The topic of “Why Do You Love RPGs? Why Do You Love GMing?” seems such a simple one, but it’s actually very challenging to articulate why you love something.

It seems to me that this is one problem that’s actually holding the hobby back from broader acceptance – it’s really hard to “sell” someone on participating when you can’t explain why you do so.

And that makes the subject far more important than the fluff that it might initially have seemed to be.

Of course, it’s always possible that people have already written on the subject and can’t think of anything to add. I have certainly answered the second question before, for example.

But for one of these reasons, or (more probably) a combination of both, there were relatively few responses to the Blog Carnival this time around.

• In For The Love Of RPGs, I list no less than seven reasons why I love the hobby and explained that I thought we fall in love with it for one of them but stay in love with it for one of the others.
• Brent Jens, The Renaissance Gamer from The Rat Hole, offered June RPG Blog Carnival in response to the first question, in which he makes some really insightful points on the differences between shared and concurrent experiences.
• Later in the month, he followed up with Why Do I Love GMing in answer to the second question, admitting that at first he didn’t love DMing, but then offering three reasons why he now not only did, but found that love growing stronger. What changed? You’ll have to read his article to find out! Since he didn’t provide a back-link to the article as part of the carnival, this roundup is your first chance to do so.
• Rodney Sloan at Rising Phoenix Games provided Busting Out Of My Shell in which he described how he used RPGs to both escape and reconnect with, the personal reality of his environment and surrounding society. It’s the sort of answer that becomes more personal and profound, the more you muse on it.
• Gonz at Codex Anathema stepped up to the plate with 13 Reasons Why which is all about why he loves Eberron as a game setting, but which also speaks to the broader question, albeit indirectly.
• When he discovered the topic of the blog carnival this month, Gonz followed up by offering Why Do I Love You? with two points. His second is the capacity for forming relationships over the gaming table, but his first discusses the far more existential proposal that he loves the hobby because of what that love reflects about who we are as people when we are at our best. It’s short but deeply meaningful, and the perfect way to round out this collection of perspectives.

There are a lot of reasons to love RPGs. There may not have been many submissions, but between them, I think we’ve covered just about everything. And that makes this month’s blog entry the place to point people who look at you quizzically when you tell them what you do with your time – and why there’s no reason to be embarrassed about it (though some people are).

I could add something more, but this post is all about the other articles to which I’ve linked – so, rather than distract from them, I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Read, enjoy, and maybe discover why you love RPGs, too.

Yesterday, the list of nominees for the 2018 Ennies was announced and Campaign Mastery is one of them, nominated once again for Best Blog!

Sincere congratulations to my fellow nominees, in both my category and in all the others (full list here). No-one who isn’t there can know how much hard work goes into achieving each and every one of these nominations. And my thanks to everyone who has congratulated me for the nomination.

To anyone finding Campaign Mastery for the first time as a result, let me welcome you. The goal here is to post evergreen content, so you have almost ten years of archives to dig into… have fun!

I’ve made the point in the past that everything I’ve ever done in my life seems to contribute to my RPGs and to this Blog, as though it was all preparation for doing this. The obvious implication is that everyone I’ve ever known has made some contribution, great or small, to achieving this honor – and for that, I thank you all!

Last time we were nominated, I was absolutely chuffed to take home (metaphorically speaking) the Silver. It would be wonderful to go one better this time around, but let’s be honest – it’s a strong field!

Voting opens on July 11, and when it does, I’ll put up a post with the link.

In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the satisfaction of Campaign Mastery being judged one of the five best blogs of the last year!

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological processes by which humans react to various conditions, and hence the hazards posed by those conditions, in a way that is both technically accurate and yet accessible to the reasonably-educated layman.

Right now, I’m only in the latter stages of Chapter 4, the last of what I think of as the ‘foundation’ or ‘preliminary’ chapters before we get to the chapters dedicated to the different conditions that can threaten survival. And already I’ve been getting all sorts of ideas from it – and, somewhat surprisingly, most of them are Fantasy oriented.

Today’s article is going to present a paraphrased summary of selected content from those first few chapters and then look at the ideas that have resulted thus far. So, let’s get started…

Basics Of Survival

Survival is achieved by optimizing conditions in three layers. Internal – within the body; surface – near the body; surroundings – farther away from the body. When conditions are incorrect for survival in one of the three it removes a protection that the body has against survival.

When the body encounters conditions that threaten survival it is called stress. The body has a great many reactions to stress which function automatically to reduce this stress. For example, in a hot environment, we sweat, lowering internal body temperature back toward a more tolerable level.

The central concept of a life-support system is to surround the organism with an environment that minimizes physiological stress, mimicking an environment in which the organism is comfortably able to survive.

Preparations for potential disaster/accident/threat may modify the specifics, but that doesn’t alter this fundamental principle.

Adaption

Human beings are amongst the most adaptable species on Earth, but the limits of biological adaption are far smaller than most people realize. About 2/3 of the Earth’s surface is salt water which we may visit briefly but can’t inhabit without technological intervention which produces an artificial environment either on the surroundings scale (submarine, mining platform) or surface scale (wetsuit, etc). When visiting, we can only cope with conditions at the surface, even if we carry a supply of oxygen. Of the remaining land, only human ingenuity and technological intervention permit survival in one half. The rest is too hot, too cold, or at too high an altitude, or is a river or lake – same problem as the seas.

Four critical variables determine the odds of survival in any situation. These are (1) The physics of the environment; (2) the limits of human physiology; (3) the duration of exposure; and (4) adaption, which includes behavioral responses such as what the victim knows about survival dangers and how to prepare for / react to such situations.

Complications arise because of the multidimensional nature of environmental stresses, for example, human physiological responses are different if an environment is hot and dry compared to one that is hot and wet, with some compounding the problem, and some mitigating. A further complication lies in body shape – size, weight, level of body fat, strength, etc.

All physiological responses are therefore a compromise between competing biological imperatives all with the purpose of increasing the potential for survival.

Racial distinctions are also important; every human organism carries a set of inbuilt adaptions to the environment. Some predate the emergence of homo sapiens as a species, and extend back to the first mammals, or even beyond; others have arisen as a result of occupying a specific environment for long enough that pro-survival traits have been the subject of natural selection amongst the population. Many of the differences between races, both overt and subtle, such as skin color, are the result of such adaption. Others, such as the Asiatic eye shape, confer no known survival advantage (yet) and appear simply to be random mutations that have been retained through the generations.

Acclimatization

When exposed to an environment that stresses the organism, a process of adaption begins as the physiology responds to the stress. Some of the resulting changes are aimed at simply coping with the immediate stress, others have the effect of increasing the organism’s tolerance for the particular stresses being experienced in the contemporary environment. The latter is known as Acclimatization.

Not all environmental stress produces this effect; it has to exceed a threshold level, but not by so much that survival is imminently threatened.

Intensity and Duration of the stress are also important factors; the more extreme the conditions, the faster, more intense, and more numerous are the physiological adaptions. You can think of the organism as having a number of parallel responses to environmental conditions of different sensitivities and intensities, with the combination optimized somewhat through natural selection. Redundant responses tend to be lost or modified to remove the redundancy unless they confer some regularly-encountered survival benefit under other conditions. As a general rule, gradual adaption is more effective.

All such adaptive responses are completely reversible unless they have been maintained for so long that the underlying morphology (shape and structure) of the organ affected has been altered by the exposure. However, the time required for such reversal to occur is unrelated to the time required to undergo it in the first place; some are faster, others slower.

One example should be recognizable by just about everyone: we all get used to Winter as it proceeds, to a greater or lesser extent. The more extreme the cold temperatures, the greater this acclimatization. This makes us feel warmer on wintery days once our bodies have made the adaption. However, if warm weather intervenes with unexpected rapidity, even temporarily, not only will we feel the warmth more severely, but if it persists for a week or so, we may lose some or all of that adaption to winter – so a return to frigid conditions feels even colder than the same temperature did before the warm weather arrived. To some extent, of course, the advent of artificial warming and cooling has mitigated these adaptions and made us more prone to be dependent on artificial means for comfort.

Cross-Acclimation

The complexity of biological organisms is revealed by the phenomenon of cross-acclimation, which is to say the integrated adaption to environments with multiple or successive stresses. For example, adaption to the cold helps animals survive ionizing radiation but interferes with the capacity to survive even short-term exposures to a lack of oxygen. Adapting to a lack of oxygen (e.g. at high altitudes) decreases the shivering response to cold. These combine to make it harder to climb tall mountains in Winter than in Summer. On the other hand, acclimatizing to heat acts to increase tolerance for hypoxia.

It is known that adequate supplies of food and water are necessary for acclimation to occur. Manufacturing the compounds that trigger these effects takes energy, and the chemicals must then be transferred through the bloodstream to the locations where they can be effective. Even well short of the point of causing death, malnutrition and dehydration diminish tolerance to every known environmental stress. In particular, malnutrition impairs tolerance for cold and disease and dehydration to heat and cold. The combination of both in a cold environment constitutes a triple-whammy!

We’re still in the relatively early stages of understanding these complex interactions. More than 100 different neuropeptides and hormones have been discovered that are produced by the human body in varying amounts and combinations under the influence of different stresses. Many more are believed to be undiscovered. At least a dozen, for example, are able to influence the internal temperature of the body, while others may increase or decrease sensitivity to internal temperature in other autonomic responses, inhibiting reactions to body temperature increases in some cases and triggering them in others – depending on other conditions.

While reading this section of the book, I had the distinct impression that this aspect of biochemistry was still at a pre-Mendeleev equivalent stage. Before Mendeleev, a whole bunch of Elements were known to chemistry; he created the first systematic ordering of them, in the form of a periodic table, by virtue of which he was able to predict the discovery of, and some of the characteristic traits of, still unknown Elements. At the moment, we assume that there are more neuropeptides and hormones waiting to be discovered because we are still finding them, and have not yet accounted for all the physiological changed known to occur. Either some of the ones we know about have secondary effects, therefore, or there are more to be discovered. As yet, there is not enough known to systematically organize the knowledge we have on the subject, or at least, that’s my impression; and that means that we can’t predict the properties of the undiscovered chemistries, knowledge that would help us identify what to look for and where.

In other words, our knowledge on the subject in general is still rather Empirical.

Most of the molecules that we have discovered so far have both unique and redundant functions, which is to say that each has a specific role to play in regulating the organism and has other effects which are primarily the role of another such molecule.

Starvation: A side-note

People have been dying from starvation throughout human history. Around one million such deaths occur annually, even today, or about one in 6000. And yet, there is still a lot we don’t know about it. Some facts have nevertheless become clear:

• Death is only attributable directly to starvation in a small percentage of cases; increased susceptibility to illness and infection as a result of malnutrition is a far greater killer. This is especially true of children, where the numbers are 23% and 77%, respectively.
• Children, by virtue of the fact that their bodies are still developing, are prone to a host of complicating aftereffects from malnutrition, including a delay in mental development, a permanent decrease in intellectual performance, and an increase in childhood mortality from other causes.
• Physical stunting of growth is a primary effect of malnutrition and is often used as an indicator of starvation. There is good news from this indicator: stunting worldwide fell from 47% in 1980 to 33% in 2000. However, one third of all children in developing countries exhibits at least some stunting by the age of 5, with two-thirds of these being located in Asia, primarily south-central Asia; One quarter of the children affected live in Africa; and one-sixth live elsewhere.
• Predictive methods for death through malnutrition are more effective for men than for women. Men also tolerate starvation less effectively than do women. The reasons for these facts are unknown.
• Adults can survive weeks or months without food depending on the amount of fat on the body. A 70kg man can fast for about 70 days, losing all but 3% of fat and one-third of lean body mass (a small amount is essential to maintaining brain, bone marrow, and cell membrane functions). Death from starvation can occur at any point after 50% loss of body mass. During the Dutch Famine of WWII, previously well-nourished individuals survived a year of hunger followed by 6 months of severe starvation, all compounded by the stress of war and foreign occupation. However, while obesity may carry a greater store of energy for the body to draw upon, it greatly increases the risk of death from other factors. Finally, certain compounds are required for normal bodily function – vitamins and the like – and the lack of these can also cause death or disease long before the point of death from starvation is reached.

Types of Adaption

When you dig into it, there are 5 types of adaption that can occur (others may categorize and generalize these differently), the last of which has three notable sub-types:

• Intracellular responses
• Intercellular responses
• Macro-organic responses
• Metabolic function responses
• Whole-body responses:
  • Tolerance
  • Acclimatization
  • Evolution

These are all important and interesting in their own ways, and – for our purposes – to varying degrees. A brief look at each is therefore in order (and also because their meanings might not be immediately apparent to the casual reader):

Intracellular responses

Internal responses within a cell. Quite often, different cells will have different intracellular responses to different stimuli. People have absolutely no direct control over these responses; they are often (usually?) part of the internal regulatory systems that keep the organism alive. However, some of them can have both direct and indirect effects on mental state, such as triggering the fight-or-flight response.

Intercellular responses

The way cells interact (and bonding together into an organ is a type of interaction in this context) is the second order of response. Quite often, chemicals released as an Intracellular response will bond to receptors on the walls of other cells, modifying the behavior of that cell. Some can even change the shape of the cell, which in turn produces changes in the shape of the organ.

Macro-organic responses

Changes that affect the functioning of an entire organ constitute the third level of response to an environmental stress. As indicated above, such changes are often the result of intercellular responses by those specialized cells that constitute the bodily organ. There are often several orders of response, trading responsiveness for effectiveness and overall impact. A quick response will normally be the least effective but most responsive; a slower but more more substantial response follows if the stress has not been abated by the “quick response”. Another way to look at it is “The more significant the alteration, the more difficult it is” – sometimes, interim responses do nothing but prepare bodily systems for the change that might be forthcoming.

Metabolic function responses

Macro-organic responses can result in a change in a specific metabolic function of the organism, shutting some down and putting others on overtime. In effect, the organism changes the way it functions in response to the stress. For example, in response to infections, the internal body temperature changes to a value that is inimical to the propagation of the infectious agent, and – through layers of such responses – fever continues to climb in an attempt to make the body a more hostile environment for the viral or bacterial agent to operate in. At the same time, digestive processes slow (so appetite is reduced) (on the principle that food supplies are as readily available to ‘the enemy’ as to the cells that make up the body), breathing alters (changing the acidity levels of the blood, another ‘hostile environment’ factor), and production of white blood cells goes through the roof to combat the infection.

Many medications stimulate or cause similar effects. For example, my Diabetes-management medication causes my liver to approximately triple its activity levels, increasing my need for fluid intake and flushing more sugar out of my bloodstream.




You might consider this an Earth Elemental.
Bismuth “glazed includes” image by pixabay.com / Hans



Or this might inspire you.
‘decor’ image by pixabay.com / MR1313
Background splash by Mike



I know at least one GM who used something like this to depict his Earth Elementals.
tetra-methyl-uronium rendering by pixabay.com / WikimediaImages,
Background by Mike



…and this is a valid if unusual choice.
‘gold’ image by pixabay.com / peachpink,
background and additional fill by Mike



It’s always hard to ignore this as a possibility.
‘bornite’ image by pixabay.com / CoffeeVampire



…and this is, perhaps, the most traditional interpretation.
‘beach’ image by pixabay.com / Pexels

Whole-body responses

Of course, it’s a short leap from altering individual metabolic functions to altering the way the organism as a whole copes with the situation – often requiring nothing more than a change in perspective. In fact, this is where medicine started. But this becomes significant in conjunction with the point made earlier – that the ‘switching off’ of a response takes place at a different rate to the ‘switching on’ of that response.

This poses a natural enhancement to survival rates, because it means that, having recently encountered a significant environmental stress, physiological processes remain primed to cope with a recurrence for some time.

In general, laymen think about responses as taking fractions of seconds, seconds, or – at most – minutes. Some are actually more substantial, if more subtle, and take hours, days, or even weeks to manifest – and to switch off. And some responses, at this scale, can be permanent once triggered.

This becomes clearer when you look at the three sub-types of whole-body response.

Tolerance

“Tolerance” is the capacity for the organism to achieve stable equilibrium with it’s environment in a shorter period of time. In other words, once you get used to a particular condition, you become able to get comfortable in those conditions more quickly. This usually occurs at the expense of tolerance for some other conditions that are not so regularly encountered. My personal experience is that Tolerance is acquired more easily with youth. I will never forget wearing a short sleeve shirt one day in 1981 and being perfectly comfortable, dressed that way, outdoors, while it was snowing. Only lightly, but snowing, nevertheless.

My personal experience is also that tolerance is also relatively fragile – constant temperatures and especially constant levels of windchill are required. Gusting winds, regardless of the external temperature, repeatedly activate more short-term responses or deactivate them, disrupting the stability of tolerance.

One way of looking at tolerance is that the baseline environment of the organism becomes altered to match the most frequently-encountered conditions, and it is this perspective that places Tolerance in the whole-body category. In reality, of course, it is compounded from lower-level responses that have not yet fully deactivated from the last time they were triggered.

It is also important to note that there are limitations to Tolerance. No matter how much underwater swimming you do, you will never become Tolerant to the point of being able to breathe in that environment. What will happen is that lung capacity will improve, capacity to withstand changes in pressure may improve, capacity to tolerate temperature changes as one descends may improve, muscle responses and even the shape of individual muscles will alter to become more efficient at moving in that environment, and so on.

Acclimatization

The second type of whole-body response requires more long-term exposure than mere tolerance, which can be acquired in days or hours (depending on the severity of the conditions encountered). This is Acclimatization, which was discussed at length earlier in this article.

Acclimatization can take days or weeks to manifest, and more days or weeks to be lost. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to speak of it “diminishing” or “increasing” over such spans. A span of (relatively) warm weather in mid-winter may cost you some of your acclimatization, but – depending on the duration and intensity – probably won’t completely reverse it. That takes the change of seasons to achieve.

There can also be an argument made that some acclimatization processes take years or decades to be lost. I am used to the weather that I encounter where I live (Sydney); even moving just a few hundred miles away would produce subtly different climatic patterns that would not quite match up. Some days would be comfortable, but a greater percentage of days would not – until I again Acclimatized.

It should also be noted that Acclimatization to conditions in which comfort is more easily achieved is more rapid than acclimatization to extremes. Thus, when capacity for Tolerance shrinks with age, we are drawn to warmer climates (but not hot ones) where the demand for Tolerance is reduced. Ideally, for maximum comfort, we would migrate like the ducks, flying south (from the North American / European perspective) for the Winter, and returning north for the Summer.

Evolution

Random mutations that confer an advantage when particular conditions are experienced occur all the time. Until such conditions are encountered, provided that they don’t also cause a concomitant survival liability, there is no particular reason for these potential traits to either spread or to be lost. However, when the triggering conditions are encountered, these mutations confer a notable survival advantage, and so tend to spread through a population.

Sometimes, they confer an advantage that outweighs an inevitable liability, because of a particular stress that will routinely be encountered. That’s why black people are susceptible to sickle-cell anemia – it’s the side-effect of an evolutionary advantage because it confers greater resistance to Malaria. Only a small percentage of the population are affected by the susceptibility, but a large percentage of the population would encounter malaria over the course of their lifetimes – and so this particular double-edged sword has spread widely through this population group.

Were it not for the use of technology to sustain individuals afflicted by such hereditary diseases, the spread of black populations to areas in which Malaria is encountered far more infrequently – a socioeconomic phenomenon – would have commenced a process of racial divergence that would eventually split the two populations into different races.

Of course, these are extreme examples. Most are not so dramatic. But even a slight propensity for the more efficient metabolizing of food can confer an advantage in an area where famines occur more regularly. The more subtle the advantage conferred, the more it will be drowned out by other factors, and the more slowly it will spread through a population.

Extrapolating too far along this line of thought brings the conclusion that an analysis of the prevalence of a particular racial feature can derive a direct measurement of its’ value in terms of survival, for example, comparing the incidence of fair-haired people in (say) France or England relative to Scandinavia. What’s the percentage of dark-haired Spaniards? The conclusion is at least partially fallacious because it assumes that survival is the only factor at play. Where it not for that, you would be forced to conclude that being red-headed was a pro-survival trait amongst certain population groups.

Why all this is useful knowledge, I: Aging

Aging is the biological process of growing older. As a condition that afflicts everyone who lives long enough, it seems only natural that humans would evolve to become more long-lived. Unfortunately, there are far too many external factors to assess with any certainty that such selection is taking place. Certainly, the ability to produce offspring at a more advanced age would inevitably increase the propensity for an individuals genes being passed on.

If we view aging as the symptoms of an ‘environmental stress’ (time), and apply the concepts described earlier in this article, it becomes possible to devise a system for the simulation of aging in humans for use in an RPG. This approach seems eminently reasonable when the leading contenders for the mechanisms of aging are considered: accumulated damage to metabolic systems and processes, and accumulated transcription errors in the DNA when cells reproduce.

We could stipulate, for example, that from the commencement of adolescence to the achievement of adulthood, characters gain the benefits of 5% of their ultimate (mature) CON every 2 years, and that prior to this time, the rate is 5% per year, rounded down.

Adolescence generally starts at about 10 years of age, give or take, and adulthood is roughly 20 years of age. That’s a 10-year span, so characters get the last 25% of their CON between those years. That also leaves 50% of their CON to be acquired from Birth to 10, so the newborn’s con is effectively 25% of the adult. A healthy child is more likely to become a healthy adult, and there is enough of a difference to be noticeable.

More to the point, tracking HP “bonuses” from CON backwards in time on this scale shows how narrowly the margins of survival can be – a typical human can end up with a birth CON of 2, giving them d8-4, or perhaps d6-4, hit points. Of course, if this yields 0 or less HP, the individual might not survive long enough to become an adult! At best, they will have 4 (or 2) HP – which isn’t a lot of margin for the survival of illnesses and accidents. This yields a fairly reasonable simulation of child mortality rates prior to the technological age, for all that it seems extreme by modern standards.

Of course, we already know that adults in the game have survived this experience. So our attention turns to the other end of the scale. Every d10-1 years, starting at age 25, the character has to make a CON save at DC5+Age or lose 10% of their current CON (round loss down, minimum 1).

Some spans, the character will age rapidly. Some spans, they will decline slowly if at all. This rule actually combines a number of very subtle considerations that are worth noting:

• ‘their current CON” – this means that a character may be able to survive more than 10 failed rolls. For example, a character with CON 16 would lose 1 CON for every failed roll – so they could theoretically fail 16 times before dying of old age. At average CON levels, that changes to 10 failed rolls.
• It also means that characters become frail a lot faster than they die, which is an accurate modeling of reality. That in turn makes survival through the last stages of life as problematic as infant survival was; when you only have 1 or 2 HP to your name, any accident or illness can be fatal.
• The roll required keeps getting harder. There will come a point where failure is automatic. The higher the character’s CON, the longer this can be delayed.
• The average of a d10-1 rolls is 4.5, which means that characters ON AVERAGE will have to make two saves every 9 years, starting at age 25. So, 25; 34, 43, 52, 61, 70, 79, 88, 97, 106, and so on are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19 rolls, respectively, on average.
• My rough calculations say that a CON 10 character will die of old age at about 70 years of age on average, but poor rolls on the d10-1 can drop this substantially. Higher CON characters will tend to have higher lifespans, but again, can die more quickly. In rare cases, good rolls may yield a considerably greater life span.

Another way of interpreting all this is that we are constantly aging and repairing the damage that results, but gradually lose that capability as we grow older.

Why all this is useful knowledge, II: Elves

With this new view of aging, it becomes trivially easy to describe a biological mechanism by which long-lived species like Elves last as long as they do. For example, a cell reproduction mechanism in which two cells combine to become four, rather than the simple mitosis of human cells, would enable a tell-me-twice DNA test that greatly reduces transcription errors, slowing the aging process. Other mechanisms are also possible; this is just an example.

This becomes interesting when you start thinking about the consequences. The cell reproduction mechanism described, for example, would also slow growth and healing of injuries, but would make it far more likely that an individual could heal an injury that would kill a human. It would spread infections through the body faster, but also assist the Elf in overcoming them more quickly – so fevers would be shorter and sharper. At some point, though, a critical threshold would be reached in which the fever won the battle – so death from fevers and infections would be both more rapid and more likely. Overall, the risks to the species wouldn’t change; but the fine details would be just different enough (and all plausibly-connected for verisimilitude) to establish the long-lived as a different species.

Why all this is useful knowledge, III: Elementals

And that signposts the way to the real value of this subject – considering non-human species from other environments and making these more “real” by understanding how their biology (or equivalents) function.

In turn, that could suggest new abilities for such creatures. In cases where such nascent potentials are realized, I tend to refer to the creatures as “Noble” or “Royal” Elementals.

A functional approach

Rather than a really abstract approach requiring a lot of technical detail and understanding, it is sufficient for our purposes to take a broader, more abstract, more generalized, more “conceptual” approach. This has been in the back of my mind throughout the writing of this article, and was – arguably – the original point that I wanted to make. As writing has proceeded, I have been contemplating the alternatives, and the one that I kept coming back to as the one that made the most sense from a practical point of view is a functional approach.

To that end, I have listed 12 essential biological functions below. Any organism should have some process that replicates these functions for the organism. Detail each, making them as unique or common to all Elementals as you like, and you define the basic biology of the species. Each answer can suggest one or more interesting abilities or traits, or can simply provide an interesting detail about the race.

Cohesion

Something binds the organism together. In humans, that’s the job of the skin. It can be tough or pervious to material objects, it can be natural or inherently magical, it can be some form of force. Depending on its nature, it may be easier or harder to knit back together when it is penetrated.

Structure

Something keeps incompatible biological processes separate. In the human body, these are performed by discrete organs, which are held in place by the skeleton. Other arrangements are obviously possible – just look at the sheer variety of structures and shapes we have found amongst other life-forms here on earth. One option that is always fun if justified by the native environment is some form of adjustable morphology (i.e. shape).

Sensory

Humans have multiple senses. Some have suggested as many as 13. Some senses tell us about our internal status, some about our bodies relative to the world around us, and some gather information directly about the world. What would appropriate analogues be for the organism under consideration, what can they perceive as a result that we can’t, what can they not that we can?

Communication

In order to facilitate communications, you need to be both Send and Receive information through the normal medium with which the body is surrounded. This may be achieved through the senses already defined, or it might be that a new sense is required.

Rationality

Every sentient race needs some analogue of a brain, even though it may be distributed throughout the organism in some cases. And this needs to be protected from harm. Depending on the communications method chosen, you may even be able to externalize it, leaving it behind and out of danger.

Manipulation

Every sentient race needs some means of manipulating their environment. In many cases, these will be the source of the usual attack forms, so that can provide a clue, but it might also be something completely separate from the natural weapons.

Mobility

Every sentient race needs some means of moving around their natural environment, seeking nourishment if nothing else. How do the creatures move?

Ingestion

For that matter, what do they consume? Humans need air, water, and food. What do Elementals need? This begins the process of transforming an environment into an ecology which is the natural habitat of the species. Don’t ignore the possibilities for inspiration, but don’t get too side-tracked either; other processes also need to be contained within the environment..

Distribution

The nutrients need to be broken down into useful form (digestion) if they aren’t already and then distributed through the body of the organism – the function of the blood and heart in the human system. But this also conveys response agents, and that can be significant.

Waste Disposal

Once the nutrients have been extracted, there’s usually something left over. This needs to be removed, and there needs to be some process in the natural environment that recycles it. What’s more, most species do not thrive when living in their own wastes, humans included; so think about the diversification of the environment needed to explain this. This continues the process of transforming an environment into an ecology.

Healing

You should probably have been thinking about this already, prompted by the “Cohesion” and “Distribution” functions. But it’s time to get specific – how does the organism react to damage? Is it vulnerable to any particular type of damage as a result, and/or resistant to one? Can such vulnerabilities be used as a clue to the original question? Can they be overcome by the intelligent manipulation of the environment, just as humans use clothes and fire? This question begins explorations of the social structures of the race in question! Again, don’t fall into the trap of getting distracted, there’s still more.

Reproduction

How does the species reproduce? There are several different techniques employed by life on earth that you can draw on for inspiration. For example, one variety of elemental might “bud”, in the process transferring half of it’s memories and skills to the progeny, effectively creating two identical individuals with completely divergent experiences and personalities where once there was one. If you think that makes this variety of Elementals too powerful, you can specify that there is a percentage of the information that is lost, overwritten by redundant copies of the information that HAS to be transferred (such as how to move).

Personal Environment

Let’s throw a kong-sized monkey wrench into the works. Contemplate this: being summoned to the Prime Material Plane by a Wizard or other magic user exposes the elemental to an environment that is about as far removed from it’s native environment (in most cases) as it’s possible to get. How do these metabolic functions react? What are the consequences? How does the elemental survive? Is it like diving, where you can live within a hostile environment for a period of time before it kills you? Is it possible to develop a Tolerance? Is it possible to acclimatize to selected environments within the plane that might provide a refuge?

Be careful to maintain consistency; it’s always useful to contemplate the answers you’ve given already for inspiration each time you come to a new item. The more unified you can make the resulting variant creature, the more plausible you make it.

In the past, I’ve modeled Fire Elementals on Jet Engines, Water Elementals on single-celled organisms with self-polymerizing surface capabilities (reducing the effect of stabbing and slashing attacks), given Earth Elementals cryonic crystalline brains and cryogenic touches, and made Air Elementals the absolute masters of force-fields. But there are hundreds of alternatives to explore.

And, of course, it doesn’t stop with Elementals. The same basic principles apply to everything from Mind Flayers to KuoTua to Rakshasa. You don’t have to rewrite what’s canon, if you don’t want to; you can simply add to it.

Related Posts

There are a host of other posts that you might find relevant to this one (and vice-versa):

• Survivors Of The Underdark: A New Dwarven Paradygm
• Creating ecology-based random encounters [series of 3]
• Random Encounter Tables – My Old-school Way
• Not Like My Tribe – Sophisticated Primitives, Part 1
• Not Like My Tribe – Sophisticated Primitives, Part 2
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves
  [series parts 1-5]
• Alien In Innovation: Creating Original Non-human Species
• A Population Of Dinosaurs and the impact on RPG ecologies
• Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Doppelgangers
• The Floi Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti [an adventure in 3 posts]
• The Age Of An Elf: Demographics of the long-lived
• Ergonomics and the Non-human
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves

We all roleplay our character’s professions or character classes, right?

Actually, we don’t. What we usually roleplay is someone pretending to belong to a profession, because that’s a lot faster and easier.

The difference between the two might seem small, but the impact when you compare the two is like night and day.

Awareness of the difference actually derives from a show about Air Crash disasters (I watch a lot of them, so I’m not sure which series it actually was); at one point in one episode, an expert investigator states that “Air Crash Investigators never like to close the door on any possibility” – by which he meant that the profession trains people to consider every possible contributing factor to be valid until completely ruled out – and if they run out of possible causes (it has happened in the past), that simply means that something has been ruled out that should not have been. So everything goes back on the table and gets rechecked – again. (EDIT:) Furthermore, even when they have found an apparent cause, they don’t stop there; not only does that cause need to be confirmed in absolute detail, other events may have contributed to the disaster. As a result, they learn to investigate everything in microscopically-minute detail.

And that got me to thinking.

Every profession trains its members to think in certain ways. Fire and Rescue people are trained to identify the nearest accessible exits whenever they enter a room. Law Enforcement are trained to consider everyone a potential threat until proven otherwise, and to protect themselves accordingly. Soldiers, especially in an era with reliable firearms, look for ambush possibilities and are uncomfortable until they are cleared, and also tend to form closer bonds with their fellow soldiers. (Actually, Soldiers are the one case where most people will make the requisite adjustments to character mindsets, without even realizing that they are treating these characters differently to the rest).

These are relatively simple and straightforward manifestations of the principle. I want to focus on four more substantial characterizations.

Money People

The superficial characterization of accountants, bookkeepers, and the like, is that they reduce everything to a bottom line. The truth is usually the exact opposite; they are inclined to break numbers into distinctive line items. Often, their problem is seeing the forest for the trees.

There is also a perception that such careers make people tightfisted, or attracts the miserly. The reality is that money people spend as freely, or even more freely, as everyone else – so long as it isn’t their money. However, this is always controlled spending – or, perhaps targeted is the better term. It’s spending with a purpose.

No, if there is one drive felt by all money professionals, it’s efficiency. Bang for buck – with ‘bang’ being something that changes with the circumstances. It could be quantity of product purchased, or a maximized income/expenses ratio, or minimal financial liability, or any of a dozen other priorities.

Doctors

Doctors are guided by two simple rules above all: first, do no harm; and second, regardless of what you may think of what they have done, you treat the patient in front of you.

Both of these can cause great ethical complications for a doctor caught up in the wrong circumstances. Harm, for example, can be a subjective thing, not an objective; and then there’s the whole question of short-term harm for long-term gain, and vice-versa. And somewhere into this question, the patient’s wishes have to come into play. And, these days, quality of life. So, this simple question quickly becomes very complicated.

The second seems a lot more obvious. But we’re talking about people here, not automatons. What if the doctor is so repelled by the patient’s past deeds that he doesn’t trust his objectivity? No problem, pass him on to another doctor, comes the obvious answer – but what if there is no other doctor? There may be no specialist as qualified in the procedure that needs to be performed, or none that can reach the patient in time.

And then there’s distributed harm. Is it ethical for a doctor to factor in the harm that the patient may do to others in reaching his decisions? Suddenly, the two conditions are in contradiction.

Every doctor has their own personal answer to these conundrums. Some personalize death or disease as The Real Enemy. Others prefer to think of positive outcomes, focusing on their patients health.

Lawyers & Psychiatrists

It’s a common misconception that lawyer-client confidentiality (or doctor-patient confidentiality, for that matter) protects everyone, no matter what. Under certain circumstances the lawyer is compelled by law to breach that confidentiality – such as the client/patient revealing the intent to commit a crime (in some jurisdictions, the shield is only pierced by the threat of a crime of violence, which can include self-harm).

Even without a legal requirement, a lawyer can ALWAYS choose to violate the privilege, so long as they are prepared to wear the consequences. Depending on the legal code, the authorities may or may not be able to act on any knowledge so obtained without risk to their own careers – much depends on whether or not they were a knowing recipient of privileged information. And even then, if they can show that they would have learned the information anyway, it’s often going to be admitted into evidence.

It’s well known that lawyers have limited options about turning a client away once they have accepted a case. It may be possible to hand the client off to someone else, but where that would materially disadvantage a client in court, even that might not be possible.

At the same time, the legal profession requires a lawyer to assist the client to the best of their ability. This poses challenges similar to those faced by a doctor, described earlier.

Lawyers generally have to learn to set questions of right and wrong aside, or more precisely, to redefine them into terms of being an effective advocate for their client. Instead, they focus on what is legal and what is not, and – perhaps – on the abstract ideal of the law, justice. Even if an individual client is released when the lawyer knows they are guilty, that can be balanced by the fact that the protections provided by the law keep many more people out of unjust punishment than they allow criminals to escape just punishment.

As a general rule, this leads many to reject absolutes in general, and embrace a relativism. This is necessary so that they can do their jobs and only worry about assuaging any moral qualms afterwards.

Politicians

Something similar happens to politicians. How much moral weight do you assign to the rules when you make the rules?

Corruption is an inherent problem in politics as a result. It may not be for money – giving preferential treatment to an organization because you share the same religious beliefs is behavior that’s just as corrupt.

Politicians learn to look for compromises. It’s virtually certain that compromise will be necessary throughout their career. Even if the government is not a democracy, you often have to compromise between benefits for sub-population A vs sub-population B, or between rival concerns. One way to raise money quickly, for example, would be to halve the size of the military overnight – but there might be unintended consequences!

These are all individual elements of a greater society. Technological and social context is all-important. In the 19th century, for example, the insane were routinely confined to asylums where the majority received little or no treatment for their problems beyond the distribution of sedatives to keep them (relatively) docile. Some institutions went so far as to explicitly state that it was forbidden to strike a patient, no matter what the provocation – which, by extension, implies that other institutions were fully prepared to condone such measures for the control of patients. Medical practitioners of the time were no less caring than those today; but there was a fatalism involved, a sense that the mind was beyond their power to control or manipulate. The best that could be done for these “poor souls” was to care for them physically and remove from them all sources of stress and triggers of distress, and give them the chance to heal themselves. Furthermore, it was social anathema to admit to anyone that a family member was in such a condition. Euphemisms were used, instead – “staying with friends” or even “convalescing in foreign climes” or simply “traveling”. The date of committal was often viewed as the date of death by families, as victims became dead to their spouses and children. Clearly, the attitude of a physician would need to be modified to take these social attitudes into account.

Personality Disjoint

Most players and GMs are quite capable of looking at the tentative personality profile of a character and stating what it was about that character’s class or profession that attracted them to that career in the first place. They may also think about what the character learned from their incorporation into that stratum of society, and will certainly assess how the character would think of his profession going forward.

Although clearly all related to the central focus, the personalty as it will present during play, there is nevertheless something disjointed about these disparate elements.

This stems from two factors: incompleteness, and the absence of a narrative. Too many people think that a character background is synonymous with a character’s history; a true background incorporates the impact that the historic events have on the personality and mindset of the character, and carries those influences forward into subsequent ‘chapters’. That’s the narrative element that was mentioned.

The incompleteness stems from the fact that there is no structure by which the partial elements listed in the opening paragraph of this section can feed back into the character or influence his circumstances. They are described as static phenomena, signposts to what actually took place over a period of time.

You don’t have to make very many or very strenuous attempts to correct this personality disjoint to discover the absence of consideration, in most cases, of how the professional training experienced by the character has shaped his personality and patterns of thought. In hindsight, it’s obvious.

A shortcut

Unfortunately, few of us have time to generate a “full” background – in the meaning given above – and make it consistent, and fewer still are capable of assimilating the whole of that background at each game sitting. To be practical, we need a shortcut.

Fortunately, the examples presented earlier in the article provide the basis for one.

What we need to do is distill all the contributions on the character’s thinking into a simple “road map” that we can inhale quickly and then express in play. The simplest format for such a map is a list of NO MORE THAN ABOUT HALF-A-DOZEN basic rules that the character lives by.

At least one of these, possibly more, should derive from, or have been modified by, the character’s professional training and experiences prior to this session of play.

• One should describe how the character handles conflicting requirements.
• One should describe how the character deals with commands from figures of authority.
• One should describe how the character feels about his profession, and what personal standards it imposes on them.
• One should describe how the character behaves towards those who fail to adhere to the standards expected of such practitioners by the character.
• One should cover snap judgments by the character – on what subjects does he or she make them, how often are they right, and what do they do when they are wrong.
• It may also be useful to have one detailing how the character responds to being placed in authority over others. Does he apply his personal standards, cut them some slack, become a martinet, treat them like personal slaves?

Throw in one or two deriving directly from the profession itself – the two listed for the Doctor earlier, for example, appropriately modified for social context – and you have an easily-digestible and navigable “road-map”.

This is NOT a character profile; it’s not even the character’s personality. It’s a set of lenses and filters through which that personality will manifest. A description of the personality should be a short paragraph preceding these modifiers. Clearly, that personality will influence several of the questions. Both are incomplete without the other.

There’s Impact In Numbers

Doing this for one character may or may not be enough to demonstrate two things:

1. That it becomes easier to “wear” the character in play;
2. That it becomes easier to identify and roleplay the most important professional decisions of the character.

Point 1 should be proven very quickly. Point 2 has to wait until events trigger one or more of these considerations, which is why it may take a couple of applications of the process before the validity of the technique can be demonstrated.

So, in and of itself, the technique can provide value returns for effort. But, the more widespread these principles are, another phenomenon begins to manifest: professional interactions become more manageable, and more susceptible to roleplay.

That means that there is a distinct benefit to viewing the PCs as a team, and getting each player to complete a set of “guidelines” for them to use in roleplay (they are not so hard-and-fast to be describable as “rules” that have to be obeyed). They are a tool. This enables the players to relate to the rest of the team through the lens of their unique representation of their profession and the contribution they make to it.

It also enables interaction at a professional level between NPCs and PCs with greater ease and depth.

Evolution Of Character

One final note: these are not set in stone. They can be changed, and no doubt will evolve over time. Such evolution is normally traumatic.

Clever players and GMs can deliberately design ongoing characters in such a way that they are not what the game role they are to occupy requires, but so that they can evolve into meeting such requirements after suitable professional trauma caused by that shortcoming. This incorporates a deeply personal story arc into each major NPC and into PCs, almost effortlessly.

In the case of PCs, the planned evolution should be factored into his campaign planning by the GM. This act of collaboration on the development of the PCs personality makes the entire game more enjoyable for both, defuses any sense of an adversarial relationship that might develop, and integrates the characters into the campaign more strongly.

Two characters can start off virtual cookie-cutter templates and evolve in distinctly different directions in two different campaigns, simple by virtue of the character development that takes place. And that makes this a very powerful tool, indeed.

Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most influential games of all time. The stories generated by Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have inspired fantasy novels and movies.

Not only has the game itself remained popular for a number of decades, it has spawned countless other tabletop RPGs and even full-blown computer games.

Yet, despite its popularity, Dungeons & Dragons has not yet transitioned into the realm of eSports.

That might be about to change, however. There are a number of reasons to be optimistic about the game’s chances of making the transition.

The Rise of eSports

Even those who aren’t computer gamers themselves must have heard of eSports by now. Those of us who are old enough to remember what such gaming was like in the days before the internet, even before broadband, have witnessed a seismic shift in the way that gamers interact with their games, and with one another. Back then, we shared our passion for gaming by playing split-screen multiplayer, and by buying gaming-related magazines.

Today, gamers have a multitude of ways to connect with one another, and they no longer need to be in the same physical location to play together. Players don’t even need to know who they are playing against in the modern world!

While some people have been taken aback by the rapid rise of eSports – eSports are reported to have generated $660 million in revenue and $485 million of investments in specific brands in 2017 – it has hardly been a surprising development for gamers themselves. Any parent with young children will probably already be familiar with how popular a spectator sport gaming has become. Esports are continuing to gain legitimacy in the eyes of gamers and non-gamers alike, with the rise of services like eSports betting website Betway contributing to the increasing popularity of eSports.

Marketing research firm Newzoo is predicting that 2018 will be a booster year for eSports. Revenues could fly as high as $905 million – a 38% increase on the last year. Most analysts are also expecting a similar increase in brand investment, with an average projection of a .48% increase.

Some games naturally lend themselves to being utilized as eSports titles than others. There are even some games, such as Dota 2, which have been designed with eSports in mind. Dungeons & Dragons might not seem like the most obvious choice for an eSport, but it actually has many of the elements that make a successful eSport.

Dungeons & Dragons has a large and dedicated following, accumulated over several decades. It isn’t something that was usually played digitally (this is changing, however), but this doesn’t mean there won’t be people interested in spectating it – if the experience is rich enough. With a potential audience of 191 million gaming enthusiasts, it seems a near certainty that there are a significant number of Dungeons & Dragons players among their members, especially given the overlap between the two groups.

Competitive D&D

Over the decades, the rules of Dungeons & Dragons have been refined and focused. The game has undergone a number of iterations, with the rules of each being codified in the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. With the current generation of the rules now well-established, any player who wishes to learn how to play Dungeons & Dragons can do so. This level of accessibility is important if a game is to become a popular eSport.

Hasbro, the company who owns the rights to Dungeons & Dragons, have been focusing their efforts heavily on promoting the game through Twitch. So far, their strategy has proven successful. Dungeons & Dragons is gaining popularity on the platform. The millions of viewers it has attracted demonstrates that there is clearly a sizeable audience, but is it enough to sustain an eSport?

A Dedicated Community

Dungeons & Dragons is well established as a popular tournament game at Gaming Conventions. While many players enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons together as a single party, it also has a long history of competitive play. This is the final piece of the puzzle in terms of the key features of a successful eSport. There are a number of platforms and services, such as Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which allow Dungeons & Dragons players to play together online, though these games are rarely in tournament form – but that seems a small step in comparison to those already taken.

As it stands, Roll20 seem like the more logical platform from which to launch Dungeons & Dragons as an eSport. Every indication we have so far is that the community at large would be receptive to the idea of Dungeons & Dragons becoming an eSport, and some think it would give the game an appreciable boost in popularity.

Dungeons & Dragons has all the key ingredients of a successful eSport, but will it ever get that final nudge it needs? There are people hoping that this will be the case, but there are no guarantees. What do you think about D&D’s chances as an eSport? Could it work? Would it be popular? The commercial success of any venture is unknown in advance, but the potential is there.

Perhaps more important to those of us who are already players of RPGs, what do you think the impact would be on the game? Would the rules have to evolve, and would this come at the expense of the traditional tabletop version?

As always, the future is terra incognita, and the journey of discovery will have many unexpected twists and turns.

If you have opinions on the subject, I look forward to hearing them.

On Quora recently, I (and others) were asked for GMing techniques to help shy players come out of their shells.

As it happens, I already had this article underway, in one of those serendipitous coincidences that stretch credibility to the point of near-fracture.

As it happens, I have 17 techniques to offer by which the GM can help a shy player learn to express themselves. None of them will be sufficient on their own, but some combination is almost certain to unlock the potential within the shy player for self-confidence.

I ought to know – I was a very shy child growing up, and easily intimidated. I still feel social anxiety at times, though I’ve learned to suppress those tendencies to the point where it isn’t normally a problem, even under adverse conditions. RPGs helped me to overcome it, but the process actually began with some public speaking (which is really being thrown in the deep end) – techniques 5 and 9 actually derive from that experience, which I have described before, but will reiterate when we get there.

I’m presenting these in a deliberate sequence that makes sense to me, in terms of placing the discussion into a logical narrative. But first, some preliminaries:

Diffidence is not Shyness

Diffidence and Shyness aren’t quite the same thing, though there can be substantial overlap.

Diffidence

Diffidence is a hesitation in putting your thoughts and ideas forward because you aren’t confident, either in them, or in your ability to express them, or in your capacity for formulating a thought or idea that’s worth the time its examination would require. Quite often, the person exhibiting diffidence will anticipate being embarrassed by the failure of their suggestions, and so avoid this social failure by attempting to avoid attracting attention.

This hesitance frequently ignores the notion of inspiration – just because your idea is no good, or is only part of the answer, doesn’t mean that it can’t suggest a more comprehensive solution to someone else. Even negative or flawed contributions to a brain-storm can be beneficial.

Shyness

Shyness is being nervous or timid in the company of other people. This manifests in an arrested fight-or-flight reaction – the person feels scared, so their adrenalin surges, their breathing becomes more rapid, their heart pounds, and they acquire a rabbit-in-headlights expression. Panic attacks – a sudden overwhelming feeling of acute and disabling anxiety – may be triggered. Shyness often results from feeling intimidated, and feeling intimidated often results from being shy – a catch-22 that is at the heart of this emotion.

Some of the solutions I will present focus on overcoming diffidence more than shyness, some vice-versa, and some can be applied equally to both problems.

Both often show similar outward manifestations – a player who sits back and observes more than they participate, who speaks in hushed tones, who is hesitant and uncertain, and who often has problems making decisions out of fear of doing the wrong thing.

For the rest of this article, as a literary convenience only, I will consider the two to be manifestations of the same underlying condition, and describe them only as “shyness” and the sufferers as “shy”.

I should also add an important caveat:

I am not a psychologist or any sort of trained therapist, just an experienced GM who would do his best to help a friend (or a stranger) enjoy a social activity – but who has some experience on both sides of the equation. If a professional advises against any of these practices in a therapeutic capacity, listen.

The Preliminaries

Before getting into the solutions, there are a few important questions to consider.

Does the player want help?

Few of these will work without the active cooperation of the shy person. It’s important to present them in a positive context when you propose them. “I think the group would benefit from a greater participation by you, and would like to help you achieve that,” for example, or “I think you would have more fun if you were able to interact with the others a bit more and have some ideas on how to help you do that” – accentuating the positive benefits to be gained, and completely ignoring any negatives of the current situation.

If the player tells you, “I’m fine”, don’t try and force them. And don’t nag them about their problem by repeatedly coming back to them with a different potential benefit, that will only feel like you are criticizing them. Instead, simply reply, “Okay – the offer’s on the table if you ever change your mind.” There are some techniques below that are GM-only – implement them, and be patient.

Does the player need help?

Things become a little more serious when the player’s shyness is actively subverting the enjoyment of the game by others. When that is the case, the best solution is to try to arrange some one-on-one gaming outside of, and concurrent with, the group situation. It doesn’t even have to be the same campaign or setting or rules system; choose something that the player will enjoy.

Sell this proposal to the player without reference to his or her shyness – but use it as a means of implementing some of the techniques offered below in a more private setting, and use the player’s interactions at the group game-table as a way of determining which techniques should be carried over.

Of course, the GM-only techniques should be implemented in the group setting.

Does the player have a reason to be shy?

I once knew a girl who was so intimidated by the beauty and success of her sister, a promising actress who had been granted a role in a major Australian TV production, that she became extremely shy and withdrawn. At the same time, she was incredibly proud of her sister’s success and so frightened by the possibility that her condition would harm her sister’s reputation or career that she became even more shy and even neurotic. When I first met her, she could barely whisper, and that only with great hesitation and reluctance. The last time I spoke to her, after an additional 9 months or so of therapy, she was able to smile and say goodbye in an almost-normal tone of voice.

She had a reason to be shy, a psychological one, requiring professional intervention. My experiences with her led directly to my caveat earlier in the article. But it also pointed out something to which a lot of readers might not give sufficient weight: that there can be a legitimate reason for people to be shy, not just a cause for shyness to have become embedded within their personalities.

Some people are afflicted with a stutter, and are shy because it embarrasses them. Some may have suffered some form of physical disfigurement and be self-conscious. It’s even possible for the emotional aftereffects of such injuries to outlast the injury itself.

It’s extremely unlikely that these techniques will be a lot of help in these situations. If the player you are concerned about has a reason for being the way they are, talk the options below over with them and see what they think will help, if anything.

It might be that none of them will help, but something else will – renaming a key NPC or the character name to avoid a stutter trigger, for example.

The Solution Techniques

Okay, with the preliminaries and foundation discussions out of the way, it’s time to get into the solutions!

1. Inhabiting the Character Space

For this technique, you need to help the player find a large, high-quality image that represents their character in their eyes. Before the player speaks, they should look at the image and imagine that it is the character talking. Sometimes, it can even be enough for them to have a mental image of the character in order to implement this technique.

Obviously, the choice of image is paramount; you need a character who looks confident and sincere. An image that looks worried or fearful won’t work, and results are often mixed with an “angry” image.

It’s astonishing how big a difference this simple technique can make.

2. Refuge in numbers

The character and the player are not the same person. Most characters have at least one good stat or skill. Reminding yourself (as the player) that “you have an 18 STR” or whatever before you start to speak and trying to make yourself sound like you are someone with 18 STR (or whatever it is) can also work wonders.

In essence, this technique comes down to pretending that you are confident, even if you aren’t, but using the numbers provides a touchstone to access that pretense internally.

This sometimes doesn’t work well with technique 1, I’m afraid. You can focus on one thing and lose the other. But sometimes, the player can integrate the two into something more effective than either on their own, by looking at the image and reminding themselves that “he” (or “she”) has “18 STR” (or whatever).

3. Shy Player / Shy Character?

It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes giving a shy player a character to play who is also shy can give the player the confidence to play more forcefully. Suggest that the player “play the character like C3PO in Star Wars” – 3PO may be nervous and hesitant and somewhat cowardly, but he has no problems making sure that others know it!

After a while, the player can grow so comfortable roleplaying that they have no trouble handling a more outgoing character – even if the player themselves remains shy! What’s more, shyness is something that is gradually eroded by this success.

4. Shy Player / Expert Character?

Another technique is to make the character an expert and, as part of your game prep, producing relevant text for the player to read to the group as his character. In effect, you are assisting the player by providing them the results of their character’s expertise; all they have to do is read it as though they know what they are doing.

It’s a funny thing, but some people can read aloud with perfect confidence that they lack when speaking – especially when the words have been issued, ex-cathedra, by the GM.

You can further enhance this with Birthday and Christmas gifts of reference books on subjects that the character knows well and the player doesn’t.

5. Matching Character and Player expertise

Similarly, making the character an expert in some area in which the player has expertise can use the player’s awareness of his expertise and experience to overcome their personal shyness. Every single working day adds to the foundations of upon which this solution rests; all this technique does is tap into that well.

Or you could choose a subject with which the player is interested, rather than one that relates to their profession. For example, let’s say that the player is into science fiction – how could you use that to assist them in D&D?

Well, first you need to make it relevant – so call it “speculative fiction” instead. Then ask the player what he or she thinks is the equivalent to writing novels in the fantasy environment? They might respond that it’s tales told by Bards and Storytellers, or they might speculate about Dwarven Scribes producing scrolls containing fantastic tales. It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s plausible. So, if the character is fascinated by this variety of in-game speculative fiction, what’s his favorite story? Who is his favorite author or Bard? What’s the most recent tale he’s read/heard?

Dropping in-game reminders of this expertise not only gives the character more personality, the expertise itself can translate to a mode of game-play for the character. In a dungeon or other encounter, the character might give forth with “this reminds me of a story…” The character might be given to wild speculation, but they won’t be wrong all of the time, and the exercising of the character’s imagination in this way leads them to ideas of what to do and what might be going in the game.

6. Shy Player / Assertive Character?

Sometimes, a shy player responds better to being pushed out of their comfort zone by playing a character who is extremely assertive. Of course, this technique conflicts with technique number 3. This is particularly effective at overcoming diffidence – a character who is headstrong, who doesn’t try to explain what he thinks is happening but simply acts, right or wrong leaves no time for hesitation.

If the character’s choice of action is actually wrong, have the other PCs stop him in character. If the character is right, even if the other players don’t think so, they don’t stop him in time. And remember that he can always be right for the wrong reasons!

7. Table Position

I wrote about this subject in The Arcane Implications of Seating at the Game Table – was it really more than 5 years ago?! Essentially, you have two choices: put the shy player next to you so that you can naturally turn to them first (see 8 below) and can hear them even when shyness makes them whisper or mumble; or have them face you (see 14 below).

There are lots of factors that go into determining the seating order around the game table. For the Zenith-3 campaign, I usually have the player of the Team Leader next to me, and another player is usually opposite me to the right because that gives them access to the power point. But sometimes, when the plot is a mystery, I might have the player of the Detective character sit next to me, and so on. Accommodating shyness in this way is just another criterion to take into account.

8. Going Round and Round

I never let an opportunity to go around the table pass me by. When PCs are having their own little plotlines, I’ll do so. When there’s a group discussion, I’ll do so, to make sure that everyone has the chance to have their say. When requiring character saves or skill checks, I will do so.

Sometimes I will vary the starting position in this routine. Whichever way I go, the goal is to end up at a specific character. If it’s a policy decision by the PCs, that’s the team leader, who has the final say. If it’s a strategy discussion, it’s the field commander, for the same reasons. If it’s a surprising situation that the characters weren’t expecting, they react in speed order (or initiative sequence). In some role-playing situations, it may be a different PC’s player, because they have the greatest relevant expertise.

Unless a shy player was deliberately going to be last in this sequence, he should always be first to speak. Letting other players go first enables the shy player to simply agree – effectively hiding in the corner without contributing, even if they have another idea.

But this requires active intervention on the part of the GM when other players criticize any suggestion put forward by the shy player to ensure that it is phrased in a positive way, not a negative (or worse, personal) way. I do this by putting my two cent’s worth (ex-cathedra) after the shy player has spoken: “[Shy Player’s PC]’s plan would work if it weren’t for [X] – [Next PC to speak], do you have any thoughts on how it could be improved to cope with that?”

9. Working From Prepared Notes

When I was in 3rd class, my school had an eisteddfod. One of the events was a public speaking contest, but they had only one entry, from a year 12 student (called 6th form at the time) – nine years my senior, in the final year of school before entrance to University. The subject was Nuclear Power, and the student had been researching and preparing for weeks. The teachers knew that I was interested in science, so the morning of the contest, when no other participants had come forward, they begged me to do something on the subject. No pressure, because no-one expected anyone with so little prep time to succeed, and failure would not be reflected on my record.

I went home immediately and spent the next few hours thinking about the subject and listing talking points on a sheet of paper, practiced it twice, then went back to the eisteddfod, and proceeded to (very nervously) talk off the top of my head on each talking point in succession – which I had arranged in a reasonably logical sequence.

My opponent had prepared his talking points on index cards, which he had carefully typed up; they contained more facts, something I was ready to concede. His problem was that my off-the-cuff narrative had already dealt with the objections that he thought insuperable, derailing his arguments, and shaping the debate between us in a way that he hadn’t prepared to counter. So he started trying to rearrange his speech on the fly, reading from one index card and then shuffling through the deck to find the next point in a horribly disjointed manner. I knew the subject at least as well as he did, and even I had trouble following what he was talking about.

It didn’t surprise anyone, after seeing this performance, when I was the unanimous winner. (And my rival was the first person to congratulate me, even before the verdict, which was good of him).

Not bad for someone who was so shy I almost wet my pants on stage!

And that’s the key point to this technique for overcoming shyness – have the player come up with little talking points and anecdotes for his character to present. He may be shaky at first, but the inevitable rehearsal in private that comes from preparing these in advance will begin to make itself felt, and eventually he will be coming up with things off-the-cuff in the course of play.

On it’s own, this technique will probably not be enough, but in conjunction with others, it can be very effective.

10. Shy Players with Assertive Players

Just as some players are shy, others are assertive. Some GMs refer to the latter as “Alpha Players”, and there is a truism that the two should never mix at the same game table.

Alphas tend to grow frustrated by the hesitance and indecision of the shy, and the shy tend to be intimidated by Alphas.

Most of the advice I’ve seen on the subject recommends either splitting them up or deputizing the alpha to coax suggestions out of each of his fellow players.

I have another technique – I make the PC of the alpha player an unofficial “big brother” to the PC of the shy player in-game. It might be that they remind him of a puppy that they used to have, or their real little brother who [insert tragic circumstance]. Most alpha players have a high opinion of their abilities (and sometimes that’s even justified) and will relish the chance to show off their roleplaying chops and the additional challenge involved. It only takes a hint or two that their PC is getting the impression that the shy player’s PC is being intimidated into silence by the forceful presentations of the others (never make it them who’s the problem) and they will make it their role-playing mission to elicit the opinions of the shy player – and without even realizing it will, in the process, moderate their own behavior.

This is a variation on that “usual advice”, but differs in that it is oriented around their characters, which makes it far more palatable and interesting to all concerned.

For bonus points, have some heavy try to bully the shy player’s character so that the Alpha’s character can come to the rescue. This really cements the roles and relationship between the two.

11. Coupling Shy Players with Shy NPCs

Yet another technique is to throw a shy NPC into the party who ‘adopts’ the shy player’s PC as his protector, teacher, hero and/or parent-figure. The shy player feels the responsibility and forgets – at least partially – their personal shyness. As the shy player comes out of his shell, so does the NPC.

This is slower than some of the other techniques but – if it works at all – works well in conjunction with most of the other suggestions.

12. Side Chatter as a warm-up

It’s often the case that once a shy player gets started, they are perfectly able to express themselves – it’s just that they are normally finished speaking before they get ‘warmed up’. Encouraging them to engage in side-chatter in character, in-game before offering their opinions on something can achieve that warming-up before they get to the important bit. Their character’s favorite phrase should become, “this reminds me of the time…”

At first, you may have to provide the anecdotes, or help the player come up with them, but eventually they will be creating them for themselves.

Enhance this by occasionally mentioning that the characters are around the campfire, listening to [shy player’s character] concoct another tall tale for your entertainment, or winning free ales in the tavern by entertaining the patrons, or whatever. Making this a roleplaying touchstone to the character gets the player used to speaking out.

13. Encouragement Awards

Most GMs factor character abilities into determining how difficult an encounter was, and hence what rewards should be provided. I like to, and try to, factor in the player’s abilities as well. Making a positive suggestion is twice as hard for a shy player, and so they deserve a greater reward for the effort.

This probably shouldn’t be anything as crass as extra gold or experience points. Other forms of reward are preferable. Allied with suggestion 12, this can be a potent technique for turning encounters into a parley – “[PC] starts telling another of his anecdotes. The [encounter leader] stops to listen. When the brief tale is over, he bursts out laughing. ‘MORE!’ he roars.” A combat encounter has just become a roleplaying encounter, with the shy player’s PC in the forefront, and an NPC has just offered positive reinforcement

This won’t happen every time, of course. But even a little can go a long way.

14. Be a Supportive Focus

Have you ever noticed how many shy players will look at the floor, or at their character sheet, while speaking? Submissive behavior like this is another of the symptoms of shyness. Instead, encourage them to focus their attention on you while they are speaking.

Not only does this help them forget (momentarily) that there are other people at the table, but you can use your body language to encourage them – nodding your head and so on. And look at them when you ask a question.

To facilitate this, you need to make a move that will lead some GMs uttering howls of protest: you need to ditch the GM Screen. The shy player needs to see you reacting positively to his speaking up.

The other plank of this technique is no easier: go a little softer on the PCs when they are following a suggestion of the shy player, even if it’s not a great idea that’s been accepted by the others. If you encourage him or her to speak up and then kill the party when they listen, it sends all the wrong messages to the players, and especially, to the shy player. If you need to redress the balance, you can be a little meaner the next time they don’t listen, or simply reduce the reward they achieve from the softened encounter.

Get the players to pay attention to you and then send the right signals.

15. Private Rehearsals

This technique employs the theory that if you can give a shy player a single starring scene in a day’s play, it will form a wedge into their shyness, enabling them to eventually transcend their problem.

Tell the player (privately, and days in advance) that there will be a scene during the next day’s play in which their character will have to publicly address X on the subject Y, where X is someone important or a crowd of specific demeanor or affiliation. “Thundervall will have to make a speech to persuade an angry crowd not to take justice into their own hands,” for example.

This gives the player the chance to draft his character’s speech in advance, and even to rehearse it a time or two – which should help them deliver it in front of the other players, as I know from experience (see 9 above). It does NOT deliver the context of the situation to the player – why the crowd are angry, who they are angry at, whether or not they are justified, etc (it might even be an anticipated reaction by the other PCs!) – so they will need to adjust their prepared speech on the fly, but should have the confidence to do so from their rehearsals, especially if this has been pointed out to them at the same time that the GM offered up the hint.

The prep and practice makes the player more comfortable and able to deliver his lines, and the absence of context forces the player to roleplay, not just recite. Once they get used to doing so, they will start speaking up at other times.

If you think this is unfair to the other players, you can drop them the occasional hint along similar lines. Just make sure you leave something out of your advance briefing! A character who is supposed to be an experienced soldier or expert tactician might be given a tactical problem to think over in advance, for example.

This technique is all about the GM helping a character to do the things in-game that he is supposed to be good at – helping a shy player overcome their shyness is a side-benefit of getting them to interact more substantially or forcefully on a regular basis.

16. Encouraging Aphorism Of The Day

There are thousands of aphorisms out there that are either directly related to self-worth, self-confidence, self-expression, or can be interpreted as being relevant. Compile a list of them (to be refreshed when necessary) and at the start of each day’s play, give one to the player to think about as play proceeds.

Personally, this technique doesn’t do much for me, but others find it valuable. It would also help if the aphorism was in some way directly relevant to the planned events of the day. Selecting the aphorism in advance and using it as inspiration makes this relatively easy.

An example might be “For evil to triumph, all that is needed is for good men to remain silent” – though I would probably replace “men” with a gender- and race- neutral term like “people” to make it more generally applicable.

17. Positive Reinforcement

If the player makes a positive suggestion, call it out. Provide as much positive reinforcement as you can, and squash negative reinforcement immediately.

The Shyness Inequality

All players may be equal in the eyes of the game system, but the reality can be very different. Some players inevitably have greater handicaps to overcome simply to make a contribution, never mind competing on equal terms with the typical player who has no difficulty expressing themselves. It follows that the GM should take these impairments into account in order to more closely approach that idealized equality.

This assists those players who have such handicaps to improve, so that they can truly become the equal of the other players at the table.

The shy player deserves just as much opportunity to have fun as the more outspoken player. Creating that opportunity is your responsibility as the GM. Your group, and your game, improve as a result. And it’s also the decent thing to do.

Original image by pixabay.com / werner22brigitte
Cropped and contrast-enhanced by Mike
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Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that I love concepts that re-imagine standard game elements like races and classes through the prism of a completely new context. During a conversation at the game table a month or two back, I found just such a new context for a staple D&D/Pathfinder race, Dwarves.

Traditionally, D&D – and Fantasy games in general – have used one of two paradigms to describe Dwarves: The treasures-of-the-earth-obsessed and the dying-race-who-delved-too-deep and who now face competition for resources from other Underdark races, or some blending of the two.

In Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans, I offered a glimpse of a more spiritual third choice built around the traditional earth-sensing abilities of the Dwarves as an example. In By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves, I took an entirely different tack and reasoned my way to a very distinct vision of the Dwarven race based upon their musculature and environment – making a couple of assumptions along the way that could be equally valid the other way around, as the comments make clear.

And, early in the Orcs & Elves series, as background, I describe (very briefly) the Dwarves of my Fumanor (D&D) Campaign as having

“….a very martial culture which is fanatically violent, a cross between Star Trek The Next Generation Klingons and the Taliban. During the Godswar, the Dwarves had retreated to the lowermost part of their mine-shafts, sealing off the passages behind them. Other groups had taken refuge in these upper levels and a number of power struggles were (and are) underway as a result. From the Dwarfish perspective, they’ve been betrayed and picked on by every other race in existence and they have had enough; from the time they sealed their tunnels behind them, they were determined to live their lives on their own terms, and anyone who wanted anything from them had to earn it on those terms. Adding an extremely sense of honor and a propensity to get drunk, rowdy, and rough, and you’ve more-or-less got them nailed. If it’s a Dwarf, it’s respected and trusted; if it’s not a Dwarf, it has to prove itself as good as a Dwarf or it’s considered subhuman – and the challenges are deliberately not easy. How the Dwarves became this specter of extremism is unknown.”

So that’s 5 very different visions of Dwarves and their society. In this article, I am going to propose a sixth: the Survivalist.

Let’s work through some of the traits most commonly associated with Survivalism and see just how they would fit the traditional Dwarven paradigm. (The last couple of items are more speculative and deal with the consequences of adopting this paradigm.)

1. Doomsday

Probably the most commonly identified trait of survivalists is the belief that the “world as we know it” is vulnerable to disruption from a great many potential causes and that only those prepared for it will survive and prosper.

The acute form of this belief states that such a disaster is imminent, and this experiences periodic resurgence depending on socioeconomic, medical, and political developments. The initial fears were of nuclear war; in the 1970s, economic or ecological collapse and or running out of oil became more dominant; in the Reagan era, nuclear war again took center stage; more recently, bird flu and swine flu, mad cow disease, and the outbreaks of Ebola have highlighted medical disasters. The currently dominant drivers are climate change, medical crisis (especially the rise of resistant diseases), and economic collapse. Policy choices by President Trump are perceived as increasing the nuclear threat faced by the world, and may once again bring the original concern back to the fore.

These beliefs drive behavior that is proportionate to the perceived threat and its imminence; the more acute the anxiety felt by an individual or community, the more extreme the preparations and behavioral changes it considers justified in making.

The Survivalist model of Dwarves therefore assumes that their ancestors perceived some threat that was so serious that the entire race made radical changes to their society, migrating underground. This logically implies that prior to the advent of this world-view, they lived on the surface.

There are, of course, three possible alternatives to contemplate when thinking about what the doomsday threat was that drove the proto-Dwarves to this action:

1. The Disaster has not yet happened;
2. The Disaster either is happening right now, or is imminent;
3. The Disaster has happened and been forgotten by the surface survivors.

Each of these has different implications for the resultant Dwarven Race and its society.

Disaster Has Not Yet Happened:

If the disaster has not yet happened, there would be a significant sub-population who don’t believe in it, or certainly not to the same extent as the more extreme adherents within Dwarven Society. These would be more willing to “brave” the surface. Of course, they would view those who exercised greater zeal in their beliefs as being just a little “strange” and would tend not to mention them except in a depreciating or oblique manner. “My crazy uncle Grimly…” “Everyone has a crazy uncle somewhere in the family…” – that sort of thing.

But there would also be some members of the society who would strongly oppose these interactions with the surface world, because the disaster could begin at any time. And these are likely to represent a significant power bloc within Dwarven Society, having been dominant enough to actually bring about the general migration in the past. They may be dominant to this day, in which case those Dwarves who risk going “above-ground” would be considered “adventurers” in the Victorian sense of the word, with all the connotations that this entails. While thrilling to their tales of “beyond civilization”, the typical Dwarf would nevertheless look down on those who took such foolhardy risks.

Every “clan” would be different in their tolerance for such “Adventurers” – some would be extremely opposed, on the principle that these wild cards are placing the entire society at risk by revealing the clan’s secrets, others would be more tolerant.

Disaster IS Happening:

Profoundly different social traits emerge if the disaster is believed to be happening right now, because you would need some enormously powerful motivation to leave the safety of your sheltered society and venture into the surface world. This scenario can quite obviously form the basis of the entire campaign, as the PCs strive to deal with the effects of the unfolding calamity, whatever it is.

Dwarves who DO emerge to join the struggle would be those who have formed deep bonds pre-collapse with surface people and institutions, and those who can’t tolerate just sitting back and doing nothing. There would be a significant sub-group of missionaries attempting to persuade the surface races of the wisdom of the Dwarven Solution and proselytizing them to enact it for themselves before it’s too late.

It’s hard to be more specific without knowing the exact nature of the emergency and how obvious its manifestations are. Possibilities range from total acceptance of the reality of the disaster to total rejection of the Dwarven beliefs. And either could be right, or wrong.

Disaster HAS Happened (and may happen again?)

This model postulates that the disaster has occurred and the survivors on the surface have forgotten it. That obviously means that Dwarves, as a society, would be less reticent about interactions with the surface world, who might not even believe that anything so dramatic has actually taken place.

There is a logical subdivision within this model based on the potential for recurrence; if there is no serious expectation of this, then Dwarves remain underground because they have grown accustomed to it, and there may even be some communities who have returned to the surface, displacing whoever had moved in while they were below ground, an ongoing source of tension and friction – Old Grudges Die Hard (Thank Goodness!).

If there is a serious concern that events of the past could recur, this model more strongly resembles one of the other two cases described.

There are significant implications for the Dwarven Norm from another angle as well: consider the typical Dwarf encountered on the surface and how representative they are of the society as a whole. If you assume that these have stats and abilities as described by the game mechanics, you will find that this disaster evaluation will give quite different implications for the real typical Dwarf.

In other words, how typical are the Dwarves that the Surface World encounters and uses as the basis of their opinions of the race of Dwarves as a whole? Are they exceptionally well-prepared and highly-trained, fiercely independent, relative to that greater population? Or are they closer to the norm?

2. Isolation/Shelter

If disaster is coming, it only makes sense to try to protect yourself from it. What’s more, desperation can drive people to acts they would never otherwise contemplate, a knock-on effect of the disaster. It follows that survivalists present as being at best slightly paranoid and untrusting of strangers. They tend to isolate themselves as individuals or as a community (depending on how widespread the belief is within the community) and don’t fully trust anyone who doesn’t share their perspective.

No matter where they go, most survivalists carry a “Go bag” packed with life-saving essentials. These are known within the survivalist fraternity by other terms, but those don’t matter to us in this context. In some cases, that’s the full extent of survivalist preparations undertaken by the individual; in others, it’s the merest tip of the iceberg.

These traits and tendencies would also manifest in our “Survivalist Dwarves”; they would perpetually have their “kit” ready to move out, and would always be prepared to abandon anything they couldn’t carry, refusing to form attachments to anything non-portable. They would be wary when dealing with strangers, an attitude easily mistaken for xenophobia. Winning the full trust of a Dwarf would be slow and difficult, but such trust, once earned, would be absolute. Until then, the Dwarf would be, to at least some degree, standoffish, alone even when standing in the middle of a crowd.

And Dwarves would have a natural tendency to “fort up” – even at the expense of comfort and convenience. Their first task, upon selecting a campsite for the night, would be to see to the defenses, and they would pursue this objective for as long as improvements were possible given the circumstances and available light. Other races would be far more superficial in their devotion to this, making sure that tents are erected etc while there is enough light to do so; a Dwarf would prefer to sleep on the ground if they can’t get their tent up in the dark.

3. Underground

As a matter of practicality, it’s a lot easier to achieve substantial isolation and defense with an underground installation than with one on the surface. Your external walls, to all intents and purposes, can be almost infinitely thick. The prototypical survivalist shelter was designed to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear exchange, and some of the designs could – in theory – survive anything short of a direct hit.

Most are not that protective, because digging that deep is quite difficult and expensive. To compensate, they are emplaced some distance from any probable target. At the upper end of the range, we have facilities like that of the NORAD command center at Cheyenne Mountain, 2000 feet below the surface.

Dwarves are known to live underground, so this seems to be an obvious connection to the Survivalist model. But there are some hidden implications that I’ll come to in the more speculative sections of this article.

4. Hidden

Cheyenne Mountain is not a good example for this next Survivalist Trait, which can be seen as putting into practice the maxim that “a danger avoided is even better than one that can be overcome”. That’s because overcoming a danger inherently carries the risk of failing to do so, and inevitably consumes resources. When supplies may be hard to come by, either can be fatal.

Consequently, survivalists don’t want the locations of their shelters to be widely-known, and may go to considerable lengths to conceal them. Every act of entry or egress poses a risk to that secrecy, so the most paranoid are likely to employ extraordinary practices to avoid detection.

If we consider Dwarves as inhabiting such a shelter on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, it follows that they would be extremely paranoid about detection of their facilities when members of their society come and go. Trade would be conducted remotely some distance from their tunnels.

5. Self-sufficiency

One danger to this secrecy comes from employing outsiders in the construction of the shelter. It follows that a poorly-done task done in secrecy by the individual is preferable to a more expert task done by some outsider.

And, of course, being dependent on outside contractors for anything is problematic if the doomsday actually occurs. It is an inherent priority within the survivalist community that you be as self-sufficient as possible.

That means learning to do everything you need to do, for yourself. If you are constructing a shelter and come across a task for which you are not currently skilled, the need to immediately become skilled in that task becomes a priority.

Many survivalist shelters are likely to evolve over time – an initial version that’s “good enough for now” being modified at a later date when the survivalists’ skills have improved.

Not enough attention tends to be paid by Survivalists, to my mind, to the social and psychological effects of isolation. This is a natural outgrowth of reliance on self-sufficiency, and is the major vulnerability of most doomsday preppers.

If we postulate the entire Dwarven Race as Survivalists, this problem is irrelevant except in one respect: it establishes a limit to the functional value of the analogy.

Nevertheless, the inescapable logic demands that the society as a collective would be as self-sufficient as it could possibly be. Others might be able to do something better – Halflings might make the best furniture, for example, and while there is access to the outside world, those who could afford to do so would be free to buy the results of their expertise – but the Dwarves would be ready to do at least an adequate job on their own. At anything that they deem to be necessary.

6. Practical Skills

It follows that the more broadly-defined a skill is, the more highly it would be valued. “Carpentry” is better than “Furniture Maker”, “Metalworking” is more useful because of it’s broader applicability than “Blacksmith” and much more useful than “Goldsmith”.

The implication is that Dwarven creations would be utilitarian and minimalist, even ugly-but-effective. These are traits that are often assigned in fantasy societies to Orcish “craftsmen”, a note of passing interest.

A further implication is that Practical skills would be valued over more abstract skills, but there is a subtle trap here that needs to be avoided: the misidentification of skills as “non-practical”. An example that highlights this is Accountancy. Many people would instinctively place it in the “abstract skills” category, but Bookkeeping is essential to any form of trade, and Payroll skills are likewise essential to any society with a financial underpinning. In a more medieval society, you might be able to do away with Payrolls and the principles of Higher Finance, but Bookkeeping would still be essential. Casually dispensing with Accountancy throws the practical baby out with the abstract bathwater.

7. Survival Emphasis

Everything that a survivalist does is framed around the principle of enhancing their chances of survival – no matter what – to the greatest possible extent. There is a natural emphasis on hunting, fishing, and other outdoorsy activities and a demand to be highly skilled in these areas. Herbology and First Aid and the like also fall into this category.

Most of these are lumped together in the D&D/Pathfinder systems as “Survival”, with the option of breaking out one or more specialist activities if the GM so desires – is “Hunting” a separate skill or not? If so, does that imply that “Survival” teaches no hunting ability, or is there an overlap? If there’s an overlap, how is that reflected in the mechanics, and is that the correct approach? Repeat that list of questions for the other skills I’ve mentioned, and perhaps, for more.

For the record, my usual answers are: Yes, these skills are available as separate from Survival; and Yes, there is an overlap; “Survival” includes the basic fundamentals of the more specialist skill, but can’t be used in any specific capacity. A “Hunter” can devise a trap designed to appeal to a particular type of creature, using “Survival” means that you have to take pot luck. “Survival” lets you dig a simple pit trap and conceal it; “Hunter” lets you place one where you are more likely to trap prey, and construct it in such a manner that it is harder for the prey to escape from, once trapped. Where you are using “Survival” alone, the DCs for “Hunting” or “Fishing” or whatever are 10 higher than using the specialist skill.

One particular case that is explicitly broken out from “Survival” is “Tracking”, and it puts this issue into perspective as something that the GM needs to think about with every campaign.

These facts would manifest in our Dwarven Society in some peculiar ways, because some skills would be just as essential and practical, while others would need to be supplanted with equivalents. This is analogous to a survivalist learning Hydroponics instead of Farming.

The issue of food is one that I’ll return to a little later. For now, I want to continue focusing on the skills/expertise subject.

8. Weapons Proficient/Arsenal

Most survivalists have an arsenal of weapons of different types, from knives to pistols to rifles of different types, and are proficient in their use. What’s more, weapons are in the “indispensable need” category – so survivalists become adept at creating their own weapons if necessary, at performing expert maintenance on their weapons, at making their own ammunition, etc.

Most fantasy campaigns don’t have firearms; many treat Mages or Warlocks as substitutes because of their ranged combat capabilities. However, Dwarves are generally not considered to be great at Magic (usually to distinguish them from Elves), and that’s something that is at total odds with the Survivalist model.

Until now, the Survivalist model hasn’t done that much beyond imparting color to the Dwarfish societies that derive from it. Here, for the first time, the model forces us to go beyond the usual view of the race.

Survivalist Dwarves would naturally become proficient with the available types of weapons, especially those useful in close conditions. Axes, Hammers, Swords, and Knives fit the bill; pole-arms less so. Crossbows make a certain amount of sense; the greater range of effectiveness of longbows is wasted capability, and the greater potential for inflicting damage relative to short-bows would make them desirable. However, they are (relatively) complex and hence potentially unreliable, so I suspect that Crossbows would be discarded after an initial salvo and short-bows employed thereafter.

But I can’t see, under these circumstances, how Dwarves would not seek to encourage proficiency in the arcane arts in anyone with the potential to learn them. This is probably not going to be magic as the surface world knows it, though there might be some parallels and overlap. It might be as simple as an emphasis on Warlocks over Wizards, or it might be Wizards with a slightly different spell list.

My preference, from a strictly theoretical viewpoint, would probably be the latter, but digging up or creating suitable spells could be quite an involved process. It might even be necessary to remove certain spells from the main list, such as the “cloud” spells, where they make more sense in an underground or confined environment.

In place of “fireball” they might have “explosion”, for example – the same basic description in terms of effects, but with concussion effects instead of fire-based effects.

That then raises the question of finding another way to distinguish between Elves and Dwarves. Under this model, it might be only High Elves who consider Magic to be an acceptable career path; most Elves considering it to be unnatural. Those are more decisions for the GM to make – all I can do is put the problem on your radar.

9. Hardy

Survivalists are generally considered to be relatively hardy. This is probably a cliche more than a reality, to at least some extent, though the principles of self-reliance mean that the survivalist would train to avoid being dependent on others for rescue from any given situation. If you break an arm or a leg, you have to deal with the problem yourself, and you have no time for self-pity. Splint it, take painkillers if necessary (but not so much that they distort your perceptions), and get yourself to safety. So there would be some foundation to the cliche, a basis in reality.

This is another area in which the popular vision of Dwarves accords with the Survivalist model perfectly. Though I can’t help but throw a spanner in the works, at this point: once again, the examples that we see and that give rise to the perception of the Dwarfish race as unusually hardy might not be all that accurate a reflection on the race as a whole if the only examples that go above-ground are exemplars of this trait. It’s equally possible that Dwarves on average are actually sickly and frail, but the only examples that anyone encounters are the rare ultra-fit and resilient members of the species!

This is a lesson in making assumptions and assuming that the official sources are gospel that is worth absorbing even if you don’t adopt the Survivalist model. Don’t change things just for the sake of being different, but don’t be afraid to make changes that are sensible in light of the campaign and setting that you are using!

10. Hard Currency

Survivalists like to stockpile hard currency that has some form of inherent value in the belief that the institutions that stand behind “soft money” might not be there tomorrow. Historically, this includes spices and salt.

Dwarves, too, are often described as having great affection for Gold and Silver and other “hard currencies”. To some extent, the fact that everyone in most fantasy games uses these as the medium of exchange masks this trait, and the fact that these resources have to be mined from underground can be used to explain the rest, because the people most likely to, and most able to, extract them are Dwarves.

Of course, the true origins of this trope of Dwarvishness are the Dwarves in The Hobbit, modified by the (historical) events of the Mines Of Moria in the Lord Of The Rings. But those are rarely Canonical within a campaign, so some other justification is needed for the trope if it is to be retained.

The Survivalist Model doesn’t so much change behavior as it does alter the perceptions of that behavior. Under this model, Dwarves extract hard currency because other races find it valuable, and then trade as little of it as possible to maintain a strategic reserve against future need. From an outside perspective, this can easily look like hoarding it. But this is a note of distinctiveness that you, as GM, will need to make explicit through the attitudes of NPCs because it’s so easy to sweep it underneath the blanket justification given in the previous paragraph.

A series of small encounters early in the campaign could be used to impart the revised perspective to the players and give an opportunity to discuss a ‘reset’ of the usual impression of the race. For example, the PCs come across a merchant who is counting the legs on his horses and the wheels on his wagon while getting out a set of scales to weigh the coins he has just been paid with. When they ask what he’s doing, he explains that he just sold (something) to a Dwarven Buyer, ending with the merchant exclaiming “Greedy-expletive-Dwarves!” – at which point, he should suddenly realize that there’s a Dwarf in the party (if there is), and eye them warily while making some sort of half-apology: “…no offense intended, of course”.

11. Food Reserves

Another trope of Survivalism is that they have enough food stockpiled in some durable form to sustain them for as long as is necessary. No more trips to the Supermarket when civilization falls!

This is a point of social vulnerability that a lot of people aren’t sufficiently concerned over, in my opinion. In medieval times, cities stored enough foodstuffs that they could survive the winter with no food coming in at all. Much of their lives in the warmer seasons revolved around harvesting and preserving sufficient supplies to last the frigid season, and crop failures were a real danger.

Industrialization made the transport of goods much easier, and these reserves began to steadily decline. Until the advent of home refrigeration in the 1950s and 60s, cities normally held enough food to last the residents for 4-6 weeks, about half a winter.

Over the years since, that has steadily declined, and in the modern era where fresh produce is more desirable than preserved, and where every last efficiency has been squeezed out of the system, most cities hold just a week of reserves on the shelves of their supermarkets. From the point of view of the supermarket, their inventory is dead money – they have spent it, and won’t be reimbursed for it until the produce is sold. The smaller these reserves, the less of their capital is tied up, doing nothing. Somewhere in the near future – some sources have quoted 2020, others 2050 – it is estimated that the reserves will diminish to a mere 3 days worth.

Of course, purchasing is not uniform – some weeks, everyone wants lemons, or carrots, or whatever. As these reserves shrink, and the emphasis becomes more and more about stock turnover, it becomes more and more frequent for something to be out of stock when you do your shopping.

There was a time when the ambition was to have enough stock on the shelves that any reasonable demand could always be satisfied. Then that was eroded to “the usual levels of demand”, making space for a greater variety of goods. Now it’s “the usual levels of demand until the next shipment arrives”, making space for still greater variety.

This represents an increased dependence on transport infrastructure, a point of vulnerability that has not escaped the attention of survivalists.

One of the ever-present problems to verisimilitude in a fantasy environment is “what do the underground-dwelling races eat?”

Halflings are no problem – they have farms on the surface. Dwarves and Drow provide a more substantial challenge.

You may be able to pay lip service to the problem by suggesting mushrooms and underground rivers and the like, and ignoring the fact that these don’t permit farming on a sufficient scale to provide for a substantial population. There also needs to be some adjustment of attitudes to food variety, and you need to simplify biochemistry to dispense with the notion of nutrients. “Food is food and automatically provides everything you need for health,” in other words.

The ecology of the food chains that provide for these races has to either be tossed aside as glibly as possible, or the GM needs to invest a LOT of deep thought into resolving the issue – time that could probably be deployed onto something more productive in terms of the campaign.

The Survivalist model makes that a lot harder to do, by virtue of the food reserves trope. It’s entirely possible for Dwarves to have been living off the reserves that were initially brought into their tunnels for centuries, supplemented by the occasional source of fresh produce and mushroom cultivation and fishing underground rivers and lakes – but those supplies won’t last forever, and it’s far more credible for them to have either run out completely or be almost all gone than for there to still be plenty.

This would be an unimaginably profound crisis within Dwarven Society, one capable of rocking the social foundations to the core. If you were the leader of such a society, would you tell your citizens that they were facing incipient starvation – or would you keep it a state secret and resort to desperate measures to replenish your supplies as secretly as possible? Either way, the Survivalist Model leads to a crisis in Dwarven Society.

As usual, there are three alternatives to consider:

1. The problem has been solved, and the crisis is historical, which requires you to work out what the solution is; it may be something that common Dwarves would find socially unacceptable or repugnant (the Soylent Green scenario), and this might be the focus of an adventure or of the entire campaign.
2. The Crisis is current, and the problem is partially or completely unsolved, which implies that the PCs are going to have to find a solution. Again, if I were the leader of such a society, I would surreptitiously dip into the currency reserves to secretly trade with the outside for more food as a stop-gap – but that will only last for so long, it’s putting off the inevitable. This problem is going to be a featured element of the campaign, even if the PCs are not directly involved.
3. The Crisis is coming, but has been recognized in time to solve it – probably by means of some draconian measures. Like starting wars to thin out the population, or exiling some Dwarves to the surface to resume farming, or conquering some surface race for slave labor to farm for the Dwarves in sufficient quantity to replenish the stockpiles – preferably without your dirty political laundry becoming public amongst your followers. Once again, this will be a featured element within the campaign.

These examples clearly demonstrate that you can have an (ignorant) Dwarf in the party and make the Dwarves the villains of the campaign. You could even have the surface world enjoying a golden age that is about to come crashing down around everyone’s ears.

There are lots of ways to play this issue, but the repercussions clearly make this a central aspect of any campaign run using the Survivalist Dwarves’ Model.

In my very first D&D campaign, I solved this problem with the use of edible crystals which the Dwarves farmed. At the time, I didn’t perceive the plot potential of the situation, just the challenge to verisimilitude. If you don’t want to explore these issues, you can do something similar to evade the problem – just be aware of what you are throwing away.

12. Hoarding

Anything you can’t make – and your time will be limited – has to be stockpiled in advance, and in sufficient quantities to last the duration of the emergency. Hoarding and Survivalism go hand-in-hand.

That’s less of an issue in a non-technological age, because there are fewer critical supplies, but that doesn’t make the issue go away completely. Leather and Cloth for new clothes, for example, would continue to be needed.

But, in general, once you’ve built up your reserves, you can draw on them and trade for replenishments, because these are not consumed at the same frequency as food supplies.

However, it is incumbent on you to make a few key decisions: How many Dwarves are there, what do they need per year, how long is the shelter supposed to be able to survive if replenishment is no longer possible, and how large do the storage caverns need to be to accommodate the resulting stockpiles?

Once again, these issues are usually conveniently ignored by the GM, but the survivalist trope shines a spotlight in their direction.

13. Evolution?

This starts moving into the more speculative aspects of the Survivalist Model. It seems natural for the Dwarves to start with more normal humanoid dimensions and to have been underground long enough for natural selection to have evolved them into the current physiology.

This makes the assumption that a Dwarf’s smaller stature is not the result of malnutrition, whereas that is a profound influence in the real world. The perception of Asians as short stems principally from this phenomenon, for example.

But the African Pygmy shows that it’s not the entirety of the story, and provides a plausible time-span for such evolution. The popular perception is that they branched off in the late Stone Age, but this view has “no archaeological support and ambiguous support from genetics and linguistics” according to various sources. Genetics suggests more firmly that the divergence occurred roughly 60,000 years ago.

60,000 years is an improbable time-span for supplies to have lasted. If the Dwarves migrated underground that long ago, the problems cited earlier would have overwhelmed the society by now. Either we need to drive evolution at a faster rate, or discard the notion that Dwarfish proportions are the results of their underground lifestyle.

Challenging An Assumption

How long have African Pygmies been possessed of their short stature? By using the 60,000 year number, we are assuming that they have only just reached that point in their racial existence.

Well, we have some information that we can apply to answer this question. There are two different population groups of African Pygmies, known as Western and Eastern – and the division occurred about 20,000 years ago. That means that only 40,000 years at most were needed for this trait to become entrenched in the population.

It beggars tolerance for coincidence that this should have happened just before the division – it makes far more sense for it to have happened already. We can plausibly knock off a quarter of that 40,000 years with this factor alone, at least speculatively. So that’s 30,000 years.

Accelerating Evolution

It seems to me that placing an organism into a new environment which naturally selects for a particular trait – in this case, smaller stature and broader musculature – would drive evolution at a far greater rate than having this occur as a natural divergence. How substantial a factor this would be is unknown, but it certainly suggests that it is plausible to cut that time-frame massively. Perhaps by half, perhaps to a fifth or a tenth.

Enhancing Nature

And none of this makes any allowance for artificially goosing development, though in a world with Gods and Magic, that’s a factor that can never be completely ignored. That alone could halve or quarter the time requirement.

The Combination

Okay, so the basis is down to 30,000 years from changing assumptions. Accelerating evolution drops that to 15,000, or 6,000, or even 3,000 years. Enhancing natural development could drop those numbers to 3,750 years, or 1500 years, or even 750 years.

THOSE are plausible numbers for how long it took the Dwarves to assume their current stature, especially the last two. Since it seems equally improbable for everything to have worked perfectly to achieve the outcome in the shortest possible time, I would choose the 1500 years. That even leaves enough margin that they can have had their current dimensions for a plausible length of time, say 500-1000 years.

The Engineering Implications

This would be reflected in the engineering of the Dwarves. Their oldest tunnels and rooms would be reflective of their original proportions, declining (because digging is hard work, as noted earlier) as their stature reduces. You should be able to estimate how new a tunnel or chamber is by its height.

14. Population Growth and Rationing

Living on reserves becomes more difficult in the long term if your number of citizens is not carefully controlled. A certain rate of growth could be factored in, but everything becomes simpler without it. I can easily foresee a situation in which population is tightly controlled and food strictly rationed.

It takes two people to form a couple, so the optimum in terms of generational replacement would be for each couple to have two children. But, statistically, you would need to be careful of gender imbalance – so it might be necessary to temporarily increase that rate in order to preserve the gender representation, and then reduce it later. In addition, you need to replace any losses through accident or act of violence.

If I were setting up such a system for real, it would take the form of a minimum number of children permitted per couple plus a lottery system for the balance. In addition, some additional children would be allocated as rewards for exemplary service to the community or achievement. This is the fairest system that I can envisage.

Of course, an ongoing problem would be the issue with having unauthorized children. This can be discouraged by rationing food and other supplies by family unit and not per person, but that punishes the child for the parents’ crime, something that offends my sense of justice.

A far better punishment is for some of the lottery “tickets” (or equivalents) to be marked differently to show that the recipients would have been winners if not for an unauthorized birth, then gather those receiving such tickets and the unauthorized parents together for the latter to explain themselves to the former. This social humiliation spares the child (at least in theory) while punishing those actually responsible. Backing that up with some sort of Community Service would complete the picture. Repeated offenses, of course, might demand more extreme punishment, up to and even potentially including expulsion from the community – creating additional slots for the next lottery.

These are indicative of the types of social issues that would derive from the Survivalist Model. There may be others that I haven’t thought of, and you might choose different punishments or even an entirely different method of restricting population growth.

Of course, these need to be interpreted in context. If there is a supply crisis, as discussed earlier, expulsion to the surface might be appropriate for a first offense – and for lesser offenses as well.

Completing the Survivalist Model

The Survivalist Model impacts on Dwarves in three ways: it places some elements of the race into a new perspective, it imposes additional requirements on the social structure of the race, and it pushes the race (in some ways) outside the traditional envelope.

Or, to put it another way: The first provides enough parallels and commonalities to establish the credibility of the model, the second described ramifications and repercussions that do not conflict with established racial canon, and the third deals with the implications that take the race beyond that canon, justifying the effort involved.

Dwarves as Survivalists works. And – from memory – there were three, maybe four completely distinct campaigns that derive from that concept, without stretching hard. Which, in my book, justifies the effort involved in this article!

The calendar has shed its leaves, and has inexorably led to Campaign Mastery’s turn at hosting the Blog Carnival for 2018. The subject that I have chosen this time around is “Why do you love RPGs? Why do you love GMing?”

I’ve been holding onto this topic for quite a while; it was always my intention to focus on it as part of the buildup to the tenth birthday of the site, coming in December. Picking a June time-frame for hosting, when (traditionally) Campaign Mastery has taken its’ turn later in the year, is also intentional; I always expected that all my time at the tail end of the year would be consumed by the imminent anniversary, trying to fulfill all the plans that I have laid.

I have many different answers to the questions I have posed. Some are indelibly time-stamped by personal experiences, others persist in their relevance to this day. Some will find resonances with other readers, while others will be singular experiences unique to myself.

This brings up an important point: while there is always one reason why we initially fall in love with the hobby, this frequently has a limited lifespan. It’s the right thing at the right time to scratch an itch, sometimes one that we don’t even know that we have. Unless other reasons to enjoy the hobby are discovered, though, the affair will eventually flounder on the rocks of time.

It is even possible that for some people, the answer to the first will be “because I love to GM”, conflating the two questions.

The answers below are not intended, nor expected, to be universal. My experiences are not those of anyone else, and may or may not resonate with others as a motivation for gaming. That’s fine with me; I’m not trying to tell anyone else why they might, should, or do enjoy RPGs, not in this article, at least.

There are seven broad reasons that I love this hobby, and why it dominates my social life..

Escape

This is the reason I fell in love with RPGs in the first place. In 1981, I was in my first year of university studies, at an institution that had fumbled the ball very badly, having completely failed to develop a curriculum for the degree that they were offering for the first time, and cobbling together a mixture of maths, science, and engineering foundations that they thought might be relevant. As if that weren’t demotivating enough, I was in a bad place, emotionally, and more than willing to engage in arguably self-destructive behavior (though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time) in an attempt to assuage the pain from a failed romance, even while putting on a brave public face.

My first RPG session was not a huge success from any point of view except one: for a few fleeting hours, I was walking in someone else’s shoes. I had left that pain behind, escaped from it, and – in the process – started to heal myself.

By the time that this was no longer a motivating factor, other reasons for a love of the hobby had manifested, and been absorbed – to such an extent that I’m still an active participant, almost 37 years after that initial exposure.

There have been occasions when this has re-manifested – when I was exhausted through long months of extreme overwork, when I was in severe financial distress, and the like, RPGs brought relief from those real-world pressures and problems.

As a therapy, it might not work for everyone. But it certainly did for me.

Creativity

RPGs have always provided an outlet for my creativity, whether its as an artist or as a writer. But more than that, they have prodded and prompted that creativity to go further than I ever thought possible. If RPGs hadn’t come along, I’d probably become a frustrated science-fiction / fantasy writer or comic-book writer/artist.

Which might provide some insight into why my oldest ongoing campaign is representative of the superhero genre with heavy lashings of science fiction and high fantasy.

Even today, this continues, through the “pages” of Campaign Mastery.

Stimulation

RPGs have prompted me to look at the world around me in ways that would never have occurred to me. Long-time readers will have seen several examples manifesting in articles here. More to the point, they have provided a framework through which other experiences can be dissected and analyzed.

I’ve been forced to contemplate issues that would never have occurred to me without this stimulation. Philosophical debates such as “If a computer system perfectly simulates sentience, should the system actually be considered sentient – and is that sentience software or hardware in nature?” – which naturally leads to, “What is Sentience, anyway?”

I’m still proud of the “physics” I created to explain Aysle, the flat disk Fantasy world within the original TORG, in which gravity was a measure of thermal differential. A molten layer (with pockets of solidity) sandwiched between the surfaces of the worlds ensured that “down” was uniform across the surface planes because the resulting gravitation followed an inverse-to-the-fourth-power relationship with distance. In places where the gravitation was stronger (including underground) you got short races evolving, in places where it was weaker (including the tops of tall trees and mountains) you got taller races evolving, and a higher internal temperature (closer to that of the magma layer) made flight possible for large creatures like Dragons.

I’ve spent a lot of time examining the fundamental concepts that could underlie time travel and their implications, evolving a vision of a complex multiverse with “traditional” physics embedded as a subset of the bigger picture. I’ve contemplated big bangs and heat death, and the lengths that a society might go to in order to survive – and what they could actually do about it. I’ve examined the differences between ethics, professionalism, morality, and justice.

While it’s possible that these contemplations might have taken place without the stimulation of RPGs, the odds of doing all of them without that stimulus is remote to the point of virtual impossibility.

Self-improvement

I mentioned in the previous section the differences and relationships between morality, justice, ethics, and professionalism. A great game gives you the opportunity to examine conundrums in these spheres that would otherwise never occur to you. Those examinations can’t help rubbing off on you, shaping your personal views on the subjects.

RPGs have nurtured and stimulated my growth as a human being, and continue to do so.

Universality

I have an extremely diverse skill-set and an even broader self-education. RPGs are the only hobby that I’ve ever encountered that not only utilizes everything of which I’m capable, but which encourages further growth.

I’ve employed the analytic and logic skills deriving from my Computer Programming training to analyze game systems and solve problems far outside the programming sphere. I’ve employed my bookkeeping expertise to understand the underlying mechanisms of game mechanics and their flaws.

If you’re an athlete, your expertise in the limits of human capacity can be relevant to your participation in an RPG. If you’re a historian, your knowledge of the past can be relevant. If an engineer… well, you get the point. RPGs are the most inclusive hobby in existence because of the breadth of knowledge and expertise than can be brought to bear within them.

Education

In “The expert in everything?” I provided a very long list of things that RPGs have required me to develop some expertise in – from public speaking to astrophysics.

While some of the subjects involved might have been matters of interest regardless, many, many, more of them have come about purely because of their applicability to RPGs.

And, interestingly, very little of that education holds no relevance to real-world situations, has no practical value. I’ve found that I can speak to just about anyone about just about anything – from a layman’s perspective. Almost everyone I interact with on social media can lay valid claim to being more expert in their chosen sphere, can drown me in technicalities – but I can grasp enough of what most are talking about to at least speak intelligently with them.

This social permeability has made it possible for me to interact in workplaces with everyone from the person who empties the trash bins to CEOs. RPGs may be demanding, but they repay those demands in ample, sometimes subtle, ways.

Friendships

But arguably the best reason of all is the one I’ve chosen to place at the end of the list – the people.

Is it possible for RPG players and GMs to be jerks? To be obnoxious, or possessed of odious practices or personal flaws? Of course. But, as a general rule, the social aspects of gaming teach participants how to get along with others. As a general rule of thumb, an RPG player or GM will be more socially open, friendly, willing to talk, and willing to listen, than people in everyday life.

I’ve seen science fiction fans become frothing evangelists when someone disses their favorite author, or expresses support for an author they dislike, and the bubbling undercurrents of hostility between literary and media sci-fi fans are the stuff of legend. I’ve encountered politicians and artists possessed of so much pretentiousness they should sell it. And, while every profession and group has those who are friendly and approachable, who make friends easily, science-fiction fans are – in general – warmer and more open than those who do not share that appreciation. And gamers are warmer and more open than even science fiction fans, simply because their hobby is a social activity instead of something that can be pursued in a solitary bubble.

The people. That’s the ultimate reason to fall in love with RPGs, and to sustain that love of the hobby..

Over to you

So that’s my two cent’s worth on the subject. That won’t buy very much, these days, but I’m happy to give my readers mate’s rates! This article will serve as the anchor post for other participants to provide links to their posts on the subject.

But I’d like this to go further. RPG Podcasters, if you take up this question, I’d be happy to stretch the definition of “bloggers” to include links to the episode in which you do so.

This month’s Blog Carnival is about the things that unite us. In that spirit, how could I do anything less?

One of the banes of RPGs since time immemorial has been been the seemingly inevitable drift toward out-of-control character capabilities at high levels. It’s something that afflicts almost every campaign that persists for any length of time, regardless of genre, but most notably, the various incarnations of D&D.

This problem is so ubiquitous that there is more than a grain of truth in the suggestion that the number-one design priority of 5e was a solution to the problem. As a general rule, this and all related and similar problems tend to get lumped together under the heading of “game balance issues”.

One of the reasons for this, in terms of martial classes, is the stacking of bonuses from multiple magic items. I have a solution to that problem to offer – one that requires a mental shift on the part of GMs from very early in the campaign, if not from its very beginning – but on its own that solution will not be enough.

The Mage Problem

That’s because of the mage problem.

It’s long been recognized that mages are disproportionately vulnerable at lower levels, but rise to become incredibly and disproportionately powerful at higher levels. And that’s without factoring in magic items!

In order for non-mages to stand a chance against a mage character of high level, they need extreme buffs, and even then, it can be iffy.

It’s worthless to fix the martial power increment problem unless there is some sort of crimp placed on the magic-wielding classes as well.

But be warned – this involves digging deeper and making more fundamental changes to the game system than many will find comfortable.

The Martial solution

When I first started drafting this article, the intent was to do nothing more than present this solution. The rest came about as a result of attempting to place the problem into context.

The solution, ironically, is to have more magic items in the campaign of the martial-buffing variety.

It’s my contention that the problem stems, in large part, from the universality of application of the bonuses and modifiers accruing from the standard magic items of the rules. A +3 weapon confers it’s bonus to every attack, and that universality makes each increase to the bonus exponentially more effective. The same is true of armor and shields – they confer their bonuses to every attack.

(I also believe that this stems from a flawed attempt to address the mage problem I described earlier by elevating potential rivals in effectiveness rather than dealing with the real problem).

The martial problem can therefore be stemmed by adding a clause to the title and description of magic items based on the character level at the time of acquisition.

Here’s a hierarchy to contemplate:

• A specific species
• A group of related/similar species
• All species with a specific trait or common characteristic
• All species not specifically immune* i.e. universal – the current default

* (Some creatures may be functionally immune to certain types of damage; others might only be vulnerable to a weapon of greater bonus than the weapon in question).

And here’s another:

• In a specific environment
• In a specific environmental condition or circumstance, narrowly defined
• In a specific environmental condition or circumstance, broadly defined
• In any environment not explicitly defined as not supporting magic by the GM, i.e. universal – the current default

Here’s a third:

• Magic takes time to build up; in the first round, it’s +1, then +2, then +3, and so on, until achieving it’s ultimate power level as defined by the item description
• Magic is drained by use, starting at it’s maximum (say +3 for the sake of example) in the first round, then +2, then +1, then +0 for the rest of the combat.
• Magic is always on at full power – the current default

(In fact, you can further extend the number of entries in the above list by increasing the number of rounds at full power, or spacing out the number of attacks before a decline in effectiveness, or both).

Now contemplate all of the above in combination.

Each of these lists has something in common: they all make the modifier provided by the magic item conditional in some manner, declining in restriction as you advance down the list, until you end up at the current default.

A fourth list makes all of the above less painful to the PCs and the overall level of magic in the campaign controllable by the GM:

• Otherwise, treat as a normal item;
• Otherwise, treat as a +1 item;
  ….
• Otherwise, treat as a +n item (where n is full bonus -1)
• Otherwise, treat as a +n item (where n is the full bonus – i.e. the current default).

Under this schema, the first magic weapon you acquire might be a “longsword of +1 vs goblins, otherwise +0”. Then you might get a “longsword of +2 vs humanoids, otherwise +0”, then a “longsword of +2 vs underground humanoids, otherwise +1”. And so on. Each of these represents a measurable and quantifiable increase in the value and effectiveness of the magic items at the party’s disposal, while slowing the growth in effectiveness in any given situation to something more controllable.

Ignoring the last part of the list, whose number of entries is dependent on the “full bonus” and so complicates the question, there are 4?=48 combinations (more, if you add entries to the third list), with the current default as the very last of them – every other option is functionally weaker and more restricted.

This degree of nuance means that you can be more generous with magic items, not less (which is the usual advice to keeping Monty haul-ism in check), because there is a practical limit to the number of items that can be carried or at hand.

What’s more, there is an inherent logic in the items available being those that will be most useful in the current adventure. Let’s assume that you knew that you were going to be fighting giant spiders – the weapons that you would be most likely to take into such a battle (assuming you had access to them) would be the ones that gave you the biggest advantage you could find against that enemy. If that wasn’t enough, those are the weapons that will therefore be captured and cached by the enemies – leaving them there to be found when the PCs rock up to pick up where you left off. Of course, if the enemies were actually Dryders and not Giant Spiders, that might leave you in a bit of a pickle…

If the argument were presented properly to the players, you can make a reasonable argument that you are actually being more generous to them. Instead of placing martial equipment with a +1 (universal) bonus, you are giving them a limited +2 item.

The unstated key word to this concept is “containment”. You are containing the bonus in it’s applicability to circumstances that you control.

The ultimate weapon, under this paradigm, might well be a +3 (universal) weapon – which is a lot less effective than a +5 or even a +10.

Another word that comes to mind is “granularity”. You are diversifying the application of magic to ‘buff” martial traits so that there is more room in between the standard magic items with their universal bonuses.

Side-benefits

There are a couple of side-benefits to this approach that are worth noting.

The first is that characters become more distinctive and specialized through the choice of magic items they make. Is a “+3 vs humanoids, +0 vs others” more valuable than a “+1 universal”? A hard choice, isn’t it – very dependent on what enemies you have encountered, and those you expect to encounter. You might be tempted to try carrying both… but then, along comes a “+4 vs reptiles, +0 vs others”, and – as a player – you might start to wonder, “is the GM dropping a hint? Which two should I keep?”

Secondly, it makes the magic items a greater conduit to the history of a location or adventure site or encounter.

Third, it makes the game world more diverse and interesting.

And fourth, it increases the scope of the tactical problems to be confronted by the players. “Hold them off while I get the more effective weapon from the packs!”

The Mage Solution

But that leaves high-level mages unchecked. As such, it’s only part of a solution to the problem.

Right now, the standard rules confer two things (of significance in terms of arcane power) to mages when they gain levels: an increase in the number of spells, and an increase in the spell level that they can cast. What if you didn’t get both by default, but had to choose which form of enhancement you gained?

What do you want: more powerful spells, or more of the spells you can already cast?

Of course, as a mage player, you want both – but you can’t have both.

Then, there’s the question of magic items. Contemplate wands whose caster level declines with the number of charges remaining, or which increase: fully charged, you might get 50 uses at minimum caster level, or 10 uses at caster level +4. Choices, choices, choices.

Choices

That’s the key to solving both problems, really. You are increasing the number of choices that the players have to make about their characters, and increasing their immersion in the game world because that’s the only guideline they have as to which choices are going to be the most useful in their future adventures.

Other Game Systems

Variations on, or combinations of, the principles of these solutions can deal with similar problems that arise in all other genres of game.

What if adding a new superpower to your repertoire required a reduction in effectiveness of all the ones you already have? It’s easy to specify “dead levels” to achieve this.

What if there was a cap to the number of improvements you could make to a skill before you had to start specifying only a limited aspect of the skill that would be enhanced by further skill improvements?

It doesn’t matter what your game system is, the general concepts can be applied to solving your problems with power creep – but you have to start early.

But I’m already In mid-campaign, and while power creep isn’t a serious problem yet….

It’s not too late, provided things are not already out of hand. You simply specify that these effects only apply to equipment/abilities/whatever in excess of the best that the party currently have access to.

It’s easiest to use D&D as the example again: if the best weapon the PCs have is a +2, then weapons are universal up to +2, but any further improvements are to be confined.

A mage’s first 5 levels might proceed as described in the rules, but from his next level onward a mage has to choose.

Remember, too, that these restrictions have to also apply to all NPCs. If you make a ruling such as the one in the previous paragraph, then ALL mages get both benefits (number of spells and spell levels castable) for their first five levels – but then the restrictions come into effect, and you have to choose.

There really is no longer an excuse for power creep to become a problem. There remain reasons why it might happen, but they are all now explicitly mistakes or choices made by the GM – and on his head be the consequences; ye reap what ye sew!

I’m posting this early to beat the kickstarter deadline. If you want to back the project, which has now reached its funding target, you will need to act quickly – you have less than 52 hours!

Background

A week or so ago, relative to the publication date of this article, Campaign Mastery received an invitation to review a ‘new’ product from Signal Fire Studios, “A Delve In The Cave”, a D&D 5e -compatible adventure.

The author, Jamie Chambers, was forced by a health issue within his family to put his 20 years of tabletop RPG creativity on hold for a few years, and finds himself starting over. This is his first product since that career interruption was resolved (happily, all is now well).

I was both flattered and gratified that several fans recommended that Jamie reach out to me for a review or a mention.

Disclaimer: I have backed Kickstarters from Signal Fire Studios in the past. For whatever that may be worth in terms of bias, readers should take that into account.

I’ve always felt that there is a responsibility associated with having been around for this long in the RPG-related blogosphere, part of which expresses itself as a need to do my share to maintain the health of the industry. Even had I not been sympathetic to Jamie’s situation (he shared more details than I have related here), that would have encouraged me to accede to his request.

Of course, I immediately replied that I would be happy to do so, but integrity compelled me to share a couple of caveats.

Caveats

First, this product is associated with a Kickstarter that is due to end in just a few days – so I’m rushing to try and get this article out early.

Fortunately, the pledge levels for the product, while modest, make it seem very likely that the equally-modest target of the Kickstarter will be achieved. So I don’t feel that I have taken on the responsibility of making-or-breaking its success.

Secondly, while I did take part in the play-testing, I don’t have a copy of 5e (Campaign Mastery doesn’t pay enough for that) and have never run a campaign using the system, which would limit the utility of the resulting article in terms of its review content.

(I’m sharing these because I feel the reader should also take them into account when reading the article. Integrity, again.)

I did float the notion of holding off until the Kickstarter had run its course and the product was in its final form – more on that in a moment – and presumably for sale.

Despite these caveats, Jamie indicated that if I could do so, he’d be most appreciative of any additional buzz I could create about his work now, without waiting – even if it couldn’t be published before the Kickstarter campaign closed (Jamie admitted that he’d dropped the ball on the Press/Publicity side of things even before the campaign started – a forgivable mistake, especially under the circumstances, that I doubt he’ll make again).

So here we are…

What Am I Reviewing In This Article?

What I’m looking at is the Early Access version of the product, which premiered at the Origins Game Fair in 2017, and which is now available from DriveThru RPG as a PDF for $3.99 or Softcover B&W book for $9.99 (prices presumed to be US$).

If you buy the PDF, you will automatically be upgraded to the final version when it is released.

I’ll also be looking briefly at the Kickstarter and what has been announced as included in the final version.

Because this is a pre-release version, the artwork is interim, and there will be substantial enhancements to the content, in particular focusing on the story content and the town near the titular cave.

Because I haven’t seen this content, I can’t judge it, and don’t consider it fair to judge the pre-release version on the basis of what’s not there (but will be).

All clear? Good!

The Collision Between Dungeons and Story

Even without the circumstances described in the Background section above, I would have been inclined to accept the offer anyway. Explaining why seems like a good place to start, because it’s from there that the title of this article derives.

“A Delve In The Cave” was described by Jamie as “a D&D 5th Edition compatible adventure published under the Open Game License, one that layers story and mystery with a classic dungeon crawl in a natural cavern. The idea is to be an homage to classic adventures from the early days but with a more modern presentation and style.” The Kickstarter phrases it, “a cavern crawl built to please hack-and-slash groups and storytellers alike!”

The Plausibility Disconnect

Now, every GM has strengths and weaknesses, areas that they know they struggle with. One of mine is rationalizing “dungeons” in terms of verisimilitude.

One or two, I could cope with (and have done so in the past), especially if I broadened the concept of a “dungeon”. But there’s a psychological disconnect in my head between “above ground” and “dungeon” that stretches credibility to the breaking point whenever I think of the latter.

Part of the problem is that there are supposed to be something like three dungeons to a character level, at least in the old school mentality. More if there’s character lethality and characters starting over at 1st level – also a very old-school tenet. Over 20 levels, that’s a minimum of 60 dungeons, probably more – and that just pushes plausibility too far for my comfort.

The Shards Solution

I solved this problem in my Shards Of Divinity campaign by defining dungeons as “Drow Underground Terrorist Camps” – a double-meaning to the term “Underground”, you see. The first dungeon they explored was actually a prison designed by Lolth to contain her ex-lover and stepping-stone to her authority over the Drow, still just a (forbidden) cult within the Elves. She’d have gotten rid of the Drow Prince if she could have, but to get to where she wanted to be, she had needed to ride his coattails and that entailed buffing him up to the point where he was a match for her. When the PCs released him, he was (officially) grateful, and rewarded them with the location of a Drow treasure cache, which was the second dungeon of the campaign. What he didn’t tell them was that their entrance would awaken thousands of his most fanatical followers who had been bound into unnatural slumber by the same Order of Paladins who had been (unknowingly) Lolth’s instruments in confining the Prince.

The Fumanor Solutions

In my Fumanor campaign, most traditional dungeons were the creations of the Chaos Powers, places where they could brew up monstrosities, some of which adapted to the outside world and escaped to become permanent residents. Since these were – effectively – anti-Gods, this ‘divine’ origin sidestepped the plausibility problem.

The other solution implemented in that campaign was to treat each “level” of a dungeon as a society, and the “story” was understanding and relating to that society. So you had the Elves on the surface, and a Troll-Kobold society (Kobolds ascendant and REALLY nasty compared to The Book) residing in abandoned Dwarfish tunnels beneath them (and off to one side a bit), then a Minotaur-Goblin Society (Goblin ascendant), then Dwarves, then Shadow Dragons, then a society of Abberations, and then the Drow themselves. Each of these dungeon “levels” may have contained a number of physical levels, but the narrative thread was all about the society and what the PCs had to do to earn, or force, their way through to the next “level”, which involved understanding the society in question and how they had adapted their living spaces to their needs.

NOT a traditional dungeon-crawl, through it borrowed some elements from them. Again, it was a way of sidestepping the plausibility disconnect.

So you could see why I’m perpetually going to be interested in anything that purports to bridge that divide and bring “story” to the classic “dungeon crawl”. The more credentialed and respectable the source, the more strongly I would be interested.

The Author’s Credentials

So, what are the author’s credentials?

Actually, Jamie’s story could well have been mine, had I been born in the US. He started gaming in 1982 at 7 years of age (I started in 1981 at 19). He “stumbled into a career publishing supplements and adventures along with designing RPG systems” some years later – something that wasn’t an option for me due to geography – but it was at about the same time that I was looking for a change of career.

Jamie is the founder of Signal Fire Studios and the primary writer and project manager of “A Delve In The Cave”. Signal Fire Studios published the card game Building An Elder God, the
parody book The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar, and most recently 5th Edition of Metamorphosis Alpha. Before that he ran Margaret Weis Productions and Sovereign Press, wrote and designed the Serenity Roleplaying Game, Battlestar Galactica RPG, Supernatural RPG, and was in charge of the Dragonlance game line for 5 years.

That gives him a lot of credibility, making interest in the adventure acute. But it also raises expectations, so I guess it’s time to see whether or not the product lives up to them.

A Delve In The Cave

“Something lurks in the shadows inside the caverns under the hill called Brin Brenin. Ancient enemies of mankind have returned for revenge, starting with the tomb of a long-forgotten hero. Somewhere inside are answers to forgotten questions, deadly monsters, and hidden treasures.” Sounds good.

Right away, it becomes clear that the story elements all derive from the treatment of the dungeon as a society that is interacting in various ways with the surface-world, and which has also done so in the past (though the details have largely been forgotten since). Jamie has done a masterful job of conveying a rich palette of choices for plot hooks leading to the dungeon, with some extremely rich characterization to draw from. However, there is an immediate sense of anticlimax as the identity of the “something” in the quoted description can easily be learned within the town. This information would be better moved into a new sub-section dealing with the town’s reaction to revelations by the PCs after they learn the truth – that’s when the backstory can be learned and appreciated by the PCs.

That implies at least two separate expeditions into the Cave – learn the source of the problems afflicting the town, go back to warn them (and get the backstory) only to be disbelieved by the populace, leaving it all up to them to confront the town’s enemies.

Learning that backstory is the next flaw that I observe – while the backstory is interesting, coherent, and relevant to the adventure, discovering it seems to be made too difficult through a series of die rolls. I would have made the backstory more readily available (once the right questions were asked in roleplay) because it has the sort of heroic mythic structure that would preserve it in the minds and lore of the town. Obscure details may have been lost, to be recoverable only with success on die rolls, but there aren’t many of those provided.

Right away, I can see that while the concepts and story are well done, there are some plot elements that I would revise, were I to run this as an adventure. Fortunately, the supplement gives me enough of the information I would need to be able to do so, and the final version will provide still more.

This organic process of revelation conflicts with the section on Random Encounters because it presumes that the cats-paw of the true villains of the adventure (speaking circumspectly to avoid spoilers) has begun his activities by the time the PCs arrive. I would prefer to have preparations still underway during the “first delve” referred to, with the real countdown to disaster starting while the PCs are back in town learning the backstory.

To facilitate that, I would have the crypt of the hero of the backstory accessible very quickly, but for it to have been despoiled and his bones removed to the altar from which he performed the deeds that made him a legend. This would require areas 2 and 3 to refer to different parts of the same cave (currently area 2), so that the existing area 3 can be re-purposed, and the existing area 4 then re-purposed to describe the link between the combined 2/3 area and the new area 3. The reason for all this is so that the PCs have the clues to the right questions to ask back in town so that they get the backstory.

My next quibble is that there doesn’t seem to be enough use of misdirection on the part of the …beings… attempting to prevent disruption of their plans by the PCs. Their goal would be well served by concealing entrances and creating a circuitous path that doesn’t actually take the PCs anywhere near anything “sensitive”. Their primary tactics are to ambush the PCs and then run in the wrong direction, not a very sophisticated solution – in fact, given the sophistication of the rest of their plans, this seems incongruous.

Speaking of which, location 8 involves – amongst perhaps other things – a swarm of bats. I would have the bad guys use illusions to create the impression of a vampire’s ghost to (a) enhance the atmosphere, and (b) make the encounter scarier than it actually is, in hopes (once again) of driving the PCs away.

Later in the module, there’s a Riddle to solve in order to gain the hero’s “most prized possessions” for the “defense of man’s realm”. I hate this approach; the riddles seem altogether too easy, but worse still, a puzzle or challenge that is supposed to be about purpose and intent can be solved with an INT check, or by the players being clever. No, No, No! It should be a moral challenge – a choice between (illusory) wealth or the “treasured possessions” (which appear to be relatively valueless except for their potential to aid in the overarching plotline of the adventure. Choose wrongly (the illusion) and you get nothing; choose rightly and you not only get the goodies (which might be substantially better than the impression given by them) but the real wealth as well. This is all about the Hero perpetuating his victory and preparing the way for those who will need to follow in his footsteps (the PCs); anyone sufficiently prescient to have done that would have done it right.

Finally, the ending of the adventure. While it’s described as possible for the PCs to succeed, the greater probability is suggested that they don’t do so in time or at all, escalating the situation faced to a whole new level. There is nowhere near enough information on what happens then and how things can be set to rights once more. This leaves the adventure feeling like it stops right before detailing the boss encounter that resolves the adventure. In fact, it feels a lot like the first half of an adventure – it feels incomplete.

There’s a lot of good content here to work with. Compared with a number of other adventure modules that I have read from small publishers, it is solid and coherent, conceptually, and contains plenty for the GM to work with. The tweaks suggested above are minor and trivial compared with those that I have had to make in order to render other modules playable – this is already playable, and the tweaks are intended to make it better.

The Kickstarter

On top of that, there are a number of goodies that are part of the basic package through the kickstarter. But it’s the additional content that is going to be most valuable – more details about the town, and its people, and the connections between the town and the adventure. Plus a color map and a t-shirt, if you’re so inclined. And more art, I expect.

Verdict

And so, to the bottom line: Is it worth the price?

Absolutely, an unqualified yes.

The writing is of a very high standard, and most of the plotting exemplary. There is an inherent similarity to a succession of natural caverns that has been overcome very effectively to give each area its own flavor, and the backstory and underpinning narrative are coherent and excellent.

On the plus-side on top of that, what’s provided is surprisingly system-agnostic. I wouldn’t hesitate to run it under any FRP game system, including Pathfinder and 3.x in general. I could even adapt it to a superhero genre on the fly, with minimal prep.

You can access the Kickstarter via the direct link above or by the dedicated url, http://www.delveinthecave.com/. I presume that after the fundraising campaign closes, it will redirect to another site from which the adventure can be purchased. This one’s definitely worth your time and money, people. And a great lesson in how to integrate story and dungeon-bash; it turns out that my Fumanor approach wasn’t so far off the mark, after all. Good to know!

It’s an important question, and one not easy to answer.

Too much description can not only be boring to listen to, it can obscure important details and confuse the players.

Not enough and players will not be able to differentiate between the NPC being described and any others they happen to encounter – or a stuffed manikin, for that matter.

In the past, I have always relied on the literary model*, while acknowledging that it was an inadequate answer. Now, I think I have found a better one.

* Except for occasions and campaigns when I could use a photograph to avoid the need to offer any descriptions at all – but this article is more about D&D/Pathfinder, where the options for this sort of shortcut are limited.

The Difficulty

Trying to assess when you have gone too far is a difficult task.

It requires the GM to do several things simultaneously, and humans are limited in their capacities for that. Specifically, the GM has to:

1. build up a mental image of the character being described from his words alone;
2. ignore any predetermined knowledge of the things that he hasn’t described yet;
3. describe what the character looks like, what he is doing, and his mannerisms;
4. which means deciding and creating those things if he hasn’t done so already;
5. all while keeping control of the game, remembering the purpose that the character has within the plot, and finding a means of achieving that purpose;
6. which may be entirely separate from the purpose that the NPC thinks the he is fulfilling, which also has to be presented indirectly through his words and actions;
7. all while maintaining some standard of “Sufficient” in mind;
8. and comparing the mental image referred to earlier with that standard;
9. while making sure that he leaves out nothing that is important.

That’s nine simultaneous tasks. Small wonder that corners end up being cut and some of these get overlooked, or performed inadequately, from time to time.

A little prep can go a long way to easing this burden. A canned description eliminates 4, and permits 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9 to be done in advance of the game. That’s 2/3 of the task out of the way, leaving the GM free to concentrate on the things that have to be lived “in the moment” due to the dynamic interactions between game and players. And it’s easy to see why the literary standard seems to be a natural “best fit” in terms of the level of description to be provided.

Too Many Words

The literary standard is too much for an RPG situation. It works in that the reader absorbs some (not all) of the description and extracts from them a gestalt impression that can later be modified by reinforcement of the important details; it ensures that there is enough description to accommodate different standards of minds-eye visual acuity, and – of course – if necessary, a reader can flip back a few pages and re-read the description to better absorb it if they find their “picture” to be inadequate.

Too much description gets in the way of distinguishing between NPCs through their interactions with the character. Employing the literary standard ensures exceeding the actual requirements, rather than falling short of them, and until now, there has been nothing better; that’s about all that can be said for it.

The New Standard

While waiting for the bus this afternoon (as I write this, weeks in advance of actual publication), I was practicing the art of describing NPCs by picking people off the street and trying to describe them. Aside from being a good way to fill time, this exercise sharpens your descriptive “vocabulary”.

But, for the first time, I added a new rule to the exercise: “as succinctly as possible”. And I found something remarkable.

To be effective, the minimum explanation is:

• enough description to give an impression of gender, age bracket, and geographic origins;
• plus anything that was sufficiently distinguishing as to be noteworthy;
• plus anything that told me more about the person than just what they were wearing or looked like.

Strip away any verbiage that doesn’t serve the stated purpose from each of these three, and compress and abstract the remainder as much as you can, and that’s all you need. Anything more is excess beyond requirements – for RPG purposes.

Try it: “Male, Curly black hair, well groomed, slightly-olive skin, mole on left cheek, well-dressed, thick glasses, expensive car.” He might be Italian, or Greek or Spanish – but he’s a businessman, accountant, or lawyer from somewhere in Southern Europe. And you could even catenate “well-groomed” and “well-dressed”, using more emotive language, to “impeccably groomed and dressed”.

Or: “Male, very dark-skinned, long black frizzy hair, cap, oil-stained overalls with “Doug’s Smash Repairs” on a breast-patch, t-shirt, heavyset with thick muscles, whole-arm tattoo” – a mechanic of Pacific Islander background, possibly Maori.

By keeping the descriptions simple, you sketch in a general impression and then let the character’s personality, as expressed through what they are doing and their interactions with those around them, do the rest.

Notice that there are no names – quite often, you shouldn’t present a name until after the visual “sketch” has been established so that there is an association between the two – and the name itself will thereafter bring back the impression created.

Let them introduce themselves – the interaction will begin adding personality to the visual as well as providing the name.

From now on, this is the standard that I’m going to apply when describing my NPCs.

I’m interrupting my planned schedule of posts to talk about what happened this weekend past in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, because it will be relevant to all campaigns regardless of genre.

I was notified on Friday Afternoon that one of the regular players could not make it that weekend. My first thought was to whether or not the game could go ahead without him, and quickly came to the conclusion that the current adventure certainly couldn’t proceed, the planned events revolving around his character were too vital to the plotline. The campaign may be an ensemble cast (Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?) but every adventure naturally has some PCs more prominently involved than others, and this just happened to be one driven by the PC whose character was absent.

I momentarily contemplated the many solutions to a player absence that I have discussed here in the past (Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence), and decided that none of them would work.

Which, at first glance, left only the option of canceling the game session – something we had previously done when another player couldn’t make it and the PCs were in-between adventures – when a new idea occurred to me; that new idea is the subject of today’s article. One of the players who wasn’t absent commented, “I certainly think you’re onto something with [this] idea,” – from a player and GM with almost as much vintage as myself, so having a solution to a problem that’s been around almost as long as RPGs have existed that was equally innovative to him definitely counted as a big thumbs-up.

Inspiration: Gotham By Gaslight

My principle source of inspiration was a graphic novel that was originally published by DC comics with the intention of it being a one-off curiosity, in which an alternate-reality Batman in Victorian times found himself in Batman-esque circumstances, chasing down a recently-emigrated Jack The Ripper after his Bruce Wayne alter-ego was framed for the crimes.

It was a surprise hit, and spun off a sequel, and that begat the Elseworlds series – a connection acknowledged when subsequent reprints of the original story featured the Elseworlds Logo.

Pulp By Gaslight

My idea was to recast and reinterpret the existing (and present) PCs (and a couple of key NPCs) to be distant relatives in a different era, and then run them through an appropriately-styled adventure that fitted the game genre but was set in a quite different environment.

The resulting one-off would be an out-of-continuity adventure, in much the same way that comic series often have an Annual that is expressly disconnected from the continuity of the main series. This adventure, which I titled “Pulp By Gaslight,” could interrupt the ongoing continuity without disrupting it.

This could either be a lost part of the background to the main continuity or completely separate from it.

I proposed the solution to my co-GM by telephone when I advised him of the problem, and his response was “If you think we can pull something like that off, let’s go for it!”

Good Genes Breed True

One of the central premises of the solution is that Good Genes would breed through – that the predisposition of their natural traits and abilities could manifest in a blood-related character in a different era.

The practical upshot of this is that the players use the same character sheet that they always use, but various items would be interpreted differently. From my adventure prep, with annotations:

Ian M’s character in the usual campaign, Captain Ferguson, is the owner-operator of a treasure-hunting salvage vessel operating mostly in the Atlantic these days, but originally from the Pacific. In “Pulp By Gaslight”, this character was the first to be introduced, becoming “Captain Ezra Ferguson, master of a Whaling ship running out of Boston in the year 1892. Ezra might be the great great grandson of Captain Ferguson’s Great Great Great Grandfather’s brother. His ship has just made port…” and then it was off into laying foundations for the adventure. Same character sheet, but captain of a completely different type of ship, and any “treasure-hunting” skills mentioned would be reinterpreted as relating to Whales and Whaling.

Eliza Black, a Canadian Intelligence Officer and former Mountie, became a small woman in rugged leather attire and stetson hat, who introduces herself as Mrs Elsa Trulane, nee Black. She was appointed Marshall in the Klondike Gold Fields following the death of her would-be miner husband at the hands of claim-jumpers. She might be Eliza’s great-great-great-aunt. Or not. Same character sheet, but a different background. This would have been before the character’s family came into money, so this was a rougher-and-readier independently-minded pioneer woman – but functionally, mechanically, virtually unchanged.

Father O’Malley, a Roman Catholic Priest from New England, became Father Mallory, an Anglican priest who had emigrated a month earlier from Brighton, England, seeking to trace a lost branch of his family. His great-grandfather’s brother had emigrated to New England in 1810, so far without success – perhaps because Father O’Malley’s ancestor changed his surname for some reason on arrival (which might have happened if they had been disowned from a particularly pious family). Same character, different branch of religion. Unknown to the character, he also possessed Father O’Malley’s abilities to smite supernatural evil etc. – which fits the established campaign background, which states that these are potential capabilities of all Priests, but that some are better at it than others.

The most-changed PC was Steffan Bednarczic, a Polish mining engineer who had fled Nazism and dark circumstances to find work on the English Docks, which was where he encountered the other PCs and signed up with them. This character became Dominikus Bednarczos, a shipwright who was lured to the Americas by the tales of Gold almost a year ago from Pyltin in Russia, his native home, which was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before that was partitioned in 1772 by the forcible entrance of Russian Troops. A second Russian land-grab in 1793 further annexed parts of the former independent state, and a third by Austria, Russia, and the Kingdom of Prussia completed the conquest of the once-proud nation. But when you arrived, and before you had earned enough to claim a stake in the goldfields, the gold-rush was over. Since then, he has adapted his skills in order to make a living as a Carpenter. A similar character, but one who was single and not a parent, and one possessed of a different set of practical skills. But so long as you remembered “Carpenter / Shipwright” instead of “Mining / Civil Engineer”, the player could step right into his shoes.

Gathering The Troops

One of the things that made this idea work was that – for this first outing of the concept – I had an idea for how the PCs could be brought together in game time. Now that the principle has been established, next time we need to resort to this solution to the absent-player problem, we can simply make something up and present it to the players as having happened in the past.

Variations On A Theme

While the personalities of the PCs and NPCs were recognizably similar, the variation in “shoes” that they were walking in gave the players license to explore and experiment a little more. I don’t think any of them took great advantage of that, but the potential is there and will undoubtedly be exploited on some other occasion.

Minimal Prep

After getting approval for the initial concept, I spent a couple of hours Friday Night doing some minimal prep – mostly writing and researching the information given about the characters above, a little on the settings (Boston and London, 1892), and jotting down the central premises of the adventure. Everything else was created and run ad-hoc off-the-cuff.

Experience

This was a one-session adventure; the standard XP that we award for those (aside from any bonus extras that are given to individual players) is 1 point. We were a little pressed for time at the very end, so this didn’t actually get awarded, but we had emphasized the principle at the start – any XP you earn with your “alternate character” goes into the original character’s pool of such.

The Verdict

For a hastily-thrown-together filler, it was a remarkable success. Some time was spent chatting during game breaks about the potential for the idea – next time, it might be another Victorian adventure, or it might be Barsoom, or a “Buck Rogers”-style adventure, or the American Civil War, or whatever else takes our fancy as a setting for a genre-appropriate adventure. We can go Steampunk as readily as Medieval.

The technique has definitely taken its place amongst the many solutions to the problem of an absent player, and would even be considered preferable to most of the alternatives henceforth.

It was while returning home afterwards that I realized that it could also be applied generally to other genres. With superheros, it might be less successful, because their abilities tend to be fairly specific, but it should be possible to adapt it without too much trouble to something like D&D.

And so, it is being presented here so that you can add it your repertoires, as well.