you’ve been able to engineer a situation in which the usually-correct choice of action will only make things worse, and a player can usually be relied upon to make the correct choice of action – for reasons I’ll get into in a moment – why wouldn’t you make them the central figure of the resulting drama?

It’s only when you can’t rely upon the Player to let his PC get into the situation all the way up to his neck, or when your plot objectives require a less immersive situation – another point I’ll get to in a moment – would you need to target a Supporting Character and draw the PC into the situation by virtue of the relationship between that Supporting NPC and the PC, i.e. to utilize the Splash Vector.

The diagram to the left illustrates all this in the simplest way possible. This catastrophe chain consists of 9 events, though the last three are variant outcomes of the same singular event, If I’m honest.

Event 1 is the initial error or condition. It defines the blue-to-green zone, which contains mistakes or circumstances. The green-to-red zone deals with discovery and response. Event 2 is discovery after the fact, and is the reason maintenance work on aircraft has to be inspected before that vehicle returns to the sky. Both of these, on discovery, lead to inconvenience or difficulty, nothing more.

Event 3 is where things start to get interesting. Something unexpected starts to happen; it has to be correctly assessed and diagnosed and the correct remedial action, if any, taken. At each point from event 3 onward, the correct choice of action leads to the previous outcome – so, getting the assessment and diagnosis right, and taking the right action, at Event 3 leads back to mere inconvenience or difficulty.

Getting to Event 4 means that one of the trilogy of actions at Event 3 was not handled correctly for whatever reason. It represents one final chance to resolve the situation before it becomes dangerous, or to discover and correct that Event 3 failure. Success leads to Worsening Difficulties, preventing the situation from escalating leads to Potential Danger. Making the wrong choice leads to Event 5.

Event 5 means that the situation represents a potential danger. Pilots and the masters of other vessels have a phrase, “Pan-Pan-Pan” (sometimes just “Pan-Pan”), which is used to alert others that the vehicle has an urgent situation that does not yet threaten the lives of those aboard or the operation of the vehicle itself. Handle this correctly and the best possible outcome is that the danger remains only potential; the slightest shortcoming in response (including simply taking too long to reach a decision) leads to the danger manifesting, and leads to the declaration of an emergency, and a mayday to alert others that assistance may be needed.

Event 6 arises from a failure to prevent the situation from worsening – if there was ever an opportunity to do so, of course. The best outcome from this point is an emergency satisfactorily resolved, with passengers, crew, and/or vehicle having been placed in danger but not harmed to the point of disaster. This event represents the final opportunity to prevent such a disaster, and margins at this point are usually razor-thin.

Events 7-9 represent disaster, with various degrees of mitigation. Loss of life is now inevitable, only its degree is now in the command of those ‘controlling’ the situation. If we’re talking about an aircraft, event 7 might be a successful crash landing with successful evacuation and no casualties but a wrecked multi-million dollar investment, or it might be less than a third of the souls aboard being lost. The maritime equivalent is the ship sinking but all the passengers and crew rescued. A “mayday” call means that the commander of the vehicle is anticipating an Event 7, even if that’s only a worst-case outcome. Event 8 is a moderate disaster – some casualties are expected, but there is also an expectation of some survivors. Event 9 means that there is no hope of survivors (though sometimes there are a few, anyway).

Some chains of events may have more opportunities in given stages, or none at all. The worst situations go directly from Event 1 or 2 to Event 7, with the crew never being aware of the danger they are in until it is too late to do anything about it. These were once commonplace, but have mostly been engineered out. These days, the worst case you can reasonably be expected to confront is a chain that runs Event 1 to Event 6 to Event 7-9.

Olympian Heights vs Confirmation Bias, Logic Errors, and Hubris

Putting a PC on the path of such a disaster chain – depending on how softly you define “disaster” – is a regular occurrence in RPGs, because the implication is that there is something that can be done about the situation – of the PCs are sufficiently quick-witted and aware of the situation.

They are aided in this respect by the GM, who usually issues multiple warnings of imminent cataclysm, and by the separation between player and character. Because they are not personally in danger, this presents the players with the perspective from Olympian Heights, and that alone can permit a more rational decision-making process than those that would be experienced if they really were in such a situation.

There are several basic responses to emergency situations:

1. Counterproductive Fight-or-flight
2. Denial
3. Confusion
4. Freezing
5. Panic
6. ‘We have to do something, now – this is something’
7. Incorrect action taken through misdiagnosis of the situation – at best, this only consumes time, at worst it makes the situation worse
8. Correct action in insufficient measure, too late, or both
9. The correct action to prevent or mitigate escalation

Now, how many times does a player have a PC choose anything but the last three – and with the full expectation that they are choosing the 9th and last option? It’s rare. Very rare.

That means that any of the other outcomes have to be applied to the character by the GM. Options 7 and 8 are usually tolerable, because that still leaves the player in command of the character, though there can sometimes be disputes about the character realizing in time that their action wasn’t having the desired effect.

Options 1 to 6 are less tolerable, even if they are reasonable responses for this particular character in this particular situation.

There are three major reasons for characters making the wrong choice of response – Hubris, in the form of overconfidence; Logic Errors which lead to incorrect or insufficient responses being made; and Confirmation Bias, in which we become so convinced of what we are doing that we can become literally blind to anything that contradicts out interpretation of the situation, and which I discuss in the context of players in this article.

Players are susceptible to each of these, but are less likely than their PCs to succumb because of the Olympian Perspective. (That perspective can also leave them more vulnerable to Confirmation Bias because it reduces the price-tag of speculation; most player Confirmation Bias results from the player assuming that his theory of events is correct, leading him to ignore as red herrings the evidence that the GM intended the players to use to disprove incorrect theories).

That means that unless you can be sure that there’s no opportunity to mitigate the situation prior to Event 4 at the earliest, PCs make unsatisfying targets for these situations.

Which brings me back to the Splash Vector, but first I want to talk a bit more about the choice of whether or not to expose PCs to a situation. In other words, I want to discuss a few more reasons why there’s a problem, and look at the scale of that problem, before I demonstrate the ways in which the Splash Vector can provide a solution to the GM.

Immersion Depth and Plot Significance

The more easily the correct course of action can be determined, the earlier in the catastrophe chain the sequence can be broken by an intelligent character behaving rationally.

It follows that the earlier a PC becomes involved in the plotline of such a situation in an active way, the lower the significant impact that plotline will have on the character, and the lower the player’s immersion within the plotline.

The logic given at the end of the previous section has already stated that only a few situations relative to the total pool of possibilities are definitely suitable for PCs. The reduction in impact means that some of the remainder can still be of use, with the assumption that the threat will be defeated at some intermediate point – Events 3-6, in other words. However, the immersion factor means that the earlier within this sequence that the intermediate point is reached, the less valuable the situation is to the GM.

As a practical measure, anything that can obviously be dealt with at Event 3 can be ruled out. Easily-solved problems at the Event 4 stage are trivial and also not, therefore desirable. Problems that can be easily resolved at Event 5 are therefore the minimum that are of value even as a subplot.

That’s at least half the potential plotlines that have been ruled out.

But it gets worse. Not every problem metastasizes into the next stage of the disaster chain. A huge number of potential inconveniences or difficulties never escalate beyond the irritation stage. I have no data on which to assess the relative proportions, but each Stage comprises more situations than the next higher Stage.

Let’s see what that means using 4 different values: 75% metastasize, 50% metastasize, 10% metastasize, and 0.5825% metastasize (I’ll show you where that last number derives from, along the way):
 

• 75% advance to the next stage, 25% are easily resolved at the current stage:
  • 75% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 4/3 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 4/3 of 6, which is 16/9 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 4/3 of 5, which is 64/27 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 4/3 of 4, which is 256/81 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 4/3 of 3, which is 1024/243 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 4/3 of 2, which is 4096/729 of 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situations, there are 5.6 stage 1 events. Minimum. And about one in six mistakes leads to a disaster.
  • Another way of stating this is that for every 800,000 Stage 1 events, 200,000 are easily resolved and 600,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 600K Events, 150,000 will be easily resolved and 450,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 450K Stage 3 events, 112,500 will be easily resolved and 337,500 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 337,500 stage 4 events, 84,375 will be easily resolved and 253,125 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 31.64% of the total. And that’s with an unrealistically high proportion of escalation.
     
• 50% advance to the next stage, 50% are easily resolved at the current stage:
  • 50% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 2x 7-9.
  • 50% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 2x 6, which is 4x 7-9.
  • 50% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 2x 5, which is 8x 7-9.
  • 50% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 2x 4, which is 16x 7-9.
  • 50% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 2x, which is 32x 7-9.
  • 50% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 2x, which is 64x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are 64 stage 1 events – and 1 in 64 mistakes leads to a disaster. I don’t know what the error rate is during aircraft servicing, but there are an estimated 39,000 commercial and military aircraft in operation currently, so that would be about 2 newsworthy air disasters a day at a 1/64 rate. That seems to be about 1/365th or so of the true rate – call it 1/400th for ease of calculation, or 0.5825% metastasizing – which is where the fourth of the values comes from, but is getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
  • Another way of stating this is that for every 64,000 Stage 1 events, 32,000 are easily resolved and 32,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 32K Events, 16,000 will be easily resolved and 16,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 16K Stage 3 events, 8,000 will be easily resolved and 8,000 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 8,000 stage 4 events, 4,000 will be easily resolved and 4,000 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 6.25% of the total. And that’s with a still-unrealistic proportion of escalation.
     
• 10% advance to the next stage, 90% are “easily” resolved at the current stage.:
  • 10% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 10x 7-9.
  • 10% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 10x 6, which is 100x 7-9.
  • 10% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 10x 5, which is 1,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 10x 4, which is 10,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 10x, which is 100,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 10x, which is 1,000,000x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are 1 million stage 1 events, with this progression rate, which is the one I instinctively selected as being “realistic” until I did the calculations in the previous results group, and hurriedly inserted a reasonably accurate value earlier into the article!
  • For every 1,000,000 Stage 1 events, 900,000 are easily resolved and 100,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 100K Events, 90K will be easily resolved and 10,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 10K Stage 3 events, 9,000 will be easily resolved and 1,000 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 1,000 stage 4 events, 900 will be easily resolved and 100 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 0.01% of the total. And that’s with a still-unrealistic proportion of escalation.
     
• 0.5825% advance to the next stage, 99.4175% are “easily” resolved at the current stage – calculated “realistic” values:
  • 0.5825% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 1717x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 171.7x 6, which is 29,472x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 171.7x 5, which is 5,059,554x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 171.7x 4, which is 8,685,292,912x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 171.7x, which is 149,114,663,056x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 171.7x, which is 25,599,083,786,461x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are roughly 25.6 million million stage 1 events!
  • For every 25.6 million million Stage 1 events, 99+% are easily resolved and 15 thousand million will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 15 thousand million Events, 99+% will be easily resolved and 8,737,500 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 8,737,500 Stage 3 events, 99+% will be easily resolved and 5,090 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 5,090 stage 4 events, most are easily resolved and 3 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 0.00000000001171875% of the total. Or 99.99999999998828125% of possible plotlines are useless for the purposes of directing at a PC.
     

Fortunately, we don’t have to think of all those possible mistakes as GMs – we get to cherry-pick one that we can make interesting or relevant. The full list, potentially, includes everything from not storing enough soft drinks to forgetting to attach the engines when the vehicle was last maintained, and all points in between, plus every possible weather configuration of note, and the risk of collisions, and, well, anything and everything you can think of, quite literally, and more that you don’t.

Modern design and engineering has redundancy and safety measure heaped upon redundancy and safety measure. That’s why so few of those problems escalate beyond the inconvenience stage. But, if we broaden the concept of “disaster” to include adverse personal developments, there are far fewer protections. Nevertheless, the principle remains clear – more plots are almost certainly unsuitable for PCs than plots that are suitable. That was the case with every possible metastasizing rate that we considered. In fact, you need a rate of just over 89% escalation before it stops being true.

And some people think it’s easy coming up with Adventures that are interesting, internally logical, and engaging – just a side-note observation :)

The Splash Vector (cont)

The Splash Vector simply means that instead of targeting a PC directly, you target an NPC with whom they have an established relationship, who then asks the PC to step in and get them out of trouble at some point deep in the disaster chain. In other words, we target the NPC and hit the PC with the ‘splash’ so that the PC can’t dodge the problem by taking the relatively obvious escape routes early on in that chain.

Players can have no objection to NPCs exhibiting the full gamut of possible reactions to a crisis. NPCs are just as susceptible to Confirmation Bias, Logic Errors, and Hubris, as anyone else – and the GM doesn’t even have to require a roll to test for it. In fact, they can be “forced” to (mistakenly) make the worst possible choices until they have escalated a situation to the point where it will be difficult (and interesting) to solve without a disaster taking place.

A lot of those rejected plotlines – and they outnumber the directly-useful ones, remember – are suddenly back on the table.

Let’s take an example:

NPC has an accident of some sort and are subsequently sued. They hire a lawyer they saw on a TV advert, and don’t tell anyone about the accident or lawsuit. They lose the case and now have 30 days to come up with a substantial sum of money. They do the worst possible thing and borrow the money from a loan shark with ties to organized crime for what they think are ‘easy terms’.

That alone might be enough trouble for the PC to have to deal with, especially if the goal is merely to seed the campaign with the presence of a gang boss who is known to the PC – this is a great way to bring them to the PC’s attention. Or you might need to escalate matters a little:

The loan shark manipulates circumstances so that they default and then blackmail the NPC into doing illegal acts for him. Which leads to the NPC being arrested and charged. The NPC’s blind faith in people leads him to retain that same TV lawyer again. At which point the PC learns of the situation, and has to somehow extract his friend / partner / relative from it.

Or another:

NPC receives an email from a Nigerian Prince in exile who needs help in recovering 1 billion dollars in gold. The PC would know better, but the NPC is taken in – and has their money and their identity stolen.

That’s enough for some entertaining role-play between the two (provided that the PC somehow learns of what’s going on, probably through the boasting of the NPC), but the actual process of closing an old credit card and replacing it with a new one, etc, is likely to be more tedious than entertaining, so anything more than a roleplay can probably be hand-waved away. This is absolutely fine if having the NPCs identity be stolen is just an establishing condition for a bigger problem, in which case it’s better from the perspective of the GM trying to engineer “interesting times” for PCs that this PC remains ignorant of the situation for a little while longer.

…That identity is then used to acquire a credit card, which is used to purchase high-end electronics, which are resold – and, of course, no attempt is made to repay this money… Meanwhile, the NPC is so confident that he’s about to become wealthy that he goes into debt splurging and buying gifts for everyone. At which point the PC realizes that something is wrong, extracts a confession from his friend (face-palm when he learns of the Nigerian Prince) – just as the police show up to arrest the NPC for credit fraud…

It doesn’t matter what the trouble is, an NPC can either get into it more plausibly than a PC can, or can make a poor choice that makes a bad situation worse.

Splash Vector Requirements

Of course, for this to work, you need an NPC with the right qualities and personality, and you need to have established a relationship between the NPC and the PC in game time. The more remote that relationship, the greater the risk that the PC will say “No”, or decide that it’s too much work or too difficult a problem.

But it’s not for the GM to state that there’s such a relationship, or to dictate it’s depth and whether or not there is sufficient strength in it that the PC will put himself out so much for the NPC. That’s all up to the player.

That means that the GM can’t take the relationship for granted. Instead, he should ensure that the relationship develops by involving both PC and NPC in mutual events in-game prior to drawing on that investment.

There are times when you can drop an NPC into the plotline “cold” with an alleged relationship to a PC and have it accepted as the plot hook, but it feels forced, because it is.

As a general rule of thumb, if the relationship is a personal one, even if it hasn’t been established in-game, a personal crisis is justifiable – a relative having gone missing, or being held hostage for an impossible ransom, or whatever. If the relationship is not, a personal crisis probably won’t play, but if the promise of “adventure” is high, you have your next best chance of pulling it off.

Once an NPC is established in-game – and you’ll never know for certain whether or not they’ve been established enough until the time comes to pull the trigger – anything becomes possible. If the relationship is not yet enough, the previous rules of thumb stand.

Confidence

One technique is to use these facts to boost confidence in the relationship, via a simple four-point plan.

1. Embed the NPC as a regular figure within the campaign. Have them interact with the target PC on a number of occasions.
2. Use the rules of thumb given in the previous section to engage the PC in a high-adventure personal crisis, i.e. one that could be safely used with a drop-in NPC.
3. Have the NPC provide significant assistance to the PC at some personal cost, repaying the debt incurred in (2). The (2)-(3) combination greatly deepens the relationship.
4. If the response to the events of (3) give you confidence that the relationship is ready-to-use, go ahead with the real test of the relationship. If you are still lacking in confidence, return to step one (interactions) to more deeply embed the character.

Of course, you will have to be subtle about it – this plan falls apart if there’s any whiff of orchestration involved.

A broader field of opportunity

For that reason, I will often embed several NPCs into a campaign with no intent to use any of them for anything in particular – then wait to see which ones “take”. This gives a broader field of opportunity, because it means that I can pick and choose which relationship is most “ripe for the picking” at the time that I need one.

There are a couple of indicators that can be usefully employed to measure that readiness. If both you and the player can name the NPC without looking it up, that’s one sign that they are entrenched within the campaign. If the NPC is fun to play, and it has become easy to involve him or her in some way, that’s another. The combination makes it even more certain.

Of course, you will need to customize these indicators to suit your group, and the way that they play. A player who is naturally good at remembering NPC names (or who maintains a list of them) will obviously discount the efficacy of the first of those signals that I mentioned.

A little cold-blooded prep can also go a long way – deliberately seeding the campaigns with NPCs whose relationships you expect to need at some future point, i.e. deliberately emplacing the NPCs that the future plotlines will require. If nothing else, this gives you the chance to see whether or not those necessary NPCs “take” or if you need to tweak them or even replace them.

Think of this as giving some method to your madness when it comes to casting choices. Having a direction is always a good thing!