With my internet still down (at the time this article was written), I’ve been taking the time to write, and to catch up on a number of documentaries preserved until just such an opportunity came to catch up on them.

One of the programs time-shifted in this fashion was something from the BBC, “The Science Of Laughter”, hosted by British Comedian Jimmy Carr, and it sparked some new thoughts on the subject of comedy in RPGs.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve found the subject in my sights (hence the title of this article); way back in April of 2009, I wrote The Right Quip at The Right Time: Humor in RPGs, in which I analyzed a whole bunch of different types of humor and how to use them (and not use them) in an RPG, discovering why Comedy RPGs are hard.

I’m going to deliberately structure this article along similar lines to the BBC documentary (which anyone who can access it should definitely check out) because a number of segments within the show sparked new and sometimes quite unrelated insights. I’m afraid that I’ll seem to ramble a bit in the course of this article, because many of the thoughts are the result of associating different elements of the show’s content with each other – bear with me!

The Mechanics Of Laughter

The program started by examining the question, “What are the biological effects of laughter?”. Medical evidence was provided that laughter is actually a rhythmic spam of the intercostal muscles – which we normally use to breathe. Consequently, laughing too hard leaves you short of breath, it is impossible to speak coherently while laughing, and it is theoretically possible to laugh ourselves to death. I’ll come back to this point in a little while, because there’s a connection with another segment of the documentary that actually seemed to escape the attention of those participating, even though several of them were acknowledged experts in the field.

Do straight men make the best comedians?

I was immediately struck by the thought, which continually distracted me for the rest of the first viewing of the show, that if you can’t speak clearly while laughing, someone who doesn’t laugh easily might make a more effective comedian than someone with such a sense of humor that they couldn’t help laughing at their own jokes. I have to admit to not being completely sold on the theory; there is also the possibility that knowing that you are delivering a joke places sufficient distance between the joker and the joke that he is able to continue delivering his monologue or one-liners.

And yet, it was later stressed that laughter is a social function, developed from the same bonding instincts that leads to the practice of grooming in apes. In a nutshell, things that might raise nothing more than a chuckle when viewed alone become uproariously, outrageously, funny when the experience is shared with another. Once someone is (genuinely*) laughing, even a little, it lowers a threshold of inhibition that makes another person more likely to laugh, or to laugh even harder, and that this is largely an involuntary response. So it would seem to me that performing any form of stand-up comedy must require the comedian to be resistant to comedy in the first place or they would be overwhelmed by the instinct to laugh at their own jokes.

The jury is still out on this one, which is entirely my own theory. But, if true, it places the GM in a unique position for delivering a comedic experience at the gaming table – his position of authority and the many things that have to be on his mind at any given moment give him more insulation against laughter than any of the players. He is, by virtue of his function at the gaming table, more of a straight man than anyone else there; so it’s just a matter of the right quip at the right time – an instinct for comedy – to deliver what I will describe (a little later in this article) as a Grand Slam of comedy. That’s food for thought.

(*There’s a difference between genuine laughter and socially-disingenuous laughter, i.e. laughter that is faked for social reasons. Testing shows that 9 times out 10, people can tell the difference – so you have to wonder whether the practice is actually counterproductive. I’d rather give a genuine attentive nod than a fake laugh, but you might choose otherwise. But that’s neither here nor there; I just felt it important to note the distinction, because it is relevant to the point that was being made).

Laughter as a sign of evolutionary advancement

Because the mechanics of laughter are what they are, if you are on all fours, you can’t laugh; the intercostal muscles are being used for support. You will either not laugh, and remain in position, or laugh and (literally) collapse. Creatures who are not bipedal can only laugh when on their backs, as later shown by a scientist who discovered a new treatment for depression (currently being developed by a pharmaceutical company who bought the rights for US$560M) by tickling rats. You see the same thing with cats and dogs – tickle them and they roll onto their backs to facilitate more of the social play.

I’ve seen it suggested a number of times in sci-fi that one functional definition of “humans” is “the species that laughs.” Without actually commenting directly on that, the documentary’s content shows that there is a certain amount of truth to that proposition insofar as we are the only fully bipedal species on earth – depending on how strictly you define laughter, of course.

All that is grist for the mill when it comes to determining social behavior and its expression in RPGs for species as diverse as Dragons and Aliens of all types. Do they have a laughter response, or an analogue? To what extent is it a biological or social necessity? What aspects of social behavior have such a function (or equivalent) as a necessity? Are solitary species, like Dragons, less needful of a sense of humor? What’s Elvish comedy like?

Laughter is Universal, Comedy is not

Another point to come out of the documentary is that while everyone recognizes the sound of laughter, no matter what culture they are from, what actually makes them laugh is a function of the culture and society around them. It’s not just subject matter, it’s delivery and atmosphere and circumstance and a whole slew of other factors. It can be quite difficult, as a result of the vast number of variables, to actually put your finger on the exact differences, but British humor is different from American humor is different from Australian humor is different from Japanese humor is different from Icelandic humor is different from…. well, you get the point.

To some extent, this is even a regional phenomenon. Do the same jokes play as well in the deep south of the US as they do in the Pacific Midwest or the Northeast? While there would be some overlap, I’m betting that there is sufficient divergence between the subcultures that some humor would simply fall flat in different places, even if deliberately provocative issues like race are ruled out of consideration, or would require the audience to be more “warmed up” than others. You certainly see the same thing in the UK – Irish humor is not quite the same as Scottish humor which isn’t quite the same as English humor.

That last paragraph is just my theory, based on my own experiences with different television shows – it would need a comedy professional who has done stand-up in a wide variety of locations to confirm it.

The main point is that comedy, and the subjects that are fit for comedic treatment, are functions of society and culture. Which naturally raises the question,

What does a game society find funny?

It was written a long time ago, so I no longer remember for certain, but I don’t think that sense-of-humor was one of the cultural distinctiveness points raised in the Distilled Cultural Essence series. This shows quite clearly that it should be!

It’s not just a function of racial distinctiveness, it’s also a function of cultural distinctiveness. But, in order to see how powerful a tool this can be, both in terms of analysis and of depiction, you need to understand exactly what comedy is – a subject that I’ll get to in a little while.

How best to simulate this?

In the meantime, though, there’s a problem of accurately simulating it at the gaming table. This comes in two parts – GM simulation through NPCs, and player simulation through their PCs.

The first is relatively easy to do – you simply have an NPC crack a joke on an appropriate subject, and (no matter how unfunny the players may find the joke), have other NPCs crack up with laughter. But the players need to understand why the joke is funny to that race/culture. Without appropriate education in the subject – say, by having them read this article – they won’t.

And, if they don’t understand it, they certainly won’t be able to roleplay this aspect of their characters racial and cultural heritage correctly. Which brings us to the second half of the problem.

There is a simple answer: permit players to crack whatever jokes they deem fit, and inform everyone that if they laugh at something (even something delivered out-of-character) that it means that the PC has said something that the PC considers funny. This might be interpreted as inappropriate humor, or humor aimed at keeping spirits high, or whatever, depending on the personality of the PC in question; it might even be that the character is trying too hard to be socially acceptable.

An even better answer is: every time a player says something they intend to be funny, it’s the character attempting to tell a joke that is appropriate to his cultural and racial background. If someone laughs, that indicates either that the joke worked from the point of view of the laughing player’s NPC; if they laugh when the player wasn’t attempting to be funny, it signifies that the PC has done something that another PC finds funny even though the first wasn’t attempting to be humorous, and might not even understand why it was funny. This says different things about both the PC whose player is laughing and the PC whose player is not – from that point, it’s simply a matter of the player interpreting the situation and roleplaying accordingly.

Both these solutions have the virtue of acknowledging that the player is not the character, but that the player is simulating being the character – is acting the part, in other words – and that the character depicted is actually a blend or interpretation of the role described by the character sheet. It simply expands the definition of roleplaying to include some aspects of out-of-game behavior – ones that more tightly integrate the player’s persona with that of the character’s.

That’s certainly something worth thinking about.

You can even extend the principle: sometimes, good roleplay might not be about interpreting literally what a character says, it might be about how they say it; the PC’s actual statement might be something completely different, and the player’s words on behalf of his character are a non-literal representation of what the character is saying.

The Infectious Response

As noted earlier, laughter is infectious. Most things are funnier in a group than they are to an isolated individual. The statistics show that laughter is 30 times more likely to occur in a group situation, given the same stimulus. Detailed studies of stand-up comedy audiences reveals (according to the documentary) that only about 3 audience members are laughing at any given moment, and that the laughter reaction proceeds in individual laughs like a Mexican wave back and forth, spontaneously, so quickly that it normally can’t be observed. Rather than being a continuous laugh, it is paused and restarted so quickly as to be imperceptible even to the person who is laughing.

It’s my impression that the “deeper” and “stronger” the laugh response in reaction to any specific source of humor, the greater the duration of these passages and more infrequent the ‘rests’ – again, this wasn’t actually stated in the documentary, it’s my interpretation of the evidence that was presented, which is why I’ve separated it into a separate paragraph.

Grand Slams of comedy

I wrote earlier of the GM’s privileged position as a natural straight man. I’m going to pick up on that thread for a moment. It’s my experience that the combination of this privileged position and the communicability of the laughter reaction in a group situation, and a third factor that’ll go into in the next section, that you can sometimes produce a spontaneous exceeding of the three-at-a-time limit – if the group is the right size. In fact, you can get four or five players to laugh simultaneously – if you get everything right. It doesn’t happen often, and the larger the group, the harder it is to achieve at all.

To my mind, this ties into something GF Pace brought up in his recent guest article:

“The number of possible member-member links (L) increases as the size of the group (N) increases: (L = (N² – N) /2). …And this number doubles if the people involved are not rude and, you know, might respond to the interaction.”

I am going to suggest, first of all, that those numbers might double anyway, because in addition to direct player-to-player interactions, you also have to consider character-to-character interactions. In other words, that the size of the group needs to factor in the number of characters as well as the number of players representing those characters.

At the same time, these additional “group members” are not full participants; they are all represented by the individuals already counted by the mathematical expression. So it might be more accurate to say that each player (other than the GM) is “1.5 people” when it comes to depicting the number of possible links – what is actually increasing are the number of modes of linkage. The GM is a special case because he may be functioning as more than one NPC at a time. Two or three are quite common, as many as five or six aren’t unheard of.

Does this increased head count hold full value? I would argue not – the fact that the GM is already playing one NPC must reduce the amount of active links that he can operate simultaneously. It would be more accurate to suggest that each counts as 1/(NPCs+1) additional characters, and that the aggregate of them all is therefore NPCs/(NPCs +1).

If, then, the GM is directly operating two NPCs, his “N” contribution is one-and-two-thirds. If it’s three, we get one-and-three-quarters. If four, one-and-four-fifths. And so on.

Let’s see what that does to the number of links:

 

• 2 players (2 PCs), 1 GM (0 NPCs): N1 = (2×1.5)+1 = 4, L1=6.
• 2 players, 1 GM, 1 NPC: N1= (2×1.5)+(1+0.5) = 4.5, L1= (20.25-4.5)/2=15.75/2 = 7.875.
• 2 players, 1 GM, 2 NPCs: N1=(2×1.5)+(1+2/3)= 4.6667, L1=8.555.
• 2 players, 1 GM, 3 NPCs: N1=(2×1.5)+(1.75)= 4.75, L1=8.90625.
• 3 players (3 PCs), 1 GM (0 NPCs): N1 = (3×1.5)+1 = 5.5, L1=12.375.

…and so on.

Those decimal places seem strange, don’t they? What might all this mean? What’s going on here?

Let’s consider the simplest possible case: 1 player, 1 PC, and 1 GM, no NPCs.


If the number of links doubled, it would mean that the connection between GM and Character was wholly separate and distinct from the link between GM and player, as shown to the left.


Instead, the situation is more like that to the right; there is an overlap, in which the player is speaking to the GM out-of-character about what the character is doing or saying or whatever. Since this overlap is the part of roleplaying that is already covered by the existing GM-player link, it can’t get counted a second time.

What this means is that by subtracting GF’s original formulation from the more complex values that I derived above (or whatever ones are currently appropriate for your game), you get the ratio of roleplaying to non-roleplaying within the group’s communications.

 

• 2 players (2 PCs), 1 GM (0 NPCs): N1 = (2×1.5)+1 = 4, L1=6; N2=3, L2=3, R=(6-3):3 = 3:3.
• 2 players, 1 GM, 1 NPC: N1= (2×1.5)+(1+0.5) = 4.5, L1= (20.25-4.5)/2=15.75/2 = 7.875; N2=3, L2=3, R=(7.875-3):3=4.875:3
• 2 players, 1 GM, 2 NPCs: N1=(2×1.5)+(1+2/3)= 4.6667, L1=8.555; N2=3, L2=3, R=(8.555-3):3 = 5.555:3
• 2 players, 1 GM, 3 NPCs: N1=(2×1.5)+(1.75)= 4.75, L1=8.90625; N2=3, L2=3, R=(8.90625-3):3 = 5.90625:3
• 3 players (3 PCs), 1 GM (0 NPCs): N1 = (3×1.5)+1 = 5.5, L1=12.375; N2=4, L2=6, R=(12.375-6):6 = 6.375:6

…and so on.

Notice (1) that with the increase in the number of players to 3, there was in increase in the amount of roleplay relative to the amount of other interpersonal contact (including the 3rd-person-perspective overlap) – 6.375:6 vs 3:3, and (2) that each increase in the number of NPCs being handled directly by the GM brings an increase in the relative amount of roleplay, but each such increase is smaller – the biggest jump is from no NPCs to 1 NPC.

Time to relate all this back to the subject at hand: at any given point in time, a player can be either “in-character” or “in person”. Therefore, every communication from the GM to the entire rest of the group travels along the larger number of links, but the player can only be receptive to one of the two links at a time. It takes time – usually less than a second, but time nevertheless – for a player in one mode to “switch gears” into the other mode. Not long, but enough to ruin the timing and dissipate the humor of the message – unless the GM uses a preamble to the comedic content to get everyone into the same mode (representing either an out-of-game joke on his part or an in-character joke, respectively, OR the GM is able to direct the comedic content down the (much narrower) overlap zone by presenting a comedic situation to the other participants.

Get it right, and the reduced barriers to humorous content (that “other factor” that I said I would get back to, and which is still to be discussed) makes everyone susceptible at the same time to a brief moment of humor. Get it wrong, and at least some of the group will be in the wrong interaction mode at the time, and the effectiveness of the content will be diminished – some will laugh, and some won’t, or will laugh late and not as loud.

A “grand slam” happens when you overcome the dissipation problem by one of the two mechanisms described – an NPC says something funny when the GM is already talking to the PCs in-character, or the GM presents a comedic situation by means of the overlap zone.

Both present an additional hurdle that has to be overcome in order for the material to trigger a laugh. In NPC-PC interactions, there is a degree of analysis that is automatically performed by the receiver – “what’s my character’s reaction?” – and that, too, can be enough to take the punch out of the punchline. In a Shared-Channel communication, the GM is presenting physical comedy by description – and that can also take the fun away. So comedy is really hard to do in an RPG context – but funnier when it does work.

What’s comedy got to do with laughter, anyway?

Well, that’s all about the purpose of laughter. Comedy is whatever triggers us to perform that natural function, whatever it is. In other words, it all depends on why we find something to be funny.

Which is not as simple a question as it might seem – whatever the explanation, it needs to accommodate the social differentiators already described.

Bonding Rituals

Anthropologically, it’s believed that laughter started as a form of bonding or “grooming” that could be performed at a distance. It builds and strengthens community bonds in the same way that grooming does in the great apes, but that is necessarily one-on-one. There’s a finite practical limit to how many social connections can be sustained by physical acts of this type – there are only so many hours in the day. In apes, that’s about 50.

Verbal communication and comprehension change all that. The number of people with whom you can sustain a strong social connection by personal interaction – family and friends – is about 150. Beyond that, you may have a sense of common community that sustains a weaker social connection. One of the ways that this communal sense is achieved is by laughing together, so the scientists now believe. Social and political structures, shared beliefs, etc, are others.

Laughter has also been shown to increase the pain threshold by about 5-10%. There’s an endorphin release that is associated with laughing.

Completely as an aside, it is interesting to note the ability of social media to broaden this reach. More interactive than email, much cheaper than telephony, and less time-consuming than traditional forms of correspondence, it’s my experience that it increases the capacity for a strong social connection into the hundreds, and somewhere close to the middle of that range. Adding in more one-sided social connections to social sub-groups, instead of individuals, raises it into the thousands or more. That’s why it is so effective at social amplification. It’s entirely possible that centuries from now, we will be deemed to live in the “social media age,” it’s potential impacts are so great.

Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, and other forms of collaboration are clearly related developments. What others will we come up with over the next decade or so?

An alternative interpretation is that social media is simply the first true social connection advance deriving from information technology, and society is therefore still in the Information Age. It would be possible to argue for weeks over whether or not social media constituted a sufficient advance over earlier forms of online interaction like chat rooms to define a new paradigm of human existence, and the debate could go either way.

An interesting thought to muse on. But let’s get back to our knitting.

There are four different theories as to what “comedy” actually is, when you get into the mechanics of it, at least that I know of.

• The ancient Greeks – people like Plato and Aristotle – came up with Superiority theory, which is “the notion that comedy is a game, there’s a winner and a loser, and we laugh at other people’s follies.”
• Release Theory, also known as Relief theory, is heavily built on the theories and experiments of Freud, and suggests that we laugh at things that release the parts of ourselves that we try to hide away in a socially acceptable manner – so we laugh at someone else’s pain to appease the sadistic tendency within.
• Incongruity Theory is one of the most widely-accepted, and it suggests that we laugh at the misalignment of expectations with outcomes – plot twists, in other words. There are a number of variations on this theory, such as the one featured in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, wherein laughter is triggered by an aborted defense reflex.

Benign Violation theory is the newest, and one that I had not heard of, prior to this documentary. It builds on, and incorporates elements of, the other three theories. Created by Professor Peter McGraw of University Of Colorado, it divides experiences into three types: Benign, which doesn’t trigger a strong reaction, Violations, such as an annoying co-worker, getting stuck in a traffic jam, anything strange or wrong or threatening, which produces an offended or negative reaction such as anger or fear or sadness, and an overlapping area called Benign Violations, which produce levity, causing laughter, which signals to others that the violation is actually ‘safe’. They then laugh to pass that signal on. The laughter of another can devalue a threat – or can be construed as a separate offense, if the subject is one that is still too threatening to deal with.

This theory has a lot going for it. First, it permits individuals to have different sensitivities, to be individual in their reactions and responses. Second, it deals with the social context, and the way in which that – and therefore humor – changes through the years, and from one culture to another. Some old comedy, for example, is extremely offensive and bigoted or patronizing or misogynistic by modern standards, and some of it is just boring and confusing (indicating that the subject is no longer threatening to the listener). Some remains hilarious. Comedy therefore reflects the broader values of society. And third, and this is perhaps its most compelling feature, it is the only one of the theories that explains why there has not yet been enough discharge of emotions to make 9/11 a fit subject for comedy. It’s now been 16 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center; by the time World War II was that far removed into the past, we had “Hogan’s Heroes”. I can’t see any serious proposals for a 9/11 analogue being seriously considered, either by a studio executive or a member of the public; the event is still humor-toxic.

The implication is that people resist laughing at jokes the find offensive, and grow upset by such laughter, because laughter tells the listener that “it’s OK to laugh” when – from their point of view – it’s not okay to laugh. If you happen the hold the latter opinion, then you will be offended by the laughter.

Humor needs to be edgy, but it can’t go too far. If it’s not edgy, it’s not threatening enough to be funny. But if it’s too threatening, it’s not funny. That’s a fine line to manage. Comedy is pointing out what’s wrong with the world in a socially-acceptable way.

Here’s another way to look at comedy, then: comedy is content and delivery. If the content isn’t funny, we won’t laugh; if the delivery is wrong, if it goes down the wrong channels of communication or takes too long, it’s not funny. You need to get both right – and every individual is just a little different.

That’s why “Grand Slams” are so hard to achieve – much harder than telling a joke and getting one or two people to laugh.

Broader interpretations & applications

All this gives rise to three final, broader, thoughts on the subject of Comedy in RPGs.

RPGs seem tailor-made for comedy

I’ve referred to this thought a couple of times already in this article; it has helped shape it, throughout. Threats in an RPG are already at arms’ length, separated from the individual by the player/character gap. That means that it’s harder (but not impossible – see Moral Qualms on the Richter scale – the need for cooperative subject limits) to be offensive. You can go harder and still be funny. But that doesn’t imply desensitization – if something is already funny, it will still be funny in an RPG. So this represents a broadening of the subject area of comedy’s constituents.

Is this factor enough to more than compensate for the added difficulties that I’ve already discussed? Sometimes, not always. An RPG lowers the threshold at which something will be funny by virtue of the distance between subject and personal identification, enough that “Grand Slams” become possible – the audience, i.e. the players, are more receptive. But in general, it doesn’t lower it enough on its own to make an RPG an automatic vehicle for humor; you still need to nail the delivery and not push the content too far.

But I guarantee that if you spend an hour or so building up a bad guy to be an enormous threat, and then have him trip over in the first seconds of combat, the players will laugh their tails off..

Spontaneous Humor as a sign of campaign identification?

Like, I suspect, a lot of GMs, if my players were telling jokes about my campaign, I might be offended. After all, I put a tremendous amount of work into most of them. That changed in the course of thinking about the documentary and this article, because you only tell jokes that strike you as funny, and before something is funny, according to the theories described herein, you have to find it to be threatening in a benign way, and that only happens if you are immersed within it and take it seriously. You can’t say something both original and funny without considering the subject to be important in some way. You have to identify with the subject, and then seek to defuse the threat and make the subject benign, with humor.

Especially if the players are able to crack jokes in character – and I have seen this done – it signals the kind of deep immersion within the world that we all strive for. It means that the game matters to the player.

It’s a good thing, not a bad thing!

Children and comedy

It’s possible to scare a child, but they are far more likely to view everything as only slightly threatening if you approach the subject in the right tone of voice and frame of mind. That’s why children can laugh at things that only arouse sympathy or disinterest in more mature age-groups, while most things that adults find funny go right over their heads. The result is that children laugh and play more easily (more readily) than adults.

Earlier, I suggested that RPGs and Comedy seemed to be a match made in heaven. Now, that statement stands revealed
as a pretender to the throne. Kids and Comedy in RPGs – that’s the real king of the crop.

This article won’t make every GM a comedy genius behind the table. Intellectual analysis of something that isn’t intellectual never does. But it will offer direction, and help you understand why some things produce laughter at the table, and when such laughter is detrimental to a good game, and understand why the joke about the Orc, The Dwarf, and the Princess in a Bar falls flat.

It won’t do the hard work for you – it’s just a road map to where you have to go if you want to invoke comedy in your RPG. But that’s certainly an improvement over nothing at all!

This image of a road through a pass in the Dolomites symbolises distance and remoteness perfectly, courtesy of freeimages.com / Enrico Corno
Click on the image for a larger version

I’m tagging this post as part of the Blog Carnival. The theme is sequels, and I think that being the third part in a series qualifies.

The first two parts of this small series (Part 1, Part 2) looked at the tremendous impact of a community being located close to the major social, political, and economic center of a nation, especially in D&D games. Well, being distant from the population / administration / social center of a nation is no less profound in its implications!

I come from a small town located a considerable distance from the main urban center of my State, and Australia is geographically remote from most of the rest of the world, and especially from our primary cultural influences, England and the USA. That places me in a unique position to be authoritative on the impact of remoteness and distance. In fact, this was originally going to be the entire article; it was only as it was being developed that I realized that the other side of the coin also needed attention.

In terms of the topics to be covered, I’m going to start with the same basic headings over these next two articles as I did in the first half of this series, suitably modified of course!

Distance From Power

When you’re located a long way from the power base of the ruling authority, you have a great deal more independence, especially if that central authority is reliant on messages from the remote community to know what is occurring there. British colonial history is full of stories of local viceroys pursuing their won agendas and ambitions, even in direct contravention of national policies.

It has long been a standard practice to exile troublemakers and agitators to remote communities – Siberias, if you will – because this limits their capacity to trouble the state. Australia was established as a penal colony, and while most of those transported were convicted of relatively petty crimes – stealing shoes, or a loaf of bread – there were a significant minority found guilty of more serious crimes. In theory, once a sentence had been served, the convicts were to be provided transport back to England, but in practice this rarely occurred. Although I don’t know of any specific examples, it is far from being a remote possibility that some were political prisoners.

One of the early governors of the Colony of New South Wales was former-Captain Bligh, notorious for the Mutiny aboard his ship, the Bounty. He had not softened in subsequent years, ruling with a heavy hand, and treating those under his authority as second-class citizens even if their sentences had been served. The Colony had been conceived as a social experiment, a moneyless community, but – as always happens in such cases – an unofficial medium of exchange had sprung up – illegally-brewed rum. Bligh, determined to keep the Colonials under his thumb, sent glowing reports back to England even as he ruthlessly suppressed and oppressed the residents. The straw that broke the Camel’s Back was his attempt to suppress the Rum Trade, leading to a full-blown revolt against his authority. He was captured, hiding under his bed, and sent back to England. Nevertheless, the Colony was still dependent on the home country, and one of the instigators also returned with Bligh to stand trial for Mutiny; he was found guilty, but pardoned due to the extenuating circumstances. More than anything else, this shows the difficulty of exerting power from a distance.

That difficulty also shows up as a key factor in the American Revolution; ‘taxation without representation’ held a particular resonance amongst many Australians on several occasions through the 20th century, as the nation of Australia sought to exert its independence. Even today, archaic English laws occasionally throw up a Constitutional Crisis here.

Distance From Authority

The more remote a community is to central authority, especially in a medieval/fantasy setting, the greater the independence of the local representatives of that central authority. Broad directives may be issued, but interpretation and implementation rests with the locals. Laws may be passed by the central command, but the reality is that some laws will be ignored (most of the time), some will receive no more than lip service (though they may be used as “the stick,” i.e. a threat to maintain order), and some laws that may have been modified or taken off the books entirely will still be in effect, however unofficially. The result is a strange melange between the contemporary and the way things used to be, as much as a generation or more earlier.

Popular myth suggest that this is true for remote communities in the US – sleepy little communities that are a generation or more removed from modern social attitudes are practically a trope in fiction and media – and there are ‘redneck elements’ in many remote Australian communities, even in modern times.

This tendency can only have been exaggerated in eras when communications were slower; it’s impossible to react sensibly to situations when all the reports are days out of date, even if those reports are accurate.

Distance From News

Back when I was growing up, people knew a lot about what was happening locally, were reasonably well-informed about regional events, and learned everything else about events at a state and national level from a daily half-hour of TV news, augmented by another half-hour of current affairs, and from 3-to-5-minute radio news bulletins. If you wanted depth, you were reliant on the daily newspapers, most of which were a blend of “the official line” and ideological perspectives. Most of what went on at the State and National Capitals was either perceived as irrelevant, or biased in favor of the cities over the needs of country citizens, and the rest was simply seen as “remote”.

Peculiarly, such when the city of Darwin was leveled by Cyclone Tracy (what North Americans would know as a Hurricane), this occasionally resulted in locals being better-informed about events than their urbanized brethren. The major news services were slow to pick up on events, but regional radio networks learned of the situation far more quickly. I can distinctly remember hearing about it on Christmas Morning in 1973, before we started opening Christmas Gifts, and the sense of guilt that accompanied having a good time while our fellow citizens were struggling to survive. Not that I, as a ten-year-old, could have done much about the situation! It was only in the evening TV news the following day that the national media seemed to catch on.

These factors are only amplified by the slowness of communications in bygone times. It was not unheard of for communities to learn of the death of their monarch after a successor was already crowned.

The effect is best thought of as ripples of emotion, spreading slowly. The outermost regions are not aware that anything has changed; life is proceeding as normal. Inward of that, you enter a zone where the news has only just arrived, and people are mourning (or celebrating, depending on the ruler, I suppose). As you proceed still closer to the center, you reach regions that have had more time to digest and react to the news and which are beginning to settle down again. Inward of that is a band in which people are waiting to see what will happen, and what it will mean for them. Then you reach regions where the identity of the new monarch has been confirmed, but in which it is not yet known when they will formally ascend the throne; then you have a band of celebrations following news of the coronation; and, in the center, the Capital, where the Coronation was last week’s news, and the consequences are beginning to dominate awareness. As the news radiates ever-outwards from the center, these bands expand outwards.

This process is illustrated in the form of a “time-lapse series” by the diagram. Each piece of news radiates out from the source like a wave, traveling a certain distance in a given time dictated by the speed of communications.

Bad and dramatic news (or rumors of the same) tends to travel faster than good news, while good news travels faster in the absence of other news or when it is in direct response to a prior bad news story. This has been simulated by widening some of the bands.

It’s important to note that “the speed of communications” is actually a two-to-three stage process. While some people will hear the news directly, a far greater number will need to hear it via word-of-mouth from someone who has heard it directly, and some will still ignore the story on the basis of disbelief or a failure to recognize the story as a matter of relevance to them.

It doesn’t really matter what the ultimate speed of direct communications is; the primary distribution medium remains human in nature. The bigger impacts on the process are (1) the telephone, and (2) social media.

The telephone changes the picture significantly because it means that someone in an inner zone can bypass the zones and inform someone in an outer zone of what is taking place (I include telegraph technology). Through central news distribution methods, they also change the model from a single source to multiple sources, with a small delay before the satellite “ripple sources” begin disseminating the message.

This of course distributes the dissemination of information, such that few places are more than a day or two removed from the latest news, even allowing for the human factor.

Social Media as a primary news source is a further game changer. For the first time, the human-to-human contact can be instantaneous, or close to it, but misinformation is equally rapidly shared; the usual filters of credibility are removed and replaced by those of the individual. However, it is easy for news of a less dramatic nature (but perhaps of greater importance) to be buried beneath the surface. The primary news networks are supplanted by smaller networks that preach to the converted, creating polarization and the well-known “echo chamber” effect.

I mention these changes purely because it is possible for some fantasy worlds to have fantasy-based equivalents of these technologies. In the absence of these equivalents – which will be the case in 99% of fantasy worlds – the primary model remains functional and accurate.

Limitations Of Communications

It’s extremely difficult to understate the relative importance of human networking in a remote community. “News” heard from someone that you trust often holds greater currency than more “official” sources, and everything is colored by local preconceptions.

Brevity is another issue, and one that I mentioned earlier. It is impossible to do more than communicate the most superficial of accounts; details and nuance take up too much room, and can only be achieved by cutting some other news.

Such communications systems struggle to cope with the pace of fast-moving events. While those closer to the source will experience the totality of a situation – initial reports, official response, outcome, and aftermath – as separate events, by the time the accumulated time losses resulting from human networking exceed the travel time plus event duration – which can happen within the first zone or two – later reports catch up with the initial events and become conflated into a single past-tense story,

When everything serious is reported as a solved problem, placed in the past tense, the sense of being insulated by distance inflates, and even the most critical emergencies lose their impact and urgency, and therefore, a significant part of their relevance to the local experience. Often, the stories seem to “pat” and superficial to be reality, as a result; manufactured propaganda, not real news. This nourishes and encourages the sense that local sources and their “interpretations” (mentioned in the first paragraph) are more reliable.

Communications problems are bilateral; just as it is harder for unbiased communications to reach the remote community, so it is hard for that community to communicate with the central authorities. Any sense of urgency is usually the first casualty, as discussed a moment ago; this is true of reports from the fringes going inward as it is for reports of government actions going outward.

Regional disasters assume a superficiality, and a sense that the difficulties being faced are being overblown and exaggerated, when the opposite is more often true. As a result, aid is often desultory, a token gesture in the face of need, further encouraging the perspective that the central authority and the local region live in two different worlds, and – by and large – prefer it that way, so long as one doesn’t interfere in the other. The problem is that almost every government intervention is colored by the insular attitudes and the perspective of distance, and is therefore most readily characterized as “interference”. There is a genuine sense in remote communities that the government cares only about the cities and their inhabitants, and would do away with the “bush” if they didn’t have to exploit it. “Us Vs. Them” is a very real internal struggle of perceptions.

Distance From Trade

The title of this section is a half-truth at best. While it is true that regional communities are far removed from the central markets and hence from the luxury and foreign goods that will usually be available there, the regional communities – for the most part – don’t miss those products, and are prone to look down on those who consume them. The mildest term for such are “fancy-pants” – Australian colloquial vernacular uses a lot of substantially stronger terminology for them, and my experiences during overseas visits is that the same is also true elsewhere. The vernacular changes, the attitudes do not.

Instead, regional communities have regional markets. The general attitude is that if the community can’t make it for itself, it can do without it if it has to; there is a far stronger sense of independence and self-reliance. This sense is often only partially true, ignoring the fact that regional goods and taxes still need to be conveyed inwards to the central markets and authority in order to keep the whole system ticking over. In particular, there is a sense that taxation is disproportionate relative to the benefits provided by authorities that often results from limited awareness of the economic realities.

For example, roads are usually maintained by some sort of regional authority commissioned to do so by the central government. This creates the impression that this work is principally funded by the regional government, and hence that the taxes paid to the central government are parasitic drains upon the local community. The reality is that the regional government provides and funds only administrative support, the actual work is funded by the central government – usually to make getting goods and taxes inwards more efficient.

Adjacent communities will often evolve to supplement each other’s manufacturing capabilities. If you think of each regional market as a piece in a jigsaw, each such piece evolves to become mutually semi-dependent on its neighbors.

Sidebar: A Regional Trade Simulator

When I started work on the image above, it was intended to do nothing more than illustrate the point made above. As it developed, it became something more.

The first panel (top left) shows an abstract representation of a number of trade regions. C represents the spaces that are completely devoted to the Central Markets. Radiating out from those markets are 5 roads in red. The rules used to generate the numbers shown are simple: 1 space along a road increases the count by 1; any other step increases the count by 2 (horizontal or vertical) or 3 (corner to corner) from the lowest value in an adjacent space. These show the relative influence of the central marketplace on the regional economy, as a reduction from a starting point of 10 out of 10.

The second panel (top right) shows the concurrent availability of produce for local markets (after tithes, taxes, etc). You get to the values shown by removing the “minus signs” from the first matrix and adding 1 to each value if the cell is adjacent to anything other than a central market space. Again, this is a score out of 10.

I selected a closeup of nine cells (surrounded by a dashed line in the second panel) to create the third panel (bottom left). This examines the actual trade at the central cell, which had a market strength of 6. To determine the relative strength of trade with each of the adjacent cells, simply multiply the strength of that cell with the strength of the central cell.

Now that’s nice and simple, but not all that meaningful at a glance. So, for the final panel (bottom right), I simply added up all the results from panel 3 and used the total to convert those values into a percentage. This shows that the dominant trading partners for this regional market are the cells to the left and upper left, though several others are almost as well represented.

If you wanted to incorporate additional realism (at the price of more work), you could extend the closeup out another set of regions. The market contributions of those cells gets reduced by 2 if connected to one of the cells in panel 4 by a road, and by 4 if not. For example, the row above the 3×3 closeup have base regional market strengths (from panel 2) of 8, 6, 7, 7, and 5, respectively. So far as trade with the regional 6 market is concerned, these are effective market strengths of 4, 3,(road), 3, 3, and 2. So they contribute 4×6=24, 3×6=18, 18, 18, and 2×6=12 to the local economy of 6, respectively.

Of course, this is a highly abstracted diagram; in real life, I would also show natural barriers and obstacles, giving them a rating out of 3, which would also subtract from the trade values.

Where things get interesting is if you designate a specialty craft to each region. Take the existing panel 4 and the more-greatly simplified depiction. In order, let’s assign the following specialties: Furniture & Timber (7), Blacksmithing (5), Fruit (6), Slate (7), Wine & Spirits (in our central ‘6’ region), Fine Apparel (4), Leathergoods (5), Horses (6), and Glass (5). Suddenly, a description of both the community and its inhabitants begins to emerge – wooden buildings and slate roofs dominate, the wealthiest dress well, but the economy is dominantly agricultural. A surprisingly high percentage of the population ride horses. Because none of the surrounding specialties (one exception) are food-oriented, it can be surmised that the land is fertile and self-sufficient. Because wine and spirit making tends to produce products for the upper classes, even the peasants effect a somewhat aristocratic or superior manner. From panel 1, we know that trade with the central market accounts for half the local trade, so the combined value of the regional trade represents the other half of the economy. Because of their respective products, it’s likely that the upper right 6 region (fruit) and lower right 5 region (glass) exert a disproportionate influence, providing additional raw materials used in the dominant local industry. Geographically, both slate and timber products are mountain industries, implying that this region is one of vineyards and orchards nestled in rolling foothills. The local cuisine would emphasize vegetables and be relatively low in meat products.

The great strength of this approach is that no region is an island unto itself; making sensible choices means that moving from this region to one of the adjacent ones also gives a sensible but unique description, and the entire nation emerges as a tapestry with internal consistency. Each region is different, but slots rationally into the whole.

Distance From Opportunity

While there will always be some local business opportunities, the real wealth is always somewhere else when you are talking about a remote region. No matter what the foundation of the local economy is, this remains true, because the definitions of what constitutes “real wealth” change. The grass is always greener.

Let’s say that a region is dominated economically by gold mines; that makes them dependent on outside suppliers for the products (Blacksmithing and timber) that supports that industry, and that in turn means that much of their food (beyond the basics) would have to be shipped in at relatively great expense. “True Wealth” means never having to ration meat, and not having to pay premium prices for better produce. You can’t eat Gold, no matter how pretty it might look on a platter! In such an area, it would be expected that only a small fraction of the wealth generated goes to enrich the locals; most goes into the pockets of the owners of the mines, who live lives of luxury in the city.

The distance from opportunity means that most people accept a socially-stable lifestyle built around traditional roles. The children of farmers are more likely to become farmers themselves, and the farthest that they stray from that path would be into farm equipment or farm supplies. A further generation removed, and you might get a generation providing services to farmers, and half would be laborers in the service of other farmers. Change to economic and social status is glacially slow, and this is generally perceived as a good thing, keeping one’s feet on the ground.

This also means that tradition, and traditional values, are highly valued in remote communities. They are far removed from the “corrupting influences” that expose people to “foreign ways” and “strange ideas”.

Even today, except at night or when you are out, it is normal in my home town to leave the front door unlocked, and people think nothing of ducking down to the shops for a carton of milk or loaf of bread without locking up. After all, they will only be gone five or ten minutes, and because everyone does it, you can never tell whether or not someone is home from the door being open or closed. An opportunist is likely to get caught, because 99% of the time, someone is home.

Distance From Fashion

The effects already described make it clear why fashions in remote settings are not only normally out-of-date, but why the locals (in general) don’t care. It’s the difference between old-school elegance and Bourgeois foppery – at least, that’s how the remote locals see the issue.

Nevertheless, there is often intense interest about the latest fashions, and some will make sincere but usually tragic attempts to imitate them.

In truth, the more you look into the subject, the more you discover that the reality is rather more complicated than popular myth would have it.

First, clothing in a remote setting tends to be divided into two categories – working clothes and dress clothes. In the case of the former, nothing is permitted to compromise practicality, and only practicality is permitted to compromise tradition. Only when these priorities are absolutely satisfied is there room to contemplate fashion, and at such times the goal is normally to compromise style for durability. Choosing a cut and style that aren’t quite cutting-edge, but which will remain close to socially-acceptable for several years, is viewed as only sensible. The combination means that working outfits are conservative in design and evolve only slowly.

Dress clothing is usually a little more reactive to the dictates of fashion. However, clothing designed for the fashion elite often has an extremely limited lifespan, whereas those in remote communities can rarely afford to be so profligate. Once again, somewhat conservative choices designed to wear well, with reasonable levels of durability, tend to be the primary objectives when choosing such clothing. When the old dress clothe wear out, or as a statement of personal prosperity, an individual’s fashions will abruptly ‘catch up’ with the conservative side of the in-style look of the last year or two, only to fall progressively further out-of-date thereafter – until the time once again comes to advance.

If you were to perform a statistical analysis of the degree to which fashions are out-of-date, you end up with a simple bell curve. Those at the extreme right are the most up-to-date, and each year their unchanged clothing drifts further and further away from the contemporary, until it is replaced. At any given time, there are some who are just a little out-of-date, more who are farther removed, still more who are still further removed, until you reach the median (where the majority always are). Thereafter, the numbers decrease, with increasingly old-fashioned clothing.

Again, these effects are not always all that obvious; the innate trend toward conservative dress means that change comes only slowly, and the differences between ‘this year’s look’ and that of yesterday are subtle and often minimal.

Distance From Style

Other forms of behavior follow a similar pattern. Matters of style are often reduced to a relatively simple common denominator. It might be the fashion at court this year for the men to wear elaborate mustaches of a particular style, held together with a scented grease; the more cutting-edge members of remote communities will grow mustaches and may even use hair oil, but will adopt a far simpler style. And no-one will pay particular note of an individual who foregoes the grease, or who chooses to remain clean-shaven.

This also means that affectations tend to vanish from the vocabularies of regional style long before they work their way to the remote communities. A good example lies in the propagation of slang terms and vocal styling when I was young.

Until the 1970s, it was routine for (most) Australian actors, presenters and politicians to affect upper-class British accents modeled on “BBC English”. Teachers and other professionals were also encouraged to speak in this way, which was considered a more succinct form of English. Outside of these ranks, better-educated people spoke a relatively slang-free language with an unobtrusive Australian accent. With each graduated decrease in education standard achieved, the accent broadened and slang terminology increased in prevalence, until one reached the point where “Oi! Strewth! The old bludger better pull his socks up or he’ll be for the high jump, and you’d better dinkie die believe it, Duckie!” would be a perfectly acceptable statement. None of those terms are especially obscure, and almost anyone in the country – then or now – would immediately understand the message. In particular, the further away from the central halls of power one went, the further down this range you tended to drift.

In the 1970s, the “better-educated” standard of Australian English became the norm, and the affectation of pseudo-British seemed to vanish overnight. It actually took a little longer than that, but the change, when it came, seemed to be an avalanche of change. It started with advertising, using Australian accents to imply down-to-earth trustworthiness, it followed onto the television screen, starting with dramas and spilling over into almost every area of the medium, and became overwhelming from that point. At much the same time, extreme characters began using a fairly sanitized form of Australian slang on television. Over the years since, the advent of American and British TV have slowly begun to kill off the most extreme Australian Slang, while some has become sufficiently acceptable that it is in routine use and no longer noteworthy; those who still employ such slang levels as the sample offered above are viewed as quaint, anachronisms and colorful characters – the Australian equivalent of Sheriff Culpepper in the Smokey & The Bandit movies. Overall, the standard of the common language has gone up.

It’s my understanding that a similar situation obtains in England, where there are multiple regional accents – far more than in the US, in far more concentrated clusters. So I’m reasonably confident that it will be a universal tendency for those in positions of power to employ the highest local standard of language, and a trend towards formality of expression, with local dialects becoming rapidly more common as you move away from those positions.

Distance From Expertise

Another harsh reality, rendered even more extreme by the extreme distances in Australia, is that for most forms of expertise, you had to travel great distances. As a child, for a long time, if you needed a hearing test or to get your eyes checked, you had to travel to the nearest city, more than 100 miles distant. When I was a teenager, these specialists began making tours of regional communities, calling once every month or two. And many communities were even more remote than mine.

It’s an interesting side-note that the popular perception of Mages has them choosing to exist in remote locations, visiting “civilization” only rarely, an interesting inversion of the usual pattern in D&D.

The consequence is that most times, if the locals need something in hurry, they will have to make it themselves; the results will usually be inelegant, crude, inefficient, but functional. It doesn’t take too much practical success of this sort to foster a sense of self-reliance that often becomes a source of pride, and can lead locals to spurn expertise even when it’s available to them, on the basis that it costs too much..

Distance From Comfort

This is a little bit of a misnomer. It would be more accurate to state that remote communities experience a distance from Luxury, but it’s also true that there is a subtle distinction between the remote-community definitions of comfort and those of a more urban setting. Durability and a “no-frills” approach are more strongly associated with the former, while the base standards of what constitutes “comfortable” tend to be a little higher, a little more decadent, in the case of the latter.

This manifests both in the form of minimum standards and of ubiquity of comforts; there is a far greater utilitarianism to “Comfort” in a remote community.

This stems from two factors: remote communities generally have a lower standard of living than urban centers, and luxury goods have further to travel, and hence are both more expensive and more restricted in availability.

I remember quite clearly visiting the electrical store in Dubbo, 103 miles away from the small town of Nyngan (where the family lived) and seeing a choice between exactly two models of refrigerator. One had a freezer compartment, the other did not. These days, the variety would be somewhat greater – perhaps half-a-dozen models, perhaps more – but, here in the city, there are hundreds to choose from, in all sorts of sizes and configurations.

In olden times, there used to be some exception made for those living on the trade route by which luxury goods traveled. That’s less true in modern times of mass-transit.

Exposure To The Outside (Aliens, “Monsters” in D&D terms)

When you’re a long way from the protection of the Central Authority, life becomes a lot more dangerous, and not just because you’re more used to taking matters into your own hands. Density of law-enforcement officers has a direct correlation to the number of criminals caught and captured and the number of crimes prevented. One sheriff, two towns over? Might as well not be there at all, for all the good he does you. The solution is generally the posse.

“Here There Be Monsters” used to be marked on the fringes of all the ‘best’ maps; in fantasy games, in remote communities, it’s likely to be true on a regular basis. The neighbors getting together to chase something nasty out of the region would be a weekly event, and the posse might even need to prioritize targets.

I’ve participated in any number of D&D adventures where the basic plot was “PC’s arrive and are hired to get rid of a locally-troubling monster”. If there’s one message you should take away from this article, it’s that nine times in ten, this makes no sense.

The self-reliance and independence that have been mentioned a number of times in this article means that the posse would either be out hunting the creature, or would have encountered it and failed to return. Without the active workers in the community, it is doomed to a slow death; the only solution would be for the remaining townspeople to beg for an escort back to more civilized lands; and if the posse is still on the job, the mistrust of expertise and usual poor state of the local economy means that the posse would be confident – possibly overconfident – of being able to do the job on their own. Only if the posse has encountered the target, been overwhelmed, and still managed to (mostly) survive might they be persuaded to let the PCs take a shot at the job.

Even then, there would be a significant minority who suspected the PCs of having deliberately driven the monster into the local region just to “create” work for themselves, and who would be ungrateful and even resentful of the presence of these professional monster-hunters – especially if still overconfident of success. There will also be those who dismiss the danger as anything unusual – “It’s just a brown bear and an active imagination, we don’t need no help from no [insulting label]”.

It follows that only if the monster – whatever it is – clearly overwhelms the local posse, and yet is for some strange reason not disposed to wipe them out – will this scenario normally make sense – and there is clearly more to the story, if that’s the case!

Paranoia aside, the GM still needs to think carefully about why the monster is here, now. It might be that the human activities have disturbed it; it might be that it has been drawn to the easy meal that the human activities offer; it might be for some other reason, but most creatures will avoid threats and dangers, no matter the likelihood of winning any confrontation.

In general, it’s a far more likely scenario that some very dangerous creature is being drawn to the inner kingdoms for some reason – again making this encounter part of a bigger story.

If you want something more plausible to take its’ place try: PCs arrive at farmhouse to find Wife of the owner distraught. The husband [or vice-versa] didn’t come home last night. She/he was about to start searching, what if he/she’s lying there hurt somewhere…

Because the remote parts of any political region are still the most likely to encounter something from outside that region. Which brings me to:

Exposure To Foreigners

The closer to the outer fringes of your homeland you are, the closer you are to being in someone else’s homeland. That has some profound effects on the population unless drastic action is taken to prevent it.

Some aspects of the native society are amplified and exaggerated, the better to distinguish the locals from those across the border. These will typically be those cultural attributes that are most dramatically contrasting. But in other areas, there will be a leakage of culture across the border, a blending of the two societies.

This leakage is also bilateral, it travels both ways; there will be some across the border who will become exaggerated caricatures of their native culture in some respects and more akin to their cross-border counterparts in others.

I spent a couple of hours throwing this map of a coastal Kingdom together to illustrate the effect. Dominating the map is our kingdom, a band of mountains forming its spine. The capital and a number of provinces and regional administrative centers are depicted. The bands of color surrounding it show a much larger ‘Kingdom B’ and the cultural seepage from both our kingdom and another, off-map neighbor, on that realm. At the border (green) you have heightened Kingdom B attributes and maximum leakage from our Kingdom. Outside that fringe, you have a yellow region in which the cultural ‘contamination’ is more contained and limited, but the exaggerated Kingdom B attributes remain; you could describe this region as “tolerant” of Kingdom A. Outside of that is a reddish orange band in which there is minimal cultural influence from Kingdom A, and the population are rural or central members of Kingdom B. Beyond that, you have cultural seepage from Kingdom C in increasing strength. At the extreme top right, and not shown on the Key (there wasn’t room), you find rural Kingdom B in which cultural assimilation by Kingdom C is almost complete; it’s entirely likely that until recently, the citizens of this area were subjects of Kingdom C.

Foreign ideas, foreign ways of doing things, foreign products and cuisines based on what grows naturally in the region, foreign music and architecture and decorative stylings – these are the things that ‘seep’ across borders from one nation into its neighbors.

There is often a sense that you are picking and choosing the ‘best’ of the remote culture for your own enhancement.

Although the map shows physical proximity, this isn’t necessarily required, as shown by the cultural history of Australia. Initially a British colony, many of the central tenets of the culture remained essentially British in derivation for many years, modified only by the unique cultural modifications that derived from the need to survive and prosper in the local environment. Even then, those modifications – a casualness of speech, for example – were regarded as culturally inferior to those of the mother country.

That started to change in World War II, when Australia became a staging and relief point for US troops fighting the Pacific War. To make these foreign visitors feel at home, Jazz was introduced into the Australian cultural scene, and the beginnings of a cultural seepage from the US into Australia began. Beatles-inspired Rock & Roll delayed that process for a while, but it continued making inexorable inroads despite the delays.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural cringe began to wane; the success of The Seekers and The Easybeats in the 60s encouraged the success of later acts like AC/DC, Air Supply, and The Little River Band, which in turn inspired the success of INXS and Kylie Minogue and many others. The architectural triumph of the iconic Sydney Opera House, and sporting success in many fields, culminating in the Intellectual Victory in the America’s Cup of Australia II’s Winged Keel, all began to convince Australians that they had something to offer the rest of the world. We also became internationally recognized as having a good ear for the next big thing – Abba, Madonna, and Blondie all had success in Australia well in excess of that achieved by the same point elsewhere – and a role as a trend-setter, not recognized until the turn of the century, also began, with groups like Nirvana citing little-known Australian acts as key sources of inspiration.

Australian television remains a blend of 1/3 American, 1/3 domestic, 1/4 British, and a dash of ‘elsewhere in origin. Thirty years ago, the Domestic and British content share was higher; it was Dallas and Roots that began to change the proportions toward the modern picture.

To a very large extent, we view the US and Britain as setting the standard – but are happy to judge anyone and everyone against that standard. Nor are we afraid to condemn anything from either nation – or our own – as ‘rubbish’ if we feel it doesn’t live up to that standard. In effect, we have turned isolation into an advantage, an opportunity to filter out the cultural elements that we don’t want.

Of course, all that is changing due to the advent of iTunes and Social Media, but that isn’t relevant to the conversation.

What is relevant is the cultural influence of our nearest neighbor, New Zealand. Because Australia is larger, it’s economy is considerably greater in potential than that of New Zealand; for a great many years, successful Kiwi musicians, actors, performers, business-people and sportsmen and -women have been relocating to Australia to try and take ‘the next step’ in their careers. If and when we see potential in these imports, Australia is usually quick to claim them and welcome them as though they were our own. At the same time, with the exception of contests with the Mother Country, they are our fiercest sporting rivals, both respected and hated, and often seen as “keeping us honest” in the way they challenge us. Australian acts are often successful in New Zealand, too. There is bilateral cultural assimilation, a continued cross-fertilization that strengthens both.

In many ways, Australia is, in it’s entirety, a ‘remote rural region’ of England. Often slower to pick up on the latest trends and fashions, but independent enough to come up with the foundations of future trends before they become widespread phenomena.

Distance, it is often said, lends perspective. Distance is what remote communities have in abundance, and that can be an advantage as much as it is a handicap.

There’s one part more to come, continuing the exploration of what it means to be remote from the cultural and power centers of a nation. Sometime Soon…

Introduction

Since I first participated in my first session of D&D 3.5, what I enjoyed most was the feeling of sharing a fantasy with other people. There is something liberating in the idea of a bunch of people participating in a history, shaping and characterizing it in every moment.

15 years later, I remain fascinated by the way we all imagine the same scene in very different ways, but we will speak of this later. All in all, I love groups. It does not matter what kind of group, I just love them.

I thought about writing this article after noticing something I had observed for a long time without consciously being aware of it: in any RPG group, the distance between the character and the person becomes thinner or thicker based on what is happening on group dynamic level.

Strap yourself in, dear stranger – this might take a bit of trust in me. It usually pays, and the advice is free anyway.

I will try to be gender equal in my writing, referring to the group roles as things, using it as method. I actually support and love playing with women, I believe that groups should willingly comprise the entire gender spectrum to make them complete.

No, I don’t think of you as a thing. And yes, I can read your mind through the Internet – I took the racial feat of Illithid Heritage many, many levels ago!

I’m going to get serious for a while.

I would like to give a model of the groups dynamic that underlie any RPG group based on Berne’s theory of Transactional Analysis. I think this will be helpful to Game Masters in terms of personal enjoyment, skills definition, and making sense of the weirdness happening within groups. Plus, part of this article will go into my dissertation that will allow me to become a Certified Transactional Analyst, a sort of weird Psychotherapist. A win-win. I have to thank my therapist for suggesting this, such a great woman that one.

Theory bits

If you don’t want to know too much about Berne’s theory you can easily skip this section.

Berne’s theory is all about the idea that our psyche is made up of 3 ego states: Parent, Adult and Child.

Parent and Child are defined as archaic, because they refer to our early phases of life and are “directed to the past rather than the present”, while the Adult is the part of us that looks at the here and now.

Berne, a psychiatrist and aspiring psychoanalyst (he would be barred from becoming one, which is why he created Transactional Analysis), believed that the extent to which people manage to stay in Adult mode, communication will carry on indefinitely and productively for both parties. We will come back to this, because it will be helpful later on.

Berne worked with people suffering from psychosis as well as neurosis in a group setting. Transactional Analysis is a group treatment theory, and works pretty well.

The ground-breaking part of the theory was certainly that people would respond and trigger the other to reflect matching parts of the self. If you communicate from adult, the other will be invited to respond in adult. Simple, isn’t it?

What I have observed in RPG groups is that we all participate for the fun. We share an objective, we have rules and we tend to be ordered – we have a facilitator who runs the group and who is pivotal to the group itself. RPG groups represent a very good example of “group” in the TA sense of the word. In most of the games I know, there is no game without the facilitator – sad, but true. The position of relative importance within the group that the facilitator occupies makes everything run more smoothly and yet complicates it. We will get to this as well.
 
A “group” is not simply a bunch of people – that is a “mass”. A group shares something, while a mass is a number of individuals minding their own businesses even if they all experience the same event, for example at a rock concert.
 
Get yourself a drink now and open your mind – here’s where it starts to get complicated.
 

Groups stages

Being a psychologist means that I love definitions, while being a relational psychotherapist means that I really appreciate subjectivity. The two conflict insofar as definitions are mutually accepted objective statements of meaning, and not at all subjective, even though interpretation of those “objective” statements will always be rooted in personal experience, education, and understanding of the usage – all of which are inherently subjective. I am still working out how to relate my subjective experiences to Berne’s theory, so bear with me while I think..

We have defined groups, more or less, so that’s done.

The reason why we will refer to stages of groups is because we can switch back and forth between them, even though there is a linear ideal progression. I am not going to use the term “phase”, because semantically it refers to something to which you are not supposed to go back to. Besides, it’s a common gaming term, and might cause confusion.

I will try to offer examples from my experience as Player and Game Master in order to cover the totality of the subject in a way that all readers can relate to.

I want to thank Mike for creating this amazing website, it really allowed me to change the way I look at my passion as something important and “professional”, not merely as a nerdish amusement.

My co-founder, Johnn, deserves at least half the credit as well. Speaking for both of us, you’re welcome, GF! — Mike

There are, then, 4 of these stages: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Every group has to achieve success in overcoming developmental tasks appropriate to the stage. Should this not happen, the group will be held back or die depending on how much tension the task is putting on the shared fantasy.

I will try to make very clear what the task is, so your OCD traits (and mine) can take a nap.

In few words

Every group seems to go through similar stages of development. Each stage has some task which enables the group to progress to the next stage when accomplished. Equally, when not accomplished the group might go towards a previous stage.

The stages do not last for a fixed amount of time. Groups tend, for various reasons, to go through the same stage more than once, especially over the long run.

The GM is a special class of player with the role within the group of handling the group, while getting as much fun out of it as the players.

The group stages are:

• Forming:
  • The First stage, where the group agrees on basic definition of the group.
  • There is maximum distance between Player and Character.

   

• Storming:
  • The second stage, where the individuality of the players and characters mix, and conflicts emerge.
  • There is Intermediate distance between Player and Character (Yes, I’ll explain all that, shortly).

   

• Norming
  • The third stage, where the group start tolerating each other’s styles and tries to actively resolve conflicts.
  • There is minimum distance between Player and Character.

   

• Performing
  • The fourth stage, in which the game flows peacefully and the fun is at maximum level.
  • There is Integration between Player and Character.

 
We are going to go through all these stages defining the GM role and tasks for each of them, the intrinsic dangers the GM/Group might face, some examples, and a bit of banter on the side. I hope you will enjoy reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
 

Forming

Task: to create shared objectives, to define fun, to come alive as a group.
 
This stage of group development starts in the exact moment that one member of the group thinks: I want to play an RPG. The genesis of the group has started, even though there is only one member so far. The group exists in this person’s mind in the form of the expectations around the group and the game they will play, and the goal of constructing the group itself to play that game. Fantasy is the word here.

Analyzing Figure 2, we can say that:

• The borders of the submarine represent the group setting: the systems used, what defines the group, the group identity.
• The internal elements of it represent the Players and their functions. This is how each Player perceives the other Players: a bunch of Others.
• The dashed lines indicate unformed or fragile elements. In the Forming stage, the Players are still defining their characters, so frailty is given by the situation.
• The GM has a slightly different position because of his role within the Group: without a GM the session does not happen.

 
Think about a group – call them “the Cult Of Pelor ek Obad-hai”. No commoner can actually have a chat with them or go down to the tavern with them to get hopelessly drunk; they can only speak with their representatives. And yet our trust them, believe in their powers and would sacrifice themselves for them.

The fact that people believe that Organizations, Gods or even the King of the Frogs exist is sufficient: they exist as a consequence of that belief, even if it is only as a metaphysical construct in the mind of the person who so believes. Subjectively, then, thought and deed are equivalent acts in terms of Forming the group.

The point is that the group is born before the group members actually meet in their roles as members of the group. Once we have all gathered around a table, wooden or virtual regardless, the group has begun the process of slowly becoming solid and partially existing within the material reality.
 
I remember one of the first time I mastered a D&D campaign. I had everything in mind: the main characters, the new gods, demigods, villains and plot twists. I just needed players as much as a director needs actors and crew to make the movie real. My campaign crashed completely because I preferred their plot twist over mine: a planar jump. I have now moved to a different approach: in this stage, I ask people what they expect and want from this specific group, from this adventure or campaign, if they like it gory and mature or classical and heroic.

Just remember to avoid over-preparing.

If the group is a fantasy, better for it to be a shared one.

In this way, I am trying to speak from Adult, explaining what I want and inviting the players to do the same. It really does not matter if we meet 5 times before even thinking about our characters; the more we define what we want, the less we will be disappointed.

Some people define this as Session 0. I do not like this definition because 0 means Nothing/Absence. I believe the group is already there, so it is the “Defining Session” for me.
 
This stage sees the GM as the main actor, it is its task to sustain and feed the fantasy. A GM who decides everything on his own might incur three different scenarios:

1. the group does not form at all.
2. the group will move to Storming right away
3. The players will be pushed to a child position, they will experience having no power over the game and will adapt their mental state accordingly. The GM role becomes excessively dominant and the group might not achieve any developmental task, dying later as a result.

 
The main issue here is that putting too much attention on one or two players will not help the group to come together as a group, which will weaken the bond between the players.

Spoiler: the GM is a player too. Bam! Once you know it, you cannot un-know it. Wait, I’ve already mentioned that.
 
As a Player, the GM’s task is to enjoy themselves and make sense. You’re there to play, just do it. The part of you that is needed is what we call Free Child, your emotions and energy. Think about what you really want to see happening and ask your Adult to have a read of the rules, the setting. This is what in TA is called “The Child informing the Adult” as opposed to the ‘Child in charge’. Outside of TA, you could describe it as emotions informing the rational mind what is required to satisfy its entertainment needs.
 
Later, I got entangled with sci-fi settings. After a decade playing only slaying fantasy villains with weird magic, I decided to move more towards psionic powers and spaceships. When I started, I asked to the group if they were happy to try this kind of adventure and what they were expecting to do: the coolest thing, the most complex one, if they enjoyed a bit of live RPG mixed and if they would have liked to playing in between sessions as well. Adult to Adult.

Sidebar: Group Size

Not much has been written on the ‘perfect’ size for an RPG group – because there isn’t one.

Damn, I gave that out too quickly: let me recover.

Theoretically (better) a RPG group can be of any size. The reality of practice tells us that not every system can handle well more than 6 people at the table (GM included, remember: you’re a player as well). There is a real reason for this: trust. Humans tend to develop personal relationships with other humans especially within groups; well, there needs to be trust for relationships to happen, and the cohesiveness of the group suffers with higher numbers because of the spread of trust. Intuitively, a smaller group will be more cohesive with a more trustworthy relationship between members.

I prefer having parties with odd numbers of players (for example, GM + 5 Players), so as to avoid strange stalls at every decision.

The number of possible member-member links (L) increases as the size of the group (N) increases: (L = (N² – N) /2). Now, a link might be a sentence or joke told at the table for each participant. For a group of 5 you can have 10 possible links, 6 gives 15, 7 gives 21, and so on – to the complete waste of everybody’s time and fun. And this number doubles if the people involved are not rude and, you know, might respond to the interaction.

Another point is that the higher the number of members, the more it is possible that subgroups appear. A subgroup comes into existence if an individual, or several, stops identifying with the bigger group, even temporarily; this will trigger the need to be recognized, to have a definite structure, and the need to be in contact with other people.

Subgroups are useful in guaranteeing the survivability of the individuals within the subgroup.

Without getting side-tracked with a complex cocktail of Psychology, Sociology, Psychoanalysis and Time-Wastery, let’s just assume that you as GM, and the fun you enable to be created by providing boundaries, represent a vital resource for the group members. If you start to become scarce, especially because the time with you starts to become less and less due to the group size, people will either leave or find another way to satisfy the need: a subgroup.

The presence of 1 subgroup will implicitly create another subgroup consisting of those not a member of the first. Now you have a conflict, the inter group aggression, originated just by the size.

One way to work this out, is to split the group in different days or with another GM.

But this is getting rather too long for an insert – time to get back on point.

Rule of thumbs:

• Count the GM as active player
• Choose a system that allows you to handle the actual number of people involved
• Keep an eye on splitting or polarization within the group
• Be honest about what you perceive as time-wasting. Side-chatter isn’t a problem if everyone enjoys it; that simply elevates the social aspects of the game over other aspects.
• Ask around for what time wasting means for the others.

Storming

Task: facilitate player/character symbiosis, allow the emergence of player uniqueness, allow the underlying contrasts between members to become visible, and allow the group to shift its equilibrium to a new point.

Most groups die at this stage, and that’s the sad truth, or even worse, they develop unevenly.

I call this event the “Limping group”: some members Storm and get some resolution, others Storm without resolution. No cohesion equals stronger Storming. (it is perhaps easiest to think of “Storming” as a player “brainstorming” with his character, players “brainstorming” with each other, and characters “brainstorming” with each other, all at the same time – if “brainstorming” is defined as collaborative interaction toward ad-hoc objectives). But Storming is also when conflicts begin to emerge.

This stage can be easily gone through if there has been enough work on the precious first stage.
 
That said, some groups are not destined to stay together. Not your fault, not their fault: it is what it is. There is a reason why not everybody wants to play a Paladin or a Barbarian, and why we all like different RPG systems. We are all different, and this is sacred.

No, the main cause is not that people are less intelligent than you. You definitely do not know better. I told you, I can read your mind.

RPG groups by definition are some of the most complex associations in terms of psychological set up: people with great imaginative capacities willing to share grandiose fantasies.

Storming is absolutely normal in any group. The main thing is not that as group you should avoid that, but rather that you have to enjoy this stage because it will happen.

Spoiler: while disagreeing is storming, agreeing on everything can be storming as well. We will get back to this in a few paragraphs when we speak of the PAC model again.

You know you are in this stage when people start complaining about the rules, or try to trick them, or ask for special treatments. It’s fine, it’s normal. It is actually not your fault. What is happening is that the distance between the Character and the Player becomes thinner: people start to become their character, at least in part, and vice-versa, so whenever they feel frustrated by the rules or other characters’ actions, something very deep kicks in.

Anger, frustration, and feelings of betrayal feel real. As GM, helping the player to get to know their own character and the other group members is pivotal. There are times when you need to bring two group members closer together in collaboration and times when you need to put more distance between them; the GM needs to play his group like a master violinist.
 
In this stage, every member of the group might feel some sense of entitlement – mainly because of the high expectations around fun. We all want to be at the center of the story, solve the puzzle or slay the monster. Hey, this group is made of heroes! Who wants to play the milkman? Nothing against that profession, but I’d rather go slaying Tarrasques blindfolded than giving out bottles of milk (Thanks for the milk anyway, we all need it).

A secondary reason for those expectations is the effort invested to reach this point, where players start to feel invested in the game and to expect a return on their efforts.

Some years ago, during my longest ever campaign ‘Reverto ad Originem’, I was an inexperienced GM and did not know how to handle this phase. One of my player was (and still is) a very intelligent guy, very able to spot conceptual twilights in the D&D 3.5 rules. I ended up having two characters virtually untouchable, unbalancing the whole campaign. I felt frustrated over this, the other players were too, and the enjoyment of the game fell to nearly zero. It took a full year before I addressed the situation, rather clumsily. Because of my reticence to participate in this storming stage, the group started to fight over rules, alignment or the meaning of numbers. The group tested all parts of the game in the attempt of avoiding a direct confrontation between players. This almost broke the group.

Most of the storming comes from the need we all have to be unique, and be recognized as such. Without getting in a long tirade of how our upbringing relates to this need, just consider that in the storming stage of group development, shutting people down is not a good strategy.

More theory bits

Let me now introduce you another layer of theory: the Functional Model. I will try to make RPG-related examples to illustrate it.

• The Parent has two functions:
  • Nurturing (most people will know what that means but I’ll explain it anyway):
    • The core affect is a willingness to help empathically.
    • The core belief is that other people can learn and might need help.
    • You might observe a player in Parental nurturing mode responding to other people’s insecurity with care and explanations, complimenting other people’s interpretation or cleverness, or providing instruments and instruction rather than solutions.
  • Controlling (The rules are the same for everyone and must be obeyed):
    • The core affect is insecurity.
    • The core belief is that the person has to be in charge of everything.
    • You might observe a player in controlling parental mode trying to one-up another, being very picky and overly precise on the rules or game mechanics, pointing fingers, employing sarcasm, or over-criticizing.
• The Adult remains undivided, i.e. it has only one function.
  • Adult (Let’s do it this way this time, afterwards we’ll check the right answer):
    • The core affect is enjoyment of the game.
    • The core belief is that everybody has a role in the game.
    • You might observe a player in adult mode being practical and attentive to the game, interpreting his character, and asking for advice if needed or to sure nothing has been overlooked.
• The Child has two functions:
  • Free (Let’s have fun!!):
    • The core affect is to participate towards the group’s fun.
    • The core belief is that we can all have fun together.
    • You might observe a player in free child mode cracking jokes without being disruptive, being creative and open.
  • Adapted (‘No, no, no, and no!’ or ‘Yes, yes, yes, and yes’)
    • The core affect is fear of, or shame at, being undervalued or ignored.
    • The core belief is that abandoning or disrupting the rules or orderly processes is fun, a slight sense of selfishness.
    • You might observe a player in adapted child mode being overly silent, detached from the game or rather being way too vocal or offensive towards the others at the table.

As is easy to imagine, staying in the roles of Nurturing Parent, Adult and Free Child seems to be the way to make the game enjoyable. While the Controlling Parent shows insecurity and tries to use dominance as a survival strategy (Overruling), the Adapted Child (Sometimes further split into Rebellious Child and Adapted Child so to clarify different sub-functions) sees being overruled (and responding to it either with petulance or by being sullen) as the only strategy to protect its uniqueness.

It is the GM’s role to keep everything in Adult mode (perhaps with the occasional controlled excursion into Nurturing Parent or Free Child modes) allowing the players to voice any dissatisfaction without disruptive conflicts and eventually concede something if deemed as appropriate.

In my game role as GM, I have never liked people swapping characters in the middle of the campaign. I used to spend way too much time refining the campaign around the characters as they had already been established. I clearly remember when one of my player came to me just after the session, telling me how much he disliked the repetitive nature of his rogue’s gameplay. He had created an amazing rogue specialized in stealth, but there was not much more. I noticed his low energy on the month before the chat, but I imagined it was due to the exam session he was facing for his studies. Working over two weeks on the new character we got to a satisfactory point, then announced and played two sessions of his rogues’ departure from the group while meeting the new character. It was fun and eye-opening to see him changing voice, juggling between two characters simultaneously, and stretching his capabilities.

Sidebar: A quick note

Before moving on the next stages, let’s take a break and consider a couple of other points worth noting.

Without being too much of a philosopher from Candlekeep (For the glory of Amon!), the main reason why behavioral patterns and responses are “Stages” and not “Phases” is because a group can move back and forth within them. Any change to the group structure (new players entering the group, old players leaving the group, changing the venue or the rhythm of the sessions) might force the group to revert to a previous stage, even if only for a while. Your role as GM is to be aware of this, and to facilitate the process.

Recently, I was playing a GURPS campaign in a sci-fi setting. After months of insisting, I manage to persuade one of my friends to join the game. A first time RPG player, he wanted to watch only. Speaking with the GM, I shared my ideas of him being creative but somehow shy to initiate roleplaying (For the ones of you who read the Theory Bits, he was in Adapted Child). The GM, being caring and a quick thinker (and a manager of various teams of IT people), made him the Mission Commander for that specific adventure, the field leader of our military team. Even though we did storm for a while (as he adapted to the role), he was fully accepted into the group and we quickly moved to Norming again.

Back to work, now! This article is already a lot longer than I expected!

Norming

Task: to learn how to cooperate, to tolerate the others and their styles, to consolidate positions and roles.

This stage is where each player has managed to get hold of their role within the group. The process is greatly helped by the work done in the Forming stage: it will be more complex to carve out a distinctively individual role within the group if there is overlapping on the character level.

During this stage, the distance between the Character and the Player becomes thinner.
Thanks to the improved relationship within the group, the players start to feel more confident to act as their characters, and to show peculiarities. It is very important to be nurturing of each players style, and to be coherent in your own choices as GM.

I also think this stage carries enhanced awareness of campaign and setting verisimilitude, and any flaws therein, because group members are now comfortable enough in their functions within the group dynamic to look beyond it. Prior to this point, there is a greater tolerance and willingness to accept what is presented, and flaws in that content is more likely to be excused as the group member misunderstanding the material that has been presented. There has been less surety of self. Just my two cent’s worth — Mike.

Jimmy the Thief was great at improvising. During a very hectic part of Reverto ad Originem, my longest running D&D 3.5 campaign, the group ended up in a chamber filling with toxic water. Jimmy had only a Freezing Vial and his mind. He waited for a flying enemy to crash in the water, poured the vial on the splashing water and created an ice ladder to reach a higher window. Rules-wise I should have made him to do something like 7 checks, basically ruining his attempt (or dragging it out so long that the fun was drained). No way I was going to ruin such a state-of-art action! One roll, success, he did it, saving the group.

“Tolerance ” in this context does not mean putting up with negative emotional inputs. It means that regardless of whether you are a combat-focused or a Straight-to-the-treasure GM/Player (or any other style), you will let the other enjoy players their fun as they want, not hindering or usurping it in any way.

If one of the players is not collaborating with the others in achieving the task in this stage, it is important to address the situation earlier rather than later because most groups tend either to stop at this stage, or to go back to the agitated previous stage in a recurring pattern. The real issue here is the trust of the player, not the character.
Paraphrasing Berne, ‘a player will not begin to play his own game until he knows how he stands with the GM’.

The GM needs to give the other players permission to explore, while leading by example, but the other players will only be comfortable enough to risk exposing their experimentation to the scrutiny of the others if they trust the GM to protect any exposed emotional vulnerabilities, trust that has been earned in the previous stage. If insufficient trust in the GM has been developed, the group will revert to that stage in a recurring cycle.

In a recent session of Transhuman GURPS, we were in the role of a Special Ops team that had to accomplish some tasks before evacuating a building we had infiltrated: the gunner shot things, the hacker hacked systems, the psychologist psychologised (yes, I was doing nothing), the demolition man was looking for where best to plant the charges. For no apparent reasons (on the surface), the hacker started to interfere with the latter task, intruding into the demolition man’s character space. The argument quickly moved from the character level to the player level as the two drove each other into Adapted Child mode. The group was approaching the Performing stage, where each was able to contribute to a harmonious whole; instead they went back to Storming. I got caught in the dynamic, actually cornering one of the players, which was “legit” since I was not the GM. After some talking with the GM, we decided to introduce 10 minutes of feedback at the end of each session, and we decided to elect a Leader for each mission who could enforce discipline and leadership when needed. Problem resolved, both in specific terms for this mission and in broader terms for the long-term, the group moved to the Norming stage again.

Repeated ‘mistakes’ from a player, frequent absences, the death of a character, losing a mission and so on, are all events that can shake the group cohesiveness. As GM, be sure to know how your system of choice (GURPS, D&D, Cypher etc) handles catastrophic events such as death or permanent impairment; this will help you decide the outcome of these ‘mistakes’….. or if they happen at all.

It is sometimes said that “nobody wins an RPG”, or that “winning” is everyone having fun. That establishes a functional definition of “losing” in an RPG, and nobody wants to be a loser, especially in an RPG!

Let me play the psychologist for a moment: on the surface, the hacker started to interfere with the other player for no reason. Below the surface, I imagine that the lack of clear leadership in the group had intrinsically created a challenge for that function within the group. One member, probably not trusting the collective group enough, decided to act instead of asking.

Performing

Task: enjoying the fun, getting closer to the players, allowing shared GMing.

One reason for my insistence that “the GM is a player too” lies in this stage: here the GM can start seriously embodying his own role within the group. In this stage, the group comes together as an association of friends with the mutual purpose of enjoying a game (both directly through their own contributions and space within the group dynamic, and indirectly through the vicarious experience of the others doing so), and as adventurers willing to explore/bend/save/blast the world or villain of choice within the moral boundaries established as normal for the group’s behavior.

In this stage, most of the primary underlying issues between group members will have been revealed, and the players will have created functional compromises between what they expected, and what the GM in combination with the group, have actually delivered. The process reflects improved competence with the rules and with the characters.

I was GMing a short Numenera adventure I wrote, the players were just facing their first Boss fight: an ancient Automaton with a bad taste for jokes (or was that ‘a taste for bad jokes’?). We were only 11 sessions in, and the group of 2 managed to shortcut the dungeon, getting to the boss way too early. I decided not to make any discount for that circumstance since they were both very experienced players, and it paid off. The two of them managed to pull so many tricks based on their stories, perks and synergies that I was astounded. The Performing stage had arrived very quickly.

This might seem the easiest stage for the GM, and in part it is; he no longer needs to devote so much energy to the smooth functioning of the group dynamic and can focus on delivering a better experience for all concerned. Once the players have started to appreciate the others’ style, the fun truly begins!

Conclusions

I hope my article will help players and GMs to build up productive and enjoyable game sessions and relationships. As a GM and therapist, I aim to create an environment where everybody can get what they are coming for, in total respect of the other participant’s processes and pace.

I know I can be verbose at times, but I have tried to convey what I call my ‘intrinsic knowledge’ of running groups in a way that will be useful to any reader, whether applied to an RPG or to a work environment.

As one last piece of unasked-for advice, let me say this: Caution is needed. As can be intuitively understood, the real danger lays in between the stages, i.e. in the stage transitions. As happens in every process, we feel more vulnerable when trying to consolidate knowledge or skills. Being mindful of this can really help you in nurturing the group during these delicate passages. Pay particular attention at such times to the actual physical setting of the session: where, when, and how. These can easily stimulate group dynamics in an unwanted direction at such times.

Your role as Player is special: you keep the group together by holding it within your mind, and in the real world.

Keep up your great work, GMs!

About The Author: G.F. Pace is me, Giovanni Felice Pace, a fantasy and RPG addict from the age of 13, when I first met D&D 3.5 and wrote my first character – ZuLu was a half-orc monk of Kelemvor, omnipresent in every one of my campaigns along with other characters my players made over time. I am also an Italian Counseling/Clinical Psychologist and Relational Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist currently living and practicing in London, UK. As a GM, I love having minimal structure – perhaps “loose” structure would be a better term – after learning the hard way to avoid excess in this area. This is my second article at Campaign Mastery, having wet my toes with Strangers sharing ideas: RPG writings in a Collaborative World back in 2014. I am happy to have a chat on various topic through my RPG Twitter account (@Crux_MM) and professional account (@GFPtherapy).

This isn’t the post I expected to put up today. The other one’s ready, and will appear later in the week. The reason is because it’s almost November – and that has a significance that will become clear any second now…

Once again it’s time for Campaign Mastery to host the Blog Carnival for the month of November!

I don’t know how other GMs choose their topics when they post, but thought a passing word on how I do it might be of interest.

Sometimes there’s some subject I want my fellow blogger’s opinions on; sometimes I already have an article in mind for the Carnival and shape the topic around it; but most of the time, I turn the question over to my subconscious, without preconceived notions, months in advance – and wait. Eventually inspiration will strike, and when it does, I make a careful note of it. The subject for this month’s installment of the Blog Carnival was the result of the latter process, and recorded in early September – which is cutting things rather finer than I like, but good enough.

That topic this time around is “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link to the original article if it is still online.” Extra points if the original is more than a year old!

This article is to serve as the anchor post for the Carnival – if you have something to contribute to the carnival, drop me a comment with a link to your new article.

On the nature of Sequels

A sequel article could be a partial or complete rebuttal; it could extend or update the original; it might explore a side-tangent branching off from the original article; or it could be similar in theme to the original but completely divorced from the inspirational content.

There’s a perception that a sequel must always be inferior to the original. In music, it’s referred to as “the dreaded follow-up album”. That’s because the author has, in theory, used up all his best ideas on the first in the series, ideas that have been built up and honed and polished over many iterations; with the success of the first album that results, time pressures often mean that the second is stuck with the leftovers.

In novels or movies, unless the first was always intended to be part of a series – and that happens in the Fantasy genre, and in the “big universe” style of movies (e.g. the Marvel Movie Universe) far more commonly these days, the first was shaped to be as self-contained as possible, and that can make it much harder to open the universe up to a larger narrative. The Empire Strikes Back shows some of those growing pains, for example.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Look at the Star Trek movies – II was more successful on any number of fronts than I, IV was more successful than III, VI was more successful than V – it’s not until VII, “First Contact”, that the pattern gets broken. Or does it? VII was the second movie featuring the Next Generation cast…

IN RPGs, the difference in GMing mindset between a one-off adventure and a campaign can be profound. A lot of the time, we actually design a new sequence of adventures to be a campaign. In that respect, we’re a lot more like a comic book or a TV series than we are novels or movies. We design for, and hope for, longevity, and often hold back our best ideas for later in the campaign (than the first adventure).

And yet, when we write blog posts, our approach is more literary, more self-contained, either to a single post or to a defined broader narrative of specified parts. So why am I convinced that there’s buried gold to be revealed by this choice of Blog Carnival topic?

I think that it’s an inevitability, and it all comes down to editing. Editing generally prunes away the irrelevant, focusing a blog post far more concisely on the subject at hand. If the writer is the organized type, he or she might save those expurgated passages to see if there’s a new article to be constructed from them; if not, it’s simply tossed away. The better-edited a blog is, the more tightly each article will focus on the subject at hand, and the more scope there will be for a sequel that explores one or more of the subject areas that weren’t covered in the original.

As long-time readers know, it’s my goal to provide useful content (in terms of my mission here at Campaign Mastery) even in an anchor post. While the discussion of sequels above might be interesting, it doesn’t really help GMs better their games very much. Fortunately, a topic came to me over the weekend.

One of my players mentioned that he had been spending a fair bit of time that week updating the NPCs in the campaign that he runs. As he did so, the thought flashed through my mind, “there must be a better way” – and was immediately followed by the lightning bolt of inspiration! There is a better way, and that is the subject of today’s article.

Because most readers are users of Pathfinder/D&D, I’ll orient the mechanisms described toward those games, but the process should be readily adaptable to any other system. And so, without further ado, I present

The XP-less NPC

What is experience other than a scalable measure of the progress toward character enhancements? In Objective-Oriented Experience Points (July 2011), I proposed eliminating XP from all sources except as a measure of the progress toward plot-based goals, and awarding it (effectively) as a percentage of the progress toward the character’s next level.

In this article, I’m going to go further, and propose eliminating XP from NPCs entirely. That should free up the GM’s time to do other things, and prep time is always in short supply.

The process itself is simple enough. It requires the GM to number his game sessions, starting at 1 even if you are in an existing campaign. NPCs are generated by the GM as they will first appear, and never have to be updated (with a couple of exceptions that I’ll deal with in a moment). In place of the character’s XP, the GM writes in the session number in which they first appear in-game (even if the PCs didn’t notice them).

When that NPC appears in the course of the adventure, the GM simply subtracts the session number of the day’s play from the session number in which the character first appeared, consults a table that the GM has constructed (one unique to this campaign and that applies universally throughout it) and reads off the number of bonuses over what’s on the character sheet that the NPC has at his disposal.

Each time he uses one of those bonuses – whether it’s to hit, or to present a harder target to avoid being hit, or to successfully use a skill – it gets subtracted from that pool of bonuses and the changed variable gets written onto a scrap of paper that will be tossed at the end of the day’s play.

If the GM feels that the character has enough bonuses, he can permanently reduce them (by updating permanently the “starting session number”) and writing in additional class abilities, enhanced or improved abilities, magic items, or whatever. Those are the only changes that ever have to be made permanently to the NPC’s character sheet!

This concept is based on three key assumptions.

1. That experience is nothing more than a progress marker towards improved bonuses;
2. That, over time, the rate of progress will average out to a consistent value;
3. That, in the course of an adventure, only a fraction of the enhancements made to a character will actually make a difference to the NPC’s capabilities.

The devil, as always, is in the detail. How many bonuses per game session? Does everything cost the same? How many bonuses are required to grant the character new class abilities as though he had gained a level? How many bonuses are required to acquire a magic item? How are magic spells to be handled?

Most of these will vary with campaign and GMing style, and hence be individual to the campaign. To determine the answers, the GM has to dig into the nuts and bolts of character progression in their game system. That sounds like a big job, but it won’t be that difficult.

To understand how to answer this new round of questions, and what form the analysis should take, let’s start by taking a closer look at those three assumptions.

Experience Is Nothing More Than A Progress Marker

Experience points received are proportional to the threats overcome and the progress made towards various plot-related goals. They are indexed against character level, and character level, in turn, translates into tangible benefits – improved hit points, attack scores, skill points, and so on.

This truth is obscured by the fact that the goal markers keep changing. It always takes more XP to go from level L to L+1 than it did to go from L-1 to L. This can be seen as forcing characters to increment the challenges they face, or as depreciating the value of the challenges they have already been overcoming – there just isn’t as much to learn from them.

Rate Of Progress Averages Out To A Consistent Value

But the net effect is that the value of encounters rises at roughly the same rate as character level goals. The value of an individual XP becomes smaller. Sure, a GM could avoid artificially inflating the challenge rating of the “average” monster, so that it takes progressively
longer to earn character levels as the get higher – but they are called “challenge” ratings for a reason; doing so makes them easier to overcome, and ultimately to boredom at the game table. “Ho-hum, more Orcs? Again?”

No, if you are to challenge the PCs, you need to continually advance the difficulties they face, in line with their capabilities. And, once you do that, you put your entire campaign in the hands of system nuances – if there is even a slight discrepancy between the incremental increase in challenge-rating-to-xp conversion rate and the XP-to-character level conversion rate, the error will skyrocket exponentially. Characters will either perpetually advance more slowly or more quickly than you, as GM, anticipate.

My original article, linked to earlier, identified this problem and proposed resolving it by eliminating the challenge-rating-to-xp conversion entirely, effectively making character level advancement something that the GM built into his plotlines, and I still stand by that concept as it applies to PCs.

Only A Fraction Of Enhancements Make A Difference

At any given character level, the character gains certain enhancements. Some of these are new or improved class abilities, some are skill points, some are improved combat abilities, some are numbers of hit dice, which translate into additional hit points, and so on.

In any given encounter, only a fraction of those enhancements get called into play. Most of the skill points are applied in abilities that don’t get used. If you have only one or two class abilities, you will almost certainly call on them; if you have ten or twenty, most won’t even get mentioned by the GM.

Some are more reliably invoked than others, but the general principle holds true.

The Analysis Process

What’s needed, then, is to look at exactly what a character gets from going up a character level over the lifetime of a character; to look at exactly what the typical session of play provides in the way of experience, and how that relates to progress in acquiring those enhancements; and to relate the two directly.

Class Progression

Fighters, for example, in the Pathfinder system: +1 base attack bonus with every level; +1 to FORT saves with every level; +1 to REF and WILL saves every third level; A bonus feat every second level (plus one extra at first level that I’ll get back to in a moment; Armour Training every 4th level, starting at 3rd; Weapons Training every 4th level starting at 5th level (with the extra bonus feat taking its place at first level); +1 hit die per level; 2+INT modifier skill points per level.

That last one looks like it might pose a problem – so let’s redefine it as “one bundle” of Skill points, with the size of the bundle varying with INT Modifier.

Add all those up and you get 1+1+1/3+1/3+1/2+1/4+1+ 1= 4 and 5/12 per level.

Standard Progression

On top of that, all characters get feats every 2nd level and ability score improvements every 4th level. So that’s + 1/2 and +1/4 per level, or 6/12 and 3/12, respectively, increasing the total to 5 and 1/6th.

Magic Items

But we’re not finished; there’s the question of magic items. And that’s where the individuality of campaigns and GMs first enters the picture.

Over the course of a campaign, a fighter might expect to gain a +5 version of his primary weapon (plus all the prior versions), an item that gives +5 in his primary stat (plus, presumably, the prior versions), a secondary weapon of +3 or maybe +4, a shielding magic (either shield or ring) that gives +5, six or five miscellaneous magic items (the extra replacing the extra plus in the secondary weapon), and probably a similar number in miscellaneous magic items that are lost or consumed along the way (call it 6). On top of that, potions and disposable magics will also come along at the rate of 1 or 2 per level – average that to 1.5, or 30 over the twenty levels. Plus he is likely to have different primary weapons and secondary weapons along the way, trading them in when something better comes along and the occasional extra disposable magic over and above the quota given above – I’ll deal with this fudge factor in a moment.

Adding those up, we get 5+5+5+3+6+6+30 = 60. Dividing those by twenty gives 3 per level. Now, that fudge factor: we’re short 5/6ths of a level of a whole number. If you multiply that out over 20 levels, you get 15 2/3 items, most of them probably in additional disposable magics.

At first glance, that seemed a little high – but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. There might be +3 in a tertiary weapon (that used to be a primary weapon), +1 in a quaternary weapon or two, and half a dozen extra potions – that’s 11 of the 15 used up already. Four extra potions here and there along the way is very easy to believe.

Of course, you may be more generous than is typical, or you might be less; you might alter the mix to favor disposable magic, especially healing potions. So you will need to perform your own assessment. That’s why I’m showing the working – so that the example acts as a guideline.

That brings the total to a neat 6 points per level, assuming that everything that goes into a level is valued the same. That’s another variable that’s in the GM’s control; if magic items are rarer, they should be more significant – so they will cost more of these ‘points per level’ and everything will work out fine. My personal inclination is to increase the value of both stat increases and permanent magic items, perhaps to 2 and 3 points per, respectively, or maybe even 2 and 4 You would want to think about wands and other items that have charges, and how much they are worth – my inclination would be to certainly increase those but then multiply by the fraction of the charges that remain to get the true ‘cost’ of that item. Some GMs rule that magical armor bonuses also add to fort saves; and some would hold that since magical weapons add their plus to both attack and damage, they should count twice. Still others might judge that disposable wealth on-hand should be factored in – be it 100 GP per level per point or 1000. Of course, anything along these lines would also increase the total per level.

One side-benefit of this proposal is that it forces the GM to really think about his attitude to, and distribution of, magic items!

But, for the purposes of this example, I’ll stick with the basic 6 per level that I’ve outlined, and move on.

The second factor: Sessions to Levels

How many game sessions does it take a PC to level up? The books all suggest that it’s around ten – my experience is that it’s closer to five or six, and a number of the house rules in my campaigns have been directed at slowing the rate of progress to this level! I generally count the GP value of magic items and wealth as experience already received, deducting them from the payout. I also adjust individual awards to favor those of lower levels relative to those of higher level on the basis that the more the character still has to learn, the faster they will learn, relative to someone who has already mastered those “life lessons”. Without those adjustments, I can easily believe a progress rate of three or four sessions per level.

This makes a huge difference when it comes to campaign planning. The PCs in my Rings Of Time campaign entered play at fifth level, the junior members and sole survivors of an expedition to kill a dragon and claim its hoard (in reality, they were being set up by the Gods, but that’s a whole other story). By the time play concluded due to the death of one of the players, they had levels in the mid-40s, and well on their way to achieving their ambitions (since they had been manipulated into doing the dirty work and heavy lifting of the Gods, they intended to become at least demigods themselves).

But all that would change if the provisions of Objective-Oriented Experience Points are implemented, which makes progress in levels a question of progress in plot.

If there are fourteen adventures left in the campaign plan, averaging four sessions per adventure, and you want the characters to hit 20th level just before the campaign’s big finish, they have 13 adventures times 4 sessions each = 52 sessions to earn enough levels to reach 20. If they are currently 8th level, to pluck a number at random, that’s 12 levels.

Fifty-two sessions divided by 12 levels is 4 1/3 sessions per level.

The third factor: utilization efficiency

Not everything that a character improves makes a difference in every session. As you’ll see, this creates a complication – we need to reduce the points allocation to the level of actual usage. But taking the skill points out of the equation simplifies that greatly, because that’s the area of greatest inefficiency. Simply reducing the number of skill points the character gets per level is more-or-less enough.

The more skills-oriented your approach to gaming is, the greater the diversity with which skill points will be spread around, and the greater the likelihood that any particular improvement won’t make a difference in the course of the current game session.

In a typical campaign, assuming intelligent character construction (developing the things you are most likely to need), and intelligent usage in-game (playing to your strengths), I would estimate that 1/3 of the skills improved have no impact. In a skills-heavy campaign, that probably increases to 1/2 – a difference of 1/6th. It follows that in a skills-light campaign, things would probably go the other way, reducing wastage by 1/6th to 1/6th.

An alternative model would be 1/4 wastage in the typical campaign, 1/3 in the skills-heavy campaign (a difference of 1/12), suggesting a wastage level of – again – 1/6th in the skills light campaign.

A third set of values might be 30%, 40%, and 20%, respectively.

Which one is right? That rather depends on the GM’s style and the nature of the adventure being played on the day. Heavy roleplay involves some skill usage, but is mostly just roleplay. Combat often involves a very limited amount of skill use. Investigation and mystery solving tends to draw on a lot of different skills to acquire and analyze information. Shopping may involve negotiations and bartering – some skills will be heavily resourced. In my experience, the thing that involves consulting the greatest diversity of skills is social settings and behavior.

My tendency would be to use the campaign/GMing style to select between skills-heavy, skills-typical, and skills-light, then choose which model to apply based on the adventure content that’s involved.

Once you know the wastage, you know how many skill points aren’t going to be ‘wasted’ in terms of this particular occasion; multiply the total skill points to be awarded by that fraction, and you’re in business.

Combining the factors

At 6 points per level, that’s 6 divided by 4 1/3 sessions per level to get the number of points per game session – which gives the absolutely awful number of 1.384615384615384615… It’s only slightly neater as a fraction: 1 5/13ths.

You could work with this number, but there’s enough fuzziness built into the estimates that I would simplify it to 1.4 just for the convenience.

Either way, the inconvenience of the result shows why you need a table.

To the left is just such a table (based on 1.4), but it’s not very user-friendly.

You have one row of sessions, and one counting points, repeat until you get to 52 sessions.

Below and to the right is a far more satisfactory way of showing exactly the same information. It starts by noting that there’s one construction point per session, so you only need to track the accumulation of decimal places.

Note the progression of values in the session numbers after the initial entry – a range of 2 followed by a range of 3. That’s because the decimal used – 0.4 – becomes a whole number every 5 times it is accumulated. That’s why I offset that first entry by a column. I thought about using that pattern to further simplify the table, but the improvement was minor. If I had kept the original fraction – 5/13ths – the pattern would be 13 session numbers long, and would contain five entries.

If you were to do the same for each of the major character classes, you could construct a table in which session numbers run down the first column and you simply track down to the right row, then across each column – one per character class – to get the right answer. But I think that a more user-friendly way of compiling the information would be to put Construction Points down the left-hand column and for the table body to contain the number of sessions required to get to that outcome. It turns the ranges back into a single number, which is always useful for compactness. That’s up to each individual GM.

Another thing that you can do is to deliberately distort the table. You might feel that spacing it evenly like that is unrealistic, that greater progress happens – or should happen – early in the table, i.e. at lower levels. This can be done by altering the ranges.

For example, you might decide that in the first half of the table, all the 2-ranges should be 1-ranges, balancing that by making all the 2-ranges in the second half a range of three values. So the pattern becomes 1, 3, for a while, then 3, 3. You could alter that to even out the first part of the sequence: 2, 2, then 3, 3.

Or, instead, you could take the “1, 3, then 3, 3” pattern and further increase the pace of development at the lower levels by also dropping the three-ranges for the first quarter to two-ranges, and making up for it by increasing every second 3 in the last quarter to a range of 4. So that would give 1, 2, then 1, 3, then 3, 3, then 3, 4. If you again pull the “evening out” in the second quarter, you get 1, 2 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 3, 4.

Or, you could decide that the big gains tend to come at the higher end of the table – you achieve that by lengthening the early ranges and shortening the later ones. “3, 4 to 3, 3 to 2, 2 to 1, 2” is every bit as valid as “1, 2 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 3, 4”. My personal feeling is that early progress is in areas other than magic, while later improvements are mostly magical in nature, but that overall, it would tend to balance out.

What this is doing, in effect, is customizing class progression rates to your own campaign, style, and philosophy. The way you think it should be is the way that it becomes – at least for NPCs.

For that matter, there’s absolutely nothing preventing you from designing a custom advancement sequence for each individual NPC, probably starting from a common template.

But it’s also possible to go even further. If your NPCs are still consistently getting their tails whupped by the PCs more easily than they should and failing to present the challenge that they should, on paper, represent, all you have to do is increase the construction points per session that they get. Even a small change will accumulate – going from 0.4 to an even 2 per session, over 52 sessions gives an additional 31 construction points! Thank back to what those points represent – +1 to saves, to to-hits, to damage, to armor class, to feats and magic equipment and to the count of class abilities. 31 more of them is a big impact – think +4 in each of those categories, with a few left over!

With this system, there is no ceiling to abilities the way the level-capped system imposes. If that 52-session example actually took 60 sessions to complete, the extra eight levels simply means that the NPCs get a bigger boost, and that you might need to compensate by handing out some additional magic items. Or not; it’s only really the last adventure or two that will be affected, and ramping up the opposition at such times is entirely reasonable!

Use In Play I

Use is incredibly simple. Just note the session number, subtract the first session in which the NPC appeared in the campaign, and look up the number of construction points available from the table you’ve constructed. For example, if an NPC enters the game in session 60, and this is session 72, you would look up 12 sessions. Using the fighter table that was generated as an example, we get 1 per session = 12, +4, for a total of 16. From this amount, subtract the amount expended on permanent improvements to the character, which would normally be determined in advance of starting play – improving the magic weapon on the character sheet by +1, and giving the character a new pair of magical boots, for example. That would be 2 of the 16, and would leave 14 to expend in the course of play.

It’s worth being aware of the rough breakdown of these points. At an estimate of 6 per level, that’s 2 levels worth, plus a couple more. So, there would be +2 to hit, +2 to FORT save, +2 HD, and 2 lots of skill points – that’s eight of the fourteen. We’ve used two more with the enhanced magic items. That leaves 4 – one of them will be a bonus feat, and one will be something else, and one will probably be a consumable magic item like a potion of Cure Light Wounds. But there are so many variant classes and prestige classes out there that if you wanted to add an extra 1 to the to hit (giving +3) and reducing the fort save improvement to +1, that’s perfectly fine, too. But, knowing this, I wouldn’t allocate most of those until I needed them in-play – if you miss with an attack by 3, you can assume that the character has received +3 in his to-hit; it simply means that he will have to go without a full increase in some other area.

In terms of the skill points, I would wait until the character used a skill then assume that it’s gone up 2 for a core skill, or 1 for something that’s cross-class, until I ran out of skill points. This works because we’ve already determined that only the skill expenditures that are going to make a difference in the course of the day’s play are going to be counted as ‘available’. If this particular character gets 5 skill points per level, (including INT bonus), and 1/3 of these are going to be wasted, 2 levels-worth is 10, and only 7 of these will be significant today.

Similarly, if you know the mechanics of feat construction – +2 to one ability or skill, or +1 to 2 related ones, or whatever is appropriate for your game system – you can simply apply them directly to represent the bonus feat without worrying about what that feat actually is.

Or you might choose to make that a permanent alteration on the character sheet as well. But the whole point here is to enable character development to take place “on the fly”, reducing the time the GM has to commit to NPC character development.

You record these expenditures on scrap paper so that you can be consistent, but can throw that away at the end of the day – or commit the changes permanently, increasing the expenditure of points accordingly. The latter greatly speeds the process of character development; the former speeds it up even more. Hot tip: if you commit the changes, update the session number as though the character had just entered play.

Use In Play II

For the next seven game sessions, the NPC doesn’t appear. He is presumably elsewhere doing something else. But, in session 80, he’s back! 80-60 is twenty, so it’s been twenty sessions since the character first appeared. Consulting the table, that’s one per session (so, 20) +8, or a total of 28. 2 of these were permanently expended on his weapon and his boots
the last time he appeared, so he has 26 remaining, assuming that the notes from last time weren’t kept as permanent changes. At about 6 to a level, that’s roughly four levels relative to what the character was when he entered play. This time, the GM chooses to expend two points on an improved AC and two points improving one of the character’s key stats – permanent changes, leaving 22.

+4 to hit, +4 FORT save, +1 REF and WILL saves, +4 HD, 4 lots of Skill points – that’s 18 of the 22 gone. There should be a couple of bonus feats, and one increase each to his armor and weapons abilities, respectively. That’s all 22 expended. 4 lots of skill points, with an anticipated wastage this time around of 30% – unless the stat increase was to INT, that’s 70% of 4 times 5 that will be useful, or 14 available.

It’s that fast. 2 minutes, tops, and the character is ready to play.

Liberating, isn’t it?

A side-comment by one of the players in my Zenith-3 campaign the last time we played raised some interesting questions.

The player was speculating that the solution to a side-mystery that the PCs are currently investigating might have repercussions beyond those the players were presently aware of, simply to cause trouble between political authorities and the PCs, based purely on the fact that I had done that before.

His point was that my pattern of behavior – my style as a GM – was a potential indicator of what in-game circumstances I might seek to exploit and what I might do, at a plot level, with those circumstances.

This, of course, is metagaming, but it’s justifiable as a guide to in-game thinking by the character in question as a “lesson from history” – i.e. “there is a potential land-mine here, this sort of situation has blown up in our faces before.”

Thinking about this situation has yielded four insights that will be of interest, and potential value, to other GMs.

To Your Own Self Be True

The player in question clearly had a valid point, both at an in-game level and at a metagame level. To a certain extent, a GM has to be true to his style, and that can make him a little more predictable at a metagame level, which in turn is a reflection in-game on life-lessons discovered the hard way through past PC experiences.

Trying to move the game in a different direction is clearly something that would not come naturally to a GM; he would be fighting his natural style, which is part of what the players bought into when they signed up for the campaign.

At the same time, while this may be just as valid at a metagame level, it is only justifiable speculation at an in-game level if the characters have sufficient exposure to game history to produce a reasonable Life Lesson in respect to the principle being applied. If that experience is not present, such thinking represents an unjustifiable level of paranoia.

This is a key differentiator between smaller campaigns and the sort of multi-year deals that are my stock in trade; as a campaign proceeds, there is clearly a significant evolution of the relationship between metagame and in-game thinking.

Unpredictability Is The Spice Of RPG Life

At the same time, however, simply repeating exactly the same things that you’ve done before will eventually grow dull. You need to be true to the principles that you have established as your modus operandi while presenting different situations and distinctive plot twists that are unpredictable.

This points, I think, to one aspect in which a campaign has a limited life-span. When you reach the point of repeating yourself and predictability, that campaign needs to close (or it will die a slow death); the GM needs the stimulus of new characters, new settings and contexts, in order to be able to devise new plotlines.

Campaign Longevity mandates Diversity

The converse of this thought is that being sufficiently creative that you can continue to explore new thoughts and new directions within the context of the existing campaign is a sign that it has not reached the end of it’s natural lifespan. If plotting is one of your GMing strengths, the result will be a campaign that can last for decades, as mine has.

This is not solely the province of the GM’s abilities, either. In any campaign that lasts this long, characters and players will come and go, providing fresh stimulation and evolving the campaign; but this demands creativity on the part of the players, who have the responsibility for the creation of those original characters. Should the well run dry – and I’ve seen it happen – the player has to bow out of the campaign, for his enjoyment thereafter will be crippled, and will negatively impact on the entertainment to the others.

Depth of characterization and background are also critical factors; these need to be rich enough to support variety of situation and response over a long period of time. This is an area in which some game systems excel, while others do not.

The Hero Games system, by virtue of digging into the psychology and ongoing circumstances surrounding a character through the Disadvantages sub-systems, encourages this sort of depth, for example, while D&D and Pathfinder do not mandate anything of the sort. This tends to blur the line between player and character a little more, and many of the distinctive features of a character are defined in terms of class and race – and (to all intents and purposes) are shared with everyone else who also possesses those attributes.

Which is a somewhat roundabout way of suggesting that some game systems better support campaign longevity than others. Ironically, being more open in terms of leaving things up to the players, impairs campaign longevity, while being more defined and hence restricted, encourages it.

Metagaming can be a useful tool for both Players and GM

Finally, I find it enlightening that these truths were revealed through the analytic gaze of metagaming. I have to wonder what else might be revealed through this unexpected tool?

Metagaming means viewing in-game developments from the loftier perspective of player knowledge. As such, you should be able to see bigger pictures, and their relationship to the smaller details of in-play experiences, more clearly. It means viewing game mechanics from the perspective of the use that the GM is making of them – which may be quite different to the usage suggested by the rule-books. Metagaming is all about applying purpose to everything else – either the GM’s purpose or a players’ purpose. That includes, plot, characterization, game mechanics, and even paranoia!

There is a perception that metagaming is inherently something bad. I tend to think it’s something positive that can be abused. The distinction is one of motive: why are you employing a meta-perspective? If the reason is positive – for example, arranging in-game circumstances to equalize screen time amongst players – then I think there’s nothing wrong with metagaming. If it is being used by the GM to maintain dominance over his players, manipulating and coercing them, and limiting their freedom of choice within the parameters of their characters, then it is a form of abuse of position, and not acceptable.

Purpose matters. Intentions matter. Everything else is just mechanism.

Documentaries are supposed to educate and enlighten, to Document and explain. There is little so irritating as a documentary that ignores or commits errors in basic facts to present a myopic, distorted, or one-sided view that provides only half the story.

This evening I started watching just such a documentary. One segment was discussing the great migration of humanity from rural to an urban setting, and it made a number of points worth recapitulating and interpreting from a fantasy RPG perspective. But then it committed a vital sin of omission of the type described above, and from that point on, became increasingly unwatchable as irritation over the fact tainted the experience.

This article will aim to correct that, and point out the true story. It will veer this way and that in the course of examining its subject matter, but always with the goal of helping fantasy GMs more accurately visualize their fantasy settings and the infrastructure needed to make them viable and believable.

Static Until About 1800

We’re so used to a booming urban population that it requires a profound adjustment in our thought processes to appreciate the fact that cities were rare.

Until about 1800, only 10% (at most) of the population resided in an urban community of any size, and between 9/10ths and 99/100ths of those were in small communities of no more than a few hundred people. A city of half-a-million was overwhelmingly extreme and improbably, and only the largest in the world could even approach that number. London at this time had not even hit the 1,000,000 mark.

Most of the population was rural, living on the land in what were essentially extended family units, frequently in the employ or service of a landowner.

It was the steam engine that changed this situation; it made factories possible, and factories provided employment, while at the same time, the steam engine made it possible for fewer laborers to produce the same or greater quantities of food more efficiently. (The documentary emphasized the first half of that statement while completely ignoring the second, and that was its great faux pas).

And food supplies define the size of a city, far more than disease or trade or anything else. If more food can’t be brought in, the city can’t grow, and if it does, the excess population will quickly starve.

A plague that wiped out 1/3 of the urban population would be a dreadful one indeed – worse than the Black Death – but, if adequate nutrition is available, those numbers would be replaced in but a single generation.

It was not until the steam revolution that it became possible to bring in sufficient food for a city to really grow in size. And, even then, it was not until 2016 that – for the first time ever – there were more people living in urban communities of noteworthy size than there were living in a rural setting, distributed and dispersed.

The economics of City Populations

Let’s say – and I don’t have access to the correct figures – that the typical well-fed individual in a medieval society consumes about 4lb of food per day, the adequately-nourished half that, and the ragged underclass, half that again.

If you have a population of 300,000, of whom 20% are adequately fed, and 3% are well-fed, that leaves about 77% at the edge of starvation. In fact, about 2/3 of this number would be starving most of the time, though they would all gain sufficient food to stave off death – often just in time. That’s the way populations work.

So that’s 60,000 getting 2lb of food a day, 9,000 getting 4lb, 77,000 getting 1lb, and 154,000 who average 0.3 lb overall by going hungry most of the time but getting 1lb of food every 2-4 days.

Multiply those food consumptions out, and you get 120,000lb + 36,000lb + 77,000lb + 46,200lb = 279,200 lb per day, or about 101,908,000 lb per year. Near enough to 51,000 tons. If the average wagon can bring in 10 tons of food per trip, that’s 5,100 wagon-loads, or about 14 per day.

An acre of wheat can produce perhaps 1 ton of wheat, 1/2 of which has to be conserved to sew next year’s crop, and 30% of which at least goes to the landowner and in various tithes and taxes. The remaining 20% feeds those who produce that acre of wheat.

So those 10 tons going into the city are only 30% of what the land produces – and that’s with one of the most efficient crops. Animals and Fruit and other forms require more area to produce a given quantity of food, sometimes a lot more. So let’s assume that the average is actually going to be half as efficient (and that’s being generous) – to get to 10 tons of food, you need about 67 acres of agricultural land.

Most land is not as productive as the best – let’s double the requirement to allow for that. 134 acres per 10 tons. And that makes no allowance for spoilage – let’s be generous and only add 50% for that. 200 acres per 10 tons. It also makes no allowance for bad years – so let’s add another 25% for that. 250 acres per 10 ton wagon-load.

The more agricultural land you have, the greater the distance that food from the outlying areas has to travel, increasing the spoilage rate, but that can be countered by various forms of food preservation – pickling and smoking and what-have-you – before the food sets out, or at some convenient location part-way to the market.

51,000 wagon-loads of 10 tons each thus represents the production of 12,750,000 acres, or about 19,922 square miles of average agricultural land – if the assumptions are correct. They aren’t of course; the real situation is far more complicated. That’s a radius of about 80 miles in all directions doing nothing but feed both itself and the city.

Wait – that all assumes that the ruler of the city doesn’t have anyone else to whom he has to pay taxes and tithes. If 30% of what the city gets in has to go elsewhere, we’re talking roughly 18,215,000 acres, or 28,461 square miles, or 95.2 miles in every direction. There’s more than enough fuzziness about some of these guesstimates to say that everything in a radius of between 80 and 400 miles goes into feeding this one city.

Yet, when most GMs picture a fantasy city, they think of something akin to the steam age cities in scale, a million people.

Making Urban Populations Practical

There are four things that can make urban populations of the 300,000+ size practical in medieval terms. The first is that they will inevitably be situated wherever the best land is. The second is that they will be situated on rivers, and river transport can easily carry produce faster, farther, and in greater quantity than any wagon. The third is that most animals can be conveyed ‘on the hoof’ and slaughtered on arrival, or after a suitable period of replenishment; that’s a lot more efficient than carrying that much dead weight in food, even though it will take longer. And finally, most major cities will be on or near the coast, because the sea adds a third dimension to the land-use – depth.

20 square miles of fishing area with a usable depth of 30′ is 6 times the size of 20 square miles that can only use the top 1′, even allowing for the fact that fish are not as densely-packed as vegetables can be. If a city can pull 1/3 or half it’s food supply straight from the oceans, it needs to bring in that much less via other means.

So you could have a city of 500,000 or 1,000,000 if you really want one. But the city has to support that level of population.

And it may not be able to do so, indefinitely.

Waste Disposal

It’s not a pretty subject, but it is an important one. Let’s say that 1/3 of the food consumed becomes human waste. That’s 1/3 of 51,000 tons a year, or 17,000 tons. It all has to go somewhere, and fantasy games are generally set in an era where sewerage processing is at its most primitive.

That river comes in handy once again, because that’s where it will all go – regardless of the medical dangers that this might pose, or the long-term effects on the fishing off the coast.

There must necessarily be an ongoing drive to improve the size and efficiency of the fishing fleet, because they will – over time – have to go further and further away from the city to find untainted food sources.

But here, the power of pi-r-squared comes to the rescue. a semicircle of 10 miles radius would represent an area of about 157.08 square miles. If that gets fished out or tainted, how much further out would your fleet have to travel to maintain the same fishing area? Well, we’re talking about doubling the area, which means we have to multiply the radius by the square root of 2, which is 1.414 – so between ten and 14.14 miles out to sea, there is as much surface area as there is within that 10 mile radius. And that’s assuming that you don’t get any more depth to play with, which is also unlikely.

That’s why improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the fishing industry is so important to a city achieving the sort of population scales that we’re talking about.

An Arcane Economy

A lot of this restriction goes out the window if industrial-scale magic is a factor, but few GMs go down that path, especially when it comes to Agriculture. Most of us don’t like the implications – mass-produced wands of Cure Light Wounds, a Sleep spell for every mugger, +1 swords on every street corner…. and even fewer are capable of working out the economic impact of all this. Certainly, the prices given in any game supplement don’t reflect this sort of industrial application of magic.

But, if you truly want a steam-era London for your capital, approaching 5 million citizens, with its thousands of beggars and poor and criminals, that’s what you have to embrace.

Even without going that far, any enhancement to the agricultural productivity of a region
through the use of magic – Divine, Clerical, Druidic, or whatever – can have a profound impact. Contemplate, even given the rough-and-unreliable numbers used, the impact of turning away the worst storms, and especially those at the wrong times of year, or of being able to guarantee good rainfall each and every year. Or, equally, sparing crops from insects and blight.

50% improvement means that 25% less land is needed to support a given population. 100% improvement – double the yields – means that half the land is needed. Or, to put it more appropriately, those would increase the size of the city population 25% and 50%, respectively, at a conservative estimate.

The more such intervention is routine, the more viable it is to have vast cities. Another mathematical property of numeric functions becomes significant – the exponential growth function. Let’s say that you have three such factors, and each improves agricultural productivity by 50%. The same area would then support a city of 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 = 3.375 times the size. 300,000 becomes more than a million.

If those three factors doubled production – still a relatively conservative estimate of what would be possible – the city swells to 2 x 2 x 2 times it’s size – 300,000 becomes 2.4 million.

The question then becomes, “What are the social and economic adjustments that are required to make such improvements sustainable?”

For the sake of argument, let’s suggest that all this is possible through Clerical Magic. The maximum number of acres that a given individual Cleric of a certain character level can care for would be carefully calculated, and there would be a massive industry set up to recruit, train, disperse, and support those Clerics.

If you assume that half the increase in population – or 2/3, or whatever seems reasonable – are employed in this manner, you can actually work backwards from the population increase in the cities to determine the number of acres each “practitioner” can support.

Farmers would have no choice in the matter. If they refused this Divine Aid, their efficiency would be so poor relative to their neighbors that they would immediately fail to meet the quotas that were set up on the assumption of such aid; they would be taxed off the land, and the farm turned over to someone more…. enlightened.

Social & Economic Dominoes

Ignoring entirely the question of magic for a moment, consider the impact of a city so dependent on its fishing fleet that a refusal to serve brings the city to its knees. Seamen would inevitably advance a step or two on the social ladder. They would be economically far more prosperous, able to afford nice homes. Law enforcement would almost certainly learn to look the other way when it came to minor offenses – like public drunkenness.

Whatever the justification for the population is that you choose to employ, it will inevitably have social, economic, and even theological implications. These must also be considered carefully; while they may be secondary effects, they are nevertheless tangible differences that should be apparent to the players.

The Size Of Fantasy Cities

As you can see, you can have cities of any size you desire in your fantasy world; but there is a necessity for cities to “justify” their sizes or the setting’s credibility will always limp. Your players might not know quite what is wrong, but something about the setup simply won’t seem right to them.

Decide the size you want your cities to be, then set up the social, political, economic, and agricultural demands that are required to sustain cities of that size. And that’s all there is to it!

You can never tell where your next inspiration is coming from. Today’s article was founded upon an interview with a group of multimedia performers who combine original music with puppetry and performance that dated back to a few weeks ago. I didn’t see the whole thing, so I’m not even sure what show it was; all I know was that the end of it got caught at the start of a show that I had time-shifted and finally got around to watching over the weekend past.

One of them was telling someone else – either an interviewer or a new member of the group, I couldn’t be sure – about the difference between puppetry and live performance by an actor. With a puppet, you can’t make realistic movements; not only do they not have sufficient range of motion to replicate anything even close, but attempting to do so makes it impossible to follow the story being told.

Instead, you need to “distill the entire movement down to a single simple gesture” (I think the quote’s correct). The rest of the story amplified on the point with the example of someone reaching to open a door and then started to talk about the music, which isn’t directly relevant to the discussion at hand.

The similarity to the situation we face as roleplayers and especially as GMs was immediately obvious to me.

We can’t completely inhabit the roles we adopt and perform; we have to continually break character to discuss game mechanics and die rolls and – in the case of the GM – deliver omniscient narrative and make plot and situational judgments and do half a dozen other things. And even then, we can’t physically perform in the role; simply speak in character and distill the actions that we describe, out-of-character, down to simple single gestures delivered sequentially.

In truth, we have more in common with a bunch of actors and crew sitting around a big table somewhere giving a script its’ first read-through than with an actual on-stage or on-film performance, and an equal legacy from radio-based improvisational theater.

But the idea that the characters we depict have more in common with shadow puppets was a new one, and it crystallized something that had been lurking in the back of my mind for a while.

How do we roleplay? What’s the process?

Well, I can’t speak to how anyone else does it – and I’ve never read anyone else’s attempt to describe the process in detail – but I thought it would be instructive to analyze and document how I do it.

Visualization

Step One is to refresh a mental visualization of the situation as the character perceives it. This may be aided by illustrations, photographs, battlemaps and miniatures, sketches, maps, and what-have-you, but ultimately it comes down to my imagination taking in the words spoken by others at the game table and the event outcomes described by die rolls and the perceptive & comprehension limits and capabilities of the character, used as a filter.

I don’t have long to put this visualization together – a second or two at most, and usually less. This is possible only because I already have such a visualization from previous turns and/or narrative, so it only needs updating from round to round.

The more characters that I am keeping track of, the simpler the logistical situation needs to be so that I don’t have to spend additional time perpetually adjusting for the differences in capabilities that distinguish those characters. The more that I can simplify the task, the better.

Characterization

Next, I need to capture, in a different part of my mind, the characterization of the character who is being depicted at that particular moment. Personality could, and should, always be a factor in deciding what a character will say and do, regardless of the situation.

Again, I have very little time to do this. When I am running a single character, this is relatively straightforward, but when running multiple characters, the time that it takes to shift from one mindset to another becomes a significant factor.

The best solution is to distill the personality, no matter how complex, down to one or at most two fundamental “directions”, then quickly scan the character sheet or character write-up to ensure that nothing else usurps those as the most fundamental determining factor in the character’s behavioral choices.

One Choice Of Action

The combination usually makes it clear what the character is going to do, and – if that response is to say something – what the gist of that statement and it’s emotional content is going to be. Say, 99% of the time.

(This used to be a LOT lower and slower, back when I was still relatively inexperienced as a player; and when first becoming a GM, it was either slower and less frequent or the characters were a fairly basic characterization without sophistication or nuance. This is definitely a learned skill).

On rare occasions, the character might need to hesitate to give me a moment to think, or I might need to employ some other factor in my decision-making.

Those other factors generally come in three forms, often simultaneously and in contradiction: What the character’s objective is in the scene, what impact I want the scene to have on the plot, and what the desired emotional intensity of the scene is (and whether the current levels are too low or too high).

What Isn’t There

But, most of the time, those metagame considerations are either irrelevant because I’m not the GM, or I have already baked them into the scene.

My objective, when designing a scene or encounter, is to create circumstances that achieve those metagame goals by virtue of the character being who they “are”, simply so that I don’t have to think about them most of the time.

The key point is this: 99% of the time, there’s no need to think about the bigger picture, simply to respond to the micro-picture presented to the character that I am representing.

And I make it a point to touch base with those subjects each time I am forced out of character, and update those “one or two fundamental directions” if necessary.

…Even when Improvising

This is largely true whether I’m working from some predetermined plan or improvising on the spot. That’s because this is a process of roleplaying that I have developed to take advantage of those many many times that I am forced to break character for one reason or another – that long list that I mentioned at the head of the article.

Bringing it back to the point

In many different respects, there is a limit to the degree of nuance that you can communicate effectively. In simplifying the world-view to the single perspective of what this character perceives and how he interprets it, or simplifying his or her personality and the impact that it has on their choices of actions, or simplifying the available choices of reactions/responses to the one that best fits the situation, or even in simplifying the context of the situation to something that I don’t need to actively modify and moderate continually, permitting focus on the smaller and more immediate picture, many different aspects can be described by the phrase, “distill the entire movement down to a single simple gesture” – at least metaphorically.

How about you? Have you ever stopped to analyze exactly what process you undertake when you roleplay? Or is it all purely instinctive, with no “process” at all?

The more you understand what it is that you do, the more easily you can identify and correct flaws in your approach, and the better you will become at this most central of crafts. You don’t have to do it my way, but you should know what your way is – because that analysis always helps you improve your skills more quickly.

Introductory Recap

This is the third post on the development of a bespoke game system for use in my latest campaign, which is now scheduled to start play on October 21st – so finishing this has become a priority.

Let’s start with a recap. A couple of minor details that weren’t properly explained the first time around are presented in italic bold.

Stats:

In the first article, I listed the 18 stats that I expected to use, with some notes on how they would tie into the game system. I have re-ordered them slightly in the list below to move most of the calculated stats to the bottom of the list.

• STR – Strength, i.e. physical force.
• CON – Constitution, i.e. health.
• RES – Resistance to physical harm, assuming maximum defensive armor. Lighter armors subtract from it.
• NIM – Nimbleness. Heavier armors will subtract from it.
• DEX – overall measure of manual Dexterity, used for manipulating tools and keyboards. The stat rolled is averaged with NIM to get the actual stat value. Hand protection will subtract from it.
• ACC – Accuracy with aimed weapons.
• MEL – effectiveness with Melee weapons & unarmed combat.
• PRAC – the character’s aptitude for Practical skills.
• THEO – the character’s aptitude for intellectual/analytic/Theory skills.
• ENC – Encyclopedic Knowledge, the character’s knowledge bank of facts and processes.
• LAN – the character’s capacity for quick-learning Languages. Discussed below.
• AWA – Awareness of the environment around the character, used for “spot” and “listen” checks.
• PERS – Personality, a combination of Presence, Charisma, and Persuasiveness, the foundation of any interpersonal skills.
• END – Endurance. Starts equal to CON.
• INT – Intelligence. Equal to 1/4 of (PRAC + THEO + ENC + LAN), + 1d6, -1d6.
• HP – Hit Points. Equal to 2 x CON + RES + NIM.
• SHK – Shock Threshold. equal to 1/5th HP, round up.
• KARMA – The universe’s debt to the character’s good fortune. Initially 10, -1 for each stat with a score of 17 or better, +1 for each stat with a score of 8 or less. Karma can be sacrificed in-game to gain a lucky advantage or to buy off a restriction placed on the PCs by the campaign background, the latter at prices to be determined by the GM. Some penalties must be bought off collectively by all PCs contributing to a pool. The GM can also throw unlucky circumstances at the PCs which turn into a Karma boost if the PCs overcome the circumstance indirectly, i.e. without directly countering with PC Karma, effectively adding to the XP that the characters get for the adventure.

It then went into the stat population process – how stat values are generated and allocated – in some detail, so I won’t repeat it here.

Stat Checks

Roll 4d6 + modifier from the GM. The character needs to get stat or less on this roll to succeed in the challenge.

Improving Stats

During Character Generation, +1 to a stat for -3 skill points or -1 to a stat for +2 skill points.

Skills

Skill Base Values

Stat / 2 +2, round up.

Skill Points

Starting skill points = INT x 2.

Skill Definitions

Characters define their own skills. Their profession must be the first such skill listed.

Skills are then classified by the GM as Specific, Narrow, or Broad. Specific skills are only useful for one small, closely-related set of tasks; Narrow skills are useful for a somewhat wider variety of tasks; and Broad skills are useful in a wide variety of applications. These cost 1, 2, or 4 skill points, respectively.

Skill Checks

When the PC attempts a task, he lists any skills he feels are relevant. The GM selects a stat basis that he thinks is most relevant and picks the single skill that is most appropriate from the list offered by the player.

Skill ranks + stat basis + modifier = target value. Player rolls 3d6 and must get less than or equal to the target value to succeed.

If a character has more than one skill that might be relevant, he must select the most relevant one, breaking ties in favor of narrowness. Each additional skill, if the GM agrees that it is also relevant, adds 2 to the target value for the check.

Weapon Skills

Characters can take weapon skills. These are broadly defined, and cost 2 skill points each, or general category skills, costing 3 skill points each. “Gun” is a general category, and so is “Firearm”. “Handgun” or “Pistol” or “Rifle” are broadly defined weapons types. If characters want to waste their points, a specific skill in a specific model (1 point) can also be applied.

Unproficient

If a character has no ranks in the skill he is attempting to use, his chance of success is defined by the relevant Skill Foundation alone, +1 for each indirectly-related skill the GM deems appropriate.

Improving Skills

Additional ranks in a skill cost 1 skill point per rank.

Skill Standards [from article 2]

Expert/Professional = 3 ranks
Skilled Assistant = 2 ranks
Trainees/Junior Assistants = 1 rank
Unskilled/Support Staff = 0 ranks

Eventual Success

If the referee deems a circumstance to be such that the characters will eventually succeed and is more interested in how long it takes to achieve that success, instead of applying “Extra Time” as a modifier, he can use the degree of success or failure on the skill or stat check as an index and interpret the “extra time” as an indicator of how long success takes to achieve. He may apply a modifier to this result based on the degree of success that the characters indicate is desired.

For example, if setting up a camp site, the characters may deem a marginal success as undesirable. Based on the standards that they describe, the GM may decide that success by 5 or more is what they want to achieve; when they make their check, he reduces the margin of success by 5, accordingly, before consulting the extra time chart.

There is a trade-off possible in which quality of outcome is further traded for extra time taken to achieve it, or vice-versa, and the GM may also interpret the results for the players in such a way that they have the choice of accepting an outcome or of spending more time to achieve a better result.

Disadvantages

These are ranked in terms of applicability of circumstance by the GM and awarded values of 1, 2, or 4 points, (specific to general). Specific disadvantages cause a reduction in proficiency in one particular skill or similar area of activity. Two points affect a broader range of activities, while 4 point skills affect a very wide range of activities. For example, “Poor at Mathematics” is a 2-point disadvantage.

If the Disadvantage is one that isn’t readily/directly applicable to skill checks, the impact on the character’s life and freedom of choice should be assessed and a value chosen based on a skill penalty of similar impact.

Multiple ranks can be taken in a Disadvantage; each confers the equivalent of two negative ranks. Each additional rank reduces in value by 1 point to a minimum of one point.

Disadvantage Points add directly to the number of Skill Points available to the character.

Karma Limits

There is a limit to the total number of ranks that a character can have in a given disadvantage equal to his starting Karma divided by 3, round up.

There is a limit to the number of disadvantages that a character can earn points from that is equal to his current Karma.

Removing/Reducing Disadvantages

Before a Disadvantage can be removed, it must be reduced to a single rank. Normally, only one rank can be removed from a given disadvantage per adventure but this restriction can be varied by the GM if it seems appropriate.

To remove a rank in a disadvantage, the character expends 1 point of Karma, reducing his Karma total accordingly.

Karmic Debt

If a character’s Karma drops in the course of an adventure to the point that he is forced to reduce one or more disadvantages because they would exceed the Karmic Limit described above, he is forced to experience a Complication.

A Complication is a player-invoked setback that worsens one or more other disadvantages by one rank for each rank in the Disadvantage being nullified. If he can no longer do so because his disadvantages are at the maximum permitted level, a stat other than Karma is semi-permanently reduced as a consequence of the setback. Note that this has to happen in-play.

The nature of the setback offered by the player and the number of stat points lost determine the value of the Complication – minus one point in one stat is worth one rank in the setback. That means that the scale of the Complication should be set to match the total unpaid Karmic Debt accrued by the event.

Another form of setback that is acceptable is for the player to deliberately blow a mission-critical roll for his character and refuse a re-roll.

Setbacks are treated as disadvantages worth “negative karma” and can be paid off whenever the GM deems it appropriate by the expenditure of earned Karma, i,e, XP (see below).

Karmic Starvation

If a reduction in disadvantages means that a character has expended more on skills than his disadvantages can pay for, he experiences Karmic Starvation. This mandates a Complication, as above, but instead of reducing ranks in Disadvantages, it temporarily reduces the amount of skill points expended by two skill points per rank in the Complication.

Other Uses For Karma

• Karma can be used to re-roll a failed roll at the player’s discretion, or to give another character a +5 in a mission-critical roll. These applications consume one Karma.
• Karma can be converted into additional Skill Points at the rate of 2 Skill points per point of Karma consumed.
• Karma can be converted into a stat increase at the rate of 2 Karma per +1. Once a stat exceeds 25, this cost doubles, and for every +5 to that limit, it doubles again. Note that this is far more expensive than during character construction.
• Karma can be expended during character construction to modify rolled stats. Every point of Karma consumed permits one stat to be reduced by 1 and another to be increased by 2. Note that this also affects the character’s Starting Karma.
• Karma can be expended to obtain a stroke of good fortune in the course of an adventure. The player tells the GM what “good luck” he would like to have and the GM counts the number of successful rolls that he would normally require in order to achieve the same outcome. That count is the cost of the stroke of good fortune, in Karma. If the cost is more than the character can or is willing to pay, the GM may propose a lower-cost variation that gives the PCs some or even all of what they want; the GM is expected to work with the players in this respect.
• Karma can be expended to reduce or remove a limitation placed on the characters by the campaign setup or background, for example to expand a character’s Meitner Field Radius, permitting them to carry more equipment through a Zener Transition. An explanation for this change will be incorporated into the next adventure by the GM, and the benefit will take effect from that time, NOT immediately.
• Finally, Karma can be expended to delay the next Zener Transition long enough for the PCs to complete their current adventure. The cost in Karma is the Time Shift shown on the modifiers table. This will only be possible after three specific campaign upgrades are purchased – enlarged Meitner Fields (PCs can carry equipment), Limited Comms to Zener Command (who design a detector), and Zener Transition Threshold Detection (when the PCs build the device designed by Zener Command).

Experience

Experience is earned for surviving an adventure.

More experience is earned for helping the locals deal with whatever problem they are experiencing when the PCs arrive. +50% XP for a solution to be implemented by the locals following PC advice, double XP for a solution to the problem that is put in place by the PCs, and these are doubled again for a permanent solution to the problem. Typical BASE xp will be 1-3 per game session, lower more often than higher, based on the length of the adventure and the difficulties that have to be overcome.

Selfish or amoral behavior reduces XP award is by 1, but this will be waived if the whole purpose of the plotline is to benefit the PCs in some way.

XP is paid in additional Karma.

The GM can (and probably will) choose to introduce an additional complication into an adventure at any time, at the cost of immediately giving the directly-affected character or characters 2 Karma, or he can give an NPC +10 to a roll (GREATLY increasing their chances of success) and increasing the Karma of one or more PCs by 1. He can do this AFTER a roll is made, turning a failure into a success . These immediate payments are in addition to any Karma earned in the course of the adventure. Increasing the difficulty can also increase the Karmic Reward at the end of the adventure. However, setbacks and complications from Karmic Debt or Karmic Starvation do not affect the Karmic Payout.

If a PC chooses to, he can sacrifice Karma to nullify or redress this interference through a stroke of good fortune, as described earlier; doing so means that the complication introduced by the GM also doesn’t count toward the end-of-adventure bonus. You get “paid” to solve your own problems through game-play, not use the game mechanics to do it for you.

Unspent Karma is always useful to have, but spending it improves the self-reliance of the PCs. Having too much unspent Karma effectively reduces the effectiveness of the PCs, having not enough can induce Karmic Debt or Karmic Starvation. The margin that a player considers safe is up to him!

As the PCs discover the situation that they are in, the GM may choose to symbolically reflect each piece of bad news for the players with a token representing an increased XP value for the adventure. The more impossible the situation seems to be, the more Karma he makes “up for grabs” – if the PCs are clever enough to earn it!

Equipment

Equipment in general is defined in the same way as skills (broad, narrow, specific) but is never the basis of a check. Equipment does count for the purposes of “other appropriate skills” or “indirectly-related skills”, provided the equipment is actually being used for the task – actually having a “.33 special” doesn’t help in firing that 44 Magnum.

Unless noted otherwise as part of the circumstances, a skill implies having the appropriate equipment; buying the equipment specifically in addition to the skill implies that the character has something that’s been customized or modified to suit them. So “Fisherman” implies having a rod and reel, or the means to improvise something. Actually buying a Fishing Rod in addition is unnecessary (but does provide a bonus to your fisherman skill checks).

If circumstances have left the character without those implied tools, that’s a factor that the GM takes into account with his circumstantial modifiers.

Three exceptions are weapons, armor, and Campaign MacGuffins.

Weapons

The cost and characteristics of a weapon are calculated as follows:

• The base damage inflicted by a weapon is up to the GM. As a rule of thumb, most melee weapons will be 1d6 or smaller, most handguns will be 2d6, most rifles will be 3d6, most shotguns will be 4d6, most grenades will be 5d6, most anti-vehicle weapons will 6d6 or more. Base Damage: 1 point for 1/3 d6, 2 points for 1/2 d6, 3 points for 1d6, 4 points for 2d6, 5 points for 3d6, and so on.
• Rate Of Fire: 1 point for 1 shot per round, 2 points for a short burst per round (conferring an extra d6 on the damage), 3 points for full auto (confers an extra 2 1/2 d6 per round).
• Additional Damage: 1 point for each +1 to damage.
• Maximum Range: The above costs are added together and compared to the universal index table (see below) to determine the base range. The GM can then restrict this to an “effective range”, reducing the cost of the weapon 1 point for every 2 steps up the table. Weapons defined as “Melee” automatically have zero range, but additional range can then be bought as “reach”.

This cost is halved (round up) if the character takes an appropriate skill in the weapon’s use.

Note that until PCs buy an Expanded Meitner Field, there are limits on what weaponry a character can carry.

Equipment that PCs obtain in the course of an adventure but can’t take with them costs nothing.

If the equipment is completely consumed or used up in the course of an adventure, the PC is refunded all but 1 point of the actual cost.

Armor

The cost and characteristics of armor are calculated as follows:

• Hardness (1-10 scale) – each step on the scale increases the protection provided by the armor in the form of bonus Resistance.
• Coverage (1-4 scale) – each step on the scale increases the amount of protection provided by the armor by approximately 25%, so one-quarter coverage, half-coverage, three-quarters coverage, or whole-body coverage.
• These are multiplied together, The penalty imposed to Nimbleness is then decided based on what the GM considers reasonable and added to the total.
• The result divided by three is the cost of the armor in Skill Points.

This cost is halved (round up) if the character takes an appropriate skill in the armor’s use.

Note that until PCs buy an Expanded Meitner Field, there are limits on what weaponry a character can carry.

Equipment that PCs obtain in the course of an adventure but can’t take with them costs nothing.

If the equipment is completely consumed or used up in the course of an adventure, the PC is refunded all but 1 point of the actual cost.

Campaign MacGuffins

Some of the campaign limitations are so “big” that they have to be bought off in stages, for example constructing a reliable communications link back to Zener Command. Less-reliable comms will become available as plot devices in the meanwhile.

Each point of Karma expended for the purpose by any PC adds to the total invested in “Campaign MacGuffins” and is translated into a component of the whole or a refinement of the design or construction that will be incorporated into the next adventure.

These tangible Campaign MacGuffins will be given suitable names in-game, e.g. “crystal radio set”. When the GM feels that the characters have accumulated enough of them, an improvement will be made in one restriction. These amounts are being left flexible for now, but the rough scale is intended to be 4 points for a minor improvement, 10 points for a new capability, 20 points for the complete removal of a limitation.

A couple of side-notes before I continue.

XP Balance

First, part of the rationale behind the point costs for Campaign MacGuffins suggested above is that I want time for the players to get used to a given “state of the campaign” before the next upgrade, part of it refers to the value that I expect it to have in terms of advantages to the PCs, and part of it is controlling the amount of XP that the characters have available for improvement in their abilities.

Take another look at that XP-earning profile. To make an adventure interesting, there might be a couple of setbacks thrown into the plot. There could be as many as 3 base XP. That gets us to 7. If the PCs provide a permanent solution to whatever the problem is that the locals are experiencing when the PCs arrive, that gets multiplied by 4, to 28, and there are two PCs in this campaign, so that’s effectively 56 between them. On top of that, there’s 4-8 instant XP for those setbacks – so, “best-case” scenario from the PC’s point of view gives them as much as 64 xp to spend.

If a couple of points get expended by each on re-rolls, and maybe a couple more on “stroke of good luck” – call it 8 points between them – and if each keeps 8 points unspent for the next adventure, that leaves 40 points. 20 points spent on a major Campaign Macguffin, and that will leave 20 to spend on skills and stats – from a major adventure.

A smaller adventure might have one setback affecting both PCs, and would only be worth a base of 1 xp. Again assuming a best-case scenario, that’s (2+2)x4=16 xp each, or a total between them of 32 xp. With the same 8 spent, and the same 16 held in reserve by both, that leaves 8 – enough for a minor Campaign Macguffin and 2 points each for a small skill or stat improvement.

Those aren’t huge amounts, given perhaps half-a-dozen to a dozen skills and 18 stats.

Of course, the players might spend less, and keep a smaller reserve, and might already have a reserve from previous adventures – so they might have more to spend. At the same time, as the campaign proceeds, they will also have expenses for equipment to eat into those past reserves.

Although the numbers were tossed out fairly quickly in the first article, there was actually a lot of thought given to campaign balance behind the scenes. The goal is to give away enough experience that the campaign and PCs keep progressing, while not being enough to produce overwhelming change, and keeping the PCs hungry for more..

Min-Maxing is extremely difficult

Another key consideration behind the scenes is that the system is designed to give players multiple priorities to choose between, several of them contradictory if not competing. The goal is to make min-maxing very hard to achieve.

This mattered in the design because one of the expected players is very good at doing this sort of thing almost instinctively, while the other is not. Making it more difficult to find a clear path to overwhelming advantage should equalize the two.

In particular, the stat roll selection mechanism is intended to ensure that all characters have room to develop. Choosing a high INT brings skill flexibility, which will pay off over the longer term, but sucks a lot of points out of the character in the short term, when stat improvement is at its most efficient, and well-chosen skills are at their most valuable.

But each of the stats brings a benefit to the character, there are no obvious dump stats, and that’s not by accident.

Which brings me to the second article, and the populating of the Modifiers Table. This is a central feature of the game system. I have compiled everything into a single table (which fits on two pages) but I’ll break it down below. First, incidental rules; second the base values and progression rates; and third, the actual tables. In addition, near the end of the boxed-off recap, a two-page PDF putting everything together into a single two-page table (A4 in size, so if you print a copy you will want to take that into account).

Additional Rules

Impossible Chances

If it is impossible for the character to succeed, a character can try for a miracle success. For every extra dice they roll and count toward the total, they increase the target by +2, up to the point where a possible roll is achieved.

If a character can’t fail, the character can choose to add “extra benefits” to their attempt. The GM evaluates what benefit or trick the player wants to add as an increase in the difficulty. For every 2 over 18/-, the difficulty target gets reduced by 2 for every extra dice that the character gets to roll, while ignoring all but the lowest 3.

These are intended to (1) give PCs a chance at achieving a hail-Mary pass; and (2) offer them a benefit if they increase the chance of failing when success would otherwise be automatic, both as optional rules that the player (not the GM) can invoke.

Loads

A Balanced load counts for 1/2 of its actual weight. An unbalanced load counts for its full weight. A Distributed load counts for 1/3 of its actual weight.

Shared loads are calculated by dividing the total load by the number of participants gives each individual load, and the group can only move as fast, and as far, as it’s most heavily-burdened character.

Vehicle STR defines their carrying capacity, which is used for fuel, passengers, and luggage. These are considered balanced loads.

Target Size Adjustment

If the range modifier is greater than the target size modifier, add the Range Adjustment Modifier based on the difference. If the range modifier is smaller than the target size modifier, subtract the difference.

Cover

Cover reduces the effective size of the target as shown. So does choosing a more precise target vs attacking the full body of an opponent.

The system is based on +0 for fully-exposed human. -1 for head & torso or aiming for a flesh wound; -2 for head and neck; -3 for an open hand or a weapon in hand; -6 for an eye socket.

Extra Time Spent/Rushing

Taking extra time or rushing a task produces the modifier shown on the time chart. This does not apply to aiming weapons, which have a special interpretation of the time chart (see below). Simply pointing a weapon in the general direction of a target and pulling the trigger (i.e. suppression fire) is defined as having a -5 chance to hit.

Aiming

The time spent aiming is converted to a bonus to hit according to the time chart. Pistols capped at 2 sec, Rifles capped at 10 sec, Sniper attacks capped at 10 min.

Assistants

The number of assistants of skill level 1 less than the lead operator for a given bonus is shown on the table of values. For assistants of skill level 2 less, drop one level on the table, and so on.

Table Summary

Base Table Values:

Weight/Load: index 10 = 30kg
Distance/Range: index 0 = 1m
Target Size: index 0 = 1m² at 2m, 10=1000m² at 2m.
Aiming/Extra Time: This is non-linear, consult the table.
Delicacy: index 0 = 1 cm
Scaling: index 0 = x1
Assistants: 0 = None at skill -1, 1 step down for additional reductions in skill

Table Value Progressions:

Weight/Load: x2 Weight for +7 index value.
Distance/Range: x10 distance for +10 index value
Target Size: index +1 = Approx x2
Aiming/Extra Time: This is non-linear, consult the table.
Delicacy: index +1 = /2, index +2=/10.
Scaling: index +1 = x10
Assistants: index +1 = +(index+1), +1 after index 2

Tables

In addition to being presented below, the Zener Gate system tables have also been compiled into a 2-page PDF (in the format they were ultimately intended to take), which can be downloaded by clicking the icon to the left.

Weight/Load Table: -24 1.5 kg pistol + holster; two grenades, 4 loaves of bread -11 4 kg rifle, lightweight sleeping bag -8 5 kg pickax, riding saddle -7 6 kg portable astronomy telescope -6 6.5kg heavy sleeping bag -5 7 kg folding cot, cloth & aluminum -4 8 kg shot-put, baby -3 8.7 kg sleeping bag, arctic weight, wide-band radio receiver -2 9.6 kg large baby -1 10.5 kg typical overnight bag, portable TV set 0 12 kg aluminum 12′ ladder, M-60 light machine gun 1 13 kg 25 gallon barrel of water, western saddle, bicycle 2 14 kg heavy overnight bag, small wood & canvas folding table, 1-man tent 3 15 kg large metal toolbox, man-length of light rope 4 17 kg block-and-tackle 5 18.5 kg Encyclopedia Set 6 20 kg Small Child, Chainsaw, 2-man canvas tent 7 22.5 kg Small Missile, goat 8 25 kg Full Suitcase, Small TV 9 27 kg 4-man canvas tent 10 30 kg Movie camera 11 33 kg 12 36 kg 13 40 kg child 14 45 kg small sack of mail 15 50 kg older child 16 55 kg 17 60 kg early teen 18 66 kg 19 72kg 20 80 kg teenager, slightly-built adult 21 88 kg 22 100 kg healthy large adult 23 110 kg overweight/large adult 24 120 kg 25 132 kg 26 144 kg 27 160 kg 28 175 kg 29 200 kg piano 30 220 kg 31 240 kg 32 265 kg 33 290 kg 34 320 kg 35 350 kg 36 400 kg Large motorcycle 37 440kg

 

Distance/Range Table: -8 16cm pistol barrel, female hand -7 20 cm male hand & wrist -6 25 cm 1′ -5 32 cm -4 40 cm forearm & hand -3 50 cm forearm, hand, pistol barrel -2 64 cm ~2′ -1 80 cm arm’s length 0 1m 3′ 1 1.3m ~4.25′ 2 1.6m ~5.25′ 3 2m 3 normal steps, 4 2.5m ~8′ 5 3.2m ~10.5′ 6 4m 13.1′, approx length of a small car 7 5m ~1.5 small cars or approx 10 sec walk at slow pace (2km/h) 8 6.4m ~21′ (length of a semitrailer) 9 8m ~26′ 10 10m ~33′ 11 13m ~42.5′ (distance traveled in ~0.5 sec at 60mph or walked in ~10 sec at normal pace (4 km/h)) 12 16m ~52′ (distance traveled in ~0.5 sec at 75mph, or 1 sec at 35mph, or walked in ~10sec at brisk pace (6 km/h)) 13 20m >65′ 14 25m railway carriage, ~82′, distance traveled in 0.93 sec at 60mph) 15 32m ~105′ (distance traveled in ~2 sec at 35mph or walked in ~1min at slow pace (2km/h)) 16 40m ~130′ (distance traveled in 1.2 sec at 75mph) 17 50m 164′ 18 65m ~213′ (distance traveled in 2.4 sec at 60mph or walked in ~1 min at normal pace (4km/h)) 19 80m ~262.5′ (distance traveled in 2.4 sec at 75mph) 20 100m 328′ (distance walked in 1 min at brisk pace (6km/h)) 21 130m 426.5′ 22 160m 525′ 23 200m >655′ 24 250m ~820′, about 1 city block 25 320m 1050′ or 0.2 miles, ~1 sec at Mach 1 26 400m 1/4 mile 27 500m 0.31 miles 28 650m 0.4 miles, ~1 sec at Mach 2 29 800m 1/2 mile 30 1 km 0.6 miles, 1 sec at Mach 3 31 1.3 km 0.8 miles, 1 sec at Mach 4 32 1.6 km 1 mile (distance traveled in 1 min at 60 mph or 1 sec at Mach 5) 33 2 km 1.25 miles 34 2.5km 1.55 miles (distance traveled in ~1.25 min at 75mph, or in 7.33 sec at mach 1) 35 3.2km 2 miles 36 4km 2.5 miles (~6 sec at Mach 2) 37 5km 3.1 miles (2.9 sec at Mach 5)

 
Target Size Table:

Target Size Table (at 2m): -8 Keyhole -7 Ring, Bulls-eye -6 Eye Socket -5 Finger -4 Fist -3 Open hand or weapon in hand -2 Human head and neck -1 Human head and torso, or aiming for a Flesh Wound 0 1 square m Whole Human Body 1 Large Motorcycle, Doorway 2 Small Car Side View 3 Truck Side View 4 Aircraft control cabin 5 Fishing Trawler, Barn Door 6 Locomotive, Barn Side 7 Small Train 8 Large Train, Freighter (Side view), Small House 9 Large House 10 Small Mansion, Lighthouse 11 Large Mansion, Eiffel Tower 12 The Pentagon (top view) 13 Small Skyscraper (side view) 14 12,000 square m 15 25,000 square m 16 50,000 square m 17 1 square km 18 2 square km 19 4 square km 20 8 square km 21 15 square km 22 30 square km 23 60 square km 24 120 square km 25 250 square km

 

Range Adjustment: +1 1 +2 3 +3 7 +4 12 +5 18 +6 25 +7 33 +8 42 +9 52 +10 63

 

Aiming/Extra Time Table: -6 < x 0.1 -5 x 0.1 -4 x 0.2 -3 x 0.4 -2 x 0.6 -1 x 0.75 0 x 1 1 x 1.5 2 x 2 3 x 5 4 x 10 5 x 20 6 x 50 7 x 100 8 x 200 9 x 500 10 x 1,000 11 x 2,000 12 x 5,000 13 x 10,000+

 

Delicacy Table: -2 1m -1 5 cm 0 1 cm A marble, Bone thickness 1 5 mm Ants, Seeds 2 1 mm Pixel, Furniture tolerance 3 0.1 mm Human hair, Resolution limit – naked eye 4 0.05 mm Thickness, paper sheet; Human skin cell 5 0.01 mm Silk fiber, 1971 transistor 6 5 µm Cell nucleus, X Chromosome, Red blood cell 7 1 µm (1 micron) Y chromosome, clay particle, e coli bacterium 8 500 nm largest virus; 750 nm = red wavelength, 400 nm = violet wavelength 9 100 nm HIV Virus; Resolution limit – optical microscope 10 50 nm Hepatitis B virus Infrared wavelength 11 10 nm 25 nm = 2017 transistors 12 5 nm Cell membrane, DNA 13 1 nm = 100 Angstroms Buckyball 14 50 Angstroms Glucose molecule, Cesium atom 15 10 Angstroms 34 Å = Carbon atom 28 Å = Water molecule 16 5 Angstroms Resolution limit – electron microscope 17 1 Angstrom 3.1 Å = Hydrogen atom, 2.5 Å = Helium atom 18 0.5 Angstroms 19 1 picometer Gamma Ray wavelengths Resolution limit – theoretical gamma-ray microscope 20 50 femtometers 21 10 femtometers 15 fm = Uranium nucleus 22 5 femtometers 3 fm = Helium nucleus 23 1 femtometer Proton, Neutron 24 500 attometers 25 100 attometers smallest confirmed objects in existence

 
Scaling Table:

Scaling Table: 0 x1 1 x 10 (Magnifying glass, Jeweler’s loupe) High-quality precision manual tools 2 x 100 Scaling limit, precision manual tools 3 x1000 Primitive process-based designer tools, Computerized scaling tools 4 x10k Generation-2 process-based tools, Computerized scaling tools 5 x100k (Resolution limit, optical microscopes) Generation-3 process-based tools, Light/laser-based scaling tools 6 x 1M Generation-4 process-based tools, Energy-beam-based scaling tools 7 x 10M Virus-based nanotechnology, Generation-5 process-based tools 8 x 100M True nanomachines, the Nanocar 9 x 1000M (Resolution limit – Electron Microscopes) Process-based chemical tools, Buckyballs 10 x 10G or more (Sci-Fi Only)

 

Assistants Table: 0 None @ skill -1 1 @ skill -2 2-3 @ skill -3 4-7 @ skill -4 1 1 @ skill -1 2-3 @ skill -2 4-7 @ skill -3 8-12 @ skill -4 2 2-3 @ skill -1 4-7 @ skill -2 8-12 @ skill -3 13-18 @ skill -4 3 4-7 @ skill -1 8-12 @ skill -2 13-18 @ skill -3 19-25 @ skill -4 4 8-12 @ skill -1 13-18 @ skill -2 19-25 @ skill -3 26-33 @ skill -4 5 13-18 @ skill -1 19-25 @ skill -2 26-33 @ skill -3 34-42 @ skill -4 6 19-25 @ skill -1 26-33 @ skill -2 34-42 @ skill -3 43-52 @ skill -4 7 26-33 @ skill -1 34-42 @ skill -2 43-52 @ skill -3 53-63 @ skill -4 8 34-42 @ skill -1 43-52 @ skill -2 53-63 @ skill -3 64-75 @ skill -4 9 43-52 @ skill -1 53-63 @ skill -2 64-75 @ skill -3 76-88 @ skill -4 10 53-63 @ skill -1 64-75 @ skill -2 76-88 @ skill -3 89-102 @ skill -4 11 64-75 @ skill -1 76-88 @ skill -2 89-102 @ skill -3 103-117 @ skill -4 12 76-88 @ skill -1 89-102 @ skill -2 103-117 @ skill -3 118-133 @ skill -4 13 89-102 @ skill -1 103-117 @ skill -2 118-133 @ skill -3 134-150 @ skill -4 14 103-117 @ skill -1 118-133 @ skill -2 134-150 @ skill -3 151-168 @ skill -4

What Remains

At the end of the first article, in addition to the tables listed above (the populating of which consumed the entire second article), I listed a number of things that still needed to be completed before the rules would be ready to play – plus a few things that have come to light since. Answering those questions is what this third and final article is intended to achieve.

Hit Location

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Hit Location systems. They can greatly add to the verisimilitude of combat, or they can stifle it. They can be a pain to use, and a bigger pain to create, and they take up an inordinate amount of space in the rules. They make hidden assumptions – the Hero Games version assumes a bullet or other point attack, and don’t work well when considering a slashing attack or beam attack that transects the body in a relatively straight line that can start anywhere and go in any direction. It also fails spectacularly when shrapnel-style area attacks are involved. But, worst of all, I can never be sure that the modifiers applied to different locations are correct, and distrust the conflation and compounding of Hit Locations and Critical Hit damage.

I want the combat system in the Zener Gate campaign to be cinematic and fast-slowing, and that usually doesn’t accord well with a Hit Location mechanic.

Nevertheless, I have reluctantly convinced myself that a simple Hit Location system is required because of the presence of the target size / aiming rules, which distinguish between whole-body, head-and-torso, head, fist/heart, and eye-sized targets with different degrees of difficulty. If you hit with an attack in one of those bodily subdivisions, you need to know where; and if you miss with one of the smaller areas, does that mean that you’ve missed the entire target?

Because characters are already rolling multiple dice, I want to minimize the additions that this will entail, so I have decided on a simple d20-based system. However, under certain circumstances, the GM can mandate that a smaller die be used, increasing the likelihood of a particular result.

Hit Location Table: Whole-body Head & Torso Head & Neck Left Hand Right Hand    Eye    Location d% d% d% d% d% Skull/Scalp (automatic critical location) 1-5 1-7 1-10 1-2 1-2 1-15 Face 6-10 8-14 11-21 3-5 3-5 16-40 Neck (1 in 6 critical location) 11-15 15-21 22-28 6-10 6-10 41-55 Left chest (d12: 3 in 12 critical location) 16-30 22-35 29-42 11-20 11-15 56-60 Left upper arm (d6: 1-2=shoulder, 6=elbow) 31-35 36-42 43-49 21-30 – – Left abdomen/groin (1 in 6 critical location) 36-40 43-49 – 31-35 16-20 – Left forearm (d6: 6=left hand) 41-45 50-56 50-56 36-50 21-30 61-65 Right chest (1 in 6 critical location) 46-60 57-70 57-63 51-55 31-40 66-70 Right upper arm (d6: 1-2=shoulder, 6=elbow) 61-65 71-77 64-70 – 41-50 – Right abdomen/groin (1 in 6 critical location) 66-70 – – 56-60 51-55 – Right forearm (d6: 6=right hand) 71-75 78-84 71-77 61-70 56-70 71-75 Left leg (d12: 1-6=upper leg, 7=knee, 8-11= lower leg, 12=foot) 76-85 – – 71-80 (Upper Leg Only) 71-75 (Upper Leg Only) – Right leg (d12: 1-6=upper leg, 7=knee, 8-11= lower leg, 12=foot) 86-95 – – 81-85 (Upper Leg Only) 76-85 (Upper Leg Only) – Attacker’s choice, automatic critical location if one available 96-00 85-00 78-00 86-00 86-00 76-00

Hit Location Effects:

• Undefined Critical Location: +2 Trauma, -1, (-d3 on a crit) dmg to stat as shown below
• Non-Critical Location: +0 Trauma, -1 dmg to stat as shown below on critical

 

• Skull/Scalp +2 shock, +4 trauma, and (d8): 1-2=THEO, 3=ENC, 4-5=AWA, 6-8=PERS.
• Face +4 shock, +2 trauma and (d5): 1-2=CON, 3=THEO, 4-5=AWA.
• Eye +2 shock, +6 Trauma, and (d10, 2 rolls): 1=DEX, 2=ACC, 3-4=PRAC, 5-6=THEO, 7-9=AWA, 10=PERS.
• General Neck +1 shock, +2 Trauma, and (d5): 1-4=CON, 5=RES.
• General Chest +2 shock, +1 trauma, and (d8): 1=STR, 2-3=CON, 4-5=RES, 6=MEL, 7-8=END
• Shoulder (d4): 1-2=STR, 3-4=MEL
• General Upper Arm (d6): 1-2=STR, 3=DEX, 4=ACC, 5-6=MEL
• Elbow (d6): 1=STR, 2=DEX, 3=ACC, 4-5=MEL, 6=PRAC
• General Lower Arm (d6): 1=STR, 2-3=DEX, 4=ACC, 5=PRAC, 6=THEO
• Hand (d10, 2 rolls): 1=STR, 2-4=DEX, 5-6=ACC, 7-8=MEL, 9-10=PRAC
• General Abdomen/Groin +1 shock, +1 trauma, and (d12): 1=STR, 2-5=CON, 6-7=RES, 8=NIM, 9=MEL, 10-12=END
• General Upper Leg (d5): 1=STR, 2-3=NIM, 4-5=MEL
• Knee (d5): 1-2=STR, 3-4=NIM, 5=MEL
• General Lower Leg (d5): 1=STR, 2-4=NIM, 5=MEL
• Foot (d5): 1-3=NIM, 4-5=MEL

For the record, the risks by stat are:
STR: 14, CON: 12; RES 5; NIM 11; DEX 12; ACC 9, MEL 18; PRAC 10; THEO 8; ENC 1; AWA 10; PERS 5; END 5

or, to put them in sequence from greatest risk to lowest,
MEL 18,
STR 14,
CON, DEX (tie) 12,
NIM 11,
PRAC, AWA (tie) 10,
ACC 9,
THEO 8,
RES, PERS, END (tie) 5,
ENC 1

Initiative & Surprise

The GM should be aware of a character’s current AWA at all times, and have determined the collective AWA of the party using the “Assistance” rules. Whenever there is an opportunity for characters
to be surprised (Initiative 0) he should make a secret AWA check.

Initiative is based on 1d6, plus:

• 0 for the character with the lowest AWA, +1 for the character with the next lowest, and so on;
• 0 for the character with the highest MEL, +2 for the character with the next lowest, and so on.
• If it is more appropriate, the GM can use ACC instead of MEL.

Characters who cannot move automatically roll “1” on the d6. Characters who are surprised automatically roll “0” on the d6. Characters who are prone (GM determination) have their roll automatically capped at “3”. The modifiers given above only apply in rounds in which the character is not surprised.

Time

Time will be handled in three different ways within the campaign: Ordinary Time, Combat Time, and Micro-Time.

Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time is the most flexible. The Players tell the GM what they are doing and the GM advances time either to the conclusion of the task or to the next significant plot development, whichever comes first before prompting for a new choice of action by the PCs.

Combat Time

Combat Time is somewhat less flexible. Combat is cinematic in style, which is achieved by varying the length of combat turns. A combat turn is defined as the length of time required before a character has the opportunity to attack, based on their initiative numbers and combat abilities, in other words, until there is the opportunity for some change to occur in the status quo – typically 10 seconds, but it may be more or less at the GM’s discretion. If both sides have cover and are firing semi-automatic weapons with plenty of ammunition, it might be a minute or more before there is any opportunity to change the combat situation, for example, especially if both sides are concentrating on suppression fire, i.e. preventing the other side from getting a clean shot.

It follows that only a limited number of events can actually change the course of combat and end a combat turn. A mistake by one side or the other, a change in tactics, a change in the ammunition status of one or both forcing a change of tactics, the arrival of reinforcements, a lucky shot, or the conclusion of some sort of countdown.

The last requires some amplification – I was thinking of a situation in which characters are stalling for time while awaiting the outcome of some prior action already instituted, for example a character trying to pick a lock, or a grenade exploding, or some other such event.

Micro-Time

When characters have the same initiative value, combat will briefly enter micro-time. In sequence of lowest RES to highest, the characters with the same initiative value choose and announce their actions without those actions being carried out. This gives those with higher defensive values the chance to choose their actions taking into account what those of lesser values are going to attempt to do. The GM then resolves all those announced actions simultaneously.

The other function of micro-time is when fractions of a second make a difference. Without the internet, it’s hard to do basic research, but let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that a weapon/ammo combination has a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s and the target is 250m away. That means that a single bullet will reach that target in 0.25 seconds. As noted in Article 2, “Mean Reaction Time for college-age individuals is about 160 milliseconds to detect an auditory stimulus, and approximately 190 milliseconds to detect visual stimulus. The mean reaction times for sprinters at the Beijing Olympics were 166 ms for males and 189 ms for females, but in one out of 1,000 starts they can achieve 109 ms and 121 ms, respectively.”

1000m/s is also near enough to the speed of sound, so there would be no auditory stimulus from the shot, but there might already have been some stimulus to which the target can react, or he might see a visual cue and react accordingly – 190 milliseconds would give just enough time to start doing something else if the character already has something in mind or is trained to react automatically to such cues. This can be enough to change the hit location roll, for example. Micro-time may be required to deal with events between the pulling of the trigger and the arrival of the round.

If the target has the next initiative, they can preempt their next action and automatically react. If not, they may attempt to do so by making a NIM save. The base modifier for such a save is determined by dividing the milliseconds by 60 (round off), finding the result on the time chart, and subtracting 10.

For example, 250ms = 4-and-a-sixth when divided by 60. That rounds to x4. Times four isn’t quite enough to get to the x5 value of +3, so the value is +2. Subtracting 10 gives a -8 modifier. Not good, but it could be worse!

The more time the target has to react, the easier this save becomes. 1000 ms divided by 60 = 50/3 =16 & 2/3, which rounds to x17. That isn’t enough to reach the x20 so the base modifier is the index that goes with x10, or +4. Subtracting 10 gives a -6 modifier.

Endurance

Ordinary activities cost 1 END per half hour. Strenuous non-combat activities (exercise, manual labor, forced march, etc) costs 4 END per hour. Combat costs 0 END per round, but each physical attack costs 2 END and each non-physical attack (just pull the trigger) 1 END..

Combat

I was going to look at d20 vs 3d6 or 4d6, but that choice was made for me when I thought up the extra dice for impossible results rule (summarized in the part 2 section above). But I haven’t talked about why some rolls are to be made on 3d6 and some on 4.

In a nutshell, it comes down to chance of failure. Skill checks operate on 3d6+modifiers vs half the stat+2, or less. So a stat of 20 needs 12 or less on 3d6, which is about a 65% chance of success if the modifiers are 0, about 55% for modifier of 1, and about 45% for a modifier of 2. A stat of 24 needs 14 or less on 3d6, so there is still a chance of failure even without modifiers. Stat Checks are run on the full stat value or less vs 4d6+modifiers. So a stat of 20 gives about 97.3% chance of failure without modifiers – but I expect to apply more modifiers to such rolls – and a stat of 24 gives a 100% chance of success without modifiers.

What should Combat rolls be made on? Well, it depends on the target numbers to be achieved. Defense will define what needs to be rolled for attack.

Defense

Defense = RES-15 + Armour, which is rated on a 0-10 scale (where 0 is none).

Attacks

A stat of 20 gives a defense score of 5+Armour. The attacker subtracts this from his attack stat roll + weapon skill ranks – if he has three of the latter (the maximum), and a stat of 20, that’s 15-5-armor, or 10-armor. To this, he adds any modifiers for target size, range, and aiming. For a human-sized whole-body target, that’s +0, and the range and aiming modifiers are designed to permit the attacker to cancel out one with another. So he needs to roll 10-armor or less on Nd6.

No armor: 10 or less. 1d6 and he always hits. 2d6 and he hits most of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 50-50. Adding armor reduces those chances – by up to 10. At maximum armor, he needs 0 or less – which says he can’t do it, regardless of whether N is 1, 2, 3, or 4. However, the “impossible result” rules offers a way out – he can increase the chance required by +2 and add a dice, repeating until he gets a possible success. 0+2=2 or less on N+1 dice – which works for 1d6. 0+2+2=4 or less on N+2 dice – which works for 2d6. 0+2+2+2=6 or less on N+3 dice, which works for 3d6. 0+2+2+2+2=8 or less on N+4 dice, which works for 4d6.

On 1d6, he would need 2 or less on 2d6 – a 1 in 36 chance.
On 2d6, he would need 4 or less on 4d6 – a 1 in 1296 chance.
On 3d6, he would need 6 or less on 6d6 – a 1 in 46,656 chance.
On 4d6, he would need 8 or less on 8d6 – a 1 in 1,679,616 chance.

Which of those results seems appropriate?

The only way to judge is to look at lesser armor values, and see how the chance changes – something I had hoped to avoid by going straight to the maximum-armor result.

• No armor: 10 or less. 1d6 and he always hits. 2d6 and he hits most of the time (~92%). 3d6 and it’s 52%. 4d6 and it’s about 17%. I have an immediate liking for the 2d6 and 3d6 results. The 4d6 roll is definitely out, and the 1d6 option doesn’t have enough variability, so forget it.
• Armour 1: 9 or less. 2d6 and he hits 83% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 38%.
• Armour 2: 8 or less. 2d6 and he hits 72% or so of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 26%.
• Armour 3: 7 or less. 2d6 and he hits 58% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 16%.
• Armour 4: 6 or less. 2d6 and he hits 42% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 9%.
• Armour 5: 5 or less: 2d6 and he hits 28% of the time, a decline of about 1/3. 3d6 and its 4.6%, a loss of roughly half.
• Armour 6: 4 or less: 2d6 hits 17% of the time, a decline of almost half. 3d6 and it’s 1.85%, a loss of close to 2/3.
• Armour 7: 3 or less: 2d6 hits 8% of the time, half what it was. 3d6 hits 0.46% of the time, a massive loss.
• Armour 8: 2 or less on 2d6, i.e. 3% of the time, a loss of two-thirds. 2 or less on 3d6 becomes 4 or less on 4d6 hits 0.08% of the time, one sixth of the previous value.
• Armour 9: 1 or less on 2d6 becomes 3 or less on 3d6, a 0.46% chance of success, a massive drop of 85%. 1 or less on 3d6 becomes 3 or less on 4d6 becomes 5 or less on 5d6, a 0.128% chance of success – and, again, 1 sixth of the previous value.
• Finally, Armour 10: 0 or less on 2d6 becomes 2 or less on 3d6 becomes 4 or less on 4d6, a 0.08% chance, a loss of about almost 83%. 0 or less on 3d6 becomes 2 or less on 4d6 becomes 4 or less on 5d6 becomes 6 or less on 6d6, which is
  again exactly 1/6th of the previous chance of success, or 0.021%.

The pattern is clear – the 2d6 option is beset with wild inconsistencies in the change of chance of success as armor value rises, while the 3d6 option gives a neat, smooth pattern.

To sum up:

• Attacks cost 1 or 2 END (has to be paid before the attack proceeds).
• Subtract the target’s Defense score from the attacker’s attack stat roll (ACC or MEL).
• Add the attacker’s weapon skill ranks in the weapon being employed.
• Add any modifier for Target Size.
• Subtract any modifier for Range.
• Add any modifier for Aiming.
• This is what the attacker has to roll on 3d6 + any circumstantial modifiers applied by the GM in order for the attack to succeed.
• If the character rolled all 1’s on the dice and that is less than what they needed to hit, they have achieved a critical hit. This may do additional damage as indicated on the hit location table.
• if the attack succeeded, roll d% on the appropriate hit location table. Roll on any hit location sub-table. Roll to select the stat impacted as indicated on the hit location effects chart.
• If a critical hit results in no additional damage, the attacker is at +2 to attack the same target next combat round.

An attack that misses by no more than 5, when the target was smaller than whole-body for reasons other than cover will hit the next larger area, but will achieve -1 Shock and -1 Trauma.

An attack that misses by no more than 10, when the target was smaller than head+torso for reasons other than cover, uses the hit location chart two steps up, achieves -2 shock and zero trauma.

Damage & Recovery

Damage in the Zener Gate system comes in 4 varieties: Trauma, Shock, Stat, and Radiation.

• TRAUMA is physical damage. It is based on the weapon type as was described under equipment in the first article, plus any bonus trauma from hit location, and less any armor worn by the target. It subtracts from current hit points. Characters heal 1/3 of the total trauma inflicted (round up) after 1 day’s peaceful recuperation & rest, plus any healing ranks in medical equipment or skill ranks from a medical professional. The balance is healed at the rate of 1 point per additional day of rest, again plus 1 less per day than any healing ranks in medical equipment or skill ranks from a medical professional (minimum 1). This is deliberately unrealistically fast.
• SHOCK is stun damage that may produce unconsciousness, but not death. It’s base value is 1/2 TRAUMA done in an attack (round up), plus 1d6, plus any bonus trauma from hit location. If Shock exceeds the character’s Shock Threshold in 1 round, the character must make a CON save or be rendered unconscious for d10-4 seconds of time on the universal scale. For every point that the shock threshold is exceeded, there is a -1 penalty to the save and +1 modifier to the time roll. If the character makes this saving roll, he suffers only 1/2 the trauma indicated on the die roll + any bonus from hit location. If the cumulative Shock received over all attacks exceeds the character’s Hit Points, he falls unconscious for d10-7 minutes time on the universal scale. A character recovers 1/3 of accumulated shock damage at the end of combat or by skipping an action during combat, recovers another 1/3 from 40-CON minutes rest post-combat, and recovers the remainder after at least 4 hrs sleep.
• END is expended by various actions. d6 END can be recovered by skipping 2 successive rounds in combat or resting for 30 minutes in non-combat. The balance of any loss is recovered at the rate of 1 point for every hour of rest, or 30 minutes of sleep.
• Stat damage is inflicted by trauma according to location. The GM will incorporate any stat damage in his description of the outcome of an attack. Players are encouraged to roleplay accordingly. Stat damage reduces the affected stat by the indicated amount. 1/2 (round up) of any stat damage to 1/2 of the stats which have been reduced (round down) is recovered by 8 hours of sleep in a comfortable setting, or 1/4 (round up) to 1/4 (round down) from 8 hours of sleep in a less comfortable setting e.g. when camping. If multiple stats have been reduced, the character selects which stats experience this recovery. Half of the remainder (round up) can be healed at the same time as trauma at the rate of 1 point to 1/2 (round down) the affected stats. Medical care (ranks in appropriate skill) and equipment (ranks equivalent) increases one or both of these values, the player decides how this bonus is to be distributed. The remainder also heals at this rate but such healing can only commence when the character is completely free of Trauma damage. Note that stat losses reduce a character’s abilities immediately, which may detrimentally impact his combat capabilities.
• Radiation Damage is a special case that is dealt with separately below.

A quick example: A character is shot with a rifle for 2d6 trauma. He has armor 5. The attacker rolls 8 points of trauma damage. The hit location adds 1 additional trauma, for a total of 9-5=4 points. This is halved to give base shock of 2, plus 1d6, plus 2 additional shock from the hit location [chest], for a total of d6+4; the attacker rolls an 8, exceeding the SHOCK threshold of the target by 2. The character must make a CON save at -2 or fall unconscious for d10-4+2 on the time chart in seconds. The character fails and rolls a 6; adding the modifiers shown results in a 4. The character is unconscious for 10 seconds, and is forced to miss an action. He recovers 1/3 of the shock damage inflicted, rounding up, i.e. 3 points, at the end of that missed round, and since he was at -2, he awakens with 1 point of Shock Threshold; he would be well advised to take an additional round or two to steady himself.

If the character had succeeded in his save, the amount shown on the additional d6 would have been halved to 2, and the base shock from the Trauma not counted, inflicting 2 +2 from hit location shock to his cumulative total.

The attack was not a critical hit and did not strike a Critical Location, so it inflicts 1 point of damage to a stat. The character rolls 1d8 as indicated on the Chest Effects chart and gets a 4, so the character loses 1 point of RES, effectively reducing his defenses by 1 for subsequent rounds of combat.

Death

If a character reaches zero or less in any stat other than their Shock Pool or Threshold, they are dying. Each round, they must make a CON roll to survive, with a +1 penalty cumulative per round including the first round affected. Medical attention (an appropriate skill check) each round can convert that +1 to a -1. If the character receives such attention with no penalty in effect and makes his CON check, he is restored to 1 point in the traumatized stat and is no longer dying.

For example, a character goes to -2 hit points in round D of combat. He must make a CON roll immediately or die. He succeeds and can act in round D. Next round, he must make another CON roll at +1 to the die roll. He again succeeds, and can act in round D+1. In round D+2, he must make another CON roll at +2 to the die roll. He succeeds and once again can act. In the round D+3, he receives medical attention which succeeds (an appropriate skill check is made), so the CON check penalty reduces from +2 to +1 instead of worsening to +3. He again succeeds, and can act. In round D+4, he again receives successful medical aid, so the +1 becomes a +0 instead of worsening. He makes his CON check at +0 to the die roll, so he is restored to 1 HP.

Other Armour Effects

Armour comes in 10 grades of effectiveness, which carry various effects on the stats of the wearer.

Resistance Modifier

Armour type 0 (i.e. none) reduces Resistance by 4.
Armour type 1 reduces Resistance by 3.
Armour type 2 reduces Resistance by 2.
Armour type 3 reduces Resistance by 1.

Nimbleness Modifier

Armour type 10 reduces NIM by 4.
Armour type 9 reduces NIM by 3.
Armour type 8 reduces NIM by 3.
Armour type 7 reduces NIM by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces NIM by 2.
Armour type 5 reduces NIM by 1.
Armour type 4 reduces NIM by 1.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining NIM modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining NIM modifier.

Accuracy Modifier

Odd-numbered armors of type 5 and above reduce Accuracy by 1 every second armor type, i.e.
Armour type 10 reduces ACC by 3.
Armour type 9 reduces ACC by 3.
Armour type 8 reduces ACC by 2.
Armour type 7 reduces ACC by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces ACC by 1.
Armour type 5 reduces ACC by 1.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining ACC modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining ACC modifier.

Melee Modifier

Even-numbered armors of type 6 and above reduce Melee by 2 every second armor type, i.e.
Armour type 10 reduces MEL by 6.
Armour type 9 reduces MEL by 4.
Armour type 8 reduces MEL by 4.
Armour type 7 reduces MEL by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces MEL by 2.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining MEL modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining MEL modifier.

Dexterity Modifier

Every 2nd Armour type starting at type 4 confers a DEX penalty
Armour type 10 reduces DEX by 6.
Armour type 9 reduces DEX by 4.
Armour type 8 reduces DEX by 4.
Armour
type 7 reduces DEX by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces DEX by 2.
Armour type 5 reduces DEX by 1.
Armour type 4 reduces DEX by 1.

Languages

Languages are defined by era, and subdivided into spoken, heard, written and read. “Spoken” is the character’s ability to speak the language, “Heard” is the character’s ability to understand it when it is spoken to them. “Written” is the character’s ability to write something in the language, while “Read” is the character’s ability to read something written in the language.

Spoken and Heard form a natural pair, as do Written and Read.

Languages also have a different meaning by Ranks. 3 ranks = colloquial, 2 ranks = functional, 1 rank = conversational, 0 ranks = marginal.

Characters only purchase one aspect of a non-native language. They automatically get 1 rank less in the other part of the natural pair and 2 ranks less in the others. Each step removed from the defining era also reduces the ranks by between 0 and 0.5 – the amount varies. Ranks are rounded down, but this means that several eras will be at the same rank. Ranks round down except for ranks 0-point-something, which round up, i.e. once you have a language, you always have at least one rank in that language if the reduction is due to era.

Which aspect of a language that a character purchases will depend on in-game circumstances and opportunity, except when buying starting languages.

Example: 1920s Spanish:

Spoken: 3 ranks
Heard: 2 ranks
Written: 1 rank
Read: 1 rank

If the character finds himself in WWII Spain, that’s 1 era difference, but languages didn’t change that much between those two time periods. Perhaps -0.25 ranks. So effectively, he has 2 ranks in Spoken, and 1 rank in the other aspects of the language.

If the character subsequently find himself in 1960s Cuba, that’s 2 eras difference, and about the same change in language – and has the same ranks as shown above. There might be a few new words, and the subjects that people talk about might be different, but most of the language would be the same.

The next significant event in Spanish history at the international scale was the formation of the EU, which saw a number of words from other languages start to migrate across borders. As a result of that, plus technological change, the language of the early 21st century is also a little different from the pre-EU language. In particular, cultural referents have changed. To an NPC from that time period, a PC with the example dialect would have an old-fashioned, almost archaic manner of speaking.

Era differences are not precise and are usually simply estimated by the GM.

Starting Languages

Characters are possessed of a rare genetic quirk that enables them to survive transit through a Zener Gate Transition. This genetic anomaly, for a still-unexplained reason, also makes Chronosquad members able to learn languages really quickly. This gift will be largely untapped prior to the start of play, but that doesn’t mean that a character starts without language skills.

For every 5 points in the INT stat, the character may select one free language to have at one rank in one aspect.

The character gets their native language for free, 3 ranks in all four disciplines. However, for each rank that they reduce one of these values, a character gets two to use in purchasing other languages. In addition, the character may spend ranks equal to their LAN skill in improving or acquiring additional languages.

It costs 1 point to buy a language skill at 0 ranks in all four aspects, Each additional point spent improves one of the aspects by 1 rank, with the others automatically increasing as explained above.

In-game language usage

Language skills are used primarily as an aide to roleplaying. When necessary, the GM may require a language roll (which is why the system is modeled on the skills system – most notably, when acquiring additional language skills in-game, as described below. Zero ranks gives a modifier of +15, one rank gives +10, two gives +5, and three gives +0.

In-game language acquisition & improvement

Languages can be obtained through immersion and attempted usage. To do so, the character spends the required time period as indicated below and makes a LAN check. If he succeeds, he acquires a rank in the language skill.

3 hours acquires the local language at 0 ranks, 6 hours more adds a 1st rank in one discipline, 12 hours more adds a second, and 24 hours more takes the ranks to 3.

If the process is interrupted by a Zener transition, it resumes at the next opportunity. If there is an era shift (quite likely), the modifier due to era must be “paid off” first.

Example:
A character acquires 1 rank of 16th century French “in the field” before a Zener Transition. At a future point, he finds himself in Russia during the Napoleonic invasion, surrounded by Troops speaking 18th century French (1 era difference). If not for the era difference, 12 hours of exposure to the more modern language would suffice to add a rank to his 16th century French, but because of the era difference, he has to first spend 6 hours (1 rank) adjusting his “ear” to the more modern usage. At the end of that time he needs to make a LAN check at +15 to complete that adjustment period. If he succeeds, the clock starts on the 12-hour interval; if not, the 6-hour interval restarts.

Alternatively, the character can choose to begin acquiring 18th Century French in addition to his 16th Century French. This restarts his “language experience clock” at zero, but his expertise in 16th Century French counts as a related skill, giving him +2 to his Language Rolls and avoiding the -1 (or whatever it might be) for era differences.

Of course, the normal mechanics surrounding die rolls are also in force – characters can use experience/karma to improve their chances or re-roll a failed roll, and in particular, characters can choose to delay the roll, spending extra time to improve the likelihood of success.

Spot/Listen Checks

From time to time, it will be necessary to determine whether or not characters notice something. This is handled as a simple AWA check, but (unlike most skills), the Range and Size modifiers are relevant. In addition, if the characters advise that they are actively looking out for something, they may get up to -5 improvement in the modifiers.

Radiation Damage

Performing a Zener Gate Transition exposes the Temporanaut to an unusual form of radiation consisting of accelerated particles and energies. Much of this will be Gamma Radiation but some will be other forms in which atomic particles within the bodies of the Temporanauts are subjected to extreme accelerations. One of the principle side effects of the unusual genetic makeup required to serve on a Chronosquad is a resistance to this radiation, which would otherwise kill quite quickly. (Side-note: It is anticipated that anti-radiation therapies of varying efficacy will become available to PCs from time to time. Supplies of these therapies will be strongly controlled by the GM to ensure that Radiation Damage remains a subject of concern to the PCs).

Radiation damage is handled as a separate category of long-term damage to the CON and HP of the character. Each time a character transitions between worlds/times, the character must make a CON roll at +15. If the character succeeds, he takes 1 point of long-term CON damage and d3 points of Trauma and Shock. If the character fails, the consequences are more severe. According to the circumstances, the GM rules the Zener Transition to be a category 1, 2, or 3 Event.

Category-1 events are the least damaging, and reflect a tranquil jump with minimal temporal change. Category-2 events are normal Transitions. A category 3 would represent entering a Zener Transition while under fire from particle-beam weapons or something of the sort, i.e. some sort of external conditions that make the Transition more damaging or problematic.

In a Category-1 Transition, the GM rolls 1d6. The character takes 1/2 of this as long-term CON damage and the entire amount as ordinary Shock and Trauma.

In a Category-2 Transition, the GM rolls 1d6. The character takes this amount as long-term CON damage and the result+6 as ordinary Shock and Trauma damage, some of which may be caused by an awkward landing on “arrival”.

With a Category-3 Transition, the GM has a choice: long-term damage or more severe short-term damage. The latter makes life more difficult for the PCs in the long term with less immediate threat, the latter reduces the long-term dangers but puts the characters at greater risk of imminent death and will almost certainly produce short-term complications in the form of a period of unconsciousness, which the GM is fully entitled to take advantage of in terms of capturing the characters or otherwise putting them into challenging circumstances in order to kick-start the adventure.

Category-3A Transitions are the long-term options. The GM rolls 2d6 long-term CON damage and halves the result to determine the Shock and Trauma suffered. Category-3B transitions do 1d6 long-term CON damage and 2d6+3 Shock and Trauma. The frequency of both types of Category-3 event will be about the same, with the GM favoring Category 3A early and saving his Category 3B events for when long-term CON loss begins to threaten the lives of the PCs.

Every successive Zener Transition after the first adds +1 to the damages experienced by the Temporanaut. If the fourth Zener Transition is a Category-1 event, for example, the character would experience 1/2 d6 +3 temporary CON damage and 1d6+3 shock and trauma. If the fifth transition is also a Category-1 event, the character would suffer 1/2 d6 +4 temporary CON damage and 1d6+4 shock and trauma, and so on.

Long-term CON damage is recovered differently to other forms of stat
damage. 24 hours after first exposure, the character regains up to 6 points of such damage, provided that this period includes at least 6 hours of restful sleep or 9 hours of less-comfortable rest. Then it’s 4, 2, and 1. Thereafter, it’s one every 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and so on.

Anti-Radiation Therapies have four aspects.

• 1, 2, or 3 points of Immediate long-term CON loss healed.
• d3 to 3d6 reduction in the “extra damage” caused by repeated Transitions.
• d3 to 3d6 reduction in the steps down the “Recovery Time” track.
• d6 to 3d6 additional Shock damage suffered.
• d3 to 2d6 additional Trauma damage suffered.

Most Therapies will represent a combination of all four in some measure. As a general rule, the more advanced the treatment, the more effective it will be with fewer side-effects. Characters may choose to experience up to 1/2 the Shock and Trauma damage inflicted as END damage, recovered normally after a delay of 4d6 hours, but the reduction has to be the same in both – if you reduce trauma by 4 you must also reduce shock by 4, suffering 8 END loss while the treatment takes effect.

Note that in most societies, significant radiation exposure (warranting the issuing of Anti-radiation Therapies) is a politically/criminally significant event that will attract unwanted attention to the Temporanaut. This can only be avoided by stealing the Therapeutic medication from an appropriate facility.

Some anti-radiation therapies reduce in efficacy with repeated usage. These are potent medications that are not intended for repeated exposures – that simply doesn’t happen in normal life, and the developers would have no reason to test for it. The obvious exception would be any world which had suffered a nuclear war, where repeated exposures to radiation would be more commonplace (though no less concerning to officials).

At a metagame level, Radiation Exposure is intended to serve as a handicap to the PCs, not a punishment or direct threat. Rather than kill a PC with CON Loss, the GM is free to “transfer” the long-term CON loss to some other affected stat. This is healed as though it were still long-term CON loss.

If characters continue to Transition without receiving appropriate treatment for the accumulated radiation damage, their health will deteriorate (CON loss) to the point where other bodily functions begin to break down.

Note that CON losses from radiation have no effect on calculated stats – Hit Points, END, and Shock Resistance remain at the values set during character generation except as indicated by combat damage.

Cybernetic Enhancement

It may become possible for characters to undergo Cybernetic Enhancement in some time frames through the purchase and installation of appropriate “equipment”. Characters should think about this very carefully; side-effects and complications are always possible, power supplies may be affected strangely by Transitions, and repairs might be difficult or impossible to achieve in other time frames. Biological functions might be more limited, but they are also going to be more reliable, and the GM should have no compunction about taking advantage of the opportunities they afford for making life more difficult for PCs.

Other Drugs and Medications

It is anticipated that in some time frames, the characters will be able to come into possession of various other medications that are “Stat Enhancing”. These provide short-term gains in one stat or another, usually in the form of a die roll, and a loss to another stat (which may be deferred until after the medication wears off). As a general rule of thumb, the costs of using such a medication will be twice the short-term gain. There may be other side-effects as well.

For example, “Stimutabs” provide +1d3 STR for 1d3+3 hours (the players should know the first result and not the second). Using the enhanced STR costs 1 additional END and when the drug wears off, 1d6+6 points of damage divided evenly between NIM, DEX, and ACC – the character experiences “The Shakes” – for 60 x 1d6/4 minutes.

Are such drugs worth the consequences? Depends on the circumstances, that’s something that only the PC can judge (or, in some cases, a medical professional).

Other Medical Treatments

It is anticipated that some time-frames will have other forms of advanced healing treatment. This may be as simple and effective as the use of a hyperbaric chambour (can increase recovery from trauma and some stat losses 3-fold) or as complex as nanotech “restoratives” that repair stat damage, heal broken bones, etc. All of these technologies are “use at your own risk”. But remember that the goal is for the PCs to have adventures, mostly action-oriented; crippling that capability is not in the GM’s game plan.

Character Sheet

Although it’s untested and may require tweaking, I have also created a two-page character sheet to accompany the game system, which can be downloaded by clicking the icon to the right.

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes.

These are matters of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because they are not immediately obvious, but that once you see one, you can never forget that it’s there.

This is a series about methods of fix plot holes so that even when they get noticed, it’s just a spur to your creativity and not a complete calamity.

Part one introduced the topic and offered a system for determining how critical the problem was, and the concept of matching the severity of the solution to that measure of criticality (you can read it here if you need to get up to speed).

Part two
dealt with minor repairs, the sort of things you can do to handle small problems before they have time to metastasize into something nastier.

Part three dealt with more serious repair techniques for plot holes of greater significance to the campaign in the medium term.

Part four is about to deal with plot holes that lead to substantial structural problems.

And part five, which will conclude the series, will deal with catastrophic problems and the critical repair techniques needed to correct them. And I hope you never need them – though, if you GM for long enough, the odds are that you will, eventually.

There are times when you discover that you’ve made a mistake that threatens to derail your whole campaign. This could be an NPC who is too powerful for the PCs, or a PC that is too powerful for the NPCs, or an NPC who is not powerful enough to pose the kind of threat that will drive the campaign forward. It could be that your long-term plotline has collapsed.

And that’s only about half of the possibilities! But we’re talking here about plot holes, and those are a specific sub-type of structural defect, though a broad one. What the structural problems under this umbrella have in common is that the campaign or some component of it, either as it will be or as it is expected to be, doesn’t work, doesn’t make sense, or conflicts with the campaign’s past or the standards of good GMing. Conflicting elements could be plot, or character, or metaplot, or history, or even exotic elements like prophecies.

(One GM I know once told me about an in-game prophecy that was supposed to define the plot outcome of events surrounding a key NPC, only for that NPC to be written out of the campaign in the first adventure – leaving the prophetic road-map of the campaign floating around and not really connecting with anything, even though it had been used as a guide to PC generation, i.e. the PCs were given roles to interpret that fulfilled different lines within the prophecy…)

Solutions from Part 2

You should never use an elephant gun when all you need is a fly swatter. It doesn’t happen often that you can fix a major problem with a minor repair, but you should never ignore the possibility.

The sooner you spot the problem, the more likely it is that the cumulative effects of a sustained smaller corrective mechanism can be used to fix it, simply because the problem has had that much less time to spawn domino consequences. However, the system of classification outlined in part 1 should minimize this possibility; you only get to a classification of “Major Structural Problem” if a smaller solution won’t solve your problem.

But perhaps the solution is simply inobvious, or a smaller solution can be part of solving the bigger problem, and so it is worth the effort to run through the solutions that have been offered thus far in the series to determine what, if any, role they might play in solving it.

Minor Repair Technique #1: Ignore the problem

This isn’t really a solution to problems of this scale, which are only assigned that status if they pose a significant threat to the campaign. Ignoring them and hoping they will go away only lets small problems become large and large problems breed more smaller ones.

Minor Repair Technique #2: Acknowledge and ignore

It’s possible but unlikely that this technique will offer any real solution to the situation, again because of the significance of the problems. I regard this as very much a last resort.

Minor Repair Technique #3: Depth Of Character

If the problem is one of characterization, this might hold a viable solution. Most of the time, the inconsistency is too fundamental for that to be the case, but this is such a simple solution that the problem needs to be considered in this context just in case this is one of those rare occasions.

Minor Repair Technique #4: NPCs are humanoid, too

You’re the main villain in the campaign, passionate – even driven – and have been obsessively planning your ultimate victory for centuries, polishing every nuance. And so far, everything has been going in accordance with that plan. That really rules out some sort of human error, unless the character can be given a massive conceptual blind spot, a key assumption that can remain a hidden flaw until the very last minute. I’ve used that technique on a number of occasions deliberately, but never had to use it to get out of plot hole – nevertheless, it should be a viable solution in some cases.

Minor Repair Technique #5: Retroactive Explanation

You’ve spent years carefully pruning and shaping the big finish to your campaign, only to tell the players “okay, go home and I’ll let you know what happens”. You can see immediately why this won’t work for this scale of problem. Bad enough for it to take place in the middle of the campaign, it’s so far removed from ideal at the end of a campaign that it’s not even worth considering.

Minor Repair Technique #6: The Wisdom Of Players

In theory, this is a viable solution. In practice, it means upsetting the apple-cart and letting the cat out of the bag about everything you’ve been building toward in the campaign, deflating and derailing the endgame. This may be suitable to smaller problems, but it is definitely not an option when problems become this serious.

Solutions from Part 3

There is an extent to which Major Structural Problems are simply “Significant Problems” with added urgency, seriousness, or repercussions. That means that the solutions discussed in detail the last part of this series need to be given careful consideration.

Significant Repair Technique #1: A New Plot Device

Everything written about this solution last time around remains valid. It can solve many problems, even of this scale. The caveat stated last time was that if you “Get it right and all is well; get it wrong, and you may do more damage than the original problem would have caused, or accelerated the onset of critical damage.” And that poses serious handicaps to the use of this technique to solve urgent structural problems; the seriousness of the problems amplifies and accentuates the risks and dangers. It therefore becomes even more critical that the restrictions and constraints described last time are observed.

At the same time, the scale of the problems posed by Major Structural Issues make it that much harder to get the solution right, increasing the risk of an unsatisfactory outcome. So this is a solution that can be used, but which requires extreme care.

Significant Repair Technique #2: Historical Event Narrative Revisit

“I only pull this weapon out of my toolkit when there is some reason why it can’t be roleplayed effectively. It’s no fun for the players to sit and listen to the GM for hour after hour, for example”. …”you may have enough time to do the job, or you may not, and you won’t know until the deadline begins to loom.” “You do have a ‘Plan B’, right? Because if you don’t, you can find that your crisis has escalated.”

All of which may be how you came to be in this mess in the first place.

This may offer a solution – with heavy emphasis and underlining on the word ‘may’. Urgency is always a factor when a crisis escalates, and Urgency doesn’t work well with this technique. Nor do you have unlimited time – the closer you get to the end of a campaign, the less scope you have for fill-ins and other forms of procrastination that might have bought you precious time earlier in the campaign.

This is an all-or-nothing solution, with no dodging the bullet if the deadline gets missed. Add in the fact that it’s at best a second cousin to a satisfactory answer, and it’s not something that I would either recommend or contemplate unless I was completely sure that no matter what interruptions took place I would be finished in ample time – and then only if there was no better solution. This is, at best, the penultimate resort when it comes to Major Structural Issues.

Significant Repair Technique #3: A Corrective Scene or Encounter

This solution down-sizes the concept of “a new plot device” to a retcon that can be dealt with in a single scene or encounter. Since I have already made the point that “a new plot device” may not be big enough and splashy enough to resolve a problem of this magnitude, it becomes extremely unlikely that this technique will suffice. That said, it may once have been the solution of choice – before the problem became in-your-face-urgent.

Major Structural Repair Techniques

Practicalities dictate that while some of the solutions already presented may hold promise, they present such difficulties or limits of application that most of the time, you will need to resort to a bespoke solution intentionally geared to this scale of problem. Your campaign is heading in the wrong direction for some reason, a head-on collision with the most substantial of nothings, a plot sinkhole so vast and central to the campaign that it threatens to swallow you and your campaign whole. This is not a time for wishful thinking and pie-in-the-sky solutions that might work if they can only be ready to implement in time – almost certainly, the solution will need to be as drastic as the problem is critical.

There are three such solutions. I’ve employed them all at one time or another.

Major Structural Repair Technique #1: A Corrective Adventure

The first is also the least likely to be sufficient, but an adventure for the sole purpose of filling the plot hole with something can be a viable solution to the problem. Your logic must be ironclad and the comprehensiveness of the solution equal to the problem at hand; half-measures won’t solve these problems, not any more. You may need to throw your campaign plan out the window and then see what you can salvage after the fact; depending on the scope of the issue and the lengths you have to go to in patching it, this might need to be “the adventure in which the whole campaign changes”.

I once discovered that due to the evolution of in-game circumstances, a master villain’s grand plot had been rendered an anticlimax. So I wrote an adventure in which he achieved everything he had been working toward since adventure1 of the campaign, only to discover that it wasn’t what he expected – so he renounced that prize and turned his sights toward a new goal. This required cannibalizing parts of the intended big finish and impacted on every adventure that remained between the Event and the Campaign Climax, altering motivations, objective, context, circumstances, moral restrictions, schemes, and personality.

An adventure in which the major objective is to alter the status quo is easy. Keeping it contained to a sufficient extent that it remains a single adventure is more difficult.

Major Structural Repair Technique #2: A New Layer Of Plot

In many ways, it’s easier to institute a series of changes in the form of a new layer of plot. This almost certainly entails extending the campaign, but that’s a small price to pay. It’s easier for three reasons: first, you aren’t trying to shoehorn the solutions to all your difficulties into one adventure, they are spread out amongst several; second, you don’t need to come up with everything all at once; parts of the solution can be deferred, making the imminent “trigger” adventure smaller in scope and hence, easier to write; and third, adding a new strand to the campaign freshens everything up.

The first Zenith-3 campaign was headed toward a big finish that would have been okay, but not spectacular, but not everything was ready for the sequel campaign. So I added a new layer of plot (and a number of self-contained adventures on the side) that extended the campaign by almost two years while I got my ducks in a row. Because of the changed in-game context and circumstances, the original plans for the big finish (which weren’t all that satisfactory) had to be scrapped, and were replaced with something altogether better, which seemed a lot less superficial and more tightly bound to events within the campaign – dating all the way back to their first adventure.

The big trick is to make it seem like the new plot layer was inevitable, and that’s easy to do if you base in on other things that have been established within the game. Whereas you may have previously employed Occam’s Razor and chosen the simplest explanation for an in-game event, under the new paradigm that event was but the tip of the newly-inserted iceberg.

Major Structural Repair Technique #3: Radical Character Overhaul/Transformation

The third solution works well in cases where the institution of a new layer of plot won’t solve the problem outright. It’s kind of like the “Depth Of Character” on steroids. Radically transforming an NPC or a PC so that the plot hole no longer exists can be seen as a drastic step, but – like most do-overs – it gives you a second chance to get things right with the benefit of hindsight.

NB: Don’t change a PC without the player’s permission!

To implement this solution, you need a triggering event, a reason for that event completely reshaping the character (at an in-game level, exposing potentials within the character that were always there beneath the surface), and specifics of the transformation. There should be consequences and ripples, and your plans for every adventure subsequent to the event needs to be reexamined and potentially rewritten to accommodate the changes. And you need an in-game reason why these potentials weren’t already being exploited. At a metagame level, the reasons will be painfully obvious, but everything that happens in or is justified by metagame events needs to be paired with in-game explanations.

Because this is only changing a single character, it can be the simplest of solutions; but because of the implications, it can also be the most complicated. As I said, every adventure still to be run within the campaign can be affected. This solution therefore requires careful thought and planning.

Major problems with an attached urgency can be solved, but they often entail drastic and decisive measures. The window for alternatives is small, and frequently closed before you’re even aware there is a problem. The good news is that each of these solutions can also be characterized as an opportunity; at the very least, you are giving your campaign a polish and fresh lick of paint..

That’s also true of most of the solutions that will be examined in Part 5 of this series, dealing with critical repairs – but they are necessarily so comprehensive in scope and so much work to implement that it can be hard to appreciate the positive benefits that they can yield, as you’ll see in the concluding article in this series.

When I announced that I would be unable to post to Campaign Mastery until my internet service was restored, I had no idea that it would take this long. It is now believed that the phone lines were accidentally cut by an unknown third party, and my Internet Service Provider’s subcontractor won’t even commit to an estimate of when repairs will be complete until the 13th of October – at which point, I will have had disrupted or no service for more than four weeks, and it could be more weeks before repairs are actually carried out. To say that I was angry about this state of affairs is an understatement of epic proportions, but there is nothing that I can do about it but wait. But I haven’t been wasting my time while waiting; I’ve written thirteen articles, edited another, and this update makes fifteen (with another underway)! One of them needs some additional editing to be post-ready, and the author of the edited article needs to approve my revisions, but that still leaves lots of articles ready to go. However, there are other considerations involved in the scheduling to take into account, so the bottom line is this: I’ve uploaded four articles (plus this update) and scheduled them for automatic publication according to the normal schedule here at Campaign Mastery, and have enough more ready to go that I will be able to see October out – and then some. Once internet service is restored, I’ll continue to lean on those pre-written articles while I address the more than 900 spam that has been received by the site (so far!) while I’ve been unable to actively maintain it. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing – so don’t be surprised if I sneak the occasional extra mid-week article into the mix once the spam backlog has been cleared!

For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an Internet Cafe, but it will be the last post published until this mess is sorted out. Hopefully, that means that there will be a new post Monday and aside from this note, you’ll never know there was a disruption.

What is the difference between a good actor and a great actor? And what do those questions have to do with roleplaying?

Tell you what, let’s come back to those questions in a moment.

Shoes That Fit

To really succeed in playing a role, whoever is doing so – player or GM – needs to be able to immerse themselves in that role. You need to understand how that character thinks, which is often facilitated by understanding why the character thinks that way.

But that’s often not enough to give more than a wooden, superficial performance as the character. To really get under the character’s skin in a way that is manifestly obvious to everyone else at the table, the character has to be playable. That is achieved when the person controlling the character has a strong – even complete – understanding of the way the character’s abilities and attributes work, and how the character’s personality is expressed through them.

It is sometimes possible to achieve something close to roleplaying when only one of these requirements is achieved. Dragon’s Claw from my first Zenith-3 campaign illustrates and explains that point far more clearly than I could achieve without such an example.

Dragon’s Claw

Dragon’s Claw was a non-Asian martial artist who was raised in a Japanese temple by monks who believed that he was destined to become a great and enlightened warrior. The concept was something of a cross between “Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous” (which is known by a different title in the US, but I don’t have access to the internet to get the correct reference) and The Shadow. Because of this destiny, he was bequeathed and trained in the use of a Mystic Katana which granted him the ability to use his martial arts at a distance, amongst other things. This was to be a character steeped in Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism, according to the creator and player.

He wasn’t played that way. Instead, he was fiercely independent of the team, behaving as an overt vigilante from day one. No sooner had the team spent 30 minutes planning their approach to the problems at hand and agreeing to maintain a low profile than he was out trolling for muggers on Boston Common, and using his full intimidatory abilities to make himself memorable.

What’s more, the rules in use at the time favored item-based powers excessively, while under-rewarding martial arts abilities, so the former was where the player sunk his experience points, becoming known within the team as both a loose cannon and a “sword delivery system” – the other players’ choice of phrase, not mine.

At no point did the character enunciate a single example of Eastern Philosophy. The gulf between what the character was supposed (on paper) to be and what he actually was provided ongoing difficulties for both myself as GM and for the other players, who could never tell exactly what he would do in any given situation – only that he would think of himself first and the team a distant second.

It wasn’t that the character didn’t understand the concepts involved, or did not have numerous role models to draw on from his own television and filmic experiences – he possessed both. But in the heat of play, he struggled to apply that knowledge to his character in any manifest or meaningful way except when it came to set pieces prepared in advance, with my connivance. On such occasions, he was a completely different character.

The character was simply outside the player’s range – the character’s shoes didn’t fit the player.

This wasn’t the only occasion when that happened, even within that campaign. At one point, we had a mage who was reluctant to use magic (because there was a 1-10% chance, depending on the spell, of a miscast producing undesirable side effects), and a precognitive who didn’t understand how his character’s powers worked or could be used to achieve anything practical.

Both the former, and Dragon’s Claw, eventually dropped out of the campaign, replaced by other characters, while the player of the latter revealed that as much as he enjoyed the stories of Sherlock Holmes and various detective shows on TV, he himself struggled as a detective, and dropped out. For a while, the character became an NPC before being taken over by a different player – but that’s a whole different story.

In a completely different campaign – D&D this time – I had a player who wanted to play a Warlock. I struggled at the time (and still struggle to this day) to understand what makes this a viable character class, what separates them from a Mage with inbuilt system rorts that bypass some of the key limitations on the latter class, and – most importantly – how such a character thinks. That made it extremely difficult to prepare game content to focus on the character.

Before the player can walk a mile in their character’s shoes, those shoes have to fit both player and GM.

The Convention Connection

This becomes especially significant when it comes to convention gaming (not that I’ve done very much of it, but I have talked to GMs who have). GMing at a convention is done in one of two ways – either using pre-generated PCs created by the GM, enabling him to frame the adventure to suit those roles and personalities, or by having the Players bring in their own characters which the GM either approves or rejects based on his knowledge of, and the player’s adherence to, the guidelines layed down in advance by that GM.

The latter exposes the convention adventure to the headaches of players who simply can’t stretch their experience and mindset to encompass the perspective of the characters they are being asked to play, while the latter avoids those options, but limits the depth of integration between characters and adventure – making it harder, for example, to ensure that everyone gets equal screen time, and can make contributions of equal significance..

The ideal solution – characters that the players are familiar with sent to the GM in advance with personality profiles, etc – is usually impractical.

The aspects of Acting

This article actually started with a stray thought regarding acting, and especially the so-called “Range” of an actor.

For an actor to succeed in a role, three things have to happen. First, the actor must be able to put himself into the role he is portraying; Second, the actor must be able to express that character with nuance and plausibility; and third, the audience has to accept the actor in that role as though he were the character.

If the first two don’t happen, the chances of the last are greatly diminished.

Great actors are those with sufficient capability in the first two that they can inhabit a variety of roles with complete conviction and acceptance by the audience. Some actors can only manage roles within a particularly narrow scope; outside of that narrow range, they either fail the first, being unable to put themselves in the shoes of their character, or they fail the second, being able to sufficiently capture the character enough for a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. And, admittedly, some roles are easier than others.

A really great actor will get so deeply under the skin of his character that he is able to enlarge upon the role in some substantial way; this famously happened with Spock in the original Star Trek, for example, and many of the actors and actresses on Babylon 5 enlarged their roles, bringing additional definition to the races their characters represented in the process.

Some actors proved themselves excellent within a narrow window – Keanu Reeves, for example, in Speed and in the Matrix trilogy – but struggled when asked to step beyond that role. In many cases, the actor is able to talk a good game, displaying a deep understanding of the character in interviews, and yet somehow failing to deliver that understanding to an audience’s perceptions when actually performing on-screen.

It’s also fair to state that sometimes it’s not the actors’ fault; the director has to not only draw out the performance required, but has to capture it for others to see. It’s also fair to state that actors learn from their efforts, and grow into a role that they were unable to capture initially. (I’ve recently been re-watching early episodes of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you can see that happen very quickly with the actor who plays Grant Ward, and a little more slowly with the actor who plays Fitz – compare the latter with his performances in seasons 3 and 4 and the contrast is very noticeable. But I’m wandering off point).

The actor’s job is clearly similar to that of the Player (or the GM when roleplaying an NPC) and the GM’s job similar to that of the Director.

A Player’s “Range”

I have known players who were great at playing “themselves plus ability X”, but who struggled to go beyond that. I have known players who were great at getting under a character’s skin, but who were utterly incapable of transforming that understanding into a performance that went beyond “themselves
plus ability X” when the time came. I have known players who found a role with which they were comfortable and who forever after played variations on that role regardless of the game system and genre in which any given game was taking place.

And I have known players who seemed to be able to cloak themselves in the mantle of a completely different, completely original, character, seemingly effortlessly.

I’m certainly not going to name names. Every player must be assumed to be doing his best to succeed in all three aspects of bringing to life the character they are playing. And sometimes, a player won’t realize that something is out of their “range” until they are committed to the role. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and instinctively tries to play to what they perceive as their strengths (which might be a third thing entirely).

Through The Looking Glass

So, what do you do when it becomes clear that a player is struggling to master a role that they have shouldered?

You have a number of options, not all of them desirable as outcomes.

• Lose the campaign
• Lose the player
• Give the player time
• Discover a touchstone
• Transform the character
• Amend the game mechanics
• Transfer the character
• Retire the character

As you might have guessed, I’m now going to examine each of these options.

Lose the campaign

The worst-case outcome, this is the result of forcing a player to continue in a role with which they are not succeeding, when that player (for some reason) does not want to drop out of the campaign or has no opportunity to do so. If you do nothing, this is one of the two possible default outcomes, and definitely rates as an undesirable. This is especially unlikely if a particular misfitting role is ruining everyone else’s fun at the table – and yes, I’ve seen that happen, too.

Lose the player

The more likely default is that the player will simply drop out of the campaign, and possibly out of roleplaying games altogether. I don;t consider this to be a particularly desirable result, either. These first two options are what we are trying to avoid. And it’s worth noting that it may take months or even years before accumulated distress yields one of these results, and that other problems can yield the same result – be sure that you’re fixing the real problem and not wasting time knocking down a straw man.

Give The Player Time

Discussing the character with the player can yield insights on both sides of the gaming table. That, plus time to either evolve the character, or the player’s familiarity with the game mechanics, or simply to come to grips with the character, may be all that’s required. The first thing to do is to talk to the player and tell him or her that you get the impression that he/she is finding it a difficult character to roleplay. Where the problem is in stage 2 of the acting process, the player can be unaware that there even is a problem – or it might be the GMs’ problem and he hasn’t realized it.

The player has four possible responses: “Yes”, “No”, “Sometimes”, or “What makes you think that?” Regardless of the answer, this is the starting point for a conversation that should prove enlightening for one or both participants, and may indicate one of the solutions below as appropriate.

Discover a touchstone

I have learned that there are often key words or phrases or concepts that can capture the essence of a character, and that reciting these to yourself at appropriate times can catapult your mindset into the one that’s required to get into the character. These are different for every player and every character, and sometimes there might not be one – the variables are so great that it can be almost impossible to discover one except by accident.

And certainly, this concept may not be a universal panacea;

The best technique that I have found is to sum up the character in a single phrase. If that phrase isn’t the touchstone (and it probably won’t be), look for other ways to express it, more abstractly, or from different perspectives, or by analogy, or symbolically. If that doesn’t work, identify the character’s strongest personality trait or outlook and run that through the same process.

I have two NPCs (neither in play at the moment, and neither of whom might show up in-game at all) for whom the touchstone is “Emotionally Volatile”. In one case, it represents a character who flies off the handle at each and every perceived setback and who is always ready to perceive a setback even when there isn’t one; in the other, it represents a character who has extreme emotional mood swings, lurching from extreme happiness to extreme anger to extreme fear to extreme depression to… well, you get the idea. Any sort of mood change in this individual is immediately carried to extremes. To get into character, I simply have to recite the touchstone to myself (remaining aware of the context). How well I then convey the resulting portrayal remains to be seen.

I have another NPC whose touchstone is “pragmatically obsessive”. That doesn’t mean that he is obsessed with being pragmatic, it means that he is an obsessive who will always be pragmatic when necessary, and who will continue to pursue his goals obsessively to the fullest extent of what it possible, regardless of the cost.

Transform the character

To whatever extent the game system allows, I have learned to incorporate a “looking glass” somewhere in a character’s early appearances – whether it’s a PC or an NPC – that lets me perform radical surgery on the character if it becomes necessary. This surgery can be conceptual, or it can be in the ways that the concept manifests itself.

When it becomes clear that it isn’t required for that purpose, I can re-task that :looking glass” to give the player the chance to walk down “Might-have-been” street with a temporary transformation. These serve as a change of pace and can be great fun for all involved.

In one of my campaigns, I included the house rule that characters could morph from one class to another and/or one race or another at any point in the first three game sessions – but that once a class or race were abandoned, the character could not go back to it. That worked fairly well, especially since I had a three-session adventure in mind to let the players “try out” their characters.

Amend the game mechanics

This might seem a radical suggestion, but if there’s a particular set of sub-rules that aren’t “working” for a player (or for yourself), you have to consider changing them.

That doesn’t mean that the rules aren’t functional; they might work perfectly (in theory) or even work perfectly for every other participant at the table.

Such changes can be temporary (spreading balm on the problem before it becomes inflamed), or indefinite, or even deliberately permanent.

I once knew a (novice) player who couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of “THAC0”. He was perfectly capable of doing the maths, he understood the theory, but given any practical occurrence of a need to work out what he needed to hit, and what impact that should have on his tactical decisions, his head yielded “error”, usually followed by “tilt”. So I adjusted the game system (AD&D) for him only,. restating the number as “To Hit Me” – i,e, what he needed to roll in order to hit a character with the same AC as he had, and revising it whenever necessary. Result: no more problems. Estimating an enemy’s AC relative to his own became a point of his roleplaying when entering a combat situation and told him immediately whether to run, look for a way to avoid combat, look for a way to gain an advantage (or nullify an advantage enjoyed by the enemy), or attack.

And, of course, there were times when it was appropriate to be a little vague about the result, or when it was appropriate that the character over- or under-estimate the opposition. The player knew that, and fed that into his roleplaying as well. That one slight change to the game mechanics (which didn’t really change the way that they worked at all) overcame his conceptual roadblock, transforming him from a tactical liability to the best tactician in that group of players!

Transfer The Character

A more extreme response is to give that PC to another player (who may or may not already have a character in the game) and let the player with the problem create a new and different PC – one that doesn’t suffer from the same problem.

Retire The Character

Or perhaps you might make the old PC an NPC until you can write them out of the campaign. A more extreme variation on this is to “retire” the character while the original player is still handling it, usually by deliberately orchestrating a personal calamity of some sort. Still another variation has the character remaining a permanent NPC who is reduced to a non-combat role, or who only shows up occasionally.

The latter works especially well in a superhero campaign, where it’s the norm for no-one to die forever (not even Bucky).

The GM’s “Range”

I make no bones about my problems with the Warlock character class. Others have no problem with it whatsoever, and even look at you funny if you mention it as a problem. The warlock simply lies outside my “range” as a GM.

When this happens, you have the solutions listed above, but you also have a couple of additional choices that might help.

• Run A Solo Example
• Alter the Class/Race
• Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

Run A Solo Example

Sometimes, running a solo game in which you are both player and GM helps you come to grips with a problem. You aren’t restricted by normal campaign etiquette when you do this; you can make assumptions, have them blow up in your face, and
change those assumptions – if necessary, in mid-combat. And because there’s no one to wait for, no explanations or descriptions to others required, this testing can proceed at lightning speed.

What should you be looking for? It depends on the specific issue that you are experiencing. If a conceptual issue, like my problem with Warlocks in D&D, the key question is “why?” Why is the class the way it is? Why is this ability the way it is? – And you aren’t looking for metagame answers, you are looking for answers that work in an in-game context, i.e. from the point of view of the character that you are playing. Quite often, such problems will come from an assumption that you have made that is unwarranted and having a detrimental effect, and they key to solving your mental blocks is to identify that assumption and change it. Sometimes that means amending the campaign background that is built on that assumption, or amending the class to avoid the clash that has produced the problem; but whatever the conflict is, before you can solve it you have to identify it.

Sometimes it’s helpful to compare the way the class or race (or whatever) plays in the basic rules relative to under your house rules. That’s also often a good place to start.

I have also experienced cases where there was nothing inherently wrong with the character affected, it was simply a matter of requiring the owner to juggle more things mentally than other classes; in this circumstance, the player may be able to cope (though it does raise the question of whether or not they are having to work harder for their fun – and some would say they enjoy the challenge); but you, as GM, are having difficulty keeping the character in focus with everything else that you have to keep track of. That’s a specific type of overload that can often be managed once you know the source of the problem.

Finally, double check everything, at least at first; what you understand from the descriptions and what those descriptions are actually saying can sometimes be two wildly different things. Make sure that you haven’t been you own worst enemy.

Alter the Class/Race

As the GM, and hopefully guided by the playtesting described above, you may find that you need to make alterations to the class or race to integrate them into the game world because there is a conflict between the two concepts, or to because you need to make the change to bring such characters into your “range” as a GM. If you go down this path, you will need to have a plan in place for dealing with characters of the affected type who may already be in-game, one that can be applied retroactively. This may be as simple as giving the character’s owner the opportunity to switch N levels of Warlock to N levels of Mage, plus (perhaps) a sweetener to the deal, or it may be something more complex. Remember that by changing the class/race, you are changing what they thought they were getting when they chose that trait of the character, inconveniencing them for your own benefit; the fact that solving the problem will also benefit everyone at the table in terms of fun should not be a factor, only a motivation.

Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

A more severe solution to be used only when the playtesting described doesn’t deliver an answer, or is impractical for some reason (which will usually involve the “real world”). Again, you will need a plan for addressing character classes already dedicated to the class/race and other choices that may have been made – if a character has been working toward a particular variant or subclass, or a particular race/class combination, this may nullify all their character choices from level 1 of the character.

The rule of thumb is to stay as true as possible to the personality of the character as it has been expressed in play; everything else can be changed to fit.

This is definitely not an option to consider lightly; it’s a last resort before you end up at one of the two deadly-ends listed under the “player-problem” options. It’s certainly not a step to be undertaken without serious discussion with any players affected.

Final Words

We’re all human, and we all have our limitations. In no two cases will those limitations be equal. Part of the technique for lasting at the game table is identifying your “Range” and working within it, with the occasional push to extend it just a little (without doing so explosively!) In particular, you need to focus on areas in which you and your players are equally within your working/’acting’ limits; it does no good for one of the two to be within their range while the other is way out of their depth.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, and exceptionally versatile, these problems will never be an issue at your game table. For most of us, that isn’t the case. You don’t become the best GM that you can possibly be by accident; you need to work at it, crawling beyond your limits until you can take baby steps towards the edges of a new limit. Some of this development comes naturally, just by doing; it’s not uncommon to look at something you’ve just created or played out and realize that X months or years before, it would have been utterly beyond you.

Being successful as a GM entails embracing the art of the practical, whether it’s the limits placed on the amount of prep that can practicably be completed prior to play, or the limits placed on you by your personal flaws and limitations. Own the space that you can reach, and cast a greedy eye on those that are beyond you, but don’t throw away what you have in an attempt to own even more of the creative potential within a game system. Know and own your range and the ranges of your players, and go beyond those limits only judiciously.

Beginners

Beginners, this advice doesn’t necessarily apply to you – not 100%, anyway. For the first few months or even years after you start, a lot of things will be outside your comfort zone. Set realistic goals and targets for self-improvement in the GMing art, and be prepared to make a lot of mistakes.

Some beginner GMs make the huge mistake of setting their first campaign in the game world or gaming space that they have always wanted to play in. They may have an idea for a particular fantasy world that consumes and fascinates them, into which they have poured all their creative energies for months or years.

While that level of enthusiasm can be an undeniable asset, your skills and abilities as a GM are almost certainly not up to the job of implementing your dream campaign right off the bat. Save it and polish it for later use, when you can do it justice; start with something smaller and let it – and your skills – grow organically until you’re ready.

The same is true for beginner players. Your dream class might be a spell-caster, capable of reshaping reality with but a word, a gesture, and the force of your will. But Mages are complex character classes to run; get your fundamentals down pat, first, with something simpler. I started with a rogue (who didn’t survive for very long), and my focus was immediately on discovering and conveying the personality of that individual. I was acutely aware that I had just scratched the surface of what looked like being a fun character to play when he was killed. The resulting frustration could have poisoned me on the hobby; instead, it lit a fire that has lasted for more than thirty years, because he survived as a character just long enough to give me that glimpse of the possibilities.

And never forget that the game should be fun for everyone – players and GM alike.

I’m not sure how I’ll go when it comes time to upload this article; my internet connection (and telephone) are giving me a lot of trouble at the moment. If I have to, I’ll hit an internet cafe tomorrow.

I’m always looking for ways to sneak campaign background and historical information into my adventures so that I don’t have to take time out from those adventures to brief players. This not only increases the level of interest players have in the subject, but also its relevance and verisimilitude (because the event is seen as having had an ongoing impact on the game world).

So, when Blair (my pulp co-GM) mentioned that a guest from India who appeared on a recent current affairs show had (in Blair’s eyes) a manifest prejudice against the British, which biased his answers and the opinions he expressed on the show, and that many others also resented the nation’s colonial history (not entirely without cause, I hasten to admit), my radar went “Ping”.

Grudges as a background delivery vehicle

Old grudges – with or without merit – can serve as an excellent mechanism for game background because what do people typically do when they have a grudge? They broadcast their opinion and the reasons for it to anyone who will listen. The more obsessive will relate virtually every activity they undertake to that grudge.

In the past, I have thought that to be effective, the grudge needed to be activated by the presence of a trigger amongst the PCs or in the circumstances that have led the PCs to interact with the NPC. But in thinking about this article, I have realized that this doesn’t matter – such strongly-held opinions will manifest anyway, given half a chance, and that provides a vector for an NPC to vent an overtly biased perception of the events in question.

If you decide in advance that you are going to employ this delivery mechanism, you can even restrict your campaign notes to a bare mention of the event, its cause, its trigger, its duration, and its outcome, like this:

“World War I: An assassination triggered an unnecessary war which, through a series of treaty ‘dominoes’, eventually involved or affected almost every government on Earth. About four years later, and after the death of over a million combatants, it ended in a negotiated armistice that imposed huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany (even though the Germans weren’t the instigators of the conflict).”

As anyone who knows anything about the “Great War” (and that should be most GMs), that is just about the most superficial recitation of events it’s possible to craft and still use something that reads comfortably as a paragraph. To be more succinct, you need to either leave things out – which is fine – or go beyond the rules of good English into something akin to bullet points:

“World War I: An assassination – treaty ‘dominoes’ – almost every nation on Earth – 4 years – killed over a million – ended by imposing huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany.”

Of course, if you do your writing the way I do, you would have started with those bullet points, using them to structure your narrative and make sure that you left nothing out.

When the time comes – which is either when you have an NPC in need of color or an in-game situation in which the details of the event become relevant – you simply introduce your “Background Delivery System” and have a character (motivated by an old grudge) provide the salient details to the PCs, usually in the form of a complaint about someone or something.

This technique works even if the subject is an event the players have never heard of before, or know of only in passing from a brief mention of the event in campaign or adventure briefing.

Motivating the PCs to seek out an NPC with a grudge

Picture the following scenario: Early in your campaign, your players acquire (either by contrivance or choice) a mission while being given minimal background information, not all of which is necessarily accurate. In the course of the adventure, they encounter several difficulties which could have been avoided or prepared for if they had been given better intelligence (in the military sense of the word). Despite these difficulties, they succeed in their quest/mission, only to discover that they were being used to further an agenda they strongly disapprove of.

It’s a good bet that they will make a solemn vow amongst themselves to never be so used, again.

This is not only a great way to introduce a mastermind villain (as the person manipulating the PCs or as the person in back of them), it’s an object lesson that the players are never likely to forget. Henceforth, when given inadequate intelligence, one of their highest priorities will be to find out more about the situation, preferably before they commit themselves. What’s more, that lesson is almost certain to carry over into other campaigns, especially under the same GM.

So the PCs need to ask someone questions about the situation they are about to become enmeshed in; whoever they ask is either the person with the grudge, or directs the PCs to speak to that person (perhaps with an appropriate warning).

What happens is that Background material becomes a source of roleplay. Your adventures might take a little longer to play out, and your prep might need to be a little more substantial, but (almost?) everyone will have more fun in the process.

A Hidden Assumption To Observe

This scenario implies a hidden assumption – that whatever is in the background material already provided to the PCs is everything they know about the situation in question.

Once you are aware of that situation, you can turn it into another vector for engaging the players with an adventure; all you need do is note some additional briefing information that you can provide when a player asks “What does [my character] know about….”

Providing a teasing tidbit not only tells the player that you have prepared this adventure with these specific PCs in mind,, it tells him or her (through your choice of phrasing) that there is more information to be had if they ask the right person the right question(s).

Tactical intelligence-gathering is often a secondary (and sometimes unrealized) source of gaming pleasure for the combat types who don’t necessarily get off on straight roleplay!

The NPC Conduit

Simply giving an NPC a personality doesn’t guarantee that they will have something to say. Quite often, NPCs are reactive, requiring the PCs to push certain “buttons” to get to the more interesting parts of the NPC. A lot of NPC color is superficial, and can be ignored after it is first noticed. “Every evening at sunset, [NPC] drinks a silent toast to the flag” is a great bit of NPC color – but at any other time of the day, unless someone asks about the practice (having observed it or heard of it as an eccentricity), it might as well not be there.

“Distrusting of Warlocks” is another example – unless the subject somehow comes up, or one of the PCs happens to be a Warlock, or the adventure happens to involve a Warlock somehow, the situation won’t come up and can seem forced if you parade it anyway.

A grudge isn’t like that, in one important respect – it gives the NPC something to talk about. In fact, it does so on every single occasion that the NPC appears. The first time (taking a war grudge as an example), it can be the general information; the next time, a key combatant, or an important battle, or some other NPCs opposing bias, or an official action that is viewed as disrespectful of veterans of the conflict and/or their memories… the list goes on and on.

Or perhaps the NPC lost his job after the manufacturing plant where he was employed was bought by Japanese businessmen – something that happened quite a lot in the 1980s – and consequently the NPC holds a grudge against the Japanese (something else that happened a lot back then). This grudge will manifest every time a Japanese gets mentioned, or is in the news; every time a business gets bought or sold; every time someone loses their job, or gets hired; every time someone retires; every time a trade union does something (even something unrelated) because it was often the unions who were cast in an adversarial role to the new management…. So, this week the character waves a newspaper around and complains, next week he is busy dumping all his crackers in the garbage because the company has just been bought, the time after, he is filling out his tax forms and complaining about big business avoiding their fair share of the tax burden, the week after that he’s celebrating because a Japanese CEO was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the week after that it’s the prominence of Asians at the local high school…. the grudge becomes the NPCs defining characteristic simply because it can manifest in a different way on every separate occasion.

It seems quite clear that a grudge – defined as “a strong emotional response to factual triggers associated with the subject of the grudge, however peripherally” – adds massive amounts of color to an NPC at the same time as giving the NPC role-playable “content” to inject into any encounter.

But a little additional thought and creativity on the GM’s part can substantially enrich the role of the NPC with a grudge; all you need is to make the grudge confer some positive benefit to the character in a social sense. The NPC with a grudge against “the old enemy” can become a spokesman for veterans’ causes, or a ready source of completely unofficial aid to veterans in trouble. You can even use this as
the means to deliver the occasional adventure to the PCs – “I’ve got a buddy in a spot of trouble, and I thought you would be able to help”.

I never give a character a grudge without trying to find some respect in which that grudge can do something positive. Sometimes, the character with the grudge is unaware of the possibility (enabling growth in the character as the game progresses); sometimes he’s unaware of the connection; and sometimes, he knows full well that his grudge is motivating him.

Even a deeply-depressed nihilistic villain who wants to slaughter millions to spare them the pain that he has felt, and who sees everything through this murky web of imminent pain, acquires a richer, deeper characterization, in this way. His goal is to spare people from suffering, and there are all sorts of positive contributions that he can make to society in furtherance of that end with his right hand, even as his left is perpetrating monstrous deeds in the name of that cause.

Beware overuse

If the benefits are so huge, there has to be a temptation to give every NPC a grudge (I’ll deal with PCs and grudges a little later).

Don’t Do It.

Overuse will cause the technique to lose its effectiveness. You need the grudge to stand out, and that means using it only in a carefully-targeted manner. I’m always careful to employ three criteria: One, it has to give the character something interesting to talk about in encounters with the PCs; Two, it has to be logical that someone would have such a grudge, which requires either that the events be recent or that they have some vehicle of perpetuation through the years; Three, the subject has to have relevance to at least one significant adventure; and Four, it has to enrich and make interactive what would otherwise be a dry and stale subject within the campaign Background.

I want to amplify the caveat in item two a little before moving on. But some might take offense over what I have to say on a couple of delicate subjects – so if you find yourself in disagreement with anything in the inset panel below, I would ask that you simply skip to the end of it.

Contrast the US Civil War with Native American relations, in the context of a modern-day grudge. These days, if you were to be holding a grudge about what took place in the Civil War, you would be regarded as a bit of an eccentric if not an out-and-out kook. That’s what makes groups like the KKK such ready targets of ridicule; they seem so out of step, more of a cult than a valid political perspective. This causes them to be underrated as impediments to social progress, cartoon figures to be lampooned, rather than perpetrators of potential domestic terrorism. This is also true of the Taliban, who seek to apply 16th and 17th century social standards to a modern world for reasons of religious indoctrination and the acquisition of political power. Given the date on which this is being written, this point seems especially poignant.

Native Americans, on the other hand, have legitimate reasons to hold grudges today. The history of forcible relocation to reservations and broken treaties is perpetuated to this day by the legacies of those past acts. My own country has its own, not unrelated, problems in this area, though there was never a treaty made with the First Australians, and it is all too easy to understand grudges held over past political and social mistakes – even those made with what the people of the time considered best intentions. Rather than condemning those with such a grudge, we laud and encourage those who rise above them – they are held to a different social standard, in other words.

(For the record, I support recognition and reconciliation; I support and approve of all members of society being given an equal opportunity, with no-one getting unearned special privileges – with “unearned” as a key word – and I support a social safety net to ensure that all members of society receive a minimum standard of safety, security, health, and standard of living. And I support religious freedom, tolerance, and multiculturalism, right up to the point where such support places others at risk of harm, where the need for society to protect itself supersedes those freedoms).

Distortions of history

The benefits to GMs don’t end there. By definition, anyone with a grudge is going to have strong opinions and interpretations of events involving the subject of their grudge. As a general practice, because they have to see all sides of a situation in order to properly roleplay those involved in any faction, GMs tend to adopt a fairly neutral and arms-length position regarding their game histories. This causes an active disconnection between our personal opinions on any subject and the ‘official’ position. Like historians, we adopt an Olympian perspective.

If game history is to be delivered through the lens of of character with a grudge, there is no need to go to such lengths. Prep Research can be sloppier and even contradicted to some extent by subsequent manifestations of the same event. The character is telling a biased, distorted, and myopic version of the story. This is personal to them, somehow.

If you make it clear through their behavior and rhetoric that the NPC is speaking from the perspective of having a grudge, you don’t have to worry about the “other side of the story” (let alone the truth) until the PCs have the opportunity to interact with that “other side” – let the players filter the bias out for themselves, making whatever assumptions or interpretations they find necessary.

Even when the PCs do interact with “The Other Side Of The Story”, don’t make the mistake of making that the “true story”; it should be just as distorted and myopic, at least in critical areas. Only when PCs are in a position to learn the real truth, free of any bias, should that be of concern to the GM.

Most events involving humans don’t have immutable and incontrovertible timelines. Let’s take a hypothetical war between Elves and Dwarves – the Dwarves might date the beginning of the war from the date of Dwarfish incursion into Elvish Territory in response to what they consider lengthy provocations; the Elves might consider this just the overt escalation of a conflict that began when the Dwarves attempted to bargain in bad faith, abrogating or ignoring past treaties, months or even years earlier.

Does a battle begin when a raiding force begins to march, or when that force encounters the defenders of the raid’s target?

It all depends on your perspective. Even something as strongly defined as the Birth of the USA – July 4th of 1776 was when the Declaration Of Independence was signed, but did the revolution actually begin when they started negotiating it, days or weeks earlier?

Two sides to every story

The “winners” write the history? Says who?

Losers perpetuate their own version of events – so long as victory is less than total.

Even if that’s not the case, the experiences of the surviving losers in a conflict will enter the popular zeitgeist of their social group as a subculture within the victorious and dominant society – and, arguably, the social position that results could qualify as the type of “perpetuation” I was discussing above. Certainly, through to the 80s and 90s at the very least, African Americans could cite the long legacy of slavery and oppression as a driving impetus behind the struggle for Civil Rights, which is a profound example of the phenomenon.

It is often helpful to the GM to deliberately stock some part of his campaign with an advocate of “the other side” as soon as he introduces the character with The Grudge. This advocate need not appear at once, and need not appear with the same frequency as the character with The Grudge; his function is simply to remind the players from time-to-time that there is another perspective of perhaps equal validity. Nor does the GM need to worry about this NPCs manifesto until such time as he will appear in-game.

Simply make a note of his existence and pop him into some appropriate scene that seems a little quiet and needs livening up.

Three sides to every story

GMs should also always remember the Vorlon Saying from Babylon 5: There are three sides to every story: Your Side, Their Side, and The Truth. You don’t have to worry about the content of the other two when creating content for the character with The Grudge, but never forget that the other sides are out there. The character with the Grudge should be wrong occasionally, and that error should manifest in the form of trouble for the PCs who rely on his information.

Does anyone really believe that the American Government and Military conducted every single encounter during World War 2 with complete honor and integrity? Or the British? That expediency and internal politics never led to a compromising of principles?

Anyone who knows history, knows better. The incarceration of Japanese Americans is one shameful example, and one that has been demonstrated to have been in error of justice in subsequent years. There are those who still question the need to bomb Nagasaki; in light of what the Americans believed at the time, and of Japanese attempts to negotiate a settlement of the war on their own terms after Hiroshima, I think it can probably be justified, and any taint of lack of necessity counterbalanced by the comedy of errors and misjudgments that turned Pearl Harbor into a sneak attack.

The absence of a victory

I don’t want to belabor the point too much further, so I will simply cite three additional points of contemplation and leave the reader to muse on them for themselves.

• Consider modern US-UK relations – well, those before President Trump and Brexit became somewhat divisive elements in that relationship
  – with the outcome of the American War of Independence, in which Britain accepted that the War could not be won with the resources they had available, given the problems that they faced with their European neighbors of the time. It was that acceptance and a subsequent normalizing of relations that drew a line between that conflict, paving the way for the US to come to the aid of the Allies in the First World War.
• Contrast that with the relationship between India and Britain. The liberties granted to the East India Company were frankly exploitative, aimed at fostering the wealth of the Company at the expense of the locals while promoting the Imperialism of Britain in the era. British control was maintained through force and corruption until those were no longer tenable. That Britain gave much, in cultural and technological terms, to the Indians can’t be disputed; but the behavior of the British at the time can only be justified in the context of the morality of the era, and fails utterly by modern standards. Although grudgingly granted independence during the reformation of Empire into Commonwealth, and despite overtly good relations between the nations since, there are still Indians who hold an anti-British Grudge. This was the attitude expressed that initially inspired this article.
• And then, contrast both with the relations between Northern and Southern Ireland, whose history raises harsh and difficult questions. There were occasions during the twentieth Century when each side of the Northern Irish conflict behaved abominably, prompting the question, how far you entitled to go in abrogating your morality in order to secure “inalienable rights”? And, the inevitable followup question – was anything really gained, or did they simply take turns building a barrier to peaceful resolution of the conflict? I’m sure that if you were to ask, both sides would defend and justify their actions. Ultimately, it was a political process that ended the conflict – and I’m equally sure that there are those on both sides who still bear grudges against the other.

Adventuring Potential

All the benefits of giving an NPC a grudge arise even before we consider the potential for adventures to manifest from the background material in question. That potential takes four forms:

• Legacies,
• Acts Of Revenge,
• Unpopular Histories, and
• Outside Forces & Conspiracies.

Legacies

Somewhere, in a long-forgotten corner of the game world, there is a leftover from a past conflict that poses a threat to the modern world. This could be an unfinished doomsday weapon, or “forbidden” research, or any of half-a-dozen other possibilities. Used sparingly, this plot gimmick never gets tired.

Acts Of Revenge

It’s easy for a Grudge to lead a character to cross a line. Every time a line gets crossed, it gets easier to do so again. Inevitably, in some cases, minor acts of pettiness resulting from a Grudge lead to more substantial acts of revenge, and characters who – due to dissatisfaction with the outcome – want to reignite the old conflict. However justified the dissatisfaction might be, the result is unjustifiable acts of revenge. What’s more, dissatisfaction leaves a character or a population open to exploitation. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the European theater of World War II, when megalomania exploited justifiable dissatisfaction to rebuild national pride into an arrogance that permitted acts of extreme barbarism.

Unpopular Histories

At first glance, it might seem like there is nothing under this heading to really exploit in terms of adventure. Revealing or Discovering an unpopular truth might be intellectually interesting, but it rarely gets the gaming juices really flowing.

Look a little deeper. I dealt with this question in in The Veil of Secrecy: A truth about organizations in games without really digging into the implications.

An organization – be it a business or a government agency or an entire government – does something that they can’t admit to. They now have a secret. To protect that secret, they erect a cover story. In furtherance of that cover story, they do other things that they can’t admit to – bribes, intimidation, ruining reputations, disinformation, perhaps even murder. Now they have another secret to protect – and one with deeper personal ramifications for those involved. Should the secret come under threat, a violent countermeasure is almost inevitably justified in the minds of those involved.

There have been lots of movies and TV shows in which characters come under threat because their activities threaten a secret. Even good people can do so if they judge the myth to be more important than the reality. Threaten to undermine that myth, and you make yourself a target.

Of course, in most such stories, the main protagonists aren’t the ones threatening the secret, they are the ones trying to protect them from those with the secret. Which is generally easier to orchestrate, from a GM’s perspective.

Outside Forces & Conspiracies

Finally, the other side of the coin is also about the exposing of secrets – the discovery that a past conflict was orchestrated for their own purposes by a third party inevitably leads the person making that discovery into a position of hostility toward that third party. Of course, such a secret would not be easily discovered; you would have to be motivated to dig deeply for the breadcrumbs that make it seem like a conspiracy theory. Characters with a grudge are highly motivated….

PC Grudges

With such depth of characterization on offer, it can be a temptation to load one or more PCs down with a grudge. And the dividends are exactly the same as for an NPC.

I urge you to resist such temptation, except under unusual circumstances – not that I have any such in mind, but concede that it’s just possible there could be some.

The first problem with this tactic is that it takes that ?deferable and compromised? background research and makes the deadline immediate and ongoing. Because you will need to keep feeding content to the PC, you actually force the player to cede some measure of his control over his character. At the same time, from an outside perspective, you can give the impression to other players that you are playing favorites. And finally, you run the risk of overuse of the “Grudge” mechanism, something I warned of earlier.

There are simply too many minefields. If you can see a way to circumvent them, then this is worth considering – but that is going to be an isolated case, I think. PCs are better served, most of the time, being the neutral observers caught in the middle, and caring about the things that the player wants them to care about.

Some things are too good to waste on Player Characters. Grudges are one of them.