Public Domain Image CC0 provided by pixabay.com / PIRO4D

These two poker terms should have special relevance to RPGs. I’ll explain why in a moment – first, let’s make sure that everyone is on the same page as to meaning.

Bluffing

Bluffs are a rather broad subject. The traditional bluff in poker and other types of gambling is an attempt to make a weak hand look stronger than it really is, usually through a combination of a false tell and a betting strategy that would be appropriate if the hand was indeed stronger than it is, and the player is trying to conceal that fact.

But use of the term has broadened in recent years, to include any attempt at perpetrating a falsehood in a card game – from making strong hands look weak (to encourage rival players to bet more than they should, given the relative strengths of their hands) to mind games in general at the gaming table, which include the traditional usage of the term.

Tells

“A tell in poker is a change in a player’s behavior or demeanor that is claimed by some to give clues to that player’s assessment of their hand. A player gains an advantage if they observe and understand the meaning of another player’s tell, particularly if the tell is unconscious and reliable. Sometimes a player may fake a tell, hoping to induce their opponents to make poor judgments in response to the false tell. More often, people try to avoid giving out a tell, by maintaining a poker face regardless of how strong or weak their hand is.”
– text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker).

The term literally means “inadvertently telling the truth” through behavior, betting strategy, body language, expression, or whatever.

There is even a branch of study within the gambling world that looks at tells for online poker games, such as those found at an online or a mobile casino, which includes things like inconsistent speed of bet placement, size of bets, responses to batting counter-strategies, and so on. Testing has shown that these can improve the chances of winning a game by as much as 8-10%.

More traditional tells – and these will be relevant, shortly – include:
 

• Acting uninterested in a hand while still in it – Feigning disinterest while continuing active involvement in a hand is usually a sign of a strong hand.
• Shaking hands – This is often an involuntary response to a surge of adrenalin which indicates that the player has something to be excited about.
• Rapid Breathing – same cause, different physiological response. If the change in breathing pattern is sudden and mid-hand, it may also be a sign of panic, indicating that a hand is much weaker than the player is suggesting, and that they may be trying to bluff.
• Overacting – Making a big production of sighs and shrugs while offering weak statements such as “I guess I’ll call” are really bad attempts at feigning disinterest (see above), but some players simply become louder and more exuberant when attempting to “sell” a bluff. They are “trying hard” and unable to hide that fact.
• Looking away from the table immediately after placing a bet or checking one’s hand – often, the very fact that you are trying not to engage interpersonally signals very loudly that you are trying to hide something.
• Playing with one’s cards – rearranging them or repeatedly re-checking them – tends to be a signal that your hand is much weaker than you have otherwise indicated.
• There are those who would add Trash-talking and boasting to the list.
• Of course, the cliche tells come to us from Hollywood – trying to scope out the other players from the corners of your eye, raising eyebrows the first time you look at your cards, playing nervously with your chips, whistling, or humming.

(partially based on a list at www.Thoughtco.com).

I want to call out a couple of specific items that aren’t on the list above:

The double-bluff

Of course, sometimes players will fake a tell while pretending to bluff in an attempt to double-bluff the opposition. Most professionals consider this too prone to error to attempt it, and an amateur move. Most amateurs will do it anyway.

The deliberate poker face

Some players work a lot harder at assuming an expressionless “poker face” when they have a good hand, while being relaxed and sociable the rest of the time.

Better tactics

Ideally, as a player, you want to behave in exactly the same way regardless of the strength of your hand. Make the same small talk, express the same measure of interest in what others are doing, and so on. Almost as effective is picturing some other hand in your mind’s eye and playing, betting, and so on, as though that imaginary hand were really what you have.

The Tell and The Bluff

Clearly, a tell is the natural enemy of the bluff, undercutting attempts to provide false information with a direct line to the truth.

The GM’s Bluff

GMs have to bluff all the time in RPGs. We’re playing characters who know things they may be trying to hide – and we may or may not want the players to pick up on that. WE know things that we’re trying to hide so as not to influence the player’s choice of action. Or perhaps the players have discovered a major flaw in our plans and we don’t want them to know it.

A previous article that I wrote touches on the subject, and even offers some techniques. The Hierarchy Of Deceit: How and when to lie to your players. But that was more concerned with plot developments and how to hide the GM’s superior knowledge in that respect of the game.

But a GM needs to bluff on a lot more occasions than are discussed in that article. That’s not particularly difficult – what’s harder is doing it well, and what’s even harder is not giving the game away with a tell.

GM ‘Tells’

Most of the poker ‘tells’ have RPG/GM equivalents (told you I’d get back to that list). Let’s walk through the entries.

• Acting uninterested in what the players are doing – pretending to be disinterested only makes the players suspicious because the players know better – and would expect more from a good GM. So if you’re a good GM this won’t work, and if you’re not, you couldn’t pull it off anyway.
• Shaking hands – The stress of running a game is high, but not that high. It’s the stakes involved that cause adrenalin rushes when gambling. So this is an obvious fake, one that few GMs would even think of trying. But there is an equivalent that most GM’s will recognize: we get a little clumsier with our die rolls at critical moments or when we’re concentrating hard because what’s happening is important. Dropping dice off the table is an occupational hazard, and a lot of GMs use a tray or some equivalent to prevent it. But I would bet that few ever recognized the association – we roll so many dice that we consider it inevitable that some will go overboard, and so think nothing more of it when it happens.
• Rapid Breathing – this is one poker tell for which there is no obvious equivalent. But I have experienced a couple of GMs who spoke more quickly when important points came up in an adventure, which is a reasonable if inobvious point of equivalence.
• Overacting – While the outward behavior may be different, the same cause – “trying hard” and unable to hide the fact – still leads to the same umbrella behavior. But it’s not overacting a pose as ourselves, it’s over-enthusiasm in descriptions and overacting as NPCs.
• Looking away from the table immediately after placing a bet or checking one’s hand – there are two GM equivalents of this one. The first is pretending to be too busy with your adventure notes or with the rulebook to pay close attention immediately after delivering your misleading statement. The second is deliberately trying to distract yourself by demanding that a player make some sort of die roll for reasons that may be valid but flimsy in justification. In both cases, as with the poker ‘tell’, the very fact that you are trying not to engage interpersonally signals that you are trying to hide something, though neither signal is as clear or obvious as the poker equivalent. It’s still a way of focusing on something other than interpersonal interaction with the players, though.
• Playing with one’s cards – It’s not common, but I have seen GMs and players who could not stop playing around with their dice – sorting them by color, by size, in groups of 3, or 5, or 10, or whatever. Is that the equivalent? I suspect so, but I’m not certain.
• There are no equivalents that I can think of to the remaining examples of alleged ‘tells’, which is why I was more hesitant about listing them.

In the article I linked to earlier, I listed a number of techniques for deceiving the players when it was necessary or desirable. None of them are worth very much if you are sabotaging your own efforts with a tell.

Avoiding Tells

Finding good advice on how to avoid poker tells is surprisingly hard. Finding such advice that can translate into an RPG setting is very much harder.

For example, some of the best advice for in-person poker players is to be consistent and follow the same routine whether you have a good hand or bad. That’s something that GMs can work with.

Another piece of advice that translates is to relax your face into a neutral expression, or better yet (when playing an NPC), into an imitation of the emotion that you want that NPC to be expressing (it really does help your “acting” performance).

Take at least one, and preferably two, breaths before speaking. In poker, the actual recommendation is to take deep breaths, but that isn’t appropriate for a game that’s based on communications. Nor is advice about not speaking to others at the gaming table.

At the poker table, the advice is to sit up straight and move steadily and purposefully, so as to avoid body language tells. That won’t work for an RPG DM, either. In fact, given the nature of the role, advice would have to be predicated on doing the exact opposite in many respects – being casual and relaxed.

The best solution that I have found is to decide in advance what the story is that you are trying to ‘sell’ as the truth, then concentrate on that as completely as possible. This works because both stories are essentially works of fiction of equal veracity so far as the players are concerned. Neither is a “true” story – not even in-game, until we decide to make it so.

Musing

That’s the ultimate difference between an RPG and a game of real-life poker, with real stakes. What we do is an entertainment, done for mutual fun. They play for sheep stations. If you’re feeling inclined to stretch your imagination, contemplate the way our game would change if the GM had to pay XP to players in real currency from our own pockets, with the players fronting the money to participate. I can’t think of a faster way to kill the fun, substituting a sense of competition. And there would always be a suspicion that the ‘house’ – the GM – was shortchanging the players to their own profit. Trust would quickly vanish, replaced by competition – a completely different form of excitement.

And that yields a (speculative) key insight into the competitive gaming that takes place at conventions, where there are prizes on offer. I’ve always been aware that there is a subtle but profound difference between convention gaming and the more common at-home gaming, but I was never able to quite put my finger on it. Now, though, the truth seems to be laid bare. And it posits the question: are the best convention games the ones in which the story is so compelling that the competitive aspects are forgotten by the participants? I tend to think so, but I’ve never run a convention game. Still, it sounds right to me. Can anyone who has done both confirm or comment?

‘Puzzle World’ from freeimages.com / B S K
has only marginal relevance to this article, it’s a leftover alternative illustration from Designing A Game System (for the Zener Gate campaign).

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

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

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

In this part of the series, I offer six basic ways of handling minor continuity problems. Between them, they should resolve up to one half the plot holes that GMs will encounter..

Minor Repair Technique #1: Ignore the problem

If plot holes can result from failures of memory, fixing them can be compared with plugging holes in a hull made from steel mesh – the ship is still going to sink. Or, to put it more appropriately, why bother making the campaign history pristinely perfect when it won’t be remembered correctly, anyway.

Minor Repair Technique #2: Acknowledge and ignore

At least, that’s the argument that would be employed to justify this approach, and – like all good arguments – it contains more than a little grain of truth. But it overlooks three very important considerations.

First, the fact that human memory has always been fallible, and so we have developed a whole range of devices and techniques for correcting those fallible memories – with the written word still at the top of that list. And second, the fact that future events will be planned around that past, using it as foundation.

That’s actually a more useful metaphor that it seems at first glance. The justification for repairing any plot hole should always be grounded in the damage to the campaign that is being experienced right now, or that will be experienced in the future. If the plot hole is underneath a hollow space in the plot infrastructure that is yet to be built, put some warning tape around it and forget it; but if a load-bearing structural member happens to get it’s support from that particular point, it needs repairs.

The third point is that plans change. While the plan might not be to pin the entire campaign on a plot development that is undermined by the plot hole, you also need to consider the likelihood that such a plot development might become necessary or desirable in the future.

If the hole is in the backstory of a character who is never intended or expected to reappear in the campaign, it’s probably safe to gloss over it and move on. The more likely it is that this is the case, even if it’s not completely certain, the less urgent repairs seem. So this may be a viable short-term or medium-term solution to the problem, even if it might not stay that way forever.

What’s more, if the repaired plot hole is never revisited in the future, any effort expended in repairing it is completely wasted. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have the time to waste.

At the same time, though, the domino effect means that repairing the hole – depending on the technique chosen – can take an unpredictable amount of time to complete. You may not be able to afford to wait until you need the solution.

Which brings me to the second solution, which is not to ignore the problem, simply to ignore the need to solve it – until it becomes necessary not to, bearing in mind the limitations that come with the notion.

It’s my preference, as a safety net, not to implement this solution until I have identified the nature of the ultimate solution that will be required. That’s “relatively” simple after a proper assessment of the scale and impact of the problem. But, since memory is fallible (as already noted), I also prefer to make some quick notes as to the “shape” of that ultimate solution – what is clear and obvious now might not be so clear when the time comes..

Minor Repair Technique #3: Depth Of Character

People are full of contradictions. One of my favorite solutions to the problem of a character’s past actions being inconsistent with the conceptualization of the character is to make the character more complex and hence more human. A great many discrepancies in action and choice can be explained by giving the character who made the “mistake” a solid motivation for the choice they made, even though it didn’t make sense in light of what had been revealed about the character prior to that event.

Never be afraid to make your characters more interesting!

Minor Repair Technique #4: NPCs are humanoid, too

It’s a very rare human being who doesn’t make the occasional mistake. Some of these are so egregious that we are left saying “I don’t know what I was thinking!” afterward.

And yet, it’s quite common to hold NPCs to a different standard, especially if they are mastermind types. Why?

Or, to put it another way, why not state that whenever possible, a mistake by the GM is actually a case of the NPC making a human mistake?

It isn’t always possible. Logically, when a plan falls apart because of a mistake, that’s the point at which the character should realize what has happened, and should react accordingly. If no such reaction was evidenced, it might be because the character has successfully hidden his inner self-fury – but that needs to be consistent with the rest of the displayed personality, and strains credibility if it happens too often.

Still, this solution is so useful that I am very careful when conceptualizing non-human characters and races to examine the ways in which I can justify some analogue of human fallibility. I don’t care if I’m talking about artificial organisms, aliens, or ancient dragons with Intelligence and Wisdom in the 30s.

Using this technique does require that bit of advance prep by the GM. Some mistakes can’t be characterized appropriately, and so as soon as a mistake is discovered, I need to be able to judge whether or not this repair technique is appropriate so that I can have the NPC react appropriately.

Of course, if a mistake is not discovered in-play and at-the-time, you have more flexibility.

Minor Repair Technique #5: Retroactive Explanation

I only use this technique when it’s effortless. There are times when the moment of identification of a plot hole also yields a spontaneous retroactive explanation. When that happens, I generally go with my instinct and look to implement that solution – assuming that it holds up.

There are two litmus tests that such explanations have to pass. The first is that the logic has to hold up – there is no point in patching a plot hole with another one! The second is that the domino effect has to be minimal – within practical limits, let us say.

It is sometimes possible to add additional content to the “patch” that constrains or limits the domino effect, and whenever the second of those litmus tests is failed, I actively look for some way of doing so. If I don’t find one, then I reluctantly rule out the “obvious” solution.

But usually, that’s either not a problem or it is a manageable one. There are then three ways of delivering the “patch”: as a drop-in; as part of a planned adventure; or as part of a specially-written mini-adventure created for this explicit purpose.

Assuming that the guidelines presented on earlier solutions are being followed, a patch only becomes necessary when a plot point intended to be significant in the campaign’s future – near or far – is directly affected. That justifies the use of a mini-adventure if necessary. It also makes it far more likely that the “patch” can be delivered as part of the adventure in which the plot hole becomes significant – if it is scheduled to occur soon enough.

That last point is a critical consideration. It is always better to deliver the explanation as soon as possible after the plot hole comes to light; with every passing hour of play, the status quo becomes more firmly embedded within the collective memories of the players. If it’s going to be a while before the patch becomes critically necessary, it makes a drop-in more attractive.

So, what is a drop-in, for the benefit of those who don’t recognize the term? It’s not unlike the information that I often package in a blue text-box at the top of an article here at Campaign Mastery, containing side-notes, glimpses behind the curtain, contextual explanations, mea culpas… well, you get the idea. So, a drop-in is literally an inserted package of text, usually only a paragraph or two, delivered out-of-continuity at the start of a day’s play.

Minor Repair Technique #6: The Wisdom Of Players

I’ve spoken of this last technique on a number of occasions, in a variety of contexts and problems. 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.

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.

I’m often so adept at this that the players often never realize that I have deliberately let them steer me off-script in order to solve a plot problem that had been overlooked until it was too late. The last time it happened, for example, was in the conclusion to the Mictlan-tecuhtli adventure (the link is to the Jan 2016 article in which I described the villain for others to use).

But it’s fair to say that I’m well-practiced in all these techniques. They won’t solve every plot hole problem – but they will deal with an awful lot of them, very successfully.

In the next part of this series: Structurally significant repair techniques!

Image courtesy freeimages.com / Meredith B

So you’ve come up with a great character for your game and want to gain maximum value for your creativity? No problem. TV has been doing that in one-hour dramas for decades.

There are two paths to follow: the Good Guy path, and the Bad Guy Path.

The ‘Good Guy Path’ is all about establishing a connection between the character and the PCs, cementing the character into a long-term role within the campaign. The ‘bad Guy Path’ establishes a character as an antagonist of significance, though not necessarily one that will stick around for a long time.

Good mileage can sometimes be extracted by inverting the roles. Using the ‘bad guy’ path to introduce a new allied NPC sells the character as someone not to be fully trusted by the PCs and turns the revelation that the character is in fact an ally, possibly a hidden one, into a major plot twist. That can be tricky to handle properly – oversell or undersell that revelation and you damage the credibility of the character or the plot twist, which also damages the credibility of the character. But get it right, and you cement the NPC as a key element in the campaign.

Things are a little easier when using the good guy path to slowly build up and then reveal a hidden enemy. The sense of outrage and betrayal that accompanies the plot twist is almost impossible to deny, making both undersell and oversell virtual impossibilities, Play it down and the players will make up the difference; over-hype the significance and the players will simply assume that you are matching your rhetoric to the way they feel (assuming that you’ve done the job right so that they do in fact feel that way).

General Advice

Before I dig into the specifics, there are couple of points of general advice that I think need emphasizing.

Don’t Go Too Fast

At the very least, each stage in the character stories needs to be in a separate scene. If the character is to be important enough – a recurring character in at least one full “season” of adventures – one per adventure is a better choice. You want time for each encounter with the character’s story to sink and build up a cumulative effect that serves as a foundation for the relationship between the PCs and NPCs.

Don’t Go Too Slow

At the same time, you can’t go too long in between touching on the character’s story, and – ideally – expanding on it or reinforcing it. Certainly, no more than a single unrelated adventure in between each stage of the Character Story. However, as the number of past stages in the character’s story increases, the more the character becomes established within the campaign, and the more flexibility you have to violate this rule-of-thumb.

You can always defer a stage in the character’s story by an adventure if you incorporate some passing mention or reminder of the character into that adventure.

For example, if the next part of the character’s story is theoretically supposed to coincide with a plotline in which time is frozen for the character (amongst perhaps many others), it’s unreasonable to grant and justify an exemption from the time-freeze to the NPC. You have enough on your hands finding a plausible justification for the PCs being unaffected. Under such circumstances, or simply when an adventure is so busy that there’s no time to sneak the next phase in as a subplot, it makes sense to defer the next appearance of the NPC’s story. So drop in a plot sequence in passing in which a PC notices a gift from the NPC and realizes that the NPC is frozen like everybody else, or something of the sort.

You can always find some excuse to mention an established NPC in passing in this way. The less established they are, the less flexibility you have.

If an NPC’s last appearance was a more total involvement in the adventure than a mere subplot, you can usually add 1 to the permitted interval if necessary.

Keep the personality firmly in mind

Whenever part of the NPC’s story appears, keep the character’s personality firmly in mind. Consistency is utterly essential, especially early on.

Don’t confuse the two faces

Everyone has two faces – the one that they present to the outside world, and the more exposed one that people can see once the person grows sufficiently comfortable around someone that they can relax. As soon as a stranger enters the scene, the public persona with it’s barriers and self-protections reasserts itself.

Even though it may not be on display, and may not have been fully revealed to a PC, always keep both “faces” in mind. When a character acts on instinct, without time to think, it’s the private “face” that dictates the nature of those actions; when a character has time to think things through and respond intellectually to a situation, the “public” face calls the shots.

Contemplate a signature

A lot of GM advice advocates some sort of signature that becomes a mnemonic to the players of the character being played by the GM. It could be a turn of phrase, a way of speaking, a prop of some kind that is held or worn.

A lot of GMs use signatures of this sort, especially for important characters. What I’ve found, however, is that too many signatures become a confusing mish-mash that actually impedes the purpose of the signature.

So, while I will always contemplate a signature when preparing to introduce a character, I will rarely implement one. This is a decision that has to be made before a character first appears and that has to be maintained with scrupulous consistency thereafter.

… But don’t be too cheesy

What’s worse, a poorly thought-out signature, or a GM overestimating his ability to deliver the signature in a credible way every time, can transform that signature into a caricature of what the GM is trying to achieve, undermining the importance of the character.

For that reason, don’t think once about a signature – if you decide to go ahead with one, think twice about it. Save it for the most important characters only, and then underplay it. GMs frequently overact, so aiming for subtlety usually makes the signature have just the right level of presence.

Three Interaction Modes

Before I get into discussing the Good Guy Path that I have identified, I need to briefly discuss the three modes of interaction that are relevant. This is another key concept that the reader needs to understand before those discussions make sense.

Professional Mode

In professional mode, the characters (PC and NPC) interact because of the profession of one or both of them. This tends to be the easiest interaction mode to plan/write.

Personal Mode

In personal mode interactions, the characters interact through their personal or social lives. This is slightly more challenging to plan/write, but still easily manageable by a competent GM.

Casual Mode

Casual mode interactions have the characters coming together by accident. Which works fine once, but thereafter requires the GM to sell the players on the plausibility of coincidence – something that I discussed at length in ‘The Conundrum Of Coincidence. This is really hard to do successfully; coincidences happen far more in real life than seems credible in any sort of story.

One additional technique that works well for a limited number of interactions is to base the interaction on a personality trait of the PC.

For example, in a season 1 episode of NCIS, Tony Denozzo has an interaction with a jogger based on his personality trait of being a ladies’ man and her being physically attractive. When he later encounters her again, he is instrumental in bringing about a second interaction, attempting to move from the Casual Mode into the Personal Mode by scoring a date with the girl.

As a rule of thumb, one interaction in the Casual Mode is easy. Two is more difficult but quite possible based on the techniques discussed in the article linked to and the additional technique offered above. Three is really difficult to do credibly, but can be extremely successful at selling the NPC as “part of the furniture” of the campaign if you can pull it off. Note that doing three in succession is much harder than doing three with some other interaction mode in between.

The interaction modes are important in defining the nature of the relationship between the PC or PCs and the NPC. But the most successful interactions blend two of the modes – characters may come together professionally, but share a personal interaction in the process, for example. This imparts a depth to the interaction that adds significantly to the role of the NPC.

This becomes a problem when the NPC has attributes such as being “all business”, but it isn’t impossible. It simply redefines the non-professional interaction as being one-sided with a rebuff from the NPC – and then offering a subtle hint that the NPC was not quite as unaffected as they made out at the time.

This effectively amounts to a subtle redefinition of the restrictive trait “all business” to “all business when on the job” – but while the distinction may be small, it makes all the difference.

Each stage of the path that I’m about to discuss utilizes at least one of the modes, but which one or ones is entirely up to the GM and the individual circumstances.

The Good Guy Path

The usual structure of a story is to reduce it to three or four simple sections or acts. The pathways of plot that I am discussing are broader, more detailed, and more sophisticated, and lines can be drawn grouping the sections into the broader structure in various places.

These
stages or plot milestones in the character’s story may be small scenes, subplots, or integral elements of adventures. If the stages occur in isolated scenes, then all the comments about timing should be read as applying to the number of scenes before the next development;

It’s also possible to condense two stages into a single milestone event, or even to occasionally omit one. In some cases, the sequence can be reversed, for example swapping the “vulnerability” and “assist” stages. And some stages may require multiple interactions. So there is a great deal of flexibility available to the GM.

Something else that the reader will notice when they examine the list of stages is the degree of repetition. This is a process, not a plot outline per se, and the difference has to be clearly understood.

In an nutshell, the process involves introducing the character, establishing the character, exposing more information about the character, rounding out the character, getting the PC or PCs to care about the character, entangling the PC or PCs in the character’s life, and then… well, where the story goes from there is up to the GM, really. The steps that I’ve outlined do nothing but maintain the status quo that the preceding steps establish in a progressive manner, giving the relationships the opportunity to evolve over time.

This is the result of analyzing the development paths of a number of long-term supporting cast members in a great many TV series and comic books – too many to list individually. Everything from Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider man (#31 – #121) to Owen Granger in NCIS Los Angeles, from Max Klinger in M*A*S*H to several of the companions in recent seasons of Doctor Who, have gone into compiling this structure. The challenge has been integrating all these disparate sources without generalizing too far.

Here is the list that I’ve come up with:

1. Introduce.
2. First Impression.
3. Second Impression.
4. Appearance.
5. Vulnerability.
6. Appearance.
7. Assist.
8. Repeat the 4-7 cycle until character completely established.
9. Establish pattern.
10. Violate pattern.
11. Appearance within pattern (repeat until ready for 12).
12. Revelation.
13. Progression.
14. Repeat 11/13 cycle with occasional 12 recurrence until ready for 15.
15. Conclusion.

You’ll notice that 4 and 6 are the same thing, while 9 and 11 are also essentially the same thing, and three stages are essentially repetitions of multiple earlier stages.

Let’s walk through them briefly.

1. Introduce.

Introduce the character. This may precede their actual appearance, as in this sequence, or it may follow the first impression.

2. First Impression.

Tell the players just enough about the character for them to form first impressions. Pay particular attention to PC character traits and opinions, and key as much of the description of the person and their words and actions off those traits and opinions to kick-start character interactions at an individual level.

3. Second Impression.


A second impression can result from a change in opinions in the course of the first encounter with the NPC or from a different context in the second encounter. It can reinforce the first impression, or expose a completely different aspect of the character without contradicting the first impression, or even confine the first impression to describing only a limited aspect of the character. Whichever you choose, it is important for the NPC to reference and remind the player of the first impression, rather than the GM doing it via voiceover. That propels the personal engagement between the characters, whereas the latter undermines it by making the relationship seem artificial.

4. Appearance.

Appearance has nothing to do with what the NPC looks like; it has everything to do with the character making an appearance, i.e. appearing in an adventure as something more than window dressing. That doesn’t mean that their role has to be major, or even pivotal, but it does have to be important. For example, the NPC might give a PC a tip-off about something, or provide vital information – regardless of whether or not the PCs could get that information elsewhere, the fact that it brings the NPC into the plotline and gives them the opportunity to again showcase their personality and cement the relationship.

An appearance can also be simply an interaction of some sort – a phone call, a card, flowers, a gift, an invitation, sharing a piece of gossip. As a general rule of thumb, half of the character’s “appearances” should be of this type.

5. Vulnerability.

Someone needs to get into trouble in a way that prompts an interaction between the PC or PCs and the NPC. That could be the NPC, it could be a third party connected to either an PC or the NPC in some way, it could even be another PC. The purpose is, respectively, to make the NPC more fallibly human; to obligate one of the two parties in the relationship; and/or to show the NPC in a different context or light.

“Getting into trouble” can mean multiple things, and each offers something different to the development of the relationship. Being accused of something, for example, with the PC attempting to clear the NPC, is a great way for the PC to get behind the public face and see the private face, warts and all. Over-committing to helping someone else and getting in over your head is a great way to highlight the NPC’s humanity. Helping the PC get out of trouble means that the PC owes the NPC a favor, which can be either called in at some future point, or dismissed as “that’s what friends do for each other”. There are lots of variations – but what they all do is deepen the relationship between the PC(s) and NPC.

6. Appearance.

This is exactly the same as stage 4, but the significance has changed completely. In stage 4, it was an intensification and deepening of the relationship; Here, it’s more of a confirmation of the relationship, a place-marker and reminder.

Connections between characters are like whiskey, or wine – they take time to mature. But while they are maturing, you can’t let them become dated or forgotten.

7. Assist.

There’s a big difference between the NPC helping the PC or vice-versa, and one of the two needing the other’s help. This is the “give” to stage 5’s “take”. Or it might be both of them helping a third party.

Nor does the type of assistance need to be something earth-shaking. Conspiring to throw a surprise party for someone who has something to celebrate, for example.

8. Repeat the 4-7 cycle until character completely established.

The other purpose behind each and every one of these events is to give more information about the NPC, in small, digestible chunks, or to reveal to the NPC more information about the PCs with whom they have a developing relationship.

It’s a tricky decision to know when to close out the repeated instances of the 4-7 cycle. There are plenty of variations to employ, but the mere fact that they are all variations on a theme becomes fairly quickly apparent. You can never reveal everything there is to know about a character before that time runs out; so you need to prioritize and deliver the essentials within the limited window.

9. Establish pattern.

As soon as the essentials have been conveyed, it’s time to move into phase two of the process. That means putting the relationship onto the back-burner while keeping it ticking over until the players find it as comfortable as an old pair of shoes. Once you’ve achieved that status – and it won’t take as long as you might think – it’s time to plan the rest of phase two. This is very much a transition – the first time around.

10. Violate pattern.

When the opportunity is right, it’s time to break the pattern with an “unconventional” appearance – one that shakes up the status quo and evolves the relationship in some way.

11. Appearance within pattern (repeat until ready for 12).

This is simply repeating 9 to establish the new status quo.

12. Revelation.

Once everything becomes settled again, its’ time to shake things up, as one of those bits of background that you didn’t get to reveal (or that you deliberately saved for the purpose) becomes critically important. This could turn into a Vulnerability or an Assist.

13. Progression.

After every revelation, the relationship should progress. Sometimes that will be in the direction that the GM wants to be its ultimate shape, sometimes it will be away. Think of this part of the process as a romance – sometimes there are rough spots, but they get overcome in time.

14. Repeat 11/13 cycle with occasional 12 recurrence until ready for 15.

The notes on 13 make it clear that it is part of another repeating cycle. You might be wondering how to have a progression without having the revelation that causes it; the answer is that some events have delayed impacts, or domino effects. Some changes to a character’s life need time for the character to reassess their priorities; they might need to find a new job that reflects that change of priority, for example.

Progression doesn’t happen all at once; it’s about ripples. The character changes internally, and that then manifests in external changes to their priorities, which then manifest piece by piece in changes to their circumstances, all of which make changes in their relationships, which exposes them to new stimuli, which prompts a fresh evolution.

Although the ultimate outcome might seem inevitable in hindsight, life should never be so predictable looking ahead.

15. Conclusion.

All character stories come to an end, a conclusion. This pays off everything that has happened in getting to that point. It can either launch the characters involved into a whole new story or signal the departure of that character from the plotline – until the GM decides to bring them back, of course!

So we’re talking about NPCs becoming friends for life, or embittered enemies, or husbands and wives, or ex-partners, or rivals, or staunch allies, or something equally fundamental, But, in every case, looking back, there should be clearly identifiable turning points where the story could have moved in a different direction – opportunities lost, opportunities taken, mistakes made.

Some character stories are even more complicated – characters who are enemies on some occasions, allies at others. You can have characters who are required by politics to be enemies while maintaining a personal respect or friendship, or nominal allies who can’t be trusted – most of the time. You can have characters whose personal obsessions sometimes shift the relationship this way or that.

But the building blocks, turning points, and milestones of all these relationships bear a certain resemblance to each other, and that is what the pathway profile has set out to capture.

The Bad Guy Path

The “Bad Guy” path is similar to the good guy path already described, but there are some distinctive differences. The “bad guy” path is all about a character who is normally antagonistic toward the PCs. He may be a mastermind, making chess moves to advance his cause; he may be a character-driven enemy, obsessed with, well, his obsessions; he may be a bureaucrat or a personal enemy, or he might even be a good guy who believes that the ends justify the means, or who thinks that the PCs cut too close to that ethical shortcut.

One of the major differences is that with the “good guy” path, cause is seen in-game preceding effect and consequence, while the “bad guy” path usually presents effects before the PCs discover the cause, even though the cause took place earlier in chronological time. Only one side of the ‘consequences’ is usually presented – the consequences for the PCs and their allies; it’s normal for consequences affecting the NPC antagonist to happen behind the scenes, only to be discovered in the ’causes’ phase of the next encounter.

There are stages in the pathway at which the GM can have a lot of fun. The “vulnerability” phase, in which the PCs need the Antagonist’s help, or vice-versa, is subject to all sorts of permutations – this could mean anything from the antagonist manipulating the PCs into doing his dirty work for him, or clearing the way for him to advance his cause, for example. It could mean discovering an area of common ground with the PCs that yields a temporary truce. There are endless possibilities.

Equally, there is great variety in the ultimate outcome. The enemy could be reformed, or destroyed, or might even destroy one or more PCs before being brought down in a Pyrrhic victory. He might fail after personal changes alter his priorities to something more socially or personally acceptable.

It can also be fun to run an enemy down the “good guys” path (making him seem to be an ally or even a friend, only for the PCs to be betrayed), or to run an ally down the “Bad Guys” path, making them seem to be an enemy.

Structurally, there isn’t a lot of difference between the two pathways. Events usually occur in clumps of two, three, or even four, all within the one adventure, so they are more compressed; that can make the Bad Guys path more rapid than the good guys.

A typical substructure is effect – cause – confrontation – consequence. Mapping one or more of the stages of the path to that substructure relates it back to the main structure already described.

For example, the mapping might look like this:

4. Appearance: effect, cause
5. Vulnerability: confrontation
6. Appearance: consequence (PC)

or it might be:

4. Appearance: previous consequence (NPC)
5. Vulnerability: effect, cause
6. Appearance: confrontation, consequence

or even,

4. Appearance: effect, cause, confrontation, consequence (PC)
5. Vulnerability: effect, cause, revelation of consequence (NPC), confrontation, consequence (PC)

or any of a great many other possibilities. All the permutations of Vulnerability and Assist are in play, though often inverted or twisted in meaning.

That usually means that multiple stages of the development path occur within a single adventure. That usually indicates a more active engagement between the two factions (PCs and NPCs), but slower, lower-key antagonism is also possible, which spreads a single development stage over one or even two adventures.

Take, for example, the role of the Crown Prince in the Zenith-3 campaign. Nominally an ally, he certainly smooths the waters for them and (mostly) enables them to go about their business with a minimum of external difficulties. He has been a generous benefactor to the team on more than one occasion. But he always exacts a quid-pro-quo, often without asking, and is prone to announcing policy positions that antagonize his enemies into thinking that the PCs are also their enemies. He uses the PCs to bolster his own political position, embedding them and sometimes pushing them into corners when they would far prefer to remain apolitical. Officially, he is a self-declared ally, but in reality he sometimes provides a short-term benefit for the team while incurring a long-term disadvantage for them. Every interaction that they have ever had with him has ended well – for him – and most have ended uncomfortably for the PCs. At the moment, they can’t even be certain whether or not he’s on the “good guy” or “bad guy” path, let alone whether or not he is intended to ultimately be an ally or an enemy. They would prefer the first, but the price might ultimately be too high.

Or take Voodoo Willy from the same campaign, who I described in Ally, Enemy, Resource, and Opportunist: The four major NPC Roles (Part 1) not too long ago. He’s nominally an enemy, but he often behaves as an ally – extracting a quid-pro-quo that is advantageous for him. He is far more clearly on the bad-guy path – but right now his ultimate destiny within the campaign, and the final relationship with the PCs as either an enemy or an ally, hangs evenly in the balance. They agree on a lot more than they disagree on, but the few areas of disagreement are subjects that matter a lot to the PCs.

Both these are characters who are likely to phone the team’s leader (a PC) out of the blue – and which usually evoke a metaphoric palm to the face and the rhetorical question, “what now?”

The long and the short of it

The pathways can, in theory, construct a permanent relationship with the PCs in as little as two or three adventures that are centered around the development of that relationship, or it can be a road map to years of complex interplay between PCs and the NPC. Use it as a planning tool, part of a process of ongoing NPC character and relationship development within your campaigns an you will enrich the game of your players,their characters, and yourself.

This image combines a number of public-domain textures and illustrations. Compositing by Mike.

There are a couple of expressions that I frequently use as metaphors, simply because they express a concept in a really compact space and in a way that everyone can understand. One is ‘The Iceberg’ to indicate something that is a lot bigger or more important than it seems on the surface. Another is ‘The spotlight’, for things or characters that are highlighted relative to their peers. And a third is ‘The Elephant In The Room’, to describe something that is obvious but that everyone seems to be ignoring or overlooking.

The last metaphor works because an elephant is a big animal. But what if the elephant blended into the room unnaturally well? What if it was, literally, an elephant in a gray room? Something of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because it’s not immediately obvious – but that once you see it, you will never forget that it’s there.

I’m talking about Plot Holes. Everyone can sail right over the top of them without noticing them – until you do, and once you do, you can never escape that awareness.

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

You may have noticed the “Part 1 of 5”. So, what’s the plan?

• Part 1, Introduction (the article that you are reading) will talk about plot holes – where they come from, how they are discovered (and why it makes a difference), how catastrophic they really are, how they can grow like a cancer if not fixed, how to correctly select a solution to thew problem, and how to shift your mindset when encountering one.
• Part 2, Minor Repairs offers six basic ways of handling minor problems, ranging from Ignoring the problem to dropping in a retroactive explanation.
• Part 3: Significant Repairs deals with plot holes of greater significance in the medium term, and offers appropriately medium-term and medium-sized solutions. There are only three of them on my list so far, but there will be occasions when one of the solutions from part 2 will also solve your problem.
• Part 4: Major Structural RepairsDeals with even more significant plot holes, ones that can only be solved by performing major surgery on the campaign itself behind the scenes. In addition to solutions from earlier parts of the series, this article deals with three even more substantial repair techniques.
• Part 5: Critical Repairs deals with the most catastrophic plot holes. Structural repairs (part 4) are like fixing a hole in the roof, replacing the guttering, or even repainting – some cosmetic details may change but the significant work is beneath the skin and the look-and-feel of the campaign are not significantly altered. That’s not the case with Critical Repairs – these are reserved for situations so cataclysmic that the campaign will never be the same again afterwards (though it may be very similar). I have four solutions to offer in this category, plus the usual smattering of solutions from earlier in the series. It will also wrap the whole thing up in a nice neat (metaphoric) blue ribbon.

For those wondering – yes, I probably could have made this series smaller. But I’m anticipating having quite a bit to say about some of those more serious solutions, so I’m leaving room, just in case. I’d rather post a short article than find myself too squeezed for time to look at things in the detail that they deserve.

Some of what follows in the course of this series will undoubtedly be familiar advice to readers. I make no apologies for that – good advice deserves to be repeated. But hopefully there will be something new for everyone to chew on in the course of the series.

That’s a fairly full bill of work, so let’s get started….

Sources Of Plot Holes

It’s too easy simply to state that a plot hole represents a mistake by the GM. In fact, there are 9 ways in which a plot hole can creep into a GM’s plans, and the cause can materially affect how difficult it is to repair and how big a problem the GM has created for himself – and what methods of repair are most effective are definitely dependent on the specifics. So let’s dig a little deeper.

The causes that I have identified (and there may be more) are,
 

1. Characterization-Event Incompatibility
2. GM Logic Error
3. A Failure To Simulate
4. Player Theory & Confirmation Bias
5. Factual Error
6. Flawed NPC Scheduling
7. A Failure Of Memory
8. Contradictory Considerations
9. Player Confusion

Each of these merits specific discussion.

1. Characterization-Event Incompatibility

This arises when an NPC has done something that is out of character. The ‘something’ can either be in a past appearance (more serious) or in their character history (less serious). The other factor that dictates the seriousness of the problem is the importance of that break in character, taking into account domino theory, in shaping the current (and recent) world as experienced by the PCs.

The consequences of this type of plot hole range from trivial to a combination of both these factors being in the worst-case condition, which can potentially rate this problem all the way up in the Critical range, undermining the foundations of the entire campaign, though the more usual extreme result would be class-3, structural.

This is a trap to which GMs who do their job more off-the-cuff and less planned-in-advance are especially prone, and usually result from the characterization being formulated after the historical role played by the NPC, though it can sometimes result from the GM falling in love with a characterization that explains most of their past actions (overlooking the critical one or ones) and which is particularly fun to play, either for him or for the PCs to play against.

2. GM Logic Error

Of course, GMs are human too, and prone to the occasional mistake. A lot of game prep is – or should be – about giving the GM the chance to spot such errors before they enter game canon, presenting the opportunity to do something about them. The more a GM relies on improv basing adventures on a seed and knowing the characters involved, both player and non-player, the less they are prone to this particularly fallacy – in theory.

In practice, because this means that decisions are made off-the-cuff, it can be argued that GMs employing this style are even more prone to such errors, though when they occur, they are more easily dismissed as human error on the part of the NPC. The real problem that results is that these error rates are not always accurately reflective of the theoretical capabilities of the character, being more of a reflection of the GM’s personal limitations. The bottom line, then, is that improv doesn’t make you less prone to making these mistakes, it merely changes them in interpretation from a strict failure logic to a characterization failure. But when it comes to selecting the best remedial action, it’s better to call a spade a spade, which is why these causes of plot holes are being presented in the sequence shown.

Logic errors span the entire gamut of possible degrees of severity. If anything, they tend to be top-heavy on the scale, more likely to be more critical than less.

3. A Failure To Simulate

Which brings me to actual cases where a character says or does something in play – either pre-planned or unplanned – that contradicts what would be appropriate for that personality in that situation, or where the GM makes an error in adjudicating the complexities of cause-and-effect when there are multiple factors influencing events.

In fantasy campaigns, the latter don’t matter too much, because physics is subjected to such simplification that superficial accuracy is all that’s required. Inaccuracies in the interpretation of game physics within this genre are less important than other forms of failure.

More modern styles and genres, including pulp, can have a somewhat more demanding requirement of accuracy in simulating classical physics, simply because the fantasy wallpaper-over-the-cracks excuse holds less sway. Still, it’s generally enough for the physics to sound plausible, no matter how rubbery it might be in comparison to the real world.

Science Fiction campaigns come in three basic varieties – the post-apocalyptic, the Space Operatic, and the hard sci-fi. Post-apocalyptic campaigns generally regress technology while presenting fantasy as pseudo-science; so far as this subject is concerned, the constraints are somewhere between those of a typical fantasy campaign and a modern campaign. Space Opera campaigns are deliberately distortive of physics but in a very controlled and purposeful manner; sometimes, they need to achieve modern-campaign-setting standards, and at other times, they need only fantasy-level physics.

That leaves only the really serious sci-fi, which I have labeled as “hard” – though, in truth, it may deserve that label only in comparison to the other sub-genres discussed (certainly, literary purists will have a far more strict interpretation of the term). This is a realm in which the physics is so intractable that plots have to yield to it, and not vice-versa. Failure to accurately model the physics can be catastrophic to such campaigns, which is one reason why they are relatively rare. The reality is that most hard sci-fi campaigns are really dressed-up space-opera which pay greater lip service to physics – but that is enough to escalate this failure mode in seriousness.

These plot holes also span the gamut of possibilities, but tend to cluster more toward the middle of the range.

4. Player Theory & Confirmation Bias

I’ve been bitten by this one a time or two, myself, as I mentioned when first discussing the problem in “I know what’s happening?: Confirmation Bias and RPGs. What happens is that the players come up with a theory to explain current events, and then forget that it was just a theory, while the GM – who knows what is really happening, and so has paid little attention to the theory tossed out by the players beyond any immediate consequences of their mistake, forgets that the players ever had such a theory. As a result, when the subject becomes relevant once again in the campaign, months or years later, the players react in a way that accords with their theory and for which the GM has failed to prepare, or an NPC does something that makes sense in light of the “real” situation but which the players can’t understand because their theory has been blessed as campaign canon within their memories. It’s even been the case where a theory persisted at the game table for so long that it is misremembered as ‘fact’ even after it has been disproved.

Even worse, sometimes the players get “clever” and decide not to share their theory with the GM, or even the other players.

Ultimately, and at it’s worst, the players and GM are playing in two different campaigns with a superficial similarity – and, from time to time, the disparity catches one or both off-guard.

This, once again, is a more of a problem for the strict-planning school of GMs. It ultimately comes down to the PCs making an invalid assumption (from the point of view of the GM) and haring off down a rabbit hole in pursuit of the consequences of that assumption, or the GM making an invalid assumption about what the PCs will do in an in-game time-critical situation (from the point-of-view of the players), or – worse yet – reinventing history to get the PCs caught in a wringer and undo one of their past successes.

The net result is that even though there isn’t actually a plot hole there, a “virtual” plot hole comes into existence that can be even more pernicious and difficult to manage than a real plot hole would have been. The solutions tend to have to be in the upper-middle range, and sometimes, even higher up the scale. That’s because the problem itself might be amenable to a smaller solution, because you have to reset the campaign in the player’s minds – or reset it in the GM’s plans – you need to amp up the drama and impact of the solution.

5. Factual Error

In ‘Lessons from the Literary Process‘, I described an event from early in what was to become the Zenith-3 campaign, when I had a mental blank and forgot when the Communist Revolution in China took place. So, in answer to a question to which I didn’t know the answer, I mentioned the Emperor Of China.

Of course, I was immediately pulled up on that, but was fast enough on my mental feet to resolve the resulting plot hole at the time, using one of the many techniques to be discussed in later parts of this series. As I said in the article cited above, Factual Errors don’t have to be fatal; in fact, this one turned into the foundations of a major structural element of the campaign, an incident that was inspirational in devising this entire series.

If you commit a factual error, it produces a plot hole, but they tend to be relatively easy to resolve.

6. Flawed NPC Scheduling

If you don’t maintain a very clear timeline, and refer to it often, you can find that you have the same NPC in two places at once. This is especially easy in fantasy and modern and space opera campaigns because it’s easy to underestimate – or completely forget to allow for – travel time.

This can be a lot harder to fix than it sounds because there aren’t very many solutions and its easy to overuse them. It’s not impossible, but expect to be seriously stretched if you can’t employ one of those obvious solutions – for example, I had to once insert a public holiday into the calendar that didn’t get counted in the days of the month to give a villainous nobleman the necessary travel time to get from A to B.

The obvious solutions are doppelgangers, faster travel modes, time travel and proxies and magical simulacra or android doubles. Introducing any of them after the fact can turn one plot hole into several, because you may invalidate handicaps that the character respected on those occasions.

I’m actually going to highlight one in-obvious solution that I implemented in the early days of my TORG campaign (before the reality invasion when a common timeline became possible using modern technology): propagating dates.

Let’s say that an event happens in the capital on the 131st day of the fourth year of the reign of Pella Ardinay. What’s the date in Zesther, 200 leagues (about 690 miles) away? Using my usual scales (refer What Size Is A Kingdom?, that’s a minimum overland distance of 19 days travel. It could be more, but when I was drawing my maps for that campaign I made the conscious decision that things would be depicted not as they would have been geophysically, but by overland travel time. Distances on the map were described not as a measure of length, but as a measure of time, and locations in mountainous terrain were often depicted as further apart than they would have been on a more traditional map. so let’s assume that there’s as much downhill as there is up, and that the 19 days is a fair estimate.

So, if an event takes place in the capital on 131-4-PA, the date when word of that event reaches Zesther is also 131-4-PA. If an event took place simultaneously in both Zesther and in the capital, Zesther would record and report the event as occurring on 121-4-PA. The seasons change on different dates. Taxes are due on the same date everywhere, which is the date the taxes all arrive at the Capital.

So let’s say that I’ve made a mistake in my timing and to fix it, I need an extra two days of travel time for the Dwarven Horde. Let’s further suppose that the season is Summer. All it takes is a river swollen with flood waters from heavy rain in the mountains to move the date of arrival out by those two days, because the trip took two days longer If I needed him to get there two days sooner, unseasonably good weather can do that.

What it meant was that I could date an event and have that date be relatively meaningless with respect to any other date relating to events in any other location.

It’s not something to do with every campaign – it’s too noteworthy and too contrary to the way we’re used to things working – but when the campaign setting is sufficiently isolated from historical Earth, it’s another trick to have up your sleeve. But it does need to be implemented during campaign design, it can’t be imposed after the fact.

In terms of the seriousness of these plot holes, they span the entire range. As indicated, the obvious solutions can often have knock-on effects that are more disruptive than the original problem was, so these problems tend to cluster toward the extreme ends of the spectrum – either trivial to resolve, or really major, as a result.

7. A Failure Of Memory

I’ve been caught by this source of plot holes more than once, too. That’s why there have been two articles on the subject – ‘The failure of …urmmmm… Memory‘ and ‘In The Footsteps Of Footprints: how to document game events.

Well, that advice may mitigate the frequency of the problem’s occurrence, but it doesn’t obviate it completely; there will always be things that didn’t seem important enough, or that seemed memorable enough (at the time) that a note didn’t have to be made.

It’s like putting something in a safe place – which is another of those expressions that my social circle all use; you can never find it when you want it. Quite often, whenever we can’t find something, we will say that we obviously “put it in a safe place”.

Solutions to this type of plot hole tend to span the lower three categories fairly evenly. It’s relatively rare for them to escalate into the most severe category, though it does happen from time to time.

It’s always important to consider multiple solutions to this problem when it does arise; it can often be the case that a more substantial ‘fix’ has less future complications than a smaller solution that starts a chain of falling dominoes. While small solutions are generally to be preferred, that principle can be violated in this case.

8. Contradictory Considerations

There are lots of factors that go into most decisions made by the GM when it comes to plot. Sometimes, priorities change between designing the plot and actually implementing it, and sometimes they change on the fly. These contradictory considerations can create a change in direction in the plot as actually executed, resulting in a plot hole.

This can often happen when the PCs do something brilliant about a problem that the GM hadn’t considered – either he shuts them down despite that brilliance (risking allegations of plot trains that may or may not be justified) or he adjudicates fairly, bypassing some of the key stepping stones to later plots that the entire adventure was intended to justify.

These can be amongst the most catastrophic plot holes to resolve, certainly amongst the top categories of severity, or they can be relatively trivial. They demonstrate that
there can be times when no-one does anything wrong, but the campaign still ends up needing remedial action, and sometimes drastic remedial action.

9. Player Confusion

It’s one of the core truths of plot holes that GMs aren’t perfect. Sometimes, we have trouble communicating clearly to the players what’s going on in our heads; when players grow confused, they can roar off in strange directions.

When that happens, you have a choice – give them their heads, and try to make it work, or bring them back into line, even letting them backtrack on key decisions made on the basis of the misunderstanding.

It’s not too extreme to suggest that the decisive consideration in the GM’s mind when making a decision in such matters should be the scale and difficulty of the remedial action that will be required – if it’s minor or trivial, let the PCs have their heads. If it’s more substantial, but easily incorporated into the existing plans, let the PCs have their heads. If it’s a little more serious than that, then you might or might not choose to live with it – depending on the circumstances, and how soon the confusion becomes apparent – but it’s time to start seriously considering a backtrack. Certainly, anything more severe and the backtrack becomes far more enticing.

But sometimes, it’s not clear that the players are confused, at the time – that discovery only comes out later, and the GM can find himself presented with a fait accompli, and needing to right the ship.

So there are two pathways by which player confusion can lead to a plot hole. And those plot holes can cover the entire range of severity.

Discovering A Plot Hole and why the ‘how’ matters

There are lots of uncommon ways to discover a plot hole, and one or two really common ways.

Thinking about the game in between sessions? An uncommon way.

Doing game prep, and planning the day’s play? Those are uncommon ways.

Just before the plot hole gets read into campaign continuity? Another uncommon way.

Immediately the players assess what you’ve told them, and it’s too late? All too common.

Days, weeks, months, or even years later? Also all too common.

It makes a difference. Those uncommon ways offer a chance – however brief, however slim – to fix things before the GM is committed to a plot hole that needs repairs. Sometimes, that’s all you need, but it’s important not to implement a half-baked solution. If you’re sure that you aren’t actually digging yourself in deeper with a quick fix, go for it – but if there is any hesitation or doubt, you may be better off taking the time over a proper fix after the fact.

Sometimes, the awareness that there’s a problem can lead you to tinker with the pacing, deferring the problem point for a game session, giving you more time to implement a fix while never committing to the plot hole.

These rare opportunities when the stars align are priceless gifts; embrace them. Most of the time, though, you will find yourself in plot repair, usually because the players have just told you something doesn’t make sense – or because you’ve stumbled across an inconvenient truth long after the fact..

Scale Of Plot Holes

Before you can think about a solution, you need to identify the scale of this particular plot hole, in terms of how much damage it will do to the campaign. Small problems – as a rule of thumb – need small solutions.

Problem scale comes from three factors:
 

• the Damage done;
• Interval until the damage becomes apparent; and
• the Persistence of that damage.
  

  The Damage Done

  Plot damage comes in three types. There’s damage to the credibility of the campaign, damage to the credibility of the GM, and damage to the adventure potential of the campaign.

  Damage to Campaign Credibility

  When you expose an adventure to the willful exuberance of the players, you need them to invest in the plot as totally as possible, and not spend time second-guessing you. But guess what? They will do both, anyway, whether the occasional plot hole gives them reason to do so. So I discount this type of damage, and recommend that you do likewise.

  Damage to GM Credibility

  If you want to project an image of GM infallibility, this is important to you. I don’t; I know that I’m human and can make mistakes, and don’t care if the players know that, too. I would rather that they know that I care about the campaign and the entertainment that it gives them, and that’s enhanced by fixing the problem, not hiding it. So I recommend that you ignore this damage category.

  Damage to Campaign Adventure Potential

  Ah, now here’s the rub. This is why plot holes matter. Any campaign is a house of cards; it can collapse at any time. Its internal coherence, the credibility of its characters and plotlines, these are the glue that binds those cards together. The stories, interest, intrigue, personality, and – above all – the fun, are what the cards are made from. Take away some of that coherence, and you can still have a pretty good campaign – but take away too much of it, and the whole thing falls in a heap.

  Everyone’s tolerance level is different. Mine is very low – I work hard on my plots because I’m not satisfied unless they are great (fortunately, I think I also have the plotting skills to be able to meet those standards). Other GMs are more easygoing. But it’s not just the GM who needs to be satisfied; each player will also have a credibility threshold, and its something that can vary over different aspects of the game. Some players will let the GM get away with plot murder if the combat tactics and personalities shine. Others are content with fairly bland combat, but demand strong and interesting personalities amongst the NPCs and solid, solid, stories. Everyone’s different.

  It’s critical that you know where you have some leeway to play with and where you need to adhere to the highest standards. Until you do, it’s best to simply aim to be the best that you can be in every area, to play to your strengths, and to do your best to satisfy the only person who can give you instant and totally honest feedback without asking – yourself.

  Plot holes undermine the story. They undermine character reactions to events within that story. Only if your players and yourself are totally zoned in on the personal combat aspects of an RPG can you afford not to deal with the inevitable plot holes we all experience.

  The Interval until the damage manifests

  The second factor deals with the urgency of finding a solution. Plot holes can exist (so long as no-one notices them) for years before they assume significance within the campaign, and even if they do get noticed, you can get away with it through sheer chutzpah by promising that there is an explanation that will emerge in due course.

  That, however, commits you to actually finding and presenting a solution, so you are a lot better off if you already have some inkling of what it will be and what it will require.

  The shorter the interval before you need to have an answer, the more justified you are in being as drastic as necessary, and hence the more severe the damage from the plot hole will potentially be.

  At the same time, though, it can be a bad thing to have too great an interval, because it permits you to perpetually delay actually committing to a solution.

  Damage Persistence

  Some characters are hotel guests, here today and gone tomorrow. Plot holes related to those character’s actions or history can be ignored without ongoing damage for long periods of time.

  Some characters are lodgers, present for a substantial period of time before shuffling off to the plot graveyard, their stories told – at least for now. Plot holes related to these characters often can’t be ignored, but can be deferred if the plot hole in question never influences current events/actions.

  And some characters are furniture, present and involved frequently or even continuously. Plot holes related to these characters have to be resolved ASAP because the characters are so pivotal to the campaign.

  (As an aside, before I continue, I should point out that resolving a plot hole is the GM finding and documenting a solution to the incongruity; it doesn’t actually have to be presented to the players right away. Until that takes place, however, it will continue to cause structural damage to the campaign).

  Plots are like characters, as described above. Some are fireflies, there briefly and then gone; sometimes, a plot exists purely as a vehicle for some key revelation or character development. Holes in that plotline that don’t affect that lingering content don’t matter much, and can be resolved with a trivial solution. Others have a more substantial impact, serving as foundation or foreshadowing for future events within the campaign. The deadline for resolving those problems is the next development within that plotline. And some have an immediate and ongoing impact within the campaign, constraining PC choices from that time forward; these need to be resolved strongly, compellingly, convincingly, and as soon as possible.

  Of course, those four criteria are often incompatible; but it is better to wait until all four can be delivered, provided that the damage will not be catastrophic in the meantime. So you can’t wait forever, but can invest time in finding the most effective solution and implementing it properly.

Plot Hole Escalation

Even if the preceding section indicates that a deadline has been reached, it doesn’t necessarily force your hand if your solution isn’t yet ready to go. So long as you are aware that the unresolved plot hole undermines the adventure you are about to run, and that the damage won’t cause the whole plot to sink into the hole, you can cope with a little temporary subsidence.

Every event in a campaign has an ongoing persistence, becomes part of the campaign’s history, and becomes the foundations for the next level of plot structure, just as the ceiling of the second floor of a building is also the foundation that supports the third floor.

Every time the flawed event or plot development is referenced within the campaign, it does damage to the campaign. Every time a damaged event is referenced, it does secondary damage. And that causes tertiary damage, and so on.

What does “referencing” an event look like? It means that it influences or shapes the decisions or actions of a character, either PC or NPC, or that a consequence of the event does so.

Below is a graphic representation of a typical strong-continuity campaign for four players. Each has their own colored mesh of plots and subplots that occasionally link into the main plot that’s driving the campaign, but the campaign is still 75-80% character driven. And beneath that, a depiction of the worst-case scenario of the corruption caused by a single plot hole – the dots show where the corruption jumps from one plotline into another. It also shows the GM doing his best to treat the problem, but he is dealing with symptoms and not with the real problem. click on the image to open a larger one in a separate tab (1024 across)

The damage spreads through the campaign like a cancer, eating away at its credibility, a little at first – a sort of nagging afterthought – but slowly becoming all-consuming. I doubt if such a campaign would ever run to it’s conclusion – by the time the corruption is half-way through its growth cycle, it has become a dominant feature of the campaign, by the time it’s 1/3 of the way, half the campaign content has been tainted. Somewhere between those two points is where I would expect the campaign to begin to collapse.

I repeat, this depicts the worst-case scenario. It shows just how bad the problem can be.

Matching Solution Scale to Problem Scale

Obviously, if you were faced with such a situation, you would be justified in drastic action to correct the problem. Most are nowhere near this severe, and can be defeated with a correspondingly mild treatment.

The sooner you detect and remedy the problem, the milder the treatment that is necessary – most of the time. Worst-case cataclysms are rare.

The scale of the ‘treatment’ should match how significant the problem is about to become – not how serious it is now, though that’s a constant temptation, and not how chronic it might eventually become.

An untreated plot hole is like a cancer spreading through your campaign. If you’re lucky, it will be benign; but the most serious cases are malignant, and require drastic surgery if the campaign is to be saved..

If, for example, the villain of the campaign is a mastermind who makes a series of silly, out-of-character choices, driven by a poorly-thought-out character trait that doesn’t make sense in light of his background; had it been part of his makeup, that background would be entirely different, and he would never have become the threat that is supposed to drive the campaign forward. Every silly choice that he makes spreads the taint until every character’s plotline is infected. Those silly choices include ignoring obvious direct paths to achieving his ambitions before the PCs can get into a position to stop him, and wasting time and resources pursuing irrelevancies and illogical side projects.

If the character had been designed from the start to be driven by passions, the GM might have gotten away with this behavior; but you can’t be a part-time mastermind and a part-time egomaniac obsessed with trivia, the melange is completely unpalatable.

This situation is not unsolvable. It would entail drastic surgery on the NPC mastermind and his story, turning him into a victim of the real villain of the piece who has been mentally destabilizing him, perhaps in the belief that the end justifies the means. The entire campaign going forward would be reshaped accordingly, split into two dominant threads (one per villain); whichever one the PCs chose to deal with first emerging as an even greater threat than he already was. If one of the PCs had the appropriate mind-set and could gain the abilities, the second enemy might even be his future self from a world in which the PCs failed to stop the unfettered, undamaged, mastermind.

But discussion of actual treatments is premature – consider the above a preview of the fifth part in this series!

Opportunities in Adversity

It’s not all doom-and-gloom. Plot Holes may be a challenge to creativity, but it’s entirely possible for the solutions to strengthen a campaign. Every challenge, after all, is also an opportunity. You can strengthen weak elements within the campaign, reinforce the structural integrity of your house of cards, and ramping up the enjoyment that all concerned derive from their participation.

Those are side-benefits, but they also paint a vivid illustration of the way to differentiate between the different solutions that are to be offered.

The minimum requirement is to contain the damage, stop it from spreading. Solutions that do that in the least disruptive manner are obviously to be preferred – you don’t nuke a gnat. And the very best solutions will offer such side-benefits on top of these achievements, providing new opportunities for adventure and a richer, more interesting, and more fun gaming experience.

Counterbalancing those considerations is this: some solutions are a lot more work than others. Some require a higher standard of applied creativity, others require more time and/or more effort. And time, as I’ve shown, is definitely a factor. So there are multiple criteria to be satisfied when choosing a solution to the problem – enough that in every case, I would expect a single best solution to present itself. The one right answer that does the most for the campaign as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Every GM , every campaign, every plot hole, and every circumstance will be different. There are too many possibilities for any series of articles to make the decision for you. But this series can put the tools in your hands; what use you make of them is then up to you.

The next part of this series will look at techniques for fixing minor plot holes.

I was spoilt for choice when it came to illustrating this article. The one that I’ve eventually chosen is “brick-1-1166510” by ilker, courtesy of freeimages.com. I’ve saved the others to use in illustrating an article series that will be rather trickier to accompany!

It’s still not certain which game system will be used for the Zener Gate campaign, but discussion with one of the players clarified many of the concepts of the original game system that was forming in the back of my mind as an option.

As I thought the process and ideas might be of interest to readers, I’ve decided to set them down – and my thoughts – for all to see.

This is not a finished game system – just a rough blueprint of the content that will be incorporated into the game system if I go ahead and write it. The goal is to be mechanically fast, with a flexibility that comes from being relatively abstract.

Stats

Not sure how many of these there will be yet, nor what they will all be named in the end, but some are fairly clear.

• STR – Strength, i.e. physical force.
• CON – Constitution, i.e. health.
• END – Endurance. Starts equal to CON.
• RES – Resistance to physical harm, assuming maximum defensive armor. Lighter armors will subtract from it.
• NIM – Nimbleness. Heavier armors will subtract from it.
• HP – Hit Points. Equal to 2 x CON + RES + NIM.
• SHK – Shock Threshold. equal to 1/5th HP, round up. If an attack does this much damage or more in one round, the character must make a CON save or be rendered unconscious for d10 time on the universal scale (see below). For every point that the shock threshold is exceeded, there is a -1 penalty to the save and +1 modifier to the time roll.
• ACC – Accuracy with aimed weapons.
• MEL – effectiveness with Melee weapons & unarmed.
• DEX – overall measure of manual dexterity, used for manipulating tools and keyboards. The stat rolled is averaged with NIM to get the actual stat value. Hand protection will subtract from it.
• PRAC – the character’s aptitude for Practical skills.
• THEO – the character’s aptitude for intellectual/analytic/Theory skills.
• ENC – Encyclopedic Knowledge, the character’s knowledge bank of facts and processes.
• LAN – the character’s capacity for quick-learning Languages. Discussed below.
• INT – Intelligence. Equal to 1/4 of (PRAC + THEO + ENC + LAN), + 1d6, -1d6.
• AWA – Awareness of the environment around the character, used for “spot” and “listen” checks.
• PERS – Personality, a combination of Presence, Charisma, and Persuasiveness, the foundation of any interpersonal skills.
• KARMA – The universe’s debt to the character’s good fortune. Initially 10, -1 for each stat with a score of 17 or better, +1 for each stat with a score of 8 or less. Karma can be sacrificed in-game to gain a lucky advantage or to buy off a restriction placed on the PCs by the campaign background, the latter at prices to be determined by the GM. Some penalties must be bought off collectively by all PCs contributing to a pool. The GM can also throw unlucky circumstances at the PCs which turn into a Karma boost if the PCs overcome the circumstance indirectly, i.e. without directly countering with PC Karma, effectively adding to the XP that the characters get for the adventure.

There may be more, but those 18 seem adequate for now.

Rolling Stats

Stats are populated in four steps.

1. Generation

To generate a character, the players roll 4d6, re-rolling sixes, until they have a list of results half again as long as the number of stats. Presently, there are 18 stats, but INT, HP, SHK, and Karma don’t count because they are handled as calculations, so currently 21 rolls would be needed; list the results on some scrap paper.

For the record, the potential results are 4 to 20, the average is 12, and the chance of each result (out of 625) are: 1-4-10-20-35-52-68-80-85-80-68-52-35-20-10-4-1.

2. Selection

Characters must select the single highest result AND the results immediately above and below that roll. Assume the list “wraps around”. If there’s a tie, the player can pick which one to use. Copy selected rolls to a separate list and cross them off.

Characters must select the single lowest result AND the .results immediately above and below that roll, pretending any results crossed out are not on the list. If there’s a tie, the player can pick which one to use. Copy selected rolls to a separate list and cross them off.

Characters must select one 13, 14, or 15 result AND the results immediately above and below that roll, pretending any results crossed out are not on the list. If there’s a tie, the player can pick which one to use. Copy selected rolls to a separate list and cross them off. NB: Ordinary NPCs must use 11-12-13 for this step.

The Character can pick any one remaining result. The rest of the original list are then discarded.

3. Allocation

The player should already have selected a profession for the character. The stat rolls are allocated to the different stats as the player sees fit, to reflect the proficiencies required for that profession.

4. Calculation

Finally, the INT and HP scores are calculated (round in the character’s favor).

An Example

Although the language I?ve used above is slightly different, and (I hope) somewhat clearer, one of my players had trouble understanding the process until I did a quick back-of-an-envelope example to illustrate the procedures. So let?s do a quick example for anyone who hasn?t quite followed.

I start by generating a list of 21 rolls of 4d6, re-rolling all sixes:
&nbsp:

	2, 3, 3, 5	2, 4, 5, 6 → 2	5, 5, 5, 6 → 2	2, 2, 3, 5	2, 3, 4, 6 → 4
	=13	=13	=17	=12	=13
	1, 3, 5, 5	3, 5, 5, 6 → 3	1, 1, 3, 6 → 6 → 2	1, 2, 4, 5	2, 2, 3, 4
	=14	=16	=7	=12	=11
	4, 6 → 3, 6 → 4, 6 → 2	3, 3, 4, 6 → 3	1, 3, 5, 5	5, 5, 5, 6 → 5	2, 3, 3, 4
	=13	=16	=14	=20	=12
	3, 3, 4, 5	1, 1, 4, 6 → 5	4, 4, 5, 6 → 6 → 3	2, 3, 5, 6 → 4	1, 3, 4, 5
	=15	=11	=16	=14	=13
	2, 4, 5, 6 → 2
	=13

 

(Practical Advice Note: I found it a lot easier to roll the dice in batches of 5 lots of 4 dice, exactly the way it?s shown in the table above).

 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13.

 
(It’s necessary to imagine these in a column running down the page).

The single highest result is the single 20 result. Immediately ?above? that is a 14, and below that, a 12. So that?s our first trio of selected rolls, which are crossed off the original list:
 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13. 14, 20, 12.

 
The single lowest roll (by miles) is the 7. Above that is a 16 and below it is a 12. So we copy those three rolls into the selected rolls list and cross them off the working list:
 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13. 14, 20, 12, 16, 7, 12.

 
There are lots of 13, 14, and 15 results to choose from. The decision has to be based on the rolls above and below it.

• The first result is a 13. Above that (wrapping around from the end of the list) is the last result, another 13, while below it is a third 13, for a group 13, 13, 13. Their total is 39, so that?s the score to beat.
• The second result is a 13. Above that is the first result, another 13, while below it is a 17, for a group 13, 13, 17. This has a total of 43, so that?s the new best result.
• The fifth result is a 13. Above that is a 12, and below it is a 14, for a group 12, 13, 14. This has a total of 39 ? as good as the first choice but not as good as the second.
• The sixth result is a 14. Above that is 13, below that is an 11, because the 16, 7, and 12 have been crossed out. So that?s a group 13, 14, 11. They have a total of 38, which is a new low.
• The eleventh is a 13. Above it is an 11, and below that is a 16, for a group 11, 13, 16. This is a total of 40, making it the second-best choice.
• The thirteenth result was a 14, but it?s been crossed out and can?t be used.
• The sixteenth result is a 15, Above it (ignoring the crossed-out numbers) is 16 and below that is 11, for a group 16, 15, 11. These add up to 42, becoming the new second-best choice.
• The nineteenth result is a 14. Above it is a 16, and below it a 13, for a group 16, 14, 13. They total 43, matching the best choice on offer.
• The twentieth result is a 13, but the numbers above and below it are 14 and 13, so the resulting group isn?t really in the running.
• The twenty-first and last result is a 13. Above that is another 13, and below it (because the list is treated as wrapping around back to the beginning) is the first 13. But a 13, 13, 13 combination won?t cut it.

So the choice is between 13, 13, 17 and 16, 14, 13. Since the next step is to cherry-pick from the remaining answers, it?s best to pick the one that has more high scores, even if one of the scores is less than the best In the other group. So the choice is the 16, 14, 13 group. Add it to the chosen results and cross them off the list:
 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13. 14, 20, 12, 16, 7, 12, 16, 14, 13.

 
With nine of the 14 stat values now selected, there are two different philosophical approaches to consider for the remaining 5 scores. Some players like to add color to their characters by deliberately choosing one or two of the lowest remaining scores on the list ? the roleplayers. Power-gamers will simply pick the five best scores that aren?t crossed out. If I assume that I?m rolling up an NPC, I?ll usually tak the first approach except when designing a villain. For the sake of the example, let?s pick one low score and the four best, something of a compromise between the two philosophies.

There?s an 11. In fact, two of them ? those are the lowest scores. The four best are 17, 16, 15, and 14. Not used are an 11, a 12, and a bunch of 13s. So the final list of stat rolls are:
 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13. 14, 20, 12, 16, 7, 12, 16, 14, 13, 11, 17, 16, 15, 14.

 
Or, if I list them from low to high:
 

13, 13, 17, 12, 13, 14, 16, 7, 12, 11, 13, 16, 14, 20, 12, 15, 11, 16, 14, 13, 13. 7, 11, 12, 12, 13, 14, 14, 14, 15, 16, 16, 16, 17, 20.

 
Next comes allocating the scores. I would normally select which two were going to be my dump stats (the 7 and the 11) and then prioritize from the high roll down ? the 20, the 17, the three 16s, and then the 15. From the stats that are left, pick the ones that are to get the 12s and the ones that are to get the 14s, leaving the last one to get the 13. But how a player might choose to handle that is up to them.

Stat Checks

These will be relatively rare but not unheard-of, especially when the character doesn’t have an applicable skill. To make a stat check, the character rolls 3d6 plus a modifier from the GM that reflects any circumstantial modifiers and the inherent difficulty of the task. The total must be less than or equal to the character’s stat in order to succeed.

Skill Foundations

Divide each stat by 2, rounding up. Add 2. That is the base value of any skill that is used with the stat for the basis of skill checks. Since stats have a maximum value of 20 (as rolled), that gives a range for skill foundations of 4-12.

Skills

Characters start with skill points equal to their INT x 2.

Characters define their own skills. Their profession must be the first such skill listed. Skills are Holistic in nature, not precise.

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

For example, the first four skills listed by a character might be:

Homicide Detective
Boy Scout
Fisherman
Park Ranger

While ‘Homicide Detective’ is a Narrow skill-set, it implies experience as a general police officer, which is a broader skill-set. So it’s a 4-point purchase.

‘Boy Scout’ implies a lot of practical experience, so it is also a 4-point purchase.

‘Fisherman’ is very restricted in what it can be used for, so that’s a 1-point purchase.

‘Park Ranger’ is also fairly restricted, but clearly broader than ‘Fisherman’; it’s a 2-point purchase. So these four skills total 11 points.

Purchase gives the skill a base value of 5 ranks in that skill.

Skill Checks

When the PC attempts a task, he lists any skills he feels are relevant. The GM selects a stat basis that he thinks is most relevant. The player adds his ranks in the skill and the stat basis value to get the target value. He then rolls 4d6 and must get less than or equal to the target to succeed.

Secondary Bonuses

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

For example, when Fishing, a character’s Fisherman skill and DEX are the logical foundations, but Boy Scout is potentially relevant as well. The GM agrees. “Fisherman” is a narrower skill than “Boy Scout”, so “Fisherman” is the primary skill for the check, and “Boy Scout” adds 2 to the target that must not be exceeded.

This means that it’s beneficial to list both a general skill and any more specialized skills in which the character wants to have additional expertise over and above his general proficiency. The idea is that the general skill provides a definitional ‘safety net’ for all the things that the character doesn’t have a specialist skill in.

Weapon Skills

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

Unproficient

If a character attempts a task in which his only skill is incorrectly specialized and he doesn’t have a general catch-all – for example, using a 44 Magnum when his only firearms skill is “.33 special” – he is considered to have No ranks in the relevant skill and his chance of success is defined by the relevant Skill Foundation alone, +1 for each indirectly-related skill the GM deems appropriate.

Improving Skills

Characters can buy additional ranks in skills at the price of 1 skill point per rank. Because narrow-focus skills take usage preference over broader skills, the benefits of improving a broader-application skill are counterbalanced by the frequency of occasion when that improvement won’t actually apply to the skill, permitting the one-price-fits-all simplicity.

Improving Stats

During Character Generation, Stats can be improved at the rate of +1 to the stat for 3 skill points. Stats can also be reduced by 1 to obtain an extra 2 skill points.

Disadvantages

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

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

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

So, for example, five ranks in a Disadvantage is worth:

• 1+1+1+1+1=5 points for a specific disadvantage;
• 2+1+1+1+1=6 points for a narrow disadvantage,
• 4+3+2+1+1=11 points for a broad or general disadvantage.

Karma Limits

There is a limit to the total number of ranks that a character can have in a given disadvantage equal to his starting Karma.

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

Removing/Reducing Disadvantages

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

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

Karmic Debt

If a character’s Karma drops in the course of an adventure to the point that he is forced to reduce one or more disadvantages because they would exceed the Karmic Limit described above, he is forced to experience a Complication. This is a player-invoked setback that worsens one or more other disadvantages by one rank for each rank in the Disadvantage being nullified. If he can no longer do so because his disadvantages are at the maximum permitted level, another stat is semi-permanently reduced as a consequence of the setback. Note that this has to happen in-play. For example, a minor stroke might impair one of his intelligence-deriving stats, or a torn muscle or cracked bone might impair his Nimbleness, or he might contract a disease that impairs his CON. The nature of the setback offered by the player and the number of stat points lost determine the value of the Complication – minus one point in one stat is worth one rank in the setback. That means that the scale of the Complication should be set to match the total unpaid Karmic Debt accrued by the event. Another form of setback that is acceptable is for the player to deliberately blow a mission-critical roll for his character and refuse a re-roll.

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

Karmic Starvation

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

Other uses for Karma

Karma can be used to re-roll a failed roll at the player’s discretion, or to give another character a +5 in a mission-critical roll. These applications consume one Karma.

Karma can be converted into additional Skill Points at the rate of 2 Skill points per point of Karma consumed.

Karma can be converted into a stat bonus at the rate of 2 Karma per +1. Once a stat exceeds 25, this cost doubles, and for every +5 to the limit, it doubles again. Note that this is far more expensive than adjusting stats during character construction.

Karma can be expended during character construction to modify rolled stats. Every point of Karma consumed permits one stat to be reduced by 1 and another to be increased by 2. Note that this also affects the character’s Starting Karma.

Karma can be expended to obtain a stroke of good fortune in the course of an adventure. The player tells the GM what “good luck” he would like to have and the GM counts the number of successful rolls that he would normally require in order to achieve the same outcome. That count is the cost of the stroke of good fortune in Karma. If the cost is more than the character can or is willing to pay, the GM may propose a lower-cost variation that gives the PCs some or even all of what they want; the GM is expected to work with the players in this respect.

Karma can be expended to reduce or remove a limitation placed on the characters by the campaign setup or background, for example to expand a character’s Meitner Field Radius, permitting them to carry more equipment through a Zener Transition. An explanation for this change will be incorporated into the next adventure by the GM, and the benefit will take effect from that time, NOT immediately.

Finally, Karma can be expended to delay the next Zener Transition long enough for the PCs to complete their current adventure.

Experience

Experience is earned for surviving an adventure. More experience is earned for helping the locals deal with whatever problem they are experiencing when the PCs arrive – +50% XP for a solution to be implemented by the locals following PC advice, double XP for a solution to the problem that is put in place by the PCs, and these are doubled again for a permanent solution to the problem. Example: Catching a killer might be worth 2 XP if the characters simply deduce who it is and let the locals apprehend him, 3 XP if the characters do some investigation, or 4 XP if the characters capture the killer themselves and hand him over to the authorities for judgment. Behaving in a selfish or amoral fashion normally reduces whatever the XP award is by 1 point, but this can be waived if the whole purpose of the plotline is to benefit the PCs in some way.

XP is paid in additional Karma, and based on the length of the adventure and the difficulties that had to be overcome.

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

If a PC chooses to, he can sacrifice Karma to nullify or redress this interference through a stroke of good fortune, as described earlier; doing so means that the complication introduced by the GM also doesn’t count toward the end-of-adventure bonus.

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

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

Equipment

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

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

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

There are three exceptions: weapons, armor, and Campaign MacGuffins.

Armor

Armor is slightly different to other forms of equipment. It costs skill points in the same way as other equipment, but has multiple factors that have to be purchased.

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

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

Note that there are currently severe limitations on the armor that can be worn while experiencing a Zener Transition. Armor that is only available for the one adventure and has to be “obtained” by the PCs in the course of the adventure is free.

Weapons

Weapons are also handled slightly differently.

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

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

Note that there are currently severe limitations on the armor that can be worn while experiencing a Zener Transition. Armor that is only available for the one adventure and has to be “obtained” by the PCs in the course of that adventure is free.

Campaign MacGuffins

Some of the campaign limitations are so “big” that they have to be bought off in stages, for example constructing a reliable communications link back to Zener Command. Less-reliable comms will become available as plot devices in the meanwhile. Each point of Karma expended for the purpose by ALL PCs adds to the total invested in “Campaign MacGuffins” and is translated into a component of the whole or a refinement of the design or construction that will be incorporated into the next adventure. These tangible Campaign MacGuffins will be given suitable names in-game, e.g. “crystal radio set”. When the GM feels that the characters have accumulated enough of them, an improvement will be made in one restriction. These amounts are being left flexible for now, but the rough scale is intended to be 4 points for a minor improvement, 10 points for a new capability, 20 points for the complete removal of a limitation..

The Universal Scale

This is an idea being lifted directly from TORG. It consists of a number of values arranged in a table in geometric sequence and given a unified common index. Look up a character’s STR on the index, and you get how much he can lift. Look up the distance to a target and you get the range modifier to hit that target with a ranged weapon. If a skill roll is “failed” but the PCs should be able to succeed, given time, looking up the amount by which they failed on the index and getting the corresponding time value tells the GM how long it will take for them to succeed. Similarly, looking up the difference between two indexed time amounts states the penalty for a character rushing, looking up the area gives the bonus to attacks for the size of the target, and so on.

Hit Location

A hit location system may or may not be used.

Outstanding Questions

There are a number of questions that I have not yet made decisions on.

• Initiative is a big one.
• Whether or not to roll attacks using a d20 is another.
• Radiation Damage is a third, though I have some ideas that aren’t yet fully worked through.
• Language Handling is a fourth, though the inclusion of the LAN stat hints at my still-incomplete thinking.
• Critical Hits and Fumbles are a fifth.

In fact, I have vague ideas on all of these but have not yet had time to think them through – that’s why there’s no section on “Combat Resolution” yet. But, as you can see, an awful lot of the work is done already; it only took a couple of hours’ discussion and one evening of typing to set it all down. And, stripped of explanations and presented as concisely as possible, the in-play necessities should all fit on a page, maybe two – which is part of the design objective.

Image courtesy PublicDomainPictures at Pixabay.com rights via CC0 (Public Domain)

I’ve seen all sorts of ways to ignite your creativity, nudging your mental capacities into a completely different orbit to their usual.

I’ve even offered a few, myself, here at Campaign Mastery, that work best when you have some idea of what it is that you’re trying to create. They don’t work that well, however, when you’re looking for something as abstract and flexible as a concept for an adventure.

I call this technique “Buzzstorming” because it has two purposes: to get your brain buzzing with ideas, and to filter those ideas through a literary filter that churns out raw “nuggets” of Surrealist Adventure. These can then be refined using my old standbys, Iteration and Domino Theory until they fit any style that you want or need.

I actually have two variations of this technique, “basic” and “advanced” (though there isn’t a great deal of difference between them, as you’ll soon see).

Basic Buzzstorming

Buzzstorming works best with good old pen-and-paper, making it something that you can use just about anywhere under almost any circumstance.

It has three simple steps (not counting the refinement process, which I will deal with after discussing Advanced Buzzstorming)::
 

• Phrase,
• Mutate, and
• Curate
  

  Phrase

  Create a dozen simple phrases. The only restriction is the format: they must be structured,

  Noun – Verb – Noun

  …which means that they are all descriptions of activity. You can create these from looking around you at activity, from watching the TV, from reading a book, from ideas in music or songs, or from whole cloth and sheer imagination.

  Write these down.

  Mutate

  Starting with the first phrase, cross out the noun at the end of the phrase and write in the noun at the end of the second line. Keep going until you get to the end of the list; since there is no phrase under the last entry to steal a noun from, use the leftover one from the first phrase.

  Curate & Re-mutate

  Go through your list and note any that spark your imagination. Write these in a separate list, crossing them out as you do so. Re-mutate the rest, as above. If any phrase ends up with its original last noun, swap the first and last nouns in that phrase. Then curate the good ones again, and repeat.

  Eventually, you will end up with a list of as many ideas as you originally had phrases, or perhaps slightly less, with a couple of starting phrases that would not yield a good idea no matter how much you twisted them. That’s fine – throw them away.

That’s it. Easy, right?

A Quick step-by-step example

Let’s do a quick example with eight phrases – note that in reality, this would take up a lot less room:

Start

The sausage fries in the pan.
Two birds fly across the sky.
The critic complains about irony.
A dog wags its tail.
A moving pen writes on the page.
Sand falls through the hourglass.
Rain collects in the bucket.
Moon-rise banishes the dark.

First Pass

Mutated, these become:

The sausage fries in the sky
Two birds fly across the irony.
The critic complains about its tail.
A dog wags the page.
A moving pen writes on the hourglass.
Sand falls through the bucket.
Rain collects in the dark.
Moon-rise banishes the pan.

Curate: I like

The critic complains about its tail, and
Rain collects in the dark,

but the others leave me cold.

Second Pass

So, mutate the rest again:

The sausage fries in the irony
Two birds fly across the page.
A dog wags the hourglass.
A moving pen writes on the bucket.
Sand falls through the pan
Moon-rise banishes the sky.

I curate that last one, and mutate the rest again:

Third Pass

The sausage fries in the page.
Two birds fly across the hourglass.
A dog wags the bucket.
A moving pen writes on the pan.
Sand falls through the irony

Nothing there, so go again:

Fourth Pass

The sausage fries in the hourglass.
Two birds fly across the bucket.
A dog wags the pan.
A moving pen writes on the irony.
Sand falls through the page.

I can work with the last one, so I curate it, and then again mutate:

Fifth Pass

The sausage fries in the bucket
Two birds fly across the pan.
A dog wags the irony.
A moving pen writes on the hourglass.

Still nothing exciting. But observe that if I simply mutate again, the first phrase is back to where it started, while the third and fourth are variations that we’ve already tried. So it’s time to do the first-to-second swap in those three cases:

Sixth Pass

The bucket fries in the sausage
Two birds fly across the pan.
The irony wags the dog.
The hourglass writes on a moving pen.

Check those: no inspiration, so Mutate again:

Seventh Pass

The bucket fries in the pan
Two birds fly across the dog.
The irony wags a moving pen.
The hourglass writes on a sausage.

I like the third one, I can use it. So curate it and again mutate the other three:

Eighth Pass

The bucket fries in the dog.
Two birds fly across the sausage.
The hourglass writes on a pan.

No joy, and the first two about to cycle back to something already rejected, so swap its nouns around:

Ninth Pass

The dog fries in the bucket.
The sausage flies across two birds.
The hourglass writes on a pan.

and then mutate:

The dog fries in two birds.
The sausage flies across a pan.
The hourglass writes on the bucket.

Nothing yet. Mutate once more:

Tenth Pass

The dog fries in a pan.
The sausage flies across the bucket.
The hourglass writes on two birds.

Still nothing. My subconscious is teasing me that there’s an idea involving the hourglass there somewhere, but the combinations are few enough at this point that I can quickly dismiss all of the ones involving the hourglass in first or last position. So I scrap the other two and save the “The Hourglass writes on two birds” for the next Buzzstorming session.

Results

That means that my final list of ideas is:

The critic complains about its tail.
Rain collects in the dark.
Moon-rise banishes the sky.
Sand falls through the page.
The irony wags a moving pen.

Advanced Buzzstorming

This works in almost exactly the same way, but there are three differences.
 

1. The Phrase structure is different: use Noun – Verb – Adjective(s) – Noun.
2. During each Mutation round, you take the adjective from the Phrase below and the noun from the Phrase below that.
3. During the Curate and Re-mutate step, you have an extra option:
    
   • Move one or more of the adjectives to before the first Noun, crossing out the original appearance.
   • Insert a comma after the adjective and insert one of the words “On, In, To, At,” or “When” so that the resulting phrase is grammatically correct.

Because the process is so similar, I won’t put up an example. However, thinking about one, and the remaining phrase on the original (mutated) list gives me,

When soft, the hourglass falls through time,

which I happily add to the curated list.

Refinement

The refinement process is one of making sense of the statement in terms of the campaign and genre, then tossing basic questions – who, what, why, etc – at the result until it is transformed into a sensible plot outline.

Let’s at least make a start on the curated ideas so that you can see where I’m going with this. I’ll do so in a high-level D&D/Pathfinder context:

• The critic complains about its tail: I had an immediate vision of a critic, one of those people who is never satisfied by anyone or anything, who happened to be a Dragon. With old-style glasses-on-a-stick. And a top hat. The personality and visual was so strong and unique, ripe with subtle implications (e.g. Humanophile) that I needed go no further. He needs only a name and a role in the adventure.
  • I get the first from thinking of Faust, and the love-hate relationship any non-human Humanophile must have for the human race as a Faustian Bargain, the source of equal parts pride, satisfaction, and frustration; so I choose a name that evokes that context without being too obvious about it: Thaust Draco Infernus.
  • What if our Draconic friend feels compelled to tell people what they are doing wrong – and, when sufficiently vexed, to instruct others to do something about a situation to which they should be paying attention, but aren’t (or not enough, anyway)? That means that he is the instigator of the adventure and the NPC giving the PCs the briefing. “Your mission, should I choose you to accept it…”
  • That last phrase, thrown in more to be cute than to be meant seriously, seems to fit so well that the nature of the Adventure immediately begins to take shape. An emergency situation of some kind that he has noticed, but no-one else has, in which he wants the PCs to intervene.
• Rain collects in the dark: This also inspired a visual image. It rains, and the drops collect unnaturally into pools, which animate as Water Elementals or a sort of Water Elemental Golem.
  • “The Water Elemental Who Fell To Earth” then lept out at me as a phrase, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
  • Ideas from that point began to fall like dominoes: A deity-level Water Elemental whose machinations threatened to destabilize the Elemental planes, and who was exiled from reality, who has found a way to launch his minions through the inter-dimensional barriers into the Prime Material Plane, where they can work his will, eventually to bring about his return from wherever he has been exiled.
  • So now I have the kernel of the adventure. Details remain to be filled in – how these minions will secure the release of the Water Elemental, his identity, how the PCs can
    interfere, and the signs that the Critic has spotted but that humanity has not. Before I turn to answering those, I’ll look at the remaining ideas to see if any of them hold nuggets of gold to inspire further answers. But that’s enough to demonstrate the principal.
• Moon-rise banishes the sky: Again, a visual notion: the moon rising at night, and in it’s wake, no stars, no darkness, nothing but white or perhaps gray. But, that was before I had reflected on the two previous ideas; the new context inspired a new interpretation:
  • The moon rises, leading a solid band of clouds, internally lit somehow, that obscures the entire sky. When the moon sets, the clouds begin to reshape themselves, drifting this way and that, until they form a part of a mystic sygil of some sort, with nothingness in between.
  • That alone is enough to tell everyone that hears of it that this is an arcane effect if some kind. Mages who analyze the effect claim that it is clerical and not arcane in nature. Worryingly, the most powerful clerics and druids cannot dispel it, and claim that the Mages must be lying. Thus, petty squabbles distract humankind while the world continues to plunge headlong toward disaster.
  • A hexagon is the simplest shape that is reminiscent of a ring (a triangle’s corners are too acute, as are those of a square; a pentagon would work but is too closely associated with demons and devil-worship – it might be more accurate to say, “the simplest available shape”). So, over the next five nights, in widely-separated locations, this same pattern repeats itself. On the seventh night, the patterns converge, and the portal behind to open, either releasing the big bad himself, or a bigger, more powerful minion, or an avatar of the Big Bad.
• Sand falls through the page:
• When soft, the hourglass falls through time: These two go together, I realized. This is a visual for some sort of temporal spell – a sandstone rock is placed on the page bearing the spell, and erodes over a period of seconds into sand which falls through the page as though it were a sieve. This is visually reminiscent of the behavior of an hourglass, the seemingly solid aggregation of sand in the top become a thin stream of soft particles, which fall through time, opening a portal to the remote past, to a time before time itself.
  • This sounds like the perfect place to exile a godlike elemental creature. You could even be forgiven for thinking that the creature would be helpless, unable to affect the “modern world”. It fails to account for the divine nature of the proposed being; although greatly weakened, it is capable of generating it’s own temporal field. Not enough to permit it to break free on its own, but enough to create his minions and boost them into the future in an uncontrolled manner.
  • There is an obvious association between “soft sand falling” and falling rain. So that gives more information on what the minions are doing – and implies that the PCs have to recover a copy of the spell being used by the minions and ultimately use it to travel back in time to confront the imprisoned Big Bad. When they succeed, a rebound effect of the cessation of the Big Bad’s personal time field will permit them to ride its own spell back to their local time – each appearing within one of the minions, perhaps!
  • Bonus idea: What if it is the destruction of the Divine Elemental and releasing of his temporal field that kick-starts time in the universe? What if this is the D&D equivalent of the Big Bang?
  • In many mythos, Dragons have access to magics that are older and more powerful than those practiced by Human Mages. That suggests that maybe the Spell is Draconic in origin, and that instead of providing the hook, the Critic is the final step the PCs have to make before confronting the Big Bad, and that finding (and rescuing?) him is another of the preliminary quests that they have to complete on their way to solving the main problem.
  • This further suggests that it was the mythic dragons of the past who exiled the Water Elemental in the first place; this would not only be internally consistent, it would explain where the critic got the spell from in the first place, passed down through the generations of Draconian offspring. It also implies that modern Dragons don’t have the knowledge, power, or skill of the originals.
  • Which suggests another idea by free association: That it is the Draconic lust for Gold and other precious metals that has weakened them, poisoning their bloodlines through the generations, a form of addiction with an impact over multiple generations. Which is why the Critic needs the PCs. “It took you long enough. This is your world, now. You took it from us when you began to mine and refine Gold. Now, you must live up to that responsibility.”
• The irony wags a moving pen: There’s a certain irony in that last idea, given the situation, which makes this idea relevant as well. The interpretation that came to mind when I read it was the exact phrase given above, minus the initial “the”: Irony wags a moving pen.
  • That gave me the idea of a God Of Irony, but until I had done the earlier refinement work, I had no idea of his role. Now it’s clear that he sets the quest to find the Critic and rescue the spell that the minions have captured.
  • There is also a certain Irony in the notion of the death of the Celestial Elemental being the D&D equivalent of the Big Bang.

The Adventure

The basic idea of the adventure has now taken shape. It still needs some details and polish, but here’s the outline:

Act I

1. One night, it begins to rain. The rain pools unnaturally, forming dozens of Elemental Water Golems. The PCs encounter one, and (barely) manage to defeat it in a suitably-public confrontation. That marks the PCs out.
2. Over the next few days, they hear that a lot more of these Elemental Golems appeared at the same time as their encounter, but others who confronted them were not as skilled or lucky, and the Golems escaped. Where they are now, and what they are doing, remain unknown.
3. Given the seriousness of the situation, A King/ruling noble to whom at least one PC is obligated, summons the PCs to serve as his strong right arm during the crisis.
4. The PCs barely managed to defeat one, they will have no hope of defeating a group- not unless they can obtain some sort of advantage.
5. The night they arrive, the minions “steal the sky”.

Act II

6. The next day, they are sent to find out what a particular Mage has been able to determine about the situation. He claims the magic involved is not Arcane, it’s Clerical, and directs the PCs (and the royal representative who has accompanied them) to the Temple Of (Athena?).
7. The High Priest Of The Temple has attempted to dispel the strange clouds, and even begged his (Mistress?) to intercede directly, without success. Perhaps the Great Druid will have more success; weather magics are amongst his specialties, after all.
8. The Great Druid reports a similar lack of effectiveness over the phenomenon. He suggests a summit between the Religious leaders, Mages, and himself – “Perhaps if we all put our heads together, we can make some progress….”
9. The PCs & escort return to the city, and the King orders to convene the Summit the next day. He puts the PCs in charge of it.
10. The next afternoon, the High Priest challenges the accuracy of the Mage’s findings and the Summit devolves into a mess of accusation and counter-accusation. An early dinner break is eventually called to let people cool off.
11. During the meal, a breathless and exhausted messenger arrives from a neighboring city; he has ridden three mounts to death since midnight to bring word of a strange event in the skies over his city. The second part of the sygil has appeared, and if the pattern holds true, a third city will be visited by this phenomenon tonight.
12. After the meal, the King issues direct instructions to each of the factions: they are to use every skill at their disposal to learn everything they can, overnight, and report back to the throne tomorrow morning.
13. The next morning, the Summit reconvenes with grim news. The priests appear to have been cut off from all divine advice and interaction, and are in a deep Funk. Spells seem unaffected but have proven unable to learn anything more about the phenomenon, only that it appears to be incomplete. Any request for advice, guidance, or information from the Gods merely returns the phrase, “Tua quaestio est, leva planctum non sufficit ad respondendum irrisorie,” which is a language that none of the priests know. Even requests and spells to translate the message have failed. “The Gods have abandoned us.”
14. The Druids have learned that that the Magic appears to have some sort of Temporal Component, that the animals and plants within their domain have all expressed fear, but that a few brave ones observed men of water working a ritual of some kind near a third city, which last night suffered a similar phenomenon.
15. To the PCs, that should confirm paranoid suspicions about the Elemental Golems and their activities.
16. The mages fared somewhat better, using Scrying to observe the pattern which materialized over (third city) last night, and over the second event which began the night before. Combining the three shows clear overlaps and connecting lines. By their estimation, the complete pattern is a magical sygil of some kind being erected in six
    parts, and that they have been able to identify one word clearly, written in Draconic. Loosely translated, it means “The inevitable consequence of yesterdays and yesterdays” – Draconic is a very concise but flowery language.
17. That suggests to the King that the PCs should consult a Dragon. The nearest one would be the most convenient. “Does anyone know where to find one?” Once again, instructions are handed out by the throne. The Mages are to continue monitoring, compiling each new part of the magical construction and attempting to interpret it; perhaps more clues will be revealed. The Priests are to snap out of it and search through their archives for any previous occasion when the Gods fell silent – there may be a connection. In particular, they should search archives that were so old that their content is forgotten and anything deemed so incoherent that it was set aside – the smallest fragment might suddenly make sense in this new context and provide a valuable clue. The Druids are to send word out through their network of animal friends – where is the nearest dragon? The PCs are to accompany the Druids, and as soon as the nearest Dragon is found, they are to travel to it and bargain for its aid.

Act III

18. The PC’s accompany the Druids back to their grove and watch as clouds of birds and fast-running creatures are summoned and tasked with discovering the whereabouts of the nearest Dragon and returning, as quickly as possible.
19. That night, the Mages send word that a fourth city has been visited. They are working to assemble more of the completed message, but there appear to have been no great revelations.

.

20. The following afternoon, their winged agents begin reporting back to the Druids. Every Dragon in [name of Kingdom] appears to have gone to ground in hidden bolt-holes when the first sign appeared in the sky. Some abandoned half-eaten prey or turned aside from a raid. Their reactions indicate that they know something, that it’s not good news, and there are even suggestions that they were afraid. What could scare all the Dragons this way? The site where the nearest one was last known to live – all the local animals knew to avoid it – was not far away. The PCs could travel there and back again in less than a day, though it’s probably too late to set out now; if they leave immediately, they might reach it before sunset, but would not be able to return until tomorrow.
21. If the PCs dare to brave the lair of a missing dragon, with the intent to linger overnight, they can travel to it and discover that the Dragon has abandoned its hoard, and is something of a poet, scratching verse into the walls of the cavern regarding its love-hate relationship with the precious metal; “it shines with such beauty but gets into the blood”. This will probably be misinterpreted to refer to the love of collecting such valuables, treating “gets in the blood” as a metaphor. This is also the PCs opportunity to power up for their next encounter with the Elemental Golems, three of which appear to be guarding the hoard. With the power-ups, they should be able to again eke out a narrow victory. If they choose to ignore the Dragon’s Lair or the Hoard, they will barely manage to escape with their lives when the trio attack.
22. If they chose not to brave the lair, another opportunity for them to power-up will arise later.
23. When they return to the Druids, they find a message waiting from the High Priest, which reads only, “A Miracle has occurred! Come immediately.”
24. When they reach the Temple, they learn that in desperation, one of the acolytes undertook to ask the advice of each individual deity that he had ever heard of. This would normally be cause for severe disciplinary action, but the lapse will be forgiven and forgotten this time, because he got a response from one, an obscure deity named Momus, god of Irony, Satire, and Mockery. In fact, it seems that all the obscure responses received before they left were from him, it seeming amusing to him to communicate in a form that made communications impossible. It actually said, when he deigned to translate, “Your question is, ironically, not ironic enough to answer.” He won’t answer questions put to him by the Priests, because their task is to interface with the Gods, making his position ironic; he will, however, deign to speak to the people who have been charged with acting and not listening. That, in his opinion, is you.
25. Roleplay the encounter with Momus, who dresses like a medieval fool or jester. His avatar is always capering about, and telling jokes (often with a wry observation at their heart) [these may need to be prepped in advance].
    • When asked about the other gods, the PCs will be told that they are in hiding, in fear for their lives, and so unable to guide those on whom their survival depends. Ironic, isn’t it?
    • When asked about Dragons, he will tell them that the one they seek is not far from them; he is the Critic, the Dissatisfied, the Poet Of Critique, and heir to the Draconic Legacy; but before he can rescue them from their situation, they will need to rescue him; he is guarded by six of the minions of the enemy. This is no coincidence; it was his presence that caused the first appearance of the Minions to occur in and around the city of [name], and that, ironically, is what caused you [the PCs] to become entwined in this situation.
    • When asked outright what the situation is, he will answer that he could answer, because it would be ironic to get the aid they need from The Guide so that they no longer needed him, only to find from the answers that they needed him anyway, but there is, ironically, a propriety involved that inhibits him. All that he can do is to give them directions to The Guide; he is the one who would die to protect the information that he holds, even though it is worthless if he cannot give it to them. Momus will then fade out except for a Cheshire-cat smile, vanishing with a final, “Ironic, that…”.

Act IV:

26. The fifth night will come and go before the PCs can start their rescue mission.
27. Following the directions given to them by Momus, the PCs can find and rescue the Critic, who is chained in chains of hardened ice that cause his limbs to lose mechanical control, because he is a creature of Fire (a Red Dragon). To rescue him, they need to break his chains and hold off the six Elemental Golems until more than 200′ away or the PCs destroy one of them.
28. When one of the Golems is destroyed, or it becomes clear that they can’t recapture the Critic, they will merge into a larger Elemental Golem and attempt to kill him. Ironically, because the merged being is only about 3 times as powerful, though restored to triple the hit points no matter how damaged any or all of them were, and with some new abilities (stretchable reach, for example), the merged being is actually more vulnerable than the individuals were, and is slower-moving. The PCs may or may or may not be able to defeat it, that doesn’t matter; they will be able to (eventually) escape it.
29. The Critic will then critique their performance while leading them to his nearby lair, and learn their story. He will invite the PCs to help themselves to anything that might be of assistance when they get there, because things are about to get a lot more difficult. He will also discuss the ironic tragedy of the Draconic condition, because it’s relevant. NB: This is the same lair that they were given the chance to visit/loot in scene 21.
30. When the PCs get to the lair, they can power-up, and rest and recover overnight (night six; the spell’s parts will now be complete).
31. That evening, they will then be briefed on the history of the Elemental God, and his exile by the Greater Dragons, and the danger that his escape poses to all existence, and informed that it is their duty as representatives of their race to deal with the menace.
32. He will instruct them on how to use the unified spell being copied down by the Mages back in [city].(without their knowing that this is what they are doing) to launch themselves back into the Time Before There Was Time to confront the mad God while he is weakened and before he can escape.
33. The next morning, the PCs return to the Capital and report to the King and the slowly-unifying Summit what they have learned. Each of the participating groups – will offer the PCs anything further that they have which might improve their chances of success. The mages present a rendering of the spell that has been constructed by the Elemental Golems, and preparations are made in to invoke it; the PCs need to wait until the Elemental Deity does the hard work, because the more that he does, the weaker he will be when confronted.
34. That night, the six patterns are brought together and activated. The PCs activate their spell, and are sucked into the past…

Act V

35. The PCs travel into Pre-time. Describe the journey. Describe the Destination.
36. Meet the Mad God. He thinks it only appropriate that there are witnesses to his triumphant return, and will not initiate combat. However, he will be arrogant and condescending toward less life forces like the PCs.
37. The PCs realize (if they haven’t already) that the Mad God can succeed simply by waiting; he has no need (in his mind) to initiate conflict. The first move belongs to the PCs.
38. They attack, discovering that the Elemental God is like having one greater elemental wrapped in another, wrapped in another, wrapped in another, and so on – all kinds, not merely water. He is an undifferentiated elemental, just as the elemental planes
    were undifferentiated when he held sway. It was the creation of the Prime Material Plane that forced the elemental planes to differentiate, and that act is what he is intending to undo. Give the PCs the fight of their lives.
39. With the defeat and destruction of the Mad God, time starts, and reveals that contrary to the claims of every religion since the start of time, the creation of the Prime Material Plane – and of the Gods, and the Greater Dragons, and the differentiation of the Elemental Planes – took place spontaneously, triggered by the shock-wave created by the death of the Elemental God. And that’s the last thing they see, as they are rendered unconscious by that same shock-wave.
40. They awaken back in the Kingdom from which they departed, surrounded by the King, his advisers, and the newly-permanent Summit, which intends to meet weekly to discuss issues that may arise. End of Adventure.

So that’s it – an adventure in 39 scenes, somewhere close to being ready-to-play. From eight lines of direct observation:

The sausage fries in the pan,
Two birds fly across the sky,
The critic complains about irony,
A dog wags its tail,
A moving pen writes on the page,
Sand falls through the hourglass,
Rain collects in the bucket,
Moon-rise banishes the dark.

– and the power of Buzzstorming.

P.S. – A couple of final notes

That’s where this article was originally supposed to end. But while formatting it for publication, I was required to re-read sections of it multiple times, and had a pertinent afterthought or two.

First, even though the example is D&D-related, the process works with any genre. It’s all in the way in which the curated phrases are interpreted. You could start with the same phrases and end up with a completely different adventure, or with one that is more-or-less a direct translation.

Second, it’s easy to incorporate any metagame or big-picture campaign content by listing it in bullet-point form at the top of the curated list. For example, if one of the PCs – let’s name him Darvon – had announced that he wanted to get his armor repaired, cleaned, and polished at the end of the previous adventure, that’s easy enough to write into the opening scene, and gives some guidance as to where the PCs are and what they are doing at the start of the adventure. If there was some ongoing villain lurking in the shadows – one of the King’s advisers – it would be easy (once prompted to do so) for him to complicate various scenes that take place in the capital; all you need is the reminder of his presence as a complicating factor. Because there is none of that, this is a very standalone adventure.

Third, I wanted to call out the way the example incorporates big-picture campaign background and concepts. These may not make a whole lot of difference in terms of this adventure or any other, but if you can do that in virtually every adventure (even if it’s just a historical figure here or a famous landmark there), you keep expanding the game world in the eyes and minds of the players, keeping it and the campaign set within it, more fresh and exciting. The only trap to beware of in doing so is to make sure that you don’t introduce anything whose presence would (a) have made a difference to an earlier adventure; and (b) will contradict anything else already incorporated. For example, though no opportunity arose to bring it out in the plot outline, there was an implication in the adventure that the differentiation between the different types of magic – Clerical, Arcane, Druidic, and so on – is both profound and also a result of the “Big Bang” effect initiated by the PCs. This may yield insights that matter later in the campaign, but it seemed to be a distraction, one too many background elements for that part of the adventure to bear.

Another point to highlight: just because the tradition is for PCs to get most of their rewards for an adventure at the end, there can be advantages to handing them out in the middle. For one thing, where they represent a significant power-boost, they can bootstrap the PCs into a position where they are ready to face the challenges that were virtually impossible before that upgrade.

Fifth, it might seem like a lot of the adventure proposed is a railroad track. That’s because I always find it easier to draw a straight line between problem and solution through the story when planning; but just because that’s the optimum path to the solution, that doesn’t mean it’s the only one; it simply gives you a basis for comparing what the players want to do with that optimum so that you can assess the consequences of PC choices. Just because you’ve backstopped an idea into the mouth of an NPC, doesn’t mean that a player can’t make an intuitive leap and get the kudos for his insight. Where there’s one solution to a problem, there are usually several, and some may be even more effective than what you had thought of. Nothing wrong with that, in fact that’s half the fun for the GM. This sort of GM’s plan is nothing more than a series of best-guesses of how the adventure will turn out in the end. In fact, in a real campaign, I would have some idea of the capabilities and styles of both players and PCs and have incorporated that knowledge into the plan to “customize” it for that particular group, ensuring an even distribution of screen time.

And finally, I wanted to call attention to the most remarkable thing about Act II: that Act I sets the players up to expect a particular challenge and then completely subverts that into a completely different type of problem with completely different skills required. This is another way in which to enlarge the scale and interconnectedness of the game universe, showing that EVERY problem usually has multiple facets and approaches. This is the plan that assumes the least, leaving the maximum scope for player innovation and insight, nothing more.

“He skulked down the alleyway, blending into the shadows and taking care to avoid the occasional patche of loose cobblestones…”   Sounds good, doesn’t it. Sounds literary, the way you would read – or write – it in a novel or short story. Let’s translate that into typical Game dialogue, and see how well it stacks up.

Image courtesy freeimages.com / Thomas Pate Note that this image has been heavily modified by Mike for illustrative purposes.

 
Sounds lifeless, doesn’t it? Perhaps if we also incorporate the bit with the cobblestones, by continuing the scene:
 

 
No, that’s just made the problem bigger by having more of it.

Juicier Narrative?

Perhaps if the GM takes some advice from my 2014 series, ‘The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative‘, and from the more recent article, Narratives Of Skill: How To ?Improv? Outcome Descriptions In Advance? Let’s try it.
 

 
Well, that’s definitely better. More immersive, it paints a picture for the player and even sneaks in a lot of background information and setting description. The player now knows that it’s night (he probably did already), has a graphic sense of it being overcast with moody breaks in the clouds through which the moon occasionally shines, knows that the walls of the alley are made of red brick, has a bit of information on city maintenance practices, and has received a hint that this alley has seen unusually heavy traffic – perhaps from wagons making deliveries, perhaps from something else.

The word count is revealing: The GM’s dialogue in the initial example was 38 words; in the revised version, it has risen to 98 words. So 38 words conveyed the necessary instructions and basic information to the player, and 60 more have been used to convey both the added color and all that extra information.

Precision Skill Definitions

There is nothing technically incorrect in the dialogue. The GM is using the character’s skills and abilities to assess success or failure, in a way that’s appropriate for those skills and abilities. But do you really need to ask for three die rolls for such a simple sequence?

That necessity has arisen from the way the GM is interpreting the rules. He is assuming that each skill or ability does exactly what it says on the tin, or in the Player’s Handbook, to be more precise, and no more.

His way of thinking is, “Fishing is the skill of using a rod and reel, and/or a net, to catch fish. If you want to know how to clean and filet them for cooking, you need a cooking skill. If you want to make your own lures, that’s a craft skill. If you want to repair a broken fishing rod or torn net, and it’s not explicitly included in the fishing skill, that’s a couple of different craft skills.”

This is an example of Precision Skill Interpretation, and there are game systems that expect the GM to take this approach. There are even times when it’s advantageous to the simulation of reality; this is especially true in modern and futuristic times.

Take, for example, the rules system that I use for my superhero games.

• Stats come in two varieties: Primary, which are simply bought with character points, and Secondary, which have base values calculated from Primary stats. (There is a third category, “Tertiary”, which are calculated from both Primary and Secondary stats, but that isn’t relevant here).
• Each of these generates a stat check value which the character rolls against to make, say, a STR check.
• Stat Check values are also used to calculate base levels in Aptitudes, which represent a character’s innate ability in certain broad areas, e.g. “Linguistic Aptitude”, “Numeric Aptitude”.
• Aptitudes are used to calculate base levels in 55 specific Fundamental Skills, place limits on how much those skills cost to improve, and determine how much such improvements cost. These are skills that everyone has to some degree, like “Digging” or “Running” or “Draw Weapon”.
• Basic Expert Skills, also known as Common Expert Skills, are skills that not everyone gets. They have a base value, improvement limits, and costs, that are derived from a combination of Aptitudes and Fundamental Skills. In fact, what defines an Expert Skill is that it is based on a Fundamental Skill. They include things like Acting, Bureaucracy, Seduction, and Persuasion.
• Advanced Expert Skills are just like Basic Expert Skills except that they derive, in part, from one or more Basic Expert Skills, in addition to Aptitudes and Fundamental Skills. Characters rarely have very many of these.
• All expert skills also have the option for the character to buy a specialty, which is a bonus in a specific subtopic within the skill. A historian might buy a specialty in 19th century France, for example, or in the 19th century in general, or in France in general. All specialties cost the same price, but the definition (by the player constructing the character) dictates how big a bonus the specialty provides in answering specific questions or accomplishing specific tasks. In theory, it’s possible to buy specialties in Fundamental Skills as well, but we’ve never found a case where it wasn’t more useful to define such as new Expert skills.

The reason for the multiple layers is to firebreak each layer. In the past, every time a stat was improved, all the skills had to be recalculated; now, such improvements are restricted in impact to the immediate level below. It takes a far bigger change than ever occurs during normal stat improvement in the course of play to have an impact large enough to transmit further down, except in terms of increasing what the lower tier can be improved to.

All told, the system lists more than 1,000 skills, and is capable of distinguishing between a character with Applied Organic Chemistry specializing in Pheromones or Perfumes and an Industrial Applied Organic Chemist who designs chemical manufacturing plants and processes, defining how much knowledge they have in common, and how much knowledge and expertise is only possessed by one of them.

For campaigns where scientific specialties are important, such a system works very well, compartmentalizing and categorizing every task or field of knowledge (the details were actually derived from the course structures laid out in my University Degree Curriculum references).

For campaign settings where that is not the case, Precision Skill Interpretation is not the right answer.

Holistic Skill Interpretation

Let’s go back to the Fisherman example. What if skill in Fishing implied that you not only knew how to use rod and reel, but how to make your own lures, fix a broken rod, know how much fishing line should cost, and how to clean fish ready for cooking?

The skills are bucket lists that contain everything related to the subject that is not explicitly defined as being part of a seperate skill.

A Stealth Check includes things like awareness of the environment and any hazards to successfully achieving the goal of moving covertly from one place to another, especially if it is an environment and location that the character knows well.

Those three rolls in the Alleyway example described earlier become one, reducing the unnecessary verbiage and delays to play, heightening the experience and the immersion within it.
 

 
A far more cinematic and engaging result. The player has time to digest what he’s being told without being distracted by additional die rolls, can focus more on what the character is trying to do, and look at the bigger picture being painted in words by the GM. The game will run more smoothly, more quickly, and be more satisfying to everyone involved.

In Case Of Emergency, Break Glass

We’ve all encountered situations in which a player has made a catastrophically bad roll. There are two ways to look at the original three-die-roll situation: either as inherently limiting the scope of one bad or good roll, so that overall performance more closely matches the overall capability levels of the character, or as increasing the opportunities for such extreme outcomes three-fold.

Both interpretations have a kernel of validity, but make assumptions that simply aren’t universally valid.

Let’s say that the player makes a catastrophically-bad roll for his initial “Sneak”. First question: will running with that result destroy/ruin the campaign? Second question: will running with that result destroy/ruin the adventure?

If neither answer is yes, run with the “comedy of errors” that results. And if the player complains, tell them to thank their lucky stars that the catastrophic roll didn’t happen on a more important occasion.

Even if the answer to one of the questions is yes, we’re still not at battle stations. Third question: can you think of a way to avoid these cataclysms while still permitting the player the full “catastrophically bad roll” experience?

If the answer to question three is yes, there’s no problem – simply put your contingency plans into effect (even if you’ve only just thought of them). But, if not, you still aren’t up the creek without a paddle.

You can always shift gears to a multiple-roll plan – in the case of the example, Spot + DEX save – in the event of a catastrophically bad (or good) result, limiting the impact only when you really need to do so.

The Lazy GM

It’s not often the case, but there is one interpretation in which the term “Lazy GM” can be a compliment. It can mean not doing anything more than you absolutely need to. Drop the PCs in an area that is adventure-potential rich and let the players write the adventure with their choices. Do a lot of broad outlines and bullet-point ideas, catalog and structure them so that you can quickly find the right one, and only develop the ones that you actually need just before you need them.

The less time you spend on irrelevancies, the more time you have to spend on polishing the things that really matter, or taking care of the real-world tasks that might otherwise get in the way of game prep to the point that you feel it necessary to give up the hobby (don’t tell me it will never happen, I’ve seen it more than 50 times, and can safely presume that it’s happened in at least another 40 cases – out of 102 gamers that were active in the hobby a couple of decades ago. Heck, I’ve been forced to ask the question myself a time or two in the last 40+ years of gaming).

For other ways to deal with emergencies and catastrophes like critically-bad or good die rolls at exactly the wrong time, check out A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies.

Big-Picture Memoranda

There’s one tool that can help answer those questions: Big Picture Memoranda. Look, I don’t know how you structure your adventures, in general terms; I use a structure like that shown to the left, at least most of the time.

For a long time, I’ve advocated and used the one-line synopsis as an adventure-development tool (and for just about everything else that I write – refer One Word At A Time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post. So I start with a one-line synopsis of the adventure, from which I produce one-line synopses of the introduction, each part or phase of the adventure, and any epilogue or afterword. I then use the one-line summaries of each part to write one-line summaries of each act of the main adventure. Then I use the one-line adventures of each act to break that act down into scenes, and finally, use those one-line summaries to write one-line summaries of the different elements of the content – who, where, and so on. The only things that might not be self-evident on the structure shown are “flags” and “bits”. “Flags” are content that only happens under certain circumstances, for example a PC asking a key question or making a skill roll, and “Bits” are instructions to the GM, for example to go directly to a scene if “X” happens. Oh yes, “GM’s Notes” deal with any setup (such as taking a specific book for a photographic reference) and “Metagame” is dealing with any rules questions that came up during play and handing out XP and things like that.

Once the entire adventure has been broken down in this fashion, it’s relatively easy to actually write, because you have detailed information on how each building block fits together to create the adventure.

Unfortunately, once you’ve finished, it can be hard to find the forest for the trees. If you’re like me, you’ll have preserved a copy of the one-line synopses, but trying to go through that to find what you’re looking for can take too long.

The solution is to preserve copies of some of these one-line synopses at the top of each building block. How does this adventure relate to the campaign big picture? How does this act relate to the adventure as a whole? How does the scene relate to either of these things? I don’t preserve them all – just the ones that are significant, as reminders. So that if any scene takes an unexpected turn, I know how that scene is supposed to fit into each of these bigger pictures, and can immediately assess the impact of the unexpected event. That’s a “big-picture memoranda” or “BigPic Memo” for short.

It means that if a scene is supposed to introduce an NPC who will become a significant enemy down the track, but who is a relative nobody right now, if the PCs do something significant with the potential to change their relationship to the NPC, I can adjust plans accordingly. It’s a cliche but not far from the truth: No plan survives contact with the PCs. Not theirs, and not yours!

A Holistic interpretation of the skills within the game permits a temporary retreat into precision when you need to use it to save your metaplot-bacon. Starting off from the precision interpretation removes that weapon from your arsenal; there are other benefits in some campaigns that justifies that cost, so a precision interpretation should not be ruled out, out-of-hand; but it should always be part of your GMing approach for a reason.

But too many GMs, and too many players, seem to think that it’s the only game in town. Well, now you know better – spread the word by making intelligently justified choices in your games!

Image Credit: via 3dman_eu at Pixabay.com, licenced as CC0 Public Domain

“Lessons From The West Wing” is a series of occasional articles inspired by the Television Series. I have several of these tucked away in development, and every now and then, prompted by watching the series for the umpteenth time or by relevant world events, I will dust one off and put it out there.

I doubt that the title of this article will mean anything to most readers at first glance, but once you’ve read it, I hope that it is a sufficiently memorable phrase that you will never forget it!

Let’s start, as usual, with some context. Bear with me, it’s relevant.

There’s been a major debate over energy policy taking place in Australia recently. I won’t bore you with the ins-and-outs, but the ideological stance being taken by the party in government, based on something called the Finkel Report, included the statement that electricity should be as cheap as possible for business, so that they can remain competitive, protecting the jobs that already exist as well as increasing the prospects for future expansion. Oh, and “by the way,” the recommended policies would also reduce electricity prices for ordinary consumers – if the report is truly the holy grail of energy policies that it claims to be.

And that got me to thinking, and to playing Devil’s Advocate. Why?

One of the problems that we face is that despite everything looking relatively rosy and prosperous, economically, wages growth and employment growth have stagnated, retail confidence remains poor, and standards of living are actually starting to fall. In such a climate, protecting the status quo is the defensive move of a government paranoid about the winds of economic fortune, a government that knows that it is in trouble, electorally.

They are right to be concerned. Their popularity is at an all-time low, the level of trust in the government similarly catastrophic, and the only thing offering hope right now is that the opposition party have, of late, fallen into the trap of playing partisan politics, of being an opposition first and true to their ideology second. Nevertheless, were an election to be held tomorrow, polling (usually pretty right in this country) says there would be a massive swing and a profound change of government – to an opposition that is looking less and less ready to function in that capacity.

So, what’s the alternative? What would happen if, as a former Prime Minister from the same party (and equally as unpopular as the current leadership, politically) has advocated, the primary focus should be about making domestic electricity prices as low as possible?

Well, consumers would have more money in their pockets, and a lot of that would then get spent, stimulating the retail economy. But higher electricity prices for industry would mean that products that are energy-dependent, especially manufactured goods, would rise in price, and some industries might even become unable to compete with overseas sources. Overall, though, wages would go up, and then – right after people got used to having more money to spend – prices would go up by the same amount. Cash flow through the economy would tick up, though, and that would enable wages growth claims to have some justification. On the whole, every area of the economy that is currently in trouble would be given a kick-start, with the big picture changing not all that much – the amount of money going into the energy providers would remain about the same, but instead of dividing the cash flow up into two separate strands – industrial and domestic consumption – the result is a longer but economically stronger single strand in which money flows to consumers, from consumers to retail, from retail to industry, and from industry to power supplier.

Our much-reviled former prime minister might just be right, this time – for all the wrong reasons, as usual – but because he’s the one espousing this position, no-one is listening seriously enough.

The problem is that everyone’s position has become ideologically entrenched – provided that you accept the notion that opposing the government, no matter what they do, is an acceptable opposition ideology.

The Bigger Picture

This is by no means a problem confined to the Australian shores. From the time of the rise of the Tea Party in the US, Republicans increasingly adopted that ideological premise, no matter how hard the Democrats tried to negotiate an acceptable compromise. Increasingly, they opposed and blocked almost everything simply because it was coming from a Democrat-held White House. I was quite astonished to read, during coverage of the recent budgetary discussion over HR 5235, how long it had been since the US had passed an actual budget instead of a continuing resolution.

Some readers might not know or understand the difference. In a nutshell, a budget spells out exactly how much the government can actually spend in the coming year, subdivided by purpose into different government departments. A continuing resolution is a watered down temporary emergency budget, with various departments often funded at a fraction of what they would expect to receive in a full budget. It provides money for a quarter, three short months. I understand (but don’t quote me) that most government departments got about 92 or 94% of their estimates from the last continuing resolution, the bill (HR5235) mentioned above. Continuing Resolutions are a political stopgap intended to keep the government functioning until a full budget can be passed – so there is an inherent assumption in the very concept that a budget will be passed.

The last budget that was fully passed by a US Government, so far as I can tell from this Wikipedia Page, was either in 2011 or 2013!

You actually see the hardening of ideological entrenchment in country after country as you become aware of their politics. I saw it in the Greek Government Debt Crisis, in the positioning over Brexit, and on and on.

In RPGs

I’ve seen something similar happen in RPGs when it comes to politics, as well. The PCs are confronted with a problem, but the politics are simplified to the point of being monochromatic black-and-white.

There’s an evil half-brother to the King, plotting to seize the throne, for example. Half-brother bad, King Good, end of story.

Real life is never so black and white.

If you’ve read and followed the advice from this blog (and others) over the years, you may have nuanced a little smudge of gray here and there – for example, making the King in question less able in some critical policy area or areas than the half-brother. This not only makes the half-brother more credible as a possible ruler, it provides an area of distinction that justifies his belief that he would make a better ruler than the incumbent. This leads into a deeper exploration of the limitations of the monarchist system and hereditary nobility, creating additional interest for the players, and enabling the NPCs to be involved in adventures in more than one way – the half-brother, usually an enemy of the PCs, who align with the King, can show up in one of the other four iconic roles of the AERO structure, making him more an element of the world at large, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but never something to be ignored, and enlarging the storytelling tapestry no end.

But even then, it’s easy for GMs to fall into the same trap of ideological entrenchment projected onto a situation or character within the game.

No Easy Answers

In politics, both in-game as in real life, there should be no black-and-white, no 100% right answers. That’s too easy, and makes things to simple – and too simplistic. Whether or not a given policy, response, position, or opinion is right or not should depend on how it impacts the individual voicing the opinion, the nation they govern or wish to govern, and the citizens that they represent. Every point of view should have at least a crumb of credibility, no matter how deeply buried.

But achieving that is often not easy, because the GM will always have his own personal opinions, and doing this properly inherently challenges the GM to justify those opinions to the themselves, and potentially to others.

I make no pretense about my personal inclination toward socially-progressive politics and policies, for example, though you would be reasonably hard-put-to-it to be able to determine that from most of my articles, which are as politically-agnostic as I can make them. In the US, I would probably vote Democrat 90% of the time or more.

You achieve that political agnosticism by continually asking, “what’s the price?,” “what’s the downside?,” “what are the assumptions?,” “how can they be tested?,” and “what’s the kernel of truth in positions in opposition?”

Every political position or policy espoused by a character in an RPG should have to run this gamut. These always represent a choice, from which some will benefit and others suffer. The question is always how to reconcile these divergent opinions.

It’s easy to suggest, for example, that free speech should be absolute. But with that position come a number of thorny questions that aren’t so easy to resolve. Religious opinions expressed in classrooms. Texts that promote violence, prejudice, and intolerance. The social media “echo chamber”. “Fake News” and the ability of commentators and editors to manipulate public opinion in the guise of reporting facts.

It’s also easy to suggest that as a defensive mechanism against such manipulation, one should operate from the perspective that every news report lies, or is (at best) slanted in this direction or that. Sometimes, there is such distortion – Fox News is notoriously perceived as pro-conservative, for example – but that doesn’t mean that they are .always right or always wrong. In Australia, we have Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, and Steve Price, and our own version of Fox News. It’s rare for me to agree with Bolt, slightly less rare for me to agree with Jones, and more frequent for me to be forced to concede that Price has a good point to make on an issue. My opinions more frequently align with, or are shaped by, Waleed Aly, who represents the other side of the political debate. (If you haven’t seen his “What ISIS Wants”, I can’t urge you strongly enough to . It reshaped and developed many of my opinions on Terrorism and how we should respond to it, and in the world that we continue to live in, the insight it offers is something we can all use.

Each of these broadcasters has their ardent admirers, and for many, the balance of credibility falls in the other direction.

Lessons From The West Wing

As GM, you have an omniscient and omnipotent position with respect to your game world. You should not cheapen that power and authority by demonizing one perspective universally.

This is a lesson that I learned from watching The West Wing (Wikipedia Page, Complete Series on Amazon. Although the overall slant of the series was Progressive, the only Conservatives (and Democrats, for that matter) who were actually demonized within the series were those who ideologically entrenched themselves or placed themselves ahead of their offices in importance.

As one Republican notably said when reviewing the series, “I hate the politics but I love the show!” (or words to that effect).

No political faction held a monopoly on the truth. No political party was all bad, or all pristine. What mattered more was the individual – were they ethical, were the honest, were they trustworthy, were they honest representatives of their constituency, did they make an effort to see the big picture, were they willing to listen and give a fair hearing to opposition positions?

Issue-By-Issue Decisions

And it wasn’t just person-by-person. Everybody had their blind spots, everybody had their ideological foundations, everybody had positions on which they were right and positions on which they were wrong – and couldn’t necessarily see it.

That’s the sort of mindset that the GM needs to hold with respect to every NPC in a game when it comes to their politics.

But that is easier said than done.

The Real Challenge

It’s not really all that difficult to get this far. There may be a stretching of your mental muscles, a certain opening of your own political awareness that comes from deliberately exploring for the validity of the opposing position, but it’s not that big a step from what you are (hopefully) already doing.

The real challenge is creating this diversity of perspectives within a character while still keeping that character internally consistent as a character.

Characterization is the Key

My secret to doing so is to have the perspectives on an issue derive from the characterization of the character.

A character who is a strong believer in military preparedness and preemptive force – a ‘hawk,’ to use the 1970s vernacular – will be Conservative in orientation on military issues. If the rest of that character is more progressive in attitude, then that’s enough for him to stand out; if he is principally a conservative already, then this needs to go further to achieve the same distinctiveness, which opens the character up to having a blind spot on the issue, an inherent belief that the military can do no wrong and if an intervention fails or misfires it’s the fault of excessive restriction placed on them by a civilian authority.

In effect, consistency of characterization is an emergent property that results from viewing the character from a metagame perspective that incorporates more than is shown in any single appearance in the course of play.

Another Example

Here’s another example from just the last couple of days. One of the most divisive and populist Members of Parliament in Australian Politics is Pauline Hanson. Yesterday, while announcing that her party had done a deal to pass a divisive school funding bill, she called for Autistic Children to be removed from mainstream school classes, suggesting that teachers spend too much time caring for such children when they should be teaching at a pace the majority could cope with, while the children themselves should be classed seperately and given special attention.

As you can see from the randomly-selected page of twitter comments in response below, this did not go over well with a lot people.

Today, she commented that people were misinterpreting her statements because of biased newspaper headlines which employed selective quotation to distort her views. This prompted a further series of attacks, pointing out that most people got their information from television news, which showed her actual statements, and that others had obtained the full press release of her statements to form the basis of their opinions and that those opinions did not differ from those who had not. So this defense doesn’t stack up, and only damages her already tarnished credibility.

But that’s beside the point. Let’s look at this policy suggestion critically, as you need to do if you want an NPC to pronounce something similar, or even to have a government contraversially enact it within your game.

Do autistic children require additional attention? Yes, undoubtedly. Does this additional attention impact on the teacher’s ability to educate the other children? In terms of a curriculum, it has to – a teacher has only so much time to go around. A regular debate in politics in Australia (and elsewhere, I’m sure) is “what is an acceptable classroom size?” based on the premise that a teacher has only so much time for one-on-one attention to students. So there is some rational basis for the position, no matter how loathsome anyone might find it.

Pesumably, then, those opposing the proposal (and, for the record, I’m one of them) see some other educational value to integration. Like tolerance and social experience – and that totally ignores reports that I think I remember showing that such children learn more effectively and more quickly in such an environment, while placing them in “specia classes” slows their education to that of the least able student in that classroom. Nor are there any studies of which I’m aware proving significant reductions in educational breadth and quality from the inclusion of such students.

Anyone with an informed opinion on the subject is therefore prioritizing one outcome over another as “more desirable.” My personal opinion does so, too. Understanding that validity permits me to attack more robustly and to defend my position more effectively. It certainly enables me to GM an an NPC who advocates such views in spite of any contrary opinions I might personally have. Remember, too, that the NPC’s reasons don’t have to be sound ones; they might be misinformed, bigoted, corrupt, loathsome, or simply employing flawed reasoning or poor sources of information. But my presentation of such an NPC is more effective even if that’s the case if I’m aware of the nuggets of underlying truth.

Bilateral Political Incorrectness

Which brings me back to the title of this article, and my hopes that it will encapsulate these principles in a single mnemonic.

Bilateral – applies to both/all sides when it comes to any single issue or policy or political party or organization…

Political Incorrectness – …are equally capable of being right or wrong, depending on the circumstances, and from the point of view of someone who is personally affected, one way or the other.

An infusion of Bilateral Political Incorrectness into a campaign embellishes it with richness, depth, complexity, nuance, sensitivity, logic, issue awareness, and personal growth. It can be difficult at times when a character adopts a position that you personally have a fundamental disagreement with, but when that happens you have to “dig” until you discover the underlying truth, the kernel of “rightness” that makes that position rational, given the character’s experiences and how they have shaped him or her. But those rewards are worth a bit of effort.

Sorry to everyone for the delay in posting – I got so caught up in writing another article that this one completely slipped my mind!

Based on an Image by Hypnoart via www.Pixabay.com License CC0 Public Domain

This is being written a little under the deadline pump; I’m still playing catch-up from my week away at the Family Reunion / 40th Birthday party for my nephew. So it may not quite live up to my usual standards, but I’ll do my best.

Actually, I’m cheating for a lot of this article, which is clearly a sequel to last month’s “Improvising An Adventure,” which was very well received. As a result of the experience that was discussed in that article, I’m currently looking at doing a campaign that’s all improv. I’ve started work on it, and this article will walk both readers and the players though at least some of the thought processes involved.

Game System

I have to admit that I still haven’t decided what game system to use. In fact, I haven’t ruled out writing a 1-2 page original on which to base the campaign. But I have thought about the selection criteria.

I don’t want the game mechanics to intrude on the game play. That’s the big thing for me at this point. I want simplicity and elegance and a lot of flexibility.

The game system is to be a vehicle for implementing the campaign concept, nothing more.

Campaign Concept

The basic notion is something of a cross between “Sliders” (Wikipedia page, Box Set via Amazon) and “Quantum Leap” (Wikipedia Page, Complete Series Box Set via Amazon). Two, or possibly 4 PCs, two players. The essential idea is that the PCs will be part of the test program for a time machine that goes horribly wrong because temporal theory is all wrong, or at least mutually contradictory. As a result, the characters will find themselves “bouncing” from one time period to another, getting involved in whatever is going on, and then moving on to the next adventure, which will take place in a completely different setting.

Character Fundamentals

My first thought was that the PCs would represent members of a team something like that in “Stargate SG 1” (Wikipedia Page, Complete Box Set on Amazon), but quickly realized that the military foundation would confine the scope of the roles open to the players, so I discarded that concept.

My second thought was that at least one of the characters would be an expert in temporal science, either an engineer or scientist. I definitely didn’t want that. I don’t want the campaign to be about the technology, or about the physics of time travel – I want all of that to be a black box, PCs go in, adventures come out.

So a key part of the Campaign Background will be addressing that restriction, justifying it. My inspiration for handling the issue comes from a relatively unknown TV series that I quite enjoyed (having stumbled across it by accident), “Seven Days” (Wikipedia Page, Box Set – probably unofficial, it has never been released officially according to this thread at GateWorld Forum – , ).

Unfortunately, the restriction in question isn’t described by the Wikipedia article, so I’ll have to do it here for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen the show. In a nutshell, not everyone can survive the trauma of time traveling – there’s a complex navigational challenge, the equivalent of flying a jet aircraft on a precision course while being subjected to extreme buffeting, high levels of G-forces, and random electrical shocks causing convulsions and involuntary muscle contractions. Most people, even most test pilots, can’t do it – in fact, at the start of the series, only one person has ever successfully functioned as a Chrononaut. In the second season, a second, backup Chrononaut was identified and the concept was repeatedly eroded thereafter in the interests of heightening the melodrama.

Beyond that, the characters need to be highly self-reliant because they are going to be cut off from home base (at least part of the time, I haven’t decided on the big picture in full yet).

Setting

This is to be pretty contemporaneous with the world around us. I might set it in 2018 or 2019 just to give myself some flexibility, but a key figure in the background and campaign introduction is going to be President Trump – I couldn’t resist the notion of exploring what he might do with a top-secret research project that, if it works, could give him a mechanism to reshape the world as he sees fit (or as he sees it).

At the same time, I don’t want this campaign to be about politics or anything like that – this is to be an action-adventure campaign.

Game Prep

The whole concept of this campaign is that there isn’t going to be any. I want to come up with the day’s adventure and any NPCs on the day, off the cuff. Part of the campaign concept is designed to absolutely minimize continuity.

The Alien Concepts

There are so many concepts involved in this campaign that are completely unlike my usual style and practices, and that’s a large part of the excitement. I don’t have a big finish pre-planned, in fact I don’t have anything planned! Everything exists as a linking element that ties together whatever situation I think of.

Technology Limitations

One of the key concepts required was going to be that each adventure would start with a clean slate, or close to it. Whatever the local technology that was available would be what the PCs would have to use, and they would have to acquire it locally. Time Travel was going to involve several limitations on what they could take with them, and one of the key decisions the players would have to make early on would be what their basic equipment was going to be.

Initially, I was going to be even more extreme in this area than I now plan to be – I was going to have the PCs go through the time warp (or whatever the framing mechanism was called) practically naked. I have retreated slightly from that line – they can now carry anything that makes direct contact with their bare skin or a metallicized uniform provided that it does not rely on chemical reactions of any kind, which behave abnormally during the transition process. No guns, no explosives, not even a match, no batteries or advanced electrical devices, and nothing that protrudes more than half an inch from their persons.

All this restriction has a key impact on the game system, in that an awful lot of most of them won’t be needed.

PC Motivation

Why should the PCs get involved in whatever is going on? This was a key question in Quantum Leap and the answers in that series never satisfied me. In Seven Days the missions were all emergencies or matters of extreme national security, but that doesn’t work unless there’s some communications mechanism between the agents in the field and home base, and the base concept I was working from had no such communications possible.

Again, I have moderated that position slightly as the campaign has taken shape. And PC Motivation is the key. In the beginning of the campaign, it will be all about the PCs coming to terms with their situation. Once that becomes settled, over the course of the early part of the campaign, the PCs are going to gather what they need to restore very limited communications, and their ultimate goal is going to be building what they need in order to stabilize their situation, get them involved in attempts to ‘rewire’ history, and eventually, to get them home at the end of the campaign whenever the players get tired of it, or I run out of ideas.

Fantasy Elements? Sci-Fi elements?

At this moment, I haven’t completely ruled these out, but intend for them to be exceptions and oddities, not the norm.

Game System – again

The last major decision that will be made is the one that I started with – what game system will I use? No decision has yet been made. All my thinking along these lines has been more about what I don’t want.

The current options under consideration (and not all of them seriously) are:

1. Triumphant
2. OVA The Anime RPG
3. Maid The RPG
4. Star Trek TNG RPG
5. d20 Modern / d20 Future
6. Thrilling Tales 2nd ed
7. Villains & Vigilantes 3
8. An extremely stripped-down variant on Pulp Hero
9. TORG (1st Edition)
10. A custom-written Home System
11. Something else…

These are all systems that I, or one of the players, have on-hand. I don’t intend to take very long over the decision – I’ll be skimming them looking for a reason to reject them. The last five are the most interesting, and have additional reasons to recommend them, so unless one of the others seems pretty perfect, that’s the most likely choice. So let’s look briefly at those relatively “hot” options.

7. V&V 3rd Edition is the game system being recommended by one of the players based on what I’ve told him about the campaign. But I haven’t looked at it yet.
8. A stripped-down Pulp Hero is an option because it’s a system that we’re all familiar with. But it’s likely to be too complex as it stands for my needs, and not quite cinematic enough in mechanics.
9. TORG is a system that I like a lot. I’ve actually GM’d it before (years ago), and at least one of the players has played it. I also have lots of supplements for it – just about the complete bundle, in fact – but they are all in storage where they will be slightly inconvenient to access. I am also concerned that the whole “possibility energy” concept would be too
   integral to the rules system, but must also admit that renaming it appropriately would be a convenient reflection of why the PCs are able to succeed as “Chrononauts” (a term that I don’t intend to keep, but that is better than nothing for now). So there are pluses and minuses.
10. An option to which I am giving serious consideration is a simple, custom, game system. This has the advantage that it will be a perfect match for what I want the game mechanics to represent, but the disadvantage that I haven’t written it yet, and it certainly won’t have been play-tested. If I decide to go down this route, I will almost certainly have to publish it here, as turning it into a post at Campaign Mastery is the only way that I will have time to write it. I have two months, so wait and see… if I do, it will probably involve a conceptual tip of the hat to some of the elements of TORG that I like.
11. Heading the “Something Else” is another story-based system, such as FATE, about which I have heard good things – but the player who is recommending V&V doesn’t like it and has actually tried it, which I haven’t, and I don’t have a copy of it, both strong negatives to take into account.

Campaign Background & Player Briefing, second draft

I wrote this up on the train on the way back from the Family Reunion and offer it here in its final form, for use by whoever wants it.

Adventure Format

It is anticipated that adventures will come to fit a standard pattern or format.

Pre-game: Spend XP and update characters.

Arrival Recap: The PCs will emerge from a Zener Transition and be able to make an immediate assessment of the local conditions and time-frame.

Baseline Resources: The PCs will obtain or identify local resources – food, water, shelter. For the first few times, this will be roleplayed in full, thereafter it will be assumed to have happened and relevant details provided by the GM in between scenes unless a specific challenge is represented.

Engagement: Something will happen that will involve the PCs in whatever the local situation is in a rational and sensible way. Initially, these will involve avoiding situations forbidden by Zener Control Standing Orders; over time, these will evolve into specific objectives that require interaction with the local environment or indigenous personnel. It will become quickly apparent that not all is as it was presented to them in the briefing provided pre-transition by Zener Control.

Impending Transit: A means will quickly be developed of realizing how long a time-span is available for the adventure in game time. This will be an amount sufficient for the PCs to resolve the engagement but still place them under some time pressure.

Resolution: The adventure is completed or time runs out to do so.

Transit: When time runs out, the PCs will involuntarily make a new Zener Transit, departing the local timeline. Care will need to be taken to avoid long-term radiation damage by carrying items they shouldn’t. The decision of what to take and what to leave behind will be a critical one for the players, as they will be strictly limited in this capacity.

Teaser: It is anticipated that most of the time, the adventure will wrap up with a teaser for the next arrival sequence.

Experience/Post-adventure: XP will be awarded immediately based on the success or failure of the characters in achieving their objectives. XP may also be awarded in the course of play. Long-term damage will be tracked and will semi-permanently impair the characters thereafter. From time to time, in-adventure circumstances will permit medical treatment of long-term damage, restoring the characters to partial or complete health.

The ?pilot? adventure will differ from this somewhat as there will need to be some foundations laid. I anticipate starting the game as the PCs from Chronosquad Indigo are suiting up just prior to their expedition through the Zener Gate.

Adding New Players / Replacing Dead PCs

I have some ideas, not yet fully developed, to enable both of these to occur should they become necessary. It is anticipated that PC death with be a rare event and a Big Deal if and when it occurs, and it is not expected that other players will want to join the campaign, but I think it important to prepare for both contingencies.

So that’s the plan

…we shall see how closely the reality measures up! Everything except game system choice and creating the first adventure is now done…

Disposing of illegal liquor By Unknown – Vintage periods, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5119649

The Story Of Prohibition

When Prohibition became law in the US in 1920, it was expected that, albeit reluctantly, the citizenry would simply obey. This was no mere law, after all; it was an Amendment to the Constitution, the very document that defined the United States as a nation, and hence an attempt to willfully modify that definition.

This was the culmination of decades of effort by the so-called “dry” movement, combining social progressives in the Prohibition, Democrat, and Republican parties as well as a large number of Temperance groups, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, all coordinated by the Anti-Saloon League. The League was based in the Southern states and rural districts of the North, especially Methodists, Baptists, Disciples, and Congregationalists and other Protestant ministers and congregations.

The League’s ethos was to concentrate on the passage of legislation, not on whether or not it had the desired effect. After all, if the laws they passed were ignored or ineffective in a few cases, it was simply a matter of sufficiently draconian enforcement and perhaps some complimentary legislation.

In a consequence foreseen and publicly predicted by the leading medical examiners of the day, illegal alcohol consumption exploded in the face of the law. Not only did you have those who actually wanted to drink, but there was considerable opposition to the laws because the use of a Constitutional Amendment was seen as both excessive and social engineering.

It faced some strident opposition, too. Civil Libertarians, Brewers, those alarmed by the rise in criminal activity and organized crime, those distressed by the mounting death toll and number of emergency admissions resulting from the consumption of Methyl or ‘Wood’ alcohol, those unhappy over the tenfold increase in arrests for Drink-driving since Prohibition, and those discommoded by the loss of the tax revenues gained from alcohol sales, all pushed hard against the law. Since several of those movements were reactionary, they only grew in strength as the unwanted effects of the legislation mounted.

The reaction of those who backed Involuntary Temperance was to ‘spike’ the chemicals that were being used in industrial alcohol to make it even more poisonous, and if one then died as a result of drinking booze with deadly additives, having consumed it in full knowledge of the risks, that was the individual’s choice and tough luck. A chemical ‘arms race’ began, in the summer of 1926, between the chemists attempting to poison the ‘wells’ and those looking for industrial processes to at least minimize the dangers in a manner that was cheap enough that the Bootleggers would institute it.

Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University became so disenchanted with Prohibition (and all the attendant social ills) that he decided to seek the nomination of the Republican Party on an anti-Prohibition platform. Already a strident opponent of the legislation – he didn’t oppose regulating saloons, but doing so by Constitutional Amendment, he said, was overkill – it was his contention that after seven years of the ‘social experiment’, “any idiot could see that Prohibition had been an enormous mistake”, one that could only be rectified by replacing the leadership that had brought the country to this position.

Ultimately, he failed to secure the nomination – in fact, he didn’t even come close, and doesn’t even rate mention as a candidate on Wikipedia’s page on the convention – and the nomination (and ultimately the Presidency) was claimed by Herbert Hoover, who promised economic prosperity and endorsed Prohibition as an “experiment noble in purpose”.

Hoover, despite this public endorsement of the policy, was not unlike the general public in his behavior, though he did not need to stoop to visiting a speakeasy; instead, he regularly paid social calls to the Belgian Embassy, which was technically on Belgian soil and not bound by US law; as a result, he could drink legally there and be guaranteed good-quality alcohol as well.

Did Prohibition succeed? Even today, that’s arguable. It did cut overall alcohol consumption in half, and did achieve a lasting reduction of 30-40% even after the repeal of the legislation. And yet, the increase in the number of fatalities and collaterally impacted people argued that while fewer people were drinking, those who were were consuming vastly greater quantities.

Every passing year saw support for the law eroded while opposition grew; it was inevitable that it would be repealed. Ultimately, the citizens of the United States told those in power that they would define the social and cultural nature of the country, and would resist any effort to have a definition foisted upon them, however well-meaning it may have been.

RPG Relevance I – The Official Rules

And that brings me to RPGs – which is what this blog is all about, after all.

A broken rule is like Prohibition: while it won’t be ignored by everyone, there will be enough people willing to do so that the rule will be largely recognized as a failure.

There will be an overwhelming temptation to ‘repeal’ the bad rule by creating and implementing a House Rule. And, a proactive GM is likely to be out in front of the players on the issue, possibly issuing his replacement rule(s) even before the official version has appeared in the course of play.

RPG Relevance II – House Rules

The institution of a House Rule is also not dissimilar to the imposition of the Volstead Act (which was the key legislation permitting the enforcement of Prohibition).

Each such rule has two inherent broad premises: that the affected rules need to be changed, and that this house rule is the change that needs to be made, or at least a step in the right direction.

If both premises are accepted by the constituency – the players and GM – then the rule will be accepted and will then stand or fall on its merits. If it fails, it will eventually be supplanted by something else, hopefully addressing the failures in the House Rule – but the option of falling back to the official rule is almost certainly a last resort.

If one or both premises are not accepted, then the House Rule is on shaky ground; the best that it can hope to achieve is a sort of armed neutrality, a grudging acknowledgment that however great a failure it may be, it at least is no worse than the original rule.

Responsibility

The responsibility for ensuring that the House Rule addresses a real problem, and that the House Rule represents a genuine improvement in the situation, belongs to the GM. And part of that responsibility comes down to public relations, to the GM selling the players both his definition of the problem and the solution.

It’s actually one of the tenets of modern advertising, especially of products like cosmetics and hair care, that a successful advertisement will create the problem in the minds of the audience and then ‘sell’ them the solution. This creates the desire for the product that translates into sales.

How should the GM address that responsibility?

The Ideal Case

Let’s start by looking at the ideal case, when you have time to prepare properly. In the perfect world, there are 11 steps to the process that I use:

1. Structure
2. Allow Time
3. Justification
4. Make Your Case
5. Failure Criteria
6. Player Copies
7. First Draft
8. Test-run (optional)
9. Preserve Rules separately to Justification and Failure Criteria
10. Schedule A Review (optional)
11. Fall-back Plan
    

    1. Structure

    Always collect and document your House Rules in a structured way, to make it as easy as possible to (a) find something when you need to, and (b) explain them to a new player if you need to. I use the chapters of the core rulebook as my starting point, but I know other people who use the page numbers. If there are multiple core rulebooks it’s always Player’s book first, GM’s guide second, and supplements thereafter including an abbreviation of the name. All these serve as a prefix; the sequential rule number serves as a suffix. That all gets followed by the actual rule. In monster guides, such as the Monster Manual, each letter of the alphabet is considered a separate chapter for these purposes.

    That means that an entry might read “17-004”, which means “Chapter 17, Rule number 4.” If there are only 12 chapters in the PHB (or equivalent) for the game system, you know that this refers to the 5th chapter of the DMG. That tells you where the original rule being modified is, and follows it up with the changed rule.

    You don’t have to use this system. You might decide that an abbreviation of the rulebook name is always appropriate, for example, and the chapter number always refers to “within that rulebook” (that would make the same rule listed above, “DMG-05-004”). The important thing is to have an official repository for your house rules and to give it a structure that enhances its usefulness.

    2. Allow Time

    Never be afraid to end a game session early or start one late if that gives you time to discuss the House Rule with the players to their satisfaction. NEVER implement a permanent House Rule without such discussion if you have any other choice. The caveat is necessary because of the “non-ideal case” when a rules change is needed “on-the-fly”, which is a whole separate can of worms to be opened a little later.

    3. Justification

    House Rules are always justified in the mind of the author. The key lesson from Prohibition in this context is that this isn’t good enough. The ‘public’, i.e. the other players (and, if not the author, the GM) need to be convinced not only that there is a problem, but that this is the solution. And that justification will need to be reiterated and reviewed from time to time, so write it down.

    4. Make Your Case

    Then, once you have it in writing, make your case to the others. Discuss the problem and the proposed solution until everyone is satisfied.

    5. Failure Criteria

    It’s not always easy to do, but I always like to have some failure criteria based on the originally-defined problem that justifies the House Rule in the first place. Start with the reference number so that you always know which rule you’re talking about. For example: “DMG-05-004: This rule will be a failure if repeated Skill Checks take more than 10 seconds to resolve.” Or perhaps you’re a little more generous, and make it a 15- or 20-second limit. This example would be the appropriate sort of criteria if the original justification for the House Rule is “Skill Checks take too long to resolve” – though I would prefer a hard number rather than the somewhat vague “too long”. “Skill Checks take >1 min to resolve” is a serious justification because it enables a specific comparison, identifies a specific problem.

    It also means that if the author of the rule is incorrect in their analysis of the cause of the problem, and the house rule is misdirected as a result, it will quickly become apparent when the House Rule doesn’t improve the situation. It might be that the real problem is in the way character sheets are written, for example, and the time taken to resolve a skill check is merely a symptom.

    6. Player Copies

    Whenever possible, copies of the House Rules should always be provided to the players in their preferred format (electronic or hardcopy). In today’s digital age, drop-box can be the perfect solution, sharing a folder containing the House Rules with everyone and updating everyone’s copies instantaneously.

    7. First Draft

    House Rules should always be considered a first draft, subject to revision. It can be presumed that the official rules have undergone considerable play-testing to iron out any bugs – it doesn’t always happen, but it is to be hoped! House rules certainly don?t undergo that sort of vetting, so it’s always prudent to leave the door open to further revisions or even a complete repeal in the future.

    8. Test-run (optional)

    Where possible, it’s a good idea to schedule a test-run of the new rule for the players to try it out for themselves. This should be as simple and free of added complications as possible – the focus should be on getting players familiar with the changes to the process before they have to use the rule for real. At the very least, you want everyone to at least remember that there is a House Rule – a problem that occurs more often than people think.

    9. Preserve Rules separately to Justification and Failure Criteria

    The justification and failure criteria should always be recorded permanently for future reference, but you don’t want the rules themselves to be cluttered with that information. Nor is keeping them in a separate section of the same document a great idea, because it’s always a pain to go back-and-forth in a document; you want to be able to read them both at the same time. For me, that means that there should always be two separate documents: the rules themselves, and notes concerning the rules. Sometimes there will be a third document with one or more examples, again so that the rules and the examples can be viewed at the same time.

    It’s to permit cross-referencing between these separate documents that the structure is so important.

    10. Schedule A Review (optional)

    I always like to schedule a time for the House Rule to be reviewed, usually in 6 or 8 game sessions time – more if it’s an infrequently used rule, perhaps less if it is frequently used. This is a simple process of asking, “is the rule having the effect intended, and if not, what needs to change?”, and the follow-up question, “have there been any secondary consequences of the rules change noticed, and if so, are they beneficial or not?” The goal is to determine whether the House Rule should be confirmed as it now stands, needs further modification, or needs to be replaced completely.

    11. Fall-back Plan

    It only makes sense, when tinkering under the hood of something as complex as a set of RPG rules, that you have some sort of fallback plan in case it all goes horribly wrong. This can be as simple as “revert to the rules as written” or even “GM to make ad-hock rulings based on the procedures for resolving similar problems within the rules” – the latter being especially useful as a guideline when the problem is a game situation that the rules, as they currently stand, did not envisage.

    Another situation that needs to be covered as part of the fallback plan is how the GM intends to respond to suspected or verified cases of players rorting the rule. This doesn’t happen often, and quite often players knowing that such a contingency plan is in place is sufficient deterrent. Critical to how such situations are to be handled is that non-offending players should not be penalized for the actions of a single rogue; the easiest way to achieve this dispassion is by assuming that all such cases are actually failures of the rules and not a breach of trust by the player. It can be argued (and often is by min-maxers) that exploiting an opportunity given in the rules is only smart playing, after all, and that players are under no obligation to conform to the GM’s assumptions of the limitations of their characters’ abilities.

    In fact, it?s mostly to avoid knee-jerk overreactions that a plan should be made in advance.

    There is a broader principle here that also deserves to at least be mentioned: whenever a GM creates a House Rule, or (for that matter) reads an official rule, he should always ask himself “How can this be exploited or abused?” No GM will ever foresee every possible circumstance, but every such situation that is anticipated can be prepared for, making the GM that much better-equipped to run the game.

Rules On The Fly

A lot of the time, it will emerge in the course of play that a rule or even rules subsystem isn’t working the way it should. Assuming that this is a situation not anticipated by the contingency plans of a House Rule, it is necessary to implement an adjusted variation on the process spelt out above, incorporating some additional steps and altering others:

1. On-The-Spot Innovation
2. Write It Down Immediately
3. Schedule Time
4. Discussion – Quick Fix vs Substance
5. Formalize
6. Integrate
7. Failure Criteria
8. Introduce
9. Player Copies
10. First Draft
11. Test-run (optional)
12. Preserve Rules separate to Justification and Failure Criteria
13. Schedule A Review
14. Fall-back Plan
    

    1. On-The-Spot Innovation

    An ad-hock solution needs to be devised right now to keep the game moving.

    2. Write It Down Immediately

    You can have the best of intentions to deal with the rules problem in a more substantial way as soon as play is over for the day, but the reality is that there is always a lot to do after play. You have character intentions and actions to document, GM plans in response to those actions to record (and to mull over), and other elements of game prep for next time to plan and schedule. On top of that, it’s always easy to underestimate the degree of mental effort involved in GMing, and the exhaustion that can follow. I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years, and it’s still a shock to me after every game session just how much effort I have put into actually running the game.

    Writing the ad-hock solution down immediately serves multiple purposes. It documents the ad-hock solution for reference throughout the rest of the game session; functions as a reminder of the problem, and that the rules in question need to be revisited; and it can even signpost the ultimate rules solution, or at least, the foundations of one. Not doing so opens the door to misunderstandings and a recurrence of the problem. Should these consequences recur a number of times, the players may even lose faith in the ability of the GM to run the campaign. That’s an extreme outcome, but why risk it when there are so many benefits to not doing so?

    3. Schedule Time

    I don’t like to interrupt play to discuss the rules problem – hence the need for an immediate ad-hock solution – but am perfectly willing to end play early, or – if I need more time to consider the situation – to delay the start of the next game session, in order to do so. This signals to the players that an ad-hock solution is not considered good enough, that you want certainty both for them and for your campaign. This is one time when the GM needs to be a leader.

    4. Discussion – Quick Fix vs Substance

    During that discussion time, the key question to be answered is “In what way is the quick fix an inadequate solution to the longer-term problem.” It almost certainly won’t be substantive enough, but it may well prove a workable foundation to a longer-term solution. I also like to ask if anyone else has any suggestions for dealing with the issue, and it can be informative to glance at the contingency plans that have been devised for any similar problems, if there are any. Above all, since the need for a House Rule has become obvious, a decision has to be made regarding what the priority for that House Rule should be. Is it more comprehensiveness? A more subtle nuance of outcome? Giving players more control over the way their choices of action will be interpreted? Faster resolution?

    To some extent, this will be made clear by the nature of the problem identified in the course of play, but it’s important to try and look beyond the obvious and identify a root cause for the problem if you can – otherwise you can end up merely treating a symptom, without addressing the real issue.

    Take Notes.

    5. Formalize

    With this guidance, you are in a strong position to draft a House Rule that achieves the objective (and may achieve one or more of the other possible objectives as a side bonus), based on the ad-hock ruling or upon a rule proposal made in the course of the discussion. This may represent a modification to the existing rule, or a refinement of the ad-hock rule, or even be something completely original. Where it derives from doesn’t matter. The main activity in this step is to formalize the thrust of the discussion into a ‘formal’ rule, with all attendant tables and rolls defined. You even have the notes as a reminder to do so – because the odds are that it will be some days (possibly even weeks) after the game play-day that you can actually turn your attention to the problem. You may have needed to look up other game systems to see how they handle the problem, for example, if those rules are to form the template for your campaign’s solution.

    6. Integrate

    It is always easier to work on a rule in isolation, without the distraction of other rules. This facilitates simple editing and sharing processes and rapid evolution of the rule. There comes a time, however, when the modified rule has to be considered in a wider context, a bigger picture.

    In particular, I always try to keep unapproved and draft House Rules separate from the ones that have actually been accepted and implemented within the campaign. Integration is when all of these processes begin – it’s the act of incorporating the rule into the list of approved House Rules, but in a format that enables it to stand out from the rest. It might be in a different color, or be in boldface or italics, or both, but the rule needs to be seen and considered surrounded by the other House Rules.

    Is it longer? Is it more complex? Does it require more explanation? Are there any unwanted interactions with existing House Rules? And, in particular, are there any unwanted consequences that require management through separate House Rules?

    A rule changing the number of hit points that a character has seems straightforward. But there are inherent assumptions built into that number regarding the average amount of damage inflicted in a combat round, the number of combat rounds that a character can survive, the effectiveness of enchantment in weapons, and so on. Even if you take all of those into account, there are also questions about the relative effectiveness of attack spells vs physical combat. That’s why having a specific purpose to be achieved by the House Rule is so important. Without it, too many such decisions are made ‘in the dark.’

    7. Failure Criteria

    We are increasingly going to find ourselves on familiar ground from this point in the process onwards. The importance of failure criteria and the setting of such criteria are unchanged, for example.

    8. Introduce

    One stage that should be a lot easier is bringing players on-board and getting them up to speed (perhaps those should be the other way around?) The House Rule has already been Justified, and consensus reached on the basic “shape” of that rule. So, unless you have completely reinvented the wheel or otherwise gone “off-script,” all that remains of the Justification stage is introducing the new Rule to the players and selling them on the notion that this is the solution to all of their problems – at least, to the ones that interrupted your last gaming session.

    9. Player Copies

    Assuming that the rule gets approval, the next step has to be getting everyone a fresh copy of the compiled House Rules – one that incorporates the new rule – as usual.

    10. First Draft

    Also, as above, the House Rule should never be considered completely finalized. House Rules are always a work in progress.

    11. Test-run (optional)

    As usual, it’s also a good idea to walk each of your players through an example or two of the new rule at this time, for three reasons: first, to make a final check for bugs or kinks; second, to familiarize everyone with the practicalities of implementing the new House Rule; and third, to imprint the presence of the new rule onto everyone’s psyche. It’s very easy, in the heat of play, to fall into doing things the same old way that you have become used to. Avoiding the complication of needing to interrupt and back-up real play, or fumbling around with the mere presence of the new rule, is worth the investment of a few minutes at the start of the game session in which they are introduced.

    12. Preserve Rules separate to Justification and Failure Criteria

    This advice is unchanged.

    13. Schedule A Review

    And ditto this advice.

    14. Fall-back Plan

    And ditto once again.

Both processes should take about the same length of time to implement, usually somewhere between 10 and 45 minutes, all told – though exceptional cases may go faster or take more time.

Based on ‘paper stack 1241478’ courtesy freeimages.com / Sarah Williams

In part 1, I identified AERO, four roles that the majority of significant NPCs occupy in most adventures or encounters:

• Ally
• Enemy
• Resource, and
• Opportunist

…and then considered the combinations, demonstrating how rich the in-game plot functions of characters became when one of these roles adopted one of the other roles as a secondary function.

We had allies working at cross-purposes to the PCs, and mercenary resources, and, well it’s quite a lengthy list, so go and read Part 1 if you haven’t done so already.

Everybody all caught up? Good! Then let’s dive right in, there’s only a little more to be said…

Everybody gets 5 minutes of fame

The goal of defining these roles is to make the NPCs more vibrant, more interesting, more rich in characterization, and to give them greater depth so that they can sustain repeated appearances within the campaign.

It might seem, at first, that it’s a waste of the GMs time to think about this for characters that are intended to be disposable, or to have one-off appearances. But that’s not the case; by making such characters more interesting, it facilitates them being the right-shaped “peg” to fill a plot need at a future time, and adds to their credibility and verisimilitude right now,.in their only scheduled appearance.

Enriching them in this way has to be done in advance, and can be enough to turn a one-off character into a recurring part of the campaign. The four plot functions (and their secondary combinations) are a way of synopsizing the characterization, enabling you to hone in on ways to make the character more interesting with minimal effort.

It can also be argued that its these one-night-only characters who are most in need of additional depth. More significant characters have generally been the recipients of additional care and design efforts lavished on them by the GM, anyway, so this analytic tool is less useful for them – though it can help cut through the fog of confusion to identify the most significant plot functions of even those characters.

The upshot is that there should be no NPCs who are exempt from this process of characterization. The benefits may vary, but every character will benefit. In general, if you are going to refer to a character by name or title, he deserves his five minutes of fame, and these role combinations give the character enough depth to withstand that level of scrutiny.

Avoiding The Mud

It might seem that if combinations of two are good, combinations of three would be even better. To some extent, this is true; but it’s easy to mistake complication for complexity. The more you add, the more you turn the characterization into a muddy mess.

You can see this illustrated in the image to the left. Note that I have enhanced the images to exaggerate the differences in color! Or, to put it another way – there’s only one way to combine the letters A, B, C and D four at a time. The only nuance comes from the sequence. A+B+C+D = D + B + A + C and any other permutation of the sequence that you can name. How many people remember in art class mixing so many colors together that what ended up with was this slightly grayish brown that wasn’t much use for anything, because it turned every color that was added to it into a minor variation of the same muddy color?

The practical reality is that combinations of two always work, and since that leaves two other traits to work with, there is usually one acceptable three-part combination for each primary-secondary combination. And yet, there is a way to nuance and finesse more complex combinations.

Avoiding the mud with clear objectives and motivations

Characters can be thought of as patchwork quilts, combinations of many different aspects of the central personality. Which aspect assumes dominance in any given situation is actually independent of the combination that usually comes to forefront. I have discovered that if you give each character a clear objective or set of objectives and a clear motivation for pursuing them, that combination permits you to sort through the various roles. The closer the result is to the dominant combination, the more comfortable and satisfied with his position on the issue the character will be; the farther removed from that primary combination, the farther from his comfort zone.

Still, it’s better to keep things a little on the simple side so that you can spare the maximum number of brain cells for other aspects of GMing. So I recommend combinations or two, perhaps with a weak tertiary role, most of the time.

Defined Profile-spaces

The next refinement to the concept, at least in theory, is that of extremism, This defines a relative strength for each of the three functions – for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that it’s a score out of ten to indicate how strong each element of the personality is. The result is the start of a characterization profile.

For example, a character might be defined as “Ally 2, Enemy 8, Resource 4, Opportunist 0.” This describes a character of strong convictions and personal code of conduct, whose ambitions are usually in conflict with those of the PCs. Under certain very select circumstances, he might ally with the PCs on a short-term basis, but he is more likely to supply needed resources and indirect assistance when the goals of the PCs and his own proclivities align.

Such profiles are useful in any number of ways. Entered into a spreadsheet, they permit sorting of available NPCs by interaction mode, making it simpler to select the NPC who is the best fit for the GM’s plot needs at the time. You can even think of it as a character sheet for the metagame level. They help ensure that you explore the entire metagame characterization space, rather than having too many characters who are too similar.

An obvious concept is to map the three non-zero elements into a three-dimensional space, something similar to an alignment grid but 3-dimensional and not two, as shown to the right. However, while the numeric profile can be useful, I have strong doubts that such a three-dimensional charting will have any practical value. I could be wrong, and if you come up with a way to make practical value of the idea, more power to you!

Part of the reason that I don’t think it’s going to be especially useful is that there’s more to a useful character profile than just the metrics discussed so far.

The Fourth Dimension: Eagerness and Reluctance

I’ve already said that the numeric score assigned to each profile axiom should represent the relative dominance of each role within the character’s profile. However, each of them should also have a separate measurement to indicate the character’s eagerness or reluctance to engage that profile role.

But that’s unwieldy and not all that practical. Instead, I recommend that a fifth metric be defined to represent the character’s eagerness or reluctance to engage an interaction mode other than his usual combination. This should only be employed when the encounter is not pre-planned and should never take the place of assessments based on the objectives and motivations of the character; if they become relevant to the encounter, they override this fall-back measure.

The Fifth Dimension: Fear and Courage

Or perhaps you would prefer “Caution” and “Brazenness”, as I do. This defines how much of a risk-taker the character is, which clearly influences the character’s willingness to escalate support or opposition from the resources level to actively supporting either the PCs or their enemies, as well as the demand for remuneration and reward in cases of opportunism. Note that a high degree of caution doesn’t mean that a character will never take an active role, it simply means that he has to be convinced that the risks have been adequately controlled or managed and that the potential rewards justify those risks. (It also probably means that he has an escape clause or some other way to back out if things take a turn in a unsatisfactory direction. A high level of Brazenness, in comparison, tends to indicate someone who will stick to their guns even in the face of reverses).

The Sixth Dimension: Preparation

The final quality that should feature in such a profile is how the character will assess unknowns, and to what extent he will extend himself to resolve them before committing. This is a difficult criterion to adequately label – I’ve gone through half-a-dozen variations without finding any that I’m completely happy with. Ultimately, I’ve (reluctantly) gone with Preparation, even though Prep usually means something completely different in an RPG context, and hence is susceptible to misinterpretation.

Some characters consider unknowns to magnify risks, a relatively pessimistic “glass half empty” perspective, and dislike committing themselves to anything without adequate research; others consider an unknown to be a variable, some of which will go their way and some of which won’t, and hence not as great a factor in their decision-making.

Complimentary Attributes

These are all complimentary attributes. None of them supplant or even guide the normal characteristics on a character sheet; they are all about the character’s attitudes and philosophies and how he will utilize his abilities, especially intelligence, wisdom, charisma, wealth, and so on.

Take a step back and assess

Whenever you create or categorize a character, always take a step back and double-check that the character will perform the plot function that you want in a manner that fits the adventure you have in mind. It’s very easy when dealing with the metagame level to take your eyes off the ball, and it’s even easier for your metagame profiling to have a logical disconnect with the actual capabilities described by the character sheet. For the optimum result, everything needs to be in harmony.

The Complete Metaprofile

So let’s recap: in the course of the two parts of this article, a number of qualities have been identified that define the role of an NPC in an adventure, and an approach to life in general.

A complete profile should like like this:

Allies ___/10
Enemies ___/10
Resource ___/10
Opportunist ___/10
Interpretation: ___________________________________________________________________

Eagerness(+)/Reluctance(-): ___/10
Brazenness(+)/Caution(-): ___/10
Preparation Insistence(±): ___/10

Put these ten meta-criteria together and you profile the way the character will function within the adventure. If you can synopsize the three text fields sufficiently briefly, a spreadsheet is the ideal format for tracking your NPCs, one to a line, enabling you to sort them by the different criteria and pick exactly the one that you need.

Used properly, the four roles and supplementary qualities that I have outlined are a great tool for managing your NPCs with the added advantage of giving them additional depth and richness of characterization. Give it a go!

‘One Model Four Ways’ based on beautiful-18279 courtesy pixabay.com (CC0 public domain)

Most NPCs occupy one of four niches in terms of their impact within an adventure or an encounter: Ally, Enemy, Resource, and Opportunist. I use AERO as a mnemonic to remind me of them.

The four roles

These four roles define, in broad parameters, how an NPC will interact with the PCs and how that interaction relates to the plotline (and sometimes to the setting, in a broader context). If that’s not entirely clear, a closer examination of the roles should clarify my meaning.

Allies

Allies provide substantive support and assistance to the PCs. Some allies are of convenience, and the alliance persists only until the situation in which both parties have a mutual interest is resolved.

Some are formal, and these can sometimes be superficial or even largely false, these allies-in-name-only are actually mislabeled enemies, and the balance of this section does not apply to them..

Some alliances are limited to actions in furtherance of mutual agendas or beliefs.

Still others are more deeply-rooted and persist until one party to the alliance betrays the other, or betrays the principle or agenda that they have in common – the distinction is highly nuanced, and the affronted party is will often not make any distinction between the two forms of betrayal. Of course, if the two allies truly have deeply-rooted values in common, such betrayal is extremely unlikely; it is more likely that some action will be misconstrued as a betrayal than that a willful betrayal will take place.

In any event, allies have a very broad role in any adventure in which they are encountered. They provide assistance that goes beyond mere resources, fulfilling an active role in helping the PCs complete their mission or quest, whatever it might be, potentially placing themselves at risk in the process.

Enemies

Enemies try to hinder the PCs, to prevent them from achieving their goals. Some opposition arises because the PCs goal, or their actions in furtherance of it, would inconvenience the enemy. Some is due to misunderstandings, leaving the door open for an eventual alliance; the more baggage accumulated in the form of active opposition, though, the harder this becomes to overlook and the more entrenched the positions become.

Some opposition is formal – i.e. one party is required to oppose the other because of some other alliance they might have in good faith. “The friend of my enemy will act as my enemy.” It can be true that before a true target can be effectively engaged, a key ally must be neutralized or even persuaded to change sides.

Most opposition, however, is more deeply rooted. Fundamental goals or philosophies may be in opposition, and historical actions may be too divisive to permit a gap of antagonism to be bridged, and the enemy has to be defeated so thoroughly that a fundamental change in nature takes place, permitting a reappraisal of the established relationship.

Resources

Resources are enablers, permitting the PCs to carry out some task in furtherance of their goal, but not actively taking part in the quest or mission beyond providing the tools, equipment, or knowledge required. The PCs have to do the actual work, a Resource simply gives them what they need in order to do so.

One peculiar thing that I have noted about Resource NPCs, as they have appeared in various games in which I have played, modules that I have read, and articles that have been posted through the years: It always seems to be the case that they are highly over-developed or under-developed, relative to other NPCs. In some cases, they are viewed as a disposable “resource delivery system”; in others, they are the most complex and complicated characters within the adventure. Neither is best-practice, in my book; and both are undesirable.

Resources may be cooperative or compelled; providing the Resource that they posses willingly or because they are forced to do so. Some resources span both, unwilling to assist except in exchange for some service or payment.

Opportunists

Which brings us to Opportunists, who attempt to use the PCs and their efforts to benefit some cause or agenda of their own. Sometimes, these side quests are tasks the PCs are happy to undertake, at other times they can be the cause of considerable angst and reluctance. Sometimes – probably the most boring times – they simply want to be paid a fair remuneration.

Using opportunists properly is an art form. There are times when a side quest will merely increase the players’ frustration levels, and there are times when they will greatly intensify the anticipation. More than anything else, the way the GM treats Opportunists at any given moment should be a function of their emotional intensity planning, a subject that is beyond the scope of this article – if interested, or you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Swell And Lull: Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1 and Part 2 and the Further Thoughts On Pacing four-part series which specifically deals with interruptions, including side quests and the other demands of Opportunists.

The Other Types: Nobodies & Motivators

Strictly speaking, there are two other types of NPC: Nobodies, who contribute nothing but color and verisimilitude (which includes no-name grunts to back up the enemies) by virtue of their presence, and Motivators, who provide motivation for the PCs to undertake the mission/quest/adventure and sometimes context. Since they make no contribution to the adventure itself beyond these extremely limited roles, they play no further part in terms of this article – but I thought I should at least mention them.

Adding Color Through a secondary role

It was strongly hinted at in the descriptions of the primary roles given above that characters become more interesting when you add a second function into the mix. Since like doesn’t add anything when partnered with like – allies and allies, for example – there are twelve combinations to consider. Some of these have already been touched on, but this is a more discrete and comprehensive list.

Allies

The first category are allies who are nominally something else.

1a. Enemies who ally

A perennial favorite, it’s possible to overuse this concept (but you have to try really hard). The question is always about motivation. Does the alliance further some agenda of the enemy? Does the primary enemy threaten the temporary ally? Is the enemy competing or contending with the temporary ally for a resource? Does the temporary ally have some moral or ethical common ground with the PCs? Is it simply a question of mutual survival? Is it simply a case of the temporary ally preferring a known enemy who has already been factored into his plans to an unknown threat? And these possibilities are far from the limit.

One of the favorite recurring NPCs in the Zenith-3 campaign is Voodoo Willy, named for the character in Predator 2, who explores the inherent contradictions in the concept of an “Ethical Drug-lord”. He sells to white collar workers, and is quite prepared to use violence to protect his turf, but he won’t sell to children, and there are certain drugs that he so vehemently opposes that he is perfectly willing to assist the PCs either directly as an ally or indirectly as a resource in wiping them out. He employs long-term planning, and is not afraid to take a short-term loss or reduction in profitability to support a long-term customer. He even helps his best customers get and keep good, well-paying employment – so that they can continue to fatten his wallet in the longer term. He survives by perpetually making himself the lesser of whatever evils are around at the time. He even recently (and temporarily) suspended his whole operation to try and assist the team in dealing with a problem that was affecting both of them. (If the players haven’t figured out that there is a long-term plan for this character’s role in the campaign, they’ve been sleeping through it!)

In fact, one of the themes of the whole Zenith-3 campaign is “shifting alliances”, as friends become enemies and enemies become friends, compelled by cosmic events reshaping the underlying ideologies of the entire multiverse in the lead-up to what is informally known as “The Apocalypse”, which is the planned epic conclusion to the entire campaign. The fun of combining such a theme with an ambiguous character like Willy is that he could go either way, becoming a reformed ex-enemy or a serious threat who has been able to build up his power base by never showing his full hand to the PCs.

Actually, calling Willy “ambiguous” is a disservice – he makes no bones about what he does and at all times exudes clarity of purpose and motivation. It’s just that the PCs can never tell what’s going to happen with him next…

1b. Resources who ally

Here, too, motivation is the essential that has to be rock-solid. It could be as simple as a mercenary action on the part of the Resource, or a response to a mutual threat, or signing on to the mission in order to protect carefully-curated resources that could be placed at risk if the PCs step over a line. Or it could be a mutually-beneficial alliance in which the NPC garners additional resources, some of which he has pledged to employ in supporting the primary mission objective of the PCs. Or, once again, a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend – at least for now.”

This actually turns an over-developed Resource character into an asset by providing a showcase for the depth of characterization,
a definite benefit if you are guilty of this commonplace error in time-management.

The converse is also interesting to contemplate – an NPC who would normally be considered an ally but who cannot support or be seen to support the current endeavor in any official capacity but who nevertheless makes vital information or other resources available to the PCs (usually by looking the other way momentarily). By placing implied limits on the alliance, you hint at the prospect of the alliance ending, adding an overtone of potential future enmity.

1c. Opportunists who ally

Mercenaries will sign on for monetary gain or other reward, but sometimes they can change their mind about the fee they are charging when confronted with the stakes, or when other priorities usurp the primacy of the profit motivation. Some opportunists may recognize the chance to gain (even if it’s only the PCs owing them a favor) and deem it valuable enough for the effort and the risk. Only very experienced and creative GMs should ever adopt this path without a clear understanding of what the Opportunist stands to gain and how they will employ whatever benefit they receive as a result. In particular, GMs should always have a clear idea of when any favors will be called in and what the PCs will be asked to do before implementing this NPC role.

Enemies

The second category are characters who function as enemies, even though they may nominally be something else.

2a. Allies who oppose

As the old saying goes, “with friends like these…” allies don’t always agree, and even when supposedly on the same side, there can often be good (or bad) reasons for them to oppose each other. In particular, allies will often be uncomfortable at the prospect of being relegated to the demeaning status of “junior partner”. Consequently, when the PCs are, or are perceived to be, representative of one of the partners in an alliance, they may find supposed allies getting in the way for reasons of their own.

If the antagonism that results is strong enough, lines may be crossed that can never be un-crossed, and the alliance itself placed at risk. This is especially likely to occur when short term ambitions and goals say one thing is beneficial, and long-term ambitions and principles advise something as “wise”. Inevitably, one partner in the alliance will consider the immediate problem or situation to be of paramount importance, even if it worsens the long-term outlook (no-one can predict the future with complete certainty so who knows what the long term will actually look like until you get there), while the other side is more willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. Such differences in perspective are sure to maroon the alliance on rocky ground, as the short-term / immediate-problem solvers behave in ways that are detrimental to what the long-term thinkers want to achieve.

In the worst-case scenario, party A can sacrifice the short-term for the long term, only to find that party B has performed actions or implemented decisions that make their short-term more secure at the price of completely undermining any hope of party A ever achieving whatever it is that they have sacrificed in order to achieve.

There are other variations. Two allies might agree completely on the long-term vision, but have completely different and mutually contradictory approaches to achieving it in the short term.

In fact, there are a host of reasons why one party to an alliance might perceive the actions of another as betraying that alliance for their own benefit.

All this is as much about the personalities and perspicacity of the strategic planners and key advisers on both sides as anything else. Even oxymorons can posses a political and strategic reality when viewed from the right perspective: “To make all men free, we must first conquer all men, liberating them from the oppression they now experience,” for example. Or, as Toby puts it at one point in the West Wing (when discussing the imposition of American Ideals and Values on the Middle East), “They’ll like us when we win.” Every revolution sets out to correct some social or political wrong, real or perceived – though the leaders of those revolutions may have less pure motivations.

2b. Resources who oppose

Just because you know, and are supposed to tell another, doesn’t mean that you necessarily want to do so. Just because you are willing to help may not mean that you are willing for it to be obvious or public that you are cooperating.

There’s already a question, when it comes to Resources – why are they not allies? There is almost always a danger, real or perceived, involved, and if that danger seems immediate enough, a resource may refuse to cooperate or even lie rather than embrace the danger.

Equally, some resources are beholden to others, and no matter how inclined to assist the Resource might be, the attitude of that superior may be markedly different.

Resources who are supposed to help, but instead hinder, are a fact of life.

2c. Opportunists who oppose

“I’ve received a better offer.” Opportunists have no loyalty to the cause of the PCs, and only their own personal morality to guide their behavior – and that can be very shaky ground upon which to erect any sort of trust.

The more ‘honest’ and ‘honorable’ may state their (bought and paid-for) loyalties or opposition up front; the less reputable may play along, a fifth column in the PCs’ ranks.

Resources

Resources can be, supposedly, something quite different. This never fails to add depth and complexity to a campaign, provided that the characters and characterizations are consistent (if you aren’t sure of the distinction, character is what a person does, and characterization is why they do it – motives and thought processes and fragilities of logic and so on. The latter is rendered more complex by the fact that someone can do something for one reason and think their motives are something completely different; we all have our blind spots!

3a. Allies with resources

If a supposed ally provides a resource and nothing more, there are clearly limits to the alliance. The question of why they are not participating more substantive in the adventure becomes a defining one for the relationship between the PCs (and/or whoever they represent) and the supposed ally and whoever or whatever they represent.

The various intelligence agencies of the US Government are all supposedly on the same side, i.e. allies. but that implies that they never keep secrets from each other (something that 9/11 proves not to be rue, never engage in turf wars, never compete with budgets, never oppose another agency even if it risks an asset of their own, and so on. It is self-evident, however, that none of these things are true.

An alliance is never a total commitment of support, even in operational terms. The limits placed on cooperation and depth of support always define the party to the alliance as much as they characterize the alliance itself..

3b. Enemies with resources

Time to dance with the devil… sometimes, only an enemy has the resources that the PCs need. Here, it’s always a question of the quid-pro-quo. It must be remembered that if the enemy had a genuine interest in the outcome, they would either actively oppose as enemies or actively support the PCs as allies, however temporary. So this inherently blends in a little of the Opportunist role as well, for a richly complex situation.

That, of course, assumes that the PCs don’t take the bull by the horns and simply treat the enemy as an enemy and go in after whatever it is that they need – and that makes for fun storytelling, too, but it pushes everyone further into intractably opposing ideological corners. Some groups are fine with that, while others will want to leave themselves some wriggle room. Even the debate over the correct course of action makes for fun roleplaying – though the GM should be wary of players over-identifying with their character’s positions, because that can sometimes become a problem in the heat of the moment.

3c. Opportunists with resources

In a way, this is the purest of definitions of the Opportunist, and of the Resource. This role says ‘I have what you need and these are my terms’. As is usually the case with the Opportunist, it really comes down to what they are demanding in return for the expenditure of their resources, and whether or not the players are willing for their characters to pay it.

It’s a favorite tactic to ask for something relatively benign, a price that the players are willing to pay or at least concede is reasonable, only for that deal to turn around in time and bite them because there is a consequence that they haven’t factored into their calculations, some assumption that they are making that the Opportunist can exploit. This very much depends on the GM knowing the players and their thinking, and in particular, what they may have overlooked, and it can lose a lot of its impact if the players think about the situation in-between game sessions; it’s just not as much fun if they work out the consequences for themselves instead of letting the GM swat them between the eyes with a plot twist.

Because players get smarter over time, and more used to this sort of deep thinking, this is the sort of thing that can be done only so often, so I tend to save it for the times when it really will make life more ‘interesting’ for the PCs; be careful not to waste the opportunity.

Opportunists

There are circumstances in which other roles can function as opportunists within the adventure. This is the last set of the two-fold combination patterns.

4a. Allies with agendas

The most obvious ones are allies with agendas of their own, who attempt to take advantage of whatever is going on in order to further that agenda. Every group, faction, or individual should always have an agenda of their own, even if it’s simply to keep things the way they are. This places allies in a particularly interesting situation since they are more likely than an enemy to learn about something that is going on through the alliance; if the actions being undertaken by the PCs are not in keeping with their agenda, they may act to “contain” the damage, rather than becoming enemies. This strains the alliance, and may require some fence-building afterwards. But it’s equally likely that they will simply take advantage of the actions of the PCs to push their agenda forward – for example, the PCs negotiate safe passage through the Orcish territories in order to deal with the Goblin Necromancer who is their real target, but one of the PCs allies learns of this and takes advantage of the distraction posed by the PCs to raid the Orcs. This furthers the agenda of the ally, who expands their territory at the expense of an enemy, but it also looks to the Orcs as though it is a betrayal of the truce between them and the PCs, so they send the PCs a warning – curb their ally, and punish him for his impudence, or be targeted. This puts the PCs in the difficult position of taking direct action against an ally, giving their real enemy the chance to better prepare to face them, or pressing on with the added complication of bands of Orcish Assassins dogging their every footstep, and potentially gatecrashing the most delicately-poised situations along the way. It may even open the door to negotiations between the Orcs and the Necromancer, doubling the PCs headaches.

All allies have agendas. Any agenda can complicate a situation. This should spell opportunity to the GM.

4b. Enemies who take opportunities

Enemies are even worse. An ally might at least restrain themselves because of the potential harm to their allies or to the principle of the alliance itself; an enemy usually has no such scruples. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the GM should keep track of who enemies are, how they gather intelligence, what they already know, and what they are desirous of achieving, then review every situation that arises (or can be perceived or even mispercieved as arising) to see if it creates an opportunity for them to do something to further their cause while the PCs are busy and/or distracted.

Every plan the PCs come up with should include contingencies for dealing with Opportunistic enemies, or they are asking for trouble. They cannot commit their whole resources, or should not be able to do so, needing to keep something in reserve; which is a problem when it’s going to take everything the PCs have to deal with their immediate problems and priorities.

That’s a major reason why the PCs need allies – to watch their back and keep an eye on things while they are busy elsewhere. But, as noted in 4a, there is a price to pay for every ally…

4c. Resources who take opportunities

The final category of compound characterization to be considered is the notion of people providing resources to the PCs who perceive an opportunity for themselves in the process. It’s entire reasonable for a character to be helping with one hand (perhaps because he’s obligated to do so) while reaching out for everything that isn’t nailed down on his own behalf, perhaps even functioning as an enemy resource. Imagine this scenario: The PCs go to a resource for assistance, which he supplies – for a price. He then turns around and sells information about the PCs to their enemy, perhaps using an alias to disguise himself (so that the enemy can’t spill the beans)..

No matter who wins, the mercenary Resource will do quite well out of the resulting situation.

Adding Nuance with flexibility

The more roles that any given NPC is providing as a function within the adventure, the greater the flexibility and nuance that he has available for future appearances, and the more interesting the players will find those future appearances.

I’ve got more to say on the subject, but I’m out of time for this article. So I’ll just have to pick this up again, in part 2!