Something got me thinking the other day about the villains trilogy that I wrote last year – Part 1 – The Mastermind, Part 2 – The Combat Monster, and Part 3 – the Character Villain and about something that wasn’t included. What makes the scariest villain?

Beginning at the Beginning: What is Fear?

Wikipedia has a reasonable definition of Fear that makes a good starting point. A bit of rephrasing, paraphrasing, and disassembly and recombination of that foundation material gives me the following:

Fear is an emotional reaction to an acute and immediate sense of danger or threat which causes instinct to override rational control of actions, or to the anticipation of such acute and immediate dangers or threats.

In humans, the instincts are generally fight or flight. There is a clear evolutionary advantage to such an override of the higher functions – the hesitation and indecisiveness that result from taking the time for complex analysis can get you killed in a dangerous situation.

It’s somewhat off-topic, but a large part of military training is aimed at replacing those instinctive responses with a trained and conditioned response which doesn’t automatically exclude rational control. Clearly, if the survival of the soldier is deemed less important than the survival of the species, or the nation, or the perpetuation of their national values and/or agenda, the basic instinct is unsuitable, simply because it places the welfare of the individual ahead of the welfare of the social collective. That’s why descriptions of Military Training such as the first half of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie) often read like brainwashing. Many of the terms used to describe the process are clearly analogous – compare “Breaking them” to “Tearing them down and rebuilding them as [Soldiers]”.

It is for these reasons that I have long advocated that soldiers leaving the service should receive mandatory “re-entry training”; the instincts that have been built into their personalities, and the acts they have witnessed, give them a set of automatic responses that can impair a successful reintegration with general society. They often have trouble fitting into a civilian life as a result. It’s not enough that we treat these problems when they arise; sometimes, that’s too late. Whether we agree with the politics that led them to be deployed, or with the missions that they were tasked to undertake, is irrelevant; they have risked their lives to protect and serve their nation, and deserve better preparation for life outside the military than that.

Almost as far off-topic: This is also the foundation of my personal pet theory as to why the ordinary German Citizen embraced Nazism in the years prior to and during World War II. The combination of the humiliation visited on them by the peace terms at the end of WWI and the Great Depression did the “breaking” part of the brainwashing process; All Hitler had to do was offer a half-convincing way out of this corner. When this sort of humiliation is inflicted by a torturer, the way out suggested by the torturer is for the victim to offer something to appease the torturer – information, conversion, whatever. Cults use the same basic processes to brainwash recruits. WWII Germany was the world’s largest cult (with the possible exception of the Communist Bloc), and that’s why good and honest citizens found themselves approving of and supporting the acts of barbarism that were inflicted by the Nazis, who redefined humanity to exclude not only anyone who was non-Aryan but anyone who opposed the state, making it possible to treat people as sub-human.

Fear and the Mastermind

While a Mastermind may employ fear as a stimulus, and may even be driven by Fear themselves, their actions are generally not going to induce fear themselves. They are too psychological, too intellectual, too philosophically-oriented. Their plans may, by virtue of their projected consequences, invoke a form of intellectual pseudo-fear, but this apprehension is never going to come close to causing “instinct to override rational control of actions”. No matter how good an opponent might be, and how inevitable a humiliating defeat may be, a chess game is never going to invoke fear in and of itself. To introduce fear to such an equation requires the attachment of some further threat to the progress, or outcome, of the game.

Fear and the Combat Monster

It might seem, then, that a Combat Monster, who poses a direct and physical threat to the welfare and survival of the character, is more prone to induce fear – and yet it never works out that way, for some reason. The character may be intimidated, may be presented with clear evidence that their opponent is superior, but the players – and the GM – clearly expect the characters to behave as soldiers, and engage the enemy – or make a tactical withdrawal until they can manufacture circumstances or strategy to equalize the odds in battle. No matter how threatening the Combat Monster may be to a character, the character sheet keeps any fear at arm’s length.

This is exactly the way things should be. The Mastermind may pose an intellectual challenge, and the Combat Monster a tactical challenge, but these are games for heroic actions on the part of the characters, and introducing genuine fear into the equation is usually counterproductive to the game – the objective of which is for everyone to have fun. Vicarious thrills, yes; Fear, no.

Fear and the Character Villain

Which leaves the character villain as the only archetype which should be capable of inspiring genuine fear. Because of the insulation between player and character provided by the character sheet, this will still be a watered-down, relatively tame form of fear – and once again, this is exactly as it should be. As a GM, you don’t want your players to be scared into inaction – or into inappropriate real-life action. You need to keep the fear at arm’s-length while still permitting the player the vicarious thrills involved.

Not all character villains can, or should, achieve this. A character villain is one whose personality is the dominant factor in their makeup, and the reactions to that personality can be anything from laughter to empathy to horror – or fear. So what we are talking about is a specific subtype of the character villain.

What sort of character could be so terrifying as to induce fear, not only in the character, but in the player? We’ll get back to that.

The Attributes Of Fear

There are various techniques that the GM can employ, taken directly from the Horror Movie playbook, that can be employed to induce a vicarious form of fear in the players. It’s worth looking briefly at these.

The Building Of Suspense

Prior to a manifestation of fear, you need to prepare the ground with a buildup of suspense. Suspense derives from the absence of expected activity. In a horror movie, you show the villain, or his shadow, or whatever, in proximity to the characters with whom the audience are identifying without those characters being aware that he’s there. Atmosphere and tone contribute.

I found two excellent articles on Suspense in writing that apply to RPGs as much as to any other medium: 6 Secrets To Creating And Sustaining Suspense from Writer’s Digest, and 41 Ways To Create And Heighten Suspense by Ian Irvine. I didn’t have to look very hard; this is both a common topic of discussion amongst writers and something that most would-be writers know that they need to learn.

One of the big tips that neither mention is to focus on individual micro-actions that would normally go unremarked. Describe each step that characters take, one by one. When they open a door, describe each step of the process in detail – reaching out for the doorknob, a momentary distraction just as the character is about to grip the knob, taking hold of the knob and starting to turn it, hearing the slide drawing back within the mechanism, a click as the knob reaches the end of its travel, the door slowwwwly opening to reveal… This is all about building the expectation of release, and it’s a Clayton’s promise in the context of the writer’s guide. What you are actually promising is not that there will be a dramatic release of tension when the door opens, but that there will eventually be an even bigger release of tension.

No let-up

Above all, there must be no release of the suspense. Don’t let the players take a break, don’t call an end to the game and expect to take up where you left off next time. Players may seek to discharge the suspense with humor – laugh right along with the rest and then carry on without let-up; such discharges are strictly small and temporary so long as the big pay-off lingers on the horizon while never quite manifesting. Don’t permit the characters to do anything decisive – if they try to do something that would end or reduce the threat, like turning on the light switch, don’t let them get away with it. Either whatever they are doing doesn’t work (they lights stay out) – or give them hope by letting it succeed, only to dash it (the lights come on – and then, one by one, or all at once, wink back out).

An equally big key is not permitting game mechanics to break the mood – No dice-rolling, no consulting character sheets or rule-books, and as little side conversation as possible. Yes, there are advanced techniques for using die rolls to build additional tension, like not asking a player to make a skill check and not telling them whether they succeed or not (or, if that is inherently obvious by virtue of the game system, not telling them what the significance is). Experiment, if you want to, but cautiously – a little of this goes a long way, and for the most part you will still want to design the encounter to minimize such things. It’s better, for the most part, to assume that a character will succeed in doing anything that doesn’t puncture the mood than to require them to make a die roll – and if it is something that will puncture the mood, let them succeed anyway (and then negate the benefit), as described earlier.

One of the scariest encounters that I ever ran worked like this: it started with an attack without warning from the shadows – a single attempted blow that was a deliberate near-miss doing enough incidental damage to the landscape that it was threatening to the character, with the attacker vanishing back into the shadows. Then the PC’s shadow began moving and twisting as though the light source that was casting it was moving – when it wasn’t – so that it was always behind the character. No matter what the character did, he could not make the shadow go away, it always seemed to be creeping up on him…

You can even tease the characters a little with a slight easing of the tension, a false release before again turning the screws.

This works because even though you are addressing the characters and their actions, the targets of you suspense are the players running those characters.

The Inconclusive Release

When it finally comes, the release of the tension should be sudden, dramatic, inconclusive, and unexpected. A whirlwind of violent action that ends just as suddenly as it began without terminating the threat. Then start building suspense again. The second time around, what was suspense will be suspense plus a tinge of fear.

Scary is not Scariest

These techniques are great for making any encounter scary – but they don’t make the villain scary, just the encounter. For a villain to be inherently scary, we have to look further.

The Anathema

All player characters have values of some sort, even in an Evil campaign. One of the most obvious Character Villains is the anathema, the villain who is everything that the player character hates and fears. That makes the villain something uniquely personal to the player character in question. It’s still not enough to make them scary, but it’s enough to get the character’s attention. It’s a starting point.

A more fearsome approach would be the Character Villain who twists or perverts every ambition the character has for the future, whose very existence threatens the character with impotence and despair. Note that it is not enough for the GM to simply describe the villain to the player in these terms; the villain has to actually engender these reactions in the character, which means they have to do likewise to some extent to the player who owns him. You want the player to feel this reaction, at least in part.

But that’s still not inherently scary. Disturbing and Depressing, yes, but not yet scary. It’s part of the picture, but to get the rest of it, we will need to pursue another avenue.

There but for the grace of god…

Villainous versions of heroic PCs are a staple of the superhero genre. Their roots trace all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, or perhaps Adam & Eve and the expulsion from the Garden. It’s not at all uncommon to extrapolate the principle into other types of campaign, like Pulp or Fantasy. GMs love them because they are fun. Players love them because they explore the roads not taken, and give them a chance to display aspects of their characters that don’t often get an airing. Characters hate them because they are everything the character doesn’t want to be, and yet are branches from the same root.

Like a snowball rolling downhill and gathering mass and momentum, the smallest change can accumulate consequences until the end result is as different as night and day – and yet it is familiar, with substantial common ground that it shares with the original character. These characters play with the primal forces of why the character is who they are, and that’s what makes them so fascinating to everyone.

What if, instead of aiming for a character who was the “evil twin” of a character, we aimed for the personality profile I identified in the preceding section? Call it… the twisted might-have-been.

The Twisted Might-have-been

Our character villain, then, is enough like the character that they have all sorts of common ground. Similar backgrounds. Similar experiences. Similar desires, similar flaws. Close enough to be brothers, or to be sisters. And yet, they are so twisted that their very reason for being is anathema to the character; not merely everything that the character hates and fears, but the antithesis of every principle and ambition the character holds dear. A Character Villain whose very existence implies that the character could become everything that he hates, and everything that the player doesn’t want his character to be, because of that common ground?

Have you ever encountered a snake in the wild? Potentially poisonous, potentially deadly – you can’t take your eyes off it, you don’t dare even blink. And it feels just as threatened by your presence – so it stares back just as intently.

Okay, maybe the Australian experience is a little different to that of the rest of the world – there are only a few species of deadly snake in North America, for example, and most are of a temperament that would just as soon leave you alone if you give it the chance. In Australia, most of the snakes are deadly, and there are a lot of them. And some of them can be very aggressive and bad-tempered. Children are always taught to be careful – especially since what might not be deadly to an adult can be very deadly to a child – and that childhood training is carried forward into adulthood. Just take a look at Wikipedia’s list of snake species native to Australia. If you consult AustralianFauna dot com’s page on snakes, you will find the following:

In Australia most people are well afraid of snakes. And with good enough reason. If you step on one accidentally you might well be bitten. And that has consequences. Perhaps that is why Australians even in snake free countries such as New Zealand can’t relax in long grass.

It’s actually more a matter of sensible precaution and common sense, even here, as the comments at the end of the AustralianFauna page makes clear:

Many Australians can tell stories of nearly treading on a snake, being frightened by a snake, or even killing a snake. One of the best known snake stories is ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson which tells of a women’s all night vigil to protect her children knowing that there is a snake in the wall of their slab hut. Although deaths from snake bite do occur, (eg one elderly women was bitten by a tiger snake while she pruned the ivy on the fence in Kew, an inner suburb of Melbourne, in 2003), many more deaths from snake bite occur in Asia and Africa.

The difference is that in the US, most people are warned about Rattlesnakes and there aren’t that many other common species of dangerous snake. Most snakes can be considered relatively harmless. In Australia, we are taught that any snake is potentially deadly, especially if mishandled. In the old days, they used to killed if they infringed on a populated settlement; these days, most are a protected species, and there are government services you can call to come and safely remove any snake you find if it’s somewhere it shouldn’t be.

The Outback Australia Travel Guide’s page on Australian Outback Dangers makes no bones about the reality.

Snakes are the number one fear of most Outback travellers. Australian snakes are the most dangerous in the world. Or so they say… Well, fact is, the “most dangerous snake in the world“, the Australian Inland Taipan, never killed anyone. To date not a single person died from the bite of the Inland Taipan. Precious few people have died of any snake bites in Australia. The people who get bitten are usually herpetologists (people whose job involves playing with snakes), people who act as if they were herpetologists (a surprisingly large number of drunk males get bitten by snakes…) or idiots trying to kill snakes. A bit of common sense wouldn’t go astray here… Yes, there are poisonous snakes in Australia. No, they are not dangerous, as long as you leave them alone.

(For the record, I agree with everything the Outback Australia Travel Guide’s page has to say).

Getting back to the point, a Character Villain who meets this description should hold the same level of fascination for the PC and for his or her player, and for exactly the same reason: They are scared stiff of each other, and what each other represents. It places the character at the same crossroads as the point of “Evil Twin” divergence – but it does so in the here-and-now, with an uncertain future, rather than in the past, where it can be an intellectual exercise combined with a “thank goodness it wasn’t me”.

You can get a similar effect by bringing a broken and twisted version of the character back from the future – the very existence of the character is inherently scary, and the more plausible the road from who the character is to what he or she may apparently become, the more scary it becomes.

Making Proper Use of the Scariest Villain

It’s very easy to squander the potential of the scariest villain. The GM is undoubtedly proud of his handiwork, and there’s a natural tendency to want to show it off.

Less is more.

Take all those tactics and techniques for creating suspense and treat them as an analogy for how you should employ the Villain. Start by showing the Villain to be a threat, and keep the encounter inconclusive. Then actively search for ways to emphasize the common ground between the PC and the Villain in subsequent encounters. Each such item is the equivalent of focusing on the relative minutia. Have the villain finish the PCs thoughts occasionally. Build up to the revelation of their ultimate similarity little by little, building the tension within the relationship until it is ready to explode.

The Scariest Villain – A shortcut

The scariest villain is actually relatively easy to create. Take a copy of the PC, with exactly the same hopes, dreams, ambitions, and motivations. Give them the same personality traits, the same psychological quirks, the same family structure, everything. Make any changes only in areas that have never contributed to the PC becoming who they are. Then add one incident that convinces the Villain that achieving these hopes, dreams, ambitions, and motivations justifies any means, however regretfully. Then turn them loose…

This is the third, final, and largest part of this series, which examines the lessons in problem-solving that I learned through training as a fire warden and as a systems analyst back in the early 90s, as applied to an RPG context. The goal is offer practical techniques that can be used to get a GM or a player through whatever difficult situation they may encounter. Part One offered some general advice, while Part Two took a detailed look at the subject of setting priorities, and used the example of a GM needing to fit game prep into a limited time window. With the series originally intended to be a single article, this concluding chapter will warp up the subject with some more practical techniques and advice to get you out of trouble.

Can information gathering occur concurrent with rapid action?

You can’t act decisively without facts to base your plans apon, but every moment that passes gives a problem time to grow, so immediate and decisive action is required. This is a classic dilemma that military and rescue personnel face on a regular basis, and some of the advice already offered – “What can you do Right Now?, and Part two’s entire discussion on breaking problems up and prioritizing the smaller problems – has been aimed squarely at overcoming the conflict between the two mission objectives.

This question considers another way to resolve the conflict. It can also be stated , “do any part of the problem you understand and then reconsider the whole,” but that implies seeing the action started through to its conclusion – and sometimes the information gathered while undertaking immediate action can change the need for, or priority of, that immediate action. If the situation is not what it appears – often the case when dealing with mistaken assumptions or a scheming mastermind – it might turn out that the immediate action is in fact the last thing that should be done.

Still another way of describing this procedure is “positioning your forces ready to act while they gather intelligence on the problem”, and that is often the description applied in a military context; but this suffers from the opposite flaw to the first alternative formulation, in that it implies that all you will do is get ready while gathering information, which can mean failing to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.

A fourth way of offering this same advice is to “stir around but do nothing final, and see what happens”. This is tantamount to involving yourself in a situation without a plan while not knowing what that situation is, and implies that any information-gathering will be coincidental and by happenstance, rather than a deliberate priority.

Because all the alternative ways of describing the process are flawed in one way or another, they are less likely to produce a solution when adopted as a policy or tactic than is the primary approach I’ve offered. Furthermore, if the opposition is particularly canny or well-informed (that scheming mastermind again), they may be able to distinguish between these approaches, recognize the shortcomings inherent when one of the alternatives is employed, and then exploit that flaw. This is something PCs should bear in mind when it’s an NPC group opposed to their interests who is trying to solve “the problem”.

What’s changed?

When something that has worked reliably for some time suddenly fails, in whole or in part, the first question should be “What’s changed?” The connection between that change and the new behavior might not be obvious, may be very convoluted, and there might in fact be no connection – but it’s a starting point that can lead to solutions.

One of the systems for which I was responsible in my Systems analyst days had a report listing various things in customer name sequence. It had worked perfectly for years. Suddenly and without explanation, it was listing some of new customers separately to old customers. Clearly something had changed, but nothing seemed obvious. It was eventually discovered that the operating system captured the difference between a Space and a Shift-space, and the department had a new data entry person who had the habit of pressing the shift key to capitalize the client’s name and sometimes hit the shift key a little early. A new step had to be added to the data entry process to strip out any shift-spaces and replace them with ordinary spaces, and a batch job written to clean up the records that were already in the system incorrectly.

You get the same question offered when you start getting system crashes on a computer – “What’s Changed?” Have you installed some new hardware, or new software, that could be interfering with some other process that had been working reliably in the past?

One of my older computers developed the habit of crashing at certain times of day. It could be reliably expected to happen. What had changed? Answer: I had replaced the power board with a generic brand version because I needed to use the old one elsewhere (it had more outlets). When the signals sent over the power lines to switch off-peak hot-water systems on or off reached this new power board, they produced a moment of “dirty” power – I don’t know whether it was a voltage spike or a corrupted waveform instead of the smooth AC input expected – but the old power board had been filtering this out, and the new one was not. This in turn was enough to cause the computer to crash. Part of the problem was that the computer’s power supply unit was getting old, and it was becoming more sensitive as a result. Eventually, it burned out under the unusual input. Replacing it provided a partial solution – instead of crashing the computer, the signal was simply passed through to the soundcard and manifested as audible tones. Only when I got some additional hardware that required putting the larger powerboard back in place, and these tones stopped abruptly, did the whole story become clear – I had blamed the failing power supply and that was only half the problem.

This advice applies far more broadly than just to computers. Whenever a system delivers an unusual or unexpected outcome – whether that’s a system of bureaucracy or of government or of law or whatever – your first question should always be, “What’s Changed?” and your second, “How could that change have resulted in this unusual outcome?” If the unusual outcome is a problem to be solved – and it almost always is a problem for someone, even if the results were beneficial (people like to learn from serendipity) – this is almost always the start of the path to a solution.

No-One’s Perfekt

People make mistakes. Good systems design anticipates this and prepares solutions to identify and correct the mistake before it becomes significant – but those systems are designed and built by people, too, so from time to time something will slip through the cracks. Which is all quite understandable – unless your department is charging the people for whom the system is being developed or maintained four figures an hour for your time, when it becomes simply not good enough?

The bigger and more complicated a system is, the easier it is for a mistake to fall through the cracks.

Another truism of systems development is that a mistake in design that is identified later in the development cycle – in the testing phase, for example – costs at least ten times as much to correct as one discovered at the beginning, during the design process.

Once again, these principles have a reach that goes far beyond the world of software engineering. Consider the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, where a design flaw resulted in catastrophic failure four months after it was built. Warning signs were present in that period, as interviews of motorists revealed after the fact. Presumably, these warning signs would also have been present during construction – but they were either not noticed, went ignored, or the complaints never reached the ears of someone who could do something about them in time. On November 7, 1940, the bridge collapsed and fell into Puget Sound. Whatever correction of the design flaws would have cost during the design phase, it would have been less than if corrective action was taken during the construction phase, which would have been less than solving the problem before it became catastrophic, at which point the entire US$8 million dollar structure had to be replaced.

To some extent, the engineering principles that were responsible for the flaw in design were unknown prior to the collapse, so this problem could be considered an unrepresentative example; so let’s take another: the Hubble Space Telescope.

Initially funded in the 1970s, technical delays and budget problems delayed the project. Originally intended for a 1983 launch, it would not reach orbit until 1990. In particular, congress cut funding during the planning stages; to what extent this contributed to the later problems with the telescope may never be known. Unknown to anyone at the time, despite some warning signs, the equipment used to monitor and control the grinding of the mirror had been incorrectly assembled, causing the mirror to be very accurately ground to the wrong shape. In 1993, a major shuttle mission performed an ingenious repair, and we’ve been going gosh-wow ever since.

I don’t know how much the repair mission cost, but for sure it was more than replacing or repairing the mirror before launch would have been. And that would have been far more than discovering the incorrect installation of the testing equipment during the grinding process. And that, in turn, would have been far more than making sure the testing equipment had been correctly set up in the first place – which would have been done if the potential implications had been correctly identified in the planning stages and appropriate testing specified. Ultimately, a minor flaw in the planning process mushroomed into catastrophic failure, from which the project was rescued by a combination of smart thinking and a lot of money and effort.

The sooner a problem is discovered, the easier it is to fix. It’s as true in engineering and writing novels and RPG adventures as it is in computer programming and systems development. It’s always important to identify and understand the cause of a problem. Sometimes, it is the only pathway to a solution, and for certain it’s the only way to ensure that the problem doesn’t recur – and that it has been solved and not merely hidden from overt view, this time around.

Look beyond the immediate

It’s not at all uncommon for a problem’s consequences to be discovered long before the problem itself – and, as I wrote in part 1 of this series, you have to “Manage Symptoms, Cure Causes” and not the other way around. It’s not at all uncommon for a problem in a process or situation to be completely unnoticeable until some other product or situation attempts to use the flawed product of the original process or situation. You can sometimes find the real cause of a problem, and the correct solution to that problem, by looking at the last step in the process that appeared to work successfully.

I had this rammed home to me recently. I had a problem while preparing the recent review of The Unconventional Dwarf. The article uploaded and saved just fine, but when I went to preview it (to make any final tweaks or corrections to the layout) WordPress kept coming up with a 404 “page not found” error – it was claiming that the article didn’t exist, that I was trying to preview something that WordPress couldn’t find. Eventually, I discovered that my cookie for the site admin pages had been corrupted somehow, and that this formed a key input into telling the WordPress control panel how to do its job (because that was where my preferences were saved). Log out, delete the cookie, and log back in – problem solved.

It’s often worth looking, then, beyond whatever is manifesting the problem, at whatever produced the inputs to that particular process. In fact, the earlier “shift-space” problem that I described is another example of this – at the time that the data was being entered, it appeared to be saved perfectly correctly, and there was no problem in evidence. Only when another process attempted to work with the flawed data did a problem manifest itself – but the problem was not in the process giving incorrect results, that was simply where the symptoms of the problem were manifesting.

“Garbage In, Garbage Out” is a well-known phrase these days, and it describes the situation in the “shift-space” problem to a T. But I have never seen what should now be an obvious corollary: “Garbage Out, Garbage In” when talking about the way one process connects with another. If something strange is happening, it generally pays to look beyond the immediate “something strange” when trying to work out why strange things are happening.

Don’t ignore the waistcoating

A related lesson is summed up in the maxim quoted above. Trying to trace a problem to a particular subsystem ignores the seams in between – and that’s sometimes where the real problem is.

One of the systems for which I was responsible back in my Systems Analysis days started crashing and producing garbage. Part of this system imported information from a seemingly unrelated system run by a completely different department. The latter system was still working perfectly, but whenever this import job was run, it would collapse or parse garbage which was corrupting the database of the system I looked after. It didn’t take long to discover the cause – the effects of inflation on prices had just carried one of the data fields in the file being imported to a new order of magnitude, one that was one digit too long for the importing software. The output, in other words, might have read “1022.48” and the software I looked after could only cope with a number of “999.99” or less. It took only a moment to fix the problem; it took rather longer to write and test a one-off tool to remove the corrupted data and troll through the other departments database to capture the correct information to replace it. It subsequently transpired that the other department had been forced to modify their own system to cope with the extra digit, but no-one had realized that this might have knock-on effects elsewhere in any other system that used that information. Fixing the actual problem was relatively trivial, fixing the overall system ecology – the principles and practices of the department within which I worked – to prevent (or at least to watch for) similar problems arising in the future was rather more difficult.

Reality doesn’t draw hard lines and say “this process ends there” and “this process begins here” – these are artificial limits imposed to aid human comprehension. So far as reality is concerned, it is all one big, ongoing, complex, process. The problem is that we often impose these limits before we really understand what we’re talking about, and are imposing them in order to facilitate that understanding – and sometimes, there is something going on in-between the two processes that wasn’t known about at the time.

If you can’t see anything going wrong in either of the processes, but the outcome is unexpected nevertheless – and this happens all the time in economics and biology and ecologies and a hundred other fields – it’s a sure bet that something is happening in the waistcoating between the two identified processes. And the lesson from The Butterfly Effect is that the waistcoating can be influenced by processes that are unbelievably distinct from the situation being discovered – you just need a long chain of causes and effects to couple the two together.

So if there is no obvious cause for a problem, and hence no obvious solution, don’t ignore the waistcoating.

Document! Document! Document!

I’ve gotten myself into trouble more times than I can count because I didn’t write something down – usually something so obvious, so important, that I would have “no trouble” remembering it. Way back in April 2011 I wrote The failure of …ummm… Memory, the title of which should clue you into how well that usually works out.

Adequate documentation becomes even more important when you’re analyzing someone else’s handiwork, such as when you’re maintaining a computer program they’ve written. Every hour spent on documentation saves five to ten hours time for everyone who subsequently work on that software, every time they have to work on it – provided the documentation is also maintained.

Whenever you are sure that your documentation is adequate, in terms of RPGs, the only thing you can be sure of is that something vitally important is missing – and the best that you can hope for is that what is written there will provide enough context to remind you of what’s missing.

In terms of gaming, a lot of GMs will carefully insert clues to future problems into their adventures. That’s information that will frequently be lost to players who don’t write it down.

The Cheat’s solution to problem creation
I know of absolutely nowhere wherein it is written that the GM needs to have a specific problem in mind when he offers a clue to the solution of that problem. You can drop the clue and figure out what it means later. This keeps the campaign spontaneous, fresh, and unpredictable – but means that it will collapse into a screaming heap somewhere down the track if the players remember that clue and keep trying to fit it in, somewhere, while the GM has forgotten it. The more you rely on improv over prep, the more important it becomes to document what you come up with on the fly.

Allow for human laziness

We all get lazy from time to time. You can’t work continuously, day in and day out, and maintain the same level of dedication to whatever you are doing – whether it’s running a campaign, working a job, or chores around the house. If we could only know when it was vital that we be at the top of our games, we could ease up a little the rest of the time and stockpile our energies for when it really matters. Inevitably, most of the time, we don’t have this information, which means that somewhere, at any given time, someone has taken their foot off the accelerator at the worst possible time, permitting a Balrog or two to slip through the cracks.

They start out small and innocuous, and can usually be penned up and exhibited in the zoo if caught quickly enough, but inevitably some of them will reach full maturity – and that’s when there’s a problem, both for whoever was guarding the henhouse and for whoever is sent in to clean up the mess.

Constant supervision is not the answer; not only is it wasteful of resources, being spied apon constantly has a detrimental effect on both the quantity of work performed and its quality, and ultimately is simply shifting the problem from one set of shoulders to another – waiting for the day when the supervisor is off his game. Even worse, it can become expected that “George” will fix the problem, relaxing the standard of diligence that would otherwise be present.

The only solution is to make allowances for human laziness at the same time as you are making allowances for people making mistakes – and build systems into your processes that test for overlooked consequences and errors of omission as well as errors of commission.

Of course, this is fairly irrelevant when you are the troubleshooter who has to solve the problem after the fact, isn’t it?

Not at all. One of the tasks that must be achieved when first looking for a solution is working out how long you have to come up with a solution and implement it. And that almost always involves working out how long people will take to achieve certain tasks.

You almost always have a little more time than you think. The last minute may be a hour or so long. The last second is often a full minute in length.

Part of the reason for this is that this is reality, and part of it is because, while the GM wants to make things dramatic and exciting, he doesn’t want the PCs to fail, necessarily. So the GM throws minor inconveniences and roadblocks into the path of a solution so that PCs can’t implement it until the last minute, or even the last possible second – and then balances the books by making sure that the players have a fair chance at achieving a solution in the time available.

Always allow for human laziness. His. Theirs. Yours. The GMs. But don’t ever make the mistake of assuming that non-humans have human laziness problems; they may have none, or may have completely different issues to overcome.

Don’t lose track of the clock

If this seems like contradictory advice to that of the previous section, that’s because it is. While most GMs will stretch the time window out to heighten the drama, they won’t view with generosity a failure to be in position to execute the solution when the time comes. Only when the PCs have a solution that to the best of their knowledge will work and is reasonable will the GM consider himself free to take liberties in the name of excitement – coming up with that solution and making all the preparations necessary to implement it is the responsibility of the PCs and their players, and he or she will be scrupulously fair in the meantime – even if that means that they appear to be biased against them. In other words, if the PCs opposition has an advantage over them, expect them to exploit it to the best of the GMs ability because that is what an opposition in that circumstance would do.

That means that there is a hard limit, time-wise, to how long the players can take to find a solution to whatever problems they are confronting. Beyond that point, momentum will carry their enemies to a victory that remains inevitable only because the PCs didn’t find a way to stop it.

The exact measure of that hard limit will vary depending on the circumstances, though the GM will usually drop a hint or two. If he doesn’t, or if whatever hint there might have been has sailed clear over your head, this becomes one of the key pieces of intelligence that the GM expects the PCs to have to obtain as part of their investigations.

Nor should any GM ever guarantee that the PCs will have enough time to find a solution. There are two circumstances in which the GM will usually do the exact opposite:

1. When the GM’s hints that there is a problem that isn’t being addressed by the PCs have fallen on deaf ears until the other side’s plans have had time to mature; or,
2. When the GM wants to run a 13th-hour adventure, which usually means that the enemy “victory” is nowhere near as set in stone as they think it is.

All of which means that it behooves the problem-solver to never lose track of the clock. You might not know what the timeline looks like, you might not recognize a deadline if you tripped over one, but you should always be aware of how long you have spent on a problem – and how long it’s likely to be before the sands of time run out.

This is also true at a metagame level. A GM will only watch the players going around in circles without direction for so long after he’s given them all the clues they should need to at least get started on a solution before he will lose patience. Normally, after presenting a problem to the PCs, the passage of game time shifts to something close to real time, or even slower; when his patience runs out, it’s prone to accelerate in the other direction, and word will reach the PCs that there has been an unfavorable development of some sort – and things have just gotten worse. What happens after that depends on the GM. Some will take pity on the players, who will have undoubtedly become just as frustrated, and offer an increasingly blatant hint – at some price to be dictated by the GM on another occasion. I’m of that sort. Others will let events take their course – so that if the players don’t pull their fingers out, eventually the PCs will simply stand around and wring their hands in despair while the plot comes to its inevitable conclusion, and let the chips fall where they may.

Playing an RPG is all about problem solving (amongst other things), ground that they have had in common with computer-based RPGs since the days of Zork. Time keeps happening in the game; don’t lose track of the clock, and – if you have to – be prepared to go with your best guess and make it up as you go along.

Work within the limits of resources

We’re inching toward the conclusion of this article, but we’re not there yet. In part one, I suggested that people needed to know their tools. The suggestion above is an extension to that principle. You not only know what your tools can do, and how to use them to do it, you need to know what other tools are available and what they can be used to achieve – for those times when your own toolkit is inadequate to a solution.

At the same time, it does no good wishing for moonbeams; “I could solve it in a trice if Pi were equal to four, or if I squared the circle,” just doesn’t cut it. Some problems may be simply too big to be solved with the resources that you can bring to bear, and that’s as true in real life as it is in game prep and for the characters in an adventure.

In a way, that’s what this entire series has been about. After all, problems with easy solutions can be solved right away, with no need for advice from anyone. It’s when you don’t have any easy answers that you want advice. So, when confronted with a problem that seems too large to be solved, you have just two approaches to pursue – and the right answer is probably going to be a combination of both.

Are resources inadequate?

Are your current resources sufficient to solve the problem? If not, you need to work out what else you need, and the obtaining of the necessary becomes a part of the solution.

Can problems be scaled down?

The other approach is to find a way to scale down or isolate your problems, and one of the best ways of doing that is to reduce the resources of the other side (there always seems to be some form of active opposition in these cases). Better yet, you might be able to take the other side’s resources and make them your own, taking two steps forward for the price of one.

When the PCs first arrived in Dimension Halo, the local setting for the adventures within my rebooted superhero campaign, the problems that confronted them seemed too big for them to solve. Organized Crime was running rampant, Corruption was systemic, Joseph McCarthy was US President, there was an oppressive superagency called the S.I.D. which answered to no-one except for the alien mastermind who was the local dimension’s analogue of the greatest Hero the PCs had ever known, and the PCs were very much on their own, with no official authority or sanction of any kind – only a pressing need to get control of these situations.

They started by cleaning up one police department, then achieving popular support, agitating against the repressive regime. From one clean department, they obtained localized authority, and used it to clean up one city council, which enabled them to clean the corruption out of an entire state. They enticed the S.I.D. into public excesses and slowly won the support of the media. Bit by bit, they reduced the scope of the problem, eventually forcing Al Capone out of the Governor’s mansion in Illinois, breaking the back of organized crime, arresting all but one of the justices of the supreme court, obtaining proof of corruption that led to the arrest and conviction of 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the Senate, forced the S.I.D. to become a rogue agency, and eventually put the choice of the future to the public in a closely-fought presidential election between a known honest man and their arch-enemy. Eventually, he was isolated and alone, while they had national backing and sanction and mass popular support. The initial situation was completely reversed. No one plan could have accomplished all this; there were too many surprises and plot twists along the way. By acquiring additional resources (public support, official sanction, allies) and denying resources to the other side, one after another, the lines of what was possible and what was not were moved until a solution emerged.

The Insoluble Problem

Even more extreme, some problems seem insoluble. When presented with such a problem, players should always remember that the GM has no interest in presenting them with a genuinely insoluble problem (the NPCs that he has created are a different story). My rule of thumb, as a GM, is to always make sure that there is at least one solution to every dilemma, even if it is not obvious – and where there’s one, there will usually be two or three. Finding one and implementing it are then up to the PCs. The objective is for everyone to have fun, not for me to out-think the players; I’m more on their side than opposed to them.

Accordingly, no matter how insoluble a problem is, there is a solution possible. Failure to find it generally comes down to one of four mistakes: Flawed Logic, Flawed Assumptions, Narrow Focus, or a Fuzzy Reality.

• Flawed Logic – something that seems an inevitable consequence, isn’t.
• Flawed Assumptions – something that is being taken for granted is not as inevitable as it seems.
• Narrow Focus – there is a possible course of action that is not even being considered.
• Fuzzy Reality – the players are applying one or more real-world constraints or restrictions that might not always apply in the game environment.

When confronted with an apparently insoluble problem, how should one proceed? [NB: These techniques won’t always apply to real life problems but are worth trying, anyway.]

Look For The ‘Because’ Contradiction

This works to correct flawed logic and, sometimes, the other causes. List the things you might do and articulate the one salutary reason why it won’t work – then try and envisage a way to change the circumstances so that the ‘because’ you will not inevitably follow. This will usually produce a list of possible courses of action that can be taken to make the insoluble, soluble. One of these will usually be more practical than the others, or will have fewer unwanted consequences, or be more controllable by the PCs, or simply be more tolerable – that’s the one you want. If there are none that fit this prescription, you then need a three-step solution – in other words, you need to further modify the circumstances so that taking that particular course of action will not have the intolerable unwanted consequences, or that will not be so uncontrollable, or will become more practical, or will become more tolerable. Simply keep adding steps to the solution package until you get to where you need to go – or run out of time and need to implement the best plan you have.

Examine The Environment of the problem

This works as a correction when the problem is a flawed assumption. Every problem has constraints that limit the scope for possible solutions, many of which are simply assumed to exist by those looking for a solution. Those assumptions are rarely tested for validity. Redefining the problem in various ways can get around the flawed assumption; when you find something that seems to solve the redefined problem, reconsider the original formulation of the problem to identify the flawed assumption (if any) and verify that this really is a solution to the problem.

Part of this procedure is in considering the characteristics of each of these solution constraints for something that may not necessarily be the case. This may involve some simple testing to discern the difference between the apparent and reality, if any.

This is a technique for thinking outside the box – and remember, a box has six sides – something I pointed out in an earlier problem-solving article, Boxed In: A problem-solving frame of reference for players & GMs alike, which I commend to your attention at this point.

Visualize the situation

Sometimes problems seem to have no solution because of the way you are looking at the problem. This is usually an example of Narrow Focus, in which you simply aren’t considering all the possibilities, and is also something addressed by the “Boxed In” article. If you can see no solution, try looking at the problem from a different viewpoint.

If we’re talking about some sort of physical problem, try a different physical perspective; the use of figures and miniatures and maps and battlemats encourages a top-down perspective, so much so that many people forget that the space they are in even has a ceiling – or has no ceiling. Lock the PCs in a 20′ x 20′ room, with a near-impregnable door and the lock and hinges on the far side, and no apparent exit, and they will start to think about secret doors. Put the actual secret door in the ceiling and it will take them ages to find it – and they will probably check the walls three or four times, first, and maybe try and burn down the door, to boot.

For any other sort of problem, pick a character whose personality you know well, and who is absolutely nothing like that of your own character, and ask yourself how would they solve this particular problem? I like using Dr Doom for this purpose, but it’s not my only option. Once you have a solution, all you have to do is refine it until it becomes acceptable to your character. It’s this sort of “outside the box” thinking that leads to the famous “shoot the hostage” solution in Speed…

Assume you haven’t been told everything

All too often, players assume that they’ve been told everything they need to know when the GM falls silent. I always find it more productive to assume that I haven’t been told everything, and try to work out what I should be asking the GM questions about. This is still another way of testing the parameters of the problem, and you should not be afraid to take that literally as well as figuratively. The wall may only look like it’s made of granite…

Slice The Sausage

Some advice that you often hear when asking how to diagnose a computer problem is to turn off everything that might be causing the problem, and see if it goes away. If it does, then turn things back on, one at a time, until you find the problem returning – and that will tell you what is actually causing the problem.

A similar approach is used to diagnose hardware faults. Borrow someone else’s computer and try replacing each of your suspect components temporarily. Use their hard disk to boot up. Try their graphics card. Whatever. Or, if the component cost is low enough, replace any possible culprit on general principles and see if the problem gets fixed. I’ve heard of a number of cases, for example, where it looked like a disk drive was failing when the real problem was an intermittent fault in the cable connecting the drive to the motherboard – and replacing this $5-$10 part fixed the problem. Or you can plug things into different sockets of the same type on the computer.

The first request of my ISP when people have trouble with their internet connection is to make what they call the “plugs out” test. This involves unplugging phones and everything else that is connected to the phone line except the computer and seeing if you can connect. If you can, plug the other items back in, one at a time, until you isolate the problem. On one occasion, I discovered that the line filter had failed; replacing it brought back my internet connection. On another occasion, I discovered that the phone cable used to connect my modem to the phone outlet had failed – no warning, it was simply completely dead. Both problems were solved a lot more cheaply than getting a technician out to test the actual phone line.

The metaphor that I use to think of all these tests, and similar problem solving approaches, is “Slice the sausage” – in which the “sausage” is the accumulation of all the things that might be the cause of the problem. Remove “the sausage” and then put it back, one slice at a time. I use this metaphor as a reminder to actually employ this problem-solving approach on a broader scale, and to deal with problems other than these specific examples.

The Well of Infinity
I was going to offer an example of an insoluble problem at this point, and then start listing all the things that could be tried as solutions, but time has gotten the better of me. Since it wasn’t going to add materially to the advice offered, I’m going to forego it. I might write it up and tack it on as a fourth part to the series sometime when I’m short of time to write something. For now, though, I’ll just move on…

Don’t Panic

When you’re confronted with the unexpected – or even an expected problem – these immortal words should be the first thing that comes to mind. Panic doesn’t help you think faster, it doesn’t help you think more clearly or more deeply – in fact, it inhibits all of these things just at the time when you most need them.

Keep those two words of advice in mind when you’re implementing whatever solution (however incomplete) that you come up with, too.

Expect the unexpected

After all, if you could see the whole problem, you would also see the whole solution. Since you can’t do the latter, you also can’t do the former – and that pretty much guarantees that there will be surprises along the way.

It can always be worse

Whatever problem you are faced with, it can always be worse than it is, or than it currently appears. Don’t waste effort trying to think of ways in which this could be true; just tell yourself this, and get on with things. Again, this is true in real life as well as in-game.

It can always get better

Similarly, no matter how hopeless things may appear, always remember this. Just because you don’t know how to make this happen doesn’t mean you should stop going through the motions and doing what it is that you do. Again, there are going to be surprises, and at least some of them should be pleasant ones (from your point of view). You may not know how long it will take, either; all you can do is keep going, endure, and wait.

Never Say Die

No-one can possibly implement all of this advice, or you would never do anything but figure out theoretical solutions to your problems. The key to success is to identify which problem-solving strategy is most applicable to whatever trouble is currently confronting you, and employ it. If it doesn’t work, try one of the others. I don’t care if the problem is a real-world one, or a fictional one, or a game-mastering one – the techniques are the same. That’s why these lessons from my past experience apply not only to the context in which they were given, but to any broader context you may encounter.

And you know, there’s very little that is more gratifying than solving a problem that confronts you…

Part one of this trilogy of articles offered some general advice on problem-solving drawn from my experience and training as a fire safety officer and systems analyst. Part three will offer more of the same, but the discussion in the first part had reached the point of considering the subject of setting priorities – a discussion that quickly ballooned into something altogether too large and important to be contained in what was originally planned to be a single article.

Prioritization is an essential skill for long-term success. In terms of problem-solving, the subject falls into four broad categories: Problem Definition, Solution Prioritization, Confluences, and Consequences & Repercussions. While I’m going to try and inject some rationality into the analyses of these different topics, in practice the results are a theoretical exercise that is not worth undertaking, so people tend to rely on gut instinct and cloak their decisions on whatever spurious and specious logic they can bring to bear. What’s needed are some practical shortcuts to put a little of that theoretical rigor into the analytic and decision-making processes – preferably something that can be applied mentally, without recourse to physical representations, but something that can be done on scraps of paper would be better than nothing.

Fortunately, I have just such a practical technique to offer – in fact, I have two of them – and they form two additional topics for this article.

So, theory and then practice. And now that we all know what the road map for this particular discussion is going to be, let’s dive right in…

Problem Prioritization

If you have half-a-dozen problems to solve, how do you decide the order of priority for solving them?

Sub-Problem Breakdown

Every problem that exists can be broken down into the steps required to solve it, each of which can be restated as a separate sub-problem. Looking at this situation from another perspective, each sub-problem can be considered a partial solution to the larger problem. This becomes important when one considers that a partial solution may be almost as good as a complete solution, but take a lot less time and effort.

A great example is creating the next adventure in an RPG campaign. So that’s the main problem. Coming up with an overall idea is the first step. Working out how the characters get involved with whatever the situation is the second. Roughing out the events between this beginning through to the end of the plotline is the third. Determining where those events are likely to occur, in general, is the fourth. Identifying the NPCs that are needed is the fifth. Generating rough drafts of any maps, props, character handouts, etc is the sixth. The seventh is actually generating those props, maps, etc. Eighth though Eleventh are detailed Narratives, Location Descriptions, Character Outlines, and Dialogue outlines.

It’s possible to run the adventure after the first sub-problem, but it would be better if more prep was done. Each of the steps through to the Seventh add to the preparedness to run the adventure, but it’s only when all seven are complete that a new level of preparedness is achieved that is greater than the sum of its parts. The next iteration develops details for each of the elements roughed out in steps two to five, and at the end of that process, the adventure is definitely ready to run. Further steps would be needed to evolve the adventure to a publishable standard, making it less focused on the specific individuals in a particular campaign and more comprehensive, able to cope with a variety of PCs, and so on, but that’s not the problem at hand.

Criticality

The more essential a solution is to an individual subproblem, the more critical that sub-problem can be considered to the solution of the overall problem. In theory, if you add up the criticality measures of each subproblem, you achieve a measure of how critical the main problem is. The flaw in this theory is that it assumes each subproblem is of equal importance, and it just ain’t so.

For example, you may have four tasks to try and get done for the next game session. One is preparing the adventure. Two is mapping the base of operations that the PCs have just acquired. Three is populating it with NPCs. Four is working out the details of the magic items that they liberated in the last adventure. Five is working out the consequences of any loose ends that the PCs left in previous adventures, and how these will affect the adventure. Now assume that you don’t have time to do all of the above.

Criticality, in the context of this example, is how urgently you need something for the next game session.

You could identify which one item is most critical and spend all your time on that one item. You could prepare each item to a limited extent and then focus your remaining time on the one most critical. Either is preferable to spending all your time on an item chosen at random, because the odds are four-to-one against your choosing the right one.

An example from a player’s perspective is: We have five problems to deal with. Which one is most urgent? Of course, you can’t judge without knowing the circumstances and identifying the five specific problems, so let’s invent some for the purposes of discussion: We’re broke, we’re starving, we’re cursed, our base of operations just burned down, and we’re being hunted by the authorities for crimes we didn’t commit. One solution would be to let yourselves get captured – they feed you in jail and give you a roof over your head, you don’t need money, and the curse provides a defense of sorts – but I don’t expect most PCs to be happy with that choice, they tend to want to be more proactive in solving their problems. Devoting exclusive attention to any one of these problems isn’t going to work very well. A set of partial solutions is needed just to get a platform from which each of the problems can be addressed properly. The most critical problem is being hunted by the authorities – a temporary solution to that problem requires disguises of some sort. Once that’s in hand, money can get some food and temporary lodgings to serve as a new base of operations. Next would probably be the curse, depending on just what it was – and which probably doesn’t have an intermediate or partial solution, they tend to be all-or-nothing. With that out of the way, the group can function effectively – but by this time, money and food are probably back on the agenda, and if money isn’t solved, the lodgings issue will also crop up again. More money is therefore the next priority – again, a short-term solution is probably good enough. Once that’s solved, the dangers of the disguises being penetrated are probably severe enough that preparing a new set, ready to go, would be a good idea. Only then can the problem with the authorities be targeted – probably by trying to identify who’s falsely accused them and why.

That’s certainly the plan of action I would outline if I were confronted with this set of issues in a game.

The key to developing that plan was distinguishing between two types of sub-problem: permanent or lasting solutions, and temporary, immediate solutions, then assigning relative levels of criticality to each subproblem – then tackling them in the order of the resulting priority. The plan was further refined by considering how long the temporary solution would hold, and adjusting the priorities accordingly.

Of course, other considerations could come into play – if one of the characters was especially recognizable, or the authorities had some means of magically tracking the characters, or complications of that nature. It’s not the only solution – circumstances might require money in order to obtain disguise materials. But this would still be the basic starting point.

These examples demonstrate two fundamental principles of criticality analysis:

• Total Criticality is equal to the sum of sub-problem criticalities; and
• Relative Criticality will vary from one problem to another.

Assessing the relative Criticality of each subproblem in terms of solving the overall problem gives an accurate measure of the criticality over time of the sub-problem. The flaw in doing so is that it assumes that each overall problem has the same priority. Correcting this requires multiplying those individual sub-problem criticalities by the overall priority rating of each larger problem to get a true relative measure of the criticality.

Confinement

Criticality is not the only principle illustrated by these examples. The second general principle is Confinement. As a general rule of thumb, some problems restrict what can be done about other problems – “being wanted” is the obvious one. Depending on the specifics, the “Curse” might be another. It follows that these problems, and their component sub-problems, should receive a greater priority than their Criticality alone, simply because even a partial solution expands the number of options open to the problem-solver, or increases the effectiveness of solution attempts.

Mathematically:

• Sub-problem Priority = (Criticality x Relative Adjustment) + Confinement Modifier.
• Problem Priority = Sum (Sub-problem priority 1 + sub-problem priority 2 + …)

Solution Practicality

Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is usually the consequence of a blocking sub-item, also known as a dependency. It’s hard to have a confrontation with the supervillain in his lair until you’ve worked out the details of that lair – so the lair blocks completion of the confrontation adventure, which is dependant on completion of the lair.

Clearly, the priority of creating the lair (to use this example) is more than if it stood alone. The actual Sub-problem priority is the usual priority measure PLUS the usual priority measure of everything that depends on it – and everything that depends on it has it’s normal priority MINUS this contribution (effectively zero) until this sub-priority item is dealt with.

The reason for this behavior is because one item is completely dependant on the other, which is another way of saying that one item is impractical until another is completed. But there are degrees of impracticality; it might not be necessary to completely detail the lair, a general summary might be enough, or perhaps you intend to use a map from a commercial product and improvise the details as you go. or maybe there’s enough material in the adventure that all you need for the next game session is a location description – so, by subdividing the adventure, you can relieve the dependency.

Practicality is therefore a fraction applied to the imported part of the sub-problem priority measure. If half the circumstances or approaches permit work to proceed without the dependency then only half the total value of the dependant items gets attached.

Mathematically:

• Sub-problem Dependency Modifier = Practicality Ratio x Base Sub-problem priority.
• Child Dependency Priority = Base Sub-problem priority – Sub-problem Dependency Modifier
• Parent Dependency Priority = Base Sub-problem priority – Sub-problem Dependency Modifier

Interval Capacity

Dependence is not the only influence on Practicality, but to facilitate analysis I have chosen to deal with the time requirement as a separate factor.

So how should time requirements be assessed? This is where it gets really tricky.

In the order of highest sub-problem, priority, multiply each priority by the probability of getting that particular task finished in the time remaining after all the previous items are completed.

This creates moving goal posts, but the end result is that priority scores get assigned to each task, and then adjusted for the real-world factors that always get in the way.

Confluences

So that’s it, we’ve allowed for everything, right? Note quite. There remain two factors that a realistic analysis would have to take into account, and they are both Confluences.

Anyone skipping all the deep theory might want to start reading from here.

Commonality Of Subproblems

First, we have a confluence of sub-problems, i.e. tasks, to consider. Any time that you need the same starting point in order to complete two or more subsequent tasks, you have a confluence of tasks.

With a ‘flat’ structure – one in which each preliminary step required to achieve a task is specified – this results in the same task being listed multiple times and receiving multiple priority scores. That’s not right – each task should have one entry and one entry only. Having done something, you don’t have to do it again to use it for something else.

The correct approach is to add the two priority measures together to get a net score. And if that puts a priority weighting on tasks that can be used for multiple purposes, what’s wrong with that?

Community Of Solutions

There are times when even though an item isn’t meant for a specific purpose, it can be adapted to that purpose. A good example is an illustration that you draw inspiration from; it can be used not only for idea generation, but can replace or compliment a narrative section. When this is explicitly defined as part of the overall problem, it’s an example of a standard confluence, as described in the previous section; when it’s a lucky accident, it’s a non-standard confluence that has the potential to completely reshape the priorities regarding the rest of the problem, and (at the very least) should trigger a reassessment of the priorities assigned.

Logic therefore dictates that the greatest possible efficiency in terms of results vs time taken is achieved by “front-loading” those items that experience shows can have this sort of serendipitous outcome.

This actually defines a couple of alternative problem-solving strategies that are worth understanding.

Game-changers first
There is a fine balance between dealing with the game changers and deciding exactly what you are going to need to do. If you actually find something that radically reshapes the problem – which won’t happen all the time – then you avoid wasting time breaking down the problem into detailed requirements only to have to redo it all; but if you don’t then your work on the game-changers is going to be less efficient than it could have been, so you end up wasting time that way. Which is the bigger risk?

Personally, I think that if you have any clue at all as to what the basic shape of the solution is going to be, then your game-changer efforts are not entirely blind choices – so, in this circumstance, doing the game-changers first is the better choice. If you are completely ignorant as to the nature of the solution, then this solution is not the best.

Game-changers after problem breakdown
That’s when this alternative is the better choice. Essentially, it can be summed up: get a rough idea of the answer, then work on anything that might offer a shortcut.

Game-changers as a cumulative priority item
And one final alternative to contemplate: consider all the game-changers to be a single confluent priority item, add their priorities together as noted previously, and use that value to determine where they fall in the task list.

Consequences & Repercussions

There’s still one more wrinkle to contemplate in this theoretical picture. If it’s wrong to consider tasks or partial solutions in isolation within a problem, it’s even more incorrect to ignore the fact that work done to solve one problem can also contribute to the solution of another. Some tasks can act as an investment in future problem-solving – whether we’re talking about PC choices in a game, or GM choices in creating an adventure, or in crafting a campaign. Ideally, it can be argued, you want all the work done in the past to come together at the end of the campaign to free the GM completely from the burdens of his role so that he can sit back and just enjoy it as much as the players should.

There are all sorts of theoretical ways in which this factor could be accommodated, but none of them are especially compelling. Ultimately, this is so dependant on specifics that it can’t be properly incorporated into a theoretical model – especially one that will never be used in real life.

Getting Practical

So, if it’s never going to be used, why did I bother putting a lot of effort into thinking about the theoretical analysis that I’ve just spent almost 2500 words explaining?

If a practical model doesn’t reflect the theory, there’s a great chance that the practical solution won’t work properly, or at all. Practicality may force a compromise, but you have to know which corners you are cutting, and why. Before I could offer the approaches that I have in mind, I wanted to be sure they worked – and I wanted to be able to explain why they worked :)

Practical Methods 1: Lists and scores

The first practical method involves making a list and doing some quick-and-dirty scoring to get a priority.

Step 1: Make the list

Make a list of all the steps and substeps involved in achieving a solution. Number the initial breakdown as a zero. For each item, list it in two entries – summary and detailed – if that seems appropriate. The exception is anything that you define as a possible game-changer which gets placed in it’s own sub-list immediately after the general breakdown, but numbered as though it were in the appropriate place on the list.

Not clear? Try the following example list:

0. Overall Idea

20. PC Involvement in Adventure

30. Adventure Breakdown – summary

31. Adventure Breakdown – Detailed

40. Locations – summary
41. Locations – detailed

42. Locations – Illustrations

50. Maps – General outline/Notes

51. Maps – detailed

60. NPCs involved – summary
61. NPCs involved – descriptions
62. NPCs involved – details

63. NPCs involved – illustrations

70. Props – General Outline
71. Props – construction

80. Player Handouts – General Outline
81. Player Handouts – creation

90. Campaign Reference – General Requirements
91. Campaign Reference – Outline

92. Campaign Reference – Creation

These 21 steps are the essential components of creating an adventure, an act that should be familiar to all of us. The list above has everything in its logical sequence. Each major adventure component starts with a “ten number” – “10, 20, 30, 40” and so on – while subsequent steps within that adventure component have been given numbers going up by 1 – “31, 41, 42”, and so on. “10” has been reserved for the potential Game Changers.

You might be wondering what “Campaign Reference” entails. This is for anything rules or world-related not specifically aimed at this particular adventure. It could be a new character class, a new NPC race, a new monster, a new magic item, a new piece of campaign history, a new gadget, or a change to the House Rules. The entire “Orcs and Elves” series falls into this category.

If I now extract all the things that I consider potential game changers and put them into their own category under the “10” entry, I get:

0. Overall Idea

10. Game-changers
11. (30) Adventure Breakdown – summary
12. (42) Locations – Illustrations
13. (50) Maps – General outline/Notes
14. (60) NPCs involved – summary
15. (63) NPCs involved – illustrations
16. (90) Campaign Reference – General Requirements
17. (91) Campaign Reference – Outline

20. PC Involvement in Adventure

31. Adventure Breakdown – Detailed

40. Locations – summary
41. Locations – detailed

51. Maps – detailed

61. NPCs involved – descriptions
62. NPCs involved – details

70. Props – General Outline
71. Props – construction

80. Player Handouts – General Outline
81. Player Handouts – creation

92. Campaign Reference – Creation

Step 2: Criticality Ranking

In each group of “10s”, starting with 20, assign a value to the highest-numbered item – do it with tally marks – that ranks them in order of criticality. High is more critical. How essential is this item to having the adventure (in this case) in a playable state?

In the case of our example, the entries to be listed are those numbered 00, 20, 31, 42, 51, 63, 71, 81, and 92.

Then do the items that precede these entries in each group; the only rule is that each one MUST be given a criticality score higher than, or equal to, it’s successor. Keep going until every item has a criticality rating.

0. Overall Idea IIII  IIII

10. Game-changers
11. (30) Adventure Breakdown – summary IIII III
12. (42) Locations – Illustrations III
13. (50) Maps – General outline/Notes IIII
14. (60) NPCs involved – summary IIII II
15. (63) NPCs involved – illustrations III
16. (90) Campaign Reference – General Requirements IIII II
17. (91) Campaign Reference – Outline IIII I

20. PC Involvement in Adventure II

31. Adventure Breakdown – Detailed IIII

40. Locations – summary IIII II
41. Locations – detailed III

51. Maps – detailed I

61. NPCs involved – descriptions IIII
62. NPCs involved – details III

70. Props – General Outline II
71. Props – construction I

80. Player Handouts – General Outline IIII II
81. Player Handouts – creation IIII I

92. Campaign Reference – Creation IIII

Step 3: Dependency

If an item is directly dependant on a previous item, add 2 to the parent item’s tally.

Add 2 to the tally of each item in the game-changing category.

Then arbitrarily increase the initial step (00) to match that of the highest item if it doesn’t already.

0. Overall Idea IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII III

10. Game-changers
11. (30) Adventure Breakdown – summary IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII III
12. (42) Locations – Illustrations IIII
13. (50) Maps – General outline/Notes IIII IIII
14. (60) NPCs involved – summary IIII  IIII IIII
15. (63) NPCs involved – illustrations IIII
16. (90) Campaign Reference – General Requirements IIII  IIII I
17. (91) Campaign Reference – Outline IIII  IIII

20. PC Involvement in Adventure II

31. Adventure Breakdown – Detailed IIII  IIII

40. Locations – summary IIII  IIII I
41. Locations – detailed III

51. Maps – detailed I

61. NPCs involved – descriptions IIII IIII
62. NPCs involved – details III

70. Props – General Outline IIII
71. Props – construction I

80. Player Handouts – General Outline IIII IIII
81. Player Handouts – creation IIII I

92. Campaign Reference – Creation IIII

Step 4: Reorder by Tally Count

The next step is to get each step into order by tally count. I’ve put the tally totals in brackets afterwards, because that makes it a little easier to reorder the list. At this point, you can also forget the old index numbers at the start of each entry. Just to avoid confusion, I will normally number the sorted steps starting at 100.

100. Overall Idea IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII III (28)
101. Adventure Breakdown – summary IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII  IIII III (28)
102. NPCs involved – summary IIII  IIII IIII (14)
103. Campaign Reference – General Requirements IIII  IIII I (11)
104. Locations – summary IIII  IIII I (11)
105. Campaign Reference – Outline IIII  IIII (10)
106. Adventure Breakdown – Detailed IIII  IIII (10)
107. Maps – General outline/Notes IIII IIII (9)
108. NPCs involved – descriptions IIII IIII (9)
109. Player Handouts – General Outline IIII IIII (9)
110. Player Handouts – creation IIII I (6)
111. Locations – Illustrations IIII (5)
112. NPCs involved – illustrations IIII (5)
113. Campaign Reference – Creation IIII (5)
114. Props – General Outline IIII (4)
115. Locations – detailed III (3)
116. NPCs involved – details III (3)
117. PC Involvement in Adventure II (2)
118. Maps – detailed I (1)
119. Props – construction I (1)

Step 5: Done!

Believe it or not, this incorporates almost everything discussed in the theory section – in a relatively simple and crude fashion. This particular set of instructions yields the “Game-changers after problem breakdown” strategy discussed earlier; it works if you have a rough idea of what the adventure is going to be about before you start. If you don’t, and want to employ the “game changers first” approach, simply skip the “arbitrary” renumbering of the old “00” item and place it immediately before the detailed adventure breakdown.

The result is a task list, in the order in which each task is to be carried out. You can simply tackle it in order until you run out of time, or you can use it to budget your available prep time, as you see fit.

Of course, this is a generic solution; in any particular real-world situation, some tasks may have different rankings because they have (in whole or in part) already been done in the creation of earlier adventures, or because you don’t perform any given step – not everyone will go looking for pictures to illustrate their NPCs, for example; they either have them already (because they are taking the NPC from an existing product) or they’ll do without and rely on narrative descriptions.

Practical Methods 2: The notes array

In some ways, an even simpler approach is to put each item on a card or post-it note and simply shuffle them down and across as necessary instead of fussing around with tallies. When I use this approach, the starting layout is always “tens down, ones across”, as shown by the illustration to the right. This naturally lines up dependencies to the left.

Then move game-changers to the left of their respective stacks to form a new column, move the “00” to the left or right of that (depending on whether you want to use the first or second of the strategies on offer). Close up any gaps by shifting cards to the left.

Once that’s done, order items in each column according to priority, moving any cards/notes to the right of the card whose order is being adjusted.

Finally, pick up the cards starting at the bottom right and working up each column before starting the next leftmost column. Once again, the result is a task list in order.

This approach has one big advantage – you can easily tweak the order. Working on an NPC might give you an idea for a location, or an event, or whatever – this permits you to shuffle things around to strike while the iron is hot.

Looking ahead to part three

Having completed our side-excursion into theory and emerged back into the realm of practical advice, it’s full-steam-ahead with more problem-solving techniques next time, as this series races to a conclusion!

In 1990 I was trained as a Safety Warden / OHAS representative for my then-employer. At the time, I was employed as a Computer Programmer and acting as a Systems Analyst for the commercial software systems for which my former department were responsible. Both aspects of this occupation taught me some key problem-solving tips and techniques that I continue to employ to this day in both everyday life and in gaming, both as a player and a GM. Today’s article will share some of the insights gleaned, and discuss how they apply to gameplay in an RPG. Some of my readers may weigh in with additional tips.

I’m going to try and impose some rationality to the sequence of presentation of these tips and techniques, but I expect that they might skip around a bit; this is my first attempt at trying to impose some structure on a fragmented and essentially disorganized confluence of training and experience.

Aim for the fire not the flame

When fighting a fire, the number one mistake that a lot of untrained people make is to aim for the visible flames. The problem is that this is not where the actual burning is taking place, so it does something between zero and squat. As a general rule of thumb (there are exceptions) you need to aim for whatever it is that is actually burning. Starting high makes it harder for the fire to spread, containing it; working your way lower uses material that’s already partially burned as a firebreak to prevent fresh breakouts.

There are analogies aplenty between this nugget of wisdom and every other problem you will ever face, and so you will find analogous pearls of wisdom scattered through any collection of worldly advice. Ultimately, when analyzed, they all boil down to “address the real problem and not the obvious consequences” – but I like the flavor of “Aim for the Fire, Not the Flame”, it makes this maxim easier to remember. While this is always excellent advice, it can also be a lot harder to put into practice than it first appears, because it assumes (a) that you can live with those obvious consequences long enough to actually address the real problem, (b) that you can identify the real problem, and (c) that there is something you can do about it. Nevertheless, it remains excellent advice in principle – and is the central starting point from which everything else in this article proceeds.

Understand your tools

Fire depends on a combination of three factors: Temperature, Fuel, and Oxygen. Take any one of these out of the situation and the fire goes out. Every extinguisher targets one or two of these elements. I mentioned exceptions in the preceding section; this is where these become important. A CO2 extinguisher does not work in the same way as a fire hose; the CO2 operates by smothering the fire and by slightly cooling whatever it hits, in other words targeting the Oxygen component primarily and the thermal component to a lesser extent. The fire hose fires water, which frequently never reaches the actual burning material, being converted into steam – but in the process it sucks a lot of the temperature out of the fire. The closer to the seat of the flame, the more temperature there is for the water to carry away, and the more effective the extinguisher. A fine spray dissipates this effect and renders the process ineffectual, you need to concentrate the water stream so that enough of it reaches the target to do the job. Chemical Powder Extinguishers generally operate by blanketing the burning material and preventing oxygen from reaching the flame – again, you need to aim for what’s actually burning rather than shooting the material through the visible flames and having it fall beyond the actual fire.

The basic lesson here is: in order to use them most effectively, you have to understand your tools.

The applicability of this lesson to other types of problems should also be obvious. Before you can decide what to do, you have to identify what you can do.

Understand your situation

The other type of exception stems from your situation. When dealing with a burning petrol spill, for example, hitting it with a lot of water just spreads it around – the oil-based petroleum floats on top. You need to attack the fire differently. The same thing goes for exotic fires involving compounds that react with water – you can make things worse by using the wrong tool for the job. Another obvious example involves fighting an electrical fire with water. It’s a well-known maxim that electricity and water don’t mix to anyone’s benefit!

Once you know what your tools are, and how they work, understanding your situation lets you choose the right tool for the job, and apply it in the right way.

The application of this principle to other sorts of problems should be fairly obvious.

Manage symptoms, cure causes

If it must be conceded that “Aim for the fire, not the flame” is all well and good in theory (when employed as an analogy), but is not always practical because of the significance of the possible “flames”, then something slightly more sophisticated needs to substituted for those occasions when the consequences are too urgent to be ignored. I’ve drawn this metaphor from first aid / medicine, and don’t remember where I first encountered it – but it fits the bill perfectly.

Don’t try to “solve” the problem of the consequences, look for a way to minimize and manage them – this will usually be quicker and easier than the former, anyway. The consequences will stop being getting worse once the real problem is dealt with, the initial objective is to gain the time to do so.

In game terms, I find this is useful advice in all sorts of situations – everything from relations with players, to rules problems, to social, economic, and political problems in-game.

Things can get more complicated when the “symptoms” function as “causes” of secondary problems, but the general principle remains.

What don’t you know?

Whenever confronted by a problem, asking yourself this question is rarely a waste of time. I want to say never, but I’m sure that someone will speak up with an exception if I do so! Having awareness of the boundaries of your ignorance means that you always know when you are extrapolating problems and solutions into the unknown, where that ignorance can subvert your intentions.

In general, to get to grips with the problem at hand, you often have to make assumptions about something that’s in your area of ignorance. If you know that this is occurring, you can at least watch for divergences between what you are expecting to occur and what actually occurs that help illuminate the validity of the assumptions and enable you to alter them before it becomes too late to alter your plan of attack.

Always, on the heels of this question, follow two others.

What do you need to know?

In firefighting terms, this may be anything from where the gas shut-off valves are in a building to what it is that is actually burning – and what sort of gasses are being given off as a result. Are there people inside? Where? What’s the shortest route to them? What’s the safest route to them? And so on and so forth. I always remember the scene from “The Towering Inferno” in which Steve McQueen is being questioned as to the tenants that have moved into the building and asks “What difference does that make?” – and cops an earful in response.

In more general terms, once you have identified your areas of ignorance, it is generally useful to identify any key pieces of information that you need to be sure of an effective solution to the problem. At the very least, this permits a search for clues to that information before you reach the point of no return. The more specific the answer is to this question, the better.

Still more important, this focuses any intelligence-gathering into the specific areas that are most significant.

What can you do in the meantime?

If it’s genuinely the case that you can’t commit to an actual solution to the problem because there is some key information needed (for example, “who is responsible?”), rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the starter’s whistle, try to identify something you can do in the meantime. This is especially important when public confidence is a key problem – sitting back and doing nothing is a sure recipe for people who know even less than you do to start improvising their own solutions and a degeneration into chaos and anarchy. Do something about the lack of information and, in the meantime, show the flag and been seen to be doing something about the situation (even if you know that it will ultimately be futile). It’s better to spin your wheels in public than to be conspicuously inactive.

What can be done right now?

An even more pointed form of the same lesson. But there’s a caveat when applying this to situations in which other people are involved – you must always acknowledge the possibility that whatever can be done right now is exactly what whoever is behind the real problem wants you to do. That doesn’t necessarily mean not doing it – but it can be a clue in itself as to what’s really going on.

The other caveat to be mentioned in this context is the misdirected action fallacy (I’m not sure of the exact name it’s been given), which reads “Something has to be done. This is something that can be done. Therefore we must do this.” As long as it is realized that the immediate activity is at best a band-aid on the real problem, and needs to actually work to alleviate the situation with which you are confronted rather than concealing it, there is no problem – anything else leaves one open to the trap of thinking that the real problem has been solved, at least for now, when in fact it has not.

A temporary ad-hoc solution sooner is better than a lasting fix delivered one week too late

After so many maxims emphasizing the value of a deliberate, intentional solution, it’s time to even the balance a little. There are time when it’s better to act in ignorance and pick up the pieces afterwards. The key questions are always

• How long will this take?,
• How long do we have?, and
• How much of my/our time and resources have to be devoted to this to make it work?

If the lasting fix will require anything even close to the time available, there is a risk that delays and setbacks will prevent it being ready in time. Choose actions and responses accordingly.

Don’t rely on temporary fixes to solve the real problem

As is often the case, there is a caveat, or in this case, a lesson that can be learned from mistakes of the past, and it’s summed up in the headline above. A temporary fix buys you time and freedom to act – nothing more. A related trap is promoting the temporary fix as “the solution to the problem” in the minds of others – doing so means that public priorities will seize apon the problem next most in serious need of a quick fix, and demand that receive priority over a lasting solution to the first problem. In the long run, this malaise affects almost every government, especially as they approach the end of their natural terms in office and start looking tired and inflexible. Management, or government, becomes all about dancing from one emergency to another and one more quick-fix.

This doesn’t really cause serious trouble until one of those “quick fixes” doesn’t work, and what was an emergency blows up into a full crisis – and those responsible are out of ideas.

Ultimately, all this boils down to an awareness of the real effectiveness of the quick fix, and neither under- nor over-selling it.

A general solution modified to suit a specific situation

Past experience is priceless, but ignorance can be equally valuable. The more past experience you have, the greater the number of specific problems and solutions you have encountered in the past; and, if you have learned from these properly, the more general solutions you will have developed which can be used as outlines to the solution of new problems. I once heard the following statement in reference to Formula 1 engineering, though it has wider application: “Ignorance innovates, experience educates”. Robert A Heinlein was fond of describing “The Book” (in a military context) as “Largely a collection of crazy stunts that worked”. Experience enables you to arrive at a workable solution more quickly and accurately, but it is inherently conservative, focused on what worked in the past. When you don’t know something’s impossible, it becomes possible to innovate and uncover a new solution – regardless of the success or failure of that solution, it then gets added to the experience bank of the conservatives for future reference. I don’t know how often supervillains and would-be Evil Masterminds have moaned “Lord save me from gifted amateurs” or words to that effect, but I’m sure it would be more often than most people think!

Prioritizing

Life would be so simple if problems came at you one at a time, with sufficient intervals in between to permit lasting solutions. It’s never like that in reality. And that requires prioritization of the problems. Successful prioritization is an art form in and of itself – it’s too complex a subject, and too full of “fuzzy edges” to be considered a science. In fact, it’s so complex an issue that I’m going to devote the next part of this article to this subject specifically before returning to some more general problem-solving advice in part three….

Warning PG-13 content

It’s been suggested that I should advise readers that some of the discussion that follows touches on topics of a mature nature and may not be suitable for thos under the age of 13. Children should consult their parents before reading this article. Personally, I think most children these days are well aware of the issues, though they may not understand them, and I went to considerable effort to adopt a non-partisan and unbiased approach to the topics in question, clearly indicating when I was voicing a personal opinion. But make your own judgments to suit your own circumstances.

Custom Worlds and Populations

I’m a strong believer in the principle that each campaign should have its own unique game world, or should extend and expand on the established game world in the event of a sequel campaign set in the same adventuring environment.

The Fumanor Example

The first Fumanor Campaign established a vast human Kingdom in all but name, recovering from an apocalyptic turn of events roughly a century earlier. In truth, this had started as a Barony, and the political usage had not yet caught up with the reality as it had expanded. It had now grown too large for effective central administration under the baronial model; it needed to create a new upper level to the political hierarchy and subdivide itself. Along the way it introduced variants on a number of other races common to modern roleplaying, but these were all fringe elements to the primary human-dominated setting.

The second Fumanor Campaign added detail to the political, social, religious, and spiritual tapestry of that human not-yet Kingdom, and introduced more substance to the variant Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc, while introducing variants on Ogres, Minotaurs, Dragons, Spiders, and Trolls, amongst others.

The third Fumanor Campaign brought the internal and external pressures to a head, explained the hidden truth behind the apocalypse, and split the Barony into three Kingdoms. It expanded still further on the theology, and revealed the meaning behind a number of concurrent plot threads that had been present from day One. It added variants on Treants, a desert-dwelling human society completely distinct from that which had been established, a reinvented Fey, and a new self-aware variant of Golem, and a race of sentient illusions.

The fourth and fifth campaigns are currently running concurrently. The fourth has introduced an Empire of Undead, added considerable depth to the Elves, Ogres, Drow, and Orcs, and much more. The Orcs and Elves series extends and expands on the non-human history and culture as a prelude to the second half of the fourth campaign (and an essential ingredient in the conclusion of the first half).

The Fifth has explored in greater depth many of the elements introduced in the third, exploring the difference between the religion of the realms and the theology, and detailed the variants on Goblins and Dragons that were present back in the first campaign but which didn’t figure heavily in the plot at the time.

None of these societies were static; each new Campaign brought refinement and added depth.

The How-to made easy in a nutshell

Sometimes it can seem like a lot of work, but it can also be a lot of fun – and is usually a lot less work than it first appears, because I don’t try and do it all at once.

Make an interesting change in one race. Modify the world and its history to accommodate the difference, and the way it would impact on interactions with other races, by going through these items one at a time. Then go through each of those changes and look for consequences and ripple effects, and adjust to accommodate those. Once you have beaten everything into shape, make a change to another race, and repeat. Tailor each of the races to suit the overall campaign idea you have, or let a campaign idea emerge naturally and simply concentrate on making each race different, plausible, and interesting. Really, that’s all there is to it – at least in theory. Practice can be quite a different kettle of fish, and it can always be useful to have a source of different ideas to spark your own imagination.

A Dwarvish Example

You can get some idea of how this process works by reading Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans, where I offer a unique variation on Dwarves of my own – one that starts with the abilities that they are reputed to have in D&D/Pathfinder, finds a way for those to make sense in terms of game physics, and then tracks the resulting changes back through other aspects of the race and to the logical impacts on their society and culture.

The Unconventional Dwarf at first glance

So you can see why I might be interested in a product like “The Unconventional Dwarf” that offers eight unique and detailed original variations on your bog-standard dwarf, plus an in-context look at the “Conventional” Dwarf.

The details of each variation are broken into sections; some vary from entry to entry, but the ones common to all deal with:

• Physiology
• Society
• History
• Faith and Magic
• Warcraft, Arms, and Armor
• Variants and Story Hooks (omitted from the chapter on Hive Dwarves).

Some races have other sections as well, further delineating the variation. As you would expect from something with this level of content, this is not a small supplement. Including License and Covers, we’re talking about 94 pages.

What’s within those covers? Well, let’s start by misquoting the back-page blurb (and making it more accurate in the process, I hope):

DWARVES! Those ale-quaffing, axe-wielding, armor-smithing, mine-digging, treasure-grubbing, tough old cantankerous skinflints. You know dwarves, right?

Think again.

Within these pages you will find dwarven scholars who study the language of creation itself, dwarven orators who live and die by the stories they tell, dwarven soldiers who have conquered – and united – most of the known world, and dwarven shape-shifters who come in peace from the cold reaches between the stars.

There are dwarves who fight desperate underwater battles against merfolk, who shave the beards off of their men to humble them, who revel in the power and perfection of their own bodies, and who curse the fickle nature of the common cabbage.

So trade in your battleaxe for a scythe, gladius, or sharpened space, swap out that horned helmet for a jaunty feathered hat or a skullcap, and leave that mineshaft behind. Tropical islands, barren scrub, and Zultur Milati (the living cosmos) await.

Are you interested yet? You should be!

Click to open the Author & Artist Bios

The Authors

The Unconventional Dwarf is a collaboration between 9 people – writers, authors, and artists – under the editorial guidance of the first of the nine, Tof Eklund. Between them, they cover the entire spectrum of gaming experience from new fan to old hand. What they share is a passion for the hobby itself and a love of originality. The full credits are:

• Series Editor – Tof Eklund
• Concept – Tof Eklund and Kevin Archibald
• Contributors – Amy Walraven, Jeremiah Smith, Rhiannon Reyes, Tof Eklund, Malcom Dale, Sean Boyce, and Kevin Archibald
• Art – Jennifer Brown, Malcolm Dale, Jelani Parham
• Cover – Rob Gee
• Layout and Design – Josh M. Lenius
• Editing – Judy Spring and Angi Gray

You may have heard some of these names before, or they might all be new to you. In most cases, this is their first foray into published game product. Suffice it to say that they all appear to have done a competent job! Tof was kind enough to excerpt the biographies; rather than quoting them in full, I’m including them as an attachment.

The Unconventional Dwarf – The opening Salvos

If it seems like I’m paying relatively little attention to the variants themselves, that’s no accident. There are two reasons for this: First, you can get the full details just by from RPG Now. The PDF costs US$9.99 and the Softcover US$14.99 (plus shipping) or you can get both for just US$19.99 – but these are discounted prices and may not last, so get in quickly!

The second reason is that I want to focus my attention on the opening sections of the book for a while.

The Introductory Note – a jaded gamer

The first thing you find when you start reading the e-book is the introduction by Tof. A lot of people skip these, just as a lot of people never watch the DVD extras that are practically ubiquitous these days, and both are missing out on valuable information and insights.

Tof starts with a lament for the sense of wonder that RPGs and The Lord Of The Rings conjured for him when he was in elementary school. He blames this on blatantly derivative works that feel like “Tolkien recycled and ‘pumped up’ with bigger swords, showier magic, and dark lords of darker darkness”, the worlds of Arneson and Gygax “fetishized, over-refined, represented as new”. Aside from loving the phrase, dark lords of darker darkness, I have to say that I disagree with his diagnosis, if not with the symptoms he identifies.

The attribution of blame ignores two factors; the first is that when first encountered, everything is (by definition) new and exciting; you can never fully recapture that compound of innocence and naivety, and everything you encounter thereafter will always seem that little less exciting in comparison. That’s why first loves are always special to us, no matter how badly the relationship ends.

What Tof describes is everything that was wrong with the D&D movie – and the biggest complaint from gamers that I remember hearing when it first came out was how limp and uninspired it was. It felt cobbled together from D&D clichés, a thousand games reduced to their lowest common denominator and assembled into a mélange that barely managed to be internally-consistent.

The second factor is the impact of gosh-wow special effects on imaginations and expectations, a subject I’ve discussed before – initially in Are Special Effects Killing Hollywood? and subsequently in an update to that article, The Gap In Reality: Immersion in an RPG Environment.

The Introductory Note – The Flawed Legacy

Tof then continues,

Then there’s what’s left out: the weak points in the works of the founders are still there. Oversimplified morality, racial hierarchies, the divine right of kings; these backwards notions are taken for granted. Female characters are more represented in fantasy today than in Tolkien, but that “representation” tends to be in a chain-mail bikini, and there are generally no gays, lesbians, or other queers. Settings and cultures are relentlessly Western European, with occasional tokens from the “exotic” and “barbaric” east.
    Oh, and every adventurer is an orphan.

There’s a lot to be said in reference to these specific criticisms. Some are correct and eminently justified; others are misapplied, some are unreasonable expectations in the context of gaming (at least in my opinion), and some are just plain wrong (again in my opinion). I’m going to address each of these complaints, but in a slightly different order.

Female representation:
Let’s start with something we both agree on. Absolutely right, but popular media always lag behind contemporary social thought. It wasn’t much more than 100 years ago that women first got the right to vote (kudos to the Kiwis for being the first to embrace female suffrage). Prior to WWII, women were still repressed socially, confined to the roles defined by a Victorian cultural ethos. Post-WWII, it was known that women could hold any job going – but doing so was socially taboo and frowned apon. Change in this attitude was gradual over the next 25-35 years – and even in the 80s, there were social stigma attached to female executives and CEOs. To some extent, these attitudes persist to this day, but they are fading. Nevertheless, issues like wage inequality and glass ceilings are still hot topics.

Tolkien was born before any of this progress had taken place, and he barely an adult when suffrage began to seep through the western world. The Lord Of The Rings was written & published in a time still emerging from that Victorian ethos. The roles it provides for women are a representation of the popular opinion of its era in most respects, slightly conservative in some respects and slightly progressive in others.

The other elements which fantasy gaming derive from are historical, western medieval in fact. Attitudes to women were even more restrictive. From the time of its first publication, D&D has struggled to dance on the tightrope between historical accuracy, Tolkien-derived fantasy elements, and contemporary social attitudes. With the coming of 3.x and Pathfinder, bias against females was taken out of the rules systems, a significant step forwards; but both still reflect the 1980s-1990s attitude that a female leader had to be “Butch” to succeed.

There is an inherent generation gap involved in all social progress. Generation #1 accepts something in principle. Generation #2, raised in the atmosphere engendered by Generation #1, acknowledges the gap between reality and principle, and strives to make what has been accepted “in principle” attainable “in theory”, removing the practical and legal impediments that create that gap. Generation #3, raised in an atmosphere where the principle is attainable in theory, notes the gap between reality and what should be attainable in theory, and strives to remove the social barriers that prevent theory from becoming reality. With Generation #4, a few pioneers actually take up that opportunity, but in order to compete with regressed counterparts, are forced to mimic them. Only with Generation #5, raised in a social environment in which the achievements of those pioneers are taken for granted, does it become possible for the original problem to start becoming a non-issue. Society is only just getting to that point now when it comes to gender equality, and there are still gaps to be addressed.

You don’t generally get to make a substantial literary contribution until you’re in your mid-to-late twenties if not your mid-to-late thirties. So the printed word in any mass-market context is always going to be thirty years behind the contemporary attitude unless the author makes a deliberate effort to be “hip” and “modern”. Media does, so it is usually a little ahead of the curve; RPGs are nerdy, so they tend to be a little behind the curve. So, here we are in 2013. Thirty years ago, it was 1983. Female characters in games can now do anything a male character can do, but to really compete with the men, they still have to adopt a particularly masculine attitude. Society might be entering Generation 5, but movies & TV shows with a female lead are just entering Generation 4. And RPGs are still only approaching that point.

The rules changes I mentioned clearly make 3.x analogous to Generation 2. Pathfinder carries the hobby to Generation 3. Tof is clearly advocating the need for someone to step up and lead the hobby into a new Generation, though he may not have thought of it in those terms.

Absence of sexual alternatives:
I described the social phenomenon in deliberately generic terms because it applies to more than gender equality, it is true of virtually every form of social progress, from racial equality to the acceptance of “alternative” lifestyles – and I’m not talking about hippies. While gay leading men may now be accepted, how many leading roles are openly gay? What was the general social attitude toward these groups back in 1983-84? Here’s a clue: In January 1984, Queen released the single Radio Gaga. They were still months away from the cross-dressing filmclip, “I Want To Break Free”. While speculation was rife, Freddie Mercury had not publicly admitted his sexual orientation. He still had more than seven years to live.

It follows that hoping for anything even approaching a modern attitude to this subject is almost certainly going to be hoping in vain.

But there is a secondary factor: once again, we face that same tightrope walk between historical foundations and a contemporary audience. Even disregarding the Western European question for the moment, what was the attitude toward alternative orientations in medieval China? In Africa? In Egypt? In Hawaii? Amongst the Norse? The Celts? The Visigoths? The French? I’m not singling anyone out – it doesn’t matter where you point to on the globe or the history books, it won’t even be mentioned unless it’s being condemned in a Holy Book. That’s why the modern attitude is considered “modern”. So hoping for anything different in any setting which is not explicitly modern is once again almost certainly doomed to be a let-down.

And a tertiary one. It must be remembered that the target market for most RPGs have been the 13+ age group, not the 18+ age group. That carries an implication counter to adult topics such as sexuality. Almost everything is either going to be G- or PG-Rated, and those ratings are fundamentally incompatible with topics like sexual orientation, at least in terms of dealing with the subject seriously. Society is only just learning how to talk about this stuff at an adult level, never mind how it should be represented at a younger level.

Will RPGs ever get to a place where sexual orientation can be dealt with in an age-appropriate but mature and respectful way? Certainly. But I don’t think it’s less than a decade away. I therefore don’t consider it appropriate to criticize products of the last 20 years for not being in advance of where we, as a society, are now.

Oversimplified morality:
I both agree and disagree with this complaint. That’s not being equivocal; it’s acknowledging that there are two different standards at play. A simplified, even over-simplified, morality makes the game accessible to a younger audience – remember who the general target market is? At the same time, as players and GMs mature, this is almost certainly the first thing that they look to change and explore. That’s why Campaign Mastery has a five-part series dedicated to the subject of that “oversimplified morality”: Focusing On Alignment, in which the subject is explored in detail, starting with an impassioned arguement for doing away with that ‘oversimplified morality’ altogether.

Racial hierarchies:
It’s not entirely clear what Tof was referring to with this complaint. At first I thought one thing, and then I thought another. I finally came to the conclusion that he’s talking about the assumption that humans will dominate the fantasy world. Again, I’m slightly ambivalent on the subject. I consider there to be nothing wrong with a human-dominated reality within a fantasy novel or RPG; what I complain about (and what I suspect Tof is also complaining about) is that this is the default assumption in too many cases; and because that is not questioned by people, the assumption perpetuates itself. In my games, every race is dominant within their own environment. Dwarves in their tunnels, Elves in their forests, or whatever. What gets interesting is one a representative is taken out of that comfort zone, or when representatives of a race equally at home in that environment move in. Why should Elven politics, or Dwarven politics, be any less convoluted than historical human politics? Then layer on top the potential for inter-species and inter-racial complexities, stir vigorously, and hand it to an unsuspecting player…

Western European -derived Settings & Cultures and Tokens from the “exotic” and “barbaric” east and The divine right of kings:
Three complaints for the price of one! There are lots of good reasons for Western Europe to be the common foundation of most fantasy/RPGs. Accessibility to the reader. Level of knowledge available. Contextually familiar, connecting with millennia of folklore, myth and legend. Finally, the majority of Fantasy/RPG authors and players are North American, and the background of that nation is a Western European history (for the most part) – so a Western European foundation draws on what they have already been taught. But even beyond those arguements against this particular criticism, there are a number of examples that simply don’t fit this mould. Bushido, the RPG. The Daughter/Servant/Mistress of Empire trilogy. The “RPG” background story of the first three Dream Park novels. If you can’t find Fantasy novels and RPGs that aren’t derived from Western European society, you aren’t looking hard enough.

Naturally, the Western European attitude to ‘Barbarians from the East’ is also part and parcel of this foundation.

And, of course, until the American Revolutionary War, the Divine Right of Kings was inextricably part of Western Societies, and had been since the Roman Empire – or perhaps it stretches back to the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt? If your game is derived from virtually any Western European civilization, the Divine Right of a ruler to rule is going to be inherent. If your game is not, it may not be. It’s all part of the one simple package.

I think the real problem is that the most popular RPGs don’t draw on singular societies, but on some fictitious homogenized bastard child of many. Put your history books in a blender and press “High”.

Bottom line: if you want to play a game in which a modern attitude to this, and many of the other topics discussed above, then play d20 Modern, or X-files, or something Sci-Fi. Everything else is going to have to compromise in order to balance on that tightrope.

Every adventurer is an orphan:
Which brings me to Tof’s final complaint. As I started, so I end – there is absolutely no good reason for such limited creativity, so in this I would be in complete agreement with Tof – except that I don’t see this phenomenon at all. On the contrary, most of the players I know desperately want the resources and heirlooms that having a family in back of them brings to the table. My problem is usually that they all want their parents to be nobles, or court advisors, or something. Everyone wants to be the son of the King (third-born, preferably), no-one wants to be the son of the turnip farmer.

A Hidden assumption
Of course, there is a hidden assumption that undermines all of the counter-arguements I’ve offered, and Tof’s complaints as well. Humans have certain social issues – who says that Dwarves (or any other species) will have the same social problems? The authors have actually hinted at this with a reference to Dwarven Women and to the unconventional solution to gender issues on Diskworld by Terry Pratchett – but unless you happen to have read Guards Guards recently, this reference will probably go over the head of the average reader.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am unsympathetic to, or unsupportive of, the personal beliefs that Tof brings to the table, because that is very definitely not the case. I just don’t think that he has correctly identified the cause of the malaise that he feels toward modern fantasy and RPGs, and the consequence is that his solution is misapplied. Tof is deliberately placing himself at the cutting edge of social progress in RPGs, a pioneer for the personal philosophy and cause espoused in the introduction and in his biographic notes – so while his solution may fall short of achieving the social awakening desired, it will be another step on the road. But people won’t buy a product simply because it advances a philosophic cause they are barely coming to grips with; to be successful, the product needs to be useful in and of itself, with the ideals behind it a secondary element. The question therefore needs to be asked: does The Unconventional Dwarf stand up to scrutiny when divorced from that progressive social cause?

The ‘Unconventional’ Solution

The short answer is a resounding ‘yes’. While I might not agree with Tof on the reasons for creating a product like The Unconventional Dwarf, I absolutely agree with the approach taken. Boiled down to it’s simplest elements, the writers start by stripping out anything that’s even vaguely Tolkienesque and retreating back to the original myths and legends apon which Tolkien himself drew, creating a variant on the result based on other cultural concepts and contexts, and then putting back only those “conventional” elements that fit the resulting picture. There’s no little irony (given some of the complaints discussed above) that the foundation of the “Conventional Dwarf” is Western European in nature!

In other words, they have employed exactly the same technique as the one I advocated earlier, and have presented the results as standalone societies with which to replace the traditional view of RPG Dwarves in your campaign.

The biggest flaw in the resulting product (and its not a very big one) is that by restricting themselves to historical societies as their foundations, they are confining the scope of what they can achieve, and ignoring possibilities such as the one given in the article cited earlier under the heading of “A Dwarvish Example”. The outcomes that are presented in The Unconventional Dwarf fit perfectly the prescription that I gave earlier in this review: they are all different, plausible, and interesting. But does it really matter why it was done if the results are so useful for the purpose intended and so well-executed?

What more do you want?

Even more unconventional?

It doesn’t say so outright anywhere in the supplement that I could spot, but Tof’s title suggests that other “unconventionals” will follow. To get confirmation of this, one need only visit at Tof’s website or check out the series’ Facebook page. But, also presumably, that will only happen if The Unconventional Dwarf is a success. I hope that this review helps make that happen; I’m looking forward to reading what they come up with next. For my money, the most clichéd race in FRP are Elves – that’s why I worked so hard on them in the Fumanor campaign…

Since I moved a couple of years ago, I have dedicated the larger bedroom at my new apartment to the purpose of being a game-room/library, and it’s there that the bulk of my gaming now takes place. My location is conveniently close to snack shops and several sources of takeaway food, and the players have to pass several more on their way here, so we are well catered-for. If there was more/better parking available, all my games would probably take place there for one simple reason: It’s quiet.

But once a month, I co-GM the Adventurer’s Club campaign, and one of the players uses his own car to get around instead of public transport, and since parking at my apartment is limited, for that campaign I return to where 90% of my GMing took place prior to the move: A game store which offers free facilities for games, and which on any given weekend, has 20 or more CCG games in progress, and at least 1 other RPG campaign (sometimes 2 or 3), all in a relatively crowded space the size of a typical classroom. Crowding 100-120 people into a space that small (including hangers-on and kibitzers) makes for a particularly challenging gaming environment.

I’ve seen games being run at conventions a number of times, both in person and in photographs, and each game has at least 50% more space in the typical con games-room. On one occasion, we were reduced to playing one RPG at one end of a 12-foot table and another at the far end, but things are rarely that confined. It’s a far cry from our previous facilities, where we had one, perhaps two games at most, in each of a number of individual rooms, and it’s an arrangement that has given me some pointed lessons in how to game in a crowded, noisy setting. Today’s article is to share some of the secrets and techniques that I have gleaned over several years of gaming in that crowded environment.

Use Two Tables if you can

Most of the tables that are good for CCG games are longer and narrower than the typical kitchen/dining-room table. Two tables side-by-side make an effective table-space that is closer to square and which leaves room in the centre of the table for maps, game props, etc. Without this measure, there’s no space for these items without making spaces by reducing the number of players.

The shortest distance between players and GMs is the right distance

There are usually several different arrangements of seating possible. Having tried just about all of them, I can state unequivocally that reducing distance from GM to players to an absolute minimum is the most critical need you can face. Just about everything else can and should be compromised to achieve this outcome.

Compromise on Personal Space

In particular, everyone will usually have to compromise on the amount of personal space they have available, because there simply isn’t enough to go around. You don’t have room for a character sheet AND dice AND a rules book AND a soft drink AND a space to actually roll dice. Put the rules book away and have one copy in common at the table. Put the character sheet in front of you and roll dice on it.

There are more physical-environment tips for consideration in another article, The Arcane Implications of Seating at the Game Table.

Compromise on GM Resources

To GM in such narrow confines is challenging, to say the least. The GM will have more resources that he needs to deploy (including the community copy of the rules). Ideally, the GM should have as much space as 2-3 players, and will often STILL feel cramped. To make this work, it will be necessary to compromise on the resources that you bring to the table. You can have a reference library – but it should contain only the items that are likely to be critical. If you don’t bring something that is needed, wing it. Big binders are a no-no, to be avoided wherever possible. Your entire adventure should occupy a single stack of pages. Don’t expect to be able to read it AND take notes or roll dice at the same time. Battlemats and Miniatures are a luxury, to be used only when absolutely necessary; quick hand-drawn maps on a pad, in which players make marks with a pen or pencil to show their positions, take up 1/4 the space.

Voice Maintenance

Expect to have to speak at high volume all day. I can’t speak to anyone else, but my throat is raw and my voice obliterated for two days after a five-to-six hour gaming session. Or, at least, it was until I discovered the wonders of a suitable rehydrating sports drink. The one that I have found most effective by miles is Poweraid Blue aka “Mountain Blast”, but this might not be available (or might have a different formula) elsewhere in the world – so be prepared to experiment until you find one that works for you. Note that other flavors of Poweraid are less effective, and so are other energy drinks that I have tried – so subtle differences can have a big impact.

Sipping such a sports drink (cold) is better than anesthetic throat lozenges or any pharmaceutical sore-through treatments that I have come across.

It probably doesn’t help that I don’t need to use my voice much during the week, so I may be more susceptible to this problem than other GMs. But everyone should benefit to at least some degree.

Exhaustion Is A Factor

Listening closely to what someone else is saying, when in a crowded, noisy situation, is exhausting. Expect your players to get tired. Creativity can suffer, and nerves can fray. Make allowances accordingly.

GMing in such an environment is much harder than playing. It’s easily twice as much work as GMing in a quieter situation, which is already several times as much work as playing. Prepare yourself.

In particular, make sure that you are as well-rested as you can possibly be. It’s often better to skip the last half-hour of game prep the night before in favor of a half-hour’s extra sleep.

A related tip is to avoid caffeinated drinks in the early part of the game session. You can have one before you start to boost alertness, but then no more until at least half-way through the game session; you can build up a short-term tolerance that makes these less effective when you really need them, otherwise. It’s as though you only have so much capacity for chemical stimulation of this sort; so target the periods when you know your energy levels will be flagging.

Finally, allow yourself some wind-down / recuperation time after a game session in a crowded, noisy environment, before operating a motor vehicle. No game is well-served by the GM, or one of the players, being in an auto accident.

A Quiet Place

No matter where you are, there will usually be somewhere that’s quieter than the general noise (rest rooms are not suitable). Make an active effort to find such a place and decompress. Just being in a noisy environment is stressful, and is one of the causes of the exhaustion I was just going on about. When you find your creativity waning, when it becomes an effort to comprehend the quite straightforward question you’ve just been asked, or when events in the game have just taken a left-turn into the unknown, take a break and go to such a place. Heck, I’ve found that even busy street traffic is quieter than the wall of sound produced by a number of simultaneous games.

The reason for this is simple: In an RPG, it’s normal for only one person to speak at once. In a CCG (or any beer-and-pretzels game, for that matter) it’s not unusual for there to be several conversations taking place simultaneously. And there’s an exponential factor involved – the more conversations, the louder each conversationalist has to speak to be heard by the other participants. That in turn requires everyone else to raise their conversation volume. There is a natural tendency for these environments to progress to full volume.

Regular, Longer Breaks

In a quiet gaming environment, I expect to take 5-10 minute breaks every 90-120 minutes. In a crowded environment, just getting up from the table can inconvenience others, so there is a natural tendency to take more infrequent breaks, even though the noise makes the need for these breaks more frequent. Add an extra 5-10 minutes to the break length when you do take them in order to compensate.

Air-Con Calamities: Dress Appropriately

It’s astonishing how much a hundred people in a confined environment can raise the temperature. Adding thermal stress on top of everything else can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, then jumps up and down on it out of sheer malice. T-shirts with light jackets are appropriate attire in a winter situation – with a second, heavier, jacket for when you go back outdoors. As a general rule of thumb, I dress for conditions 8°C (14°F) warmer than the outside temperature, then cover up with as much additional, removable, clothing as may be needed for outside conditions. But that’s for 60+ people – adjust accordingly.

There are times when this overestimates the amount of heat generated, and times when it underestimates it – but it’s a good rule of thumb.

The heat generated by a large group of people puts huge strain on air-conditioning systems, never mind the increased likelyhood that there will be one person in the crowd who is too lazy or forgetful to close the door. Expect the air con to break down and take that into account when choosing your apparel. You can always choose not to take something off, but there’s a limit to how much you can remove in public.

Adjustments In Style: Shorter narrative passages

Writing narrative for reading in silence is quite different to writing narrative for reading aloud. You will take your eyes off the page more often and look elsewhere – at a player, at a die roll, at a notepad, or whatever. If your narrative is in one big block, it can be hard to find exactly where you were up to. For public delivery, then, shorter passages work a lot more effectively. I will sometimes put a tick next to a passage when I’ve read it to make life easier.

Build in more opportunities, brief intervals, for the players to react. This gives you natural break points in your narrative.

Adjustments In Style: Simpler narrative passages

Truncate your vocabulary. Longer words are more easily confused. If you must use them in order to deliver flavor, tone, or mood, put them in a note to the player(s) where they can read them instead of having to interpret some mumble. Instead of saying something like “truncate your vocabulary”, tell the players “he uses longer words but the meaning is ‘use shorter words'”.

Adjustments In Style: Forget Nuanced Delivery

I love using variations in vocal delivery to deliver nuance, mood, and characterization. In a crowded situation, you can forget 90% of that. The simple need to deliver your communications clearly requires greater volume, and that reduces the scope for variation. Expect instead to explicitly state what the mood and characterization are supposed to be. “In a creepy voice, he says…” “He winks seductively and whispers…” “Her voice lisps strangely…”

Adjustments In Style: Overact even more than usual

GMs usually overact a little, just to be sure that the message they are trying to convey is received correctly by the players. Be ready to take it up several notches when in a crowded situation. There is a natural tendency to be more conservative in such situations for a lot of people; learn not to give in to it.

Adjustments In Style: Read More Loudly

Most people, when they are reading something word for word, speak more quietly than when they are actually talking to someone. I attribute this, at least to some extent, to the absence of audio-visual feedback from the people you are speaking to – you’re too busy keeping your eyes on the page. Make a deliberate effort to speak more loudly and more concisely when reading aloud. Presumably, the information is important or it wouldn’t be there in the first place – so treat it accordingly.

Stretch

My final advice for gaming in a crowded, noisy environment is this: stretch every now and then. It’s normal to be more confined and cramped in such circumstances that you would normally be, and that makes many of the problems addressed by the preceding sections of advice worse. Combat this by occasionally stretching. It doesn’t do much by itself, but it makes everything else just a little bit better, and therefore makes every one of the tips I’ve offered that little bit more important.

The objective is always to have fun

Treat anything that gets in the way of that objective as a problem to be solved. The solutions I’ve offered above might not work in your specific circumstances, or might not be available, so use these as a starting point to finding your own solutions. And if you find anything I haven’t mentioned, feel free to share it in the comments!

On a completely unrelated topic:

Over the last 36 hours Campaign Mastery has received more than 3000 spam comments, all originating from about 25 IP addresses. I doubt that I am the only site being hit in this way, it seems unlikely that Campaign Mastery would be singled out and 3000+ in 36 hours doesn’t seem high enough for me to be the recipient of these spambots exclusive attentions.

I have reluctantly taken the unprecedented step (for me) of blocking access to the site by those IP addresses, and hope that this does not impact any legitimate reader. The owners of the networks in question have been advised of the problem, but after 24 hours had not yet fixed the issue.

I have no reason not to give the networks in question the benefit of the doubt, and so I assume that this is the result of a security violation of those sites. For this reason I am not going to name the sites, provide links to them, or quote the affected IP addresses.

At some future point I will unblock those IP addresses (not saying when) one at a time and see if the deluge resumes – and if it doesn’t work, you can bet that I’ll have unblocked them by the time you read about it all. In the meantime, if you are unable to access Campaign Mastery as usual, this is probably the reason, and you should contact your site hosts / ISP about their security. I do apologize to any user affected.

About the Stat Vs Stat series

This nine-part series looks at opposed stat checks and what they can represent. Part 8 will create a new characterization tool, The Stat Matrix, based on the interactions described, and show how to use it to turn stats into characters, and Part 9 will wrap up the series by turning that process on its head – demonstrating a way to use the Stat Matrix to turn a personality into a set of stats for a character.

What Is Strength?

According to the 3.x rules, “STR measures your character’s muscle and physical power.” Pathfinder says much the same thing (“muscle and physical power”). In fact, it measures nothing of the kind; what they measure is the character’s capacity for generating physical force – force for shoving, pulling, lifting, carrying and hitting things – and for jumping over obstacles, wrestling, bending things, and breaking things.

STR Checks

Logically, a STR check would be called for to ascertain how effectively the character targets and delivers the force that they are capable of. There are a couple of subtle nuances that can make an interpretational difference of which GMs should be aware, and should choose between.

Option 1: Reduction from Potential Maximum

This is the most common interpretation. It assumes that the best that a character can produce is the amount indicated by the stat value, and a stat check shows how far removed from that maximum a specific effort is. Most of the time (a success), the losses will be negligible, but from time to time (a failure) a string of minor problems – stance, targeting, leverage, whatever – will compound to limit the amount of force actually delivered relative to the potential to “not enough”. The assumption therefore is that the character’s stat is a measure of the maximum that the character can achieve.

Option 2: Capacity for extraordinary Results

When a GM allows a system for critical successes and failures on stat checks, regardless of the actual mechanics of that system, he has opted for this variation whether he realizes it or not. In addition to the either/or situation of “enough” vs. “not enough” force, the capacity for a critical failure or fumble indicates that a character can achieve catastrophically less than the performance indicated by their stat value, or devastatingly more. The assumption on which these mechanics are built is therefore that the character’s stat is a measure of the power delivered on an average successful result.

That in itself delivers a sting in the tail of the definition – the lower the stat, the lower the chances of a successful stat check, so the less likely a character is to actually deliver on his potential. The goal posts keep moving. Very few GMs who introduce a critical success/failure mechanic are aware of all the nuances and subtleties that such systems incorporate.

Option 3: Effective Force Delivery

I know at least one GM who decided that an incremental effect was preferable than the “all or nothing” ledge of the standard “enough/not-enough” mechanic. Essentially, every point of success on a Stat check adds +1 to the character’s effective STR, every point by which the character falls short subtracts 1 from the character’s effective STR. The results have the advantage of transparency to the players, and it readily translates to any derivative of STR, such as the amount that a character can carry. So far as I know, this system was never anything more than a theoretical exercise (the GM in question never refereed D&D or any derivative of the system), but it’s one heck of a proposition.

And it’s in Stat Vs Stat contests that this variant really shows it’s value, because ultimately it produces a simple and direct comparison between the two scores that makes it completely obvious who has won and who has lost.

STR Checks: General implications

If every character delivered their optimum capacity every time, Stat vs Stat tests are completely straightforward. You compare the stats and the highest wins – full stop, end of story. Incorporating a stat check die roll of any sort immediately adds a fuzziness to this straightforward picture. A character whose stat is slightly lower than that of the character with whom he is being compared can still win any individual contest, though if the comparison happens often enough, the superior raw stat will bias the outcomes – statistically, overall, nothing changes, so a higher stat retains its overall value.

Nevertheless, the combination of this fuzziness with variations on the game mechanics of the stat check create nuances of interpretation. Option one is all about how badly each character fails to live up to their potential, and who fails by the most relative to their optimum. Option two implies that there are things that the character can do to enhance his situation directly as well as by compromising what the other character can deliver, resulting in a more dynamic range of descriptive interpretations – but requiring the GM to interpret the results, or a lot of the added value of the option is lost.

There is a subject within engineering – more properly, in mechanical engineering – called statics. It’s used to calculate loads and stresses and that sort of thing in basic engineering and works by abstracting a construction to its essential elements. You don’t need to understand statics to interpret STR rolls, but it can definitely help. What may surprise a lot of people is that the terminology and concepts that they often apply in converting roll results into descriptive language actually derive from an amateur understanding of statics.

For example, consider a character trying to push a pole over. If the roll fails, the GM might talk about the character losing traction, or not having enough grip on the ground to put their full strength into it. Or they might think about the pole as a lever, and the character pushing too close to the fulcrum of the lever (where the pole enters the ground) to be able to achieve full effect. Or the pole’s resistance to bending (metal) or fracturing (wood/stone) might be less than the resistance of the ground into which the pole is embedded – and once the pole bends or breaks, it reduces the effective force being applied on pushing the pole out of the ground. These are all concepts of statics, whether the GM knows it or not.

Under the “critical success” model, the GM might suggest a flaw or fracture in the surface of the ground that creates a weakness in a particular direction, enhancing the effective STR relative to the requirement, when interpreting a critical success in narrative terminology. Again, this is a more advanced application of statics.

STR Vs Stat

The preceding section mentions a key concept that is essential to interpreting STR vs Stat checks – STR is about generating force, which is used to overcome resistance. This metaphor of resistance is a key touchstone to employ when converting STR vs Stat contests into narrative language, which is essential to assigning meaning and relevance to the stat checks.

STR Vs. STR:

This is absolutely the most obvious stat vs. stat comparison going.

Internal

There aren’t many cases where a character is trying to overcome his own strength (I discount Mirrors Of Opposition because they produce outside opponents who simply happen to have the same STR score). But there’s at least one circumstance that produces such a check.

Self-restraint
Arguably, attempting to control the effects of a stat is also a function of the stat. The implication is that when STR needs to be applied with finesse – neither too much nor too little – the outcome is best determined with an opposed internal STR vs STR check. One check is to apply sufficient force, the other is to control the application of that STR. If the first roll fails, then the character has applied too little force, if the second fails then the character has applied too much, or has applied it incorrectly in some manner – pushing when he should have pulled, or whatever. A good example would be throwing something fragile that you don’t want to break – or don’t want to break over you, but there are others. Certain rope restraints, for example, that connect the ankles to a choke-hold while forcing the character into an uncomfortable position – stooped or bent over, or with the legs bent all the way at the knees. Attempting to burst these bonds with STR would definitely merit consideration as an application of STR vs STR – though it could also be argued that the check should belong in the next category, STR vs CON.

This application of opposed stat checks has particular significance when the concept of Casual Strength is taken into consideration, something I’ll get to in a moment.

External

Arm-wrestling. Boxing (actually, you would usually use the combat mechanics for Boxing, unless you want to employ a more cinematic approach). Trying to force open a door while another character holds it closed. Hauling a heavy load up a cliff or a wall. A tug-of-war. Heck, even a contest like the shot-put or hammer-throw – though some people might argue that there’s enough technique involved there that it should be a Dex check and not a Strength check, or something even more convoluted.

Casual Strength
There’s a game mechanic in the Hero System called “Casual Strength”. The basic idea is that characters exert one-tenth of their strength every time they push a button, pull a chair out from the table, grip a doorbell, shake a hand, pick up a glass or a bottle, etc. When you’re dealing with superheroic characters who can have many times the strength of ordinary people, this can be important – breaking the button when you push it, pulling the chair back so hard that the backboard is ripped off, tearing the doorknob out of the door if you don’t turn the knob all the way, breaking the bones in someone’s hand, and so on.

You can derive a similar value for D&D / Pathfinder by dividing the amount that a character can carry by five and then converting that back to a STR score. A character with STR 18, according to Pathfinder can carry 100lbs as light load – which gives a 20lb capacity for using casual STR, which is a STR of 6. A character with STR 25 has a light-load capacity of 266 lbs – giving a casual STR of about 13.5. Why is this useful?

It means that the character with STR 25 exerts more force without thinking about it as a character with STR 13 does deliberately at light load levels – and more than the absolute all-out effort (exceptional die rolls notwithstanding) as a character with STR 5. The STR 18 character has casual STR equal to a deliberate effort by a character with STR 6 – and more than an all-out effort by a character with STR 2. That doesn’t sound like much, but it must be remembered that “character” in this context should have a very broad interpretation. A higher STR character can deal with a larger, heavier, stronger pet with casual STR – all that you really want to use – while a weaker character may have to make a deliberate effort just to restrain an animal while walking it.

STR vs STR checks, and the notion of casual STR, can be used to provide context for what the character considers ordinary life, and that’s well worth the effort of analysis.

STR Vs. CON

But that’s the barest tip of the iceberg of the utility of understanding STR vs Stat checks. Let us now turn our attention to STR vs CON.

External

Str Vs Con external checks are fairly straightforward, at first glance. One character is attempting to use STR to inflict pain and the other is trying to resist this persuasion. There’s a relatively narrow intersection point between the two, which narrows even further when combat mechanics are used to exclude the more violent possibilities.

But some thought reveals a few more subtle situations. Attempting to break a horse, for example, is less about skill as a rider, and not at all about skill in animal handling – it’s more a contest between the STR of the horse attempting to throw the rider and the STR of the rider attempting to stay on. The fact that it’s possible at all is a result of Statics once again – the rider has gravity and his mass on his side, while the horse is fighting to overcome gravity and it’s own mass, and is unable to bring his full strength to bear because it’s in the wrong direction (up, not forwards). As a result, even though the horse has more STR than the man, it can’t bring all of it to bear; its effective STR is a lot lower. Enough to make it a fair contest, in fact – which is why bucking broncos are a regular part of rodeos to this day.

Internal

Things get more interesting when you start considering situations in which the same character is making opposed CON and STR checks.

Self-Injury
If the difference between STR and CON is high enough, the character may be so strong that he injures himself slightly when he exerts himself – pulling and straining muscles, etc. Athletes do this all the time, especially if they aren’t sufficiently warmed up before commencing full-intensity activities. As a general rule of thumb, there are two modes that I would consider: Half STR and STR-5.

Half STR means that the character’s CON is half the character’s STR or less; STR-5 means that the character’s STR is five or more higher than the character’s CON. The latter gives a greater chance of a successful CON check, ie a pair of dice rolls for a result of “nothing happens”, the former means that making such an opposed check is far more likely to indicate an injury. The assessment of how severely the character should be compromised by such injuries is another decision for the GM to make, preferably in advance.

Sidebar: Which stat covers determination?

A while back, I wrote an article which attempts to figure out which stat should govern instincts and intuitive insights A Rational Intuition. Another, equally-vexing question is which stat reflects a character’s determination? The usual answer in my games has been that this is a function of “Will”, which is a part of the Wisdom stat – so much so that I have sometimes renamed the stat and made Wisdom a sub-function of Will.

This is not the only possible answer. Another is that determination is a function of force of personality, and therefore it should be an expression of Charisma. This has the benefit of doing something useful with what is otherwise one of the most useless of the stats in terms of doing things for the character.

And still another school of thought suggests that determination should be an expression of whatever stat best expresses what the character wants to achieve. A character with high STR has a high level of willpower when it comes to using physical force – in effect, because they are good at it, they have learned to rely on it, and to resort to it more readily.

In an effort to keep this series of manageable length, I’m going to try to assume (despite the obvious contradiction) that all of these are true at the same time. The GM should make his own ruling on the subject and then reject interpretations of opposed stat checks that don’t agree with that decision.

STR compromised by health
Another occasion on which STR vs CON checks are appropriate is when the character’s health is compromising his capabilities. This could be anything from a hangover to food poisoning to a wave of supernaturally-induced nausea. At least at lower levels, it would not be inappropriate to have characters engaged in combat with undead need to make CON checks to overcome the stench. This applies when determination uses “the most appropriate stat” model.

Hysterical Strength
We’ve all heard stories of ordinary people being driven to extraordinary feats of strength in moments of utmost desperation. This is often described as Hysterical Strength. This is the sort of extreme result that only a critical success system models into an RPG, and it’s clearly a case of overriding the normal limits placed on the in-built biological capacity. The side effects – torn muscles and damaged joints – are so obviously akin to the self-injury category already mentioned that this is clearly best modeled by an internal opposed stat check – the character’s STR is saying “yes” but the character’s CON is saying “don’t be crazy”, while the character’s rational mind is hardly saying anything at all. When circumstances seemed appropriate, I would permit a character to exhibit hysterical STR – but only if they failed both an INT check and a CON check while succeeding in a STR check opposing both of these, AND rolling a natural 20 on d20 (or 3 on 3d6 for the Hero system, where low results are good).

STR Vs. DEX

Nimbleness and delicacy of touch can often be at odds with the application of force. Even more often, the two are complimentary, with both checks needing to succeed in order to accomplish whatever it is that the character is attempting.

External

One character provides force while another aims and directs that force. One character attempts to hold a character still with sheer force while the other attempts to wriggle free. One character throws something that another character attempts to catch. One character attempts to keep his footing on a slippery surface while another attempts to push him over. These are all examples of external STR vs. DEX checks.

Internal

Of course, who needs another character trying to push you over? Simply using force on a slippery surface is challenge enough, and is an example of an internal STR vs. DEX check. In fact, any situation calling for both the application of force and any form of physical delicacy other than direct control of STR is an internal STR vs. DEX check, which is why these are amongst the most common checks required.

Reaction Time is another attribute of DEX, and can also result in a STR vs DEX check. A character is picking up a chest, which seems rather heavier than he initially expected from its size, when he notices a rope or lever attached to its underside – can he stop lifting the chest before setting off the trap? Or has he been tricked into lifting too vigorously to stop in time? Perhaps the mechanism is a little rusty, explaining the additional weight, and giving the character his one chance to stop himself in time. Can he hold it up absolutely still? That requires both STR and DEX.

Caber-tossing is about more than simply throwing a heavy piece of timber. You have to throw it in such a way that it spins through 180 degrees, so that the point that starts on the top ends up being farther away from the character; the relative success of one caber-toss verses another lies in the distance between the point of launch and where that bottom end falls. There is arguably enough finesse involved to require both a STR and a DEX check.

Hammer-tossing and shot-put are arguably examples of the same thing.

Running while pulling a wagon or rickshaw or even a stretcher with a patient? STR and DEX combined, definitely.

STR Vs. INT

This is a little more problematic. In fact the only example I could think of is…

External

…where a character is attempting to overcome someone’s reasoned and rational arguement with a show of force. This could be aimed at the opposing character, or at an audience. The character using the INT check might be attempting to stop the STR character from rushing headlong into a dangerous or unknown situation, a possible ambush, or something along those lines. Or the character using the STR might be attempting to persuade the opposed character to grasp the nettle because time is running out to take action.

Internal

Of course, any sort of dispute between rationality and force can be internal as easily as external. This is a key personality indicator.

STR Vs. WIS

INT and WIS are so similar that a straightforward analogue of the STR vs INT example also applies directly to STR vs WIS contests, both external and internal. Instead of applying cold rationality to counter the arguements of force, though, this tends to be about force vs doctrine and general experience. And that makes this another key personality indicator.

STR Vs. CHA

…and the same is true where a display of force attempts to overwhelm charisma or emotional arguement.

Emotional arguement? When did that become part of Charisma?

Officially, never. My line of arguement runs as follows: Empathy is a key element of charisma. Empathy is about understanding emotions. Displaying the emotional cues or arguements that will cause a particular group to respond to a speaker in the fashion he wants is therefore an application of charisma – a character with a high charisma attracts people because they like him, and one of the reasons that they like him is because he is able to lead their emotions in the direction he wants them to go. It follows that an appeal to the emotions of a crowd is an attempt to use charisma on that crowd, and therefore emotional arguements are part of applied Charisma.

Internal

This of course means that any attempt to control one’s own emotional response can also be an attribute of charisma – so long as you aren’t trying to use logic or common sense to dissuade yourself. “I know they are just trying to make me angry, and they’ve succeeded, and I’ve got a right to be angry. I also know they are doing this to get me to do something hasty, without thinking, and since that’s what they want me to do, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction. Their turn will come…”

Anger management is often about finding a safe outlet for the emotional overload. Rationality plays no part in this; it has to be a learned behavior, you can only be rational after getting control of your emotions. It is not so much about dispelling anger as it is dissipating rage to permit a rational response to the cause of the anger – and about techniques to prevent the anger building up to the point of uncontrolled rage in the first place.

STR can be equated to a character’s instinct toward a violent reaction (certainly, there’s no other stat that comes close), and a STR vs CHA check can therefore represent a character’s impulse control. Which is certainly not an obvious application of stat checks, but is definitely food for thought. And the perfect place to end this article.

In the (eventual) next part of this series: CON comes under the spotlight.

Earlier this week, the subject of opposed stat checks came to mind. Although it seems to be the sort of subject that would have been done to death several times over, I found that I had a couple of what I hope are original thoughts on the subject – and a couple of advanced versions of techniques that we all have to develop as GMs. So this occasional series is going to look at the whole panoply of Stat Vs Stat questions.

As GMs, we are used to having to interpret stats into personality attributes all the time, and vice versa. This character should have a DEX of what? This other character has an INT of 13 – what does that mean?

Most analyses work in reference to the ‘average person’, but this is not the only basis of comparison. And that’s what today’s article is all about – looking at the ground rules.

Core Stats

Most game systems have a particular set of ubiquitous stats at their heart. Some may split one of them up into two sub-stats, others may roll a couple of them together into a broader umbrella, but the concepts embodied by these stats are so fundamental that almost every game system has them, or some equivalent. All told, there are six of these stats.

The Six

The six core stats that form the bedrock of most game systems, one way or another, are the stats inherited from D&D and other early RPGs. They are:

• STRength
• CONstitution
• DEXterity
• INTelligence
• WISdom, and
• CHArisma.

Like a strawberry birthmark, the DNA of modern games systems continues to reflect their descent from these early prototypes.

Stat Vs Stat

While most interactions in RPGs come down to attack vs. defense, or skill vs. target, or skill vs skill, there are still occasions when the interaction is more primal, and require a test of raw capacity. When that test is opposed by another type of capacity, the result is a stat vs stat contest.

The Six by Six Matrix

With six stats, each of which can be opposed by any other, including someone else’s capacity in the same measure, the number of combinations can be expressed as a six-by-six matrix, where each column and each row belongs to each of the core stats. That gives a total of 36 possible specific types of stat vs. stat check.

Some of these can be unusual, so rare that they virtually never occur in real life. Some are frequent and common. So the interactions themselves have differing value to a GM. And its entirely possible, even likely, that not all of the possible applications of each combination will have occurred to any given GM.

Nor can I promise to cover the whole field of possibilities, for the same reason. But a systematic approach gives me a better shot at it than blind chance, because it forces me to think about those unusual modes of interaction. Until I adopted this approach, for example, I had never thought of a circumstance in which a CHA vs DEX check might be needed. Now a couple of them have occurred to me – which means that my repertoire of techniques has grown, and this series has already made me a better GM.

Stat checks in D&D / Pathfinder

Since these core stats derive from D&D, and each game system defines these stats perhaps just a little differently, I have decided to use D&D as the framework for the comparison. But the results will be just as applicable to game systems as Diverse as Traveler, Call Of Cthulhu, Champions, Indiana Jones, and Dr Who.

It must be stated up-front that there is no official mechanism for making opposed stat checks in the 3.x / Pathfinder game systems (never mind stat vs stat checks!) They attempt to cover this situation by giving characters an untrained skill check and making all contests either attacks or Skill vs Skill contests. But what do you do when there’s no skill that specifically covers what the player is trying to accomplish? What if what you are attempting is to use a skill untrained that doesn’t permit untrained use?

Champions uses the example of a character being pushed out a window and trying to grab the window ledge before she can fall. In D&D/Pathfinder, a GM might employ a Reflex Save for this purpose, so it’s not the perfect example. How about trying to walk across rice paper without leaving a mark or tearing it? That’s not a “dodge” sort of activity, so it’s not appropriate territory for a reflex save. The best way of resolving the question is with a DEX check against a target nominated by the DM.

There are times, then, when stat checks are a useful extension to the GMs toolkit, canonical or not.

Mechanics of Opposed Stat Checks

There will be times when a character is trying to do something and another character is trying to stop them from succeeding. When there’s a skill covering both activities, you get a skill vs skill check.

As soon as you acknowledge the utility of the occasional stat check, you run into more ways for them to interact with the game system: Skill check vs. Stat check, and Stat check vs. Stat Check. The first gives us a guide apon which to base the game mechanics – it should be parallel to the skill check system. In effect, what we’re talking about is a roll of d20 + Stat Modifier or (in some game systems) 3d6 + stat modifier. This means that a character relying on raw potential instead of expertise is always at a disadvantage relative to a character who can bring some skill to bear.

In a game system that doesn’t give stat modifiers, like the Hero System, you can use the stat itself. Or you can have each character make a stat check and compare who succeeded by the greater amount.

Other systems are possible – I have seen AD&D systems in which you were awarded 1d6 for every 5 points of a stat, for example, and the highest total won. I have seen that same approach employed in Traveler.

A useful way of looking at the situation is this: One character is attempting to do something, and the opposing character is using his stats and expertise to set the target required for success in overcoming his resistance.

I had done a whole lot of very pretty graphs to examine the way the chances of success shifted in opposed skill checks, like the one below:

Red-Yellow: 2nd 3d6 roll is higher than the first so the stat vs stat check shows a failure to overcome resistance. Green: a tie. Blue: The first character succeeds in overcoming the second character’s resistance. This graph shows 3d6+2 vs 3d6+0.

The graph was generated using AnyDice and then colored.

Unfortunately, for some reason, I suffered a complete brain meltdown and completely forgot that D&D 3.x and Pathfinder use a d20 instead of 3d6. So these are pretty much useless, and the article is a LOT shorter because I had all sorts of variations to discuss. Oh, well.

Ties: Success, Failure, or something in between?

Is the goal to beat the target, or to match the target? How you choose to handle ties is generally up to each GM, possibly drawing on the skill vs skill rules for consistency. As a general rule of thumb, I usually assume that matching the target or better is enough for success, but you’re free to choose an alternative interpretation.

Two Modes Of Interaction

There are two modes of stat interaction that can result in a Stat vs Stat check: External and Internal.

External

This is where two characters are opposing each other. An Arm wrestle, or discus throw, or whatever.

Internal

This is where the character is opposing himself. A good example might be trying to do some delicate task (threading a needle) while extremely seasick (DEX vs CON) – if the DEX check succeeds, he has threaded the needle; if the CON total is higher, then the character is too distracted by the need to keep his lunch down. There will be many more, and better; I wouldn’t actually run this as Stat Vs stat, but as two separate stat checks – with the margin of success in the CON check becoming a bonus modifier to the CON check. That way, the character can actually lose his lunch on a failed CON check.

Not all Combinations Are Relevant

So, we have six stats, each of which has some form of stat check, which can interact with any of the six stat checks in one of two ways. That’s 72 combinations, at least in theory. No matter how interested you are in the subject, though, by the end of 72 combinations you would be pretty burned out on the subject – that list of combinations needs to get pruned down to something more manageable.

Fortunately, not all combinations are going to be relevant. STR vs STR, for example: there’s not much need for an Internal Mode with that interaction, but there’s definite value in an External Mode. That probably halves the number of interactions to be detailed. In some cases, both will need to be considered, but at least some of the time, only one mode will matter. I figure that’s a 33% reduction.

Then there’s the fact that almost half the entries on the original table are going to be redundant. STR vs. CON is going to be the same as CON vs STR – or close enough that they can usually both be discussed under the same heading. That’s about a 40% reduction.

All told, that’s 67% x 60% x 72, or about 29 interaction modes to consider.

The shifting perspective

External mode implies that one stat check will belong to a PC and one to an NPC. But the interaction remains the same, regardless of which character is trying to overcome the other’s resistance, so generalizing instead of saying which belongs to the PC prevents replenishment of the combinations matrix by adding a new variable.

About the Stat Vs Stat series

All told, there will be nine parts to this series, which will be an occasional item here at Campaign Mastery.

• Part 1 is this introduction.
• Parts 2 to 7 will each focus on a single core stat, and the combinations with that stat’s check.
• Part 8 will create a new characterization tool, the Matrix, based on the interactions described, and show how to use it to turn stats into characters.
• Finally, Part 9 (all going well) will turn that process on its head and demonstrate a way to use the matrix to turn a personality into stats.

Right, so that’s got the decks cleared. Originally, I was simply going to dive straight into the interactions, but as the article began to take shape I kept finding more things that needed to be addressed in a preamble – until it reached the point of needing to be an article in its own right, which became this article. Next Time: Strength. Because I want to hit the ground running with the series – and because I haven’t actually gotten to the part I originally intended to write – I’m aiming to present part two next week. Let’s get down to business!

About the “Epigrams Of Life & Gaming” series:

An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. Usually under the hashtag #Musing, I have the habit of tweeting notions and thoughts and philosophizing; the 140-character limit of twitter (and yes, I know there are ways around that) by definition makes those tweets epigrams. I’ve been documenting the best of them (in my opinion) with the intention of discussing them here. Because I’m not constrained to 140 characters, I’ve been able to clarify some that had been compressed severely in order to fit twitter’s limits – but they are all still very short.

These are thoughts that run deep, or that are succinct to the point of being razor-sharp. Taken all at once, they can be quite overwhelming, and each can receive less than the attention it deserves. So I’ve broken them into batches of ten or twelve. I’m not going to present them all at once, instead relegating this to another irregular series. After each epigram, I will try to expand on the thought propounded, or discuss the point raised.

Not all of these are directly applicable to RPGs. But all RPGs involve people, and that makes them all at least indirectly relevant…

If you don’t enjoy the result, at least enjoy the process. And vice-versa.

One of my greatest assets in life has been the capacity to find something I enjoyed about every job that I had, no matter what it was, from meeting new people to discovering new cultures, from improving processes that make a real improvement in government services, to enjoying the sunshine. And a big part of the secret to acquiring that capacity is this little tip.

It applies to my GMing, too. From creating campaigns to writing adventures to making maps to creating interesting characters, either I found something satisfying or enjoyable about the process itself, or I deliberately guided the process so that the end result would be something that I would enjoy.

It’s like creating a new PC. If you find the character intriguing / interesting, and the GM engages in the character, you will always be happy to play it. If either of these is not true, your enjoyment in playing the character will either wane or be crushed beneath the growing burden of frustration. Neither negative outcome is conducive to good roleplay, and will lead to a cessation on your part as a player of any effort whatsoever. You start playing by numbers and just going through the motions.

In the same way, if you enjoy neither the process or the result of any phase of your activities as a GM, the level of effort will suffer, and the overall outcome will diminish in standard, ultimately affecting your capacity to do the things that you do enjoy about the process – ultimately, in the worst case, because the campaign shuts down.

If there is any aspect of game or campaign prep that you don’t enjoy, you need to invent or discover a new way of doing that work that is fun, or sooner or later, your campaign will suffer.

If you write something you enjoy, you’re successful whether it is a commercial success or not.

Game prep is a bit like writing a blog, or a novel, or whatever. You can’t do it day in, day out, unless you enjoy what you do. No-one gets rich from gaming or writing about gaming. Fewer than 1 in a thousand make significant money from writing of any kind – it’s a significant achievement just to earn the equivalent of a standard wage. That means that you either find some other source of satisfaction that compensates and rejuvenates your motivation, or you stop doing it – some time after you stop doing it well.

This observation is obviously closely related to the one previously discussed, and they are both about work/life balance and maintaining enthusiasm for what you do.

You can enjoy the craftsmanship of an artistic effort without liking the product. The reverse is harder. Forest for the trees?

I’m not a big fan of rap music. Most classical music doesn’t excite me, either. There are artists – both traditional and digital – whose work leaves me cold. Most poetry induces yawns. Yet, I have studied all of these things for my own enjoyment, and discovered selected works that do appeal. Even if I don’t like a piece of music, or a painting, I can still appreciate the skill and artistry of execution. I might like the way the bass guitar is played, or appreciate the fingering technique on the guitar fret, or the complexity of timing, or the use of color. Hence the first part of this statement I consider proven beyond question.

The rest of the statement gets a little deeper. Is it possible to enjoy the end result of an artistic process without appreciating the craftsmanship and skill of the artists involved? Examples that demonstrate a ‘yes’ case are much harder to find. My tastes would be different from yours, so there’s no point in citing specifics; but I would suggest that every time you hear a piece of music or see a work of art and think, ‘I would like that if not for X (whatever X might be) that it is an example. The problem is that X – whatever it is – is interfering with your overall enjoyment of the work. In effect, you can’t enjoy the forest because there’s one ugly tree in the middle of your view.

This is a statement about appreciation of technique against your capacity to enjoy a holistic view of the finished product.

Now, consider the following: The ‘finished product’ is an RPG campaign or adventure, and the craftsmanship refers to all the elements and ingredients that go into it, from the players to the characters to the maps to whatever. You can appreciate the effort that a GM puts in, even learn something useful from it, without that campaign or adventure being your cup of tea, or something that you would enjoy playing in. (First part of the statement). But it gets a lot harder to enjoy a campaign or adventure that would otherwise be a massive hit for you if there is one particular aspect of the result that you don’t like. It’s hard to overlook the distasteful ‘tree’ to discover the enjoyment that the rest of the forest would bring.

That connects this thought with the ones that preceded it. If there is a significant aspect of your campaign prep that is being shortchanged because you have not found a way to enjoy doing it, this can potentially kill a campaign no matter how good the rest of it might be. The solution is to find a way to grow your enthusiasm and skill for that section of the GM’s craft that you aren’t currently enjoying, and your game will benefit.

Nine-Tenths of the ideas you have as you are falling asleep are rubbish. But the last 10th makes the effort of recording them all worthwhile.

Our conscious minds continually filter our ideas through a plausibility screen, while distracting us with reactions and stimuli from the world around us. Only as we are falling asleep do both the distractions and filters go away, giving your conscious awareness direct access to the part of your mind where inspiration happens. The lack of filters means that a lot of what you come up with will be rubbish. But a few gems that you might otherwise have missed will also sneak through. Always be aware of these ideas, and examine them diligently but cautiously the next day.

You can tell an idea is worth the effort if you worry that you are inadequate to the task of developing that idea.

There are times when we all come up with ideas and aren’t sure if they are good enough to be worth the time they will require to develop. One hallmark of the really good ideas is that they seem overwhelming, even beyond our skills. If you undertake the development of such a great idea, either you will be up to the task despite your self-doubt, or you won’t; if you aren’t, you will either rise to the challenge and improve yourself in the process, or you will fail. Assuming all conditions are equally likely that means that 75% of the time, you will succeed in developing that idea. In fact, since you were good enough to come up with the idea in the first place, the chances of success are probably higher. So back yourself; you might be surprised at what you can achieve.

Here’s another way to look at it: If you don’t try, you will always regret it if you later realize that you might have had the skills necessary to have succeeded. So don’t be put off by the prospect of failure.

Writing is a creative process that transforms ideas into text through the mechanisms of skill and discipline.

There are a lot of answers out in the world to the question, “what is writing to you”. Some talk about the need to write, others about the work involved, others describe it as a labor of love. Still others describe it as a skill, or a discipline, or a habit that you have to get into in order to succeed at it. This is my answer, and it packs a lot of meat into a simple expression.

• Ideas – you have to have them, or you’re writing will never be worth anything.
• Skill – you need to learn what you are doing in order to succeed in transforming the ideas from the original imaginary medium to the page.
• Discipline – you need to keep doing it, for as long as it takes, or your skills will lose the edge needed.

This is true of all writing, whether it be a school assignment, a work of fiction, a blog, or an RPG.

How frustrating would it be to discover the $10,000 winning token in a packet of munchies a week after the promotion had ended…

This has never happened to me, or to anyone that I know – but I’m sure that it has happened to someone, somewhere, at some point.

When crossing the desert of ignorance, a book is both canteen and compass. Be prepared, always have one with you.

In a desert survival situation, a canteen prolongs survival while a compass gives direction. When in a situation where ignorance and uncertainty are all around, a book on the subject gives direction and enables you to get through the situation. Try to always have any book dealing with subjects that might arise and about which you are uncertain at hand when you might need.

If you must rehearse a conversation in your mind (and we all do), ask yourself what the other party MIGHT say, don’t decide what they WILL say.

We all rehearse conversations in our heads. While this advice is good in general life, it’s also applicable to GMs when they are preparing the interactions between NPCs and PCs. Don’t expect it to follow any particular script you might have in your head – because most of the time, it won’t. So rarely will the script bear any resemblance to what will actually be said that locking yourself into any particular delivery is a waste of time, and counterproductive to boot.

Instead, keep a list of the points that you want to be made in the course of the dialogue, and look for multiple ways to go from something that might be said to the message you want to deliver. And if one of the other parties makes one of your points for you, cross it off your to-do list for the conversation rather than contributing excessive weight to that particular statement by reiterating it.

I hate being wrong. I would rather admit ignorance. I hate admitting ignorance, so I educate myself constantly.

Another piece of advice that applies to both general life and sitting in the Game Master’s chair. There’s not a whole lot more to say, really – except one footnote: You never know what will turn out to be useful information. In the past as GM, I’ve drawn on information on subjects as diverse as biology, genetics, politics, history, music, art, sociology, real estate, banking, economics, computer science, software design, desktop publishing, cooking, geography, geology, thermodynamics, engineering, metallurgy, movies & media, publishing, journalism, mathematics, and many more fields besides. The more you can absorb, the more tools you have in your toolbox.

If you do something without thinking first, you will never do it as well as you could – unless it’s emoting. If you do anything without thinking after, you’ll never learn from the experience.

Another item with considerable depth to think about. The first part seems fairly obvious and straightforward – but there’s a sting in the tail. Thinking about how best to display emotion can sometimes – even often – be counterproductive, focusing too much attention on clarity of delivery while obscuring what your performance is attempting to deliver. You are far better off imagining that you are feeling that particular emotion (or something close to it) and letting that mood color your words and tone than you would ever be trying to fake them.

The counterpoint in the second half is something not enough people realize, unfortunately. Mistakes, lucky and unlucky guesses, serendipity – they can all be educational, but only if you take the time to understand what just happened. If not, it’s a sure bet that mistakes will be relived, but serendipitous lightning might never be caught in a bottle again – in other words, it’s all downhill from there. Which sucks mightily and is the best possible reason for taking the time to learn from your experiences.

The brilliance of technology is that it makes communication easier. The price is that it makes miscommunication easier.

The final installment of this particular set of epigrams. This is something that seems obvious when it’s stated outright, but that seems to take a lot of people by surprise the first time they hear this thought expressed. At the time, I was thinking about the many false “celebrity deaths” that have misled people on twitter – consider this list of premature obituaries from Wikipedia, which only scratches the surface of the phenomenon. But after I had drafted it, I realized that it applied in broader terms and to more forms of misinformation. An essential skill of modern times is the passing of everything you read or hear through a plausibility filter and verification process.

“I read it on the Internet” used to be synonymous with unreliability and misinformation. These days, the web in general has cleaned up its act a lot. Wild rumor and imaginative gossip has largely been swept aside by professionalism and corporate spin, respectively, but there are still corners that are a bit wild and woolly. Social Media are definitely one of those areas. But scams and fisching attempts and malware still abound, and the last line of defense is often our credulity and credibility.

At the same time, the level of trust that can be imputed to previously-unimpeachable news sources has steadily deteriorated, at least in Australia. Newspapers are full of editorial slant, and once-trusted current affairs programming has revealed itself to little better than the notorious National Enquirer. These days, it’s becoming very commonplace to use the internet to verify stories that run in the traditional media.

Modern society has more information at its fingertips than any past generation could have dreamed. But we also have more misinformation and misrepresented information at those fingertips. The more unlikely it is, the faster a story seems to spread, and the only solution is to learn which sources can be trusted and which to regard with suspicion. The sad reality is that this statement is definitely something that you can trust.

That’s all I have for this article. There will be more; all told, I have well over 100 insights like these twelve to share. Be sure to check out the next batch – whenever they appear!

About the Casual Opportunities series:

I realized recently that something is missing from my campaigns, and has been for a long time: casual opportunities for the PCs to establish their primary role within the campaign.

Casual opportunities for heroes to be heroes, for villains to be villains, for geeks to be geeks. It’s easy to become so focused on the primary plot, or on the things that the PCs are contributing to it, that it’s easy to overlook these touchstones that remind players of who their characters really are when the chips are down.

Unless a villain (or a PC) has set it alight, there has never been a burning house, or inn, or wagon, in one of my fantasy campaigns. The PCs have never spotted a street urchin picking someone’s pocket only for the urchin to run into the PC while looking the other way for signs of pursuit.

The PCs have fared a little better in my superhero campaign, but there still has not been enough casual crime for them to deal with – speeding drivers, break-ins, etc – in passing.

In part, this situation has resulted from a nearly-obsessive drive to try and show the characters’ private lives, outside the superheroes-on-a-mission context, in an extremely limited play window of about 5 hours once a month, without short-changing those missions and plotlines. In part, it has come from the players expecting to always be in or near their home base because of those primary plotlines. And, in part, because I simply hadn’t thought of it – until now.

So, I’m going to try and make up for that with this series. Each part will focus on one particular character archetype and list at least half-a-dozen minor encounters for that major type of character that showcase an essential characteristic of that archetype. I will also take the time to explain why I think each encounter is relevant or significant to that character type, and make some attempt to get under the skin of the archetype and examine what makes it tick.

The series itself will be an irregular one, appearing every now and then – don’t look for it every week. And while it might start with a D&D / Pathfinder character class, I intend to cover superhero, sci-fi, and pulp archetypes along the way – all in no particular order. In fact, I’m going to deliberately mix it up…

So who is this Barbarian chappie, anyway?

There are a few who think of the Barbarian as a bloodthirsty savage who settles all arguements with whatever weapon comes to hand – if it’s not too delicate for the job. And a few more who equate the Barbarian Rage ability with a Berserker‘s battle fury. Aside from those three or four people, everyone else looks for a more sophisticated description that can accommodate intelligent Barbarians instead of treating them as being as dumb as stumps, regardless of their intelligence scores, and can also accommodate skilled barbarians instead of treating them as living buzzsaws.

The problem is that Conan, who is the classic Barbarian archetype, was used as one of the foundations of the Fighter class, so whatever the Barbarian is, Conan isn’t it. This wasn’t a problem until 3e D&D; prior to that time, the Barbarian (if he existed at all as a class) was a sub-class or variation on Fighter. Third Edition did away with subclasses, moving Barbarians out into their own character class, and introduced the Rage mechanic.

Before I can come up with a set of minor encounters to reveal and illustrate who the Barbarian really is, I need to understand exactly who that is. Right away, a number of variations come to mind.

The Simple Hedonist

Eating, Drinking, Gambling, Wenching – those are the important things in life. Some people get so intellectual about things they forget what really matters, forget to smell the roses. It’s not that this variant can’t understand a complex arguement, it’s that they don’t care about complications. They will always try to reduce any situation to it’s most primal elements, and the smarter they are, the better they are at doing so quickly. This enables a rapid (if simplistic) direct solution to the problem which the Barbarian can be implementing before the intellectuals have finished figuring out what the problem is. Determined, resolute, and unwavering, this character employs a direct approach to problem-solving – because anything else is playing whatever game the other side has chosen, on his terms. If you have a political problem, kill the politician. If he’s well-protected, you just need a little more force or a touch of craftiness to lure him out into the open. Sometimes he gets a little carried away, that’s all.

The Emotional Arrow

This variation has a lust for the zest of life. It doesn’t matter what they are doing, they will find a way to make it enjoyable, or what’s the point of doing it? If the game is not enjoyable, change the rules, the parameters of the situation, until it becomes something that is fun. Because this character is so in touch with what he feels, emotionally, he is adept at getting to the emotional heart of any situation, any relationship, stripping away the complications that get in the way and confuse things. He has some bedrock fundamental values on which he has built his life, and which he will not yield or bend one iota – for anyone or anything. Loyal, steadfast, and brave, he takes his time declaring a friendship – but will back any declared friendship all the way to the gates of hell. Loyalty to that friendship, and to any commitment, is his greatest virtue, and betrayal of that friendship by others is the thing that will really, really, tick him off. There is no turning back from such a betrayal; once trust is broken it can never be restored. Instead of Conan, think Sam Gamgee. [This is the variant that I used for Arron in Fumanor – refer Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2 for more details (look for the section on Ogres). This variant’s Rage is that of a lover spurned, a wife betrayed. When he has to, he simply turns off the thinking part of his mind and operates on raw passion and determination.

The Thrillseeker

This is an obvious variation on the variation just presented. The thrillseeker also has a lust for the zest in life, enjoying being at the centre of events, and forcing his way into that centre. He aspires to be an elemental force, a force of nature, whose very presence demands confrontation on his level and his terms because he will simply smash anything else against the wall. This variation revels in brutality when necessary, and directness the rest of the time. The greater his intelligence, the more successful the character is at positioning himself exactly where he wants to be in any situation. In many ways, the Thrillseeker’s emotional condition is arrested in childhood – he has a childlike love of adventure and danger, and a child’s temper, which casts aside anything and everything else when it expresses itself.

The Hop-head

The word ‘assassin’ derives from the Persian word hashishi or hashshashin, and refers to a sect of Ismalis. A combination of real life, enemy propaganda, and western imagination depicts the Nizari Ismalis as “hashish-consuming intoxicated assassins” (refer the “Legends and folklore” and “In popular culture” sections of the Wikipedia page linked to).

In reality, these were a group of religious warriors who had more in common with fantasy clerics than the “assassin” character class, and who just happened to be used by their political and religious masters for the purpose of assassination.

The description of the supposed impact of Hashish consumption on their psychology is closer to what would be expected of PCP abuse (also exaggerated by media reports) – warriors who felt little or no pain, and who kept going long after anyone else would have dropped, with extraordinary strength and ferocity. Think of a medieval version of The Terminator.

Not a lot of imagination is needed to re-blend fiction and reality to create a culture whose warriors routinely dope themselves up to achieve a state of religious ecstasy once a day or when going into battle. Some of the well-publicized incidents regarding violent acts committed by PCP users, such as those committed by former rapper Big Lurch, could easily be considered barbaric and the origin of the reported behavior of Barbarians as a class.

In summary, this variant imagines the Barbarians as a group of strongly-religious warriors who employ naturally-occurring drugs on a daily basis and before battle to place themselves into a psychotic state of religious ecstasy, and who reject the ‘sophistication’ and complication of ‘modern life’ to become ‘closer to the spiritual world’.

By modern standards and in the modern world, there is nothing but negatives to this depiction. But in a fantasy world where the gods are real? It’s still extreme, but would be seen as more tolerable – so long as they directed their violence against real enemies and not innocent bystanders. They might have their origins in a successful last act of desperate defense when faced with being overrun by some fallen race – Orcs or trolls or ogres or whatever. And it’s an interpretation that leaves a lot of room for roleplay and interesting exploration, thanks to the spiritual connotations. In fact, this variety of ‘Barbarian’ easily has as much depth, complexity, and plot potential as any other character class. There are elements of the classic cloistered monk, elements of religion, elements of a complex philosophy, all disguised as something simple, which is often mistaken for something primitive.

The Hot-head

This is the interpretation favored by some – the berserker who gets angry at the drop of a hat, but who is able to focus that anger and aggression into something that is usually positive. Dangerous to be around, and more dangerous to have as an enemy.

Comparing 3.x and Pathfinder

The descriptions of the class vary in two broad respects between these two sources. The first is that the 3.x version lists the berserker aspect as only one of several characteristics of the profile, emphasizing primitive and uncivilized origins. The Pathfinder version speaks of fury and passion and berserker tendencies as a far more dominant element within the profile, while offering the player far more variations on the “Rage” ability that imply a degree of sophistication at odds with the 3.x ideas. This is further borne out by the implications within the text that being a Barbarian is a philosophic choice that can be learned and embraced by anyone, rather than being the exclusive province of primitives beyond the fringes of society. The options and variations presented above cover the full range of possibilities implied by these extremes.

Common Threads

There are some themes that run through all of the variants listed, and these are fertile ground for exploitation in casual encounters.

• Directness
• Simplification of issues
• Passion over intellect
• Violence when wronged
• Spirituality/Philosophy
• Hedonism
• Passion for life

Differential Threads

Each of the variations also have something that is unique to that variation. These are always useful as a source of minor encounters because they give the Barbarian Variant an opportunity to display the point of distinction of that variation:

• The Simple Hedonist: An opportunity for revelry
• The Simple Hedonist: The Cure for what Ails You
• The Simple Hedonist: The bully/li>
• The Emotional Arrow: The Aegean Bargain
• The Emotional Arrow: An arguement over trivia
• The Emotional Arrow: The Honest Advantage
• The Thrillseeker: A thrilling novelty
• The Thrillseeker: On the edge of the spotlight
• The Thrillseeker: A risky proposition
• The Hop-head: An arguement about religion
• The Hop-head: An excess of hedonism
• The Hop-head: The temple thief
• The Hot-head: Three-card Monty
• The Hot-head: Scene at a restaurant
• The Hot-head: Water in the Ale
• The Hot-head: What happens on the battlefield, stays on the battlefield

So, that’s the menu for today’s article…

The Common Encounters

In this section, I’m offering seven encounters derived from the common threads. Each variant and individual will respond slightly differently, of course, but will still be expressing that common trait of the class.

Directness: The star-crossed lovers

These situations are ridiculously easy to assemble. You start with the simply proposition, X wants to marry Y, and then start layering on complications that stand in the way until the whole thing seems utterly impossible. For example:

• Pherilia wants to marry Drythas.
• Pherilia’s hand has been promised to Umberto.
• Umberto is Drythas’ father, an old and bitter man.
• Pherilia hates Umberto.
• Pherilia’s parents are deeply in debt to Umberto.
• Drythas is a playwright, dismissed as completely unsuitable for anything by both Umberto and Pherilia’s parents.
• Umberto has been blackmailing Pherilia’s parents for decades.
• Pherilia’s father once tried to kill Umberto with a crossbow, but missed and killed Drythas’ mother instead. Pherilia isn’t supposed to know this, but her mother told her.
• Drythas’ mother was the only one who held him in any esteem, and he loved her deeply.
• Drythas’ is convinced that Umberto (his father) had his mother killed because she wouldn’t go along with his schemes.

What a tangle – it’s positively Shakespearian! Now, let’s introduce our Barbarian to the situation. He encounters a weeping and slightly drunken Pherilia, who is clutching a vial of poison and trying to work up the nerve to use it; she would rather die than be forced into the marriage her parents have arranged for her. It won’t take much more than a sympathetic growl from the Barbarian for the whole story to come spilling out.

There are a number of simple solutions the Barbarian can employ to solve the problem:

• Kill Umberto.
• Kill Drythas.
• Kill Pherilia.
• Umberto is old. Tell Pherilia to marry him, and use the poison on him.
• Pherilia knows things about Umberto he would not want to be public. Blackmail him back.
• Tell Pherilia to elope with Drythas, and let Umberto and her parents fight it out. None of the mess is her fault.

Sure, there are more sophisticated solutions that buy into the whole Greek Tragedy paradigm. But Barbarians are direct, remember?

Simplification of issues: The Wizard’s Tower

I thought about rolling this one into the preceding, but realized that while there is some overlap, it is not total. The biggest problem is trying to confine examples to a manageable scope; it’s very easy for this type of problem to take over the campaign and become a major plot element.

Stohl is a wizard with a problem. He thought it would be a clever idea to build his tower out of stone blocks that were recycled from the fallen tower of his mentor, who was once a wizard of great power. But the stones had absorbed leakage from countless spells over the decades, raising the morphic field energies to the point where the smallest cantrip went wildly out of control. That was how his old master had died, and how his tower came to be destroyed in the first place. Then Stohl came along and imposed order and rationality on the ruins rather than letting the excess of arcane energy dissipate over time, as it would naturally have done, by rebuilding them into a structure with a purpose – and just at the same time that the temple next door was preaching unification of the people and common interests and looking out for each other. Now the very stones are reaching out to the neighboring buildings, turning loose stones into improbably and impossible structures that defy common sense and rational thought (two things that stones are not known to be particularly good at) and which violate every ordinance of construction within the city. Still more worrying, they have not been tapping their own morphic energies to achieve this, but have started draining other sources – such as the Duke’s prized +3 broadsword. A full investigation is underway, a handsome reward has been offered for the head of the thief who “replaced the broadsword with a magicless forgery”, and it’s only a matter of time before Stohl is blamed for it all. Worst of all, the stones have begun to vaguely apprehend what happens when a building is razed to make way for new construction, and have started to take it personally. What Stohl needs is someone who can solve the problem without deducing all sorts of inconvenient deductions that will lead to his head being offered up on a platter. Someone like a Barbarian…

The big trick is now getting the Barbarian involved without explaining what’s going on. The simplest solution is to have Stohl hire the Barbarian to knock down his tower (he can use just about any excuse he can come up with to justify this desire. The desire to redecorate (‘towers are so yesterday, you know, and I so want to be stylish…’) is my favorite. The tower will, of course, fight back. Either the Barbarian will win, ending the problem and any connection between the events in town and Stohl, or the Tower will win, in which case Stohl can blame him for doing something to his tower. Either way, Stohl is off the hook.

How the barbarian can solve the problem:

• Lure Stohl back to the tower, and attack him. The walls will soak up the magic Stohl uses to defend himself until the tower goes boom. Problem solved.
• Or, he could figure out that it’s magic doing it, and that it’s draining magic items in the town to do it – and simply stack as many magic items as he can find or steal in the tower until it overloads. Problem solved.
• Or he could knock down a whole heap of other buildings to soak up all the magic in rebuilding the town.

Three solutions that all get to the heart of the problem – with no real need to even attempt to understand the complexities of how things reached this point. And that’s what a Barbarian is good for – clever of Stohl to have realized that…

Passion over intellect: The Wildervore Migration

A migration of wildervores* is threatening a crop. The smart thing to do is to try and deflect them around the croplands, or concentrate on protecting the town and declaring the crop a lost cause. But to anyone who really relishes a challenge, confronting the alpha Wildervore mano-a-creature and seeing who’s stronger is irresistible.

* What’s a Wildervore?
I made the name up to represent a large creature that travels in larger herds. It could be anything from a Stegosaurus on down. Invent something. It should be prone to charging, and big. A herd of them should be something that no-one in their right mind gets in the way of. That’s what Barbarians are for.

Violence when wronged: Accusation In The Alley

After a night spent carousing, the Barbarian stumbles out into the lane to make his way to the stables where he is lodging for the night because the innkeeper wouldn’t let him sleep indoors, when he stumbles into a mugging that’s gone very badly wrong. The victim has been hit rather too vigorously over the head, and the city watch are approaching the alleyway entrance. The perpetrator, a thin man dressed in dark clothes, takes one look at the situation and does something half-smart – he yells for help and pretends the Barbarian has assaulted his “friend” and is threatening him…

If the Barbarian were a country bumpkin or a savage simpleton, this might have been a smart ploy. But he’s not, he’s a Barbarian, and that doesn’t mean stupid. Brave to the point of idiocy, perhaps, but not stupid. Even drunk, he’s more than a match for the town guard – but the confrontation gives the would-be mugger the chance to get away – for now. The next morning, the hunt is on, as the wrongfully accused Barbarian begins stalking the streets like a natural disaster…

Spirituality/Philosophy: The Arguement

The Barbarian comes across two priests having a very loud arguement about a trivial aspect of religious doctrine. Normally he wouldn’t get involved, but a crowd have gathered to listen, and some are starting to take one side or the other, and they are all blocking the Barbarian’s path.

This encounter gives the Barbarian the chance to be simple yet profound: “What does it matter? The Gods look inside men’s hearts, not at all the fancy trappings and pretendings that you wrap them up in.”

Hedonism: The Wedding

The Inn where the Barbarian is lodging has run out of ale – something about the delivery cart being late. So, slightly tipsy, he has wandered out to find another to drink at, only to come across a high society wedding where there’s plenty of fine booze, good food, and attractive women – who have also consumed enough of that booze to be impaired in their judgment. Any respecter of propriety would keep going rather than inviting himself in, but we’re talking about a Barbarian here, and no-one seems to mind.

The next morning he awakes to the screeching of one of the maids of honor, who has just discovered the Barbarian in bed with her mother…

Passion for life: The Night Before

It’s the night before an important battle, or at least, a significant and dangerous one. The ascetic and professional military have ordered the inns closed so that the citizens will respond to orders in the morning with clear heads. The pious are praying. The fearful seek hiding places. The opportunists are taking advantage of the opportunity. All sorts of revels are on offer for the Barbarian, who is no coward, doesn’t especially like or trust thieves, and whom no inn door can keep out if he really tries…

The Differential Encounters

Having completed the litany of minor encounters and mini-plots focusing on the Generic Barbarian, it’s time to get specific…

The Simple Hedonist: An opportunity for revelry

Two con-men are working a ploy almost as old as time – they claim to be selling a farm on behalf of an old widow who can’t look after it any more. Because she is not well, and needs to relocate for health reasons, they have to sell it quickly and “for a small fraction of what it’s really worth”. They have worked their way from town to town, selling and reselling the same piece of swamp at every opportunity, then moving on before anyone can complain. They take the time to liquor up their marks before, during, and after making their pitch – it makes them easier to convince. This time, they’ve made the mistake of choosing the Barbarian as their next victim…

The Simple Hedonist: The Cure For What Ails You

The Barbarian, feeling a little delicate after last night’s activities, wanders down the street wishing the dawn didn’t have to be so loud, and comes across an enthusiastic little man who has set up a small apothecary stand on the side of the street and is offering a cure-all. The Barbarian is stumping past grumpily when he is spotted by the salesman, who immediately mentions another putative benefit of his potion: “Cures Hangovers”…

This is really two encounters for the price of one. The initial encounter sells the Barbarian the “cure”, the second involves the Barbarian realizing that it doesn’t work. Most people would shrug and let it go, not having expected miracles under the circumstances – but the Barbarian isn’t most people.

You can up the ante by having the Barbarian notice several other customers buying the potion to cure more serious ailments, and letting the Barbarian champion “the little guy”. Or you can save that for an intermediate encounter, stretching the plot thread to three encounters – the salesman suggesting that maybe the Barbarian “got a bad batch,” and “Here, have a replacement for nothing, my compliments”…

The Simple Hedonist: The Bully

The Barbarian comes across a weak and spindly guy being picked on by a big, burly, bully. Normally he would keep going – “None of his business” – but then the spindly guy says “You’ll be sorry if you’re not careful, I’ll set my Champion onto you,” and points vaguely at the Barbarian. The Bully, with more bravado than sense (practically a Barbarian himself) replies, “Oh yeah? I’ll kick his butt…” or medieval to that effect.

In a straight fight, the Barbarian would probably win. But the Bully cheats, and has a couple of confederates nearby…

The Emotional Arrow: The Aegean Bargain

Last night, drinking at the inn, the Barbarian ran out of coin, and promised to muck out the stables for another jug of ale. It’s the next morning, and the Barbarian has just discovered that the Inn and several neighboring businesses have a communal stable that is eight times the size he was expecting – so large that by the time he’s finished, the end he started on is dirty again.

The Emotional Arrow: An arguement over trivia

A son and his father are arguing over trivia to avoid telling each other that they care about each other, an all-too-common pattern where the people concerned consider themselves ‘too macho’ to go in for the ‘touchy-feely stuff’, in the next room to the Barbarian’s. After a while it starts to grate on the Barbarian’s nerves. Some Barbarian variants would threaten or simply assault them; the Emotional Arrow gets to the real problem – in a fairly blunt and direct fashion, of course.

The Emotional Arrow: The Honest Advantage

The Barbarian has come into possession of some minor knick-knack that he hopes to sell in the next village for enough to buy some ale and food. The village, a very small community, has only one tradesman who might be interested in the knick-knack, but after apologizing profusely, he informs the Barbarian that he cannot afford to purchase it; he has only counterfeight coins, which he was given by a passing stranger yesterday in payment for his entire inventory. The Merchant then shows the Barbarian one of the false coins; the Barbarian realizes that he cannot tell the difference between these and the real thing. Had the Merchant said nothing, he would have been none the wiser until someone discovered the truth at a later time; the Merchant would have passed the economic loss on to several other businesses (but would probably save his own in the process).

While most Barbarians would simply shrug and move on, the Emotional Arrow values honesty and integrity. What he will do to make things right is up to him, but here’s one suggestion:

The Barbarian sells the Knick-Knack for all the counterfeight coins that he the Merchant has, and adds some real ones of his own to the total. He then hurries to the next town, where he suspects that the counterfeiter will attempt to sell the fruit of his lies; sure enough, he finds a man there attempting to trade the goods obtained from the honest merchant at a small fraction of their real value. A bidding war begins between the merchant who was being persuaded to buy them and the Barbarian, which the Barbarian inevitably wins because he is willing to pay full market value (plus) for the goods. The counterfeiter, fooled by his own creations long enough for the sale to go through, is only beginning to suspect what has occurred when the Barbarian tells the town constable that the merchant in the previous village has accused the counterfeiter of trading in false coins, and produces a sworn complaint from the Merchant. Because the merchant has a reputation for honesty throughout the local region, his complaint is taken seriously enough for the counterfeiter to be searched and the false coins discovered. His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, his accusations against the Barbarian yield nothing but a threat from the Barbarian if he doesn’t apologize on the spot, and he gets carted off to prison. The other bidder remains silent and denies ever having met the counterfeiter when questioned. Later, he tells the Barbarian that he spotted the origin of the produce, and the counterfeight coins being offered for the merchandise, and figured out what was going on. “I would rather have an honest competitor with whom I will always know where I stand than a piece of deceptive trash like that hanging around.” He then gives the Barbarian enough for some ale and bread to compensate him for his efforts.

If the above is too cutesy for you, make the second Merchant a secret confederate of the counterfeiter and a fence on the side – who has cut his compatriot loose when the jig was up. Insert some subtle clue to this relationship into the conversation with the Barbarian; then let the Barbarian get to the edge of town with his ale and bread before he figures it out. Time for some more direct action…

The Thrillseeker: A Thrilling Novelty

Trekking through mountainous territory, the Barbarian (and his friends/companions, but they don’t matter) come across a man offering rides down a waterfall in barrel. Unknown to the PCs, this is a con – a confederate kills the Thrillseeker, relieves the bodies of valuables, and attaches lead weights, all while supposedly helping the thrillseeker into the barrel. The body is then (after a brief delay) stuffed into the barrel, which shatters conveniently on the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall; the body, because of the weights, sinks, while the salesman pretends to be stunned, “that’s never happened before”, etc. Things go badly wrong when the confederate tries to kill the Barbarian. The scheme is quickly exposed and the villains taken into custody, leaving the Barbarian to pine regretfully that he never did get to ride the waterfall in a barrel. But maybe one day…

The Thrillseeker: On the edge of the spotlight

The thrillseeker variant can’t stand not being the center of attention. That means that he tends to thrust his way forwards whenever a volunteer is called for, no matter how dangerous the mission might be (and how much his comrades might wish he wouldn’t). It also means that he doesn’t do sneaky very well – whenever the PCs need to do something they would rather other people not pay attention to, the best bet is to have the Barbarian stage some sort of diversion. Something like climbing the castle tower bare-handed, or challenging everyone who passed by to a wrestling match, or being very loudly drunk in the middle of the market square.

A Barbarian with intelligence is smart enough to realize all this – and so, when he encounters some public display designed to capture the attention of the crowd, his first thought is “what don’t they want me to notice?” and his second is probably “Maybe I can figure it out if I make myself the centre of attention”.\

To use this encounter then, all you need is a spectacular stunt, and something that the stuntman is trying to distract attention from. Smuggling a princess out of the castle, for example. Add one Barbarian and stir well. Then stand back, and let the Barbarian and the designated Distraction engage in a series of one-up-manship games.

The Thrillseeker: A risky proposition

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Barbarians rush in where fools hesitate and think about visiting a relative several Kingdoms over – well, at least the Thrillseeker variant does. To employ this encounter, you need something absurdly dangerous, a Barbarian in the audience, and a volunteer who (to the Barbarian’s eyes) is clearly unfit for the task. The Barbarian should challenge the volunteer to some sort of contest to prove his fitness for the challenge – in the process committing the Barbarian’s companions.

The Hop-head: An arguement about religion

The Barbarian encounters a hellfire-and-brimstone cleric calling for abstinence from alcohol as he is on the way into a tavern. If only he weren’t so tall/broad/whatever, he might have been able to slip in without being singled out. But the cleric did call him out, and called him a godless heathen in front of everyone (including any gods that might be watching), and he couldn’t have that. But the witless idiot was only doing what he thought was right, so violence wasn’t the first answer – he just needed to do some more learning about the real world and lose some of those wrongheaded notions. Then some punishment smackdown could be handed out.

The Hop-head: An excess of hedonism

Getting drunk and drugged is a religious duty and obligation to those who truly believe. There is no better way to get closer to the Gods according to those of the Barbarian credo. But, shockingly, there are those philistines who go through the motions without believing, without piety, without purpose – and walking through the tavern doors, he’s just found a a room full of them, and it’s the last straw. He’s gonna learn them or he’s gonna burn them…

The Hop-head: The temple thief

Everyone worships in their own way, so unless they get in his way, the Barbarian doesn’t pass judgment on the practices of others, one way or the other – not too often, anyway. But when a small child clutching a golden candlestick bursts out of a temple and runs headlong through the crowd, priests and temple guards in pursuit, only to collide headlong with the Barbarian because he was looking behind him at the time, it was time to draw the line. And then he saw that the priests wore the sigils of Mornless The Unfathomable, the most-hated god in existence, whose credo is the live sacrifice of any who don’t believe in their squid-headed deity…

The Hot-head: Three-card Monty

The Barbarian encounters a street hustler who engages him in a game of three-card Monty. After eight attempts and eight failures, the Barbarian is starting to get suspicious, but forces the hustler to play again, as he has done several times already. He’ll find that Queen card if it kills somebody…

The Hot-head: Scene at a restaurant

Feeling uncharacteristically flush with money, the Barbarian decides to buy himself a fancy meal at the most exclusive restaurant in town – one of those ones with the snooty waiters – without a reservation…

The Hot-head: Water in the Ale

Most people know better than to serve a Barbarian watered-down ale, but this barman doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo…

The Hot-head: What happens on the battlefield, stays on the battlefield

Yesterday there was a fight. Both sides had Barbarians. It ended in a draw, both sides falling back. Today, the Barbarian encounters one of the enemy Barbarians in a tavern. He’s about to tear the tavern down around him when the other Barbarian offers to buy him an ale…

Primitive doesn’t mean stupid: The Conclusion

There’s a lot of plot potential in these variations on the somewhat poorly-defined standard Barbarian, and that’s before you start exploring native cultures and the like. In particular, there’s lots of opportunity for Barbarians of all types to both refute and reinforce the stereotypes – and for a player and GM to have fun doing it. The other players might get a little jealous, though – how come they don’t get cool plotlines like this?

Whew! Finished at last. I wasn’t sure I was going to get there – this article has taken more than twice as long to write as I thought it would, and that was with a clear idea of what I was going to say, and with the basic concepts of the variations already in my head. Future parts of this series might have to be subdivided – one half the character analysis and one half the plotlines – just to keep the workload, and the deadlines, manageable. The question I would now pose our readers is: Would you find it better to have the second half of a subdivided article published immediately after the first (which should make these easier to write) or would a bigger gap, leaving room for something else in between, be preferable?

Click thumbnail to see larger image. Refer to the discussion of the “Original Pix” folder in ‘Adventures’ for why it is relevant.

Introduction

A week or two ago (as I write this) I was chatting with someone on twitter, and they wanted to show me a map they were working on – but couldn’t find where they had stored it on their computer. File organization is one of those areas that no-one ever really talks about, so everyone evolves their own system by hit-and-miss without ever knowing whether the system they have created is merely good enough or if it actually helps their game prep. This is, in itself, an unsatisfactory state of affairs, so I thought I would address the problem by discussing how I organize my game-related files – in general (I vary it as I deem necessary).

The top level

Unlike a lot of people, I have multiple campaigns on the go at any one time. So the uppermost level has a folder for each campaign and separate folders for any metagame notes like timetables and so on.

The campaign level

I try not to have any documents in the top level folder itself; I find that it is better to impose some order and structure at the campaign level by employing subfolders. The folders I usually create at a campaign level are:

• 00. Campaign Overview
• 01. Campaign Plan
• 02. Campaign Reference
• 03. Campaign Notes & Research
• 04. Campaign Background
• 05. Campaign Background Reference
• 06. Spells
• 07. Character Sheets
• 08. Character Class Notes
• 09. Characters & NPCs
• 10. Enemies
• 11. Monsters
• 12. General Maps
• 13. Kingdoms & Cultures
• 14. Rules
• 15. Ideas & Rumors
• 16. Inspiration
• 17. Adventure Notes & Ideas
• 18. Adventures

What goes into these? In some cases, it may be obvious – but in others there are some twists to the tale, and still others are not clear. So let’s take a brief look at each of them…

00. Campaign Overview

The campaign overview folder is where I maintain a quick synopsis of the campaign concept at the start of development. This serves as a master plan of what is going into the campaign – not notes and possibilities and ideas, but the things that have actually been approved and incorporated. I will often have two versions of this document – the player’s version and the GMs version. Think of this as the non-rules briefing material for the players, and a GM’s version with lots of hidden truths added in – the revelation of which will constitute some of the adventures within the campaign.

Once play starts, a separate document in this folder maintains an overview of actual campaign events. This overview is more a “state of play” than a blow-by-blow account of what happened in any given adventure. It’s the document you use to refresh your own recollection before working on a new adventure. Once again, I will usually also maintain a player’s version that can be used to bring new or forgetful players up to speed – this needs to be updated rather more frequently.

I also keep a document in here called “reminders” which contains bullet point summaries of the key things to be incorporated into the campaign overview the next time I update it – which means that I only need to work on the main document once or twice a year. If I were running a weekly campaign, this would be a monthly or bi-monthly chore.

01. Campaign Plan

I keep the past and the future of the campaign as separate as possible. This always contains at least one file listing the upcoming adventures with a one-paragraph summary. Sometimes I will also have a player version that has the titles of the upcoming adventures – as long-time readers will know from Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1) and Part 2, in which I listed the titles of many of the adventures that were (and in some cases, still are) upcoming in my campaigns.

02. Campaign Reference

Sometimes this will be an empty folder, but things have a habit of ending up here. Descriptions of headquarters, photographic reference, in-game documents, saved web pages – you name it.

03. Campaign Notes & Research

The dividing line between content destined for the previous folder and this one can be hard to pin down. This folder contains the results of research aimed at answering specific questions, and any specific notes that relate to the campaign overall, and not to any one specific adventure. Quite often, material from a specific adventure that will have an ongoing relevance gets moved to this folder after the adventure in question is complete.

04. Campaign Background

This may be one document or many. Sometimes there will be subfolders. For one campaign I created an entire offline website. But they are all different ways of telling the backstory that players need to know before the campaign starts. Any GM secrets get placed in the Campaign Notes folder so that I can make this entire folder available to the players.

05. Campaign Background Reference

In this folder I put any supporting documents and materials that accompany the Campaign Background, again so it can be shared without stressing about showing the players things I don’t want them to see.

06. Spells or 06. Powers & Gadgets

The “Spells” folder is only present in Fantasy Campaigns. It frequently contains two or three subfolders – one for spell sources published elsewhere, one for any original spells I introduce to the campaign, and one for any altered or amended versions of standard spells that are intended to replace the ones in the core rules or other official sources, not simply supplement them.

Also in the Spells folder (in theory) would be a catalog reference compiling details of all the spells in the campaign, and especially noting any that for some reason were not to be available to anyone at the current time within the game. In practice, I started one (operating on the theory that I would compile a base document that could then be customized to each campaign) but haven’t found time to work on it for at least 8 years. At best, I have a list of spells currently barred from the campaign.

This is also the place where any rules interpretations involving spells gets stored for future reference.

In non-FRP campaigns, this folder is given over to new ways of combining and applying supernatural abilities and descriptions of gadgets and devices. This isn’t about the rules used for describing these powers in terms of game mechanics, this is about ways of applying those rules to create new and novel effects. Most importantly, this folder and its contents exist to prevent wasting time reinventing the wheel.

07. Character Sheets

For some campaigns, the rules are sufficiently different that I have generated custom character sheets. For some other campaigns, I have done so for NPCs only, usually because I have additional political or factional information to document. This is where blank character sheets and related forms live. Sometimes this folder is made available to the players, sometimes not.

08. Character Class Notes or 08. Alien Species

If I customize a character class for the campaign (which is a frequent occurrence) or create a new class, this is where it goes. For 3.x/Pathfinder campaigns, there are subfolders to distinguish between core classes and prestige classes. There is also a list of approved and rejected character classes. Except in very unusual circumstances, this will be shared with the players; any classes that I don’t want them to know about will go into the campaign notes until I’m ready for the players to know the mechanics of the class.

Of course, my non-FRP campaigns don’t employ a character class game mechanic. Instead, this folder is used for notes about alien and non-human species – even within the Pulp campaign there have been a few of these.

09. Characters & NPCs

Each important character within the campaign gets his own subfolder. These contain not only character write-ups and backups but any notes and plans for that character. In fantasy games, I will often also have a folder for some races and classes containing lesser NPCs whose affiliations are more important than their individual personalities.

Ideally, I would have a separate subfolder for a copy of each PCs character sheet, as of the last significant change it undertook – a level gained or important magic item acquired – but each of my players has his own system of tracking these things and not all of them are amenable to maintaining a record in electronic form.

From time to time, the inconveniences this causes have caused me to attempt to hold a hard line in this respect. Officially, the house rules require that I be given a copy of the character which is kept up-to-date. Inevitably, as I fall behind in keeping major NPCs up to date and have to rely on handwritten adjustments to the official version, I find this hard line untenable, and am forced to fall back on a less-severe stance: If you don’t bring your actual character sheet to the game, you lose any XP that the party earn, and any magic items the character acquires, on that particular day. I keep track of any expended items like potions and charges on items that have them, and deduct these from whatever the “official” character sheet shows when next it is produced.

Ultimately, though, the losers are the players, because I can’t tailor adventures to best suit their characters – and from time to time that causes a plotline to go wildly astray because they have some obscure and forgotten ability that completely short-circuits the adventure. When that happens, I again adopt a hard line with respect to any game rewards; I look on it as the player deliberately withholding key information that I, as GM, am entitled to have and which I require, and will also strip away or weaken any loot acquired. Coins are reduced in denomination by a rank, on top of any such change dictated by the house rules – so gp, which become sp under my usual house rules and game economy, are further reduced to bronze pieces. The same thing goes for the value of any material rewards. Magic items are reduced or stripped, or have negative aspects introduced that weaken them. And any spell that I don’t remember explicitly approving that appears on a character sheet is immediately banned from the campaign except for NPC use. I recognize that some or all of these are Draconian penalties; the goal is to use peer pressure to prevent a recurrence in future. At the same time, though, I tend towards a leniency in accepting any good reason – and if a player catches me out (for example, if they can show that I have in fact explicitly approved a spell or given out a magic item) then that character’s xp ‘take’ from the session is doubled. (And, if I ever forget something so vital for a game session that the game can’t proceed without it – like the adventure itself – all the players get a reward in compensation. Fair’s fair, and I have to hold myself to the same standards that I demand of them).

10. Enemies or 10. Gods

In a fantasy campaign, rather than “Enemies”, this will usually read “Gods”. “Enemies” is more melodramatic and appropriate to campaigns where melodrama is a feature – pulp and superheroes.

That doesn’t mean that these characters are less rounded than in my Fantasy campaigns – if anything, they have more attention lavished on them. Key characters will even have sub-sub-folders dedicated to them by name. “Enemies” include people who would have preferred to be allies or simply left alone, but who were forced by circumstance into opposing or being opposed by the PCs, as well as those who pursue an ideology that conflicts profoundly with that supported by the PCs. There are out-and-out villains here as well, but there are also those who – at the right times and under the right circumstances – could act as allies, however prickly the resulting relationship might be. (Another of my favorite tricks is to take an apparently-inexorably opposed character and ‘reform’ them into a quasi-ally or leading a trusted quasi-ally down a path that leads to bitter hatred and opposition. The players are forced by the resulting uncertainty into thinking of these characters as individuals, and not as ciphers.)

The major difference between an “Enemy” and an “NPC” in these campaigns is simply that an “Enemy” has a larger, more dramatic, and even a more melodramatic role to play in the overall plotline.

In contrast, the FRP contents of this folder, “Gods”, tend to be relatively unchanging. They embody and represent primal drives and forces and principles, and no matter how out of touch they sometimes become as individuals, the game world and its inhabitants continually discover afresh how relevant those forces and principles are to the futures of their existence. They don’t change, or not much – but the world comes back around to their way of thinking, time and time again. Instead of dynamic, evolving individuals, these are the foundations and pillars of existence – reinterpreted with the evolution of society and circumstance, but static and unyielding at their cores, and more akin to forces of nature.

11. Monsters

This folder gets a lot of content in Fantasy campaigns, rather less in Pulp & Sci-Fi campaigns, and is barely used at all in Superhero campaigns. There’s not a lot more to say about it, really.

12. General Maps

This folder is used for maps that are available for general circulation amongst the players. More maps get placed here as the players travel.

The actual content of the maps varies from campaign to campaign – galactic zones of political control in some, star charts in others, and continents or explored landmasses in still others. I generally produce a master that shows everything and stays in a subfolder (GM Maps) and an edited version that hides things the players don’t yet know (Player Maps).

13. Kingdoms & Cultures

In this folder are maps and notes about different ‘kingdoms’ and cultures. “Kingdoms” is a general term, applied as equally to nations like the US and Australia as it is to places like the UK or Fumanor/The Golden Empire. I use as many subdocuments as necessary – I find it easier to keep one subdocument for each kingdom or culture, though if there grow to be too many I will look for some means of grouping them together using subfolders.

14. Rules

This folder rarely exists without subfolders. One for rules notes & ideas, one for rules research, one for draft versions, one for official rules, sometimes one for a player version. Specialized campaigns may have additional subfolders for Original Feats, Modified Feats, Approved Feats, One for Skills, one for Spell Research, one for Armor, One for weapons… you get the idea.

15. Ideas & Rumors

I never have any notion of where a rumor will lead or what its validity might be when I drop it into a campaign. I draw these from a stockpile of ideas, most of which will never lead anywhere. When a campaign ends, this is the first place I raid for ideas for the next campaign, and if I ever get stuck for an adventure idea, this is my first stop. There are three subfolders: “new”, “revealed”, and “explained”.

“New” contains anything not revealed or used in the campaign, and it’s where I stockpile new ideas.

“Revealed” contains those ideas that have been used as rumors within the campaign.

“Explained” is where a rumor goes once it has been, well, explained. What it means, what’s correct about it and what the rumor got wrong.

Note that if I actually build an adventure around a rumor/idea, it will get removed from any these folders; they are to hold only ideas that are either unused or that are still just rumors.

16. Inspiration

This is where I stockpile anything like illustrations from the web, we pages, etc, which may not be used directly, but which suggests one or more ideas for future development.

17. Adventure Notes & Ideas

The 17th folder category is where I put my actual adventure notes and ideas. This includes notes about alternate outcomes from past adventures that I can draw on for ‘other side of the coin’ plotlines. In theory, once a campaign is fully mapped out in the campaign plan, I stop adding to this stockpile.

Yeah, right – I didn’t think you’d believe that, either. In practice, you never know when you’re going to need a new idea to fill a gap, and any unused ideas in this slush pile can always be recycled. That’s why, despite the intensive planning that’s already gone into the Zenith-3 plotline, I have since accumulated another 15 ideas. Some of these are substantial, others are one or two lines long.

The Truth About Numbering

Despite what’s been described in the preceding paragraphs, I don’t actually number these folders. Instead, I precede some of them with a “minus space” so that they float naturally to the top of the list of folders if I refer to it frequently. “Rules” usually gets a “minus space”, the actual folder name is “- Rules”; “Campaign Background” may or may not get one, and so on. Instead, I reserve the numbers for something I really WANT to be able to keep in sequence.

18. Adventures

Which brings me to the 18th and final folder – Adventures. Actually, there are a LOT of these, because each adventure gets its own folder, numbered in the order they get played. And don’t forget any zero padding required – adventure #3 isn’t in a folder named “3. [Adventure Name]”, it’s “03. [Adventure Name]” or even “003. Adventure Name”.

Internally, adventure folders have their own, entirely separate, architecture, which is why I’m treating them as a whole new topic within this article. Within an adventure folder, the usual architecture is:

• – Metagame [folder]
• Plot Overview [document in Metagame folder]
• Other Documents in Metagame folder
• Adventure Reference [folder]
• Character Reference [folder]
• Locations [folder]
• Location Notes [documents within folder]
• Location Pix & Maps [within folder after adventure]
• Maps – Display [folder]
• Maps – Print [folder]
• Monsters & NPCs [folder]
• Monsters & NPCs [documents within folder]
• Original Pix [folder]
• Pix [folder]
• Villain(s) [Folders, by name of Villain]
• Adventure [document(s)]
• Character Notes [document]
• GM Notes [document]
• Treasures & Rewards – GM’s List [document]
• Treasures & Rewards – Player’s List [document]

Once again, some of these may not be all that clear without some explanation, and there are a couple of tips and tricks that are worth noting.

– Metagame [folder]

The most important thing about many adventures, and the starting point that I always use when writing them, is the relevance of the adventure, how it is supposed to fit into the bigger picture, and what it’s purpose is. Sometimes the purpose will simply be something straightforward like “a change in mood” or “introduce X” (where X is a key campaign concept or villain or Organization). It always feels artificial to me when these things don’t appear until they have a significant role to play in the big picture, like you’re creating things out of whole cloth. The key to strong continuity is to introduce things long before they matter, then let them simply fade into the woodwork and become part of the larger tapestry that is the background against which adventures take place.

The Metagame folder is where all those details and connections are noted – so that if an adventure turns out to have a different outcome to the one expected (which happens more often than I let my players realize), I know which future plans have to be modified to accommodate the changes.

For example, at one point the PCs were supposed to come to the rescue of an NPC (who was going to be significant later in the overall plot) and kill another NPC who was attacking him (whose death was also going to be significant later). They fouled it up and the wrong NPC got killed, totally fouling up the motivations for other characters to act in a certain way in the future. The NPCs in question and the organizations they represented had to be completely reinvented to get the campaign back on track. Ripple effects spread through the entire campaign, until it ended up with virtually everyone who the PCs thought an ally was a secret enemy, and the PCs apparent enemies were actually trying to protect people from various things – for their own benefit, mostly, but nevertheless…

Plot Overview [document in Metagame folder]

The most important document in the Metagame folder is the plot overview – an outline of what the adventure is going to be. The second adventure in the current Zenith-3 campaign had a plot overview of “002: Blood Runs Cold. Vampire in the Paris Sewers. Establishes autonomy of Zenith-3 in D-Prime and new relationship of team with parent body [001]. Villain: Bring back Baron Varnae, connects campaign with Background.” To make sense of this, the only additional information needed (because it’s taken for granted in the document) is:

• D-Prime refers to Dimension-Prime, the dimension of origin of most of the PCs. Most of the campaign takes place in another space-time, Dimension Regency, but under new guidelines given to the team in the previous adventure (that’s the 001).
• The PCs are an organization that is an offshoot of a larger parent superhero organization, which has recently experienced catastrophic losses, forcing them to give more autonomy, independence, and responsibility onto their branch organizations.
• Baron Varnae was a character introduced in the campaign before last, fifteen years or so earlier, in a solo adventure for one of the then-PCs. He was believed destroyed in that plotline and had not been heard from since – because his MO is to be very subtle and sneaky. A Vampire, he gains duplicates of his victim’s superpowers when he sucks the blood of a paranormal – which enables him to dispose of bodies in creative ways not easily detected. A minor footnote in the campaign background is the only exposure the current PCs have ever had to the Villain.

Other Documents in Metagame folder

It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time other documents will make their way into the metagame folder. Notes about how to handle it if a player can’t be in attendance on game-day, for example, or reminders that a player will be away, and to take that into account when writing the adventure.

The most frequent “other document” is titled ‘concordance’ and contains extracts from previous adventures – location descriptions, character descriptions, etc. These are copied from previous adventures as indicated in the plot overview not only to ensure consistency, but to enable me to highlight any changes that have occurred since, and any aftereffects from the previous visit.

Adventure Reference [folder]

This folder is only present when I’ve got content for it – PDFs and web pages that are relevant to the adventure.

Character Reference [folder]

Similarly, if there is something that a PCs skills should enable him to know and that will be relevant, this folder contains the research into the subject that I’ve done.

If there are only one or two items (the usual case), I will forego the folder and put the contents into the main adventure folder.

Locations [folder]

This folder starts off with one type of content, and acquires another after the adventure. I’ll explain that in a moment.

The purpose is to gather everything about a key location in the one folder so that the next time something happens there, I can simply copy-and-paste it to where it needs to go. It makes writing further adventures quicker and easier.

Location Notes [documents within folder]
Initially, each location will have a separate document describing it. These then get copied and pasted into the adventure at the relevant point – at least in theory. More often than not, a location that has never appeared in the campaign before will get written up in the adventure, and those notes will then get copied-and-pasted into the relevant empty document here.

Location Pix & Maps [within folder after adventure]
Illustrations and Maps depicting the location don’t start out here, they start out in other folders. After the adventure, they will get moved to the Locations folder. Having them in this location is useful when writing the adventure, and is useful when writing future adventures, but is not the most useful location when actually playing the adventure – so content starts here, gets moved when it is actually incorporated into the adventure, and then moved back out when the adventure has been played, ready for future reference.

Maps – Display versions [folder]

I use Google Maps and screen capture a lot to grab maps for various locations (less so for fantasy games). This is where I store these until they are ready to insert into the actual adventure, and where they stay if they are not to be revealed to the players in the course of the adventure – Dungeon Maps and the like. These versions are 72dpi and have a smaller file size, with realistic colors. They are designed for quick display on a laptop. The average map in this folder has a file size of maybe 250Kb, less if I’ve optimized the jpg, and many are 100kb or smaller. Sometimes I will reduce them in pixel size to fit the laptop screen, other times I will keep them bigger so that I can zoom in – depending on what I think I need to do.

In the course of writing the adventure, these get moved from this folder into the “Pix” folder, just like the location illustrations and renamed according to the protocol in place in that folder. After the adventure has been played, they move from there into the Locations folder, ready for future reuse, and again renamed.

So part of game prep is to fill this folder with resources, then empty it out. When the adventure has been played, this folder should be empty, and can be deleted.

Maps – Print versions [folder]

There are some maps that I expect the Players or myself to want to write on in the course of the adventure. That’s hard to do with a file displayed on a laptop, and easy to do with a hardcopy. These maps are 300, 600, or 1200 dpi, and also have a lot more pixels because a physical page holds a lot more than a computer screen. This produces a much larger file size. Because my printer is a 1200dpi B&W laser printer, pale colors tend to become a grey mud – yellow on white doesn’t show up very clearly at all, for example, and reds print as blacks – so a lot of color correction gets made; they are very ugly to look at, but are clearly legible when printed, which is what matters. The average map in this folder is 65Mb in size.

After the adventure has been played, these get moved into the Locations folder, just as happened with the display versions. Once everything has been gathered in the Locations folder, they will usually get put into a subfolder which is then moved into a campaign-level folder.

Monsters & NPCs [folder]

If I have to make decisions on something or someone’s behalf in the course of the adventure, information about it belongs in this folder. That includes everything from AIs to Giant Ant-eaters to Zulu Chiefs, and anything in between.

After the adventure, any relevant illustrations get moved from the “Pix” folder and renamed. Again, the idea is to have everything needed to reuse an NPC or monster in the one place. After they are gathered here, they may well get moved to a campaign-level folder.

Monsters & NPCs [documents within folder]
Every monster or NPC gets a document of his own. Physical description, personality, affiliations, encounters with PCs, apparent status after that encounter, actual status after the encounter, characterization notes, stats, equipment – anything of relevance gets compiled here.

After the adventure, any illustrations used get moved into here from the “Pix” folder and renamed appropriately. They then get compiled into separate subfolders and moved into a campaign-level folder, ready for future reference.

Original Pix [folder]

Typically, especially for more modern campaigns, a lot of photographic reference will get downloaded. Not all of it will be used. This is where the unsorted downloads get stored. Subfolders are used as necessary to keep these organized.

As the adventure gets written, these get renamed to whatever the subject is supposed to be and moved into the Pix folder. Once the adventure writing is complete, anything left gets moved into a clip art folder ready for consideration the next time I need an illustration of that sort.

Sometimes, a picture will need to be edited in some way to be useful, or to be exactly what I want. The number of times I’ve had to paint out telephone lines and air conditioners for the pulp campaign is astonishing, for example. Another example has been used to illustrate this article: We wanted a character to drive a Red Cord-2R – it matched the NPCs character. But we could only find a good picture of a yellow one – so I changed the color to what we wanted. Note the wheels, which were not changed from the original color. The original, unmodified picture stays in a subfolder as a fallback in case the changes go horribly wrong – it happened once or twice in the case of the example. (Note that I don’t spend a lot of time on these – usually 5-10 minutes or so per picture, sometimes less, very rarely more). The goal is “good enough” not “perfect”.

Pix [folder]

As the adventure gets written, illustrations and maps get placed into this folder and given an incrementing two- or three-digit reference number to keep them in sequence. Part of the writing of the adventure is telling me, as GM, when to display the picture. The images are named according to the subject (if that hasn’t been done already). When pictures get moved out of this folder into others (as described earlier), the numeric prefix gets removed so that a new one can be used if and when that location or NPC next occurs in an adventure.

The goal is to keep the images, as closely as possible, in the order that we think they will be needed.

By way of example, here is a list of the illustrations that go with the current adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, “Worse Than The Disease”:

Directory of H:\RPG – The Adventurer’s Club\19. Worse Than The Disease\- Pix

001 map01 Adventurer’s Club to The Elms, RI.jpg
002 The Elms from the fence.jpg
003 Behind The Elms.jpg
004 The Elms – Tropical Garden.jpg
005 The Elms – Summer Garden.jpg
006 The Elms front view.jpg
007 The Elms front view closeup.jpg
008 Martin, the Butler.jpg
009 The Elms Stairs.jpg
010 The Elms – Ballroom.jpg
011 The Elms – Dining Room.jpg
012 Edward Julius Berwind.jpg
013 Mrs Edward Berwind.jpg
014 The Elms – The Living Room at Christmas.jpg
015 Xavier Berwind.jpg
016 Dr Blake.jpg
017 St John’s Catholic Mission, NYC.jpg
018 Harbormaster’s Office.jpg
019 The Adventurer’s Club Library.jpg
020 Juneau – urban shape.jpg
021 Juneau.jpg
022 Mount Juneau.jpg
023 Juneau & Mountain.jpg
024 Juneau Looking East 1887.jpg
025 Sentinal Island, Juneau.jpg
026 Juneau – Street.jpg
027 Juneau Streets In Winter.jpg
028 Juneau – Church.jpg
029 Juneau – Laundry.jpg
030 Juneau – Store.jpg
031 Juneau – Hospital, staff posing.jpg
032 Juneau – St Nicholas Orthodox Russian Church.jpg
033 Juneau – Hotel.jpg
034 John Weir Troy, Governor of Alaska.jpg
035 Iditarod.jpg
036 Gerald Mackay.jpg
037 Duncan Christiansson.jpg
038 Map 02 Overall Small.jpg
039 Dawn Day 2.jpg
040 Juneau looking north.jpg
041 Looking back at Juneau.jpg
042 Alaskan Coast north of Juneau.jpg
042 Map 03.jpg
043 The Coastal Valley.jpg
044 Map 04.jpg
045 Aitlan Provincial Park.jpg
046 Map 05.jpg
047 Tagish Lake from the South.jpg
047 The practice creek.jpg
048 The difficult creek.jpg
049 Map 06.jpg
050 Dawn over Lake Tagish.jpg
051 The river channel between lakes.JPG
052 Caribou on frozen river edge.jpg
052a frozen banks.jpg
053 Map 07.jpg
054 the wide creek.jpg
055 The narrow pass.jpg
056 The Deep River.jpg
057 ferry to whiteghorse.jpg
058 Whitehorse evening.jpg
059 Whitehorse Inn.jpg
060 Whitehorse Inn Interior.jpg
061 Innkeeper, Whitehorse Inn.jpg
062 Patron 01.jpg
063 Patron 02.jpg
064 Patron 03.jpg
065 Patron 04.jpg
066 Patron 05.jpg
067 Patron 06.jpg
068 Patron 07.jpg
069 Patron 08.jpg
070 Buckshot Peters’ 3-barrel shotgun.jpg
071 Patron 09.jpg
072 Patron 10.jpg
073 Patron 11.jpg
074 Patron 12.jpg
075 Log Bridge.jpg
076 Morning Whitehorse Pre-Dawn.jpg
077 Map 08.jpg
078 Lake Laberge.jpg
079 Bear Growling.jpg
080 Map 09.jpg
081 frozen lake.jpg
082 deep snow over valleys.jpg
083 Map 10.jpg
084 Frozen Waterfall.jpg
085 Deep Valley.jpg
086 snow_rapids.jpg
087 Dawn Day 5.jpg
088 Alongside the river.jpg
088 The small mountain.jpg
089 Map 11.jpg
090 Frenchman’s Laket.jpg
091 White Bison.jpg
092 Whte Panther.jpg
093 The Pass.jpg
094 The deeper snow.jpg
095 Skirting Frozen Pond.jpg
096 Map 12.jpg
097 Towhata Lake.jpg
098 Northern Lights.jpg
099 Polar Bear At Night.jpg
100 Dawn Day 6.jpg
101 region closeup 1.jpg
102 Bloodtrail.jpg
103 Amaryllis in Snow.jpg
104 The Alvei Now .jpg
105 The Alvei as it was.jpg
106 Family Of Captain.jpg
106a DSCF0782.jpg
107 IMG_2476.JPG
108 IMG_2476 closeup.jpg
109 Flowers-in-the-snow.jpg
110 Pink wildflowers.jpg
111 claim post.JPG
112 4-totems.jpg
113 Village.jpg
114 Chief’s House.jpg
115 Chief.jpg
116 Wife.jpg
117 Shaman.jpg
118 Warrior.jpg
119 shamans cabin.jpg
120 Wall Mask.jpg
121 Blanket On Wall.jpg
122 Threatening Sunset.jpg
123 blizzard begins.jpg
124 Village map1.jpg
125 Village in blizzard.jpg
126 Blizzard at Dawn.jpg
127 Blizzard by day.jpg
128 sunset day 8.jpg
129 Tongarrk Form 1.jpg
130 Another threatening Dawn.jpg
131 the hunt.jpg
132 Tongarrk Form 2.jpg
133 Carolyn Nakoma.jpg
134 Evelyn Dyani.jpg
135 Tongarrk form 3.jpg
136 Poacher.jpg
137 Tongarrk Form 4.jpg
138 Fresh Tracks.jpg
139 Alvei Deck Plans with Damage.jpg
140 Tongarrk Form 5 (white-wolf-tiger hybrid).JPG
141 summer in winter.jpg
142 Tongarrk Spirit Form.jpg
143 Tongarrk Form 5a.JPG
144 Tongarrk Form 6.jpg
145 Totem In Spirit.jpg
146 the halftrack.jpg
147 location of the flowers.jpg
148 Flowers-in-snow.jpg
149 return of the snow.jpg
Blizzard Duration Chart.jpg
Calandar.jpg
Overall Map with alternate routes.jpg

This admittedly goes further than most adventures – we worked hard to really give the players the feeling of being in the frozen wilds of the Yukon Territories in the 1930s, and their feedback has told us that we succeeded. They “felt” the presence of cold and snow, something that’s easy to do in mid-winter – but it’s currently mid-spring in Australia, and it was a warm winter. We also wanted to mark time (and the developing Blizzard) with a carefully-chosen progression of Dawn images since they were up against a tight deadline in-game. Plus we have a shape-changing monster/villain, the Tongarrk. All of which adds up to that list being three times the usual size; but it illustrates the principle. In the early part of the adventure, you have the maps, separated by the things the PCs encounter while travelling on the map; it’s all pretty much in order.

Villain(s) [Folders, by name of Villain]

This folder or folders contains all the vital information about villains from the adventure, in exactly the same format as that for other NPCs. But villains often have other information in separate documents – current plans, for example, and ambitions, and bases, and they are more likely to have an illustration depicting them. Unlike the NPCs, illustrations get copied out of here into the Pix folder.

In fact, unless this is the villain’s first in-campaign appearance, what’s here isn’t a folder at all – it’s a shortcut to the villain’s subfolder in the campaign-level organization. This is because a villain is more likely to reappear on a future occasion, and there’s too great a chance of ending up with multiple conflicting versions if you do anything else; practicality demands that these be kept as a central resource.

Adventure [document(s)]

That’s the end of the subfolder-level structure. What’s left are documents in the top level of the adventure folder. Of these, the most important is the adventure itself. I write these using a .rtf format document because it’s quick and easy. When the writing is complete, I’ll open it in Word and spell-check it, adjust the page formatting, insert page numbers into a footer, and so on, and save this ready-to-print version in a .doc format.

Because the software that I have on the laptop messes up this formatting, and because it doesn’t have all the fonts installed that I use, the next step is to covert the .doc into a .pdf. That permits me to refer to it on the laptop, and (more importantly at times) to search within it. I use because it’s free and works very well for small PDFs (the only time I had a problem with it was the 300-page Assassin’s Amulet; for anything up to about 64 pages, it works perfectly).

To run the adventure, I’ll usually use a hardcopy of the PDF, so that I can make notes and indicate where the players got up to. The purpose of the PDF is to provide an exact electronic copy that can be searched to help me find things that have gone astray in the printed copy.

Character Notes [document]

The other almost ubiquitous document is one containing notes to the PCs (or, on rare occasions, to the players). When one character gets the chance to see or know something the others don’t because of background, unique abilities, or skills, this gives them the opportunity to roleplay the discovery, and gives them a head-start on figuring out what it means – something that’s appropriate to someone with expertise in the relevant field.

A typical note from the current adventure reads:

Worse Than The Disease Note #6: Eliza: It is illegal to kill Elk at this time of year. It is illegal to kill elk and not harvest the meat. Only poachers with no regard for the law would do either.

All the notes will be in this one document, regardless of who they are addressed to, so that they can be printed and separated as they are distributed. There are a couple of details worth calling to your attention: All the notes indicate which adventure they come from, so that if one turns up loose at a future point, there is a reminder of the note’s context. All the notes are numbered. The note indicates who it is to be given to. The note content is generally short and to the point. It may point the player to supplementary material in the Adventure Reference folder (this one doesn’t, again typically). And, in the adventure write-up, at the appropriate point, it will instruct the GMs to give Eliza (in this case) note #6, possibly after a successful skill check or other action.

GM Notes [document]

We GMs need reminders of things as well. This is where they go – if needed. So that they can be easily added to at the game table using the laptop, they are usually a plaintext document, avoiding any risk of format conflict or complications.

Treasures & Rewards – GM’s List [document]

Only present in fantasy campaigns, this gives full information on everything the PCs are to get. It is a plaintext document so that I can add experience points if, for some reason, these are not to be handed out immediately – the Zenith-3, Warcry, and Adventurer’s Club campaigns only give experience at the end of an adventure. These are printed so I can take notes, especially concerning the disposition of any booty, or who it has been taken to for appraisal.

Treasures & Rewards – Player’s List [document]

Again, only present in fantasy campaigns, this is an edited version of the GMs list that adds additional descriptions and redacts information about item abilities and values (other than in very general terms). These are to be provided as hardcopy to the players. As with the notes, there will be an encounter number to go with each set of entries on the list.

Other Documents

All sorts of other things can be needed in the course of an adventure. For the next adventure in the Pulp Campaign, for example, we have a couple of MI6 reports, and lists of personnel from a couple of Embassies. In the Zenith-3 campaign, Memoranda from various government agencies are a regular feature. There have been times where I’ve had to produce “newspapers” – sure, we could have simple quoted the headlines, but it doesn’t have the same impact.

Most of these are done as PDFs for the same reasons listed earlier. On rare occasions, they won’t even be printed, but available only for electronic display.

Another key document that will sometimes be present is a “Player Wish List” – these are magical goodies that they want me to place as treasure in the game – though they only tend to appear when I deem it appropriate to give the PC a special reward.

“- To Printx1”, “- To Printx2”, and “- To PrintxN”

Three folders that I maintain as blanks at the root level of the drive and copy (empty) as needed are the above trio. Anything that gets placed in the first one is to get printed once, which generally means its for GM use only. The adventure itself falls into this category.

Anything placed in the second folder is to be printed twice – and that usually means one copy is to be available to one or more players while the GM retains the other as an official backup/reference copy. Finally, the last one means one copy to each player, plus a backup retained by the GM.

Conclusion

Directory structures are intended to make it easier to find what you are looking for, when you need it. A haphazard structure interferes with that objective, and there are some tricks that can be employed with a more systematic and dynamic structure that actually boost workflow over the longer term. While I might occasionally have trouble putting my finger on a particular document, just like anyone else, the structure and processes that I have evolved make this a very uncommon problem, leaving me free to get maximum efficiency out of my prep time.

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

On the face of it, “What constitutes treason?” is a fairly straightforward question to answer. But, as I explained in a previous article (Splitting Hairs: Exploring nuance as a source of game ideas), even the most straightforward of questions can have a wealth of subtle shades that can be exploited.

The obvious answer: Betrayal Of Oath

I should start by stating the obvious meaning: Treason is the betrayal of an oath of allegiance. An Oath is a sworn promise of fidelity, i.e. a formal promise to be true to the matter being promised. If the language sounds a little archaic, that’s because the concept itself has not materially changed in centuries, and the formality involved has tended to preserve the linguistic terminology used to describe the concept in its older forms.

Oaths are usually delivered in reference to an object that symbolizes deep belief, a symbol that supposedly matters more than anything else to the person making the oath. Quite often, this is a bible or holy symbol, and the promise is made in the name of the deity. The implication is that the oath-taker is asking the aid of the Deity in keeping the oath, stating that his fidelity to all that he considers holy requires him to keep his promise, inviting that deity to witness the binding nature of the promise, and equating a betrayal of his office with a betrayal of his Deity. So it’s serious business, especially in a world where the Gods are demonstrably real and not to be taken lightly. Alternatively, it may be made to a flag or other national symbol, such as the US Pledge Of Allegiance, though this is given less force than an oath made on the bible. An important implication is that violation of the oath will lead to severe punishment; where the oath of fidelity is to a nation, that crime is called Treason.

There’s often a caveat attached that can be useful to the GM looking for story potential in an oath – the promise is often made for fidelity “to the best of my ability”. A person can think they are doing the right thing, when in fact, they aren’t. But that’s just the beginning of the plot potential inherent in the concept of oaths and the betrayal of those promises, and that is what this article is going to explore.

Vectors of infidelity

Let’s start by looking at who Oaths can apply to, or be given to, that could be an element in a plotline. This will establish some of the parameters of plot potential. Since these are all about the delivery of an oath’s relevance to the plotline, I think of these as the “vectors of fidelity” – “vector” implying movement in a specific direction. But, since we’re talking about the betrayal of the oaths in question, this discussion could be better characterized as “vectors of infidelity” – oaths, and the reasons why people might break them.

Individuals

People can promise to be true to the members or ideals of their social sub-group, and take an oath to that effect. This is often the case within military units or even entire branches of a specific military organization. Such oaths are also often implied or explicit within an adventuring party, and this is one explicit difference between the Lord Of The Rings in movie form and its original literary form. Marriage vows also fall into this category.

And that brings up the first interesting plot potential: Under a semi-feudal system, like those often found in D&D/Pathfinder, citizens often swear loyalty not to an abstract office or to the overall monarch, but to their local Noble as an individual. That Noble is, in theory, bound by similar oaths to his direct superior in the nobility, and so on up until you reach the King or Queen themselves. If a superior Noble betrays his oath, or swears allegiance to someone else for whatever reason, all his subordinates are bound by their oaths to follow him. Loyalty and treason, in civil war situations, are very difficult matters to pin down.

Heads Of State

Alternatively, oaths can be sworn directly to the Head Of State as an individual, or to the office regardless of who happens to hold it at the time. There’s a big difference between the two, when you consider what keeping that oath can require of an individual. Again, if the pledge is to the Head Of State as an individual, then you are committed to supporting that individual no matter what they do, even if they break some oath that they may have taken in accepting their office – a subject that I’ll get to in a moment. In contrast, swearing allegiance to the office can be more convenient if the office-holders change on a frequent basis, but it can put you in conflict with the actual holder of that office if they are corrupt or are seen by you as betraying something that the office represents or requires of the office-holder. What’s more, it’s not always clear which way an individual is interpreting their oath – loyalty to the man in the office at the time, or loyalty to the principles and ideals of the office no matter who happens to be occupying it. This is fertile dramatic ground that has been the subject of exploration since the time of Shakespeare, if not the time of the ancient Greeks!

Heads Of Another State

Things can get even more interesting in an international organizational context. A superhero or paramilitary organization with members from many different countries usually include members who have oaths of allegiance to the head of a state that is different to the head of the state in which they current happen to be located, or even resident. Heck, the same is true for foreign tourists! It’s very easy for such oaths to come into conflict, something that has torn UNTIL apart in the Zenith-3 campaign (notably when the US walked out of the UN because it wasn’t being permitted enough independence of action). A conflict between two moral principles in the Oval Office led to the withdrawal, which then placed a crisis of conflicting oaths and loyalties on every member of UNTIL who derived from the US (almost half of them) or who happened to agree with the moral principle which the US Leadership upheld (half of those remaining, if not more). Want the context? “Is the UN required to recognize the duly- and properly-elected government of a member state even if that government is a neo-fascist “Fourth Reich”?” The UN said ‘yes, but’; the PCs said ‘no, but’; the PCs parent body said “we derive our authority from the UN and its charter, and it has made its ruling clear”; the US Government said “Hell, No!”. Practical Diplomacy warred with Idealism, Morality warred with Morality, Loyalty warred with Loyalty. Of course, the US walkout also eviscerated the UN’s budget, making UNTIL’s peacekeeping mandate even more difficult than it was before, and leading many officers to remain onboard out of loyalty to the organization’s goals, no matter how much they disagreed with the policies of the parent body. Conflict within conflict…

Elected Officials

Most elected officials have to take an oath of office. These oaths can bind them into doing things that they disagree with, morally or spiritually, or at the very least, can end up conflicting with those principles. Doing “The Right Thing” can be hard, even when “the right thing to do” is clear. It can be even more difficult when it is not. Choices like Churchill having to choose between keeping the secret of Ultra – i.e. that the allies had cracked the German’s Enigma code machines – or evacuating Coventry, when it was learned that the Germans were going to firebomb the city. Ultra would not win the war on its own – so how much, how many innocent lives, was the secret worth? The more idealistic and moral the leader, the more difficult these decisions become. Only if Churchill had chosen to reveal the secret, saved the city, but consequently lost the war, could either decision be criticized from any dispassionate viewpoint; absent that outcome, he could never have been sure whether or not he made the right decision. That’s the sort of stress that burns out leaders of governments. And makes for great stories.

Appointed Officials

Similarly, most appointed officials also have to swear oaths, and those oaths are just as binding. However, an appointment can always be revoked, or resigned. Except when it can’t, for some reason! Politics is always as much about perception as reality, and a resignation at the wrong time, or under the wrong circumstances, can undermine public confidence at a critical time. When a nation is at war, resigning a government post is also much harder – morally – to do, and can even lead to charges of disloyalty and treason in their own right. A government should rarely if ever be held hostage to the moral judgment of one official who wasn’t even elected by the people that government represents – but what if that official’s moral judgment is correct, and the government’s is faulty?

An act of treason always involves either coercion of some sort, or the individual placing his ideals and moral judgment ahead of those of the government, rightly or wrongly. It’s entirely possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or vice-versa – and that’s a simple situation. Actions can be both right and wrong at the same time, and so can reasons – and that opens whole new container-loads of worms.

Causes

It’s not uncommon for people to pledge loyalty to a cause, usually an idealistic one, no matter how impractical or unrealistic that cause might be. What happens when the leadership of the cause demands that people go too far? What happens if the leadership begins to moderate the aims and objectives of the cause in a spirit of practicality? An oath of loyalty to a cause begins fracturing the organization demanding the oath the instant the oath is made, it just takes a while for the cracks to spread and open up into clear fissures.

Inheritances

Another potential source of activities that can be characterized as treasonous are inherited loyalties. The ‘generation gap’ is generally presumed by most to be a bigger factor in modern times than it was historically, but I dispute that; instead, I simply think that it has more modes of expression in modern times that make the problem seem to be bigger now than it used to be. BY way of proof, consider the following series of rhetorical questions:

• Can the context of a situation change over time?
• Can the effect or impact of a situation change because the context of that situation has changed?
• Can two reasonable and honest men perceive a situation differently because the context and effect of that situation has changed in between these assessments?
• Does a father’s oath of loyalty bind the rest of his family while he is in charge of the family? Especially in a pseudo-medieval setting like those commonly found in D&D and Pathfinder?
• Does an oath of loyalty persist unconditionally regardless of changing perceptions of the situation that led to that oath being made?

The obvious answer to all of these questions is ‘yes’. It follows that a father can make an oath of loyalty binding apon the entire family, only to see the situation change to the point where – if he had the opportunity – he would choose not to have made that oath. Nevertheless, so long as he is head of the family, fidelity to his promise demands that he (and his family) do what is required of him in furtherance of that oath – and a son can resent the oath, and personally oppose what it is that he has to do in fulfillment of it, and – since there is no-one else for him to blame – to attribute these acts to the short-sighted oath taken by his father. He transfers his anger about being forced to do things he doesn’t want to have to do into anger at his father. One medieval generation gap, to order.

It follows that as soon as he ascends to control of the family, that son will make a 180-degree turn in family policy, refusing to renew the oath. But if that is too far away, or the acts that the oath mandates are too loathsome to the son in the meantime, thoughts of hastening that ascension will inevitably occur – and that is a recipe for a treasonous betrayal of that oath.

In general, it’s rare for oaths to bind ‘eternally’; there is usually some condition, explicit or implicit, which terminates the promise and permits a fresh assessment of a situation. Sometimes this can be hidden in flowery language “So long as friendship endures betwixt the Houses of L’Orange and Hapsburg”, or “…as long as they both shall reign” or all manner of variations. Diplomats love to sneak these triggers into treaties and like documents because it gives them a chance to weasel out if that becomes desirable or necessary. And they sound very pretty and impressive, too.

But until such limits are triggered, or can be interpreted as having been triggered, a son can come into conflict with agreements that he inherited at birth.

Layers Of Government

You don’t have to listen to too much debate about state-vs.-federal rights to realize that there can be disagreements between different layers of government. The reason is also clear – the smaller serves only a minority segment of the population served by the larger. Both are bound by oaths to that service, and those oaths can conflict. In an extreme situation, this can lead to the smaller layer of government performing actions that the larger considers betrayal, or even treasonous.

The recent government shutdown in the US, where the entire country was held hostage to the principles adhered to by a minority of extremists from within one party on an issue they had already lost comes very close. If the question had been one of international relations, rather than of domestic policy, it could easily have been adjudged to represent treason against the larger level of government.

Few issues are black and white. There’s always room for honest disagreement. Compromise is a practical necessity that stops anyone from going too far. But when one party to a dispute refuses to compromise, there’s always going to be trouble. Another thing that’s absolute? Oaths. Any Oath, under the right circumstances, can prevent or prohibit compromise. Society tolerates, even demands and mandates, Oaths – despite this potential – only because the alternative is much, much worse.

Church Vs State

Obviously, then, any absolute can create conflict with an oath, explicit or implicit. One of the most obvious is in another thorny doctrinal issue in terms of government: Church vs. State, Religion vs. Authority. To what extent is an elected official entitled to foist the views and demands of his theology onto the citizens he represents, regardless of their views on the subject? To what extent is he permitted to compromise his own views and ideals in order to more fairly represent the citizens who elected him? The Doctrine of Church Vs. State in US Politics and Law is interpreted as banning any faith from becoming the official state religion, and is usually interpreted as resulting from wishing to avoid a situation in which the government is forced by a narrowly-defined ideology into choices that are not in the best interests of the citizens of the state. The founding fathers may have thought that this was enough to settle the debate and keep religion out of politics; the ongoing debates about Intelligent Design and Contraception and Abortion prove that it isn’t. Even the Environmentalists, who by embracing a position of shutting down and shouting down all opinions to the contrary, have begun to act as a religion, show the depths to which the conflicts between religion and authority can conflict. Personally, while not a climate Skeptic, I’m unconvinced – and the behavior of the environmentalists feeds my traces of skepticism and fuels my unwillingness to be convinced.

Any ideology, whether religious or environmental or economic, can lead to acts that conflict with an oath – and those are a betrayal of that oath at best and treason at worst. As I said earlier, it’s as easy to do the wrong thing for the right reasons as it is to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or in the wrong way.

Professionals Vs State

That’s any ideology, including the protection of a professional body or group or even of the professionals themselves. Worker’s Unions and Professional Bodies are variations on the same theme. Analogues exist in many FRP campaigns, such as Mage’s Guilds. And oaths of loyalty to the profession can come into conflict with the policies and oaths of the government, to the point where the activities of the professional body can be considered treasonous by the government. For example, if a treaty is not in the best interests of a given professional body, they may feel entitled to block, obfuscate, or sabotage it even if it is arguably in the best interests of everyone else. Experiments that risk the destruction of the world, for example, may be outlawed by the government – but a Mage’s Guild who refuses to accept that ruling may simply sanction conducting those experiments in a neighboring country or territory.

Biological-weapons research would be a modern equivalent that has been used in fiction many times. There are many others that could be turned into RPG plotlines. The development of Daleks or Cybermen from the Dr Who universe, for example.

Ethics Vs Morals

At it’s purest, you can have a conflict between ethics and morality that can lead to someone disobeying a government restriction, or even seeking to undermine that government. A philosophical question that has been endlessly debated without reaching a conclusion is whether or not there can be moral absolutes, or is morality relative? One of the most subtle and thought-provoking questions raised in Starship Troopers is “Is it moral for a group to do something that is immoral for an individual?” I disagree with Heinlein’s logic and hence his answer; anyone doing likewise who found themselves in a position with the authority and capacity to act would be committing treason against a society founded and run along the ideological lines espoused by Heinlein within the novel. (For the record, my answer: It is moral for the group to do that which may be immoral for the individual, in the name of the individuals collectively represented, when the action protects the individuals from a threat greater than that which can be opposed by an individual.” Disaster relief is moral. War against an oppressor or invader is moral. Government standards and regulation are moral. Accessibility to affordable medical treatment is moral. Subsidized education is moral. In fact, lots of things are morally right, even if they contravene an individual’s freedoms, explicit or implied. However, potential abuse and corruption mandate supervision and regulation – so government coverups are not moral. And there aren’t many absolutes involved.

Consider government standards & regulation. They don’t exist to ensure the quality of workmanship or to protect the public completely from risk; they define an acceptable limit of risk. One standard might mean that there is a one in ten thousand chance of something going wrong; that might be acceptable or it might not, depending on how many are exposed to that risk and how often. A tighter regulation might reduce that to one in 100,000 – but drive the price of compliance to a level that places the product out of the reach of the ordinary citizen. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about seat belt laws, or medicines, or air conditioners. So there is a compromise to be made between accessibility of technology and safety. Subsidized accessibility may permit higher standards to be maintained, or may bankrupt the government – if the lower-quality product is also available and the higher-quality product is only made available to those that need that standard of protection, all will generally be well. Is it possible to draft a set of traffic laws that would end all deaths from motor-vehicle accidents? Sure – just ban internal combustion as a means of deriving the power for locomotion. You can’t even charge the batteries on an electric vehicle. No cars, no car-related deaths. But it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and anyone proposing it seriously would be laughed off the public stage. So instead we have laws that act to reduce the risk of being on the road to a level that society has deemed acceptable, and we tolerate the occasional tragic accident as a society no matter how much we may regret individual examples.

Black hats vs white hats: context matters

Here’s a sticky question: is it ever moral for a trusted group to do something while immoral for an untrustworthy group to do the same thing?

Now think about this: American cold-war policy regarding nuclear weapons research says the answer is ‘yes’. Some nations could be trusted with the development or deployment of the bomb – the US themselves, primarily, but others like Britain and France as well – while others could not. Even now, the world stands at the brink of nuclear Armageddon if certain countries or conflicts go too far – India vs. Pakistan, North vs. South Korea, Taiwan and China, Israel and virtually any other middle-eastern country. And no matter how legitimate or illegitimate the grievances may be on any side in those conflicts, the potential for collateral damage in such conflicts continues to argue for a ‘yes’ answer.

But that’s not the only view possible, and anyone subscribing to an alternative perspective may well be placed in a position of committing acts that a subscriber to that view defines as treasonable. That’s the logic behind the convictions of those who fed nuclear secrets to the Soviets, for example. A plausible counterargument might be, “if the US is the only country with this technology, they will eventually become a world dictator. Parity is needed, and Mutually-Assured Destruction to keep fingers off the triggers, and prevent either country from going too far”. And that’s certainly a hard line to refute, given that this is what we ended up with – and the world is still outside my door.

What’s the equivalent in FRP? A Fireball spell? Resurrection? Steel? Something more? Something less?

In the section on Inheritance, I proposed that context alters perception which alters loyalties and ideologies – which can lead to an act of treason against an Oath that was “a good idea at the time.” The situations discussed in this situation show that this must be extended and expanded: Every oath and every act of treason against such an oath has to be viewed in context, and any absolute can lead to the commission of such an act – under the right circumstances, no matter how improbable they may be.

Everyone who takes an oath will have some circumstance under which they will break that oath, or will uphold the oath even when that is the morally wrong thing to do.

Regulations and laws and punishments don’t keep us absolutely safe – they simply confine the risks to an acceptable level. Context matters.

Fidelity to cause

I’ve written already about how loyalty to a cause can lead to the betrayal of an oath made to someone or something else. But another kind of betrayal is the breaking of a promise of fidelity to a cause.

This is a potential that was implicit in the discussion and examples offered of conflicts between professionals and the state. The Mage’s Guild example, for example, puts a mage who learns of the experiments in the situation where he has to betray either his fidelity to the cause of magic itself, or his loyalty to the state. Which one will he choose? While it might technically not be an act of treason, the choice of supporting the ban on this experimentation is an entirely valid one.

Depending on the game, the circumstances, and the specifics, an oath of fidelity to a cause can be bigger or smaller than an oath of loyalty to one’s government. In any game where the fate of existence is on the line, any oath to someone or something fighting to preserve that existence is going to take precedence over a petty national allegiance. The less epic and sweeping the campaign and its concepts, the more strongly national allegiances will overshadow fidelity to any cause. They may not completely overshadow allegiance to a cause – there will always be people who will fight for peace over any other allegiance, for example. And people who will fight to equip the military with the latest toy, no matter what they have to do to to get it.

Any cause, in the right circumstances, can be adjudged more important than an oath of loyalty; whether this is a correct judgment or not, it can be the basis of a plotline.

Fidelity to issues

An issue is something more specific and less generalized than a Cause. Consequently, it’s less likely to involve activities that could be characterized as treasonous; but it can lead to lesser forms of betrayal. An example might be a crime in which the victim gets under the investigator’s skin, leading them to go too far in seeking out or punishing the offender. Less likely does not mean impossible, however; and the Pelican Brief is the story of a case in which greed led to crime which led to something very close to treason.

The Revolutionaries

We’re approaching the end of my list of people who might commit treason, or something that would be considered treason. So I thought I would conclude this part of the article by revisiting a couple of points made earlier in passing or implied without being explicitly described. The first of these is this: any act of revolution is, by definition, treasonous with respect to the administration being overthrown. It follows that the motives for such acts need to be stronger than the loyalty felt towards that existing administration, and there needs to be an urgency or desperation that demands immediate action – avenues of reform must be blocked or too slow. When all these conditions are met, the circumstances are primed for a revolution, or attempted revolution – which is to say, an act of treason.

And there is always the problem of a revolution for reasons that seem just and worthy – that only put a bigger bunch of crooks in charge.

The Reformers

Not that having an avenue of reform open is necessarily a guarantee that treason will neither be involved or required. We’re generally used to reform being a positive thing, or to the term being used cynically to suggest that so-called “reforms” are anything but. There is a third option, however, and those are reforms that improve one situation with such severe side effects that they can become motives for treasonous opposition in those sworn to uphold them; and a fourth option, in which the need for reform is given a sufficiently hostile response that either the proponents of the reform can commit treason to enact the reform, or that the opposition can overstep the mark in their zeal to prevent the reform from occurring.

No change of administration policy or position ever benefits everyone. There is always the question of the minority (or even the majority) who are penalized by a change, and how strongly they oppose it as a result; and for any proposal you care to offer in terms of public policy, there will be the question of who supports it and how far they are willing to go to achieve their ends, however laudable.

Things can get even more complicated when you contemplate attempted reforms that through short-sightedness, flawed logic, or political, religious, or social dogma, will fail to achieve the promised benefits. If you are a supporter of the cause or general principle who opposes the specific reforms mooted then you are tagged with being a traitor to the cause, whether or not your reasons are valid – because zealots will not tolerate any form of opposition. To them, it’s not about how right or wrong you are, but about the fact that you have opposed them.

The Little Guy

There is an implied oath, even if not explicitly required, that citizens will support and obey the ruling body that commands them. But there are laws that ordinary people break regularly, sometimes with reason and more often, without. Speed laws. Running red lights. Cheating on taxes, inadvertently or deliberately. Some folks go further; usually feeling disenfranchised or so opposed to the current regime that they deliberately flout the law. And that in turn opens the door to actions that can be considered treasonous.

Whether or not these actions are, or can be, supported depends an awful lot on the regime being challenged. Take the case of the French Resistance in World War II. Their government had surrendered. The Resistance was therefore committing acts of sabotage and conspiracy that were illegal under the terms of the surrender, and by definition, treason against the appointed government of the day. Because the general view is that the regime they opposed was wholly monstrous and undeniably villainous, these partisans are considered by history to be heroes and patriots.

When the circumstances are dire enough, the little guy can commit what are technically acts of treason. So the question then becomes, under what circumstances is this warranted? Or, more particularly from a roleplaying perspective, are the circumstances arranged by the GM sufficient to justify treason by “the little guy”? How desperate are the people? How grave is their situation? How much hope do they have? How much scope for expression of their discontent, and how possible is reform of the situation? So long as an alternative avenue exists for achieving their ends in a peaceable way, acts of sedition can’t be justified. Take away their alternatives, and some people will start sharpening pitchforks. And even if reform is not possible, the situation has to be both desperate, urgent, and pose a clear risk to the lives of the people before extreme measures are in any way justifiable.

And yet, there is a lot of gray area. Consider the American Revolution. This was, if historical propaganda is to be believed, about the principle of self-rule. Dig beneath the surface, and it’s possible if not likely that a whole range of motivations were in play, some noble and some less so. People are only human, after all. How does this conflict stack up in terms of our justifications? Desperate? Reasonably. Avenues for reform? Attempts had been rebuffed. Scope for expression? Yes – I’m not aware of any interference in the press by the British, more of a casual indifference to the opinions of the colonials. Were the revolutionaries lives at risk before the declaration of independence? That’s a more difficult one. Past acts in opposition to the British may have warranted prison, but even that is far from certain. For most participants, the answer has to be, “not really”. And so, under the established criteria, the Revolution was unjustified. If we therefore conclude that the principle for which they were fighting is sufficient to justify the Revolution, it shows that our criteria are too narrow to answer all cases. So bear that in mind, as a GM, when considering whether or not grassroots elements of a society will rebel to the point of treason.

More Variations of Treason & Betrayal

So there are an awful lot of vectors for infidelity to an oath, a lot of different groups that can commit a lot of different types of treason. And yet, the types of treason described so far are not the entire gamut of possibilities. There are still more forms of treason and betrayal that have to be acknowledged. Some of these may be viewed as less serious than others, while some individuals may consider them more important. Little puts a character under more pressure than forcing them to choose between two different forms of betrayal of concepts or loyalties that they believe in. Many characters, when confronted with such choices, become paralyzed and unable to choose at all; some kill themselves to avoid having to make the choice, while others choose one and then commit suicide out of remorse – even if they ultimately chose the lesser of two evils. Such situations are defining watersheds for the evolution of the character at the heart of the storm; no matter how they choose, they will be transformed by the experience – even if they subsequently try to pretend otherwise.

All of these represent great story potential. They have all been at the heart of dramatic television and movie narratives in the past, and will be again, in the future. And they are all fertile ground for RPGs.

The old girl ain’t what she used to be: Betrayal of history

One of the best places to start is with the question of infidelity to history. There are often good reasons advanced by circumstances in RPGs to hide the truth of a confrontation – the knowledge itself may be dangerous, the people may not be ready to know the truth, there may be a minority who could use the truth to undermine the positive outcomes, or public confidence would be needlessly undermined. Especially in times of war, the truth is a necessary casualty, because the truth arms and advantages the enemy. Disinformation can be essential to the achievement of victory, or the minimizing of the price of victory.

But there is a counterpoint, one which demands that eventually the truth be revealed. Firstly, secrets have a life of their own, and the protection of secrets can lead to crimes worse than those the secret was meant to protect. I looked at that more substantially in The Veil of Secrecy: A truth about organizations in games.

But entirely aside from that consideration, there is another: If the truth is hidden, future generations will find their attitudes and history compromised and distorted by belief in the lies told in its place. That in turn generates myths about the events, and those myths and the beliefs that go with them then form the foundation of future expectations, ambitions, and policies. Avenging a betrayal or an injustice that did not in fact take place, for example. Hiding the truth about a mistake can maintain public confidence in those who made the mistake – but it can also eliminate the opportunity to learn from that mistake. Keep the secret for too long, and it can even be the case that it will not be believed when the truth is finally revealed.

It’s not enough for there to be good reasons for a cover-up (never mind cases where there are bad reasons) – it is always necessary to consider the question of “for how long” and “what will be the price of that secrecy?” Depending on the circumstance and the secret being kept, a betrayal of history can be a far more serious matter than simple treason.

Betrayal of principle

I made the point earlier that the lesson of the American Revolution – or the myth of the American Revolution, depending on how pedantic you want to be – is that Principle can be enough to justify what are technically or substantially acts of treason.

The other side of that coin has to be the betrayal of principle. Is this a worse crime than simple treason? Is it acceptable to subvert or betray a principle if the letter of the law is obeyed? If fidelity to the letter of the law supersedes fidelity to the principle, what happens when the law is inadequate or antiquated? These questions go to the heart of most of the great social conflicts of the last century – everything from copyright infringement to spam and spyware, and will continue to be at the heart of serious legal issues into the future. For example: Is it even possible for the public to make an informed decision when end-user agreements are choked in legalese fine print? Or: Can the law become so complex and convoluted that it is impossible for a non-lawyer to know what it obligates the ordinary person to do – and is that acceptable – and, if not, what should be done about it? Every legal complication is there for a reason, every legal precedent stems from a real case and a real verdict.

Once again, context is everything in these cases. What are you betraying? What are the costs – of fidelity, and of betrayal? Who should have the power and authority to decide?

Muddying the waters still further: How do you decide when principles come into conflict?

Betrayal of an oath to uphold a principle
Still more flavors and subtexts are possible under this heading and deserve to be at least mentioned in this article.

The first of these variations asks the question, How far should people be willing to go in defense of a principle? To the point of treason – or beyond?

How should such individuals be judged – by their peers, by those to whom the oath was sworn, by the public, and by history? If a prosecution follows, despite public belief that the individual did the right thing, is a fair trial possible? Is the verdict a foregone conclusion? If a prosecution does not follow, can’t that be seen as setting a precedent for the violation of other oaths under other circumstances in the future? Is it necessary for each successive judicial rung to prosecute such a case, knowing that they will lose, just to define the scope of what is acceptable? These are difficult questions that get to the heart of an individuals perceptions of right and wrong.

Betrayal of a principle to uphold an oath
Conversely, what of the person who betrays a principle because they are compelled by an oath to do so? The same set of basic questions obtain – how should they be judged? Did they do the right thing? Is it legal to disobey a flawed law? Should it be? Principles are as subject to interpretation as laws – which means they are just as subject to mis-interpretation.

The relative betrayal of principle
Questions of degree are inevitable when discussing this sort of question at any length. How about violating a principle just a little bit in order to preserve a broader principle? What is the order of precedence among principles? Is that open to the individual? Where an individual has been elected to office, does that mean that the people have chosen to agree with his order of priorities in this respect?

There was a series on Australian TV a long time ago called “Hypotheticals“, by Geoffrey Robertson. These placed a panel of notables into a fictitious scenario in which, acting in the guise of an imagined identity, contemporary issues were explored and debated in ways that could never have happened in any other context. Some of these were later collected into books (refer to the Bibliography below the section linked to above) – there are six copies of the first available through Amazon, but they are extremely expensive (the cheapest being US$199.93). They were entertaining, brilliant, stimulating, and uniformly thought-provoking, and – in many ways – epitomized RPGs at their very best. And a recurring subtheme was always the constant tug-of-war between principles, law, and morality.

The confusion of an honest man
The more complicated these questions get, the harder it is for anyone who is neither a genius, a lawyer, or a saint to answer them – and that describes most of the population. These are situations that call on ordinary people to make extraordinary choices, and it’s always easy for even an honest man to make a mistake when he thinks he is doing the right thing. Who needs a villain when you can use a good guy as the Bad Guy?

Using a White Hat in this way doesn’t solve the issue – it then passes the question on to those who are in a position to oppose or stop the White Hat: the PCs. Does that make them the villains? One of my favorite tricks is to put characters in my superhero campaign into the position of having to choose between doing the right thing and doing the moral thing. It doesn’t matter, from my GM’s perspective, what they choose: it will only cause complications and problems in the future. All roads lead to an interesting and entertaining time.

An evolving context

Everything I’ve discussed so far has made the assumption that the right thing to do is always the right thing to do. In the real world, context is continually evolving, and what seemed like the right thing to do ten years ago is often transformed by circumstance and time into the worst choice that could possibly have been made.

Adding fortune-teller to the list of requirements for always having the right answer really puts it out of reach of, well, everyone. Two types of campaign premise can exploit all this: The Time-travel campaign, and thw non-Time-travel campaign.

Time-travel campaigns confront this issue at its most direct. They proceed from the premise that the long view trumps the immediate, and that the impact in 30, 50, 100, 500, or whatever, years, is more important than the immediate impact. One group either has to bring about the required change – or stop idealistic zealots from altering history. These are simply different sides of these same questions.

Non time-travel campaigns deal in the legacies of the past. Whatever was done in the past – rightly or wrongly – now comes home to roost and has to be coped with. There’s a problem that has to be solved, and the PCs are the ones anointed by fate (also known as the GM) to get their hands dirty.

These are the sort of issues that haunt US Government Policy (amongst many, many others) to this day. Thirty years ago (or whatever) they anoint a leader in a particular part of the world for what seemed reasonable and necessary reasons at the time. Now they have to cope with the consequences of that act. You see this as a recurring theme throughout the central Americas and the Middle East. I would be very surprised if Russians didn’t have the same problem and perspective, but this time in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Germany certainly has this problem whenever it confronts the legacy of Nazism. In fact, every nation whose leaders have ever made a political decision will have had to deal with the mistakes of the past at some point in their history, and the vexing question of secrets.

Digging for Answers: The Mole

Some people are expected to make promises that they never intend to keep: spies, moles, and infiltrators. And, as is always the case with such individuals, there is a perpetual question hovering about their presence as to their real loyalties. If someone can become an agent, they can become a double- or even triple-agent. Some people are like an onion, loyalty within loyalty, never revealing their true allegiances. Does the crime of espionage automatically exonerate one of the crime of treason against the people being spied apon? Or is that a convenient legal fiction exploited because treason trials are messy, embarrassing, and frequently public, while espionage often results in no public trial, and no public embarrassment – no matter how much angst and anguish they may induce behind closed doors?

A prior engagement: oaths of precedence

Which brings up a whole new general subject for consideration: Can one oath supersede another? Or are they accumulated like layers of wallpaper – the newest one on show, but the old ones binding the whole surface ‘skin’ to the actual person? Can they be shed like a skin, or do they persist? How do oaths interact?

You can talk about general cases and general principles relating to this question all day, and the end result is still going to come back to the actual and specific wording of the specific oaths involved. Some are open-ended, some are discharged following a specific event or time, and some are – at least supposedly – binding long beyond the lifetime of the individual.

Related question: can one oath prohibit the taking of a second?

An excess of Fidelity

Even if multiple oaths are technically possible, how many masters can one person be loyal to at the same time? The more oaths one has sworn, the more likely they are to come into conflict – which brings us neatly full circle. Is it really a betrayal of fidelity when an act is demanded by one oath and contravened by another?

There are more aspects to this than may initially meet the eye – so it’s a question I’ll come back to in a moment.

Life and Death

But first, let’s wrap up this exploration of variations on the theme of treason itself with what some may consider the ultimate question of fidelity (especially in an RPG): If Life and Death are real than abstract concepts, if they are tangible, manipulable forces, with exemplars and avatars – then must not the betrayal of life itself be more significant than any oath that may be involved? A betrayal that costs someone their life is bad enough, but a betrayal of life itself that risks the end of all?

Layers of Fidelity

It’s entirely normal for certain positions of authority to have to cope with multiple layers of fidelity. To continue the discussion of those layers coming into conflict that I started a couple of paragraphs ago, I thought it worth taking the time to consider some of the situations in which layers of fidelity are taken more or less for granted, and can be more-or-less guaranteed to come into conflict at some point.

Layers Of Government: Modern

Local government. State government. Federal Government – Senate, Congress, and Presidential. Political party allegiances. These could never come into conflict, could they? No-one ever has a personal agenda, or personal political beliefs, that might differ from those branches above, below, or around them, do they? Now throw in industrial connections and sympathetic lobbyists, and laws and lawyers, and a press that is always hungry for a story – the juicier and more scandalous the better, and the propensity for some to pander to the fourth estate, and international relations (depending on the actual positions) – and then expect them all to work together as a harmonious whole. Now throw in a model of electoral interaction that emphasizes polarities and hardline no-compromise attitudes and the concept of voter churn…

Sidebar: What’s “voter churn”? It’s my term, not an official one. Take the two, four, or six most marginal electorates in any given election. Both sides will target them with everything they can spare. Voter churn results when no matter the outcome in one electorate, it is matched by an opposite outcome in another, so that in the end, absolutely nothing actually changes. Which raises the somewhat heretical speculation: could it be that marginality is actually irrelevant, because the results are usually a wash – and that what really decides elections are trends in those electorates just outside of these marginals?

Although I wrote the opening paragraph of this section with the US Government in mind, what’s been written is true to a greater or lesser extent of any nation which practices democracy – from Germany to the UK to Australia to those few democracies that can be found in the Middle East.

Why does it happen? There are two separate factors at work.

The first is that the voters are the same in all levels of government, viewed from the collective perspective of the larger branch of government. That means, for example, that a state that is nominally pro-Republican will tend to elect Republicans to all levels of their representation; but the distribution will rarely be uniform, despite this overall trend. This local government is more pro-Republican or more pro-Democrat than that. This district swings one way, its neighbor swings the other. So you end up in a situation where the majority of constituent elements will have the same trend as the overall, but there will be a minority – substantial in some cases, marginal in others – that nominate leaders from the opposition party, and a smaller minority of swinging electorates. Any political body, viewed collectively, will contain a mixture of people from both sides of politics – and sometimes a few outsiders as well.

The second factor is that those who are strongly aligned with their party’s principles find it easier to appeal to this electoral bias, while those who are politically moderate are viewed as vulnerable by both sides. In seeking the best chance to form government (of whatever level), the trend is to marginalize and drive the moderates out of politics, polarizing the candidates that the electorate is offered.

All of which is background to our primary discussion, which is betrayal, and it’s most extreme case, treason. Let’s assume that we have a city government. The majority of local councilmen belong to Party A, which is therefore said to have won the last local elections in the city. The mayor probably also belongs to Party A, therefore, and the region collectively swings in the direction of A. But there will be several councilmen who come from Party B. The Mayor is expected to represent all the electors in the city, not just the ones that voted for him; nevertheless, his political leanings will place him into conflict with the opposition councilmen, who will generally do their best to block measures they disapprove of (and measures that they do not actively agree on on general principle). So long as the opposition is confined to political debate, there’s no problem; even political activism, though more marginal, is still within acceptable and tolerable limits. But is it possible for an opposition councilman to step over the line, to go too far, to commit what would be considered an act of treason against the city government? Of course it is. Meddling in some other district’s election. Encouraging voters aligned in his political direction to migrate into districts that nominally swing the other way, but are sufficiently marginal to be swayed. Bribery and Corruption. In systems where voting is not compulsory, impeding voters who support the other party. Blackmail, exposing secrets and airing dirty laundry.

If one of these councilmen accepts a bribe to throw the next election, he betrays the people who elected him. It may be less serious than betrayal of country, but the basic crime is still the same; it’s simply a matter of scale.

Nor is that the end of the possible scenarios to be contemplated under this heading. A government can take whatever measures it deems appropriate to the service of the national interest, subject to whatever review and oversight that is deemed appropriate – but what happens when such measures contradict a national ideal? No-one could argue with increased airline security in the wake of 9/11 – but was the interception and eavesdropping of electronic communications a step too far? It certainly flies in the face of American ideals. These are not easy issues to resolve, and I don’t suggest for one minute that I have a magic bullet for the problem. Does the American Ideal itself have to evolve in response to an evolving context? Was the betrayal of the old ideal an act of treason? Is opposing such activities an act of treason? Both could be argued. When national security is involved, the most trivial act can have wide-reaching repercussions.

At this point, and to wrap up this part of the article, I have to draw people’s attention to Mudslingers: The Twenty-Five Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time by Kerwin Swint. It’s essential reference (and very readable) for anyone interested in US Politics, or running a modern-era campaign.

Layers Of Government: Feudal/Fantasy

So, taking elections out of the mix should clear things up, right? Wrong. It makes things worse, because every noble is somewhere on the line of succession. Supporting anyone who is not the current monarch creates the potential for treason. It brings every level of government closer to the ultimate, minimizing those differences of scale. Nobles, as a group, are going to have as broad a diversity of opinions as members of any elected body; some will align one way on any given issue, while others will align with an opposing view. Democratic systems have mechanisms to prevent excesses in any given political direction; regardless of their effectiveness, they have them. If worst comes to worst, the opposition can be elected at the next poll. Feudal systems give the local ruler far more autonomy, and far less restraint. You don’t have to study much European history to come across multiple examples of Nobles in conflict – and the most extreme expression of these conflicts can only be considered treason against the monarch.

Party Politics

Even within a single political party, there are going to be divided loyalties and diversities of opinion. While generalizing a party platform leads to simplicity in summarizing a political philosophy, it is oversimplifying to consider every member of that party to subscribe to that precise view in all things. People are more complex than that.

An individual may disagree with his party platform on individual issues, may subscribe to some views more vehemently than others, may be more radical than his party agenda on some matters. Every individual will be just a little different. You don’t think the Republicans try to pull strings to get Democrats with “the right attitude” assigned to key committees, and vice-versa? You think neither party has ever resorted to nominating a poison-pill candidate to selected committees? If a candidate has an opinion on a particular subject that differs from those of his party, he may be told he is “too close to the issue”. The effectiveness of any government sub-body is eminently manipulable if you look hard enough for a way. How far do such tactics have to go before they are a betrayal of party principle? Of democracy itself? Of the national interest?

Is diverting military funding from one effective measure that would be built in someone else’s state to one that is less effective, but which would me manufactured in your own district, an act of treason? It materially impacts on your nations military capacity? Where do you draw the line?

How about adhering to party policy in the face of demonstrated national need – blocking reforms or changes that the majority have deemed necessary or desirable? The US voted an overwhelming endorsement of “Obamacare” – can the Tea Party’s continued intransigence on the issue, which ultimately led to the recent shutdown, be considered an act of treason? How about if the issue was a military campaign? Or the deployment of an intelligence asset?

On The Bench: The Trends Of Law

Society evolves in response to the opportunities and capabilities given to its citizens and institutions by technological advance. Politicians and laws almost always lag behind. It follows that the constituency of those bodies who interpret and decide the laws of a nation are inherently and perpetually involved in conflict between the socially accepted attitudes of the day and the preservation of past interpretation and precedent. Probably the best-known example is the kerfuffle about file sharing and copyright – and although that seems to have died down of late, it’s only the tip of a very messy iceberg that’s still lurking somewhere in the jurisprudential waters. Heck, the right-to-choose vs. the right-to-life debate still has not been definitively resolved, and that’s been going on for a lot longer than the copyright reform debate.

Legal conservatism is aimed at providing stability and continuity of laws. You can’t have a society where what is permitted and what is not are radically reshaped on a daily or weekly basis and expect that society to be stable. But this also makes it slow to react, and often insufficiently progressive to keep up with social attitudes. And that’s all before vested interests and politics get involved in the debate. Should judges be elected, and if so, how frequently? Or should they be appointed by politicians? Or should they come in matched pairs – a conservative for every liberal?

And all of that generalizes opinions unrealistically – a given individual may be conservative on some issues and progressive or even radical on others.

One of the more interesting books that I’ve read in the last few years was Supreme Power by Jeff Shesol, about FDR’s struggle to get the New Deal through a conservative and ideologically-opposed Supreme Court. There is more than enough capacity for discord between governments and courts to lead to issues of betrayal and oath-breaking.

Military Ethics

Stepping away from the speculative, there are many examples in world history of circumstances leading to allegations of treason (or lesser crimes) against members of a military – everything from fraternizing with the enemy on up. Members of the armed forces are just like everyone else – they will have opinions and beliefs that will vary from one individual to another. At the same time, they swear oaths of loyalty to the state, and to their own military organization, and to uphold their chain of command. Many have strong religious views, common amongst men and women who choose to risk their lives in the service of something they deem to be of greater value than those lives. And sometimes, one or more of those values conflict with respect to any particular situation; and, as I said earlier, any situation involving national security is inherently sensitive. For this very reason. most military organizations hold their men to a higher standard of propriety than is the case with the general public. Disobeying orders in the face of the enemy is not exactly the same thing as treason, but it is another name for the same sort of behavior.

In particular, ideals and morals can lead members of a military to act in ways that are intolerable to the organization; but those same qualities also make for better, more committed and determined officers and soldiers. It’s a witches brew that leads to the occasional catastrophic intersection of circumstances.

The Impact of Dramatic Moments

There have been a number of occasions in the preceding where I have used phrases like “sometimes,” “in extraordinary circumstances,” and so on. It’s rare, even improbable, for things to achieve these extreme outcomes – at least in real life. But that improbability is subject to reality override when we start talking about an RPG context, where the goal is not to emulate “real life” – it is to dramatize the improbable. It’s the GM’s job to create interesting circumstances for the PCs (and hence their players) to deal with. The improbable happens at least nine times out of ten – in an RPG.

RPGs are sometimes described as games of “What If,” but not all what-if’s are of equal interest or equal validity. Some are silly, some are dull, some are inappropriate in the genre or game context. In every game, however, there is at least one constant: the PCs interact in some way with figures of authority in circumstances that are extreme and/or dramatic. And that means that questions of betrayal and treason are universally applicable. Treason is always on the menu.

Fidelity and PCs

We’re slowly closing in on the heart of the subject: Treason and betrayal in RPGs. The very concept of an RPG introduces a dichotomy into the subject: treason & acts of betrayal by PCs, and treason & acts of betrayal by NPCs that affect or involve the PCs in some way.

Black and White: Pulp

Some genres reduce choices to black and white, at least in theory, and this simplifies and clarifies. The most interesting pulp campaigns are those in which NPCs may exhibit a full range of moral tones, but with an exaggerated high-contrast, while the PCs see the world as black and white and react accordingly. This concept permits the PCs to instantly take action without complex moral debates (most of the time) while placing them in something that has at least a passing resemblance to the complexities of the real world. It is this capacity to get to the heart of issues of right and wrong that makes the PCs (and selected NPCs Pulp Adventurers) different from everyone else, clearing away the clutter and letting people get down to business while the sophisticates are ham-strung by their need to process moral complexities and shades of grey.

In this genre, treason and betrayal of any sort are equally bad. They mark one as a villain, not to be trusted, and hence an enemy of the PCs – most of the time. It follows that betrayal and treason by a PC in the pulp genre is not permitted, in fact, not even possible – not without them going the whole hog and becoming arch-villains. There’s not a lot more to say on the subject, really – so let me throw one last thought at you and move on: consider Captain Kirk to be a Pulp Hero in a science-fiction setting. He ticks every box…

Black and White: Superheroes

Not far removed from the Pulp genre in the respect is the superhero genre. But, for the first time, morality within the PCs is not completely black-and-white, and most characters are a high-contrast blending of the two. White can be tinged with gray, black can be slightly pale. And the issues that can be presented can be infinitely more complex. There is enough complexity and moral diversity possible that some forms of betrayal and treason cannot be wholly ruled out – in particular, cases where the betrayal seems like the right thing to do at the time. Here, it’s the public perception of the PCs that is black and white; the reality is not quite so clear-cut. Nevertheless, they are supposed to be heroes – and that makes any form of treason or betrayal an extreme event. Not impossible, but it’s not going to happen very often.

Black and White: Fantasy – Us Vs Them

Things grow still more complex in most Fantasy gaming, but there are still areas that are generally regarded as black-and-white regardless of an individual’s morality (and its possible summation as an alignment). One of those areas tends to be party unity – the most serious act a player can perform in a Fantasy RPG is usually a betrayal of his fellow PCs. “I don’t care if you are the party thief – you don’t steal from the other PCs!” “But I was just roleplaying…” How often has this sort of behavior come under scrutiny? Long enough for most veterans to be tired of the subject, that’s for sure.

Black and White: Fantasy – RPGs & The Gods

I’ve made the point several times in other articles that in a world where the Gods are manifestly real, only a fool disobeys them – especially when they lay down a “Thou Shalt Not” or two. Now, if the Gods in your campaign don’t manifest so directly, or aren’t really the moralizing type (Greek world? Roman world?) then there’s little or no problem. People are what they are; get over it and get on with it. The less those conditions hold true for a campaign, the bigger the question looms.

In some respects, a fantasy game with an afterworld and judgment of the dead is the other side of the coin to the superhero/pulp hero equation – because here it’s not the PCs who are reducing every moral decision to black and white, it’s the judge of the afterworld. Pursuing that thought can lead to an entirely different perception of the mortal-immortal interface…

For this discussion to be valid within this section of the article, we have to pose the question: what could drive a PC to betray the Gods? It’s not going to come up very often, and it’s going to be in pretty extraordinary circumstances when it does, but it is possible, especially if mortals have idealized perceptions of the Gods, who in reality have feet of clay.

Things can get murkier in a hurry when you’re dealing with one or more pantheons that do not present a united front. What do you do when your character class has a patron deity, and your race has another patron deity, and the city you are in has a patron deity – and they get into a knock-down drag-out about something you are doing?

Black and White: Fantasy – The Paladin Dilemma

There is one character class that is still supposed to see things in black and white. And like a solo superhero in a world of gray morality, sometimes it’s a vey bad fit. You can take everything that I’ve said in the section on RPGs & The Gods and square and cube it so far as Paladins are concerned. But to counterbalance that, and make a Paladin’s life even more difficult, there is – or at least should be – a political aspect to the role. Paladins are directly akin to Knights, at least conceptually – and Knights are at most a stone’s throw removed from Nobility – and that means politics. Any campaign with a Paladin as PC that doesn’t have him hip-deep in politics is missing a bet. And as soon as you start talking politics, you’re into all the territory that this article has thrown your way.

Fidelity and NPCs

There are lots more NPCs than PCs, and that means there’s a lot more scope for treason and betrayal of all kinds. Fortunately, there are shortcuts that permit a broader assessment of the possibilities.

Enemies

Enemies committing treason? There’s no surprise in that, is there? But this is a potential that cuts more than one way; there are more possibilities than might immediately meet the eye. Why not an enemy committing treason by coming to the PCs with a warning about something an even worse enemy is doing? An enemy opposing the PCs out of principle? An enemy betraying a cause because he is required to do so by an oath? There is a whole gamut of ways in which an NPC can commit treason and have it involve the PCs. And that’s when the treason really takes place; why not someone who should be an ally but who is an enemy because he thinks one or more PCs has committed treason or some other serious form of betrayal? Or who thinks that everyone of a PC’s class – social, political, character – can’t be trusted, because of a past incident? Someone who is so desperate for revenge that they are willing to commit treason themselves in order to achieve it?

Allies

Things get even more complicated when the party accused (or guilty) of betrayal or treason is an ally of the PCs. Played properly, this puts the PCs in the position of having to choose between their own integrity and their friendship with the ally. But the possibilities don’t stop there. Is the Ally friendly to the PCs in hopes of making restitution for a past mistake? Does the ally perform an act of betrayal or treason to rescue the PCs from a trap that has been set for them? There are as many ways of interpreting or integrating an act of treason as there are types of possible relationship between an NPC and a PC. It’s just a matter of selecting one that will have “interesting” repercussions for the PCs…

Passing Strangers & Fellow Travelers

Having dealt with both enemies and allies, there’s only one major group of NPCs left to consider: everyone else! These are cases where the treason or betrayal doesn’t directly involve the PCs, though it may be proximate to them, and they may be swept up in the consequences. They may discover it, or simply find themselves at ground zero, or have to deal with the fallout. Once again, there are as many possible stories as there are types of betrayal.

Fidelities in Conflict

There is some groundwork that can and should be done when the GM starts contemplating a plotline revolving around fidelity or infidelity of any sort, but there are too many variables to offer a comprehensive guide, and this article is more than long enough already! So this is going to offer one recipe for placing Fidelities in conflict as an example how-to and leave the broader picture for each GM to fill in his own way, using this as a template.

• Step 1: Establish fidelities & values – This step is about identifying what the PCs are loyal to, and what values they hold. This is to ensure that they will relate to at least one of the participants.
• Step 2: Exemplify with archetypes – If a PC is not to be a primary participant, you need to create exemplars to represent the most extreme viewpoints or values that are going to be involved in the act of betrayal that you are contemplating.
• Step 3: Map the context and circumstances – Next, you need to work out what the circumstances are going to be. There are two requirements here: justifying the betrayal, and ensuring that the PCs are front and centre for the resulting firestorm.
• Step 4: Place them in conflict – When all is ready, place the values in question into conflict, and then have the perpetrator make his decision. Until this occurs, there has not actually been a betrayal, just a set of circumstances in-game that could conceivably lead to one.
• Step 5: The PC is the pivot – Finally, put a PC squarely in the middle of events, as per the plans layed in step 3. This could involve someone coming to the PC and asking for their help in committing an act of betrayal or treason for what seems to be good reason, or it could place the PC in a position to discover the treason, or any of the other possibilities discussed so far; the key point is that circumstances mean that the outcome and consequences of the betrayal will pivot on what the PC chooses to do about it (or not to do about it).

This is a fairly straightforward example of mapping out a plan to integrate a betrayal into a plotline. There can be many others, but the basic steps remain similar, if not identical.

The Ultimate Question: Treason against the RPG itself

One final thought to plant in the minds of the readership before I wrap this article up: Just what constitutes a betrayal of the game itself? Some would say cheating at the game table. Others would talk about Metagaming, or Railroading players. From my perspective, these can be bad – but in some cases, can also be positive, even justified under some circumstances – so they don’t rise to the level of treason against the spirit of the game. No, in my opinion, the ultimate treason is deliberately setting out to sabotage someone else’s fun at the table. That, to me, is the ultimate case of treason in RPGs. Fortunately, it’s a very rare event…