With this item, I continue the practice of offering shorter articles to start the week. Usually, this is to make room for a longer article later (and from time to time, the sequence has been temporarily inverted), but for much of the next year, that’s the plan. This week, though, it’s not for that reason – I have an optometrist’s appointment mid-week that will eat into the time that would normally be dedicated to producing that longer article. Prudence dictates that I make this a “light” week. Whether or not my writer’s instincts will tell Prudence to go fly a kite remains to be seen…

For a long time, I’ve been a supporter of the carrot-and-stick approach to encouraging good play. I tolerate a certain amount of side chatter and the occasional excursion into out-of-game conversation, and I tolerate absence or lateness when the player has a good reason.

When such behavior reaches the point of becoming a problem, rewards are likely to be reduced as a punishment – I favor XP awards for this as they can directly target the character of the player responsible without others being unduly affected by “splash”, but if there’s a magic item or equivalent that’s been placed to specifically target and benefit the character whose player is involved, it might instead be reduced in effectiveness, either temporarily (requiring the player to inconvenience the character to lift the ‘penalty’) or permanently.

By the same token, however, for more than 30 years I’ve been handing out bonus XP for good play – be it good role-play, or clever tactics, or for the player doing something that helps me run a good game. My players know all this and have come to expect it – especially since rewards are far more frequent than punishments.

This weekend’s table side-chatter carried with it a new idea. It’s not my idea (not completely), but I’m stealing it and filing off the serial numbers! That notion: an in-game reward for doing a good job as a player instead of extra XP.

What’s Wrong With Extra XP?

Extra XP make a great reward because they are something that the player cares about. They are quick and easy to hand out, and they can make a real difference to the character. They encourage consistent patterns of good behavior because they accumulate. So, what’s wrong with them?

Players care about them – and not getting them when you think they are justified can arouse ill-will. They are easy to hand out, which encourages the GM to hand them out frivolously, rather than being earned by achieving a consistent standard of good behavior. They can make a real difference to the character, and they can accumulate – which means that, over time, the benefits obtained will tend to grow exponentially.

So what’s the alternative?

Three things come to mind:

1. In-game kudos and high-fives from NPCs whose opinions matter to the PC.
2. Recognition from the PC’s NPC-peers. In-game popular support from “ordinary people”.
3. Tokens that are redeemable for in-game advantages but that must be used by a certain date or they get converted to XP.

Of these, the last of the three is more powerful, and more flexible. You can either hand out different tokens that offer specific benefits, or you can establish a “price list” and use the tokens as a form of metagame currency. The first permits greater control, but is more work, the latter is easier on the GM’s workload.

An Expiry Date?

The notion of an expiry date is an important point to note. A physical token made of cardboard is easily lost, but also easy to write a date on, and easily replaced after use. A physical token made of plastic can be marked with a permanent marker, though such markings can still wear off (it depends on the combination of markers and the plastic the tokens are made of). Both these options also require the player to spend time sorting and counting his accumulated “rewards” at the start of each game session. Getting a character to write something on their character sheet means that the character sheet will eventually wear out (this section is likely to see a lot of “traffic”) but is also more flexible.

These are all problems that can be solved. I recommend using a choice that has a low financial impact on the GM, minimizes the chances of tokens getting lost, and that has a low overhead in terms of additional work for all involved.

Why have one at all? I have seen (and used) similar systems in the past, and what happens is that players tend to hoard them until they have a whole lot – enough to give them an overwhelming advantage. A use-by date forces players to expend them regularly, keeping them manageable as rewards.

I have a suggested solution: instead of a calendar date, use a relative date – “expiry in N game sessions”. The more you want to reward a character, the longer the time frame you attach – instead of increasing the size of the reward. Use tokens that will pack flat.

You know those plastic sheets that are designed to hold cards from CCGs? They tend to be cheap per sheet. There are usually nine pockets per sheet, sometimes there might be 12. Those are more than big enough for this purpose. Here’s how it might work:

How long should a cycle be? I’ve used 5 as an illustration, but you could choose three, or four, or six – it’s all a question of how many different tokens you have. This solution means that there’s no need to mark or replace the tokens at all – they are constantly being recycled.

Types Of In-Game Reward

What could you spend tokens on? Well, that’s up to the GM. For the rest of this article, I’ve listed (and discussed) as many types of in-game reward as I can think of, and a suggested price in tokens.

Here’s the list of rewards I’ve come up with:

1. Partial Map (with potential inaccuracies) or equivalent
2. Partial Map or equivalent without inaccuracies
3. A Clue
4. +5 to a roll (before you roll)
5. +1 to a roll (after you roll)
6. -5 to a roll (before the GM rolls)
7. -1 to a roll (after the GM rolls)
8. Re-roll a failed non-combat roll
9. Re-roll a failed combat roll
10. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one encounter
11. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one full game session
12. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC’s class orrace for one full game session
13. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PCs (as a group) for one encounter
14. Kudos from and a lasting improvement in attitude towards the PC on the part of one specific NPC
15. 10% off the purchase price of one mundane item one-time-only, for this particular PC only
16. 10% off the prices of one particular merchant, one-time-only, for this particular PC only
17. A more generous valuation of one particular item being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%)
18. A more generous valuation of all items being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%), one-time-only
19. Placement
    of a specifically-desired magic item in a place and location that the PC can obtain it
20. XP (the default)

That’s a solid list of 20 possible rewards, by my count. None of them are particularly game-breaking unless the price is too low or the GM is too generous in his distribution of reward tokens. I’ll discuss that a little later.

1. Partial Map (with potential inaccuracies) or equivalent

The PC gets a map (as described) or a verbal description of one particular room in a dungeon. The closer to the entrance that room is, the more likely the description or map is to be accurate, but the GM doesn’t have to tell the player how close the room in question is – the player still has to recognize it. I suggest a hierarchy, such as 1. completely accurate – 2. a few minor inaccuracies – 3. an important detail wrong – 4. an important detail and a couple of unimportant details incorrect – 5. information is mostly close to the truth but nothing is quite right – 6. not even close to accurate. Count one door or length of passage as “1”.

This information (or mis-information!) may be from personal experience, or it may be from Scrying or some other similar technique, or from a friend of a friend, or myth/legend/rumor or whatever. It might have been totally accurate at one time. Those are all up to the GM depending on the context of the situation.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

2. Partial Map or equivalent without inaccuracies

As above, but without inaccuracies – anything actually said is correct. This simply strips out the inaccuracies from the above and only reports the factually-correct information. This can be difficult for the GM to explain, in-game, so it is harder to earn.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens.

3. A Clue

If the PCs are stumped, it is expected that the GM will help them out in order to keep the game moving, because sitting around doing nothing is boring.

Making this option available changes the paradigm. Instead of a clue to keep the game moving (for free), the GM is free to use some other action to keep action happening when the game starts to get boring – a wandering monster, for example, or a PC “hears something” (sparking paranoia) or whatever. ANYTHING except actually helping the PCs do something that the players should be capable of doing on their own.

But, if one of the players chooses to expend reward tokens, an appropriate PC gets a clue or a hint. Which PC is appropriate depends on the problem that has the PCs stumped – it might be the cleric, if it’s a religious puzzle, or the fighter if it’s a physical challenge, or the smartest person in the party if it’s logic puzzle.

This also guarantees that the GM won’t make the clue too cryptic – it should be possible to get from the clue to the solution reasonably – though it doesn’t and shouldn’t make it too easy, either.

I’ve had a reasonable amount of success promising to answer 5 yes-or-no questions truthfully as a ‘clue’.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

4. +5 to a roll (before you roll)

Some game systems permit you to “take a ten” or “take a twenty” under certain circumstances, but force you to roll the hard way the rest of the time. This option falls somewhere in between – in effect, the player is cashing in his reward to get a better shot at a successful roll. Note that whether or not the +5 is actually needed doesn’t matter – the token still gets expended. The GM may permit multiple tokens to be played or may cap this at one, or anything in between, as he sees fit.

Nor does the player paying the token have to be the owner of the PC making the roll.

What this does is ensure that when one of those rolls comes up that the PCs absolutely have to succeed in, they have the means to shade their chances in their favor. And that this potential can be frittered away taking the lazy option when failure is not going to be the end of the world!

Recommended Price: 1 token.

5. +1 to a roll (immediately after you roll)

On the other hand, once a roll is made, the GM should be much harder to convince, because the player already knows whether or not they have succeeded.

This has three applications, from the players’ perspective: they can avoid a fumble or critical miss (i.e. turn a natural 1 into a 2); they can ameliorate the frustration of just missing a failed roll; or they can turn a 19 into a 20 (or system equivalents, of course).

I often feel that the PCs need to have an edge that enables them to win most fair fights; it’s only a question of the degree of difficulty involved (no-one ever promised that it should be easy!) This option provides the PCs with just such an edge while still keeping it constrained and controlled within reasonable limits.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

6. -5 to a roll (before the GM rolls)

This is a more defensive option. The player who is buying this reward is betting that the modifier will make the difference, or is desperate enough that it’s worth any price to improve the odds. I strongly recommend that GMs cap the number of tokens that can be expended in this way on any single roll to one, or at most, 2. But if you do want to make it more open-ended, reduce the size of this reward to +4 or +3 (and the size of 4 above, to match).

Recommended Price: 1 token.

7. -1 to a roll (immediately after the GM rolls)

The obvious alternative or variation on 5, above. I have to admit that I thought long and hard about making this a -2 instead of a -1, and am STILL of two minds on the question. A minus 1 will avoid a critical success (a 20 becomes a 19), and turn an only-just success into a failure or a near-fumble into a fumble, but those are very limited circumstances. Doubling the scope for this to make a difference is a substantial improvement in utility.

If your objective is to keep the ‘economy’ of tokens turning over, don’t cap this; if you trust yourself not to be excessively generous, I suggest a cap of 1 or 2 tokens.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

8. Re-roll a failed non-combat roll

“Psst, Hey kid, want to buy yourself a second bite of the cherry?” The lower the level of the PCs, the more comfortable I would be having this choice on the table. That’s because the greater the chance of success, the greater the value of a re-roll.

If you only succeed on eighteen or better (on d20) (or three or less on d20, it’s the same thing), a second roll doesn’t improve your chances very much – 3/20ths of 17/20ths, or 12.75%. Overall, your chance is only 27.75%, or slightly less than one in four. I’d be completely comfortable with that sort of improvement.

If your chances are 50-50, you get twice as much gain – 10/20ths of 10/20ths, or 25%, which takes your overall chance of success to 75%. Look at it the other way – your chances of failing have just halved. That’s starting to get to my squeal point.

Every improvement from there only ramps things up. If you succeed on 14 or less, the improvement is 14/20ths of 6/20ths – which is only 21% – but that becomes significant when added to the base 70% chance, taking your overall likelihood of success to 91%. From a roughly one-in-three chance of failing, it’s become one in 10, or better than three times as unlikely. By now, we’re well past my squeal point.

So I would limit the heck out of this option. ONE re-roll, only, and only when most of the rolls by the party are 50-50 or less (in D&D/Pathfinder terms, until about 5th-8th level). This option may NOT be combined with any of the other ones on offer – specifically, the +5 or +1 to the die roll. And even then, to accurately reflect the utility, I would up the price, as shown below.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens.

9. Re-roll a failed combat roll

Everything that I’ve just said counts double or triple when we’re talking about combat rolls, because these can literally be the difference between life-and-death. The price should reflect that innate value, and be high enough that you would only contemplate this if you were absolutely desperate..

Recommended Price: 3 tokens.

10. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one encounter

From “burn him at the stake” to “lock him up”; from “lock him up” to “fox touring the hen-house”; from “extreme paranoia” to “grudging tolerance”, to “polite acceptance” to “warm welcome” to “long-lost brother”. Or whatever other gradated structure you use.

As a general rule of thumb, such shifts in attitude resulting from the expenditure of multiple tokens decline back to the base at the rate of 1 step per encounter, or per game day, whichever comes first. So spending four tokens might take a hostile reception to a polite if cool welcome for one encounter, to deep suspicion and second thoughts on a second encounter, to feeling manipulated and betrayed on the third, and back to the base “extreme prejudice” level on the fourth.

This is a foot in the door – but unless the PC works hard to take advantage of the opportunity to better his relations, it’s a fleeting advantage. Rewards should never take the place of good roleplay.

Recommended Price: 1 token per step.

11. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one full game session

As above, but the decay rate is weekly or by game session, whichever comes first.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens per step.

12. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC’s class orrace for one full game session

This is about creating a local exception to a generalized attitude. Decay assumes that the PC is unable to live up to the expectations of the locals. I keep thinking about the attitudes toward the Dwarves in Lake-town in “The Hobbit” as the perfect example.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens per step.

13. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PCs (as a group) for one encounter

The locals have heard good things about the Party (whether they are true or not is another matter). This overrides any prejudices they may have – for a while – as per 10, above. “Most [fill-in-the-blanks] are uncouth scum who would do [something horrible] to us if they could, but we’ve heard that you’re different.” Again, if the PCs fail to do something significant to cement relations, the goodwill quickly evaporates, and even those who the locals might get along with (or have no prejudice toward) will suffer, tarred with the same brush.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens per step.

14. Kudos from and a lasting improvement in attitude towards the PC on the part of one specific NPC

This can only be accessed after performing a deed of which the NPC approves, and is a means by which the player can enhance/leverage the resulting goodwill.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens per step.

15. 10% off the purchase price of one mundane item one-time-only, for this particular PC only

The GM should have a reasonably liberal interpretation of “one item” – if something is usually bought in sets, or in quantities, the discount applies to one set or one transaction. The discount may not show up immediately; this commits the GM to “arranging” circumstances under which the discount will be offered. The scale if circumstantial change depends on the scale of the transaction and the size of the discount that has to be justified.

Recommended Price: 1 token, plus 1 token each 2nd additional step. So 10% costs one, 20% costs 1 plus 1 equals 2, 30% costs 2 plus one, plus one, or 4, and so on,
The sequence is: 1 (10%), 2 (20%), 4 (30%), 6 (40%), 10 (50%), 14 (60%), 20 (70%), 26 (80%), 34 (90%), 42 (100%, i.e. free).

These somewhat brutal increases at high level are intended to keep these benefits within reasonable (and rational) bounds. The GM is perfectly entitled to interpret circumstances that emerge during play as providing one or more additional “steps” of discounting.

16. 10% off the prices of one particular merchant, one-time-only, for this particular PC only

As above regarding in-game interpretation.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens, plus 1 token each additional step.
The sequence is: 2 (10%), 5 (20%), 9 (30%), 14 (40%), 20 (50%), 27 (60%), 35 (70%), 44 (80%), 54 (90%), 65 (100%, i.e. “take whatever you need”).

17. A more generous valuation of one particular item being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%)

Only one level of this benefit per item. This is justified as the buyer already having a customer in mind who will pay him a premium for the item, or something similar. When dealing in a more mundane item, something has put him in a good mood.

Recommended Price: 1 token per significant digit of base valuation in gp. So a 5,000gp item needs 4 tokens to get the +10% benefit.

0-9gp: 1 token for 10%
10-99 gp: 2 tokens for 10%
100-999 gp: 3 tokens for 10%
1000-9999 gp: 4 tokens for 10%
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 5 tokens for 10%
and so on, but I doubt more will be needed. Which is convenient because these are all reasonably workable with mental arithmetic.

18. A more generous valuation of all items being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, see below), one-time-only

This should usually be interpreted as an attempt to forge a lasting trading relationship with the PC. The NPC might do so out of avarice (expecting to do a lot more business with the PC in the future) or might have some ulterior motive (“you owe me a favor”). The GM is free to place any other interpretation on the situation that seems appropriate, but something is motivating the NPC to deal with the PC on more generous terms than most would get.

Recommended Price: 1 token, plus 1 token per significant digit of base valuation in gp of the total. So 5,000gp worth of items needs 5 tokens to get the +10% benefit (see above for what I mean by significant digits).

However, the player should not be told the total number of tokens required; instead, divide the number offered by the PC by the required amount and multiply by 10%. So if the player only expends three reward tokens when four are required to get the full 10%, he gets 3/4 of 10% or +7.5% overall. If the player had expended five tokens when only three were required, that’s one-and-two-thirds of 10%, or about 16.7%.

19. Placement of a specifically-desired magic item in a place and location that the PC can obtain it

This isn’t meant to guarantee that the PC will obtain the item, but does guarantee the opportunity to acquire the item. The GM should add it to whatever treasure he has emplaced and add additional defenses appropriate to the increase in value of the total. It certainly does not guarantee that the item won’t be used against the PC!

Recommended Price: 2 tokens plus 1 token per significant digit of the valuation, -2 for one-use items, -1 for a charged item with 5+d10% of the base charges.

So, Potions & Scrolls:
0-9gp: 2+1-2=1 token
10-99 gp: 2+2-2= 2 tokens
100-999 gp: 2+3-2= 3 tokens
1000-9999 gp: 4 tokens
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 5 tokens

Wands (5-15% charged [round up]):
0-9gp: 2 tokens
10-99 gp: 3 tokens
100-999 gp: 4 tokens
1000-9999 gp: 5 tokens
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 6 tokens
100k – 999k gp: 7 tokens

Armors, Weapons, etc:
0-9gp: 3 tokens*
10-99 gp: 4 tokens**
100-999 gp: 5 tokens***
1000-9999 gp: 6 tokens****
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 7 tokens*****
100k – 999k gp: 8 tokens*****
* few if any items will be this cheap, this entry is only for the sake of completeness
** you might get some mundane/masterworked items in this price range
*** too cheap for magic, but most mundane items will be in this range
**** the realistic minimum for low-level magic items
***** most magic items will be in the 7-8 token range.

20. XP (the default)

Some players respond particularly poorly to falling just short of acquiring their next level. Aside from ensuring that tokens keep circulating, this offers such players a way past the hump. The actual value per token goes up with the number of tokens being redeemed for XP:

1 token: 100XP
2 tokens: 150XP
3 tokens: 200XP
4 tokens: 250XP
5 tokens: 300XP
6+ tokens: 400XP + 20XP per token over 5

Unlike most of the other rewards, the PC doesn’t have to do anything to receive this XP. He is considered to have done whatever-it-is that justifies the extra back when he received the token.

So, a character who cashes in three tokens would get 3×200=600XP extra.

A character who cashes in five tokens would get 5×300=1500 XP extra.

A character who cashes in ten tokens would get 10x(400+100)= 5000 XP extra.

If your game system doesn’t use the D&D scale or similar for XP, you may need to adapt this.

Sidebar

Assuming characters earn up to 3 tokens per game session on average – and I’ll get into reward levels in a moment – this sets up an interesting dynamic in which a character may choose to tap into his non-expiring reserve to obtain a bigger XP payout, and hence an additional level sooner – but in the process, sacrifices the benefits / security blanket of having those untapped rewards on hand. This may actually handicap the character for a while, relative to another, more patient, character. This effectively simulates a situation in which the character has to take a little time to fully assimilate the things he’s just learned how to do (the level increase and any level abilities that go with it). Suggest to the player that he roleplay it that way :)

Earning Rewards

The number of reward tokens you hand out is critical. A brilliant idea or making the whole table laugh might be worth 1 token. Roleplaying especially well in a single encounter might be worth 2 tokens, and so on, but my recommendation is to vary the lifespan rather than the payout. The longer a token will survive, the more tokens the character can accumulate in total.

Or you can do what I did in the pictured example, and blend the two strategies for even more flexibility – one short-lived token for something small, a long-lived token for something more significant, a very long-lived token and a short-lived token for something even more substantial.

Or, option number four, you could state that the first reward in a game session has a 1-session expiry date, the second has a two, the third has a three, and so on.

What this system, in its variations, is all about is rewarding and encouraging certain behavior at the gaming table, and especially in in-game terms. The scale of the reward should reflect how much you want to encourage that behavior.

What is your minimum standard – the level that gives you no rewards beyond those mandated within the rules? Is it being polite and engaged? Is it being so in-character that when the personality dictates it, you will put your PC at a disadvantage? Is it deliberately failing at a task (because the character is almost hopeless at it) rather than rolling? Is it having a brilliant insight into the in-game situation? Is it getting the GM out of tight spot or a plot hole that he didn’t see coming?

I would argue that everything listed above after the “polite and engaged” should be actively encouraged by the GM.

And hey, if you’re concerned about game balance, this system gives you the perfect excuse to skimp a little in other areas. Don’t dole out magic items like candy; provide them at a rate that is reasonable in terms of the campaign that you are running, and let characters earn ‘extras’ through rewards. Anticipate that a character will get 100xp or more per game session from roleplaying and reduce the other awards that you dole out, accordingly.

I’m not saying that I recommend you do so, just that this is an option that is on the table for you to consider.

One final piece of
advice (or two)

Avoid playing favorites. Every player/PC combination is different, and requires judging by its own standards; some characters are more robust or complex than others. Some players are natural or skilled min-maxers who should be held to a higher standard than others.

It’s even more important, though, to avoid giving the appearance of playing favorites, because that’s more easily done (even by a good and fair GM) than actually playing favorites. If you take control over the rewards system into your own hands, even to this limited degree, you expose yourself to allegations of bias, even if they are unwarranted, unless you are scrupulous in your approach.

The benefits of providing rewards that can be meta-gamed in the ways that I have described for an in-game benefit are that you give the player flexibility in the form that their reward takes – it’s whatever they need most at the time. That gives players a greater sense of control over the campaign, even as it protects from the unexpectedly good (or bad) roll or decision. This system protects the players from bad GM decisions as much as it protects the GM from excessive generosity (i.e. Monty Haulism) and other errors. It grants great rewards to those who earn them, but the GM retains control over the awards, and it can even make the GM’s job easier because he has more flexibility in his ability to challenge the players.

The notions described have clear merit. Is that merit sufficient justification for house rules that alter your game in the fairly fundamental ways described? It’s certainly worth considering!

It’s one of the easiest techniques to follow – you simply copy a character or a plotline from some other source, be it Television, a Movie, or a literary source. If you’re particular clever, you might go so far as to rename the character.

There are a number of reasons why a GM might be attracted to this. The character or story might be a personal favorite, or it might just seem absolutely perfect for the campaign’s current needs. Or there might be an irresistible pun or witticism involved.

Resist that urge.

What most people don’t realize is that such derivative interpretations fall flat seven times in ten – and explode in your face most of the rest of the time.

Not convinced? Okay, let’s run through why this happens. Then I’ll show you how to pull the fangs of this particular dragon.

Irresistible Humor

A joke of any sort is transitory. If you’re lucky, it might still be funny the second or third time. Sooner or later, though, it will become a millstone around the neck of the character or situation introduced purely for the comedic value of the media/literary in-joke, dragging your campaign down with it.

Tribute Characters

There’s a reason why a character appeals, and it’s rare to actually capture that with the character; the reason they are beloved is because of the situations they find themselves in, and how the character reacts to those situations, and how the character interacts with the other characters around him. Usually, these are carefully crafted to show the character in his ‘best’ light.

So when you clone the character, what happens? He finds himself in different situations, requiring a different reaction; he finds himself surrounded by other characters, and so the interactions with those characters are different. In a nutshell, the context doesn’t translate with the character, leaving him looking like a pale imitation of the original instead of the vibrant homage that you expected.

Cloned Plotlines

A plot develops as a consequence of the stimulus of the characters engaged in it. Different characters will react differently, have different capabilities and different priorities. In particular, the PCs are not going to the same as the protagonists in the source material.

Quite often, the plot requires characters to overlook the one correct explanation for what is going on, to experience particular lapses in logic, or to make particular assumptions that shape their thought processes and actions. None of these are likely to be replicated by the PCs, and so the plot will evolve in a different direction to the original. Long before you get to the parts of the source that motivated you to create the derivative plot, it’s on a completely different course.

Making matters worse, you have often been so busy adapting and collating the plot that you expect to occur that you haven’t done prep for what actually happens, forcing you to scramble to react to the situation. And when you do that, your first instinct is to try and force the plot “back into shape”. The tracks are laid and the PCs forced aboard the plot train before you know it, all in the most blatant form possible.

Or, if you have avoided these pitfalls, you run afoul of the fact that plots are designed for particular characters – and your characters are different. The coalescence of this reality is that your plot is unlikely to suit your characters as well as the lovingly polished narrative in the source – and that leaves your efforts less satisfying than the original was.

Clone plotlines are one pit-trap after another for the GM to fall into.

The right way to do it

There are solutions to all these problems, a right way to do it that either solves or avoids these problems, and a number of others that I haven’t mentioned.

The right way to incorporate a joke or witticism

Have you ever noticed that people are more prone to laugh at a joke if they have already been laughing? It’s the difference between a “cold room” and a room that’s been “warmed up”.

The other time that humor is most likely to hit the mark is when it’s a relief, a release.

So tell your joke as an aside, use it as mood inspiration, and let the players and yourself find your own joke amongst in-game events. But either soften the ground up in advance with other humor, or go in the exact opposite direction.

Throw a little slapstick at an NPC. Tell a joke or two. Show a humerous cartoon or meme around. Make your target audience receptive, then use your joke as a launchpad. “My first thought was to make Darwin Orwell a character like [name] for the joke value – can you imagine what he would say/do if he were in this situation?” – then tell your joke.

This gets the ‘audience’ receptive, incorporates the humor that you wanted to use, and gets full value for it – without contaminating your in-game situation.

The right way to make a homage to a favorite character

At the very end of 2015 (I can hardly believe it was so long ago), I offered details of a villain named Mortus, who was a homage to the comics version of Marvel’s Thanos, a character that has been lurking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a while now, and who is set to figure prominently in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War.

Having railed against derivative characters, how could I countenance such a creation, let alone laud it as a success?

First, because this wasn’t a cheap knock-off, or second-rate pale shadow of the original; instead, I took the central concepts of the original character and constructed a new character that embodied those key themes in a new context.

Next, the adventure in which he appeared was one designed to highlight this new character. He did things that the original source character would not have done because the source character had completely different motives and ambitions. In terms of personality, the two were as different as dumplings and steel girders, and the adventure served to showcase the character who was actually in-play, and not the one that had inspired him.

The best homages are those which permit you to do something original, and which let the new character evolve in his own direction.

Compare Thanos with Mortus in detail, and understand the process that created one from the inspiration provided by the other.

The right way to draw inspiration from a situation or plotline

There is a novel of the thriller genre called ‘The President’s Plane Is Missing‘ by Robert J. Serling. There is another, ‘The Red President‘ (link is to the Amazon page for the book which has more and better reviews than anywhere else).

At one point in the last Zenith-3 campaign – about nine years ago, I guess – I attempted to combine these into a single adventure, with the plane crash merely a cover to conceal what was being done to the President.

In theory, it should have worked. In practice, it was a near-disaster, with the PCs exposing one plot hole after another, most of them stemming from the fact that they did not follow the script that the protagonists in the novels worked from. They thought of things sooner, and thought of options that the novel didn’t mention.

In the end, the plan was so riddled with holes that to salvage credibility for the bigger picture, I had to make this a plot by a crazed zealot within the KGB who usurped official resources for his own ends, rather than a state-sanctioned operation. And get out of it as quickly as possible.

So my criticism of derived plots stems from first-hand misadventure. Sometimes, things work out to a better outcome than this experience, but you can never be sure of that outcome until after you have nailed your colors to the mast.

But I learned from that experience, and from a couple of more successful attempts. The key is to select the one or two central premises, settings, or scenes that capture the appeal of the source material, translate them into your genre if necessary, and build a new adventure around them, throwing away everything else, which embeds these sources of inspiration into the context of your campaign and characters.

If that sounds an awful lot like the approach recommended for characters, it should. That’s because it works.

By way of example, let’s take a story that most people will recognize, Star Wars, and start adapting it to a D&D/Pathfinder setting.

The central plot of Star Wars has two elements: “Farmboy against an Evil Empire” and “Farmboy discovers unsuspected mystic powers”. We can work with both of those, but first we have to confront a major issue: our Farmboy isn’t the star of the show, the PCs are. At best, he will be a prominent NPC.

I am rejecting out-of-hand the idea of making “The Farmboy” one of the PCs for a long list of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• It isn’t something the player intended for his character;
• It adds an ongoing thread to the campaign rather than the standalone adventure we were aiming for;
• It unfairly singles out one PC over the others; and
• It takes control of the narrative out of the hands of the GM and places it in the hands of a player, who may not be on-board with it.

However, if there’s a PC who fits the cliche – high charisma, young, etc – it might be amusing to have someone mistake him for the Farmboy. In fact, that might be a good way to first put the plotline on the PCs radar. Something to bear in mind as I proceed.

The question of how the PCs will fit into this situation will fundamentally shape the plotline. But I have to admit that right now, nothing is coming to mind.

So let’s move on to the next element – the Evil Empire, which poses a whole new set of challenges. Empires are big; they tend to dominate the political landscape in every direction. It doesn’t make sense for one to suddenly be revealed that the PCs have never heard of before. To be able to integrate it into an existing campaign without having it dominate that campaign from that point forward, we need to scale it down while remaining true to the premise of “one against the odds” – and knowing the we will need to violate that premise when the PCs become involved.

In fact, let’s scale it all the way down to become a tiny hole-in-the-wall kingdom, the sort of forgotten political relic that might be omitted from maps. But in a younger age, it was in fact the seat of a mighty Empire. We could further suggest that centuries after the greater political structure fell, it was annexed by a neighboring ‘upstart’ kingdom, though it retained enough power and influence internally to be granted an unprecedented level of independence. This guarantees that it won’t be shown on any modern maps, and will be forgotten by all but the scholars and the locals. But it also means that they have a few artifacts and historical remnants of the power of the Old Empire.

So, what happened to it, to cause it’s fall? And why is it now considered an Evil Empire? There are lots of possible answers, but one lept immediately to my mind, and it’s representative of the point that I’ve been trying to make in this section.

Perhaps they grew powerful enough to invade one of the circles of Hell, smug in their moral certitude and drunk on power. It became the height of fashion for the aristocracy to display their power by parading captured devils on leashes wherever they went. The devils seemed so totally cowed that they endured this without protest, a point not lost on the Empire’s neighbors and subjects. But all the while, the Devils were whispering in the ears of that aristocracy, and the aristocracy become cruel, despotic, jealous, and protective of privilege.

Seemingly overnight, internal conflicts sprang up like weeds, great family going to war with great family, and the Empire shredded itself to pieces, becoming a long-forgotten footnote of history.

This does a number of things for the GM. It raises the stakes of what the Old Empire’s leftovers could represent, power-wise, though they no longer have the numbers to dominate. Should anyone with more might and ambition uncover their secrets – even just some of them – a mighty army might become a nigh-invincible military force. Certainly, within their domain, trouble and bloodshed would be around every corner, just waiting to be unleashed. The remnants of several of the old Great Houses would linger, still despotic and intent on pursuing petty rivalries and long-forgotten insults. Civil Wars between this family and that would be an annual recreation, and alliances would come and go like the tides. Betrayal and scheming would be second nature.

All of which makes it seem pretty evil as a place, and helps explain why the Kingdom which has (nominally) conquered it keeps the place at arm’s length whenever possible, rather than getting entangled in their endless rivalries and feuds.

We’re still looking for a way to get the PCs involved, but this characterization of the Empire not only provides a foundation for our Farmboy having unsuspected powers, it suggests that there might be some legacy artifact from long ago that the PCs need in order to deal with a more modern evil. It all also speaks to Priests and Elite troops have strange and exotic weapons – effectively translating Darth Vader and Lightsabers in the in-game context. But we don’t want such powerful weapons running riot through the campaign, so make them dependent on some forgotten power source within what’s left of the Empire – go beyond it’s borders, and they stop working. In fact, the area in which they work would be the practical definition of the “Imperial Boundaries” – cross this line and you enter a world of hurt, but it’s all bottled up and the secrets have been lost.

At this point, the plot is beginning to take shape. Part 1: The PCs are confronted with some Evil, discover a Devilish connection, find the Devil in question to have overwhelming power, but learn of a potential weapon against him or her in an isolated and long-forgotten corner of an old Kingdom. Part 2: Rumors, Myths, and Legends delivered en route as they search for the old Kingdom prepare them for what they will face. As their quest unfolds, they become entangled in one plot after another as various factions attempt to use them for their own ends. Part 3: Finally, they get a lead on what might be the artifact they seek, in the keeping of the lost heir to another of the great houses – our Farmboy. It turns out not to be what they wanted, but it awakens his inherited powers and he sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart, who was sold to another of the great families to settle a debt between them. The PCs can either aid the Farmboy or not, as they see fit, but either way, his quest will further complicate theirs. Part Four: In the course of his Personal Quest, the Farmboy learns the location of the item the PCs are looking for, and promises it to them in exchange for their aid in rescuing his Princess from the citadel in which she is held. They succeed, get their reward, and in Part 5, use it to undo the Evil that sent them on this quest in the first place.

A nice touch would be to relate the original Evil to the War in some fashion, making the whole thing more self-contained and internally-referential. We would need a seer or scholar of some sort to set the PCs on the path.

This certainly has the right “epic qualities” to be a homage to Star Wars, and I’ve even been able to stir in some direct references – the elite forces and the “Lightsabers”, and make them critical elements in sustaining the credibility of the situation rather than undermining it. We can even have a Darth Vader -analogue for the High Priest of the Family (led by a Moff Tarkin -analogue) who have the Princess, and the Citadel can obviously be a tip of the hat to the Death Star – it just needs a big weapon on top that forces an approach using stealth and guile!

But, at the same time, this has a completely different plot, one that’s integrated fully with the genre, game setting, and milieu. It’s an in-context homage to Star Wars, not an attempt to simply retell the Star Wars story in a fantasy setting. It has plenty of scope for the PCs to steer the plotline as they see fit. And finally, it transforms familiarity with the source material into an asset, rather than a liability.

It avoids all the pitfalls of a derivative storyline to deliver something that tips it’s (metaphoric) hat to the source material while delivering something unique and appropriate to the genre.

And it shows the right way to take an external plot and add it to your own RPG stew.

Sometimes, you want to hit your players with a problem that can be solved only with action of the most violent kind. In D&D, a monster that presents a kill-or-be-killed situation; in a superhero game, a violent threat that has to be stopped before innocents are harmed.

But it’s never a good idea to do the same thing all the time, and it can be equally entertaining to occasionally hit the players with a threat that can’t be overcome by such obvious means.

Most GMs use more intelligent and definitively evil creatures for the purpose, and once again, great fun can be had that way. There is something cathartic about roleplaying an irredeemably evil enemy every now and then.

But, that too can run thin and become predictable if overused. So, from time to time (if not more frequently), GMs will tend to drop in morally ambiguous characters as enemies.

Between these options, any half-decent GM can weave a campaign full of adventures and encounters. What more do you need?

The problem with Good enemies

Variety is the spice of life. The more alternatives you have to inspire you and complicate the lives of the PCs, the better. And there is little that complicates those lives more than a good opponent.

Unfortunately, as most GMs will know if they have followed this line of thought on their own and attempted it, Good characters as enemies often fall flat. The PCs invite them round for a chat (or drop in to visit) and patiently explain the flaw in their thinking, draw up articles of alliance, sing a couple of choruses of Kum-bay-ah, and everyone goes home.

The obvious ways around this is to make the good-oriented characters so obsessed with their path that they will not be deterred, or so long-lived or super-intelligent that the enemy can claim that the PCs are too limited to see the big picture.

It doesn’t work.

If the enemies are so obsessed that they have accepted the maxim “the end justifies the means”, sooner or later they will cross the line and cease being Good. If the GM tries the “can’t see the big picture” solution, it smells of railroading the plot to place the PCs in a quandary, and that never ends well.

But now, I think I have a solution. The constraints involved mean that it can’t be used frequently, but as the occasional really-curly problem to throw at the PCs, it should function superbly. I’m putting good characters back on the enemies list for us all.

Five Principles

To make good characters work as enemies, four principles have to be adhered to with ironclad logic and impeccable assumption foundations.

1. A Noble Cause
2. An Imperative Demand
3. A Conflict
4. Fastidious Limitations
5. The PCs have to be right, too

A Noble Cause

The Good characters must be attempting to do something that is morally defensible from their point of view and, while they may be free to admit that other perspectives might also have validity, there must be nothing inherently incorrect about their position.

This is an essential because it prevents either side from talking the other side around. It needs to be a question of one side valuing something more than the other, and being willing to sacrifice something else to achieve that cause – with the PCs valuing the something else more highly. The conflict between the PCs and the Enemy has to be a manifestation of two ethical principles in conflict.

What’s more, the Enemy needs to believe passionately in their cause, and feel righteous about their support for it.

An Imperative Demand

The cause must be urgent, imperative even. Any sort of delay while a “more perfect” or “more tolerable” solution is devised must be intolerable, even discussion in place of action must be unacceptable.

If these constraints are not in place, the Enemy can be persuaded to seek “another way” as a means of resolving the conflict.

A Conflict

The Cause – whatever it is – must conflict with something the PCs want, take for granted, and/or believe in.

This makes them enemies at worst, collaterally impacted at best. It ensures that the PCs have “skin in the game”, and can’t accept the notion of putting the problem in the “too hard” basket.

Fastidious Limitations

It’s tempting to try and exploit the notion of obsession, and “the ends justify the means”. The problem is that this logic is too easily derailed, or will inevitably lead (as noted earlier) to the Enemy crossing a moral boundary once too often, or once too far.

No, the Enemy has to be a Good Guy and act like one. He has to scrupulously follow the tenets of his alignment, and better yet, to have an inflexible and iron-clad code of honor that constrains his actions.

This ties the hands of the PCs as much as it does the enemy. This will be a very polite and civil disagreement, which may cause violent conflict between them – but, after each such conflict, the victor will bind the wounds of the vanquished and express remorse for the lengths that the “misguided” PCs have forced him to. If they stoop too low in their opposition, they should be the ones facing alignment violation penalties.

It also permits the Enemy to sometimes act as a Frenemy, something that I discussed in the course of the recent two-part article, Ally, Enemy, Resource, and Opportunist: The four major NPC Roles (Part 1, Part 2) – and yes, this article was, in part, the inspiration behind that one.

Another element of this restriction is that the Enemy must recognize that his actions will be mispercieved by “the shortsighted”, even by good people, and be willing to oppose them if necessary, without stooping to anything morally unsavory.

Both sides must be right

The PCs have to be just as morally, ethically, and logically correct in opposing what the enemy is trying to do – from their point of view.

This recipe produces an honest disagreement between two groups more alike than they are different, one that justifies and demands a limited degree of violence and mayhem between them of a particularly genteel variety – one with polite warnings, care to minimize the harm to non-combatants and bystanders, binding of defeated enemy’s wounds, and a certain level of mutual respect and regret.

An example

In The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?, I told readers (briefly) about Ullar-Omega, the central villain from the Zenith-3 campaign that preceded the current one, and why he was a “Cool” villain. I didn’t go into his motives, because those were irrelevant to the point being made in that article.

Well, they are relevant to this one, so here goes: There were three characters (two NPCs and one ex-PC) who had, in the epic conclusion of the previous incarnation of the superhero campaign, acquired the power and the mandate to “reinvent the multiverse”, being elevated to something beyond mere “godhood”.

To Ullar-Omega, this not only made them responsible for every misery experienced by anyone in the re-created multiverse, it fundamentally denied them liberty and free will, something that he found intolerable. This, of course, is one of the oldest questions of religious doctrine – if God is omnipotent and omniscient and Good, why does he subject so many people to pain and malice and evil? Blaming the Devil merely undermines that omnipotence. The standard reply, that the “Divine Plan” is beyond mortal understanding, never seems adequate. What’s more, they were self-appointed to their positions.

He decided to do something about it, by forcing the Three Powers to abdicate and relinquish their power. He also decided that, since they lacked free will, it was acceptable to sacrifice the lives and ‘pseudo-liberties’ of everyone on his particular parallel-earth to that end, and so set out to conquer the world, transform the citizenry into living weapons, and forcibly ‘recruit’ them to the cause. What matters the fate of one world, even one universe, if it liberates an infinite number of others?

As a side-note, it was recently discovered by the PCs in the current campaign that the Three Powers were never as omnipotent as they made themselves out to be. Ullar-Omega was a lot closer to succeeding than they thought, and those limitations also made it clear that everything they created was done a lot more deliberately than previously thought, giving him more moral credibility than he already had.

This was a clash of principles, as described above – in fact, of the same principle, in the one case applied collectively to everyone in existence, and in the other, to a specific population on the premise that the whole was the sum of its constituent parts.

“Limited Freedom” is a non-sequetor; you are either free, or you are not. Freedom does not mean that there are no consequences to be faced deriving from your choices; it does mean that you are morally responsible for those choices, and need to accept that and “own” those actions. Those are the moral dimensions on which the epic adventure was founded. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with that statement; these were the judgments of the NPC, and they put him in direct conflict with the PCs – in both cases, for idealistic motives.

Alignment and It’s Violation

A lot of people will simply skip over this section. That’s fine, but if you bear with me, you might find it worthwhile.

Alignment has a very chequered history in D&D. Many game systems don’t have it, or anything like it. Others have a set of implicit alignment standards while never actually coming out and
explicitly defining or codifying things – the Hero System, for example. I’ve always found the 9-alignment model presented in AD&D to be pretty useful, but capable of all sorts of abuse.

D&D 5e pays lip service here and there to alignment but then does its’ best to ignore the subject in terms of game mechanics. Pathfinder, of course, retains the core of the 3.x rules for alignment.

Back in 2009, Campaign Mastery ran a five-part series (Focussing On Alignment) starting with a guest article that proposed eliminating alignment altogether. It remains a controversial subject.

In theory, the GM is supposed to track decisions and actions for every character and determine what alignment shift, if any, they represent. Too much drift one way or another, and the character might end up changing alignment. Yeah, right, like the GM has nothing better to do with his time and attention. But set that aside for a moment.

If alignment matters, then there should be consequences for actions that fall outside your alignment, especially if those reach the point of actually changing that alignment through an accumulation of misaligned deeds. That seems fairly obvious and logical, but it’s also the rub – penalizing your players for exercising their free will is not all that good a choice.

At the same time, there are a couple of character classes in which devotion to a cause is part of the bedrock definition of the archetypes. Paladins come to mind, and Clerics, and yes, Druids.

In 5e, Paladins have very little tolerance for deviation; part of the deal is that they are supposed to get smacked down, hard, for any violation. Clerics and Druids get no penalties at all. In Pathfinder, there are general penalties for consistent alignment violations sufficient to change a character’s alignment, and deviations by Clerics or Paladins attract additional and immediate penalties. Druids… tend to get overlooked.

There has to be a better way, and I think I’ve figured one out. To make this work, you will need 12 tiddlywink-style counters or cardboard chits for each PC – three black (for evil), three white (for good), three in a third color (for lawfulness), and 3 in a fourth (for chaos) (actually, technically, you need five of each per PC but in practical terms three should be sufficient.

The Alignment Baseline

When a character starts play, the GM should assess their alignment and stated ambitions and ensure that the character “fits” within the designated alignment, specifically warning the player of any potentials for alignment violation that can be foreseen.

The Alignment Total

A character’s alignment total is always 6. If a character has less than 6 tokens, the balance represents “neutrality”. So a character with 3 good tokens and 2 lawfulness tokens has one invisible, intangible, “neutrality” token.

Starting Tokens

Characters start with two tokens from each of their primary alignment traits (good vs evil, law vs chaos). Priests and Druids may start with an additional token from one of their alignment traits IF THEY CHOOSE TO. Paladins and the like MUST start with an additional token from EACH of their alignment traits.

The Alignment Test

At the end of each game session or adventure, or after a particularly noteworthy action (in the GM’s eyes), he should ask himself, “is the character’s overall behavior in keeping with the character’s stated alignment?” If yes, nothing changes, carry on. If no, then the GM may choose to award one (or even two tokens for extreme deeds). If more than one token is issued, they need not be of the same type.

Each black token cancels out a white token (the player hands both back to the GM), and vice-versa. Similarly, each law token cancels out a chaos token.

If a player ever has more than 6 tokens after such canceling out, he must hand back the excess – so a player with 5 good tokens and 3 law tokens (total of eight) would have to hand two back to the GM. One must be a ‘good’ token, because that’s what he has the most of, while the other could be of either type.

Priests & Druids

These are somewhat more sensitive to alignment shifts and receive one extra token when any are awarded – so, instead of one, they get two; instead of two, they get three. These need not be all of the same color – you might get two good tokens and a chaos token.

Paladins and other extremists

These are even more sensitive to alignment and receive two extra tokens when any are awarded – instead of one, they get three; instead of two, they get four.

Alignment drift

So long as the character has one token from each of his alignment traits, he is within alignment. If he loses one, he is subject to alignment drift and is facing an imminent alignment shift. For ordinary people, that doesn’t matter too much (but it does matter, see below).

For priests, they may suffer some form of Divine Rebuke; suggested rebukes include 1d6 of unhealable HP damage for the day, loss of access to the highest level of spell for a day, loss of access to one spell slot of each level for a day, +1 to all casting times for a day, and so on. An act of contrition (a small donation or quick prayer begging forgiveness) nullifies the rebuke – for a day – but will not be enough for two days in a row. The tokens represent the divine goodwill that the character has amassed. The goal is not to punish or harm the character, it is to warn them – so if the character is in a particularly dangerous situation in which he might need his spells, some other form of punishment would be chosen.

Paladins and the like are less tolerant. They get no warnings; instead, the character loses access to all his Paladin special abilities until he redeems himself, though an act of contrition may restore them for a short period of time. The goal is to reform the character,not kill him.

Alignment Shift

If a character achieves a net balance of one token opposed to his defined alignment, his alignment has temporarily shifted. This brings no direct penalties to most characters, though it does leave them vulnerable to appropriate “Detect” spells and Divinations. But it opens the door for forces aligned in the opposite direction to attempt a “permanent conversion to the cause”; the GM is required to put thoughts of opportunities into the character’s head by suggesting possible acts contrary to his written alignment. Nothing so crude as “it would be easy to pocket the gold” or “a fancy trinket catches your eye”; be a little more subtle about it. “The merchant makes a mistake in your favor when giving you your change, do you want to keep the extra silver?” or “You really need to know whatever the innkeeper is trying to hide, but you may need to force him to come clean”. The goal is to represent a temptation to the PC.

Things aren’t so rosy for Priests. A double-rebuke, and of the more serious options offered above, a messenger or symbolic event of some sort to remind the priest of the power of his faith / his god, and the nearest Priest in good standing will be advised that one of his brothers or sisters needs “counseling”. An act of contrition is no longer sufficient, a sacrifice of some substance is required to lift the cloud over the priest’s head each day. This will take at least an hour of the Priest’s time, or cost 10 GP per character level.

Things are even less sanguine for extremists. The head of their order is notified that one of his subjects (for lack of a better, more inclusive, term) has betrayed his oaths, and a “corrections officer” is dispatched to remedy the matter with an appropriate punishment – and with the authority to strip the character of his class, should he be unrepentant.

Permanent Shifts

Two tokens contrary to the listed alignment causes a permanent alignment shift. The character earns the enmity of former friends and adherents of the deity with which they were formerly associated, while those who once would have been enemies seem to recognize a kindred spirit – one to be taken with a grain of suspicion, of course. Opportunities and invitations will begin to crawl out of the woodwork, so it’s not all bad news. The alignment on the character sheet is updated.

Priests who undergo a permanent alignment shift have two choices: a major sacrifice (1000 GPs per character level) or a week of his time spent repenting and performing appropriate deeds while reflecting upon his sins may grant him the opportunity to redeem himself in his deity’s eyes, but in the meantime, he has his full compliment of hit points and spells – but all of these have a twist of some sort that indicates that some other deity or being is trying to woo him by providing the power for them. Former colleagues and friends may be outwardly hostile, or may attempt to provide the opportunity for redemption, depending on their personalities. Once a month, the character’s former deity may send a “reminder” that he has earned the displeasure of the deity, and over time that may turn to enmity.

Paladins and other extremists don’t have to wait. They are supposed to be paragons of their calling (whatever it may be) and they have not only dishonored that calling, they have dishonored all those who pursue it. They will be actively hunted by their former order, traps will be baited for him, prices put on his head (and lesser prices for information on his whereabouts and activities). But he is neither alone, nor powerless; paragons of the opposing virtue will seek him out and offer to “convert” the character’s levels, while deities who used to oppose him will seek to encourage this conversion by granting him some of the appropriate class powers – with appropriate twists, of course.

Why these proposals are improvements

They require minimal work by the GM, and – for the most part – involve no penalties to the character of great substance. They leave the player free to roleplay his character as he sees fit – everything that happens to him occurs as a result of an outside force. They stimulate roleplay instead of stifling it.

Emotional Impact

If you employ a Good villain in the manner described in this article, expect to touch a lot of nerves in your players. By taking away the moral simplicity with which they are usually presented and making the enemy someone to be respected, even admired, at the same time as you oppose him or her, you challenge the moral authority and principles by which the players live their lives, usually without giving such matters deep thought. This can’t help but raise emotions. This, in turn, attaches significance to the adventure in their minds.

Works of fiction can explore deep moral and philosophical questions, even when they only touch on them superficially and by proxy. The very best fiction makes us think, even makes us better people, even while it entertains, and without preaching.

It can be enough to be able to ask the questions; you don’t have to have all the answers, those are for each individual to find for themselves. And introducing a Good-aligned implacable enemy can’t help but asks questions of the PCs and, by proxy, the players who operate them – what moral choices are justified? What is worth fighting for? What do you value, and why?

Interesting questions that lead to interesting times, whether it be in life, or in the relatively safe confines of an RPG, and that can only enhance the entertainment value – and force the players to think about their characters actions and choices. That’s not a bad thing at all.

One task that confronts every GM is giving characters a personality. There have been a number of articles on the subject here at Campaign Mastery and I have no doubt that there will be many more.

I tend to think of characters as coming in three different kinds or tiers: Feature Characters, Secondary Characters, and Walk-on characters. These roughly correspond to Stars, Supporting Cast, and Extras.

A GM’s creative requirements should vary according to the scrutiny a character will receive in the course of play: Stars get the most attention in-game and appear more often, or in more significant roles, and need to be constructed to the highest standard – PC-equivalents or better. Supporting cast occupy important and usually recurring roles but in a secondary capacity. They don’t need as much richness of detail as a star, but need to stand up to repeated scrutiny without seeming superficial. Supporting cast can be the easiest to create, or the most difficult; they need only the most superficial creative effort, but it’s easy to make them cliches or caricatures. Giving them personality, making them seem to be real people, can be quite difficult without investing excessive efforts.

This article will look at some of many different techniques that I use for the creation of NPCs of all types while focusing on just one. This technique consists of a core process that occurs in three distinct stages that dig successively deeper into the personality, it’s nuances, and how it will be expressed in-game.

Walk-ons complete phase 1 and then branch off into a “final polish” that readies them for game play. That final polish consists of selected activities from the later phases, and a number of activities that only happen in “final polish”.

Secondary characters continue the process through to the end of phase 2 and then branch off into their own finishing process that again readies the character to appear in-game. That finishing process has a lot in common with the walk-ons “final polish”.

Stars go through the whole process, all three stages, and then get a few final touch-ups in their own “finishing school” that readies them for use in play.

Phase 1: Distinctiveness

1.1 Hook

I always try to start with a “hook” or central concept. I call it a “hook” because whenever I go fishing for new ideas or more detail, it’s always to the hook that I turn.

Hooks can be

1. an ethnicity,
2. a religious or pseudo-scientific belief,
3. an occupation,
4. a socioeconomic position,
5. a name,
6. an appearance,
7. a choice of clothing,
8. a personality trait,
9. a political position or cause,
10. an attitude,
11. a relationship,
12. trappings or environment,
13. or a mode of expression / speech pattern.

In some genres, there are more options – paranormal abilities or personal magic items or a distinctive weapon choice or what-not. Not is this list exhaustive – you can (and will) always find more items to add to it.

The hook is something that is (or will be) distinctive about the character. It follows that some options may not always be available – if the character is not expected to ever be in a position to speak, a distinctive vocal pattern is fairly useless as a hook. But most of these will be readily obvious to a PC at a glance, or in the most superficial interaction.

The circumstances under which the character is to appear will dictate two or three of the above, and that normally rules them out of consideration for being the hook – what you want is something that will distinguish this example from everyone else in the role. Though you can deliberately choose one of those “mandated” items and cast against type, making that aspect of the character the hook. Unless doing so deliberately, though, it’s better to pick something different to a “mandated” item.

Example: Almost every village has a “leader” of some sort. The titles can vary, but should be consistent over a culture. This dictates the occupation of the NPC and restricts his socioeconomic position, and probably defines his ethnicity to boot. Unless deliberately going against type – a human “Mayor” to an Elvish community – you are better off picking something else off the list as the hook for this character.

1.2 Avoid, Embrace, or Undercut the Cliches

This is a critical decision.

“Avoid” simply means doing something other than the cliche. A scientist who looks like a nerd? Cliche. A nerd who is a highly-successful track-and-field performer? Distinctive. A Tolkienesque Elf who spends his time obsessively playing a fantasy football league instead of composing poetry? Distinctive.

“Embrace” means that you take the cliche on board as part of the description of this character because you have thought of something original to do with it. That probably won’t happen often, but I always ask myself the question at this point to keep my gray cells ticking over on the question. Every now and then, a “yes” happens.

“Undercut” means embracing the cliche and showing it to be a hindrance to the successful performance of the character in the cliched role – again, this only happens when you have a specific idea in mind. A military scientist who looks like a geek and who is less successful in his role because the military bully him? That undercuts the cliche of “geek”. A geek who is a military scientist because he revels in combat, is gung-ho and bloodthirsty? That uses one cliche (the bloodthirsty military type) to undercut the “geek scientist” cliche and results in a very distinctive character.

Most of the time, “Avoid” will be your choice.

Before you can make that choice, however, you need to mentally identify all the applicable cliches so that you know what you are choosing between. So mentally list the applicable cliches, and for each, ask the question: avoid, embrace, or undercut?

Note that it is unusual to embrace or undercut more than one cliche at once.

1.3 Avoid repetition

The other thing to avoid is repeating yourself (unless you choose to do so deliberately, for some reason, of course – “every cop in the city has a partner who is petite, brown-haired, and mousy” for example). That means quickly running your eye over the last half-dozen or so examples of the same role that you have generated, and making sure not to do the same thing again.

1.4 Bait The Hook

Given what you now know about the character, he, she, or it is almost ready to exit the process and head into polish (if it’s a walk-on). But not quite yet – first you need to make the characterization a little more internally consistent and justified. You do that by picking two more items off the list – three, if there was a relatively low degree of “mandated definition” – and filling them with “logical implications” from the hook or expressions/representations of the hook.

That’s sometimes not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the hook doesn’t lend itself to being expressed in very many ways, all of which are already defined for this character. But it will usually be manageable with a little effort.

For example, if your hook is “Scottish red-head”, you might put something that invokes Scotland on the walls of the NPCs environment – a poster of the Scottish football team, or a beauty poster from a hair-die manufacturer, and you might choose to have the character wearing leather boots embossed with a tartan pattern, or wearing a tartan scarf.

These are all ways of expressing the individual uniqueness of the character in other ways that are internally consistent with that uniqueness.

Polishing a Walk-On

1.5 Name

Unless appearing only within a mob/crowd scene, the character needs a name if they don’t have one already. This might be a nickname, it might be christian name only, or title and surname only.

Try to derive one from the hook first, from any socioeconomic or ethnic definition second, and from any other source only if those let you down.

1.6 A story to tell

Every character needs a story or anecdote at the ready for any social interaction that might take place. This should be something personal, but it might be something recent or something historic. It need not be relevant to anything beyond the character, and it’s often better when it doesn’t have any further relevance. It might be “My daughter is running a fever and I’m worried about her” or “there’s a new coffee shop in town and I can’t wait to try it” or “I once visited Africa and was distressed over the hunting of elephants to near-extinction” or “I was born to money and abandoned it to feel relevance in my life”. As you can see from these examples, it should be something short – it’s a conversation-starter for the character.

At least one element that you have defined needs to reflect this story in some way – if necessary, define another one to the extent of incorporating the story. That might be a photograph of the daughter on the character’s desk, or a cheap-and-nasty coffee urn on a side table or a WWF pin worn (perhaps incongruously given the rest of the clothing choices).

1.7 Something to care about

Every character needs a cause or event of some sort to care about, something that will push them to exceed authority or normal limits. This can be something trivial, like always paying their bills on time, or a social commentary, like being distressed by falling standards of customer service, or whatever. If this can derive from the hook, do so, but I usually find it more valuable to make it something that puts spin or context on the hook.

1.8 Key PC relations

Every PC has one or more distinctive attributes – ethnicity, class or profession, reputation, fame, wealth, history,
prominence, religion. Any one of these might interact with the hook to produce a positive or negative reaction to that particular PC on the part of the character (though it’s equally possible that none of them will). I make sure that I have identified any “buttons” that will be triggered by a particular PC’s presence, or the reason for the PC interacting with the NPC, in advance, and may even script a couple of sound-bites in advance.

1.9 Document it all

The final step is to compile these decisions, and any associated notes, into a single coherent paragraph for quick reference. Remember, this is a walk-on role; the character is not expected to ever recur. The process and polishing has given them just enough distinctiveness to make them seem to be a person and not a cardboard cut-out. At best, they have enough depth to survive a single conversation with a PC, and/or a couple of in-passing encounters (the secretary of a more important NPC who will make multiple appearances in the adventure, for example). The process should have taken seconds. The extent of your notes and the depth of your prep should reflect this; be quick, be efficient.

But always remember that strange things have a habit of occurring when players get involved; it is entirely possible that the role will becoming a recurring one. Your notes and prep need to be substantial enough that you can recapture the character if that occurs, so don’t skimp too much.

The absence of completion

But wait – that’s all? Surely, you need to make sure that you have a description of the character / know where they live / know who the character’s immediate family are / whatever?

Actually, no. By giving the NPC enough color to be an individual, and making sure that this gets conveyed to the players, their imaginations will do the rest. If they ask for something you haven’t prepped, derive it from the hook if you can, from the cliches and your decision with respect to them if the hook isn’t enough, and from everything else you know about the character in the third place. But – given the relative “importance” of a walk-on – you will rarely be asked for more.

If, however, you are, pay close attention to the scene and the interaction with the PC, because it might be that the player is interested in making the character a recurring element within the game – they scratch some itch that the PC has, or has some mutual interests with the PC or whatever. There is a foundation for something more, and you need to identify what that is and how you are going to build on it if you choose to (or the player asks you too).

This was supposed to be one long article but exhaustion caught up with me – so I have split it into three. In the next part, I’ll continue to build on the process with Stage 2 and Supporting characters polish!

For the last few weeks I’ve been (occasionally) reading a board-game development blog/newsletter – Brandon the Game Dev for anyone who might be interested – at the invitation of a relatively new twitter contact, @brandongamedev.

This week’s post was about playtesting; in it, Brandon wrote,

Since people can do unexpected and strange things with your games, they tend to become more chaotic as they grow in complexity. People will misunderstand your rules. Your game will break, no matter how simple it is. Your game is broken until you categorically prove that it is not.

It took me 17 versions to get War Co. where I wanted it. I’m already on version 16 of Highways & Byways, and it’s just this week gotten to a point where I’m ready to find play-testers out of my inner circle.

No-one knows these hard realities better than an RPG author or GM. “People doing unexpected things with your games” is straight out of the RPG playbook, as is things becoming “more chaotic as they grow in complexity”, and “Your game will break, no matter how simple it is” – and RPGs are NOT as simple as most board games – the core rules of something like D&D or Pathfinder are hundreds of pages long, never mind the thousands of pages of add-ons and supplements!

And yet, there is a very different mindset at work, one that makes the two experiences seem as different as Amoebas and Eiffel Towers. The board game rarely has a referee, meaning that the rules have to be sufficiently robust and comprehensive that they can cope without one, requiring hundreds or thousands of hours of playtesting and analysis. In comparison, RPGs can be incredibly sloppy – while there is a reasonable expectation that those core rules will have been playtested for the same hundreds or thousands of hours, that’s not always the case, and they are never comprehensive, because the world is too complex for every possibility to be adequately catered for within the rules, players have too much freedom.

To bridge the gap, GMs are not only expected, but required to make ad-hoc rulings and create house rules more-or-less on-the-fly as they go, rules with something close to zero playtesting time.

Which got me to thinking about some of the unwritten house rules that I use from time to time, and the shortcomings that they address and/or expose within most rules systems. There won’t be time or room to examine them all, so I’m instead going to focus on one specific one, and it’s corollary.

Failures of Rules

First, let’s look at a couple of problems that these solve.

Complex Tasks Are dealt with too quickly

I watch a lot of cooking shows, and three things stand out. First, cooking is a number of (mostly) simple tasks done well, especially if you are following a recipe; Second, it takes time to get it right, with multiple chances to get things right or wrong; and Third, you can recover from most errors if you spot them in time, and a systematic approach permits avoiding the ones that are not so easily recovered from. In fact, sometimes, it takes an expert to even notice that something did go wrong.

Cooking – whether it’s a simple boxed cake mixture or a ten-course degustation – is a complex task. In the case of a complex recipe, it can be hours of work.

Similarly, writing a computer program can take hours, days, weeks, or months of man-power. Building a car from a stack of parts can involve hundreds of man-hours. Driving from New York City to Los Angeles takes, according to Google, 41 hours. There are dozens of steps involved in getting an aircraft into the sky – never mind setting out for a destination and landing when you get there. These are all examples of complex tasks that most game systems would have us dispose of with a single skill check.

Does that seem all that reasonable?

Always-fail chances are too coarse

If your attack skill is high enough, you can expect to hit a target almost very time in most game systems – unless you roll a ‘always fails’ result in a game system that has them.

“I swing from the chandelier by my toes while catching the diamond in mid-air and drawing my bow with my teeth. I have an attack of 28, less any modifiers for all that, he has a defense of 1; I hit on anything but a one,” says character number 1.

“The target is immobile, his foot wedged in the hole in the floor, he’s unconscious so he’s not dodging and he’s prone, I’m taking careful aim, being slow and deliberate, and firing at him from point-blank range. I have a base attack of 28, plus modifiers for all of the above, and he has a defense of 1; wait, my chance to miss is the same as character number one? How is that fair?” says character number 2.

“Well,” says the GM while desperately trying to understand how it could come to this. Yes, you could talk about the character’s extreme skill compensating for all those difficulties, and the outside chance that a bowstring could break, or you could rule that despite those possible outcomes that character 2 should be presented with a fait accompli with no need for a die roll – but if you follow the rules strictly in some game systems, then yes, both characters have to roll and have exactly the same chance of failure, a 1 on d20, or a 3 on 3d6.

Or you could have character number 1 make a roll for each of those activities – but, assuming that the character’s skills are commensurate with that attack value, the odds of success are still going to be 95% of 95% of 95%, or 85.7375%, according to the laws of mathematics.

In both examples, the best solution is to split apart the task into sub-tasks or activities.

The Principle Of Task Subdivision

Any time the GM feels that a task is complex, or has too extreme a duration to complete, he is entitled to subdivide the task into stages and require rolls for each stage. Furthermore, attempting to complete multiple sub-tasks simultaneously not only attracts a penalty handicap, it attracts an additional penalty for each sub-task that is applied to all sub-tasks being attempted in this fashion.

Discussion

This permits a greater integration of events in the course of play. A character can be attempting one complex task while others are completing several smaller ones, and at the same time can have some progress to report at each point.

It enables the GM to focus his attention on how the in-game circumstances affect different aspects of the broader task, resulting in more fairly-scaled modifiers.

It can lend an epic quality to what would otherwise be a simple die roll by turning the process into a driver of narrative.

It solves the problems of the “automatic fail” chance and “complex tasks” problem.

Used injudiciously, it can become tedious, but used well, it can seriously enhance game-play – if the GM understands the ramifications and the process..

An excessive example

Obviously, this sort of thing can be taken too far. A skill check for every step in following a recipe, for example, is way over the top. Heck, even a roll for each course in a 10-course feast is too much.

That means that how the GM subdivides the task is absolutely critical to the success of the technique. “Like” tasks should be bundled together to form logical ‘bundles’ of sub-tasks. In the cooking example, I would divide the task “cook a feast” into four sub-stages: ingredients, prep, flavoring, and presentation. A failure in one of these doesn’t indicate that every course suffers, just that at least one of them does. As always, it’s then up to the GM to apply sociological and situational awareness to interpret the results.

If the key person who the feast is intended to satisfy comes from a culture in which food is heavily-spiced but the PC does not, he might have consistently under-spiced most of his dishes. Everyone else might agree the meal was delicious! Or, if there are no broader cultural distinctions, one course might be overcooked or under-seasoned or simply take longer than expected to cook. Or there might be a problem with some of the ingredients – due to the recent in-game weather.

By focusing the task into more specific sub-tasks, the GM can tailor the resulting narrative to enhance the cultural and social background of the game while focusing on specific causes of error. This also permits the player who thinks about what his character is doing and the relative importance of each step to adjust his focus accordingly – if the character had been reminded of the cultural proclivities of his target “market”, to use the strongly-spiced example, he might have chosen to spend less time in preparing the ingredients and more time getting the spice mix just right – a case of taking a small penalty in the “preparation” sub-task for a small bonus in the “flavor” sub-task, which the GM then inflates to a big bonus because this is the critical phase from the cross-cultural perspective.

This makes the process interactive, an ongoing dialogue between GM and player, not simply a “make a roll – do you succeed? – yes you succeed” display. A sufficiently good roll early in the process might confer a bonus to later sub-tasks, while a bad roll might be discovered and at least partially rectified in a later sub-task.

In a word, the whole process is nuanced.

If it really can deliver all that (and it can, trust me), the Principle of Task Subdivision packs some serious juju. But no rule (or principle) exists in isolation, and its the trappings of structure, prep, interpretation, and narrative that make a lot of the magic happen. So it’s time to
put some limits and structure on the bare bones of the principle.

TORG and the rule of 4 – a realistic limit

I’m not the first to think of subdividing a task into smaller steps. TORG did it – to accomplish anything the GM decreed a “Dramatic Task”, the player had to achieve four sub-tasks, simply labeled “A, B, C,” and “D.” This was achieved by playing a card with the requisite code after a successful skill roll. If you didn’t have a card with the code you needed, there were ways of replenishing your hand until you did, though it might take several attempts. And each roll, each replenishment, took a character turn – such tasks were not (usually) achieved in the twinkling of an eye. Unless, of course, you had carefully built up a set of cards with the required codes in advance!

One of the first house rules that I implemented in my TORG campaign was that these codes had to actually “mean” something. It wasn’t simply being “one-quarter done”, each step had to have some logical or symbolic value, and did not have to be sequential.

I don’t want to wander off-point here, so suffice it to say that this house rule was very definitely formative in terms of the principle under discussion. Instead, I want to focus on a completely separate aspect of the TORG experience, because it also remains relevant today: sometimes, requiring four steps was too many, but requiring more always proved too much.

The maximum number of sub-tasks into which a particular activity can be broken is – or should be – four. If you need more than that, it’s either beyond the scope of a single activity, or a more “generous” definition of the sub-tasks is required.

With this limit in mind, let’s examine the mechanics that need to be understood. I’ll try to keep the maths to a minimum, but this is the stuff that needs to be understood.

Dividing a task in two

It can be argued that almost every action should be divided into two logical stages, planning and execution. Failure to plan what you are doing means that you are operating on pure instinct plus expertise/experience, and if you’re skilled enough, you might be able to get away with conflating the two stages and planning as you go.

There’s an obvious analogy here for GMing style – Pre-planned vs Improv – but I think that might muddy the waters, and confuse the issue, so I’m not going to go into that in this article.

Instead, let’s keep things as abstract as possible. When an actual example might be useful, I’m going to use a simple task that almost everyone has some experience of, no matter how long ago it was: painting a picture, it doesn’t matter of what.

Chance Of Success

If you have to make two rolls to complete a task, the chance of success in the overall task is the chance of success in each task, multiplied together.

If you need twelve or less on d20 on each, that gives 12/20 x 12 = 7.2. So, requiring two rolls at 12/- is the equivalent of one roll at 7/-. It’s often more useful to state things as a percentage chance, because that avoids obvious nonsense like the “0.2” in the above calculation.

12/- is 60%, and 60% of 60% is 36%.

You can only work it the other way, with chances of failure, if the character only has to succeed on ONE of the die rolls in order to succeed in the overall task.

Digging into the why of that is complicated and would take more time than it’s worth – it’s fairly basic probability, and most easily explored with a pair of d6. I’m only interested in the practical application of the maths in this article.

The GM’s choice

That gives the GM a choice: he can either require each roll to be made at the character’s skill level, as shown on the character sheet, or he can correct the chances of success so that the chance of succeeding in the overall task remains what the character sheet reads.

The choice has a profound impact as chances of success, i.e. skill levels, rise. Two rolls at the same chance of success, assuming a d20, gives the following percentage chances of success: 1 = 0.25%, 2 = 1%, 3 = 2.25%, 4 = 4%, 5 = 6.25%, 6 = 9%, 7 = 12.25%, 8 = 16%, 9 = 20.25%, 10 = 25%, 11 = 30.25%, 12 = 36%, 13 = 42.25%, 14 = 49%, 15 = 56.25%, 16 = 64%, 17 = 72.25%, 18 = 81%, 19 = 90.25%, 20 = 100%.

It’s every second value that tells the story: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100. This is a simple squaring function. And it means that things get messy, because a y=x^2 function is not a nice neat straight line.



graph generated using fooplot.

It stays low and flat until the middle, at which point it begins to climb in value rapidly and appears to flatten out only at the very end – an appearance that is, in fact, an illusion, because it would continue to steepen if the graph were extended.

What this means, in practical terms, is that it can be very hard to match a chance of success of “X” with two equal rolls of “Y” chance of success each. In fact, it’s impossible to exactly match a given chance of success with two unequal rolls, but you can come close (all on d20):

5% = 2 and 10, or 4 and 5
10% = 5 and 8, or 4 and 10
15% = 6 and 10, or 5 and 12, or 4 and 15
20% = 8 and 10, or 5 and 16
25% = 10 and 10
30% = 10 and 12 or 8 and 15
35% = 10 and 14
40% = 10 and 16
45% = 10 and 18
50% = approx. 11 and 18
55% = approx. 13 and 17
60% = 15 and 16
65% = approx. 16 and 16
70% = approx. 15 and 19
75% = approx. 16 and 19
80% = 18 and 18
85% = approx. 18 and 19
90% = approx. 19 and 19
95% = 19 and 20 (unsatisfactory)
100% = 20 and 20 (by definition)

But who’s going to remember all that? I certainly don’t and won’t, I had to calculate it just for this article.

Instead, I remember: Add six and subtract one-fifth (add five instead for values under 5). For results close to a 0.5 fraction, round one high and one low. Then apply the following adjustments to the lowest roll: -3 for 1/-, +2 for 4/- and 5/-, and -1 for 16-19/-.

If I want a result of roughly 14/-, one fifth of that is roughly 3, and 14+6-3 is 17, so two rolls of 17/- give a rough result of 14/-. (In fact, they give 72.25% chance).

If I want a result of roughly 10/-, one fifth of that is 2, and two rolls of 10+6-2 is 14, so two rolls of 14/- give a rough result of 10/- (in fact, they give 49%).

If I want a result of roughly 7/-, one fifth of that is just over 1 and a half, and two rolls of 7+6-1.5 is 11.5 – and one roll of 12/- and another of 11/- give a rough result of 7/- (in fact, they give 33%).

If I want a result of roughly 2/-, one fifth of that is just less than 0.5 – and two rolls pf 2+5-0.5 (not 6) gives one roll of 6 and one of 7, which is roughly the same as an overall roll of 2/- (in fact, they five 10.5%).

As rules of thumb go, it works pretty darned well, with just a handful of corrections needed.

Unequal Divisions – importance

What if one sub-task seems more important to the outcome than all the others? That happens in computer programming, where it is more-or-less guaranteed (and assumed) that mistakes will be made in the design or coding stages, errors which have to be found and corrected in the testing phase.

This situation describes a circumstance in which we want to adjust the chances success on one roll for flavor and accuracy while adjusting the other so that the overall chance of success is unchanged.

Here’s another rule of thumb:

for +2 to one roll, – 2 to another, reducing by 1 for every odd +after +2.

If you have two rolls of 5/-, and you add +2 chance of success to one of them (making it easier and therefore less important to the overall result), you can balance that by subtracting 2 from the other – 5/- and 5/- are 6.25%, 7/- and 3/- are 5.25%.

Two rolls of 14/- are a 49% chance of success, and a 16/- & 12/- combination is a 48% chance of success.

Base Rolls 16/-, +3 on one, -(3-1) on the other gives 19/- and 14/-, or 66.5% vs 64%.

Base Rolls 10/-, +5 on one, -(5-2) on the other gives 15/- and 7/- or 26.25% vs 25%.

None of these shortcuts are completely accurate, but they are close enough for practical use.

Unequal Divisions – phase bonuses and penalties

The final thing that has to be understood before we can move on is the impact of an uncompensated modifier to one of the constituent die rolls, because that’s the key to understanding the unequal impact of circumstances to a particular activity.

5/- and 6/- give 7.5%, up from 6.25%.
8/- and 9/- give 18%, up from 16%.
13/- and 14/- give 45.5%, up from 42.25%.
17/- and 18/- give 76.5%, up from 72.25%.

So the rule of thumb appears to be that below 6 on a sub-task roll, +1 is worth roughly 1.25%; from 6-10, it’s worth roughly 2%; from 11-15, it’s about 3.25%; and for rolls above 15, it’s roughly 4.25%.

Since +1 on the overall roll should be +5% to the overall chance of success (on d20), that means that we achieve that with the following adjustments:

sub-task roll 5/- or worse: +4
sub-task roll 6-8 /-: +3
sub-task roll 9-14 /-: +2
sub-task roll 15/- or better: +1

11/- overall = 55%. Adding 6 and subtracting 1/5 of 11 gives 11+6-2.2 = two rolls of roughly 15/-. 15/- and 15/- = 56.25%. So +1 to one of the sub-task rolls, giving 15/- and 16/-, is worth +1 on the overall result. 15/- and 16/- give a 60% chance of success, which is the exact equivalent of 12/- – perfect!

8/- overall = 40%. Adding 6 and subtracting 1/5 of 8 gives 12.4, which is close to the 0.5 mark, so we use 12/- and 13/- to get 39%. +2 to one of the sub-task rolls should get us to roughly 45%. There are two
to choose from; 12+2=14/- and 13/- gives 45.5% (close to perfect) while 12/- and 13+2=15/- gives 45% (perfect). Either works perfectly satisfactorily.

Dividing A Task In Three

At first, it might seem like this is an even trickier task than a two-way division. It’s not. All you need to remember is that 5 gives 1/4, 10 gives 1/2, and 15 gives 3/4 of whatever the 2-roll chance is, and work from there.

So if you need an overall chance of 5/- on three rolls, work out the 2-roll requirement for 4 times 5 or less, 2 times 5 or less, or 4/3 times 5/-. There will usually be one value that’s easy to work with. In this case, 2×5 or less is 10/-, so work out the two-roll for 10/- (=14/- x 14/-) and apply a 10/- on the third roll to halve it.

If you need an overall chance of 9/- on three rolls: 9×4=36 (not helpful), 9×2=18 (possible), or 9×4/3 = 12 (excellent). The 2-roll for 12/- is 15/- x 16/-, and the third roll is another 15/-, which reduces the 12/- to a 9/-..

If you need an overall chance of 17/- on three rolls, 17×4= who cares, 17×2=34 (too much), and 17×4/3 = 22 and 2/3. Ah, that’s rather more difficult, isn’t it? Well, just a little. You know that 17/- is 85%, so start by assuming that your third roll will be one higher (18/-, which equals 90%) and divide what you want as the end result (17) by 0.9 = 19/-. So the two-roll for 19/-, which is 19/- x 20/-, gives you a third roll of 18/-.

Hang on – what does a sub-task roll of 20/- even mean, anyway?

It simply means that there is one sub-task on which the character is guaranteed success. Which one is up to the GM, but preference should be given to a sub-task that does not ensure success on the overall task. Sometimes, there aren’t any – it doesn’t matter how you subdivide the task of painting a picture, success in one area doesn’t guarantees success overall – but in the case of writing a computer programme, with the sub-tasks of design, code, and test, automatic success in either of the latter two steps ensures automatic success in the overall task, but you can have a perfect design that is not executed perfectly, so that is the “automatic success” that should be chosen.

Artistic flourishes: An optional rule

An alternative interpretation is this: an artistic flourish in any sub-task can be considered a fixed modifier to that sub-task’s chance of success. Deliberately inserting some other programmer’s “signature” into your programming code code, or a backdoor into the software, for example. I tend to use a -2 for the purpose, increasing by -1 for each additional flourish (cumulative). So a 20/- simply means that the character is forced by his ability to insert at least one artistic flourish, reducing the 20/- to an 18/-.

one flourish: -2
two flourishes: -2-3=-5
three flourishes: -2-3-4=-9
four flourishes: -2-3-4-5=-14
five flourishes: -2-3-4-5-6=-20 (not possible in any given sub-task).

This also requires the GM to adjust his definitions of failure. Let’s say that a sub-task has a chance of 17/-, and the character decides to incorporate two artistic flourishes for a -5 penalty (a total of 12/-). If he then rolls a 14, say, one of two things happens: either the artistic flourish fails without impacting the overall success of the sub-task (because 14 is below 17/-) or the attempt causes the sub-task to fail.

The choice I make is usually dependent on the hubris being displayed by the character. If he is being cocky and arrogant (four flourishes on a base 17/- sub-task roll), I would be tempted to apply the worse of the two alternatives and have the whole sub-task fail as a result. If the character had a reasonable expectation of success, I would apply the lesser penalty.

Intermediate choices are also available – for example, in the case given above, the character could succeed in incorporating one artistic flourish (14 is less than 17-2=15/-) but fail as described to incorporate the second.

Oh, and one more side-note: most IT departments have a set of standard procedures to which they expect a coder to adhere. Being forced to “do it the official way” counts as a flourish. Similarly, executing a forged artwork in the distinctive style of a famous artist counts as a flourish that could apply to several sub-tasks. Giving the artwork some inherent artistic merit would be a second – as would hiding the forger’s true signature somewhere in the work. That sort of ‘artistic touch’ is often easier for the GM to assess when the task has been subdivided.

Unequal Divisions – Importance

This more or less describes the default situation. It will be so rare for all three of the die rolls to be the same value that it’s not worth worrying about. Nevertheless, using the two-roll system will work perfectly provided that you don’t alter the third roll. And, having done so, you can then apply a separate modifier and adjustment to that third roll, as necessary. The higher the base skill roll, the less room you have to maneuver, as shown by the “17/-” example above.

Unequal Modifiers

The same technique used to determine the “third roll” in the first section, when applied to a two-roll modifier, works perfectly. In other words, work out the two-roll modifier you need and divide by the percentage equivalent of the third roll. With a calculator app available for every PC and laptop and smartphone, this should be trivial.

Dividing a task in four

You do this in exactly the same way as dividing a task in three, you just do it twice – once to get the three-roll value, and the second time to translate the three-roll value into a four-roll value.

Remember the shape of the x-squared graph? A high fourth roll will have minimal impact on the effective total, a low fourth roll will have a big effect.

Almost by instinct

With a little practice, you can reach the point of dividing any task into logical constituent sub-tasks almost as quickly and easily as asking for a die roll, just as most GMs can interpret a single die roll as a likely success or failure without actually doing maths in their head.

Consummate Professionalism: an optional rule

If a sub-task succeeds by more than 10, you can rule that the “excess success” functions as a bonus to subsequent sub-task checks. You have three choices:

1. allocate the whole bonus to the next sub-task;
2. allocate enough bonus to the next sub-task to take it up to 19/- chance and any that’s left to the sub-task after that, and so on;
3. divide the bonus as evenly as possible amongst the remaining sub-tasks.

This requires a little caution; it is not difficult to create a situation in which a “consummate professionalism” bonus from an early sub-task generates a second one in the next sub-task, rolling the benefits forward through the entire task.

For that reason, I never tell the player of a “consummate professionalism” bonus, I simply apply it mentally. If it makes the difference, I will tell the player that his character almost made a critical error, but spotted it (and corrected it) at the last possible moment.

This also means that one “consummate professionalism” bonus does not contribute to any others being generated, only good raw die rolls will do that.

This optional rule can also be married to the “artistic flourishes” sub-rule – so that a good roll early in the task makes it easier to succeed while incorporating artistic flourishes later in the process.

What is a Masterworked Item that you are mindful of it?

This combination also permits the GM to identify exactly what it is that distinguishes a Masterworked Item from any others.

You could decide that “Consummate Professionalism” bonuses accumulate, and every 5 points so accrued adds up to a +1 capacity in the item. You could, as an alternative, set thresholds for minor, medium, and high miscellaneous magic effects. Weaving a carpet (design, artistry, dying, weaving) with a cumulative professionalism bonus of 10 might enable it to fly at 20″, of 15, at 25″, and so on.

This also presents the GM with a further choice: some objects might be so inherently well-crafted that they become imbued with magical qualities without the need for enchantment. This was certainly something that the Ancient Romans held to be possible, and Tolkien was quite happy to imbue such creations with a kind of “pseudo-magic” as a virtue of the skill executed in their crafting. So there is plenty of precedent.

The Need For Narrative Differential

There is nothing worse than a player being told, “okay, you’ve succeeded in one-quarter (or 1/3rd, or 1/2) of the task. Now roll again.”

If you are not to make this an exercise in tedium, being able to distinguish between two different sub-tasks in terms of the logical activities being carried out is an essential, as is being able to convey that distinction to the players by way of narrative.

That means that it’s incumbent on the GM to either know something about everything, or be able to fake it – refer to The Expert In Everything? and Lightning Research: Maximum Answers in Minimum Time for techniques.

Going In The Other Direction: Many foes, One Enemy

When it comes to fighting swarms or hordes or just a bunch of meaningless nobodies, you can sometimes be better served by treating the whole group as a single monster, not as discrete individuals. 7th sea first introduced this concept to me in the form of “brute hordes”, and I expanded on it in the This Means War!: Making huge armies
practical series.

If you are being confronted by a group of N identical enemies (it makes it much easier if they are identical), you don’t care which one you hit so long as you hit one of them. That makes this a case in which “any successful roll is a success” on N die rolls.

That means that the chances of failure get smaller with each additional foe. Let’s say that you have a 75% chance of hitting one, and there are 5 of them: your chance of missing all of them is 0.25 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 25% = 0.09765625%. Your chance of hitting any one of them is therefore 100-0.09765625=99.90234375% – call it 99.9%. That’s so close to 100% that I would assume automatic success.

When you get them down to only 4, the chance worsens, slowly trending towards the base 75% chance (which will happen when the second-last one falls). The chance of missing all of them increases to 0.3905025% – but that’s still so close to 100 that I would deem that to be another automatic hit. With three of them, the chance of missing becomes significant for the first time = 1.56201%. On a natural 20, that’s about a 1-in-3 chance. With two of them, the chance of missing one is up to 6.24804% – so, miss on a 20.

It works in the other direction, too, though not as neatly. Let’s say they have an 8/- chance of hitting, +2 because they are flanking – something that will last only until there’s only one of them. That’s a net 10/-, or a 50-50 chance.

The odds of all five missing you are 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 50 = 3.125%. Each time one of them falls, that chance doubles. The chances of any two of them hitting in a round are trickier to work out and involves factorials, which are maths too advanced for this article. Instead, I would use a cheat: If one hits, there’s a 3.125/0.5 % chance that a second one will also hit. and if two hit, there’s a 3.125/0.5/0.5 % chance of a third one hitting. In other words, the chance doubles each time provided that the previous group hit.

So, one hit: 50%
Two hits: 50% of 50% = 25%
Three hits: 50% of 25% = 12.5%.
Four hits: 50% of 12.5% = 6.25%.
Five hits: 50% of 6.25% = 3.125%.

This creates a table:
01-03: 5 hits (3.125%)
04-09: 4 hits (6.25%)
10-21: 3 hits (21.5%)
22-46: 2 hits (25%)
47-96: 1 hit (50%)

This greatly speeds up combat with meaningless flunkies, saving time for confronting named enemies.

Focusing Attention

Dividing a task up focuses the attention of both players and GM on the logical subdivision. This makes substantial or complex tasks feel bigger or more involved, respectively, and provides vectors for GM narrative beyond meaningless fluff – or, worse yet, non-narrative game mechanics.

It takes a little more effort, but – employed judiciously – the effort repays both players and GM handsomely.

‘blue logo element’ from freeimages.com / A perfect1
has only abstract relevance to this article, it’s a leftover alternative Designing A Game System (for the Zener Gate campaign).
That said, it still seems somehow appropriate…

As long-time readers will know, I like to break up larger series, on the theory that any given subject will interest only part of the readership. On that basis, I’ve let this series lie fallow for a few weeks, but now it’s time to get back to it!

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor 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 fixing 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 – which you are about to read – deals with more serious repair techniques for plot holes of greater significance to the campaign in the medium term.

Part four – in a week or two – will 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.

Significant Problems need significant solutions. Or do they?

There were three factors involved in assessing plot hole significance: the damage to adventure potential within the campaign, the interval until the damage becomes obvious to players, and the extent to which the damage will persist and cause ongoing harm to the campaign.

Clearly, if we’re talking about an assessment of “significant” then there are only a few combinations that fit the bill. Critical damage with a reasonably high persistence that is still some distance away, for example, or critical damage that won’t linger but that is on you right now.

In fact, it’s hard to think of any combination that falls into this category and doesn’t have one of those two factors – persistence or immediacy – at a high level, but not both.

Of course, these are relative measures; a less-damaging plot hole that has either of these extremely high is about the same as a more-damaging plot hole when you have a small window to correct before the world comes crashing down.

These are nevertheless important distinctions to make. The more time you have for a solution to take effect, the smaller the solution that you typically need to apply. Similarly, if the problem will only be important for a short period of time (no matter how significant the impact might be for that period), the less radical you are justified in being in terms of a solution.

Solutions from Part 2

Before you implement any of the significant solutions to be discussed later in this article, you really need to satisfy yourself that a lesser solution won’t do the job while inflicting less harm. So that’s my starting point: by revisiting the part 2 solutions and discussing them in this new context.

Minor Repair Technique #1: Ignore the problem

The simplest of solutions, but it’s probably not the best advice for more serious issues. Still, you can probably get away with this one for a while – so long as you don’t forget that there is a problem that needs to be resolved eventually – if the problem isn’t immediate.

Minor Repair Technique #2: Acknowledge and ignore

This is a technique that might be employed as a last resort in those cases where the damage is contained and not ongoing. Under any other circumstances, I would not even contemplate it.

Minor Repair Technique #3: Depth Of Character

This is a much better solution under most circumstances, but it only works when a character (probably an NPC) has done something for reasons that make no sense, or has suffered some critical failure of logic that was only recognized after the fact. In many respects, it’s the exact opposite of solution #2 – instead of paying minimal lip service to the anomaly, this really requires that you revel in it, flaunt it, and throw it in your players’ faces. And, if you can twist the reaction to reinforce the normal personality and modus operandi of the character, so much the better. Here’s a couple of quick examples:

“Have you ever been consumed by one of those midsummer madnesses, fallen utterly head over heels for some stranger? It’s an insanity that sneaks up on you from behind, consumes your soul, chews it up, and spits it back out. For a brief moment, you will do anything in its service, no matter how ridiculous. You are quite literally not thinking straight. I hate it when that happens, and I told her never again – right before I threw her to the starving pit fiends.”

“It must have been the CIA and their mind-control satellites, there’s no other rational explanation. They wormed their way into my thoughts when I wasn’t looking. Well, it will never happen again, I’ve had tinfoil surgically implanted to stop it!”

As I said last time: Never be afraid to make your characters more interesting!

Minor Repair Technique #4: NPCs are humanoid, too

“I don’t know what I was thinking back then, to be honest. It still makes no sense to me, in hindsight. I must have been seduced by my own cleverness and forgotten what I was really striving for – a mistake that I will never make again, you may be sure.”

As explained last time, this solution only works in a limited selection of circumstances – notably, where the PCs aren’t in a position to observe the appropriate reactions when the flaw in logic responsible becomes inescapably apparent to the NPC whose thinking was faulty.

“I knew I should have paid more attention to lesson six in how to be a maniacal world-conqueror, but I wasn’t well that day. Don’t be so foolish as to expect a second lapse.”

“For a brief moment, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Which is why, every morning since, I have recited my mantra of total dominion to remind myself of the bigger picture. You are the last and only witnesses to my failure, and it gives me just one more reason to see your existences snuffed out, erasing my humiliation forever!”

Minor Repair Technique #5: Retroactive Explanation

This solution is similar in scope to the primary solutions to be discussed today. The distinction is that in this case the explanation is simply dropped in as a sort of “sidebar” to the adventure, whereas something more substantial is made of the solutions that directly target more serious problems.

When there is a trivial solution, this technique works – the caveats outlined last time remain very definitely in force: The Logic of the explanation has to hold up, and there has to be minimal domino effect, or some way of containing those ripples of continuity.

Minor Repair Technique #6: The Wisdom Of Players

GMs should never be afraid to confess their limitations – when you have a problem and can’t think of a solution, (1) crowdsource a solution, or (2) ask your players. There are two – no, three – big benefits that make this worthwhile.

First, players will be that much more tolerant when they spot a flaw in your designs, and more willing to overlook them for the sake of the campaign. Second, they will often think of solutions that would never have occurred to you in a million years, enriching the campaign. And third, it provides another avenue for the players to invest in the campaign, making them value it that much more. Compare that to the effect of being perceived as stubborn and standoffish to the point of bloody-mindedness, unwilling to dilute your “vision” even when it’s obviously flawed, and unwilling to let the players participate in the campaign beyond their assigned roles, and the choice becomes rather obvious, doesn’t it?

If I get to choose between being perceived as a flawed human being doing his best to entertain the players who have chosen to invest their time in me, or a broody, prickly, prima donna, I’ll take door number one, every time, and without hesitation.

I described the technique very clearly last time out, so I’m just going to quote from that:

During general chatter before play starts, simply mention that you’ve spotted a plot hole and are fishing for solutions, then describe the problem in terms of what the players already know (and not revealing anything that they don’t know from in-play). Then just sit back and listen.

Of course, you are aware of constraints that the players aren’t; you know parts of the story that they aren’t. So you might not get anything usable. Or you might get a brilliant idea. I use those parts of the story that the players don’t yet know as filters for selecting the best answer.

At the same time, anything that hasn’t been revealed in-game yet is subject to revision as necessary, and there have been one or two occasions when I have, on the basis of the discussion, completely junked the planned adventure in favor of something similar (i.e. cannibalizing whatever has been prepared) that incorporates their solution.

I also offered an on-the-spot variation that is probably not appropriate to the scale of problem under discussion today, but just in case:

If I become aware of a plot hole in the middle of play, I have even simply pointed it out in-game as something that doesn’t make sense to the PCs, sometimes after a die roll, to make it seem as though I was prepared for it to happen, even expected it and had done it all deliberately, improvising the rest of the day’s adventure before formalizing the plot developments between game sessions.

And so we come to the meat of today’s solutions. There are three of them, and once you’ve read them, you’ll understand why they are not to be utilized for more trivial problems of plot logic and continuity.

Significant Repair Technique #1: A New Plot Device

The least severe solution in many respects, this involves complicating everything in the campaign, which is a rabbit that can only be pulled out of your hat so many times before the campaign becomes unworkably tangled and falls over from being too top-heavy with complexity.

It involves introducing a new plot device that explains the anomaly. A new villain who has been lurking behind the scenes and using some form of mind control to distort his rivals’ thinking at key moments, for example. Or some tactical consideration that the PCs weren’t even aware of.

Such solutions always remind me of the metaphoric premise of the Belgariad: a child throws a stone which flies off in the wrong direction and is about to break someone’s window. If you move quickly enough, and can throw fast enough and accurately enough, you might be able to throw a second stone to deflect the first. The new plot device that you are introducing is just such a “second stone”, and its purpose is to make your plotline structurally robust. Another metaphor might be reinforcing the damaged foundations of a building before subsidence makes it uninhabitable.

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.

Restricting the vast field of possibilities to the right ones is achieved by requiring the possible plot device to satisfy a number of constraints.

Constraint One: Lack of at-the-time detection

The place to start is always to assume that the players don’t know the whole story, and anyone who briefed them either suffers from the same shortcoming or deliberately lied or withheld the information, in such a way that the PCs could not detect the distortion of truth.

Always remember that: if the PCs didn’t notice the “new plot device” at the time, or have it brought to their attention, there has to be a reason for that failure. Only plot devices whose lack of discovery at the time can be explained are suitable as solutions to the problem.

Constraint Two: Intersections with subsequent events

The second constraint is that there must have been no opportunity for the plot device to have affected in-game events since the initial manifestation being contemplated. Having a character who logically should have been able to act, logically would have acted, and whose action would have been noticeable, but who did not act, is just as big a plot hole. However, because less is established in-game about this new plot device, you have greater operational freedom, so this may replace one problem with another that is more easily patched or repaired.

It’s all well and good to postulate some hitherto-unnoticed conspiracy to explain a past plot hole, but the question always then becomes, “what have they been up to, since then?”

This can be an opportunity, however – are there other plot holes that can be resolved with the same plot device? Is it, in fact, ‘an elephant in the room’ that no-one has noticed? Sometimes, a GM can discover that he has subconsciously been building another plotline into his campaign that not even he was aware of!

Constraint Three: Lack of subsequent detection

Why has no-one noticed the existence/presence of the plot device since that original intervention? More specifically, why haven’t the PCs noticed? Did they make an assumption at the time that appeared correct, but is rendered inaccurate by the existence of this plot device? What other decisions have they made based on that assumption? Were these decisions incorrect, and if so, why didn’t they notice? Has someone been using the PCs for their own purposes?

Constraint Four: Impeccable Logic

Occam’s Razor states (in essence) that the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions and explains the whole of the observed phenomenon is more likely to be true than any alternative. Scientific history is full of explanations that were adequate for their time but that needed to be modified or even rejected completely when new phenomena were observed that were not explained adequately by the accepted explanation.

In a way, that’s the sort of exercise that is being embarked upon with the introduction of a new plot device. The GM has noticed a phenomenon that was not adequately explained by existing explanations of the situation and is postulating a new assumption or theory to repair the explanation. It is therefore absolutely essential that the new interpretation of events does, in fact, adequately explain what happened at the time.

There is a certain degree of fuzziness about the whole thing that can be used to the GM’s advantage: the “human error” factor applies here. The NPC who made the mistake for which the GM is seeking to provide a rational explanation may have noticed or acted in response to the new plot device but misinterpreted or misjudged the sensitivity of the phenomenon. Just because it might be possible for a “hidden rival” to take advantage of the NPCs actions, causing the NPC to altar his planning, doesn’t mean that the necessarily would have been able to convert that theoretical possibility into a real benefit. Or, if it offered an advantage that the NPC was hoping to take advantage of or acquire, he might not have been successful in obtaining that benefit – little pleases a player more than learning that his PC not only blocked the plans they were aware of, they also spoked the enemy’s wheel in the plans they weren’t aware of!

Any solution that satisfies those four constraints is suitable, but may not be desirable. If you’re lucky, there may be several possibilities to choose from. How you choose which one to implement is up to you, but questions relating to the long-term impact on the campaign of the new plot device, entertainment value, and personal preference should be your guides. In particular, you need to think about how the whole situation will come out “into the open”.

There are a number of options:

• PC discovery (bespoke adventure): A PC “discovers” the plot hole following clues and breadcrumbs set before them by the GM. This works especially well if you have a new PC studying the past exploits of his compatriots. This leads into an adventure for the sole purpose of exposing/containing/eliminating the plot device, repairing the damage to the campaign.
• PC discovery (drop-in scene): It might be that the PCs don’t need to take any such action; a dedicated scene or two may be added to another adventure and be sufficient. For example, if the plot device was a hidden ally to the PCs, having the NPC who was affected open his next appearance by smashing that hidden ally makes perfect sense. This would obviously have been the point at which the original plot hole would have become obvious, so applying the solution at that point works perfectly and has a certain elegance. Employing some metagame logic, It might be that if the PCs had spotted the plot hole sooner, they might have been able to save that ally – a nice way to up the ante while replacing a plausibility hole with a realism enhancement!
• NPC revelation (drop-in scene): If you can write in an opportunity for the NPC affected by the plot hole to monologue as part of hid next appearance, you can have him gloating about ‘solving the problem’ or lamenting his failure to achieve his hidden side-goal – effectively casting the ‘solution’ in the past tense. This also enhances the realism of the campaign by implying that there are things going on behind the scenes that the PCs may not be aware of, again turning a liability into an asset.
• NPC revelation (bespoke adventure): If the situation is dramatic enough, it can justify incorporating a new appearance/plot by the affected NPC purely as a vehicle to give him the opportunity to deliver a drop-in scene as described above. The only danger comes from the PCs being able to implement some sort of ‘permanent solution’ to the problem of the NPC – you want this to be a standalone episode that essentially restores the status quo to what the players already thought it was.
• Plot Device Becomes A Factor (drop-in scene): So far, the implementation methods described all focus on writing out the plot device as completely as possible, it’s ‘work’ (in campaign terms) done. The alternative is for the GM to embrace it, and make it an ongoing background element within the campaign, and the best way to do that is for the plot device to make an overt difference in an already-planned adventure, thereafter being a factor that everyone has to take into account. The PCs can then realize, after the fact, that it’s been “playing a part” behind the scenes for some time. Obviously, this enriches the campaign – but its easy to have too much of a good thing, so this is not an approach to employ every time. In fact, I tend to reserve it for plot devices that can’t rationally be written out easily and naturally.
• Out In The Open (bespoke adventure): The final method is to embrace the plot device so completely that a new adventure is required simply to bring it out into the open (from the PCs point of view). This is the most dramatic technique, and should be reserved for cases in which the plot device enhances the drama, or merits it. The extent to which the plot device then becomes an ongoing element within the campaign depends on the circumstances and the outcome of the adventure. Revealing that the PCs have had a hidden ally helping out behind the scenes all this time and then taking that ally away is a great way of upping the ante going forward!

Significant Repair Technique #2: Historical Event Narrative Revisit

I’ve only employed this solution once or twice, and only in the most extreme of circumstances – when a past adventure has been so totally corrupted by one or more plot holes that the only solution is to rewrite it completely, but in which there is limited exposure to future campaign events caused by domino ripples, or when those future ripple effects justify the correction immediately..The PCs, of course, get to keep any experience they earned the first time around, but this is a genuine retcon in which a part of their past is rewritten in the form of a short story.

It takes time to write, much longer than it does to play. It took me eight weeks, from memory, or maybe it was twelve, to write If I Should Die Before I Wake, which was supposed to be two or three double-sessions of play – call it about 24 hours worth of play. That was weeks of writing at least six hours a day. On top of the difficulties of characterization that were described in the “afterword” article section of that post, I had to work out how I thought the characters would function and interact based on the personalities of the players (I got a lot of kudos from them when they read it at getting most of that right).

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 – so the Orcs and Elves series content had to be in narrative form and presented outside the game itself (the original plan was to be a lot less comprehensive and deliver a much smaller block of information in-game, then let the players read the more substantial version for “the full story”) – a ‘full story’ that remains untold to this day; I got through the critical parts that the players needed to know and then took the decision, on reflection, to end the series, because it simply wasn’t as popular as the more usual standalone articles. Will I ever return to it? Maybe, but not at the expense of the usual posts.

That’s a factor that needs to be taken into account – how much time do you have, and how much time do you need? I discussed the sort of scheduling that you need to implement in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity, but that technique presupposes that you have some sort of reasonable baseline from which to estimate realistically how long things will take.

Writing prose is also a learned skill. It’s not quite the same as writing an RPG adventure – the players make a difference, and so do the things you need to do in order to accommodate player freedoms. Some of these differences can make the prose process faster, some make it slower. The more practice you have, the faster you can do it, and the less time you will usually need for revision and rewriting.

The bottom line is this: you may have enough time to do the job, or you may not, and you won’t know until the deadline begins to loom. That’s where the development process that I describe in One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post (and everything else) comes into it’s own. If you have the plot broken down into a bullet-point synopsis, you can at least present that; and, as you go, you get a clear measure of progress. It’s not perfect; three bullet-points became 20 chapters of the Orcs and Elves series, for example. But, if half-way through the time available, you aren’t at least 1/3 of the way through the task (allowing for a substantial increase in pace as you proceed), you can state fairly confidently that you aren’t going to get there in time and need a plan ‘B’.

You do have a ‘Plan B’, right? Because if you don’t, you can find that your crisis has escalated.

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.

The restrictions, conditions, and caveats described earlier all still apply. The retcon scene can either be written as narrative or roleplayed, but it’s really hard for a player to recapture his frame of mind unless the problem and retcon take place immediately, i.e. the game session after the plot hole occurred at the latest. So, most of the time, you’re talking about a literary retcon, but one on a more manageable scale than rewriting the whole adventure.

Typically, you’ll need to frame the rewrite with a synopsis of what had happened up to the point of the retcon at the start and a synopsis of what happened afterwards and how it impacts the outcome through the rest of the adventure. The best choices of retcon are those that have no impact on the rest of the plot, they simply correct the sequence in which the NPC acted out of character or made a fundamental mistake in logic.

These solutions won’t solve every problem of this scale

While it’s true that you can sometimes solve a serious problem with a smaller-scale solution, there are also occasions when you have to unlimber more powerful tools. Those will be the subject of the next article in the series.

There is a principle of script-writing and fiction writing that says that if you want to grab the audience’s attention, you should start the story in the middle. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this principle is the James Bond teaser. I’m not sure if it’s the case with the most recent movies – I’m not a huge fan of the Daniel Craig bond movies – but for a long time, more often than not, the teasers actually had a completely separate creative team behind them. Different writers, different directors, different cameramen.

Until the Craig movies came along, at least, the only time this wasn’t the case was when the teaser was an integral part of the main plot, such as was the case with Goldeneye.

But these movies are exceptions; most movies do not adopt this principle, because they have a sufficiently broad canvas and time-span. The Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy did not; they had relatively “quiet” plot-oriented beginnings. Avengers: Age Of Ultron, on the other hand, did utilize an action-beginning that saw the characters engaged in conflict with a Hydra facility. This essentially started the show in the middle of the plot, with the characters filling us in on the backstory through dialogue as the action progressed.

There have been a number of writers who have recommended the adoption of the principle by GMs, and there are occasions when that would be my advice, too – but as a blanket rule, I don’t recommend it.

In today’s article, I’m going to deal with why, and offer some alternatives for consideration.

The contra-indications

Let’s start with this: an RPG generally has even more scope to play around with than does a feature film. Most of the latter have a 2-hour running length to contend with (there have been a few exceptions, but in general, 2 hours or less provides maximum profitability for both the studios and cinemas), but an RPG can continue “next game session” from wherever it left off. Stories can take 5, 10, 20, 50, or more hours to run their course. So there is ample scope for a slow buildup as the players become aware of moves, one after another, by shadowy figures in the background.

And, starting slow and building up, it is usually possible to achieve a greater tension and excitement as the story heads for a conclusion than it would be “starting strong”.

What’s more, some of the literary constructs employed to make it possible to “start in the middle”, like the flashback, do not work as well in the case of an RPG. Players like to stay in control of their characters, but this forces the GM to either take some or all of that control away from the players, or forces them to play while pretending not to have the foreknowledge of the future that the “opening sequence” provides, while demanding that the GM lay down plot train-tracks to ensure that the ultimate outcome places the PCs back where the plot started. And, often, by the time the GM gets there, those events have lost their intensity. It’s not too bad if you can get there in one game session, but if it takes longer, you can be in trouble.

Starting in the middle often works more effectively if the action sequence is unrelated to the main plotline, but the challenge is then to make it relevant.

Again, no one rule of plot construction is a one-size-fits-all solution; there are exceptions to all of these contra-indicators. But, in aggregate, most plots will fall victim to one or more of them.

The other problem with “starting with an action sequence” is that these consume a disproportionate amount of screen time to resolve, using most game systems. It’s quite common for a fair fight to consume half of the day’s play – and, often, the only way to resolve that is to give one side or the other overwhelming power. If the PCs so totally overpower the enemy, the opening sequence loses the excitement that justifies its inclusion; if the PCs are blatantly overpowered, the GM can be accused of unfairness; and a fair fight takes too long.

Sometimes, you can get around that problem with a more cinematic approach to combat, and I wrote a three-part series on cinematic combat that explicitly shows how to do so.

The bottom line remains that in RPGs, action-oriented openings are usually harder than the alternative, or won’t work as well most of the time. Every plot is different, and each needs to be examined to see (a) if it falls prey to one of the problems described above, and (b), if so, can a way around that difficulty be found, and (c), if so, will the result be a better adventure from the point of view of the players?

The Other Side Of The Debate

There are almost as many good reasons to start with a bang as there are to hesitate.

When you have a lot of backstory to tell, you need to hook the players into the situation so strongly that they are compelled by their fascination to bear with the GM while that back story emerges. You have half-a-page to bait the hook, maximum.

Where the slow build-up is more tedious than a sense of the walls being thrown up around them as the PCs watch – when there is no tension, in other words – an action opening can provide the energy ‘lift’ necessary to get the players through the buildup.

If the campaign is such that the PCs regularly get involved in action, and the plot doesn’t have any for a period of time, an unrelated action sequence may be just what’s required to reflect that element of the PC’s lives – a random interjection of violence positioned so that it doesn’t distract, or detract, from the main plot.

If the planned adventure is complex and convoluted, it may help to balance things to have a simple action sequence to get things started.

And, some players are only there for the action. An exciting opening sequence may scratch that itch for long enough that the other players can get their own gaming needs satisfied.

So there are a lot of good reasons to have an exciting opening sequence of some sort. That’s why it is worth all the effort of trying to incorporate one if you possibly can.

Moments Of High Drama

Here’s a convenient fact: Any moment of high drama, passion, or intensity involving a PC will work as a high-voltage start. For example, it could be an accusation being leveled – if you give no clue as to the justification for the accusation, no hint as to whether or not the target deserves the accusation, then you can fit it in wherever. The more bereft of context the opening scene, the more places in the adventure it can fit.

Using this logic, here’s another plot structure that achieves the desire to start at an exciting point in the story, even if that isn’t the beginning:

• We open with the description of a bloody battle, a shadowy figure raising his great-sword in victory over the blackened and bloody corpses of the PCs. No explanation of who the enemy is, or how things reached this point.
• You continue with ” ‘….at least, that’s what will happen if [x] does [y]’, [z] announces grimly.” Z can be someone the PCs know – a known enemy, a known ally, or a complete stranger. The point is that the first scene turns out to be narrative on the part of this person, who is delivering a warning to the PCs. It could even be a complete fiction. The PCs don’t know, and don’t know how to respond, because this framing scene, too, is completely devoid of context. Though it can be useful if it’s taking place somewhere that the PCs wouldn’t expect such an encounter to occur – an enemy’s base, or the PC’s briefing room, if Z is normally hostile; a hospital bed, or via a recorded message if it’s an ally (implying vulnerability); a strangely-alien cemetery or improbable castle or whatever if a stranger. By making it somewhere unlikely, you further shear away at any context that the players might have been able to infer.
• You then pose the rhetorical question of “How did this come to pass?” and that is where play actually starts.

Why does this work? Clearly, the first part of the plot is how Z came to be colluding with the PCs. But that’s the only fact that has to be established via railroading, and it’s not relevant in a campaign context, it’s so minor. It’s like the PCs saying, “we don’t need the adventure briefing, we’ll figure out what we are supposed to do along the way” (which can be fun, sometimes, too). Because an NPC is narrating the opening scene, it could be entirely improbably or implausible, and need not ever actually take place. All you need is for the players to think it might happen to associate the outcome with the threat it poses, creating exactly the same interest as would be present had it been a certainty.

By making what has to be “forced to occur” something small – an NPC warning the PCs of what they think might happen – you make the degree of manipulation required to achieve it equally small.

Here’s another example of the same thing:

• “The man with the mustache grabs [PC name] by the lapels and pulls him close so that they are practically eyeball-to-eyeball. ‘Don’t make any silly mistakes, now,’ he warns….
• At which point the GM starts the game properly, segueing with “Several days earlier….” and completely failing to offer any context or explanation for how events reached that point. Is the man with the mustache an enemy with which the PC has come face-to-face? Is he a potential ally who is deeply suspicious? Is he an actual ally playing out some game for the benefit of someone else watching the scene? These are all questions that the GM has left hanging, having started the day’s play with a moment of high drama without explanation.. And because the scene is capable of so many different interpretations,
  it’s relatively easy to find some way to slip it into the plotline.

Undirected Teasers

In fact, if the GM is sufficiently confident in his ability to improv, he might have no idea how the teaser will come to pass, just that when the opportunity strikes to do so, he needs to take advantage of it.

• “Wildemere [a PC] slumps to his knees in the alley, concealed by some empty barrels from the nearby inn that are awaiting collection for refilling, and attempts to regain his breath. In the distance, he hears the barking of hounds as the search for him gets underway…” – is Wildermere on the run? From the Authorities? From an enemy? Or do the searchers want to help him? The only thing that this scene nails down is that the character will have been doing something that has left him momentarily short of breath.

A similar technique is to take an NPC statement out of context, but have they deliver the key line of dialogue with attention-getting force and passion.

Self-contained and Undermined Teasers

• “Falcon [a PC] collapses, the blade protruding from his back, having slain the last of the accursed undead who had confronted him. As the curtain descends, blocking the actor from sight, the audience rises to applaud the latest “re-creation of real life” by the famous playwright, Ernest Quiverspeare. Only the real Falcon remains seated, grumbling to himself, “But that’s not the way it happened at all…”

The GM has clearly usurped control over one PC [Falcon}, possibly more, for the briefest of moments but under these circumstances, that will be forgiven, even overlooked. Once again, this scene has started without context and with more than enough dramatic impact to get the attention of everyone at the table – and then has filled in the missing context in such a way that makes the entire scene a matter of “artistic license” that will bear absolutely no resemblance to what is actually going to happen in the course of the day’s play. The only certainty is that somehow, this “famous playwright” will be involved, however peripherally, and will be inspired by events.

What might have been a prophetic sequence is now walled off from the “in-game reality” that is to transpire; the GM has no need to railroad anything – meaning that all the downsides of the dramatic opening go away.

Three commonalities

The observant may have noticed that there are three commonalities to all these examples. The first is that there is minimal input by the players, even if the scene revolves around the PC that they control. Instead, any involvement or interaction with the scene by a player has been deferred until this sequence rolls around ‘in continuity’.

The second is that there is a minimum of description of location. This has two effects: it focuses attention on the action, and it makes it easier to fit the scene in anywhere that it will fit.

The third is that they all create a mystery for the players to solve, however minor that mystery may be, while promising that the players won’t have to do any detective work to solve that mystery.

A couple of sci-fi -only methods

In one of the last handful of adventures in the previous incarnation of the Zenith-3 campaign, I started the adventure by describing the sun going nova and incinerating the planet, PCs and all. We then shifted to the PCs several days earlier as they lived through the events that led up to the event. And then the sun went nova again. And the PCs found themselves back at the start of the adventure for a second time (with the clear implication that this was at least the third such repetition, and possibly much more. In a nutshell, the event that caused the nova had created a paradox which trapped the PCs in a self-contained loop in time (the idea for which was stolen from a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode). Only by preventing the Nova could the PCs release themselves from the loop, thereby enabling them to inadvertently instigate the events that would create the loop in time in the first place. The whole point was to prevent the disaster described as the ‘teaser’ from happening in the first place.

The other trick that I once pulled was to have the players inadvertently (and quite unknowingly) playing parallel world versions of the PCs that they usually controlled as a crisis unfolded, having been warned of forthcoming events by a mysterious stranger. When they failed to prevent the crisis from occurring, the mysterious figure vanished – only to reappear in another parallel world and warn the PCs that lived there all over again. By defining the “real game world” as the one in which the PCs “got it right”, I was able to give them as many attempts at preventing the calamity as they needed. This completely liberated me from the usual considerations and self-imposed restrictions (e.g. “don’t kill a PC unless they’ve done something stupid or deliberate to deserve it”) and let me do my absolute worst.

Where does a story begin, anyway?

The ultimate truth is this: all campaign adventures start in the middle, whether you (or anyone else) realizes it, or not. Unless a PC was present to witness the birth of the idea, unless a PC was present at every step along the way, the first time that they become aware of events is when those events affect them. This is the inevitable result of “telling stories” from the point-of-view of the PCs.

The “beginning” of the story, so far as they are concerned, is actually the middle of the story from the point of view of someone else, including the perspective of the GM, who has had to determine what these unseen events were.

This gives rise to one final trick that I have to share with you:

The Omniscient Tease

This is when you start the adventure by “showing” the PCs a preliminary scene from the point of view of someone other than their characters, because their characters are not present to witness it.

This is the equivalent of a metaphoric “first shoe” dropping. For the rest of the adventure, until the event that they “witnessed” is placed into context within the events that their characters have experienced during play, they will be waiting for the “other shoe” to drop. They know it’s coming – and the longer you make them wait, the more the tension of the situation will build up.

The Inevitable Conclusion

One of the most common pieces of advice that used to be bandied about on Australian Idol (you all know what that show is all about from the name, even if you’ve never seen an episode) is for the performer to “tell the story” with their song or performance. “Sell” that story to the audience and the performer imbues the story with gravitas that sucks the audience into the performance, making them enjoy a vicarious participation in it whether they want to or not.

One really clear example of what they are talking about is “The Sound Of Silence” by Disturbed. If you haven’t seen the video or heard this incredibly powerful rendition of the Simon & Garfunkel classic, do yourself a massive failure and via YouTube.

The first time I heard it, I was sitting bolt upright in my chair going “what is that?” from about the 1:48 mark. Until then, I had been captivated by the apparent dichotomy between the performance style and the appearance of David Draiman, the lead singer, a lesson in never judging books by their covers. But that first minute-and-three-quarters is all foundation for what comes after. And every time you think the performance has hit peak intensity too soon, it steps it up another gear.

The success of the rendition is built on the knowledge of the song – we’ve all heard the original – and the anticipation that comes from knowing how much of it there is to come.

But the point is that it places, and interprets, the song through an entirely different context while never actually showing us that context. It places it in the back of our minds and just leaves it there, while the video explores still another context.

What “The Sounds Of Silence” does, musically, and the impact that it has, is exactly what you want the opening scenes of any day’s game-play to do. They suck you in and involve you totally in what is going on, building a foundation of investment in the plotline on the part of the players.

Regardless of your GMing style, we are all storytellers under the skin. That story may be an undirected ramble through a game setting or situation, it may be driven and directed by the characters, or there can be the elegant inevitability that results from a carefully planned and executed narrative that permits individuality of expression and decision by the players only within the broader context of the unfolding storyline.

At the same time, RPGs are a collaborative art-form in which the contributions of the players can and should never be underestimated or unwelcome. To make the most of those contributions, though, you need the players to be in the head-space defined by the story that the GM is shaping. That makes their contributions relevant and not sideshows, makes them participants and not mere observers.

And that makes the game a social activity that’s entertaining for all those participating.

This image combines two wonderful pieces of public-domain art that is vividly suggestive of the worlds that can be created by a good GM with D&D, and hence the appeal of the game, regardless of which flavor you prefer. Click on the image to view full-sized in a new tab.

This is going to be a really long article* unless I control my enthusiasms really tightly, so expect me to be a little more succinct than usual. Until I get carried away, that is….
* Actually, it was always going to be a really long article. I should have said, “incredibly long article”!

The Roots Of Gaming

D&D has four conceptual parents. Without each, the RPG as we know it would not exist.

And that, I think, is the right place to start.

Dice Games

Dice as a concept extend back into prehistory; the oldest known dice of any type were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at the Burnt City, an archaeological site in south-eastern Iran, estimated to be from between 2800-2500 BCE. The oldest known d20 is from Ptolmaic Egypt, part of a larger historical dice collection held by New York’s Metropolitan Museum Of Art, and the Ancient Egyptian game of Senet was played with dice.

Most of the early dice games were gambling in orientation. That changed in the late 18th or early 19th century.

Military Sims / Miniatures Combat / “Wargaming”

The great grandaddy of all these ways of describing the same thing is Chess, created as Chatarunga in ancient India as a simulation of Indian Warfare with pieces representing the different types of units. Hellwig, the Master Of Pages to the Duke Of Brunswick in 1780, took inspiration from Chess to create a battle emulation game. Somewhere between 1803 and 1809, the Prussian General Staff took that concept and developed the tactical Wargame, Staff officers would move metal pieces around on a game table, use dice rolls to emulate chance events and outcomes, and with a referee who would score the results and adjudicate the rules of the simulation, frequently overruling the roll of the dice. The Prussian victory over the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 is sometimes credited, at least in part, to the benefits of this tactical training.

During the 19th century, increasingly realistic and detailed tactical simulations became a standard element of military officer training, coupled with real-life simulations and training scenarios involving all ranks. In the same period, the first non-military wargames club was started in Oxford, England; Naval enthusiast Fred T Jane came up with and published a set of rules for simulating naval encounters with model ships, around 1898 (these were reprinted in 2008), and the 1905-06 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships included a revised edition of “The Naval War Game”.

HG Wells wrote two rulebooks in 1911 and 1913, respectively, that attempted to codify similar rules for infantry encounters into simple rules, and which championed restoring the principle of random outcomes as the ultimate authority. While Wells’ rules were self-admittedly simple, he did discuss in the second book, Little Wars, the notion of expanding the system into a more rigorous rules set.

In 1940 Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game was first published. Pratt’s game involved dozens of tiny wooden ships – built to a scale of about one inch to 50 feet – spread over the living room floor of his apartment. Their maneuvers and the results of their battles were calculated via a complex mathematical formula, with scale distances marked off with tape measures. Many of the grand masters of science fiction and fantasy participated, including Pratt himself, Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and – if memory serves me correctly – Fritz Lieber and L. Sprague de Camp. There were many others, as well.

These rules were respected by the US Naval War College and their popularity grew with clubs springing up all over the US. They soon evolved into grand tournements which used a ballroom for games with 60 or more players to a side.

Although available to the general public, the expense of metal models hindered the commercial growth of public wargaming until the mid 1950s, when Jack Scruby started producing models using rubber molds, making the hobby commercially viable for the first time.

Specialist book retailers dealing with Wargames were the precursors of the modern gaming store in many places, including here in Sydney – there was a time when Napoleon’s Historical Games was the only place to buy RPG materials. That’s certainly where I bought my copy of AD&D!

Tabletop Board Games

Senet, the previously-mentioned game from Ancient Egypt, is the oldest board game known to have existed. Board games were used in the early-to-mid-19th century to promote socially-virtuous behaviour, but by mid-century, Americans had begun to embrace materialism, and their games began to reflect this shift as daily life rather than eternal life became the focus of board games.

In 1860, “The Checkered Game Of Life,” rewarded players for mundane activities such as attending college, marrying, and getting rich, was the first to focus on secular virtues rather than religious virtues, and sold 40,000 copies its first year, signalling that social values had changed. From the 1880s, the premise of most published games was further refined into Algeresque rags-to-riches games. One of the first, the “Game Of The District Messenger Boy” encouraged players in the belief that the lowliest messenger boy could ascend the corporate ladder to its highest rung. This movement culminated in the first publication of Monopoly in 1935, still the most commercially-successful board game in history.

In 1952, the Wargame merged with the concept of the Tabletop Board Game with the release of “Tactics”, designed and published by Charles S. Roberts. The game was the first to use cardboard counters instead of miniatures, and even today some RPG terminogy can be traced back to that original game – “stacking limits” being the specific example that I have in mind. Nearly breaking even on Tactics despite the small-scale release, Roberts founded Avalon Hill to publish and promote games with similar structural elements, and is now known as “the father of board roleplaying”.

The time came, in 1959, for board wargames to begin exploring beyond the boundaries of tactical simulation. The game that made this important first step away from the direct representation of individual units to a more conceptual approach that focussed on the rough-and-tumble of international diplomats was – unsurprisingly – Diplomacy.

The first use of a hexagonal grid on a map board followed in 1961 with the publication of D-Day and Chancellorsville, both from Avalon Hill, as the popularity of the ‘intelligent games for grownups’ boomed. In the late 60s, a number of small magazines and new gaming companies appeared.

These were followed in the the early 70s by a boom in the number of game publishers, including two that most readers will know; Game Designer’s Workshop (or GDW) and Tactical Studies Rules – better known as TSR.

Fantasy Literature

TSR took the wargame and infused it with fantasy literature, something else that had been around just about forever in terms of human society. Classical mythology is replete with fantastic stories and characters, the best known (and perhaps the most relevant to modern fantasy) being the works of Homer (Greek) and Virgil (Roman). So deep do these roots run that even today, it is not entirely clear how much of the classical Mythological tales were actually theological doctrine and how much was allegory, fable, or fiction. This is equally true of the other famous mythology used by RPGs, the Norse.

Strangely, although fantasy literature was regularly created through subsequent eras to the Empires of ancient Greece and Rome, it was in the Renaiscance and Enlightenment that the seeds of popularity for the first great boom in fantasy literature were sown. Scientific discoveries and the age of exploration made it seem like the hitherto-impossible was just around the corner, the undreamed-of was just as possible as the commonplace. The victorian boom in fantastic fiction encompassed notable authors as diverse as Hans Christin Anderson, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll (Alice In Wonderland), Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde (The Picture Of Dorian Gray), HP Lovecraft, H Rider Haggard (King Soloman’s Mines), L Frank Baum (The Wizard Of Oz), J M Barrie (Peter Pan), and, of course, H G Wells. So popular were these works that many of them, or their authors, are still household names today. 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice In Wonderland, for example, and similar landmark events will occur right up to 2050, even as some of the pivotal works of the early 20th century are marking their 100th year of publication; arguably the most inspirational books of modern fantasy, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, included. The Hobbit was first published in 1937 and The Lord Of The Rings in 1954-55.

Until those books came along, Fantasy was not even identified as a genre distinct from horror and speculative fiction (which evolved into Sci-Fi), and it can sometimes be hard to draw the dividing lines (hence the somewhere-in-between subgenre of Space Opera).

TSR

Gary Gygax and Dave Arnerson were developing what would become D&D and needed to publish in a hurry in order to beat a number of rival products to print, so they brought in first Don kaye and, shortly thereafter, Brian Blume, as partners in Tactical Studies Rules.

“First Edition” – OD&D

TSR’s medieval era miniatures game, Chainmail (1971) included a fantasy supplement in 1974 that led to a new phenomenon that would become much bigger than its parent hobby, role-playing games (RPGs). But no-one knew how large a phenomenon it would turn out to be. Gygax “expected to sell about 50,000 copies” of what he was marketing as a Niche Product. In the first year, 1000 copies were sold; in the second, it was 3000 (aproximately).

It’s fair to describe the three-booklet product as conceptually flawed. It was cheap and amateurish in production, short on details and explanations, and long on assumptions that the reader was already familiar with all the basic concepts.

But a strange thing happened: this new melange concept of embodying and representing a discrete individual in a simulated world created within the imagination caught on, especially on college and university campuses. Distribution far out-stripped the limited production and distribution capabilities of TSR. The game was first brought to Australia as a set of photocopies of those original rules – Blair Ramage, my co-GM and occasional collaborator was one of the first players recruited by the GM responsible – and this was far from an isolated case. Photocopies of photocopies of photocopies spread far and wide, so distribution of the rules set dwarfs the official publication numbers by more than enough to render those numbers meaningless. I’ve seen estimates that range from 10,000 copies (on top of the the 4,000 reported) to 250,000 copies – I personally expect that the truth would be somewhere around the 50,000 mark, but no-one knows.

In fact, to be brutally honest, we came close to losing D&D forever in those early years. The fledgling TSR couldn’t keep up, couldn’t produce enough copies or enough content, and there were no go-to guys that could be recruited to pinch-hit in the production of new content. They needed as much time as they could get to write, to recruit and train new contributors, to work out broader distribution plans. Their prime recruiting ground was the magazine, The Dragon, launched in 1976 as a successor to their previous periodical, The Strategic Review, and their policy of welcoming submissions from readers.

That financial year, 1975-76, was a pivotal one. At it’s start, RPGs were seen as a minor subgenre of the wargames industry; by the end of it, RPGs were a seperate industry, and within a further year, were completely dominant.

Basic Set

The in-house development of the time was completely focussed on what would become AD&D when TSR was approached by outside writer and D&D enthusiast John Eric Holmes, who offered to rewrite and re-edit the original rules into an introductory version of D&D.

This offer was promptly accepted and D&D seperated into two seperate strands – a relatively rules-light basic set and the more structured, comprehensive, and rules heavy Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The basic set cleaned up the presentation of the essential rules, was designed to introduce the concepts to the general public and in particular to younger teens, and was sold as a package, ready-to-play (if you used a slightly-fuzzy definition of ‘play’ that included character and game world generation).

AD&D

But it was AD&D that was the “real” game to most people. It wasn’t percieved as an “advanced” set of rules; rather, the basic set was seen as a watered-down choice for those not yet ready for the “real thing”. It was AD&D that was the focus of 95%+ of the content within the Dragon, and this percentage would have been even higher if winning convention modules are excluded.

The first of three core books appeared in 1977, virtually simultaniously with the Basic Set. The others followed, one each, in 1978 and 79. These were the books that cemented the RPG industry with D&D as its cornerstone.

That’s not to say that the Basic sold badly; it did very well as a feeder category into the industry for players, GMs, and game writers. This two-pronged strategy would persist as the D&D publishing structure for close to twenty years; if it weren’t working, that wouldn’t be the case.

When players and old-time referees talk about old-school gaming, 90% of them are talking about the vast freedoms of the box set or the minutia-rich AD&D.

The Supplement Free-For-All

From the moment the core rulebooks were complete, work started on additional hardcovers and published adventures. LOTS of published adventures. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing; sufficient success to begin edging into the entertainment mainstream also brought with it attention from the self-imposed guardians of mainstream morality, especially certain religious figures and groups. At the same time, TSR was forced to fight legal disputes over the use of copyrighted creations without a licence, notably in 1980’s deities and demigods, which had chapters on the Cthulhu Mythos and Fritz Leiber’s “Nehwon Mythos” as well as traditional Mythological figures, new creations, and Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonéan Mythos, for which the company had obtained permission from the author.

The Cthulhu Mythos was believed to be in the public domain, so TSR assumed they could legally use it without any special permission. However, Arkham House, which claimed to hold the copyrights on a number of works by H.P. Lovecraft, had already licensed the Cthulhu property to the game company Chaosium, who had also licensed the Melnibonéan copyright from Moorcock. When Chaosium threatened legal action, the first printing was halted. Eventually, the two companies agreed on a compromise: TSR could continue to use the material but must provide a credit to Chaosium to do so. The second printing took place while the litigation was still pending, and so removed both of the disputed sections; after the deal was done, the material was restored with the agreed-upon credit.

From the fannish point of view, it’s uncertain whether or not TSR actually had a case to answer. One of the acceptable use provisions of US copyright law is the homage and arguably, that was what TSR had presented.

I have never heard anyone in a position of authority at the time suggest that this notion was part of their legal strategy, but if so, it would certainly explain the TSR position with respect to the plethora of third-party modules and supplements that were emerging though this period in time. Because these required ourchase of the core rulebooks if you didn’t have them already, each was – in effect – an advirtisment for the game, and this effect continued to boost sales of AD&D. From very early in the game’s history, TSR took no action against small publishers producing D&D-compatible material, and even licensed some (notably Judge’s Guild) to do so in a more official capacity.

But by then, the religious opposition was becoming more serious and more disruptive. For the 1985 printing of Deities and Demigods, the book was repackaged and the name changed to Legends and Lore. But the pressure was beginning to tell, and would have a substantial influence over the next editions of the game system.

On top of that, there were serious internal rifts. TSR Hobbies ran into financial problems in the spring of 1983, prompting the company to split into four independant businesses. After losing their executive positions due to the underperformance of the business, the two shareholders with the controlling numbers of shares sold their interests in TSR to TSR Vice-president Lorraine Williams, who in turn engineered the ousting of Gygax.

AD&D 2nd Ed

The mid-eighties under the Williams leadership saw a marked change in attitude by TSR, and a move toward being “commercially responsible” and away from the fan-oriented cottage-industry grown large. Williams was a financial planner who saw the potential to rebuild the debt-plagued TSR into a highly-profitable business, but was disdainful of the gaming field, viewing herself as superior to gamers. Gamers were, in other words, something to be exploited.

Under Williams, the flagship D&D titles were rewritten, removing the material that had been most heavily criticized by the religious community (Devils, Demons, and Assassins and Half-Orcs as character options) and any material that was potentially objectionable under copyright. At the same time, TSR began to actively prosecute unlicensed third party materials, another reflection of the corporate shift.

Williams diversified the company’s products, adding magazines, paperback fiction, and comic books. She continued the commercial tie-ins spearheaded before his departure by Gygax; in particular, she personally owned the licencing for Buck Rogers and encouraged TSR to produce games and novels under that licence.

I have to admit to not playing D&D in this time; I was busy with the Hero System and my interlocking superhero campaigns. Later, however, I returned to D&D with what had been intended to be an AD&D campaign, which I was persuaded to run using 2nd Ed rules. My impression was that a lot of streamlining had taken place, the rules were far more cohesive, and yet – somehow – lacking in soul. Corporately dispassionate. I never understood why until I started researching this article. But that was why, when it was released, and as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I was easily persuaded to shift my D&D campaigns into third edition.

The SSI Video Games

What I was playing during this time period were a great many of the SSI-licensed computer games, starting with Curse of the Azure Bonds, Pool Of Radiance, Secret Of The Silver Blades, and Eye Of The Beholder. These successful licenced-properties began an ongoing association between the computer and D&D that continues to this day with platforms like Roll20 and other online virtual tabletops. I’ll continue to touch on the “Computer RPG franchises” from time-t-time as this article progresses.

The Game Setting Explosion

TSR released the Forgotten Realms setting in 1987, the same year as a small number of staff members began working on the Second Edition of the rules. This campaign setting had first appeared as a series of articles in the pages of The Dragon during the early 1980s, written by its creator, Ed Greenwood. This game setting became one of the cornerstones of the D&D “universe” for much of the next decade.

In fact, over the course of the decade-plus in which 2nd Edition was “the” flavor of (A)D&D, the rules became relatively stable, and the major product lines were all game settings and adventures that took place within those settings.

Ravenloft followed in 1990; Dark Sun in 1991; Al-Qadim in 1992; and Planescape in 1994. Despite this diversity, But despite the popularity of several of these settings, TSR was again heading for rocky waters.

Player’s Option Rulebooks, Dragon Dice, and the end of TSR

By 1995, TSR had fallen behind both Games Workshop and Wizards Of The Coast in sales volume. They had become the industry heavyweight that embodied all the cliches that came with that position – sluggish, corporate, passionless, and crumbling. Sadly, the highly-dissapointing D&D movie was probably their high point of the era, just as AD&D had been the high-water mark of the Gygax-led era.

Collectible Card Games were beginning to eat into the RPG market, a sign of generational change; many of the teens who had been playing D&D gave up gaming as real life forced them to become “respectable” or imposed other priorities on their life. Only about one in ten would remain. The new generation of teenagers were into gameboys and CCGs and wanted their fantasy-gaming fix delivered in a faster-to-play, faster-to-finish format rather than the long-term slow burn that was an RPG campaign.

Seeing the writing on the wall, TSR attempted to move into the new market with Dragon Dice – expensive to produce, but initial sales were encouraging, so – despite knowing little-to-nothing about the new game industry – they went into it, boots and all, only for Dragon Dice to become an embarressing and financially disastrous flop. The various game settings were cannibalizing sales from each other in a shrinking marketplace.

In an attempt to revitalize interest in the line, TSR rewrote the core rulebooks for 2nd edition with new covers, art, layouts, and structure, full of optional rules with minimal regard for potential inconsistencies and holes in the resulting rules. On top of that, theer was a perception that the Player’s Option rules were produced cheaply (since they had softcovers instead of being hardcover books) while at the same time splitting what had been one book into three (interpreted as corporate greed). There was a sense of panic, and of throwing as many things as they could think of against the wall to see if any of them “stuck” and gave a new direction.

Despite sales in 1996 of $40 million, TSR ended the year with very little cash reserves; when Random House returned an unexpectedly high percentage of unsold stock, including the year’s inventory of unsold novels and sets of Dragon Dice, and charged a fee of several million dollars, leaving TSR unable to pay their printing and shipping bills, and the logistics company that handled TSR’s pre-press, printing, warehousing and shipping refused to do any more work. Since that company had the production plates for key products such as core D&D books, there was no means of printing or shipping core products to generate income or secure short-term financing. TSR imploded, dismissing 10% of their workforce, followed by other staff members who resigned in disagreement with the way the crisis was to be handled.

There was a certain amount of irony in that under Williams, TSR succumbed to essentially the same problems that had led her to take control of the business in the first place – the failure to recognize that diversification into multiple product lines exposed a business to the potential liabilities of each product line. While there were occasions when one good sector could prop up another that was less profitable, conditions were right for a “perfect storm” of adverse situations, and in late 1996, their number came up. In large part due to the need to refund Random House, TSR entered 1997 over $30 million in debt, and facing lawsuits over their inability to pay contributing freelancers and royalties, but survived the first half of the year on sales of existing stock even while Williams was negotiating the sale of the business to Wizards Of The Coast.

It’s fair to say that most of this was unknown to the population at large in a way that would be unthinkable in today’s era of social media and grassroots mass communications. The sale came as something of a bolt from the blue for most, and gamer speculation on the impact that it would have on both the D&D game itself and the broader industry was the hot-button issue for gamers over the next six months or so.

In retrospect, they – we – need not have worried. Wizards Of The Coast may have been making money hand-over-fist on it’s Magic CCG franchise, but it was (in essence) more akin to TSR pre-Williams – but a fan-based company that had gotten several aspects of its business model more right than TSR had done.

3rd Edition

In fact, with financial security and a business-as-usual approach moderated by the practical realities of the marketplace, there was barely a ripple. Even the TSR logo remained in place on the products. Certainly, some of the game settings were let go, including the popular Ravensloft setting, but to the fan at large, not much changed.

Behind the scenes, however, there was a great deal of activity.The two-pronged approach was abandoned during the takeover, and three writers – Monte Cook, Jonathon Tweet, and Skip Williams – were hard at work doing a complete rewrite that would unify game mechanics, shift almost everything onto a linear d20 resolution mechanic that was far simpler to handle than the 3d6 mechanic that had preceded it, and modernized the entire set of rules.

Most importantly, it also reinvented the business model so profoundly that the aftershocks are still being felt today.

The Balder’s Gate Series

But before I get into that story, let’s again step to one side and into the world of D&D and Computer-based gaming.Balder’s Gate was released in 1998, some two years before the first release of AD&D Third Edition, based on a simplified set of the AD&D Second Edition rules, and set in the Forgotten Realms setting, who many gamers had gotten to know through the SSI games discussed earlier.

Critically acclaimed, it sold by the pallet-load and was even credited with Revitalizing the computer RPG genre. Personally, I wasn’t that entranced by it; the Second edition foundations were a bit of a turn-off and the gameplay felt awkward and unpleasant to me, at least in comparison with the relative ease of gameplay of something like Diablo. It certainly had a stronger story-based interactive element than the latter, however – but that wasn’t saying much.

Part of the problem was that it was seen as signalling what WOTC were going to do with the AD&D franchise now that they had it, and in terms of signalling what was to come, it proved a particularly poor crystal ball. So strong was this response in my case that it came close to turning me off 3rd ed even before any such thing existed.

But the other part was more concerning. Characters in the game all sounded alike to me, with so little differentiation that the screen would flash up something that someone had said and I would respond “who?” Without that character identification, it was all but impossible to immerse myself in the plotline. Compared to other RPG game demos at the time, and in light of the gushing praise heaped on it by reviewers, it was a serious let-down.

Clearly, however, I was in the very small minority. And the success must have had a profound impact on the perceptions of D&D on the part of WOTC, signalling very clearly to them that there was nothing inherantly wrong with the franchise’s potential; it had simply been mismanaged. More than anything else, I credit Balder’s Gate with convincing WOTC to make 3rd Edition D&D a premium product, that it was worth investing in, and the RPG community was worth investing in.

The OGL Explosion

I consider that to be a strong contributing factor to the OGL business model that was the foundation of D&D 3rd Edition.

The official story is given by Wikipedia: “Frustrated that game supplements suffered far more diminished sales over time than the core books required to play the game, WotC’s Dungeons & Dragons brand manager Ryan Dancey introduced a policy whereby other companies could publish D&D-compatible materials under the Open Gaming License. This would spread the cost of supplementing the game and would increase sales of the core books, which could only be published by Wizards of the Coast.”

The 3rd edition core rules were a phenomenal success. As I recall, they made the New York Times best-seller list. And there was an explosion of OGL product that made D&D ubiquitous. Not only were there 3rd party supplements from dozens, if not hundreds, of game companies ranging from TSREsque in size to one-person operations, but there were many game systems based on the core mechanics – everything from Star Wars to d20 Modern to… in essence, the core D&D mechanics had transcended the genre to become a universal role-playing system.

The gaming community were the big winners, experiencing a boom the likes of which early TSR could only dream – or have nightmares about.

Forgotten Realms Revisited

It’s probably fair to say that the most popular campaign setting released for AD&D was Forgotten Realms. Many of the most popular adventure modules, most (if not all) of the SSI computer games, and Balder’s Gate, were all founded on that setting. So it was no great surprise that Forgotten Realms was one of the first campaign settings released under the new 3.0 rules set when it appeared on shelves in 2001.

Far more surprising was that supplements expanding the distinctiveness of the Forgotten Realms setting followed at what seemed like lightning speed. There were two in 2001, two in 2002, two more in 2003. When the game system updated to version 3.5, the Forgotten Realms expansions kept coming: Another one in 2003, three in 2004, four in 2005, three in 2006, and one in 2007, all in addition to the core setting book. For anyone keeping count, that’s 19 books, 150+ pages each, not counting adventure modules, and making the Forgotten Realms one of the most thoroughly-explored game settings ever published.

Version 3.5

July 2003 gave the D&D franchise another step into the marketing stratosphere with the release of the version 3.5 rules set. This revision incorporated all errata noted to date, clarified a number of confusing rules, and specifically addressed common complaints about certain areas of the game system. Nevertheless, as indicated by the version number, at it’s core this was the same game as had already been released – with additional spells and feats.

By 2004, consumers had spemt more than US$1 billion on D&D product and the rules were selling at the rate of about 750,000 copies per year. There were more than three million players spanning the globe in 1981, and that had more than doubled by 2007.

Eberron

A rival for the Forgotten Realms crown is the Eberron Campaign Setting. A competition winner in 2002 run to find the best new Game Setting for D&D, Eberron by Keith Baker was chosen from more than 11000 enties. In June 2004, this resulted in the publication of the first hard-cover in the campaign setting. Additional supplements were still being released for the 3.5 version of Eberron even after the D&D ruleset was revised into fourth edition. In total, and not counting adventures, some 16 books – again at the dizzying pace of three or four a year – were published between mid-2004 and March, 2008.

Edition Wars

At the same time as 3.0 and 3.5 were proving to be such a smash hit, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to RPGs that had never gamed before, a counter-culture started developing that lamented the seriousness of the latest iteration of the game and the loss of the sense of freedom and whimsy that had characterized earlier editions. Some pined for the quirky geekiness of AD&D, and others for the relative simplicity of the basic set. There were a number of vitriolic and passionate advocates on both sides of the debate, but for the most part, those feeling disenfranchised were seens as a vocal minority. That would soon change…

Hasbro

In September 1999, toy giant Hasbro bought Wizards Of The Coast for about US$325 million. Their primary goal was to get their hands on the enormously-successful Magic The Gathering and Pokemon CCGs, and on the patents that WOTC held over the very concept of a CCG, but they also obtained the premier RPG line, D&D. Interest in the acquisition had first been expressed as early as 1994.

At the time, Hasbro promised that nothing would change, then started changing everything. In retrospect, this was history repeating itself; the new owners were from the Williams school, caring nothing for the product or its users except as a way of making money.

But at the time, little of this was evident, and not much seemed to have changed on the surface, even though there had been a lot of personnel changes behind the scenes, and a new corporate culture was now driving the decisions. The first real indication of the new direction came just two months after the purchase, with the announcement that Gen Con would leave its traditional Milkwaukee venue after the 2002 convention.

Fourth Edition

In time, sales of D&D 3.5 began to slow, probably because everyone who wanted a copy, had a copy. It was announced in August 2007 that Fourth Edition would be released in December of that year in what was widely seen as a cynical profit-making exercise that ignored the investment that customers had made in the 3.x versions.

At first, though, there was curiosity and excitement about the prospect; there had been so many game supplements, both official and third-party released for the game that compatibility issues had arisen. While this was viewed as an acceptable and inevitable consequence when it came to third-party supplements, it was less forgivable when it came to official pubications; the one that always irritated me the most were the incompatabilities of the revised Deities and Demigods and the Epic Level Handbook. With so much material produced, there were a huge number of good ideas that could be incorporated and the whole product line “cleaned up”.

Then the bad news started coming. Minimal-to-no backwards compatibility. A far more restrictive licensing regime, massive licensing fees, and stronger enforcement. Rumors that some content would only be available to paying subscribers of a new online service Contraversial decisions about the broader philosophy underlying the game. There was a pervasive sense that the company wasnt thinking about its customers at all, just about how much cash could be gouged out of them.

And the Edition Wars really exploded.

One of the earliest decisions that we made when setting up Campain Mastery was that we weren’t going to buy into them. Our position would be that every game has its merits, that what was right for some did not have to be right for all, and that every gamer would be treated with respect. And that acknowledgment of the capacity for human error would always be a consideration. This site was to be a voice and a vehicle for everyone, no matter which edition you preferred. Johnn and I may have had our personal preferences, and reasons to back those up, but that did not undermine the validity of anyone else’s decision, even if it contradicted our own.

I gave my take on the whole situation in one early article at Campaign Mastery, “The more things change: ..”: An essay on the future of RPGs – I’ve quoted from parts of it in this section. But the biggest response to the changes was something that no-one really expected (though some of the content in the article foreshadows it).

But before that reaction, Fourth Edition would actually be published. To quote from Wikipedia, who have summed up the changes really well, “Mechanically, 4th edition saw a major overhaul of the game’s systems. Changes in spells and other per-encounter resourcing, giving all classes a similar number of at-will, per-encounter and per-day powers. Powers [had] a wide range of effects including inflicting status effects, creating zones, and forced movement, making combat very tactical for all classes but essentially requiring use of miniatures, reinforced by the use of squares to express distances. Attack rolls, skill checks and defense values all got a bonus equal to one-half level, rounded down, rather than increasing at different rates depending on class or skill point investment. [Skills are] either trained (providing a fixed bonus on skill checks, and sometimes allowing more exotic uses for the skills) or untrained, but in either case all characters also received a bonus to all skill rolls based on level. A system of ‘healing surges’ and short and long rests [were] introduced to act as resource management.

The system of prestige classes [was] replaced. Characters at 11th level choose a ‘paragon path’, a specialty based on their class, which defines some of their new powers through 20th level. At level 21, an ‘epic destiny’ is chosen in a similar manner., the paragon path and the epic destiny replace the prestige class system of 3rd edition. Core rules extend to level 30 rather than level 20, bringing ‘epic level’ play back into the core rules.”

In hindsight, there’s quite a lot to like about 4th edition. I know of at least one group still actively playing it. Sacrificing a certain level of flexibility in order to achieve a more balanced gaming environment without the character-class inequities remains a sticking-point for many, and a large amount of the angst surrounding the release can be attributed to mismanagement. There’s also a certain amount of truth to the statement that “Fourth Edition did for the Basic Set what 3.x did for AD&D”.

Fourth Edition is designed to offer more streamlined play, with reduced prep time and greater access for new players. The real mistakes that were made come down to the overly-rigid Game System License (and the huge fees demanded, and intrusive creative oversight entailed, in participating in it) and the decision to shut down the 3.x line rather than maintaining the two as seperate strands or options.

And the edition was certainly a success, if not one on the same scale as the heady days of 3.x. Even before the first rulebook was published, the first printing had sold out and a second was underway. To date, there have been 40 supplements (not counting campaign settings and adventure modules) released for this edition of D&D, and one thing is for certain: if they weren’t selling, they wouldn’t have kept producing them.

The Pathfinder Reaction

Fourth edition was never going to be as big a success as 3.x because of the reactions by those who had a massive investment in the older version, and who felt disenfranchised by the new policies and direction. In the article I linked to earlier, I wrote “Many – even most – of the third party publishers that were so much a part of the ongoing drive of 3.x have opted to take the old OGL material and published their own game systems, hewing individual paths away from a common point.”

By far the most successful of those is Pathfinder. At first glance, this system is a virtual clone of 3.x, and any supplement written for 3.x will generally translate into the newer game system fairly seamlessly and painlessly. When you dig under the hood, there are a few subtle differences, especially in terms of character power progression – Pathfinder seems geared slightly more strongly toward the power gamer – but until your character levels get into the double-digits, you would never notice these differences, and even then, most would be minor for most of a character’s gaming life.

This is the ultimate landing spot for all those who felt abandoned and betrayed by WOTC and their Hasbro masters. The proof of the strength of the public response lies in the simple fact that Pathfinder outsold D&D fourth edition.

So ubiquitous and obvuious is the association between Pathfinder and D&D that I have chosen to include it here as though it were another edition of D&D. And many of those gaming companies that were producing game supplements for 3.x have continued to produce Pathfinder-compatible products.

Fifth Edition

The growing success of Pathfinder and the ongoing rancor in parts of the gaming community toward WOTC and Fourth Edition forced the company into a serious mea culpa in January 2012 when they announced that a new edition of the game, referred to at the time by the title D&D Next.

To their credit, this wasn’t just a superficial gesture; serious efforts were made to engage the gaming community as active participants in the games mechanics and structure. WOTC wanted to try and lure the dissafected back, and undo the mistakes of the past, and were refreshingly candid about the nature of those mistakes.

It was never going to be 100% successful in that goal, but I was surprised by the vitriol used by various factions. I wrote about that in What Does ‘Old-School Gaming’ really mean, anyway? (hard to believe that it was almost five years ago!)

The article sparked a huge response, and seemed to crystalize a ‘sensible majority’ that were being lost or overwhelmed by the extremists, both pro- and anti- D&D Next.

Distance in time lends perspective; it is now possible to look back at 5th ed and give it a relatively dispassionate assessment. First, the name: it was pretentious and precious, and some marketing or management person somewhere should hang their heads in shame over it, and over the decision to back away from acknowledging it as 5th ed from day one.

In terms of the content, 5th ed unifies the things that people missed the most from 3.x with the best innovations of 4th edition, and a couple of new ideas to bind the two together, most notably the Advantage game mechanic, whih I analyzed here. From a game-mechanics perspective, that remains probably the hardest thing for GMs to get their heads around. It’s reasonably functional, but hard for GMs to judge, and is probably the least-successful element of the fifth edition game.

Did it work? The reports I’be heard are that it was partially successful, luring some gamers back, and doing better than 4th edition had – but all has been quiet for some years, so it seems to have been a qualified success. Attempt to put genies back into bottles rarely seem to come off. Pathfinder continues to sell well, and there is no longer anything that could be considered the premiere game in the RPG firmament. But at least all the shouting has died down.

If anybody’s counting…

OD&D, three editions of the basic set, two editions of AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4th ed, 5th ed, and Pathfinder as a ring-in – by my count, that’s 11 versions of the game. Taken collectively, D&D is the most successful RPG ever published, hands down.

Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns

From the 1980s, D&D has had a flirtatious relationship with computer gaming. The latest entry into that canon is perhaps the most unlikely, attempting to fuse the RPG franchise with the world of online slot machine gaming.

When you look into it, it quickly becomes aparrant that this game is more accurately described as an attempt to infuse some of the D&D atmosphere into a slot machine simulation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; there are so many slot machines out there that are totally lacking in atmosphere that anything done to improve them in that respect has to be commendable, and might just give the game an edge over its rivals.

What this game says, more than anything, is that D&D’s coat-tails are long enough that with sufficient creativity, anything is possible. As a first step into making slot machines more ambitious in their game-play, this hints at the possibilities to come. A plotline in which different targets become a higher priority as play progresses, with random elements that have an impact beyond a single spin, for example, ensuring that each game is different, might make an impact on a group not currently interested in electronic gambling, as well as leading a gambling afficionado into the more mainstream RPG community. So there’s a lot of potential in the concept.

Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns barely taps into that well of possibilities, but if it proves popular, it will encourage progression down that creative path. If you are both a gamer and someone who plays slot machines, that’s something that’s worth encouraging. You can play Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns for free at the link provided.

The (Supplement) Saga Continues

With 5th edition, a more open structure and attitude toward third party publishers prevailed, another example of WOTC learning from past mistakes. There has consequently been a slow increase in the number of game supplements available for 5th edition, mostly from small game companies publishing in PDFs. Pathfinder supplements also continue to appear, but the larger companies remain wary of being caught in the licencing wringer. Having diversified away from D&D, they see little value in boxing themselves back into a corner.

Were D&D-related game materials to once again start selling through the roof, that position would undoubtedly be revisited, but it’s more likely that new companies would spring up to fill the void.

So, if the world-beating days of 3.x are to be revisited, all that seems necessary is to reignite passions for the game. And there is one obvious mechanism by which that might be done.

Tomorrow, when the Edition Wars Begin (again), or, When Will 6th Ed happen? If Ever?

It’s been five years since the announcement of 5th edition. OD&D turns 43 this year. Lead time in the production of a new edition would be two years, at least. And everything has been conspicuously quiet lately.

Five years is a fair length of time in the RPG world. Pathfinder is that much longer in the tooth, and players may be more willing to jump ship if the product were right.

For all these confluent reasons, there are two time frames when it is reasonable to expect the announcement of a forthcoming 6th edition: this year, or two-to-three years from now in 2020.

A new release announced this year could target the 45th anniversary of the original, but that’s not a very exciting or landmark moment. And two years development for a project of this scale is cutting things fine. So, while an announcement this year is not out of the question, I rate it as a low probability.

Two-to-Three years from now is avery different story. First, the date – 2020 – is a symbolic date. It may be less than three years away, but it still feels like it symbolizes “the future”. 5th edition would be eight years old by then, and (assuming that it persisted throughout the development process), we would be talking about a once-a-decade generational update by the time a putative sixth edition was released. And, if the publishing schedule were similar to that of 5th edition, or stretched out just a little more, the first of the core rulebooks could be released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original game. In terms of marketing, of the potential to once again make D&D the RPG game of RPG games, the ducks all seem to line up in a row around that date: a 2020 announcement, a three-year development cycle, and a multivolume publishing schedule that culminates in 2024 and the 50th anniversary of the game.

The time to start planning for this is sometime in the next two years, and the sooner the better. Time allows WOTC to make sure that they get it right, and frame the 6th edition a celebration of the history of the game.

On top of that, the popularity and acceptance of “Nerd Culture” as exemplified and demonstrated by Big Bang Theory – which has been renewed for an 11th and 12th season through 2018-2019, respectively, and growing awareness of the social and personal benfits of RPGs makes the time right for a fresh explosion of popularity into the mainstream.

Will it happen? Will it happen that way? I don’t know – but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t.

The Variation That’s Right For You

D&D was hardly ever the only fantasy RPG system out there to choose from. There have been many others, some of which rivalled it in popular acceptance. Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, The Dark Eye (reviewed here) , GURPS Fantasy, Fantasy Hero, Rolemaster, The Fantasy Trip, Hackmaster, Runequest, and many more – D&D has outsold (and, in many cases, outlasted) almost all of them.

In addition to those, there are a growing number of ‘retro-clones‘ from which to choose.

Every game system has its strengths and its weaknesses. The trick is always identifying those and determining whether the game that you want to run will be enhanced or hindered by a particular rules set, and which rules option will provide the maximum benefit for the minimum downside.

Often, the game system is chosen first, and the campaign developed around that choice. This inherently weakens the campaign concept much of the time, though sometimes a serendipitous combination occurs.

I advocate designing the campaign first, and choosing the best available game system second. The purpose of this review of the many editions of D&D is to introduce and remind readers of the distinctiveness that makes each different – so that you can make the right choices.

There are two different visions of a typical winter’s day. If altitude and latitude permit, you have your snowy day with bitter winds and flurries and whiteouts and snow getting down your back; if not, then cold and wet with howling winds and driving rain that sheets horizontally and in which the only cover is being fully enclosed in four solid walls and a ceiling.

These are cliches of weather, and today is the latter kind of winter’s day in Sydney. The strange thing is that I was only thinking as I went to bed how it had been quite a while since we had experienced that sort of “cliched winter’s day”.

Historically, I know that in Sydney, those cliche days are relatively rare. Spring and Summer are actually wetter seasons than Winter, and it rains overnight twice as often as during the day. Nevertheless, when you think of winter, it’s the iconic cliche that comes immediately to mind as being “typical”.

Nor is this the only phenomenon where this pattern holds true. Runs of luck, Patterns of personalities, corporate practices – whenever there’s a cliche, you will tend to find that they are actually relatively rare in real-life occurrence.

That begs the question, then, of why these occupy the roles they enjoy in the zeitgeist? It can only be the result of one of two phenomena: an echo chamber reinforcement, a sort of verbal shorthand that encapsulates a broader pattern, or some form of appropriateness to the cliche that makes it a quintessential representation.

The weather example is a case of the first. If you describe that sort of day – cold, windy, and wet – the actual label of “winter” becomes a redundancy, even a tautology.

Examples of the second would include “greedy taxman” or “greedy banker”. Because “greed” is seen as reflective of the qualities that make such people more effective in those positions, the quality enters into a cliched relationship with the popular perception of the role.

Cliches are critical to RPGs whenever the GM goes into improv mode, because they leap so readily to mind. When that happens, the GM always has four choices: to Embrace, Flirt with, Subvert, or Reject the Cliche.

Embrace

Embracing the cliche is often done without thinking. And that’s a real problem, because cliches are rarely the most interesting of choices. This can be the right choice in only three circumstances, to my way of thinking:

1. The cliche avoids distracting from something more interesting that the GM wants to focus on;
2. The cliche will provide a moment of levity and otherwise be unimportant in terms of the plot; or
3. The GM thinks of a way for the cliche to manifest in an unusual or non-cliched situation.

The first is easier and more common. Being able to put the NPC in a box like that permits the GM’s creativity, and the players’ attentions, to focus elsewhere. This is using a cliche as a cardboard cutout and being fully aware that you are doing so. Unfortunately, so many people resort to cliches when they run out of creativity that this can still undermine the quality of the adventure or campaign. For that reason, however legitimate this approach might be in theory, I find it better to avoid the baggage that comes with it, and so will refuse to embrace a cliche when that’s all I get out of it.

The second therefore becomes the most common reason for me to embrace a cliche. It doesn’t happen very often, but when the circumstances are right and the introduction of a cliche will provide a brief and insignificant diversion from the prevailing trend, I will occasionally use one for humorous purposes. This is the cliche in the service of the principles of emotional pacing ? refer

• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1;
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2;
• The Further Thoughts On Pacing Series (4 articles);
• and, from a bit left-field, The Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson: New Inspirations In Pacing and Style.

But the third is my favorite reason to embrace a cliche – because you’ve thought of something new to do with it.

The city is locked in the heart of a bitter winter, snow falling with monotonous regularity for much of the past week. Only those with the most urgent of business vacate the warmth of fireplace and hearth to venture outside. You hole up in the inn, delaying devotions and business to the point of rushing to complete these tasks, but also growing more bored by the situation day after day. Surely, the weather can’t maintain this monotony for much longer? Surely, something will come along to fill these empty hours? You are often reduced to idly watching through the windows as children play, chased out from underfoot by exasperated parents, tired of them being perpetually underfoot. Makeshift toboggans slide down snowdrifts into the street, displaying a variety of levels of skill on the part of the pilots; snowmen adorn several corners; several children have combined forces to construct a pair of snow forts, from which they emerge to pelt the opposition with snowballs from time to time, and one young girl has clearly just been told that all snowflakes have absolutely unique patterns, and is catching them to peer closely at this strange phenomenon. Suddenly, she screams in fear and drops the flake from her hand before fleeing toward the nearest cover – as chance would have it, the very inn in which you are ensconced. “The face, it bit me,” she explains after the cleric calms her hysteria. The face? What face is she talking about? “The face in the snowflake,” she explains, looking around warily.

Before too long, the PCs will discover that many of the snowflakes are in fact teeny-tiny ice Elementals, capable of joining together to become larger representatives of their kind, of animating ordinary snow as they see fit, and of turning ice into something more akin to hardened steel. Suddenly, the significance of all those snowmen changes abruptly – this isn’t just a snowstorm, it’s an invasion from the elemental plane of water….

Such inspirations don’t come along every day, but when they do, it’s worth embracing the cliche that spawned them! In fact, every time a cliche comes to mind, the first question I ask myself is whether or not I can do something original with it…

Flirt

Flirting with a cliche is giving the impression that the cliche is present, when the reality is quite different. There are, it is often said, two sides to every story (and yes, I know that the quote is another cliche!) – one of those sides, the one initially presented to the PCs either through direct experience of the consequences or indirectly through the testimony of a third party, casts a protagonist in the cliched role, inviting the PCs to act accordingly – only to discover that as a result they have completely misjudged the situation.

For example, the PCs come to a small village nestled at the base of a mountain range. Planning to stop overnight, they are surprised to find that a ruinous tax-collection regime is in place. Ten percent of any ready cash and three percent of the worth of any valuables are payable upon entry to the town, and there are inspections at the gates. A thirty percent tax surcharge has been placed on absolutely everything – whether it’s a nail, a meal, or a service like lodgings. There are spot-fines for the most trivial errors of behavior, custom, or propriety.

That’s all right – the PCs can afford all that, even though it depletes much of their ready cash. But it prepares the ground for the tales of hardship that they will brush up against – the poor boiling old bones and boots for soup (cliche alert!), the child complaining that the cold gets through the holes in their clothing only to be told that the family can’t afford the tax on new clothes, the tenant being evicted even though his rent has been paid because he can’t afford the tax on the rent, and so on.

At the inn, over watered-down mugs of cut-price ale that cost way too much, the PCs learn that all this started when a new exchequer took the reigns of taxation authority some six months earlier. The only positive thing that he’s done, according to the locals, is that he has abolished the Debtor’s Prison; instead, unpaid taxes result in the citizen being forced to perform public works that save the expenditure of cash from the exchequer’s books. All sorts of dark rumors circulate about the Exchequer, Danevan Scrimp – everything from being in the pocket of organized crime to plans to extort as much as he can before disappearing with the cash. But all discussion paths inevitably lead to reminiscing about the good old days.

Clearly, this situation flirts outrageously with the “greedy taxman” cliche, and the fact that they’ve been extorted as shamelessly as everyone else will persuade the PCs to do something about this greedy villain.

When they do, they will discover that he’s not at all what they would have expected. He is old, and tired, and losing sleep over the harsh measures. It seems that former exchequer coddled the townspeople and reduced taxes to the bare minimum and beyond – small wonder that they they remember it as a golden age – but this forced him to skimp on essential maintenance of the dams and water-management services high up in the mountains that protect the village during the summer thaw. He’s hired the best, and been forced to pay top dollar to get them, but to pay for them he’s had to be draconian, and even so it’s a race against time that might not be won. Of course, he could tell the villagers none of this, or they would have left in a panic, and the village would never have recovered. He only prays that the terrible price everyone is paying is only temporary, and will not need to be extended to pay for expensive reconstruction if his gamble doesn’t pay off!

And now that they know, the fate of the village is in their hands – they can reveal the secret and destroy it, or they can join the desperate struggle to save it…

This is essentially a plot twist built on the foundations of the cliche. For more on plot twists in RPGs, see

• The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You;
• Pretzel Thinking – 11 types of Plot Twist for RPGs, Part 1;
• Let’s Twist Again – Eleven types of Plot Twist for RPGs pt 2;
• and finally, The Final Twist: Dec 2014 Blog Carnival Roundup.

Subvert

Subverting a cliche means to deliberately go against expectations, doing the exact opposite of whatever the cliche suggests. This can be interesting at times, but it’s done so routinely these days that it can often be considered embracing an alternative cliche!

While I will always look at the possibility of subverting the cliche whenever one comes to mind, the choice to do so has to meet the same standards as embracing the cliche would do – either it advances an existing plotline, or it avoids distracting the PCs with side issues, or it provides relief from prevailing moods, or I think of something new and interesting to do with the resulting “square peg in a round hole” or “fish out of water” cliches that subverting the main cliche embraces.

That said, there is more creative potential here to be exploited than there is in blindly embracing the cliche; in particular, if you can find a way to turn the break from “tradition” into an advantage for the character in performing the functions of the job that create the expectations if cliche suitability

The PCs are shortly to travel through a town they’ve never visited before. They stop to ask directions at one of the neighboring towns, and uncover a swarm of stories and legends, always starting with the question, “Why in the world would you want to go there?” or variations on that theme. From that beginning, each time they will get another cautionary tale about the place – the suggestion that it has the lowest crime rate of any town in the Kingdom of similar size; .the sheriff must have eyes everywhere; and so on.

From this foundation, build up an impression of the town as a totalitarian extreme – but never from anyone’s personal knowledge, they all avoid the place because of its reputation, and NPC after NPC will tell the PCs that they should do the same. “They really make travelers feel unwelcome!” is the only piece of first-hand information they can pick up.

But – for whatever reason – the PCs have no choice; to this particular town, they must go.

Upon arrival, they find the behavior of the locals to bear out these fore-warnings. None will willingly have any dealings with the PCs, and all eyes are perpetually turned in their direction. They can’t go anywhere without at least one of the locals following and trying to look unobtrusive and disinterested, and failing miserably. And several times, they see the Sheriff – there needs to be some way they can visually identify him established before they arrive, perhaps description during that advance “briefing”.

The cliche is of the “ruthless cop”. You’ve built it up in the minds of the players, and seem to have backed it up with actual experiences.

But the reality, that the GM has been keeping in the back of his mind the entire time (having decided to subvert that cliche), is quite different. The sheriff succeeds in keeping the crime rates low because he’s everybody’s best friend, knows everyone by their first name, is always fully aware of everyone’s business and what they are up to, and “How’s the lumbago today, Miss Dawshamp?” Because of this relationship, everyone shares all the town gossip with him; this is a town in which the sheriff is the keeper of everyone’s secrets, and he uses that knowledge to always be there to intercede before anyone does anything they shouldn’t. And the locals have grown to like it; to them, it feels like the sheriff is always watching over them, keeping them out of trouble, and they are all anxious to return the favor whenever they can. Obviously, the only people he doesn’t know like the back of his hand are outsiders, and so the most certain source of trouble is always those outsiders, and everyone knows it. This turns the entire population into informers and spies and amateur sleuths aimed squarely at the PCs (and any other outsiders who happen to come to town).

Having milked the groundwork for all it’s worth, the GM now needs a way to bring the PCs into the secret. The best answer: some NPC outsiders who will adopt a particularly poor attitude to this treatment at the hands of the locals, who will do all the things that the PCs may have been tempted to do (but thought better of), who are up to no good and who try to frame the PCs for their misdeeds. Perhaps they are criminals, who – from the town description – figured that they would have no competition, and that perhaps the locals were lax in locking things up because they had been too comfortable for too long. This naturally divides the community into “us” and “them” – with the PCs on the side of “us”, whereas until now, they had been treated as “them”.

.

I was only going to offer the one example, but another one suggested itself at the last minute that was too good to ignore. Take the cliche of the happy little community, ignoring the world and content to have the world ignore them, and subvert it – everyone in town is a wanted criminal, and over the last hundred or so years, this has become the retirement community of choice for thieves, murderers, and rogues of all descriptions. The biggest criminal of the lot is the Count who rules the town (whose great-grandfather blackmailed his way into a patent of nobility way back when), and he maintains the peace with an iron fist and the declaration that all feuds, enmities, and rivalries stop at the town borders. As a result, this town has gained a reputation for being the politest, quietest, most peaceful town in the world. Exactly the sort of town that a cleric might prescribe for a PC whose nerves have become stretched too taut….

Reject

The fourth choice is to reject the cliche. That means not only not embracing it it any way (including to subvert it), but also not embracing its opposing counterpart. It means avoiding the cliche entirely. This is often the hardest choice – but can also be the most rewarding. And, if you make a habit of this choice, the rare exceptions when you do choose to embrace, refute, or subvert a cliche because the plotline is irresistible, always tend to be surprises to the PCs – making those plotlines all the more effective.

Shortcuts to Creation

A cliche is a shortcut to creation. They should never be embraced likely, but knowing when not to reject them can be just as useful to the GM. Never ignore them – the fact that they have come to mind is your subconscious telling you something about the current in-game situation. Instead, use them to your advantage!

Prelude I:

Someone asked why readers might want to read a diary of rules creation.

The Answer is simple: it helps you understand rules and rules processes, making it easier for a GM to interpret other game mechanics as they encounter them.

That’s always the value of a glimpse behind-the-scenes!
 

Prelude II:

Well, that was an adventure! Sorry for the delay in posting folks – it wasn’t my fault! There was a security tangle between my ISP’s backbone provider and my hosting service, with the bottom line being that I was ejected and locked out as a hacker. It was supposed to be only for 10 minutes, but didn’t unlock properly because I was already logged onto the site and in the process of uploading this article. But Bryan from TCH Hosting has done a great job of helping me sort it out – thanks, Bryan! :)

Usually, when you develop rules structures, you edit and write over the top of your draft in progress until satisfied. Because I want this to be as much about my thought processes during rules development, that’s not the approach that this article will take. Instead, I’ll be transcribing my thoughts in chronological sequence as they happen with a minimum of editing for clarity, and showing all my intermediate stages – even if they lead me down a blind alley for a time.

In the last article dealing with the Zener Gate rules, I made mention of a table that was to be at the heart of the system, and a few dangling unresolved questions. Today’s article is intended to complete the picture.

What needs to be in this table of comparative values? Range, Size of target (large), delicacy of precision, time, weight. Maybe speed.

The parts of the system worked out so far indicate that +1 is a significant advantage, -1 a significant liability, and anything up to plus-or-minus-6 can be tolerated – as an extreme modifier. Since some modifiers can counter others, that means that the most useful range on the table will be -12 to +12. I could run it up to plus-or-minus 15, or I could go 20, or even 25 – but whatever I choose, the number of entries on the table will be double that number, and that has me inclined to go smaller rather than larger in terms of range.

But that also makes a big assumption: that minus values will need to extend to the same distance as positive ones. And I don’t think that is likely to be the case. For every 5 values I remove from the low end of the scale, I gain 5 more that I can use at the high end. If I can, I’d like to get away with a low of -5, leaving me 10 more to play with at the high end on a thirty-entry table. But that will all depend on the progressions that I choose and which seem reasonable. And those will be different for each attribute that is indexed.

Weight

The Hero system bases it’s LIFT value – the real-world index of STR – on a geometric progression in which each +5 to STR is a doubling of Lifting capacity. The base value is 100kg at STR 10.

That works well for a superhero game, moderately well for a pulp game, not all that well for a game populated by normal people. LIFT goes up too fast – a STR of 25 permits a lift of 800kg, or a small trailer.

A key question has always been whether or not this “Lift” included the character’s body weight. Part of the table (the low part, in which a grenade requires a STR of -25 to lift) argues no, but the base value makes a heck of a lot more sense (given that STR 10 is supposed to be the Strength of “the average person”) if 100 lb – about 45 kg – or so – is already used up getting the character upright.

I don’t consider my personal Strength to be that far removed from average, but I doubt that I could lift 100kg. Even 50kg would be a struggle – if lifting meant being able to hoist it overhead without assistance.

So instead, I’m going to look at the question of weight in a different way – as “Load”.

Load

A character’s total load capacity is determined by looking up their STR on the index and finding the corresponding weight value.

A Distributed Load counts for 1/3 of it’s actual weight. So 6kg of uniform, boots, etc uses only 2 kg of the capacity. 60kg of body armor would only use 20kg of the load capacity. Medieval armor, at it’s heaviest, came in at about 50kg, because the heaviest load that could be carried by Warhorses of the era was the limiting factor. Note, too, that if you were expected to fight while wearing it, you would not want this load to be anywhere near the wearer’s capacity!

A Balanced Load counts for 1/2 of it’s actual weight. So 20 kg of backpack would use 10kg of capacity.

Unbalanced Loads are the least desirable, counting fully.

Shared Loads

If multiple characters work together to lift or move something heavy, how should loads be assessed? Dividing the 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.

That means that the base value can be set quite a bit lower, and the progression can be quite a bit slower, and reasonable results can still come out the other end.

I was momentarily inclined toward the elegance of a base of 10kg at STR 10, but that seems too low. Something closer to 25 or 30 kg seems more reasonable.

To work out the progression, The simplest way is to look at the top end of the scale. If the top STR value to be indexed for humans is 25, what’s the world record clean-and-jerk?

263.5 kg, lifted by Hossein Rezazadeh, according to Wikipedia.

Let’s plug that in and see where we get:

Balanced Load

So, if every +1 represents ×X on the scale, with STR 10 being 25 or 30 and STR 11 being 25 times × or 30 times ×, respectively, then STR 25 is 25 or 30 times × to the 15th power:

263.5 = approx 25 x^15. Take the log of both sides:
Log(263.5) = log(25) + 15×log(x)
Log(263.5) ? log(25) = 15×log(x) = 2.42078 – 1.39794 = 1.02284
log(x) = 1.02284 / 15 = 0.06819
x = 1.17001

Now, that’s not all that convenient a number. Trying it with 30 as the basis won’t make a huge amount of difference, either; x would still likely end up being 1.1-something.

So let’s go with a progression of 1.2, and round the progression off every now and then – downwards.

(STR 10) 25;
(STR 11) 25×1.2=30;
(STR 12) 30×1.2=36;
(STR 13) 36×1.2= 43.2, round down to 43;
(STR 14) 43×1.2=51.6, round down to 50.

That’s a doubling every +4 STR, much to my surprise! So +15 STR would be ×2 ×2 ×2 ×43/25 of 25 STR, or 43 ×2 ×2 ×2 = 86 ×2 ×2 = 172 ×2 = 344kg.

We can quickly work out the actual record: 263.5 / 8 = 32.9375, which is a smidgen more than STR 11 above, which means the record is 11-point-something, +12, = 23-point-something. That’s close enough to be workable.

What if the progression is fine, but the base value is a bit too high? What does it need to be for the record to come in at exactly STR 25?

263.5 / 8 = 32.9375; 32.9375×25 / 43 = 19.149, or 19.15kg.

So the best compromise would probably be to define STR 10 as permitting a 20kg load, and a x1.2 progression from there:

(STR 10) 20;
(STR 11) 20×1.2=24;
(STR 12) 24×1.2=28.8, round down to 28;
(STR 13) 28×1.2= 33.6, round up to 34;
(STR 14) 34×1.2=40.8, round down to 40.
(STR 18) 40×2=80.
(STR 22) 80×2=160.
(STR 23) 160×1.2=192.
(STR 24) 192×1.2=230.4, round down to 230.
(STR 25) 230×1.2=276.

Still not quite there – the world record would be somewhere in the vicinity of STR 24.5.

Hold the phone – what if we consider the load to be balanced, instead of unbalanced?

Balanced Load

In this case, the static load was 263.5, but the balanced load is half that, or 131.75.

We now have three possible bases for consideration: 20, 25, and 30.

Base 20:

131.75 = approx 20 x^15. Take the log of both sides:
Log(131.75) = log (20) + 15×log(x)
Log(131.75)-log(20) = 15×log(x) = 2.11975 – 1.30103 = 0.81872
log(x) = 0.81872 / 15 = 0.05458
x = 1.134

….not especially nice. It’s too far away from 1.1 to round down and from 1.2 to round up.

Base 25:

131.75 = approx 25 x^15. Take the log of both sides:
Log(131.75) = log (25) + 15×log(x)
Log(131.75)-log(25) = 15×log(x) = 2.11975 – 1.39794 = 0.72181
log(x) = 0.72181 / 15 = 0.04812
x = 1.117

….better, not far removed from 1.1.

Base 30:

131.75 = approx 30 x^15. Take the log of both sides:
Log(131.75) = log (30)+ 15×log(x)
Log(131.75)-log(30) = 15×log(x) = 2.11975 – 1.47712 = 0.64263
log(x) = 0.64263 / 15 = 0.042842
x = 1.10367

…which is really close to 1.1. Rounding errors would soon swamp any difference that small. So base 30 gets the nod, and the progression is now x1.1:

(STR 10) 30;
(STR 11) 30×1.1=33;
(STR 12) 33×1.1=36.3, round down to 36;
(STR 13) 36×1.1= 39.6, round up to 40;
(STR 14) 40×1.1=44.
(STR 15) 44×1.1=48.4, round down to 48.
(STR 16) 48×1.1=52.8, round up to 53.
(STR 17) 53×1.1=58.3, round down to 58.

… looks like we aren’t going to get a nice neat “doubles in this many steps”. Maybe if we round up at STR 15?

(STR 15) 44×1.1=48.4, round up to 49.
(STR 16) 49×1.1=53.9, round up to 54.
(STR 17) 54×1.1=59.4, round up 60.

It took another “round up, not off” in the last step, but this progression gets us there – load capacity doubles every +7 STR.

Of course, this list isn’t used just for people. Vehicles have a STR, too, that defines their carrying capacity. A sports car has room for 2 people (240kg-250kg, maximum), plus at best 50kg of baggage. Plus itself, of course, but that doesn’t count. This is a distributed load (over all four tires), so the actual static load equivalent would be 4×300=1200kg.

(STR 17) 60.
(STR 24) 120.
(STR 31) 240.
(STR 38) 480.
(STR 45) 960.
(STR 46) 960×1.1=1056.
(STR 47) 1056×1.1=1161.6, round down to 1161..
(STR 48) 1161×1.1= 1277.1, round down to 1277.

So a sports car would have a STR of about 47.2 or something like that.

A four-passenger saloon can carry four people and easily 300kg of luggage. 4×120=480, +300 = 780. But this is a distributed load, so the static load equivalent is 4×780 (four tires) = 3120.

(STR 49) 1277×1.1 = 1404.7, round up to 1405.
(STR 50) 1405×1.1 = 1545.5, round down to 1545.
(STR 51) 1545×1.1 = 1699.5, round up to 1700.
(STR 52) 1700×1.1 = 1870.
(STR 53) 1870×1.1 = 2057.
(STR 54) 2057×1.1 = 2262.7, round up to 2263.
(STR 55) 2263×1.1 = 2489.3, round down to 2489. Except that it should also be 2×1277, which is 2554. So split the difference and call it 2500.
(STR 56) 2500×1.1 = 2750.
(STR 57) 2750×1.1 = 3025.
(STR 58) 3025×1.1 = 3327. So a family saloon would have a STR of about 57.3.

Note that this isn’t the only way to calculate the table. I could take as gospel the principle of double every +7 STR. Which means that STR 18 will be double STR 11, and STR 19 will be double STR 12, and so on. This preserves the rounding errors in the original progression, and enlarges them, but it preserves the shortcut perfectly.

And that makes it easy to find any load on the table, even if the table doesn’t go up that high. Simply keep halving the load (and counting the number of times you have to do so) until you get to a value within the range of the table. Count +7 for each doubling, and add the STR indicated by the table.

A freighter carrying 100,000 tonnes? That’s a classic distributed load, so x3 (there are no legs or tires to distribute the load, so we fall back in the standard).

300,000 -> 150,000.
150,000 -> 75,000.
75,000 -> 37,500.
37,500 -> 18750.
18750 -> 9375.
9375 -> 4687.5.
4687.5 -> 2343.75. Which is a smidgen under halfway between STR 54 and STR 55, according to our calculations above. So (7×7)+54.5 = 49+54.5 = 103.5.

A third approach is hinted at by what I did at STR 55, above. I rounded off to a convenient number. Which might not be mathematically accurate, but which is a heck of a lot easier to use. And that’s a winning argument in my book.

At this point, constructing the “weight” part of the table is a simple exercise.

Length/Distance

Whenever I think of this value, I think of modifiers to an attack roll, or to a perception or “spot” roll – however the PC wants to define it. Something along those lines is ubiquitous in RPG game mechanics.

But here I don’t have a base value to start from. I could define one – “-1 at 5m” or “-1 at 10m” or something along those lines. I also have no real idea of the desired progression rate. So this is going to be a great deal harder.

I think the way to get a handle on this is to look at the sporting events of some sort of international competition. I didn’t find a list of Olympic events at Wikipedia (I’m sure it’s there somewhere) but did find one for the Commonwealth Games – 10m air pistol, 25m sport pistol, 25m standard pistol, 50m small-bore rifle – so these are important values that need to be embedded within the table.

The longest confirmed sniper kill in combat was achieved by an undisclosed member of the Canadian JTF2 special forces in June 2017 at a distance of 3,540m. So that gives some sort of upper range to the table. I presume that a specialized weapon and expert training are both required, and those would presumably be worth something like +5 each, maybe more – let’s say +10-20 between them. Aiming could achieve as much as +10, also maybe more. Skill checks are to be made using 3d6, and low is better than high. So a 3/- has to result from difficulty – modifiers. Or, to put it another way, difficulty = 3+modifiers.

That pegs this value as roughly index points 23-33 on the table. That more or less fits with the notion of a total number of entries of about 30 – and means that there will be some close ranges at which characters receive a bonus to hit for proximity instead of a penalty for distance.

So 3500m is going to be roughly 30 on the table, and 1m=+0 seems reasonable.

3500/1 = x^30.
log 3500 = 30 log x.
3.544 / 30 = log x = 0.11813333
x = 1.3126.

That’s not at all a convenient number. Increasing this reduces the number at which 3500m falls on the range, and so reduces the modifiers against success at that range. But we haven’t even done aiming time yet, which is one of the factors being taken into account – so it might be +10 (as speculated) or it might be +7 or something like that. Adjusting the aiming time bonus compensates for any reduction in difficulty.

Reducing it blows the difficulty out, making this even more of a difficult shot to make. And, realistically, a 3 on 3d6 comes up one in 216 times, which is not all that remarkable. Getting six dice to snake eyes would make this a one-in-46,656 shot – which is closer to the mark. Nine dice to snake eyes would make this a one in 10,077,696 shot – that’s noteworthy!

Six Dice? Nine Dice? Where did that come from?

Since writing the previous article, I’ve decided to incorporate an additional game mechanic. If the chance of success is impossible (i.e. 2 or less or below are required), 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. So 2/- on 3 dice becomes 4/- on 4 dice.

Similarly, if a character can’t fail – the chance is 18/- on 3d6 or better – 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. So a 19/- becomes a 17/- on 4dice, keep the lowest three, with a +2 gimmick, benefit, or advantage. A 20/- becomes a 16/- on 5 dice, keep the lowest three, with a +4 gimmick, benefit, or advantage. A 22/- becomes 16/- on six dice, keep the lowest three, with a +6 gimmick, benefit, or advantage.

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.

So, 3/- on 9 dice (six more than the usual 3d6) is worth +12 modifier, meaning that the original chance could be as low as 3-12=-9. Which in turn means that I can put the range entry for 3500m as much as 9 places higher up the table.

That gives me some wriggle room in constructing this progression. I can pick a convenient value, and so long as 3500 comes out meaning something between 23 and 42, everything else can be tweaked to fit the scale.

The pivot point is a progression of 1.3126 – higher than that, and the difficulty is lower; lower than that, and it becomes higher.

Rather than trying to match that with an exact result of convenience, though, a far better approach is to work out how quickly the range index doubles. Is it every step? Every 2nd step? Every 3rd? 4th? 5th? more?

Or, indexing to a ×5 or a ×10 might make more sense.

When you have so many options to choose from, the best answer is to try them all out for size, and see which one looks prettiest.
 

×2 every +1 = ×2; 3500m = 12. Too low, our window is 23-42.
×2 every +2 = ×1.414; 3500m = 23.55. At the very low end of what’s permitted.
×2 every +3 = ×1.26; 3500m = 35.31. Nicely in the middle of the range of permitted values.
×2 every +4 = ×1.19. 3500m = 46.91. A little more than the highest acceptable value.
 
×5 every +2 = ×2.236. 3500m = 10. 23-42 is acceptable, this is too low
×5 every +3 = ×1.71. 3500m = 15. Still too low.
×5 every +4 = ×1.5. 3500m = 20.12. A little too low.
×5 every +5 = ×1.38. 3500m = 25.34. Acceptable, but on the low side.
×5 every +6 = ×1.308. 3500m = 30.393. Close to perfect.
×5 every +7 = ×1.2585. 3500m = 35.493. Still acceptable.
×5 every +8 = ×1.223. 3500m = 40.5377. Acceptable, but on the high side.
×5 every +9 = ×1.1958. 3500m = 45.6366. Too high.
 
×10 every +4 = ×1.778. 3500m = 14.18. Too low.
×10 every +5 = ×1.585. 3500m = 17.718. Too low.
×10 every +6 = ×1.4678. 3500m = 21.264. A little too low.
×10 every +7 = ×1.3895. 3500m = 24.808.The low end of acceptable.
×10 every +8 = ×1.3335. 3500m = 28.354. Acceptable, but still a little low.
×10 every +9 = ×1.29155. 3500m = 31.8966. Acceptable.
×10 every +10 = ×1.26. 3500m = 35.43156. Acceptable.
×10 every +11 = ×1.233. 3500m = 38.9616. Acceptable.
×10 every +12 = ×1.2115. 3500m = 42.5339. Just barely outside the acceptable range.

 
So, the choices are:

• ×2 every +2
• ×2 every +3
• ×5 every +5
• ×5 every +6
• ×5 every +7
• ×5 every +8
• ×10 every +7
• ×10 every +8
• ×10 every +9
• ×10 every +10
• ×10 every +11

 
Scoring big for elegance are “×2 every +2”, “×5 every +5” and “×10 every +10”. Scoring big for accuracy to the desired result of about 30 “×5 every +6” and “×10 every +9”, but neither of those make the elegance cut, so at best they are on an equal standing with the first three choices shortlisted. Scoring big in terms of a multiplication factor that’s easy to work with are “×5 every +4” and “×10 every +10”, with “×5 every +5” close behind. That means that we have one clear winner with a score of 2 out of 3 – “×10 every +10”, or ×1.26.

That wasn’t the result that I was expecting – I was sure that a ×2 or ×5 would be more likely to get the nod – but mathematics doesn’t bend to suit our expectations.

The resulting progression is:

0 = 1m
1 = 1.3m
2 = 1.6m
3 = 2m
4 = 2.5m
5 = 3.2m
6 = 4m
7 = 5m
8 = 6.4m
9 = 8m
10 = 10m
11 = 13m
12 = 16m
13 = 20m

…and so on. And 3500m is a modifier of 5 (from 3.5) +10 (to 35) +10 (to 350) +10 (to 3500)=35.

Size

I once did an experiment to get a better handle on how target size should work. I drew a number of squares on a sheet of graph paper – 5cm×5cm, 10cm×10cm, 2cm×2cm, 4cm×4cm, and 8cm×8cm, all arranged concentrically. From a height of about 10cm, I dropped 1cm×1cm×1cm d6 and made a mark where they landed. I then repeated the experiment from a height of about 20cm, about 40cm, and about 80cm.

The purpose was to see whether doubling the area also doubled the number of “hits” using the 5cm×5cm score and the 10cm×10cm score. These results would either largely track with the 4cm×4cm vs 8cm×8cm results or they wouldn’t, but the 2cm×2cm vs 4cm×4cm results would give some indication of how the accuracy changed with target area. Comparing all of these with the matching results from the different heights would permit an estimation of the effect of range on the accuracy relative to target size..

So, did doubling the target size double the accuracy?

In fact, it did everything but, depending on the range (height above the graph paper). At close ranges, the majority of dice landed inside the 5×5 area – something like 80% of them. Virtually all of them landed inside the 10×10 area – close to a 125% accuracy increase from doubling the area.

This finding was reinforced by the 2-vs-4-vs-8 results. About 35% landed inside the 2×2 area, another 30% in the 4×4 area, and about 20% more inside the 8×8 area.

As the range increased, so did my inaccuracy (no surprise there!), and the accuracy counts began to approach the sort of ratios that you would expect from the different areas, but even at the greatest range, they never quite got there. I could only conclude that my attempts to aim for the center of the target – no matter how good or how bad – biased even the misses closer to the target than area alone would suggest. At close ranges, this effect overwhelmed the randomness.

So the size of the target, as a modifier, is dependent on the range. Which is extremely difficult to model using simple mechanics of the sort being contemplated for this game system.

Up to a certain point, doubling the size of the target more than doubles the accuracy. Which is another way of saying that the modifiers should not reflect a doubling of the size for a doubling of the modifier, a smaller increase in the area will do that.

That stops when the range is more than the target. The easiest way to build this behavior into the table is a “shift” up the table based on the range if the range modifier is greater than the size value, and a shift down the table if the range modifier is smaller than the size value – in terms of determining the size increase represented by a particular modifier.

But in practical usage, we will want to determine a modifier based on the size of the target, so these adjustments have to go in the other direction – a “shift down” if the range value is greater than the target, a “shift up” if the range modifier is smaller than the target modifier.

For various reasons that I won’t go into here (too long and complicated), these shifts should have non-linear intervals – 1,2,3,4,5,6, and so on.

So,

+1 = diff 1
+2 = diff 2 to 1+2=3
+3 = diff 4 to 3+4=7
+4 = diff 8 to 7+5=12
+5 = diff 13 to 12+6=18
+6 = diff 19 to 18+7=25
+7 = diff 26 to 25+8=33
+8 = diff 34 to 33+9=42
+9 = diff 43 to 42+10=52.
+10=diff 52 to 52+11=63.

…which is more than we are ever likely to need, but the table can be extended from there.

To accommodate this effect, I need to extend the table seven extra entries in either direction for size only. But that means that I can then use a simple doubling of area for a given modifier.

Next, we need to define a base standard. I keep coming back to 1m × 1m at 2m, If you do the math, that means a target that occupies 53 degrees of a possible 180 degrees (360 if you had eyes in the back of your head), or 29.4% of the visible space.

Why 1m × 1m? Well, the typical human is roughly 2m high × 0.5m wide, which just happens to come to the same area as a 1m × 1m target.

Torso plus head is roughly half that size – leaving an amount of about the same if the goal is to avoid hitting a vital area, conveniently! Head and neck alone are roughly 1/4 the size of torso+head. A hand and wrist is about half that, if open, or about 1/4 of it if wrapped around a grip – so, to attempt to shoot the weapon out of someone’s hand, we’re talking about the same area as the open hand, consisting of half weapon and half gripping hand. Eye sockets are about 1/3 of the width of the head, each, and about 1/6th the length – so that’s 1/18th the head – but a glancing blow to the eyebrow ridge has a 50-50 chance of deflecting towards the eye socket, so we can justify making them just a little larger – a nice convenient 1/16th of the head size is a nice working value. And a ring, or a darts bulls-eye, is about half that area. So 1m × 1m gives a whole range of useful values!

I want these to all be listed on the table. They are all things that a PC might want to target, depending on the situation.

+0 = 1m² at 2m, human
-1 = head + torso or flesh wound
-2 = head + neck
-3 = open hand or weapon in hand
-4 = fist
-5 = finger
-6 = eye socket
-7 = ring, darts bulls eye, marble, button
-8 = keyhole

With the main table, I’m going to take a couple of “rounding error” liberties to keep the values useful.

1 = 2 m² (large motorcycle, doorway)
2 = 4 m² (small car side view)
3 = 10 m² (truck side view)
4 = 15 m² (aircraft control cabin)
5 = 30 m² (fishing trawler, barn door)
6 = 60 m² (locomotive, barn side view)
7 = 120 m² (small train)
8 = 250 m² (large train, freighter side view, small house)
9 = 500 m² (large house)
10 = 1000 m² (small mansion, lighthouse)
11 = 2000 m² (large mansion, Eiffel tower)
12 = 4000 m² (the pentagon, top view)
13 = 8000 m² (small skyscraper, side view)
14 = 12,000 m²
15 = 25,000 m²
16 = 50,000 m²
17 = 1 km²
18 = 2 km²
19 = 4 km²
20 = 8 km²
21 = 15 km²
22 = 30 km²
23 = 60 km²
24 = 120 km²
25 = 250 km²
26 = 500 km²
27 = 1000 km²
28 = 2000 km²
29 = 4000 km²
30 = 8000 km²
31 = 15,000 km²
32 = 30,000 km²
33 = 60,000 km²
34 = 120,000 km²
35 = 250,000 km²
36 = 500,000 km²
37 = 1,000,000 km²
38 = 2,000,000 km²
39 = 4,000,000 km²
40 = 8,000,000 km²

That probably goes further than necessary. 8,000,000 square km is slightly smaller than the USA – including Alaska and Hawaii. It’s slightly larger than Australia, which is roughly the same size as the continental US.

It’s important to bear in mind the “at 2m”). At 1m, the target is twice the size – a +1 modifier. At 0.5m – effectively point-blank – it’s twice that, or a +2 modifier.

So how about at 200m?

That’s a range modifier of 23. The size at 2m is +0. So you might expect that we’re talking a modifier of 23. But the range modifier is definitely more than the size modifier, by 23 – so we effectively shift 6 rows down the size table, effectively increasing the size of the target. So the modifier is actually 17.

Time

Time as a modifier has multiple functions. It can be used to determine the penalty for rushing through a task (i.e. taking less time than is required to do the job with care, accuracy, and precision, in the GM’s opinion), or a bonus for taking extra time over and above the minimum requirement, or it can be used to define the modifier for aiming based on how long you aim – and capped by the type of weapon.

That last is critical, because none of the others give us any clue as to the base or the scale.

Most people point at the target and shoot. Taking a second or two to aim with a pistol greatly increases the accuracy, but more time after that has a negligible effect. Taking five or ten seconds to aim a rifle will markedly improve the accuracy, but not much more. A sniper can take five or ten minutes or more to aim, and then spends time waiting for the target to get into the optimum position to make the hit when it happens as effective as possible. He might also spend as much as half-an-hour letting his eyes adjust to the natural light, but that’s not time spent aiming.

The Sniper Record Revisited

That brings us back to that record kill-shot by a sniper, which is a key metric for determining what the time modifier for “5 to 10 minutes” is. We want our hypothetical sniper to have a -9 on 3d6 chance.

There’s a 3500m range, which gives a 35 range modifier.

For a kill shot, we could be talking chest, but head/neck seems more likely. So there’s a base size modifier of -2. So that’s a difference of 37. And that’s an adjustment of +7 to the target size, so the total modifier so far is 30. Let’s assume that the telescopic sights are worth another -5, and that the sniper has a +3 from stats and +4 from skill – that’s quite a high score.

Roll required = skill + modifiers, or less.

-9 = 3 (stat) +4 (skill) -30 (range and size) + 5 (sights) + Aim, which is the one modifier that we don’t know.

3+4+5-30=-18. So Aim-18 = -9, or Aim = 18-9 = 9.

If we can identify one other value on the table, we can work out a progression. And we have one – spending 0 time aiming has to be the lowest entry on the table, because you can’t spend less than that. So “0 time” = -5.

But “0 time” is meaningless, because 0 multiplied by a number is always zero. What that actually means is “less than 1 second” has a value of -5 – and therefore, “1 second” has a value of -4.

The difference between -4 and 9 is 13. That means that whatever the progression is, 12 lots of it turns 1 second into 5-10 minutes, i.e. 300-600 seconds.

That’s a big difference. But let’s work out those values and then pick something convenient in between.

1 times x^12 = 300
log (x^12) = log (300)
12 log (x) = log (300)
log (x) = log(300) / 12 = 2.477 / 12 = 0.2064.
x = 10^0.2064 = 1.6085.

1 times x^12 = 600
log (x^12) = log (600)
12 log (x) = log (600)
log (x) = log(600) / 12 = 2.77815 / 12 = 0.2315
x = 10^0.2315 = 1.7041.

Anything in between those values will work just fine. Given that this was a record, we can assume that the value is closer to the high end, requiring more time to take the shot.

+1: 1.7×1 = 1.7.
+2: 1.7×1.7 = 2.89
+3: 2.89×1.7 = 4.93
+4: 4.93×1.7 = 8.35
+5: 8.35×1.7 = 14.19.

That’s not looking too neat, but there are a couple of alternatives there that leap out. x5 for every +3, or x10 every +4.

x^3 = 5
3 log (x) = log (5) = 0.69897
log (x) = 0.69897 / 3 = 0.23299
x = 1.71 – a fraction outside our acceptable range.

x^4 = 10
4 log (x) = log (10) = 1
log (x) = 1 / 4 = 0.25
x = 1.7782

…which is even more outside the acceptable range. Obviously, adjusting any of the factor results upwards gets us in trouble. The third-best choice is x8 ever +4:

x^4 = 8
4 log (x) = log (8) = 0.90309
log (x) = 0.90309 / 4 = 0.22577
x = 1.6818

that’s not an especially pretty number, either. Perhaps this approach should be scrapped, keeping only the identified value of, say, ×500 at +9, and fill in the rest through some other function of the table.

Spending Extra Time on a task

One of the applications of this list is to determine a bonus for spending extra time on something, and a penalty for rushing a task. Base time required is always +0.

It strikes me as appropriate that +1 should result from spending an extra 50% of the time required, and +2 from spending twice the base time. +3 could result from spending 4× the base time required, +4 from spending 8 times the base time. That gives us a number that’s very close to the 1.7-factor we were looking for. And base time ×15 at +5 sets up a neat progression. So the table would be:

+0 = ×1
+1 = ×1.5
+2 = ×2
+3 = ×4
+4 = ×8
+5 = ×15
+6 = ×20
+7 = ×40
+8 = ×80
+9 = ×150
+10= ×200
+11 = ×400
+12 = ×800

…but that’s not going up fast enough to give us ×500 at +9.

So, keeping the lower values, let’s try again:

+0 = ×1
+1 = ×1.5
+2 = ×2
+3 = ×4
+4 = ×10
+5 = ×15
+6 = ×25
+7 = ×50
+8 = ×100
+9 = ×200

… still not enough.

+0 = ×1
+1 = ×1.5
+2 = ×2
+3 = ×5
+4 = ×10
+5 = ×20
+6 = ×50
+7 = ×100
+8 = ×200
+9 = ×500

…bingo!

+10 = ×1000
+11 = ×2000
+12 = ×5000
+13 = ×10,000

… which is probably as far as I need to take the table.

And what of going the other way?

+0 = x1
-1 = 1×5 / 10 = 0.5
-2 = 0.5 × 2 / 5 = 0.2
-3 = 0.2 × 1.5 / 2 = 0.15
-4 = 1 × 1 / 10 = 0.1
-5 = < 0.1

That defines “the time it takes to point at the target and pull the trigger” as 0.1 seconds, and “the time it takes to pull the trigger indiscriminately” as something less than 0.1 seconds.

These have the opposite problem – they seem to decline too quickly. According to Wikipedia,

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.

109 ms is 109 thousandths of a second, or 0.109 seconds. Close enough to the 0.1 already in place, but with a -5 modifier. That gives me room for an extra entry.

+0 = ×1
-1 = ×0.75
-2 = ×0.6
-3 = ×0.4
-4 = ×0.2
-5 = ×0.1 or less

That works for me, time to move on.

Precision

Doing delicate, precise work can be just as difficulty as a physically challenging task requiring great strength or agility. Some people can never do such work, others are capable only by spending a great amount of time on the task. The ability to perform time-critical precision tasks, on a very small scale, under pressure, is pretty rare. Some electronics techs might have it; some surgeons have it, especially neurosurgeons; watchmakers have it to some degree; bomb disposal techs often have it in some measure; artists often have some capacity in this direction.

In practical terms, this is a two-fold issue: the delicacy of the task (based on the size of the target) vs the visual amplification or zoom factor and any tools that scale movement down. Zoom factor makes it easier to see exactly what you are doing, movement scaling means that a large movement in the real world becomes a small movement in dealing with the target.

In game system terms, this is all about setting the difficulty of a task. Some of these factors are under the control of the PCs insofar as they can increase the magnification of whatever microscope technology they are using, or acquire better technology if it’s available. Both of those factors have limits according to the technology of the era, and those limits define the limits of what is possible – with skill, natural talent, training, and innate artistry (i.e. skill level) having to bridge the gap.

That means that this will actually be three columns in the finished table. Assuming that zoom factor and movement scaling can use the same column, that can be simplified to two: Delicacy and Scaling.

Delicacy

This is similar to the range target but moving in the other direction – smaller gives a higher difficulty.

So the place to start is with the range column that I worked out earlier. The first few entries will match the negative values on that column; from there, it should be possible to take the reciprocal of entries from the range table.

So my starting point is:

RANGE:
0 = 1m
1 = 1.3m
2 = 1.6m
3 = 2m
4 = 2.5m
5 = 3.2m
6 = 4m
7 = 5m
8 = 6.4m
9 = 8m
10 = 10m
11 = 13m
12 = 16m
13 = 20m

… and so on.

Two observations strike me immediately: first, that I didn’t work out any negative modifier entries earlier, and second, that this progression rate is very small. Too small to be useful in this way, in fact; most modifiers would be so large that mental arithmetic would be hard-put to cope (that’s another reason why I’ve been trying to keep the number of entries in the table small).

So plan “A” is a washout. Back to square one.

Carpenters etc have to be accurate to within a mm in most tasks. Many amateur mistakes come from not being sufficiently precise – my dad has a setup on his workbench that allows for the thickness of his pencil, because that’s between 1 and 0.5mm thick – and if you cut on the wrong side of that line, you’re in trouble. He also has to allow for the thickness of the cutting blade, especially when using a disk cutter. That can be about 1.5mm thick. Again, it’s all about making sure that whatever is left when you finish cutting is exactly what you want.

So I want 1mm to have a small modifier, enough to distinguish between those with some experience or skill in carpentry and those who don’t – between him and me, in other words!

I think that a modifier of 2 would be about right.

At the same time, I remember some of the very rough-and-ready “furniture” that we knocked up at our field camp when I worked for the NSW Dept of Agriculture, essentially using a chainsaw and wire. Okay, there might have been a drill and some bolts on some of it, too. Anything within about 5mm was good enough. Instead of chairs with four legs, we used three-legged designs, because they won’t rock if one of the legs is a little short – it just means that the table or chair slopes a little. For chairs, in fact, we simply sliced a section out of a tree and left it to air-dry – a ‘one leg’ solution!

At the same time, though, I’ve known people who couldn’t do that, more because they had never thought about the practicalities involved. So that’s a modifier of 1.

I’m something of an artist, and have been for decades. I have done my best to adapt those skills to a digital medium, but have in fact ended up developing a whole new set of skills – at least to the point where ten or 15 minutes of effort produced the “dropping dice” illustration above. But there are a huge number of things that I can do with pencil and ink that I would have extreme difficulty replicating in an electronic format.

When I was doing the artwork for Assassin’s Amulet, for example this piece, I did pencil sketches at double-size in pencil, went over them (correcting) with 0.5mm marker, scanned them, and then “painted” over the top of them. Finally, the scanned “underlying image” was deleted when I was satisfied.

With such manual tools, I have a resolution of about 1/10th of a mm – which is to say, if a pencil stroke is 0.1mm away from where I want it to be, I can see the error. Well, I used to be able to – I haven’t done anything like this for 6 years, now!

That didn’t mean that the pencil or pen went where I wanted it to go, every time – just that I could detect it when it didn’t.

When doing the digital work, I also worked much larger than the final scale – the “raw image” of this work was about 2400×2400 pixels, as I recall. The image shown here is about 450 pixels wide, the one that actually appears in Assassin’s Amulet is more like 600 pixels wide – so that’s a 4x zoom. But to do some of the detail work – the ribs on the end of the bottle, the suckers and so on – I would have zoomed in perhaps another 500%. So 2400×5=12000, or about 20x zoom.

It meant that small errors – that might not have even been visible to others – became vanishingly small, enabling me to work at absolutely top speed. I was doing 3-5 of these illustrations a night while working on the text and maintaining Campaign Mastery during the day – giving some idea of the speed that was possible from these working practices.

Would I have liked more time? Absolutely. I would love to have been able to linger over one of these for a whole day or two – a week in some cases. But time and financial pressures meant that I had to churn them out at top speed. (I did the best I could – deliberately pairing complex pictures like “Ink Of The Squid” with a couple of simpler ones, so that I could lavish some more attention on it. But it was all compromised to some extent by practicalities.)

So, this illustrates both the zoom effect, the mechanical scaling effect (both of which are to be dealt with shortly) and gives another data point on the scale: 0.1mm. I don’t think the modifier that goes with that scale should be much more than the 0.5mm I’ve already allocated to a 2 modifier, so let’s make it a 3.

But that brings me to the question of progression. There is a clear pattern beginning to emerge, but I’m concerned that it won’t progress fast enough to give workable modifiers for really small operations. At the same time, I want to be sure that these are only possible if you have both the skill and the right equipment. Choosing a non-linear progression should solve these problems.

So let’s start with what we’ve got and extend the table from there, and see how it looks:

-2 = 1m (FM radio wavelength – included for completeness)
+0 = 1cm (microwave wavelength)
+1 = 5mm (ants, seeds, rice grains)
+2 = 1mm (pixels, grains of sand or salt, furniture tolerance)
+3 = 0.1 mm = 100µm (width, human hair, limit unaided vision)
+4 = 0.05mm = 50µm (thickness 1 sheet of paper, human skin cell = 35µm)
+5 = 0.01mm = 10µm (width of a silk fiber, white blood cell, 1971 Transistors, infrared wavelength)
+6 = 0.005mm = 5µm (cell nucleus, x chromosome, red blood cell)
+7 = 1µm (1 micron) (y chromosome, clay particle, e.coli)
+8 = 0.5µm = 500 nm (largest virus, red wavelength = 750)
+9 = 0.1µm = 100 nm (limit optical microscopes, HIV, violet wavelength = 400)
+10 = 0.05µm = 50nm (Hep B virus, infrared wavelength)
+11 = 0.01µm = 10nm (2017 Transistors = 25nm)
+12 = 0.005µm = 5nm (cell membrane, DNA)
+13 = 1 nm = 100 Angstroms (buckyball)
+14 = 0.5 nm = 50 Angstroms (glucose molecule, cesium atom, x-ray wavelength)
+15 = 0.1 nm = 10 Angstroms = 100 picometers (carbon atom = 340, water molecule = 280)
+16 = 0.05 nm = 5 Angstroms = 50 picometers (limit electron microscopes)
+17 = 0.01 nm = 1 Angstrom = 10 picometers (Hydrogen atom = 31, Helium = 25)
+18 = 0.005nm = 0.5 Angstrom = 5 picometers
+19 = 1 picometer (gamma ray wavelength)
+20 = 0.5 picometer
+21 = 0.01 picometer (uranium nucleus = 0.015 picometers)
+22 = 5 femtometers
+23 = 1 femtometer (proton, neutron, helium nucleus = 3)
+24 = 500 attometers
+25 = 100 attometers (smallest confirmed objects in existence)

That’s not bad!

Credit where it’s due: the examples are from The Scale Of The Universe 2 by Cary & Michael Huang. Have a play around with their interactive app, then get their email link from this page to thank them!

Scaling

The above also makes the scaling pretty clear. Because scaling modifiers are to be half the delicacy scale (leaving the other half for movement scaling technology), we get:

+0 = ×1
+1 = ×10 (magnifying glass, jeweler’s loupe)
+2 = ×100
+3 = ×1000
+4 = ×10k
+5 = ×100k (limit optical microscopes)
+6 = ×1M
+7 = ×10M
+8 = ×100M
+9 = ×1000M (limit, electron microscopes)
+10 = ×10G or more (sci-fi only)

Movement scaling is relatively new technology, though it was always possible to a limited extent mechanically. In fact, a lot of tools are intended to scale movement in a very limited way – teeny-tiny screws and screwdrivers, for example. These days, robotized tools controlled through a computer let us manipulate objects as small as 50nm or so, and we have processes that let us design and manufacture tangible objects as small as 10nm (the component parts of a 25nm transistor, for example).

Nanotechnology machines are the obvious next stage of development, the cutting edge. Again, we haven’t devised tools to scale our own movement that small, instead we have designed processes that create the components. We are only just getting to the point of being able to assemble these components – that will involve more processes. Fraser Stoddart, Bernard Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the 2016 Nobel prize for their work in the field, especially the creation of a “nanocar”. But tracking down a size for these devices has proven incredibly hard – the best that I’ve been able to manage quotes “a few billionths of a meter”, which is around the +7 or +8 mark on the scale given above. It was just as difficult trying to find a freely-licensed image to illustrate it – the best image I was able to find is shown in an article on The Verge but the terms of usage don’t leave me any the wiser as to who the copyright owner is. So the best I can do is provide the link and let you check it out for yourselves.

So, what we have is the following:

+0 = ×1 precision tools
+1 = ×10 high-quality precision manual tools
+2 = ×100 limit precision manual tools
+3 = ×1000 primitive process-based designer tools, computerized scaling tools
+4 = ×10k generation-2 process-based tools, computerized scaling tools
+5 = ×100k generation-3 process-based tools, light/laser-based scaling tools
+6 = ×1M generation-4 process-based tools, energy-beam based scaling tools
+7 = ×10M virus-based nanotechnology, generation-5 process-based tools
+8 = ×100M true nanomachines, the nanocar
+9 = ×1000M process-based chemical tools (buckyballs)
+10 = ×10G or more (sci-fi only)

Each scale of tools permits – in theory – the construction of parts of roughly the size of the tool, and the assembly of those parts into a “machine” one scale larger. So tools the scale of the nanocar would permit the construction of virus-based nanotechnology.

Before I wrap up this section, let’s run a realism check: Designing and creating a custom computer chip at the limits of known precision manufacture in 2017:

Precision Modifier +11, – Optical Tools +5, – Energy-beam based scaling tools +5 + design difficulty gives an overall difficulty of 1 more than the design difficulty.

So, if the GM sets a design difficulty of 3, the manufacturing difficulty will be 4. If the character has a skill of 3 and +3 from stats – both reasonable for an expert in the field – he will have to roll 6 or less on 3d6+3. Which is, impossible. So we add a d6 to improve the roll required: 8 or less on 4d6+3. Which is the same as 5 or less on 4d6. That’s a 0.39% chance of success, or about 1 in 256. And the manufacture will be even harder – 4 or less on 4d6, or 0.08% chance, or about 1 in 1250. But manufacturers will typically put 1000 or more chips on a single manufacturing batch – so, if they can get 1250 on a sheet, they are likely to get 1 fully-functional chip from the process.

Compare that with a genius in the field with skill 5 and stats +4: that’s 9 or less on 3d6+3 for the design, and 3d6+4 for the manufacture: 9.26% chance of success for the design and 4.63% chance of success in the manufacture.

And both of those test-cases ignore the potential for spending extra time to get the design and manufacturing right. But the results I did get all sound reasonable!

Assistance

It also brings up another point that I don’t think I’ve addressed previously. How to handle multiple people working in teams. Going it along might work for geniuses and mavericks, but most R&D is done by teams of experts.

This is to be based on the non-linear size adjustment, enabling me to re-use the same table entry.

Number of assistants or skill 1 lower than the lead operator required for a given bonus

+1 = 1
+2 = 2-3
+3 = 4-7
+4 = 8-12
+5 = 13-18
+6 = 19-25
+7 = 26-33
+8 = 34-42
+9 = 43-52
+10 = 53-63
+11 = 64-75
+12 = 76-88
+13 = 89-104

For assistants of skill 2 lower, drop down one count. So 2-3 such assistants give +1, and so on.

Even unskilled assistants can be useful, taking care of the daily routine, for example. If we use “+3 skill” to signify “expert”, then laymen (by definition, those with +0 in the skill) have three ranks less, so 8-12 such assistants are still worth +1.

One expert, leading a team of half a dozen skilled technicians and another half-dozen trainees, and supported by a dozen unskilled people doing mundane tasks, is a reasonable small engineering firm in this sort of industry.

+3 from the expert, +3 from his stats, +2 from extra time, +3 from skilled assistants, +1 from the trainees, and +1 from the support staff, gives 14/- on 3d6+3 – a 62.5% chance of success. If the normal design process takes 1 month, that means that a first attempt will be ready in 3 months, and a second (if necessary) three months after that, increasing the chance of success in design to almost 86%. A third attempt is close to 95% certainty of success; a fourth gets that up to about 98%. A year spent in design and another in manufacture gives you that cutting-edge computer chip almost every time. Most experts would be secure enough in their ability to deliver taking a 2-year contract of this sort.

And all of those calculations assume that nothing is learned from the failures, that’s its all trial-and-error until you get it right; most design/engineering firms wouldn’t work that way. As a GM, investing a month in analyzing each failure would reasonably be worth another +1. So you could have four attempts totaling a 98% chance of success, or three of them – the first at 14/-, the second at 15/-, and the third at 16/-. Those are 37.5% chance of failure, 25.93% chance of failure, and 16.2% chance of failure, respectively – 98.4% chance of success, all told. And, if a fourth attempt was still needed, that would be at 9.26% chance of failure – a 99.9985% chance of success, delivering the design 3 months behind schedule, time that you might well be able to make up on the manufacturing side.

All of which sounds like it works to me.

To be continued…

So, the core table has now been designed, but I’m out of time for compiling it, and for looking at the other unanswered questions, like how combat will work. That means there will need to be on more in these posts, probably in a few weeks’ time.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of having a singular arch-enemy in a campaign. If anything happens to that enemy, it can leave the GM casting around for a direction. What’s more, having one central villain who is responsible for all that ails the world (and his flunkies, of course) is inherently a harder ‘sell’ in terms of credibility, especially if that villain is to be a string-puller behind the scenes – which always makes more sense for that kind of character.

It’s very easy to take the plans of one master villain and diversify the activities attributable to him or her amongst two or more “lesser” masterminds, with no diminution of the impact of the plans or the villain.

If you follow my advice on running a mastermind – which remains one of the most popular articles here at Campaign Mastery – you will find that one of the key pieces of advice is to perpetually ask questions along the lines of “what is the best thing that the villain could have set up to take advantage of (whatever the current situation is)”, then to assume that the villain has in fact done exactly that.

That advice, compounded with a point made a week or two ago – that when a story is about villain development, effects should precede causes in the awareness of the PCs – actually gives you all the tools that you need in order to have your masterminds proliferate.

One becomes two

The technique is simple; determine what the best possible change of circumstance is (in the villain’s favor) at some critical point in the adventure that is about to take place or is currently underway, then have a second mastermind manipulate events to create that circumstance.

This effectively splits what was one mastermind into two – one who is relatively overt and obvious, and one lurking behind the scenes and using the first as a stalking horse.

The Underlying Logic

The second, absolutely critical, step is to determine why. How does it advantage the second mastermind for the villain to benefit? Fortunately, creating villains in this way gives the GM a huge advantage: as of right now, the mastermind has no assigned motivation or objective.

That means that you can work backwards from their actions to assign the traits and characteristics to justify those actions, which is a lot easier than giving an objective and then scanning everything that happens looking for a way for them to benefit. That can be tricky when you have a completely open slate in terms of motivation and objective. The sheer variety of choice can lead to a sort of creeping paralysis and paroxysms of second-guessing. This technique totally bypasses that problem.

And it’s not a problem that you carry into future “appearances” of the mastermind, because the decisions of motivation and primary objective have now been made, reducing the vast field of opportunities to a very straightforward strategic decision.

Another weapon that you have is the relative simplicity of the questions being posed. The mastermind is doing something to advantage the “overt” villain but it’s not out of the goodness of his flabby black heart – it’s because he will benefit in some fashion even more significantly than the “overt” villain will do.

Benefits are relatively simple to characterize. They are either:

1. Direct;
2. Indirect, resulting from something the overt villain is or will do;
3. Indirect, resulting from something the PCs will do in response to the actions of the overt villain; or
4. Indirect, resulting from something that a third party will do in response to the actions of either the overt villain or the PCs.

Furthermore, benefits are either:

1. Gaining access to a resource that was previously unavailable;
2. Gaining information that could not be acquired in any other way;
3. Gaining a change in circumstances that will provide future opportunities for gain that were not previously available;
4. Gaining an alliance that would not be possible otherwise; or
5. Denying one of the above to someone who is functionally in opposition.

The term “resources” is applied very broadly in the above statement, ranging from something material to something quite intangible – it can be anything from a political advantage to an elevation in social position.

There are a lot of possible permutations, but they are relatively quick and easy to assess, and one particular combination usually leaps off the page according to the circumstances in the campaign at the time.

The Modus Operandi Restriction

Of course, there’s always a caveat, a sting in the tail, whenever things are so straightforward. In this case, it’s the fundamental similarity of the modus operandi of the masterminds that result.

That problem brings us to an utterly essential third step: redefining the problem, or in this case, the modus operandi into something that is absolutely unique in the campaign to the mastermind (and preferable unique to all your campaigns).

In order to distinguish this character from the similar ones that will result from the repeated application of these principles, you need a modus operandi that is succinct, distinctive, and that restricts the mastermind from doing anything similar except under extremely restricted circumstances – that just happened to occur during the first occurrence.

What’s more, that modus operandi has to be rooted in the background and characterization of the mastermind, to the point of being the equivalent of a fingerprint – sometimes to the point where that modus operandi can (eventually, when it is sufficiently well-known to the PCs) identify the mastermind’s true identity.

For example, one villain in the Zenith-3 campaign specializes in identifying the weakest link in a process, the point where minimal exertion and exposure will achieve his objective. Through a stationery tracking-and-reordering system, he gained access to the sealed computer systems of the courts, then used that influence to manipulate trial outcomes – for a fee – and always within the bounds of what might have happened by chance. This practice was 15 years old before a piece of truly rotten luck led to his exposure.

This is a villain who is quite capable of meddling to benefit someone else if they benefit even more significantly in the process. But most of the time,, he wouldn’t – he is restricted completely by that modus operandi. His “fingerprint” is not that he manipulates situations from behind the scenes, it’s that he does so in a way that preserves both his anonymity and even the very secret of his existence as his first priority.

This is critical because it defines the restrictions under which the mastermind will operate henceforth. It defines – to the GM – his signature, a signature that the PCs will eventually discover.

Two becomes three

The first mastermind should get away with making life hard for the PCs long enough for them to become suspicious that there is someone working against them from the shadows, and to start speculating on who it might be.

It’s quite likely that they will come to the conclusion that the ‘overt villain’ is a subordinate of the mastermind, especially if you’ve done nothing to obstruct that conclusion. Your game has just acquired a fourth layer of plot:

• The superficial layer contains the day-to-day events that the PCs experience;
• The immediate layer contains self-contained adventures that are unrelated to the larger plotline.
• The Overt Villain layer contains the ongoing conflict between the PCs and the Overt Villain.
• The Subterfuge layer contains the shadow-war between the PCs and the mastermind.

Now, that’s quite a tasty recipe, but a fully rounded dish requires more. This is a little too pat, a touch unrealistic. And there is usually a little nagging inhibition against the GM really going to town and doing his worst, because without PCs, he doesn’t have a campaign.

There is a simple solution. Once the existence of the mastermind has been detected and progressed beyond a vague suspicion in the minds of the players, once he or she has become established in the manner described in the opening paragraph of this section, it’s time to complicate the situation.

One mastermind gaining an advantage in this way almost certainly means that he will be interfering in the plans of some other furtive manipulator. On the principle that the enemy of my enemy should be my pawn, the PCs should become enmeshed in the crossfire.

(For a fun variation, don’t reveal this second string-puller as an enemy right away, make that a plot twist for much later in the campaign – have them appear to be someone who is overtly on the PC’s side, a bona-fide ally).

Using this figure as a safety blanket and occasional escape clause for the PCs takes away any pressure to hold back, and lets the other villains revel in their villainy.

Of course, this third mastermind adds still another layer of plot and needs to have his or her own modus operandi that is just as binding, just as identifiable, and just as solidly founded on and justified by his background experiences and personality.

The Lieutenant Distinction

There are still a few i’s to dot and t’s to cross. It’s important to distinguish between things that the masterminds will not do and things that the masterminds are unable to do. Those distinctions are defining in terms of the relationship and attributes that the masterminds will seek in their lieutenants.

A smart mastermind will seek
out a Lieutenant who compliments there own abilities and who can be trusted not to cross any “lines” that the mastermind lays down. (That doesn’t mean that the Lieutenant has to agree with his boss, and won’t get frustrated with those restrictions, and certainly doesn’t mean that the lieutenant won’t cut the occasional corner if he feels it necessary.

It might seem that this relationship isn’t something that the GM needs to pay a lot of attention to, leaving it to evolve naturally. I disagree with any such analysis. First, the relationship will color every instruction that the mastermind gives the Lieutenant, and second, the restrictions placed upon the Lieutenant, and the relationship he has with his superior, will – over time – shine an additional light on the mastermind’s signature.

And that makes this critically important. The Lieutenant is a window onto his boss. There may be other relationships that the GM needs to think about, but few are this important. (A related and equally-vital set of questions: Does the Lieutenant know who the mastermind really is? Do they ever meet, and if so, where and under what circumstances? How does he receive his instructions, and how does he authenticate them? How does he report back to the mastermind?)

The Modus Operandi Integral

It can pay dividends to think of the ‘mastermind-plus-Lieutenant(s)’ combination as a unit. Is the whole greater than the sum of its’ parts? Because it not only should be, that is a great way of enhancing the adventure experience.

To put it bluntly, every combination where that wasn’t the case always seems to fall a little flat in comparison to those in which there is a dynamic that yields this sort of coalition.

It also means that losing that Lieutenant will seriously cramp the mastermind’s plans, which can be a useful plot card to have up your sleeve!

The Flunky Factor

Another point that I want to pay specific attention to is the difference between a Lieutenant and a Flunky. A good mastermind will have two or more of both.

A flunky can be just muscle, or it can be an extension of the mastermind. Flunkies should also never be completely interchangeable parts; there should be a difference between the flunkies favored by the mastermind and those who back up the Lieutenant – not to mention differences between this mastermind and that.

The Organizational Structure

I find it useful, from time to time, to look at these coalitions as a single organization. The mastermind is the CEO and thinker; the Lieutenants are the department heads; and the flunkies are the senior staff.

(As an aside, it can also be useful from time to time to characterize an organization as an individual. Internal culture becomes uncertainty and internal conflict within the mind of that individual, and you can often discern paths ‘forward’ for the organization while looking at how the ‘corporate individual’ would resolve his doubts and uncertainties).

Getting back to the point, identifying a ‘corporate culture’ helps characterize those who work for the mastermind, It can also help the GM understand how the presence of the mastermind influences the rest of society, and what will happen when the mastermind is gone. It might not be the prescription of universal peace that the PCs expect it to be!

And that’s how one Uber-villain becomes three

There are a whole host of benefits from this approach, as readers can see. Richness of plot and characterization, internal consistency, enhanced believability, It may not be the solution to every problem, but it’s definitely deserving of a place in the GM’s toolkit.

This is a somewhat unusual article for Campaign Mastery in that it is pitched as much, or even more strongly, at players than at GMs…

While planning the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign yesterday with my co-GM, I made an observation regarding the changing style of roleplaying.

Both my co-GM, Blair, and I, are old-school. We speak in character when roleplaying except when describing an action the character is making or attempting – and even then, we’re just as likely to say “I” instead of referring to the character in the third person.

When our characters have a conversation, we have a conversation.

Many newer players don’t seem to handle their roleplaying in the same way, or at least. not as often. Quite often, instead of speaking in character, they will describe what they want their character to say using the third person. And instead of using a character’s skills as a guide to how “clumsily” they should make their efforts, they rely on a roll against that skill to determine success or failure.

My observation was that we were having to accommodate this “modern” approach more and more often when writing adventures.

Is this a sign of player laziness? Absolutely not. One of the players in whom we have most noticed a tenancy in this direction (no names) works harder than just about anyone else at being a player.

No, we attribute the change to a desire to be sure the character gets the full measure of value from their investment in skills, and a reliance on the rules to interpret the meaning of a skill level of X rather than the player doing the interpretation based on guidelines.

I don’t think the change is an improvement. It makes some things easier – in particular, it takes the competence difference between player and character out of the equation almost entirely – but the price seems too high, because what is being sacrificed is immersion. Immersion of player into character. immersion of character into story, and even immersion of story into world.

Resorting to third-person roleplaying should be reserved only for the most difficult of conversational tasks. But, in order for that to become the case, players who have never been shown how will have to be educated in the techniques and processes of first-person roleplaying.

Modern games provide all the tools necessary. All it takes is understanding the systems sufficiently well to interpret a given skill level into playable expressions of capability. You, as the GM, will need to be the source of that education – a tough assignment if you haven’t been educated in the techniques of skill interpretation. And that’s the purpose of this article.

In order to make the article as universally-accessible as possible, I’m going to use Pathfinder as my example game system. But the same basic techniques, properly adjusted, work for any game system, and to demonstrate that, I’ll use the hero system as my secondary example. Why? Because Pathfinder is based around a linear die roll (a d20) while the Hero System is non-linear (based around 3d6). Between them, they cover the fundamentals of most game mechanics.

Finally, to ensure common ground, I need some skill that’s functionally similar in both game systems. Pathfinder has a skill, Diplomacy, which can be used to persuade others. The Hero System has a skill, Persuasion, which is specific to that function. And these are exactly the sort of in-game function that this article is talking about, making these perfect for the purpose. So, with everything organized, let’s get started.

The Pathfinder Example

Skills in Pathfinder work by adding the bonus from a stat to the number of ranks in the skill. The character then rolls a d20 and adds the result to this total, needing to roll a target number or better – the DC – in order to succeed. In addition, the GM may add bonuses or penalties to adjust the DC for specific circumstances.

So let’s assume a stat bonus of +2 and a skill level of 4 ranks, which is a total of +6.

The average roll of a d20 is 10.5 – call it 10. the minimum is 1, and the maximum is 20.

So the lowest result total is 7, the average is 16, and the maximum is 26.

In Pathfinder, the DC is initially set according to the attitude of the target:

• Hostile = 25 + target’s CHA modifier
• Unfriendly = 20 + target’s CHA modifier
• Indifferent = 15 + target’s CHA modifier
• Friendly = 10 + target’s CHA modifier
• Helpful = 5 + target’s CHA modifier

You need to succeed in a Diplomacy check to shift the attitude of the target on a temporary basis. Succeed and you get a one-step improvement; for every 5 more than the DC you get, the attitude can be shifted one more step, but there. is usually a limit of two steps of improvement that the GM can waive.

At the moment, you don’t know what the target’s charisma modifier is. It could reasonably be anything from -2 to +5 or even more. So let’s start with a CHA modifier of zero and see where those adjustments take us a little later.

The formula is: Roll + 6 >eq; DC. We can subtract 6 from both sides to get Roll >eq; DC – 6.

That lets me analyze the significance of the character’s skill in Diplomacy, which is the object of the exercise.

• Hostile = 19 + target’s CHA modifier, and the chance of getting 19 or better on a d20 is 2×5=10%. If the target has below-average charisma, that chance goes up by 5% for each -1 CHAR modifier, to a realistic chance of 20%. However, it doesn’t take a very high CHA modifier to make the roll impossible to achieve successfully. A CHA modifier of +2 and there is no hope of success – unless the GM can be persuaded to incorporate a bonus for circumstances that favor the character – warning of some imminent threat to the NPC, for example, or otherwise engaging his self-interest. Even then, the odds of success are going to be slim if you target anyone who deals in popularity – leaders, religious figures, entertainers, even a well-spoken educator might be out of the question.
• Unfriendly = 14 + target’s CHA modifier. The chance of rolling 14 or better is 35%. If the target has high charisma, that could drop by as much as 25% (from a +5 CHA modifier) to 10%. If the target has low charisma, the chance improves to almost 50%. Further adjustments are possible if there are circumstantial modifiers in the character’s favor, but declines equally quickly if circumstances oppose. So this is right on the cusp of success.
  • If the target has high charisma, the chances get pretty slim, so I would focus on achieving as many positive circumstantial modifiers as I could think of – gifts, flattery, the self-interest of the target – while doing as much as possible to undermine the relevance of anything that might give a negative modifier.
  • If the target has moderately high charisma, the same approach could make success almost a 50/50 proposition – enough that I would be confident of at least being heard.
  • If the target has average or less charisma, the odds are already fairly good. Rather than employing the “butter him up” approach, I would make a virtue of not doing so, focusing on his self-interest and being direct and matter-of-fact, with a prefatory comment about not wasting his time on hollow flattery. My focus would be on appearing honest and trustworthy. This approach is more effective because empty flattery turns people off when it’s recognized.
• Indifferent = 9 + target’s CHA modifier. The odds of rolling 9 or better are already over 50%. More importantly, there is a 35% chance – roughly one-in-three – of success even if the target has a substantial CHA modifier (+5). Success still can’t be taken for granted, but it is certainly within reach. Employing the gifts-and-flattery approach, and engaging the target’s self-interests, to hopefully get a +5 modifier effectively nullifies the CHA modifier, letting what you have to say stand or fail on its own merits. But unless I was dealing with a prominent leader or other high-charisma figure, I would focus on the direct approach described above.
• Friendly = 4 + target’s CHA modifier. The odds of success even with a high-CHA target are 50-50 or better even without flattery and circumstantial modifiers. If there was a pressing self-interest for the target or some mutual interest that we have in common, I would focus on those, otherwise politeness and making satisfying the request as painless as possible would be my focus.
• Helpful = target’s CHA modifier – 1. Any reasonable request is likely to be successful, so my focus shifts completely to establishing a longer-term relationship of trust and mutual advantage with the target.

The more leaning towards ‘helpful’ the target’s attitude is, the more I shift my approach from one in which the target may have to be ‘bribed’ with a service or the satisfaction of a very clear self-interest to one in which I offer a service that I hope to be of value to them, not so much to get approval of whatever request I have at the time, but to ensure that the attitude is protected and encouraged as much as possible.

A shortcut

Of course, in play, you don’t have time to perform this sort of intensive analysis. Fortunately, there’s a shortcut, made possible by thinking of everything in terms of shifts to the target needed for success. If you have a skill of +6 ranks (including stat bonus), that is how much operating room you have to overcome any reluctance due to attitude to get you back to a 50-50 chance. If that’s not enough, you need to work on improving the perceived circumstances to counterbalance the shortfall. All you need do is pay attention to who you’re “talking” to and it becomes
easy to assess (roughly) their initial attitude and charisma bonus. It only takes a second or so to select how much flattery and goodwill you need to muster to overcome a negative attitude, and to select an approach accordingly. Since there are practical limits to what you can achieve in that respect, any shortfall gets “paid for” in diminished chance of success.

In other words, I set a personal target for what modifier I need to get from the GM with my approach to the target and then roleplay accordingly. The goal is to make a die roll irrelevant, or more precisely, to enable the GM to interpret your actions and dialogue as a result rolled on the die and hence determine the outcome. It becomes a sign of failed or inadequate roleplaying for the GM to say, “make a Diplomacy check”.

The Realism Side-Benefit

It’s always possible to misjudge your target. Sometimes, you put a lot of effort into trying to force open a door, only to find that it was already ajar; sometimes there’s a cause for reluctance that you either didn’t know about or didn’t factor in, and what seems like a slam-dunk turns out to be dead in the water before you even opened your mouth. The variety of unexpected outcomes that emerge naturally make the game world seem more realistic, populated with real people.

That’s a potent benefit, but it’s not the primary reason for this approach – the reason is immersion, because that makes every aspect of the game more fun and less an intellectual exercise.

The Non-linear roll

The Hero system works by building a stat’s contribution directly into a roll required. GM modifiers are applied to the die roll, and not to the target. The formula is 9 +(stat / 5). To that, the character can add additional “skill levels” by improving their basic skill.

Unlike Pathfinder / D&D, the target’s characteristics don’t matter; instead, the predisposition and stats are just another factor that the GM takes into account when choosing modifiers.

For our D&D example, we gave the character a stat bonus of +2. That corresponds to a stat of about 15. While the stats in the hero system are different at higher values, below about 20 they are fairly directly comparable. The equivalent of that 15 would probably be a Hero Games stat of 13 or 14. Which one doesn’t matter – dividing by five still gives 2-point-something, which rounds in the character’s favor to 3. So the equivalent of stat bonus alone gives a base roll of 9+3=12.

On top of that, we gave the character 4 ranks in the skill, the equivalent of +20% chance. That’s harder to assess in terms of picking an equivalent, but a rough rule of thumb that works at lower values – up to, say, 8 ranks – is to halve the number of ranks to get the equivalent number of ‘extra levels’ in a skill that the character has, rounding up if necessary. So 4 ranks is roughly the equivalent of +2, giving the equivalent character a total skill of 14 or less.

Because 3d6 is a non-linear roll, the game system makes it easier to interpret a skill level in relation to a result.

Above is a graph of the chances of getting x or less on 3d6, which I sourced back in April from Anydice for the thematically-related article, Narratives Of Skill: How To ‘Improv’ Outcome Descriptions In Advance.

If you pick some key target numbers – 10% chance of success, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90%, – and analyze the graph, you get some very interesting results, as you can see from the modified graph below:

As you can see, the 10% chance happens with an adjusted result of 6 or less, the 25% at 8/-, the 50% at 10/-, the 75% at 12/-, and the 90% at 14/-! That’s such a simple progression that it’s easy to remember.

It also puts that 14/- into perspective: if there are no modifiers, or if the balance of modifiers is at least neutral or even in favor of the character, he has a 90% chance of success.

Every +2 to the die roll from modifiers drops his chances of success another bracket. So +2 to the die roll makes success 75% likely, +4 makes it 50%, +6 makes it 25%, and +8 drops the chances to a mere 10%.

It’s not going too far to equate each of those +2’s to a shift up the ‘initial attitude’ table – from Helpful to Friendly to Indifferent to Unfriendly to Hostile.

It follows that if you can estimate how the GM will interpret the circumstances, you can make the corresponding interpretation and choose your approach accordingly, exactly as described earlier. What you are actually doing, in Hero Games’ game mechanics, is trying to load in additional modifiers in your favor to neutralize or counter these modifiers.

Certainly, when I’m GMing the Adventurer’s Club, and I want to adjudicate something along these lines, I would use the margin of success over requirements to assess the shift in attitude on a +2-to-a-step basis.

How First-Person Roleplaying Fits In

The key here is to “sell” the notion of a circumstantial modifier in your favor to the GM. Simply announcing what you are doing, or trying to do, third-person style, lacks the impact of actually “doing” it through dialogue. As a player, you are far more likely to succeed in getting the bonus you are seeking if you can immerse the GM in what you are doing.

Getting the GM on-side in this way is far more likely to enable you to get the NPC you are speaking to on-side, because you are making the game more fun for the GM in the process. So many GM decisions are subjective and nuanced, getting the vision of the world slanted in your favor is always worthwhile!

And everyone has more fun at the game table! Now, I ask you – isn’t that worth a little fuzziness when it comes to exact numbers?