What are hit points? The most obvious answer is that hit points are a numeric index between healthy and imminent death, but there are other interpretations of the significance of this ubiquitous character statistic, and some of them lead the GM down interesting paths. This article will examine the first of these options, while parts 2 and three will examine a second and a third, even more far-reaching alternative, respectively.

Each of these alternatives has consequences for the flavor of the game that is being run, and requires house rules to interpret the philosophical metagame definition into concrete game mechanics correctly.

The Healthy and the Helpless

Another possible answer which I have seen in house rules from time to time is that hit points are a numeric index of the gap between healthy and helpless. This relates the damage that is inflicted apon a character to the impact that this damage has on his abilities, and his capacity to overcome that impact.

Before going too far with this, I have to admit that I have never run a game using this particular wounding model. Everything that is written below is unplaytested and derived strictly from RPG theory, and being written straight off the cuff.

We’ve all experienced injuries in our time – abrasions, falls, nicks. Some have had more serious injuries like broken bones or surgical wounds. And a few unfortunates have even more serious injuries in their pasts. So we can all relate to the principle that being injured slows our movements, impairs our physical capacities for action, and saps our will to act. These are responses to the pain of the injury, which is the body’s reaction to that injury; if we heed these warning signals, we heal, or at least have the chance to do so, and if we don’t then healing is slowed, may not progress properly (bones fusing out of alignment and so on), or may not occur at all (cuts reopening, etc).

We have all also seen people, especially in desperate circumstances, ignore wounds that might have incapacitated them at other times, in order to meet the needs of survival (be those their own or those of someone else).

Under this paradigm, the increase in hit points a character receives as a result of a level increase can be described as an increase in the capacity to remain functional despite injuries that may have been received, and the condition of zero hit points remaining – helplessness – is tantamount to death, should any enemy remain in better condition.

Implementation

To have the game mechanics reflect this metagame definition, two things are required: first, an index of impairment, relating the degree of injury to the degree of impairment suffered; and secondly, a table of consequences which define the consequences on other game mechanics of the impairment that a character may suffer.

Index of impairment

Interpreting the increase in hit points as a character acquires levels as an increase in capacity to absorb injury before reaching a given point of impairment gives us the scale apon which an index of impairment must be measured – the percentage of hit points lost.

Further, since characters have four limbs, plus a head (even a character with both arms and both legs broken or ruined can bite the enemy), and there would need to be a base level of no impairment, it is easy to construct such an index as a percentage of hit points lost.

While many such tables are possible, I’m going to present three that will represent the field of possibilities.

Impairment Index 1: Simple Linear

The graphic to the right illustrates a simple linear impairment index. Start by considering the left-hand-side: at no hit points taken, the character suffers no impairment, and this persists until the character has lost 1/6th of those hit points. At the point where his damage taken crosses that 1/6th boundary, he goes from ‘impairment zero’ to ‘impairment A’ and suffers the impairment effects that match that condition. At 1/3 hit points lost, the character enters condition B and suffers greater impairment, and so on. How much impairment is something to be considered later, when we work on the table of consequences.

The left-hand section reflects external injuries and the relative impairment that results. ‘A’ can be considered minor impairment, B is impairment equivalent to the inability to use one limb, C is equivalent to two limbs, D to three, and E to four. When the character has no hit points remaining, he hits the bottom of the chart and is helpless to prevent the enemy doing whatever it likes to him.

The right-hand section concerns itself with internal injuries, and divides the potential impairment and consequences into three sections, labeled alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha means that the character has no noteworthy internal injuries unless the weapon specifically inflicts them. Beta describes a condition where there is some risk of internal injury – how great a risk and how serious they are forms a third section of these variant rules – while gamma denotes a condition in which such wounds are more likely to have occurred and/or for them to be more serious.

If a tenth-level fighter with 79 hit points were to set up a list of ‘danger points’, it would look something like this:

• 0-13 HP lost: zero zone, alpha zone.
• 14-26 HP lost: A zone, alpha zone.
• 27-39 HP lost: B zone, beta zone.
• 40-52 HP lost: C zone, beta zone.
• 53-65 HP lost: D zone, gamma zone.
• 66-78 HP lost: E zone, gamma zone.
• 79 HP lost: totally helpless.
• 89 HP lost: death.

That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it? Compare that with a mage of 10th level, no CON bonus, giving him 25 hit points. 25-1=24; divide by 6 to get the intervals (4 hit points):

• 0-4 HP lost: zero zone, alpha zone.
• 5-8 HP lost: A zone, alpha zone.
• 9-12 HP lost: B zone, beta zone.
• 13-16 HP lost: C zone, beta zone.
• 17-20 HP lost: D zone, gamma zone.
• 21-24 HP lost: E zone, gamma zone.
• 25 HP lost: totally helpless.
• 35 HP lost: death.

That seems a bit nasty, doesn’t it? After 9 HP damage, the mage is either casting spells one-handed or leaning against something, unable to stand on one leg.

This scale of impairment and injury permits the rules to be adopted to be simple and straightforward, with minimal calculation required; though that is another area the GM can tailor to his own requirements.

Before we get into that, let’s consider a couple of alternative impairment Indexes.

Impairment Index 2: Biased Linear Progression

This is achieved by making the early zones larger and reducing the later zones accordingly. The example to the left shows just how broad a scope the GM has for tweaking the design. The GM who designed this proposal (me, obviously) has tripled the size of the zero zone, and doubled the size of the A and B zones relative to the C, D, and E zones. 3+2+2+1+1+1=10, so this gives an impairment index based on tenths of the character’s hit point total.

Until the character loses three-tenths of his total hit points, he is unimpaired and in the “zero impairment zone”. When he has lost half his total hit points, he is only slightly impaired – the equivalent of using the use of one limb. Until he has lost seven tenths, he is still in the ‘B’ zone – the equivalent of using the use of two limbs. Use of the remaining limbs then occurs fairly quickly, at 8 tenths and 9 tenths his total, respectively.

He has then gotten carried away with his own cleverness (note that I have done this deliberately to make a point!) and set the end of alpha region (no internal injuries) as occurring half-way through the A zone, so that a character can have nothing more than bruises and contusions but still have a risk of internal damage – perhaps a rib puncturing a lung, or something of that sort. He has then made the gamma region the same size as it was before, adjusted, i.e. overlapping the D and E external injury zones, and stretched the beta zone (some risk of internal injuries) to fit.

Relative to the even breakdown that was there before, this is the equivalent of making the Alpha zone 5% larger than it was, the beta zone 36% larger than it was, and the gamma region only 60% of what it was. The critical numbers are 7/20ths of hit points lost and 80% of hit points lost.

Personally, I would think this was overcomplicating things, but it’s certainly possible to arrange things this way.

How this is better than the simple linear index:
It defers impairment until the character has taken more damage, letting him fight for longer. And if the designer hadn’t gotten carried away, it would have been just as simple to implement. Consider the 25-HP mage from the previous example. 25HP-1 = 24 (because once he has taken 25 HP he is totally incapacitated), divide by 10 to get intervals of 2.4:

• 0 to 2.4×3 = 0 to 7 HP lost: zero zone, alpha zone (was 0 to 4).
• 8 to 10 HP lost: A zone, alpha zone (was 5 to 8).
• 11 to 12 HP lost: A zone, beta zone (combination didn’t exist before).
• 13 to 16 HP lost: B zone, beta zone (was 9 to 12).
• 17 to 19 HP lost: C zone, beta zone (was 13 to 16).
• 20 to 21 HP lost: D zone, gamma zone (was 17 to 20).
• 22 to 24 HP lost: E zone, gamma zone (was 21 to 24).
• 25 HP lost: totally helpless.
• 35 HP lost: death.

So the seriously-incapacitating zones don’t occur until the character is much closer to helplessness. Even with this fairly tight scale – the result of a low HP total to start with – the effects are evident.

How this is worse than the simple linear index:
It’s more complicated (it adds an extra condition step). It’s less intuitive as a result – we used to have three internal injury conditions, or zones on the table, each subdivided equally into two external injury/impairment zones. And worse still, by getting clever and putting the alpha-to-beta transition midway through a zone, it introduces a new calculation that has to be done on the fly.

Finally, if even a low-hit-point mage feels the benefits, how big will the effects be on somebody with a fairly decent HP total? Consider a character with 101 hits points (to make the math simple):

101 minus 1 = 100; 100/10 = 10. This gives:

• 0 to 30 HP lost: zero zone, alpha zone.
• 31 to 40 HP lost: A zone, alpha zone.
• 41 to 50 HP lost: A zone, beta zone.
• 51 to 70 HP lost: B zone, beta zone.
• 71 to 80 HP lost: C zone, beta zone.
• 81 to 90 HP lost: D zone, gamma zone.
• 91 to 100 HP lost: E zone, gamma zone.
• 101 HP lost: totally helpless.
• 111 HP lost: death.

ImageL:Wound Index 3

Impairment Index 3: Geometric Progression

Those who like consistent patterns may wish to take things a step further, making the range of each zone a multiple of the range of the zone that follows it. This achieves something similar to the Biased linear progression, only more so. The following table shows the breakpoints for a variety of geometric patterns (plus a ringer at the end).

Of course, these results aren’t all that useful as they stand. Utility – and the revelation of an interesting pattern or two – comes from converting the above results to a percentage of the sum of the ratios:

Personally, I would stick near the top of the table. The lower reaches leave the extreme zones too small – for characters of under 100 hit points, and that’s most of them – a single point would be the difference between one level of injury and the next. Oh, and if you’re wondering why such a precise value as 2.23435 is stuck in the middle of the table, that’s the result that comes closest to delivering a total of exactly 100; without the rounding errors, the total comes to almost 99.992, which is pretty darned close!

Also as a personal note, and while I adore elegant patterns in my tables, I DON’T like this approach. It’s too extreme, there’s too much capacity for no effect at the top (0/a/b zones) and results crowd together too closely at the bottom (c/d/e zones). But that’s a personal assessment, and yours may differ.

Consequences: translating impairment zones into game mechanics consequences

There is a natural approach to assigning a game-mechanics effect to any given impairment level – it’s called the modifier. But from there, things can become a lot more complex and sophisticated.

Modifier Pattern
To start with, consider the amount of this modifier. The simplest approach would be -1, -2, -3, or even -4 per external wound level. (Since there are 5 such wound levels, a -4 per level gives a net -20 at the most extreme level).

But there are non-linear models to consider. -1 cumulative would mean that each wound level increases the change in penalty by 1 at each wound level step – so -1, -2, -3, -4, and -5; the cumulative part means that these compound, giving -1, -3, -6, -10, and -15. This result falls somewhere between the flat -2 and -3 results, and has the additional virtue of reducing the impact at lower wound levels. The result, if applied to the simple linear impairment index is not dissimilar to a flat modifier of about -2-and-a-half applied to the geometric or biased impairment models – and is a lot simpler to implement.

Impairment from internal injuries can be considered a separate issue – perhaps a flat -1 or -2 in addition to the modifiers from external injuries, coupled with a point of bleeding, for each of the two internal injury zones.

Modifier to what, exactly?
Next there is the question of what this modifier is applied to. There are many options:

• Attack Rolls – the character’s mobility is impaired, making his reactions slower in battle.
• Damage Rolls – the character’s physical forcefulness is impaired, so he does less damage in melee.
• Saving Throws – the character is impaired both physically and mentally, making it harder to shrug off environmental complications and spell effects
• Skill Checks – the character cannot move or think as freely as usual, making it harder for him to employ skills successfully
• Initiative – the character slows down in battle
• Hit Points – the character does additional damage to himself by acting forcefully while wounded (once per turn or once per attack)
• Armor Class – the character’s mobility is impaired, making him an easier target in battle
• Movement Rate – the character’s mobility is impaired, slowing his movement

These are all reasonable. And then there is the possibility of combinations – a minus one or two to each of these applications (with the exception of movement rate) would not be terribly significant in isolation but when compounded with all the other penalties represented here, it can be enough to swing the tide of a battle. Multiplying the penalty by 5 would give an appropriate measure for loss of movement (i.e., -5′ per -1 penalty).

Complex Models
Nor do all of these have to receive penalties at the same level, or following the same pattern, or even starting at the same impairment zone. Attack Rolls, Saving Throws and Skill Checks might be -2 per wound level, Initiative and Hit Points might be -1 cumulative for each wound level after Zone ‘A’, AC might be -2 and Movement -5′ per wound level after wound level ‘B’. There are so many combinations and so much flexibility that you don’t really need the complications of a geometric impairment index (which is why I didn’t bother doing a graphic for it).

An even more complex solution is to apply different impairment index models (but the same impairment levels) to different character classes by Hit Dice size. Perhaps your d4 and d6-based classes get the benefit of the more benign Biased Linear Index while the higher hit-dice types – the more active combatants, under normal circumstances – have to cope with the more even-handed Simple Linear Index.

Internal Injuries

These got a mention in the previous section, listing a possible penalty to go with an internal injury, but – aside from defining hit point ranges where a character is at risk – we haven’t yet looked at the ways that a character might incur that risk. As usual, there are a couple of options to consider.

None
This model states that – for the sake of simplicity and game-play – internal injuries are ignored or presumed to be included in the existing external injuries. This is the simplest possible approach.

Automatic
This model states that as soon as a character enters the appropriate injury zone, he receives the appropriate injury. This is the simplest approach that actually includes internal injuries.

Automatic With Save
This is exactly the same as the Automatic check except that the character gets some sort of a saving throw each time they take damage while at risk. I would suggest DCs of 15 and 20 for beta and gamma, respectively, as being appropriate. Note that external injury modifiers may make these saves harder to achieve (modifier to the saving throw) or even trigger a mandatory check (modifier to hit points for strenuous activity).

Automatic With Numeric Threshold
In this approach, a character receives an internal injury if they receive a certain quantity of damage in a single attack, or in a single round. If this is the GMs preferred option, I would suggest thresholds of 5, 10, or 20 points (depending on how severe the penalty is). Note that these thresholds may be different if the character’s condition after the attacks are totaled leaves them in zone beta or forces them into zone gamma.

Automatic With Percentage Threshold
This approach inflicts an internal injury when the damage received in a single blow, or alternatively in a single combat round, exceeds a certain percentage of the character’s hit points. If the simple linear index is being used, the gap between zones is 1/6th of the total hit points, and that seems a reasonable threshold. If a more complex index, then it might be easier to state a percentage outright – 10%, say. Note that this approach permits characters to receive internal damage without serious external wounds if zone 0 is larger than the threshold, and provided that the GM has modified the meaning of zone alpha from “no risk” to “low risk” of internal injuries.

The more likely an injury, the smaller the penalty should be. The less likely, the more draconian you can afford to be. Always bear in mind, when considering such choices, that these penalties are in addition to any conferred by the external injuries system.

Differentiation Of Healing

This is where the fun starts. D&D lists several different varieties of Healing Spell, differentiating them by Wound Type – Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, Heal – and I hope I haven’t missed one! Pathfinder preserves this array of choice. When you get right down to it, the only real difference in these spells is the amount of damage they heal – as though they were presuming that injuries totaling a certain amount could be automatically defined as being wounds of a certain degree of seriousness.

In reality, of course, they simply needed a variety of names, and the content of those names is metagame fluff. But that’s what this whole system (and its kindred to follow in other blog posts) are all about – giving same game-mechanics meaning to that fluff, giving it some teeth.

How you apply this differentiation is up to you. The simplest way is for it not to matter – each healing spell does so much healing and that adjusts the character’s position on the impairment chart accordingly.

But there are other, more interesting approaches. You could match each impairment category with a type of damage – Zero and A = light wounds, B & C = moderate, D = serious, E = critical (for example), and state that a lesser form of healing than the one corresponding with the character’s current level of impairment just doesn’t work, or can’t move the character out of that impairment zone. You could state that only Cure Critical Wounds and Heal can restore an internal injury.

You can define Healing potions as CLW only. So you can’t quaff eight or nine or sixteen or whatever to fully recover.

Suddenly, those different spells have a reason to be different, and spell selection for clerics becomes absolutely critical. In fact, a character class that has a Cleric’s combat and spellcasting abilities but a spell list comprising nothing but those Healing spells becomes quite a viable choice (though it would need something else to make up for the other clerical abilities and spells that it was giving up). Call it the Healer?

Even More Fun: Magic! And Class Abilities

By adding another parameter to the handling of damage, Magic can be created by the GM to exploit that parameter. A sword which always inflicts a wound one class higher than the damage would signify. Armor that downgrades impairment levels. A net that impairs a character as though they were one impairment class worse off than they are. A sword that does more damage when the character is seriously impaired, or has some other effect that is triggered only by entry into a given impairment zone (beware of healing effects triggered in this way, they can make a character nearly-invulnerable).

Another potential that these concepts offer are for the creation of class abilities that will further distinguish one class from another. Perhaps some classes take no impairment until zone B, or are treated as being one impairment class better than their current hit points suggest (at least under certain conditions) – A Barbarian’s Rage becomes something more akin to a Berserker attack if he has the latter advantage while Raging, for example.

There’s a general principle here – if you make a change to the game mechanics with a house rule, try to extend it into as many areas as possible. Anything less compromises the uniqueness conferred on the campaign by the presence of that House Rule.

What’s It All For? – The Implications & Benefits

I started this article by suggesting that the reasons for adopting such a system as I have described are flavor. Certainly, they mean that combat takes on a more realistic attribute, where performance in battle is directly compromised by the injuries received. That flavor can also show up in terms of healing and magic items. It certainly gives the GM some direction and foundation for a narrative description of combat, and the flavor that this imparts is reflected back in game mechanics. But there are other implications, some good and some not so good.

Who acts first in a battle become even more important than it was. Having a high Initiative total gives the opportunity to impair a combatant before they even get a chance to strike. For some, that’s a neutral item; for me, that’s a negative (because my NPCs always seem to roll poorly for initiative).

Healing becomes more important, and either a larger slice of the cleric’s role in the party, or the province of a whole new character class. Certainly, the differences between spells that otherwise simply do more or less of the same thing become a lot more significant. That’s both a good thing (the spell definitions) and a bad thing (restricting the role of the cleric).

Critical Hits, which do more damage in a single blow, and hence are more likely to carry a character into an Impairment Zone, also become more than a matter of bookkeeping. That’s a good thing.

Multiple attacks become a more significant step up than a simple multiple of one attack, by virtue of their ability, cumulatively, to force a character into impairment. That’s a bad thing, because it means that the advantages of additional character levels increase at certain points in a character’s history – but that also brings high-level fighters somewhat more in line with the power progression of high-level Wizards, which is a good thing (if you think, as many do, that there is a game imbalance in this area). Wizards become more vulnerable, further eroding any power imbalance; this may provoke more characters to take martial class levels, and that’s probably a bad thing.

Extended combats – ones in which the combatants are closely matched – become more epic. That’s a good thing.

The game in general becomes more lethal, especially to low-level characters and those with small hit dice sizes – that could be either good or bad, depending on a multitude of factors.

Combat becomes something to enter into less lightly and more reluctantly – encouraging everyone to look for non-combat (i.e. roleplay) solutions. Some players will find that a negative, but most players and GMs will view it as a positive.

R&R times between adventures will increase, especially at low- and mid-level, when characters don’t have access to the healing magic they need to recover, and have to lie up until they heal naturally sufficiently for their remaining injuries to be treated magically. That could be good or bad.

The game will certainly be changed, and changed significantly. If your campaign, and the way you want PCs and NPCs to behave, and the tone of adventures and encounters, all support and fit this changed mood, these house rules can be a winner for the whole game. There will be less fantasy and more gritty realism. In a high-fantasy campaign, that can act as a leavening agent; in a mid-to-low fantasy campaign, it can bring the game closer to a historical simulation and less of a comic-book. Is this a change that’s right for you and your game? Yes? No?

Who would have thought that so much impact can be felt from a simple metagame redefinition of the humble Hit Point?

The next part of this trio of articles will look at another option: Hit Points as an index of soft-tissue damage. Part III will consider a high-fantasy variation on the handling of wounds called the Differential Damage Approach (for lack of a better name).

Image: www.freedigitalphotos.net

Last week, I proposed an alternate approach to plotting mysteries that made them more suitable for RPGs and could also be of benefit to mystery writers generally. Due to time pressures, I didn’t include examples – and I wasn’t entirely sure they would be necessary (that’s why I spent some time working on the diagrams; they were supposed to be a combination illustration & abstract example). Nevertheless, I had also intended to include some actual examples, if there was time. Since at least one reader has requested some “real” examples – and since I hold by the tenet that one person making a request represents up to a hundred more who didn’t bother to actually make the request – today’s article consists of those missing examples.

The Jar Of Jam: An example of the Linear mystery

The initial situation: A household contains a three-year-old boy, a five-year-old boy, and a ten-year-old girl, plus mother and father. The Father works Saturdays, departing before the Mother gets out of bed. On the morning in question, he told the Mother as he was leaving that they were out of bread. When she gets up, and before getting breakfast, she nips down to the corner store to buy more. When she returns, she finds what had been a new and unopened jar of jam on the kitchen floor, with half its contents consumed. Her task: to decide Who is responsible.

1. Observation: There are traces of jam on the floor and walls in the rough shape of a small handprint.
2. Observation: The three-year-old’s cheeks are covered in jam.
3. Statement 1: The five-year-old claims to have been playing the PS3 in his room at the time.
4. Statement 2: The ten-year-old claims to have been talking on the phone to one of her friends at the time.
5. Investigation Of statement 1: Plausible, fits the childs habits.
6. Investigation Of statement 2: Plausible, the ten-year old can spend hours on the phone.
7. Suspicion: The three-year-old is immediately the prime suspect, but the evidence is purely circumstantial.
8. Known Fact: Jam-Jars can be very difficult to open for the first time, even some adults struggle unless they know the trick of using a sharp knife to break the vacuum seal first.
9. Deduction: A three-year-old doesn’t have the gripping strength to open such a jar. He may have consumed the jam, but cannot be responsible.
10. Deduction: The same is true of most five-year-olds.
11. Suspicion: The Ten-year-old girl is therefore the new prime suspect.
12. Deduction: A ten-year-old would probably not have consumed jam direct from the jar, she would have made a sandwich.
13. Known Fact: There was no bread to make a sandwich.
14. Deduction: The ten-year-old is therefore probably not responsible.
15. Deduction: Therefore, either the 5-year-old was strong enough to open the jar of jam, despite expectations, or someone else opened it. The only possible “someone else” present in the household at the time is the ten-year-old, who has previously been eliminated.
16. Deduction: If the father gets up before the rest of the family on a Saturday Morning to go to work, he either has no breakfast or makes his own.
17. Deduction: If the father did not make his own breakfast, he would not have known that the family had run out of bread. Therefore, he did, in fact, at least attempt to make his own breakfast.
18. Investigation: Mother asks the five-year-old to help open a new jar of jam and observes his behavior. He struggles with it for a few seconds before giving up. His demeanor displayed some guilt at the mention of Jam, however, and the jar lid is slightly sticky when he returns it to the Mother.
19. Observation: The three-year-old is not tall enough to see a jar of jam left on the breakfast table without climbing onto a chair.
20. Known Fact, not previously revealed: The three-year old can climb onto chairs but does not do so unless others are at the breakfast table.
21. At this point, three plausible solutions are possible. Either the ten-year-old opened the jam to make breakfast while talking on the phone and before realizing that there was no bread left, or the father used the last of the bread for his breakfast, opening the jam and leaving it on the kitchen table. The five-year-old saw the opened jar and ate from it using his fingers before giving it to the three-year-old or leaving it on the table where the three-year-old could get it, or consumed the jam himself and smeared some on the hands and face of his brother to deflect guilt over ‘being naughty’ from himself.
22. Observation: The butter is still on the breakfast table. This supports both possible explanations.
23. Observation: The usual storage location of the jam is beyond the reach of the 3-year-old and reachable only with difficulty (involving moving chairs) for the five-year-old. Since the chairs appear relatively undisturbed, this supports both possible explanations.
24. Observation: There is a bread-and-butter plate in the sink with breadcrumbs on it. Since there was no bread for the ten-year-old to consume, this exonerates her and leaves only one possible guilty party: The absent father. The five-year old is an accessory, but is guilty of lying about his behavior actions, and may be guilty of attempting to frame his brother.
25. Interrogation of the five-year-old confirms the more innocent alternative. He came out for breakfast, followed by his brother, who climbed up onto a kitchen chair because his brother was sitting at the table. He decided that since there was no bread, he would just have jam for breakfast. His brother then demanded some of the jam. They both got down from the table to make it easier for both of them to reach it at the same time.

This was a straightforward, linear, and trivially domestic investigation. There was only ever one solution: Father to Five-year-old to Three-year-old. It was also a very realistic situation that many parents will know from first-hand experience.

Okay, be honest: How many readers suspected the father from the start? And how many were sure of it from item 15 on? Okay, who doesn’t have their metaphoric hand up – no-one? That’s the problem with a linear mystery plot – it can be easy to suspect the identity of the guilty party, and it turns the whole thing into an anticlimax that plods to a solution.

That’s bad in a TV show or piece of fiction. It’s worse in an RPG, and more likely to occur, because you don’t have one person investigating (and possibly missing key facts), you have two, three, four, or more. In fact, it was very hard to slow down enough to identify each concrete step in the above chain of detective work; if all the clues had been presented at once, most people would have the solution in seconds.

The Wounded Monarch: A Parallel Plot

To demonstrate the Parallel Plot, we need a somewhat more complex and significant mystery than the simple story of the Jar Of Jam. We also need a somewhat broader suspect list. At the same time, to keep the example practical (and capable of completion in the time I have available), it must necessarily be limited in scope. So this will not be a complete example, but rather an illustration of the various steps involved in constructing a mystery plot of this sort; where those steps are to be repeated multiple times in order to construct the finished mystery plotline, only one or two iterations will be presented. Anyone who wishes to complete the process of turning it into a complete adventure or suite of fictional accounts is welcome to do so.

I’ll be putting the actual content of each step in a text box like this one to set it off from the description of the process.

1. Initial Briefing

The construction of a Parallel Plot has several elements in common with that of a Linear Plot. You still start with a setup, or initial briefing, which describes the mystery to be solved, but is otherwise devoid of clues or evidence.

While dispensing high justice and hearing supplications from his subjects, someone has shot the King with a crossbow. Fortunately, the bolt missed hitting anything vital, but the rumors have been swirling ever since he was carried away to the Royal Chirurgeon where the bolt was removed. The King is still in considerable distress and not entirely rational following the attack. With the Palace Guards all tasked to defending the King, the PCs have been summoned by the Seneschal to discover who shot the King and Why.

2. Prior Knowledge

It is better to be minimalist here, but context is also very important – clues may exist in the form of encounters that the PCs have had in past adventures. For example, if it is known that there is a conspiracy of high-level mages hunting for a lost artifact, that’s a piece of information that may be relevant if magic or a clue to the artifact appear in the mystery.

So the second thing that the GM should do when constructing a mystery of any sort is to make a note to themselves of any such Prior Knowledge that might be relevant to the mystery, or that the PCs may mistakenly consider relevant.

(Because this is an isolated example and not part of a series of stories or adventures, there should be nothing here. Note that it can be useful, when designing a mystery for an RPG, to work backwards to establish certain facts in advance of the actual adventure – whether that is the presence of a dark cult, personality profiles of selected nobles, or whatever. So you can build a list of “prior knowledge” requirements and then use that as a checklist of elements to include in preceding adventures.)

3. Three Solutions

The next step is to outline at least three solutions to the mystery. These must all be plausible stories that explain what has happened. I’ll call them A, B, and C. So far as possible, they should feature (mostly) the same protagonists, though the relationships between the protagonists, and even elements of their personalities, may vary. These variations should all be consistent in terms of objective behavior, however.

The King was shot by a member of the Assassin’s Guild in fulfillment of a contract with the Earl Of Halsford, who is 14th in the line of succession but who has Crown Prince Harald under his thumb. The Earl then plans to persuade the Prince to permit him to marry the Prince’s daughter, bolstering the Earl’s claim to the throne, and then have the Prince follow his father into the grave. Poison on the bolt has deranged the wounded monarch; the PCs are also required to find a cure BEFORE they can confront the guilty party. The Seneschal, already suspicious of the Earl, has chosen to have outsiders investigate because he does not know who in the court are in league with the Earl.

The King was shot by a member of the Assassin’s Guild in fulfillment of a contract with the Earl Of Halsford, one of the King’s advisors, because the King has become progressively more deranged and the Council Of Advisors are finding it increasingly difficult to conceal this condition from the public while preventing the monarch from doing serious damage to the Kingdom (if not outright disaster). The Earl would be Horrified at any suggestion that he wants to claim the throne himself. But Crown Prince Harald is not a strong character, and the Earl fears that a court faction led by the Seneschal will unite behind the Princess Alyssa – unless he can force the Prince to marry her off to someone who will blunt her ambitious nature, preventing a Civil War. The Seneschal, who fears a disaster should the Prince ascend the throne, has brought the PCs in to conduct the investigation because he suspects the Earl, and can use the incident to discredit both the Earl and the Prince and possibly even have the Prince removed from the line of Succession as a traitor. Rumors of poison are being spread to explain the King’s current incapacity, but in fact there is no poison and the incapacity predates the attack.

While the Seneschal and Earl of Halsford each lead a faction within the court and would like to blame each other, one a supporter of the Crown Prince and the other a supporter of the Princess Alyssa, neither had anything to do with the plot. The assassin was a deranged individual whose life was destroyed by a poorly thought out Royal Decree. He believes that the King, who was once good, wise, and kindly, has been possessed by a demonic evil and must be destroyed. In truth, the King has NOT been possessed, but he has been replaced by a Doppelganger. The PCs have been brought in to investigate the attempted assassination because neither faction would trust any member of the court acceptable to the other (and the undecided are courtiers and idiots who couldn’t be trusted to investigate a birthday party). The Doppelganger keeps a vial of Lamb’s Blood on hand at all times to fake any apparent injury necessary. There was no poison on the bolt at the time, but another Doppelganger has anointed it with some after the “King” was wounded to mislead investigators who might otherwise want to poke and pry. * NB * This solution works exceptionally well if the ideas in The Complete Guide To Doppelgangers by Goodman Games, or in my addendum to that game supplement (described in ‘The Hidden Truth Of Doppelgangers’) is used.

Notice how much these three theories have in common? In all three, we have the Seneschal and Earl of Halsford as antagonists toward each other. In all three, we have a King with a reputation for wisdom and kindness and being a good ruler. It might have been helpful to establish the existence of the Assassin’s Guild and the rivalry between the two factions in advance, but these can be brought out by witness statements.

4. Mouthpieces

Next, we need to “Salt” the adventure with people who will espouse the motivations contained within each of these three theories. The deranged peasant in the third can act as his own spokesman, but it would be helpful for the others to come from the outside – the innkeeper where the PCs are staying, a member of the watch, whatever. These exist only to ensure that the possible theory is in front of the PCs for the players to consider.

5. Hotheads, Reactionaries, and Red Herrings

Next, we need a couple of hotheads from each faction (and I count the followers of the lunatic and those who oppose them as factions, bringing the total to four), who will blame the other without need for tedious investigation, and act accordingly.

We also need to make a note of anyone who would have strong reactions to the events, deciding that the time is right to set plans of their own in motion. A lieutenant of the guards might see this as a chance to eliminate his captain, ensuring his own promotion, in the hope that by making the crime look similar to that under investigation, the same person or persons will be blamed for both.

Thirdly, there will always be a couple of people who will seek to exploit the situation for gain. While some of these may be obvious – “King Ramus Memorial Mugs” – others will be more subtle, involving perhaps trade deals or illegal acts that would normally not be permitted but which might escape notice while everyone is distracted by something more important. All three of these groups are Red Herrings but they are also plausible suspects.

6. Witnesses & Confusion

Finally, we need to populate our cast with a number of witnesses – some of whom are truthful, some of whom are not, and some of whom just want attention.

Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence there is – it’s even worse than circumstantial evidence or hearsay. At the same time, it can often be the most powerful testimony in convincing investigators of what took place. (For more on this, I strongly encourage everyone – GMs and Players alike – to read:

• Eyewitness Testimony Can Be Tragically Mistaken, an article at the Live Science website; and
• The Certainty Of Memory Has Its Day In Court from the New York Times.

So we need some wheat, and a heap of chaff to hide it in. Everything from Halflings riding miniature dragons to magically-animated shadows to members of the Palace Guard attacking the King with swords. Witnesses should disagree on the number of assassins, the number of shots, the type of weapon, ages, descriptions, genders, and clothing. Make up the nonsense now so that you can avoid distracting yourself with it while working on the real clues.

6. The first trail of breadcrumbs

Next, we need to outline a trail of breadcrumbs that lead the PCs to solution A. These should be everything from true statements by witnesses – the “wheat” mentioned above – to physical evidence. This is the trail that, if followed, will solve the crime – if Solution A is the real answer.

This trail of breadcrumbs can be simplified into larger chunks and then broken into details, which tends to make life easier. For example, for solution A, we might have

Bolt to Assassin’s Guild to Earl of Halsford to Prince Harald to Princess Alissa to The Plan To Usurp The Throne to Poison to Cure to Solution.

It’s necessary to break those landmarks down into individual steps before the path of the investigation can become clear:

Bolt to Expert Fletcher to Assassin’s Guild as suspects. Watch Crime Reports (Dead bodies) to General Location Of Assassin’s Guild. Street Rumor (investigation) to Specific Location of Assassin’s Guild. Raid on Assassin’s Guild to Guild Records to Earl’s Pseudonym & Method Of Payment. Method Of Payment to Earl’s Estate to Meaning Of Pseudonym to Identity Of Earl. Identity of Earl to Relationship with Prince Harald. Prince Harald’s history and personality to Earl’s Plans (suspicion only). Investigation of Earls Estate to confirmation of Earl’s Plans for Princess Alyssa. Suspected Nature Of Poison Used to Search Of Earl’s Estate to Dark Elven Outpost. Raid On Dark Elven Outpost to confirmation of Agreement between Earl & Dark Elves. Dark Elven Poison to Elven Lands to Cure for Poison. Cure For Poison to Recovery Of The King to Confrontation With The Earl. Capture Of The Earl to Solution.

That’s a substantial adventure in four parts – the Mystery, the Assassin’s Guild, the Earl’s Estate and Dark Elves, and finally the confrontation with the Earl and Cure of the King.

But Players are fickle and unlikely to follow the train-tracks of such a straightforward plotline, and nor should they. They might well focus on the poison first, or decide that the Assassin’s Guild is too obvious, or any of a dozen other possibilities. It was contemplating that reality that led to the invention of the Parallel Plot approach.

When you look over such a detailed list of breadcrumbs, you soon find that things are missing, as well. For example, there is nothing there about the factions within the court, but an understanding of the nature of those factions is critical to understanding the relationship between the Earl and the rest of the Royal Family. That information needs to be inserted at the very top of the investigation, before the PCs even get to the Bolt, and while they are still interviewing witnesses.

7. & 8. The other breadcrumb trails

Repeat the above procedure for plotlines B and C. Don’t be surprised if there is considerable overlap. Remember that at the moment, all three solutions are equally valid.

Key Switching Points

The next step is to determine which of these events are Key Switching Points. Solutions A and B, in the case of the example, are perfectly parallel right up to the plans for the Princess Alyssa and the encounter with the Dark Elves – since there was no poison. That makes this a key switching point between solutions A and B.

9. The Innocence Flags

The final preliminary prep that is needed is to identify, in each of the solutions, evidence that will disprove the other two, leaving that solution as the one true story. What is the central point of difference, and how can these be brought to the attention of the PCs?

These are events, and evidence, that can ONLY occur if the solution that contains them is the correct one. These will usually be found at the Key Switching Points; they are the branching points in the flowchart of the investigation. For example, if solution B is the correct answer, then even if there is a Dark Elven Enclave on the Earl’s estates that is proffered up to the PCs as a Red Herring, they will find evidence that the Earl (who in solution B is a good guy, if ruthless) has opposed and tried to eliminate the Dark Elves, not that he did a deal with them to get a rare poison that induces madness, and whose effects linger even after the poison itself is neutralized.

10. Who says what

With the solutions now mapped out, just as a list of quick notes like the one presented above, and some definition of the personalities involved, it is now possible to determine who says what to the PCs, and when – in other words, to construct a list of initial clues and subsequent ones. The Earl will accuse the Seneschal, the Seneschal will accuse the Earl, the Lunatic will accuse the Demons, his enemies (the churches) will accuse the Lunatic, and so on. You can determine who has a reason to lie under each of the possible solutions, and about what, and construct a table accordingly, as shown in the previous post (and replicated below).

As much as possible, each witness should say exactly the same thing, regardless of which solution is correct. But some of what they say will be the truth in one solution and a lie in one or more of the other solutions. Use wit and double-meanings as necessary to achieve this.

Often, the “person” saying something will be the GM interpreting a skill or observation roll. “I examine the bolt – what do I see?” This is every bit a witness statement as anything said by an NPC, but it must never be a lie – though it might be a mistake, or misleading. Never assume that a PC will succeed or fail in any given role of the dice, either – eventually it will catch you out.

Anything that a PC is expected to determine using his own senses or skills should be backed up by a witness saying the same thing. Just in case. And if a PC’s extraordinary perception is going to give the solution away immediately, make sure that someone has the means of confounding that perception, and a reason to be doing so.

The Power Of The Parallel Plot

Because you have three possible solutions to the mystery and don’t have to choose between them right away, two of the three become false trails while the remaining solution becomes the truth. The answer that the PCs decide to focus on obviously seems to be the truth to them, or at least the most likely to be the truth; if this really were to be the truth, the end of the adventure would be truly anticlimactic. Deciding that the first solution they investigate is NOT true leaves you with two, and a guaranteed plot twist part way through the adventure. You can then focus your efforts on making one of those remaining solutions seem to be the truth when it isn’t, building in yet another guaranteed plot twist, or on using the third solution to raise doubts about their proposed – second – solution until the very last minute, your choice.

Remember the limitations of your players

I have one player (and a very good friend) who appears in my campaigns from time to time (and who has popped up as a commentator/contributor here at CM in the past) who loves Sherlock Holmes and enjoys some other mystery authors – but who is not very good at detective work, himself, and who becomes extremely frustrated when confronted with such plotlines as a result. For him to get full enjoyment out of a mystery plotline, he needs a constant stream of obvious clues and lines of investigation to follow – give him those and he’s as happy as a clam (He’ll know who I’m referring to).

The lesson is this: Plan your mysteries based on the limitations and abilities of your players. Don’t hand them anything they will ferret out for themselves on a silver platter (or they will busy themselves with ferreting out something else that might be more damaging to your plans) – but don’t let the adventure bog down too much if your player doesn’t have the knack of thinking a certain way.

This ia an art that takes practice. There is a fine line between catering to your players capacities and being condescending toward them. So aim for a level of sophistication and difficulty that is just a little above what you think they can handle – and then give them a helping hand across the final threshold if they need it.

My personal solution

Someone is sure to ask, so here is my personal solution to The Mystery Of The Wounded Monarch (and yes, it’s a further step up in sophistication): All three solutions are partially true. As a GM, I will do my best to make the solution A appear to be true at first, right up to the flag point regarding the Drow. At the same time, I will do my best to ensure that solution C appears to be a Red Herring by constantly foisting apparent railroad tracks leading toward it in the direction of the PCs – then letting them ‘jump the tracks’. Putting the lunatic front and centre and then being dismissive of him as a harmless fruitcake with a bee in his bonnet will distract the players. I will then have Solution B appear to be the correct solution, right up to the point where the PCs have to make the moral judgment that’s implied between letting the Earl get away with a very bad deed in furtherance of a righteous cause or exposing him and letting the Seneschal sow the seeds of Civil War. Once the mystery has apparently been resolved, I will have the lunatic expose the reason for the King’s seeming loss of touch with reality as his replacement by a doppelganger (Solution C).

So A is partly true (it was the Earl) but B is partly true (it was a desperate attempt to prevent a Civil War, and his oath to the Kingdom is more important to the Earl than his oath to the King or his personal Honor) and C is partly true (the King really has been replaced/possessed, not be a Demon but by a Doppelganger) – which means that the consequences of the PCs moral choice will be visited apon the Kingdom almost immediately.

Sounds like fun to me!

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AetherCon is coming!

(As any viewer of Babylon-5 knows, a Zocolo is a marketplace or gathering place).

The unusually observant may have noticed a new link in our right-hand Navigation. AetherCon is an idea that has arrived at exactly the right time – just as the required technologies and their distribution intersect with the realm of possibility that is required to make it work.

So what is AetherCon, exactly?

AetherCon is the first example (that I’m aware of) of a new (to me) concept: the virtual convention – a gaming convention that is held purely and completely over the internet.

Just like any other convention, it will have a huckster’s area, an art show, games and tournaments, areas for con “attendees” to mingle and chatter and meet one another, and so on. The only difference is that it will take place entirely within cyberspace.

Many of the building blocks for such a convention have been in existence for a while now, waiting for someone to assemble and package them in the right way. People have played RPGs in chat rooms before, for example, and there have been podcasts and streamed interviews, which are virtually the same thing as an online “Panel”. E-commerce has been around for years. Twitter’s been around for a while, and Tweetchat can turn Twitter into a virtual chatroom within a chatroom using the magic of hashtags. One such regular “virtual chatroom” that’s been around for a while is #RPGChat; I’ve only had the opportunity to participate in one, but gained some new friends and followers from the experience, and picked up a couple of new ideas for my trouble. It was quite rewarding :)

But playing games in this way is somehow less stimulating than the genuine tabletop experience with its interactivity. What will make AetherCon really work is a new piece of virtual tabletop software, currently in Beta test, Roll20.

AetherCon is scheduled to take place on the weekend of November 16-18, 2012.

And here’s the best part: It’s absolutely Free!. No registration fees. No registration QUEUS. No sudden rushing from one room to another after a panel is relocated.

Distributed Conventioneering

One of the big reasons why I expect AetherCon to be very successful, and why Campaign Mastery is so happy to be associated with it, is the fact that attendance is distributed all over the planet. It has the potential, therefore, to become the biggest convention in the world. This first effort is the first raindrop of a monsoon.

Furthermore, with GMs scattered around the globe in different time zones, with a little scheduling effort and the right volunteers, a virtual convention could operate 24 hours a day, with GMs and administrators in one country taking up the baton from those in another. Even if were a convention you had to pay for, that means that attendees would get more value for their dollar – and however much it costs to line up sufficient servers to run the convention, I am quite sure that the cost per attendee would be far less than a ‘conventional’ con, which has to worry about renting facilities, refreshments, insurance, and so on. That’s a savings that can be passed on to the customer – and it also means that virtual conventions would be more easily profitable.

The advantages just keep adding up. Have you ever missed a convention panel you were interested in because it was scheduled back-to-back with another one that you also wanted to attend? A streamed convention panel can be recorded, and a text-based one can be automatically transcribed – and both can be downloaded for “attending” at a later time, just like a podcast.

Guest fees are almost certainly going to be less, because there is no need to pay for transport and accommodation. That’s either more guests or even lower prices! Because guest commitments can be smaller – they can attend from home, or from wherever else they happen to be – guests should also be easier to find and organize. What do you need – ten bucks for a webcam and twenty towards internet fees and electricity?

At some conventions, guests are paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and justifiably so – they have a lot of demands on their time, and a convention can be a big commitment. Add security and other overheads, and the total can be staggering. The virtual convention undercuts all these requirements, all these expenses.

And finally, there is the international appeal. I live in Australia – for an American or European guest to attend a convention here, the air fares are thousands of dollars, the time commitments are much greater (call it a couple of days spent travelling), the guest is often jetlagged. It not only makes it much more expensive to have such guests, making cons more expensive and less profitable, you have far fewer guests when you do organize a convention. The virtual convention internationalizes attendance. It doesn’t matter much where the convention is being based, or where the guest lives, or even if they are working – on a movie, TV show, or whatever. It would be a lot easier to get Peter Jackson on a webcam for a panel for an hour than to get him to physically attend a con, especially if he was in the middle of editing or shooting his next movie. Does anyone seriously think he wouldn’t be a popular guest at a gaming con? It just hasn’t been practical in the past. It still might not be easy, but it’s suddenly not out of the realm of possibility!

So, let’s talk about AetherCon

AetherCon, as befits any prototype, is not organized on a scale to match these grandiose visions, but it’s still impressive. AetherCon is a free to attend, free to partake, non-profit initiative.

It will feature tabletop RPGs of all genres throughout the weekend, highlighted by four three-day tournaments of Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, and Shadowrun. Game tables will be run on the Roll20 browser-based virtual tabletop. There will be Roll20 tutorials and a Roll20 Live Stream. The Roll20 program will allow GMs and players alike to simply click on a link in our Gaming or Tourney Halls and enter the playing area as opposed to needing to download and install the software to participate.

Game publishers confirmed as taking part in AetherCon either through prize support, supplying guests, or taking a vendors booth include Battlefield Press, Catalyst Game Labs, Chaosium, Chronicles of the Void, Flying Buffalo Inc., Immersion Studios, Imperfekt Games, Kenzer and Company, Paizo, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Scrying Eye Games, Skirmisher Publishing LLC, Stardust Publications, Sundered Epoch, The Design Mechanism, Third Eye Games, and Vigilance Press.

Confirmed guests to date are Wedge Smith and Doug Bush (Chronicles of the Void), Steven ‘Bull’ Ratkovich (CGL), James Sutter (Paizo), and Lawrence Whittaker and Pete Nash (The Design Mechanism).

Current Members of the Artists Enclave include Paul Abrams (TSR, Shadowrun); Alex E. Alonso Bravo (DC Comics, Pixar, AEG); Brent Chumley (AEG); John L Kaufmann (Shadowrun); Eric Lofgren; (Paizo, White Wolf, Mongoose Publishing), Chris Malidore (Fantasy Flight Games, PEG), Patrick McAvoy (WotC, AEG, Fantasy Flight Games), Brad McDevitt (Chaosium, CGL, Battlefield Press), Jesse Mead (Fantasy Flight Games), Aaron B. Miller (WotC, AEG, Open Design), and Stanley Morrison (AEG) – among other up and comers in the field. Some of the work by these artists is available as computer wallpapers for free download from the AetherCon website, and Convention attendees will have the opportunity to purchase prints of these and other works as well as attend live tutorials by those artists during AetherCon.

Confirmed games now include:

• All Flesh Must Be Eaten
• A Thousand and One Nights
• Atomic Highway
• Call of Cthulhu
• Castles & Crusades
• Dark Heresy
• Eclipse Phase
• Fantasy Craft
• Labyrinth Lord
• Legend of the Five Rings
• Leverage
• Mouse Guard
• Mutants & Masterminds
• Paranoia
• Pathfinder
• Pathfinder Society
• RIFTs
• Savage Worlds
• Serenity
• Shadowrun
• Time Lord
• Star Wars WEG D6
• Swords and Wizardry

…with more to come.

How to participate

If you’d like to play in a game use AetherCon’s Player Pre-Registration Tool to register.

If you’d like to run a game use their GM Pre-Registration Tool.

If you don’t see your game in their lineup, would like to lend a hand, or need to inquire for any other reason, they encourage potential attendees to feel free to use their ‘Contact Us’ page.

Be sure to visit their website and show your support for AetherCon via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter:

• Website: http://www.AetherCon.com/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AetherConRPG
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/AetherCon
• Google+: http://www.gplus.to/AetherCon

The Shape Of Things To Come

I’m proud that Campaign Mastery is a supporter of AetherCon and wish the organizers every success. I’ll be updating this post regularly in response to releases from the convention website, and I’ll post a comment each time I do. So if you want to use Campaign Mastery to stay informed, post a comment to this post and tick the box to subscribe to further comments.

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I was running an adventure this weekend from a module that I had downloaded from the net. Central to the plotline was a mystery, a political situation in a small town, stories of an ancient Curse, all calculated to drive the PCs to an above-ground dungeon which could also be called a Mansion.

While the content that was provided was excellent, the author had ignored a couple of plot holes – or plot opportunities – as large as the mansion that was the central feature. Specifically, a historical mention of a drought and a plague of snakes, and the arrival virtually simultaneously with those events of a band of Druids who had set up shop in a grove outside of town. To anyone except the author of the module, it would seem obvious that these events are possibly linked, and that investigating the Druids was a rational step in solving the mystery.

The problem was that no details useful in roleplaying the Druids had been supplied. There was no statement as to what information they could contribute if their cooperation was won over, no suggestion as to what fees & services they might demand in exchange for their assistance – in fact, beyond the fact of their existence, and that they had converted one-quarter of the locals to their theology, there was virtually nothing about them.

Since I had already been preparing to write an article on how to do Mysteries in RPGs, the failures of this adventure in this department struck home all the more forcefully. So, what should the author have done? I’ll get to that a little later. Let’s start by looking at the taxonomy of mysteries and laying some groundwork…

The Elements Of A Mystery

Anytime you have a question that needs answering in an RPG, you have a mystery on your hands. It might be a small-scale puzzle whose solution only requires asking the right person the right question, or it might be quagmire of lies and deception that will require substantial investigation.

The Focus

Mysteries all start with a Focus. In a crime-style mystery, this is the victim; in other kinds of mysteries, it may be some unexpected scientific outcome or unexpected event or surprising decision or action. In other words, it’s always “X did something” or “Something happened to X”, and the question to be answered is always, “Why?”.

From the circumstances and conditions, clues are gathered and a list of potential suspects – theories – is formed. These are then investigated, hopefully leading to other clues, eliminating suspects until only one remains, and all clues have been tied to this person or cause with none remaining to be investigated.

The Suspect Triangle

At it’s heart, a mystery – any mystery – can be summed up, “Who did what, why, how, when, and where?”. These elements are summed up in the Suspect Triangle. The top half of this inverted triangle covers Motive, subdivided into Who and Why, while the bottom half deals with Means & Opportunity in the shape of the questions How, When, and Where.

All three areas of the triangle need to be filled with something that is uncontradicted and undisputed before you can consider someone a genuine suspect, and only if you have eliminated all other suspect triangles can guilt be confirmed and the mystery be considered solved.

Of course, that’s a very crime-oriented approach; but substituting “What” for “Who” covers all the other types of mystery which may be encountered.

The Clue Process

Each clue is subject to a three-step process, without fail.

• Detection, in which the presence of a possible clue is identified;
• Analysis, in which the specifics of the clue are determined; and
• Interpretation, in which the meaning and significance of the clue with respect to one or more suspect triangles is determined.

Each clue adds an item to one or more of the areas of the suspect triangle for some suspects, while demonstrating that one or more other suspects could not be responsible.

The Investigation Procedure

This relationship between clue and suspect triangle is depicted in the graphic showing The Ideal Situation. Ask the right questions – and each question-and-answer constitutes a single clue – and you will only be left with a single suspect, the guilty party.

This question-answer-meaning trio corresponds with the structure of a clue. The trio can be taken literally, where each question is asked of a witness to the event being investigated or to part of the circumstances surrounding it, or metaphorically, where the question can relate to physical evidence, historical relationships, financial information, and so on.

The Lie

Mysteries would be easy to solve if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They don’t.

One person in particular – the guilty party – has every reason in the world to lie. This is so axiomatic that discovery of a lie is tantamount to elevating the liar to the status of Prime Suspect.

A lie works as depicted in the illustration: by shifting apparent guilt or by contradicting part of the suspect triangle to show that the guilty party could not have committed the crime. In this case, a truthful statement would have led directly to the first suspect (the one on the left), but the lie makes it seem like the second suspect is guilty rather than the first, or makes it appear that the guilty party could not have been responsible because he no longer had one or more of means, motive, or opportunity.

Mysteries in Media & Fiction

Making a mystery more interesting requires that things not be so clear-cut. One of the easiest ways of achieving this is the introduction of a lie for some reason other than guilt in relation to the main mystery. Blackmail, an adulterous relationship, the commission of a minor but unrelated crime or impropriety, seeking to protect someone who the liar thought was guilty, protection of social status or reputation; there are a multitude of possible reasons for such a deception. Only once this second lie has been identified and the deception penetrated can the other lie, that of the guilty party, be verified and proof of guilt obtained.

This gives us the simplest of satisfying mystery structures – the Linear Mystery. The name derives from the fact that one step follows another in logical progression, like the pages of a script or the chapters of a novel. The first clue describes the circumstances of the crime; the second represents the line of questioning that initially leads to the questioning of the guilty party. The Guilty party lies, of course. The next clue represents the questioning of everyone else except the second liar. Everything else not shown in the linear mystery is essentially irrelevant, window dressing and red herrings.

Going too far

It’s tempting to set up a mystery in which every person interviewed has a reason for deception as a way of increasing the difficulty of the puzzle. Having tried this for myself, I can state that it is definitely going too far, and ended up generating more confusion once the lies were detected than is really suitable. There are better approaches, which I will discuss in due course.

The Clever Alternative

At this point, I have to confess to a fondness for the Columbo telemovies, especially the later ones. Many of them use intelligence and cunning in place of such crude tactics as described by the linear plot. Arranging matters so that everyone can speak the truth and still be misleading is a far better solution than a linear plot. This requires a deception as to the nature of one of the lower elements of the suspect triangle – altering the apparent time of commission of the crime being investigated, for example, or the apparent whereabouts of the prime suspect at the time of commission through the use of some form of impersonation. Having everything but one small overlooked detail covered shifts the nature of the mystery to a battle of wits between the guilty party and the investigator.

Further Complications

Investigators generally have one or more additional complications to work around. These usually (but not always) take the form of legal requirements which must be met before certain clues can be accessed.

The Parallel Plot

Roleplaying Games do not proceed in a nice, neat, Linear fashion. Players are too creative, and too cynical, for any such simple structure to suffice. They are too prone to reason, “If I assume that {suspect 1] is guilty, how can I reconcile that with the evidence the GM has put before me?” They will then test the assumptions they have made, setting traps, violating strict legal practice regarding the obtaining of evidence, or doing whatever else is necessary.

The solution is the Parallel Plot. I simply take a Linear Mystery and list of possible suspects and use the player’s own techniques against them. I shortlist a group of suspects, and then determine which ‘clues’ are lies and deceptions of various types, the penetration of which will lead to the unmasking of the culprit. I then do the same for the second suspect in the shortlisted group, and then a third.

This prevents shortcutting the mystery by ensuring that the Nth approach to the puzzle is the correct one. All the lines of enquiry the Players make which precedes the Nth approach lead to dead-ends, because the correct line of enquiry is always the last one.

Practicalities

This might seem like a lot of work, but it can be achieved relatively simply if the GM, when designing the adventure, employs only a short phrase to synopsise each clue. Setting up a table like this:

makes it simple work. For each clue, you simply need to determine whether the clue is true or not, given the identity of the guilty party (shown across the top). Using this table, you can quickly identify which statements need to be prepared in more than one form (truth or lie); for each lie, you can add a notation about why the source of the clue is lying, how the lie can be penetrated, and so on. Numbering each clue in this respect and indexing by source down the left-hand column, again as shown, turns the table into a crib sheet showing all possible solutions.

The result is that you have a list of the clues (which don’t change, but whose circumstances might), and additional notes regarding them, all of which can be organised by source and by clue number. Any clues that don’t specifically lead to the guilty party are, by definition, clues pointing to a non-guilty party – a red herring or a dead-end.

Beyond The Clichés

You can wrap a mystery, created in this manner, around any genre you like, from Fantasy to Pulp to Superhero to Western to Cthulhu to Sci-Fi, because the structure doesn’t change, only the content.

Each of these genres will have its own clichés in this respect. I urge you to get these all out of your system at once so that you can concentrate on more interesting and original approaches thereafter. By way of example, the first adventure that I ran utilizing the Parallel Plot structure was for the graduation exams in my trainee superhero campaign, where each player was presented with the same mystery in turn, and had to solve it. All but one of the five student PCs chose a different guilty party because the right answers kept changing to whatever was most interesting to play. The setting was a convention of butlers – one of whom was the killer and one the victim. I was even able to title the ‘adventure’, “The Butler Did It!” without giving anything away – this article has been titled in reminiscence of that adventure.

Technology & Magic

In the foreword to Asimov’s Mysteries, Isaac discusses the perceived difficulties of uniting the mystery genre with science fiction in his foreword. I’d like to start this section by quoting some selected passages from that essay:

…yet science fiction writers seemed to be inhibited in the face of the science fiction mystery.

Back in the late 1940s, this was finally explained to me. I was told that ‘by its very nature’ science fiction would not play fair with the reader. In a science fiction story, the detective could say, ‘But as you know, Watson, ever since 2175, when all Spaniards learned to speak French, Spanish has been a dead language. How came Juan Lopez, then, to speak those significant words in Spanish?‘

Or else, he could have his detective whip out an odd device and say, ‘As you know, Watson, my pocket-franistran is perfectly capable of detecting the hidden jewel in a trice.’

Such arguements did not impress me. It seemed to me that ordinary mystery writers (non-science-fiction variety) could be just as unfair to the readers. They could hide a necessary clue. They could introduce an additional character from nowhere. They could …

…The point was, though, that they didn’t do anything. They stuck to the rule of being fair to the reader. Clues might be obscured, but not omitted… …The reader was remorselessly misdirected, misled, and mystified, but he was not cheated.

It seemed, then, a matter to be taken obviously for granted that the same would apply to a science-fiction mystery. You don’t spring new devices on the reader and solve the mystery with them. You don’t take advantage of future history to introduce ad hoc phenomena. In fact, you carefully explain all facets of the future background well in advance…

Magic and the other trappings of Fantasy are just as problematic, because (by definition) they contravene what we know as physical laws. If they exist, they make possible the otherwise impossible. But the same solution holds – understand how it works, what its limitations are, and how it affects cause-and-effect, and make sure that any relevant information is provided to the PCs trying to solve your mystery.

It’s an additional complication, but one that yields great rewards in the long run.

Some final principles

When you are preparing a mystery – whether for a story or for an RPG adventure – there are some key steps and principles that you should keep in mind.

1. Where might information be found?
2. What do these sources know? What will they speculate? What will they get wrong, for reasons of prejudice or other failure?
3. What do the investigators need to know in order to solve the mystery?
4. Where can they get that information?
5. Where Else can they get that information?
6. What can your players do? What can their characters do? What are their respective strengths and weaknesses? How can you utilize the former to drive the plot forward, and how can you ensure that the latter don’t make it come unstuck?
7. What will be tedious to play through, and how can it be made interesting?
8. Mystery plots are inevitably frustrating at some point – how can you relieve that frustration? Will a little random action suffice?
9. If the players get totally lost, how can you help nudge them forward?
10. What DON’T you want the players to learn – and how can you avoid it, while still being fair?
11. How can you make sure that everyone has fun while solving the mystery?

It is in failure to address the first two points that the designer of the module I was GMing, and which I referred to at the start of this article, failed to perform his due diligence. The first item should have turned up the potential for investigation of the Druids, and the second one should have provided the answers necessary to keep the plot rolling along.

One other tip: It helps a great deal with the last couple of items on the list if players can find things out for themselves with their characters, rather than being spoon-fed answers through dialogue!

One Final Technique – and its pitfalls

A technique that I have used occasionally is to create a puzzle without creating a solution. Let the PCs investigate and theorize about possible solutions until you hear one that you like – then expropriate it, give it a slight twist to make it your own, and run with it.

Sounds simple, right? There’s a sting in the tail. If you don’t know where the PCs are going, they can end up painted into a corner. You are not guaranteed that there will BE a solution, after all. You can accept a solution, only to realize, months later – or for a player to realize after such a time-span – that the solution contradicts one or more of the clues that you fed the players and which was overlooked when they came up with their solution.

It gets more complicated – what if, on being confronted, the accused had admitted his guilt – and months later, a line of thought proved that he wasn’t guilty? Why had he lied? Why go to prison, or get executed, or whatever, if he wasn’t guilty? Was he protecting someone or something sufficiently important to justify this sacrifice? Was he misled, or stupid, or forced to confess by back-room interrogation techniques?

What if you’ve lost all your notes in the meantime?
I strongly recommend that if you adopt this technique – which can be an invaluable one – you make DARNED sure that you begin making contingency plans immediately for the possibility that the train will go off the rails at some future point!

Of course, the same thing can happen with ANY mystery if the GM doesn’t get his logic right, so this is good general advice for ANY mystery!

Immersion

A good mystery can produce greater immersion in the campaign world than any other plotline, but you need to hook the players. It’s a great way to take the campaign background and setting and make it relevant to the PCs. A bad mystery can confuse, obfuscate, and – in general – have exactly the opposite effect. The advice above should help bring you more of the successes and make failures fewer. That’s a good thing, don’t you agree?

Update 25 May, 2021

There are now two sequels to this article:

• The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, and
• Delving Deeper Into Mystery.

Links open in new tabs.

Campaign Mastery is incredibly proud and humbled (and not a little excited-exuberant-exultant!) to learn that we are amongst the five Nominees for Best Blog at this year’s ENnies (Wikipedia Page) – (full list of nominees here).

The competition will be stiff, there are many other fine blogs nominated (and even more that didn’t make the five) – and that should be a source of pride for the entire gaming industry. I want to congratulate all our fellow-nominees.

With the judges choices made, it is now over to you, the public, to vote for your favorites in each category. Voting starts a week from now (on July 20th) and runs until July 29th. I’ll share a link when voting starts.

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Thank you to the judges for choosing Campaign Mastery as one of the five finalists, and a huge thank-you to our fans, followers, contributors, and – heck, to anyone who’s even thought about clicking a link to us! Without your support, this would never have happened!

Yaaa-hoo!

Planet Hell by Zakeros – click the thumbnail to view the image full-sized (it’s worth it!)

One of the big questions that every GM should consider when creating their D&D campaign is how to resolve the anarchy of the theological implications of the cosmology.

It’s a simple question: In a world where miracles are readily apparent at the hands of every cleric, where Gods and Demons and Devils and Heaven and Hell are demonstrably real, why would anyone in their right minds choose to be evil?

A proven eternity of torment awaits anyone who transgresses, according to standard theology – and even if you found room for doubt based on a multiplicity of theologies, why would you take a chance?

In standard christian belief, Evil can succeed in tempting the weak because there is room for doubt and confusion. As soon as there is concrete evidence, never mind proof, resistance to temptation should rocket skywards.

D&D attempts to resolve this solution by utilizing multiple pantheons and different versions of Hell (in the form of the planes of the Abyss) but the solution is only half-hearted. Devils and Demons remain standard (if high-level) encounters, and much of the descriptions of the 9 Hells and other planes of the Abyss are relatively standard extracts from christian belief.

The Fumanor Solution

So concerned was I about this particular problem that I decided to do away with evil entirely within the theology of my Fumanor campaign, making it all about a Nihilistic Chaos and a Desperately Rigid Order.

Of course, the morality of the situation I devised is not that simple. The Chaos powers are too disorganized to plan, instead coming up with new stratagems on the spot and executing them immediately. That doesn’t make them dumb, by any means – in fact, they are frighteningly intelligent. It can be argued that it takes even more intellectual firepower to fight an organized planner to a standstill than it does to devise and prepare contingency plans in case your current scheme fails.

Because the landscape keeps shifting on them, the Gods are forced to continually reassess and revise their plans, being forced into progress despite themselves, when what they would prefer would be to act as a constant, consistent foundation for the mercurial changes of mortals to build apon.

The two sides really do need each other in order to be complete, but both consider any such proposal to be heresy of the worst kind.

There is also an interesting moral inversion at work in that the progressives are frequently painted as being the good guys and the conservatives the bad, out of touch with reality. The result is a very 1950s flavor to the campaign, which at the same time is also very modern.

Everything that connects with the problem described in my opening paragraphs is explained as the manifestation or creation of one side or another. The Chaos Powers created demons to do their bidding, so the Gods created devils to interfere and compete with the Demons while creating Celestials to oppose both and keep them in check. All the temptations of evil are actually manifestations of Chaos. What the PCs have yet to realize is that so are al changes for the better. :)

The Fumanor Solution was not intended to become the be-all and end-all answer to the problem; I fully expected to need to implement one of the two solutions given below. It just worked out that I could answer all my questions using the fundamental Law-vs-Chaos conflict that I had already made fundamental to that campaign – if not perfectly, then at least, well enough.

Do as I say, not as I do

The Fumanor solution is a half-measure, and I’m the first to admit it. That it works is immaterial to that assessment. There are better answers.

There are two real solutions to these quandaries that I have been able to come up with, and detailing them is the purpose of this article.

What Fools These Mortals Be

The first solution is to link alignment with intelligence, and decide that only the foolish will ignore these obvious moral warnings. The forces of true evil have always been described as infernally deceptive manipulators, after all, and it is not unreasonable that the less-intellectually profound could be misled into a fatal mistake.

This approach mandates a different, even biased, handling of alignment transgressions than that described in the rulebooks. There can be no forgiveness – any moral lapse must leave a permanent stain apon the character of the transgressor. Absolution is a myth under this paradigm, or almost so – perhaps it is simply two, three, four, or even five times as hard to regain lost moral ground.

Under these circumstances, using the planes of Evil for afterlives of torment and punishment works. Demons and Devils run around setting traps and moral quandaries for mortals, testing and tempting them, and with each success, they gain a greater grip over the mortals who have succumbed to temptation.

The Consequences

This is not a perfect solution. Intelligent enemies are often more interesting opponents than the dumb, and this solution takes that off the table – unless you further refine the concept to make Evil something akin to an addiction. If your smart bad guys are all fallen, corrupted, good guys – think Martel in David Edding’s Elenium trilogy – does it all make sense.

You can’t spring this concept on your players without warning, or after the campaign has begun. It has to influence and shape your encounter design and society and theology and mythology from day one. It needs to subtly reshape the rules of the game – aside from alignment and alignment transgressions; there are various spells that may need subtle adjustment. The definition and class description of various classes might need to be tweaked.

As a result, while this is a simpler solution than the alternative discussed below, it is like an iceberg – there will be a lot more work needed behind the scenes and below the surface.

Let Evil Be Evil

The alternative is to redefine the nature of Hell, as depicted and represented in D&D. If it is no longer a place of torment for all who come to reside there, if there is something about that afterlife that is appealing to certain personality types, suddenly the problems all go away.

In any afterlife where there is a judgment rendered, there are always three options. The first is bliss, for those who have led a life of spiritual purity – or who have at least been forgiven and absolved of their sins. The second is condemnation (and possible destruction) for those who have been willingly disobedient to the “pure” moral code. In between these two extremes lie a middle ground – one that holds all manner of promise in terms of game theology.

Why could it not be that both extremes have their needs met by the spirits of those in the middle – until whatever minor infractions that had led to this condition had been paid for?

Two standards of Evil

This defines two different degrees of being Evil – the aristocracy of evil and the peasantry of evil. The aristocrats may be those who are actively evil, or this rank may be reserved for those who enter into pacts with the forces of Darkness, or there may even be a hierarchy of rank between these two levels of commitment to the cause. The peasantry are those who merely succumb to temptation, who take the easy way out.

If the representatives of Evil can offer power not only in this world but in the next, it both increases the appeal of Evil as a way of life and a philosophy, but overcomes the stumbling block that makes choosing that path so nonsensical. If those who labor on Evil’s behalf have a realistic expectation of a life of comfort and ease, with servants and lesser beings to fulfill their every need (no matter how vile), a life of Evil becomes far more tempting – and the playing field for mortal hearts is restored to an even balance.

The Consequences

Unlike the first solution, this can be introduced retroactively. Even if the PCs have been to the planes of Hades and seen the tortured souls of those exiled their, this can be glossed over – if the victims they had seen were neutrals being tortured not for their misdeeds by to demonstrate the power of the true evil souls for whom this was their final reward.

But, if anything, it is more work than the first solution, though it might not seem so at first glance.

• Entire planes of existence need to be redefined;
• the cosmology in back of them needs to be reexamined;
• a whole theology needs to be assembled complete with rituals and mythology;
• the cleric class description needs to be adjusted slightly;
• other classes with theological connections like Paladins, Monks, and Druids need tweaking;
• each of the major races needs to be appraised to integrate the new world-view;
• and finally, some of the standard monsters need to rewritten to fit the new paradigm.

Alignment, Schmalignment

It should be noticed that beyond the general principle of good vs evil, this has no more to do with the standard alignment definitions and treatments than does a duck or a sunset. The ethics and morality can be as complex as desired. Consult my five-part series on Alignment for more discussion in this respect. The link is to part 1, An Unnecessary Evil? which in turn links to the other 5 parts of the series.

The Reward

So, with all this work to do, why would you choose this solution over the other? Well, firstly, it puts the bad buys on an even playing field with the good guys – which automatically ramps up the challenge and drama of whatever the situation is in the game. Second, it feels far more integrated than the somewhat slapdash first solution. And thirdly, it gives more scope for independent creativity, for making this campaign different from that.

It makes your world more personal, more unique, more a reflection of you and your ideas. It makes your game better – provided you have the prep time to put all those pieces together.

That sounds like a pretty good reason, to me.

Milestones are special. Campaign Mastery has just had two – 300,000 visitors and 550,000 page views. We want to thank each and every one of you. But even more than that, we want to thank our many readers for their loyalty; more than 37% of those visits are from returning visitors. Ten percent is usually considered an excellent result for a website. 37% is extraordinary!

Another statistic that I am very proud of is our continued growth rate of 40% per year. Another incredible result! And then there are the comments – over 3300 of them, on our 386 posts so far. Enlightening, thoughtful, insightful, and encouraging, they have driven us to even greater efforts.

Sadly, Milestones also often mean change. For the last few months, Johnn has been slowly prioritising other endeavours, and working to fulfill other commitments. To make room for these efforts, he has now chosen to set aside his efforts at Campaign Mastery – at least for the foreseeable future. Which probably means he’ll be back in a month or two, since the best-layed plans have a penchant for cataclysmic disruption as soon as they are announced! I’ve greatly enjoyed working with Johnn, and I think we made a good team. I wish him well and hope to see him back in these pages on a future occasion.

What does that mean for Campaign Mastery? Not much will change. We’ll still post tips and content twice a week – most weeks, at least. There may be the occasional gap when Johnn would previously have provided a stopgap article, and – on average – Monday blog posts will tend to be smaller (at least in theory). I’m still hoping to open the blog up to more guest posts (including, perhaps, the occasional one by Johnn), and I’m still working on the sequel to Assassin’s Amulet.

Some priorities may shift a little, but the overall goal remains to arm and equip our readers with the tools to improve their campaigns, either by example, or by lessons learned through experience, or by offering insights and ideas and fresh perspectives.

And, of course, we’re not far away from our 400th post (this is number 387) – I’m trying hard to think of something special for THAT one! Any suggestions?

So here’s to the 300K. I hope you’ll all be back with us when we reach 400,000!

My history with RPGs encompasses an unusual variety of settings in which to play. Each different circumstance involved different session lengths and conditions, and so I feel that I am uniquely qualified to discuss the subject of session scheduling.

NB: The following is necessarily edited and omits a huge amount in favor of the relevant.

The Early Days

When I first got involved with RPGs, we played at a student facility within the University of New South Wales here in Sydney, on Saturdays. The facility, known as The Blue Room for reasons I never really understood, was used by students post-lessons which meant that we didn’t actually take possession of the premises until Noon, and even then had to share the facilities with non-gamers until 1-2 PM. Most had lunch while we waited for the students to go home.

We had use of the facilities until 6AM, in theory, though numbers started falling off at about midnight. That’s 10-16 hours of play each week.

Around 6 or 7 PM – after 5-6 hours play – we would break for dinner – usually about an hour. Between midnight and 1 AM, we would break again for a late-night snack and then play through until one of us announced reaching the limits of his endurance.

The whole atmosphere was very casual, and ten minutes lost here and there was never a problem – I can even remember one occasion when all the games came to a halt because a player was approaching the high score in Defender!

Variations

Campus Security were the only people not happy with this arrangement, and after lodging a number of grumbles with university management, a couple of students not actually part of our group had too much to drink and made a mess on university grounds, providing them with what they claimed to be a Causus Belli. Claiming that they were too busy monitoring our group to keep full control of the rest of the campus grounds, they succeeded in restricting us first to a 1AM finish, then Midnight, and then in getting us banned altogether.

Until the last of these restrictions, all this really did was to cut out the late-late-session, though the fact that we had no opportunity to continue for an extra hour or two if necessary to finish the current stage of an adventure had a profound psychological impact on everyone.

As the final hour or so approached, first the GM would begin rushing, almost forcing the pace, and then the players would begin feeling and reacting in the same manner. Roleplaying elements became submerged in favor of cursory descriptions of action; all the characters everyone began to resemble a Sly Stallone knockoff. The haste made for some incredibly thick-headed decision-making by both parties.

The Long-Weekend Social AD&D Game

In the course of the Queen’s Birthday long weekend (early June in our state calendar), I participated in a standalone social game held at a suburban home from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. This was the first (and last) time I’ve roleplayed in any game where the players were free to consume alcohol (and some did, to excess).

The whole event was incredibly casual. Half the group spent the evening gathered around the bonfire in the back yard, players were continually scattered all over the quarter-acre block, there was a continuous stream of barbequed steak and sausages for whoever wanted them, and gameplay was incredibly calm and slow – until about noon on Sunday, when the GM suddenly seemed to realise that there were only three hours or so left in the game session. That was when the panic set in; having spent 36 hours getting about 6 hours of play done, the GM then attempted to get another 6 hours worth into the final three hours. Nor was he completely sober at the time.

Predictably, the results were something of a mess. My character didn’t even enter play until mid-afternoon on Saturday, and some players never got their characters into play. There was no organization in the campaign, either; players were told what level of character to bring, but beyond that it was open slather. Character backgrounds were virtually non-existent, some were overpowered with magical goodies while others were underpowered, concepts were contradictory (three players decided that their characters were brothers without noticing that one worshipped Aphrodite (Greek Mythos), one worshipped Odin (Norse Mythos), and the third worshipped Set(Egyptian Mythos))!

The First Principle

These experiences gave me my first principle of session length: The psychological effects of available time are more important than the physical or social effects.

If you have too much time and not enough game, the focus of the game and the urgency of events will dissipate. The longer the session, the harder it is to get the pacing right. And, unless you get the pacing exactly right, at some point you will discover that there isn’t enough time left, and a state of slight panic will set in.

The MLC & Institute Of Technology Eras

Around October of 1981, it became clear that we were no longer welcome at the University Campus, and we started looking around for somewhere else to play. We ended up hiring some meeting rooms on the first floor of the MLC Centre building in North Sydney, rooms which were completely unused over the weekend. This was about two or three miles away from where I was living at the time so I was able to walk home over the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge. This was also when I first started to GM.

We gained access to the facilities when the security guard day shift arrived at 9 AM, and were required to vacate the premises at Midnight, when the evening shift finished. Because there was no competing demand for the facilities, they cost very little to hire, and there were quite a lot of people gaming at the time – sixty to seventy-five – so the price per head was even lower.

The day obviously broke naturally into three sessions – morning, afternoon, and evening – but a funny thing happened: no game started in the morning session went anywhere. They had trouble holding onto players or getting regular attendance and those players they did get seemed to have trouble maintaining concentration.

The Second Principle

It didn’t take very long for this to establish the second principle of game scheduling: Habits are powerful and persistent, no matter how inconvenient they may be.

Because we were all used to starting play after lunch, and spending time gossiping and chattering about geekish things prior, what happened was that the ‘general chatter’ period became extended through the morning. It became a time for board games and card games and character generation and even some game prep – anything and everything except actual play.

Variations

As a result, when the opening times varied over time (in the direction of starting later and ending earlier), not much changed. It was, in general, only a matter of cutting short the “gossip period”. Over time, we became well known to the security guards, and when eventually the building stopped using human security and relied on electronic alarm systems, we were entrusted with arrangements for keys.

During this period, state laws were enacted which required us (and other organizations, clubs, playgrounds, and the like) to have insurance, which in turn required us to organize into a formal club – “The New South Wales Historical Gaming Society”. It wasn’t so much a requirement targeting accidents and injuries to members as it was targeting accidents to incidental members of the public.

Because the biggest risk we faced was of somebody tripping over a bag full of books, and our core activities involved nothing more strenuous or risky than sitting down at a table, the premiums started off very low – from memory, our weekly fees rose from $1 to $2.

The problem was that each time we got a new risk assessor, they kept confusing us with historical reenactment societies, and especially The Society For Creative Anachronism (SCA) which carried out activities like mock combats. As a result, the premiums kept going up, and then being negotiated down – but never down quite as far as it had been the year before.

As a result, from the outside, it appeared to management of the MLC building that we were engaged in continual disputes with the various insurers (we used to chop and change regularly, always seeking the lowest premium).

The Institute Of Technology

Eventually, the MLC building was sold, and (in part) because of this dispute history – which looked worse on paper than it actually was – the new owners informed us that we would have to move elsewhere. Since we had been using the MLC building for years at this point – it must have been 1985 or ’86 – we now had a long history of trustworthy behavior – we were able to find new premises on the 26th floor of the Institute Of Technology, a technical college in central Sydney (which later became the University Of Technology).

We had access to a student recreation/gathering area on the 26th floor, and to one of the classrooms. Also on this floor were the facilities of the Institute’s Radio station, something that would quickly become significant. But I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

We had access to the 26th floor from Noon to 10PM. That suggests breaking the day into two equal segments of five hours each, with each of them having a meal break at the start.

Didn’t Happen. The half-hour from Noon to 12:30 – or so – was lost to lunch and gossip, and the hour from 12:30 to 1:30 – or sometimes 2 PM. If the chatting went over-long, as it sometimes did, it could be as late as 2:30 before “serious” game play got underway.

5PM soon proved to be too early for the evening meal. 6PM was more typical, and 6:30 was not uncommon. So play session one ran from about 2 (by the time set-up was complete) to about 6 (a total of about 4 hours) and session 2 ran from about 7 to about 10 (about 3 hours).

But this brought about an interesting phenomenon: because people were used to playing until Eleven, that final hour of mad panic didn’t happen any more in the evening session (though it always felt like we were stopping early). Because the afternoon sessions were also down an hour on what people were used to, the same thing happened – and the same “finishing too early” feeling obtained.

In other words, the Second Principle was being (quite accidentally) used to the benefit of our games.

GM Politics

These session times were important because of the number of games being played. When we had first moved to the MLC Building, GMs ran the same campaign every week, all day. Occasionally, a game would finish early and a different game would then start on a given day, usually after a meal break.

While at the MLC, the number of GMs running campaigns increased, and some GMs (myself included) began running multiple campaigns concurrently. There were a number of arrangements tried to organize this; we tried splitting the games by the evening meal, we tried splitting them by days of the month, we tried combinations and we tried running them as “what do the majority feel like playing?”. There were a number of arguements between GMs over whether or not one was being greedy in tying up players in their campaigns.

Ultimately, we ended up sorting out some unofficial round rules and drawing up a timetable. The three most popular campaigns (by number of players) were permitted a full day each; other campaigns had a half-day each. They were all organized by availability of existing players. It turned out that mine were two of the most popular campaigns, and that they had no players in common with the next two most popular campaigns. So these formed the 1-2 punch at the start of the month, when tables were at a premium, and for the other weeks of the month, it was session-by-session. Anyone wishing to start a new campaign simply had to find players who were available – or who were more interested in the new campaign than in continuing within the game they were currently signed up for.

The notion of a timetable, so that players knew when the games they were committed to were going to be played, did not go over well with everyone, but it prevented so many arguements that most accepted it as a necessary evil.

You can see how the timetable evolved from one of my early articles at Campaign Mastery, Clash Of The Timetables.

The Third Principle

The timetabling adventures through the years establish the Third Principle of game scheduling: Predictable schedules can create patterns of behavior which strengthen games – if they do not conflict with the Second principle.

The Connection

Session lengths play a crucial role in timetable negotiations. They have different lengths – afternoon sessions tend to be longer than evening sessions. They have different attendance restrictions – afternoon sessions can be delayed by players who work Saturday mornings, evening sessions occasionally run afoul of other social functions. They have different psychologies – afternoon sessions have daylight and are better suited to heroic and friendly campaigns, while night-time campaigns are better suited to gothic, horror, and cinematic game styles, as well as anything sci-fi oriented, because the environment helps players buy into the game.

The Fourth Principle

This identifies the fourth principle of scheduling: the environment can reinforce or or undermine a game; schedule accordingly.

Radio Station Dramas

In winter, when they kept the doors closed to retain warmth, there was no problem, but in summer, when the staff of the radio station wanted to keep their doors open for additional ventilation, they found they couldn’t because of the noise from roleplaying in full heat.

After a couple of years, these complaints led to us being relegated to a couple of classrooms. The space available, which was already more confined than we had been used to, reduced even more dramatically. Then we got moved to even smaller classrooms on the 25th floor. The situation was becoming untenable, but having learned already how difficult it was to locate affordable venues located centrally, we made the best of it, expecting that once the weather cooled, we would be permitted to return to the 26th floor open area.

But then an incident occurred that brought an end to our time at the Institute. One occasional attendee who had been an irregular fixture since the Blue Room days took it apon himself to climb the fire stairs to the 26th floor and have a stickybeak inside the Radio Station facilities – and got caught. He subsequently became the first and only member to be expelled from the club; we all felt betrayed and let down by his behavior.

The Woodstock Era

Fortunately, we had always been wary of the possibility that we would have to move again, and had been constantly on the lookout for potential future venues. The facilities that we moved to were somewhat controversial at first, since they were many kilometers removed from the city centre, but we quickly became accustomed to them.

The hours of operation were very similar to those we had enjoyed at our previous venue, but the arrangement of rooms meant some changes to the established routines. The preliminary card and board games went away, replaced by the occasional game when a roleplaying session finished early.

This was a period of stability in game environment, which meant that the only changes were in the games that were being played and not when. We stayed at Woodstock for well over a decade, and it was only when the facility was slated for redevelopment by the city council (who owned it) that we reluctantly moved.

About the only change that took place was that the timing of the evening meal slowly crept a little later, finally stabilizing at around the 6:30-7:00 mark. In essence, this added an hour and a half to the morning sessions, at the expense of the evening sessions, and marked the end of those incidental side-games.

Attempting to even the balance

There were numerous attempts to even the balance in timing between the two sessions over the years, and none of them lasted very long – two weeks was a good run. This only reinforced the significance of second principle as a dominant factor. In fact, this point is sufficiently important to reinforce it as the Fifth Principle of scheduling – but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The Gamestore Era

And so we moved to where we gather to this day – most of the time – a first-story game store, where we have been based for about a decade. Since the store had its own insurance, we let our organization lapse into history. The store opens at 9 or 10 AM, and for the first few years, closed at 10PM. Did we start at that 9 or 10 time? Hear that hollow echo?

We started at the same time that we had been starting. People would show up between noon and one, eat lunch and chat until somewhere between 1 and 1:30, and start play between 1:30 and 2 PM.

After those initial years, the store was sold to new owners who were not themselves gamers, and hence the closing time was adjusted to between 6 PM and 6:30. Where previously, we had been running two games a day, suddenly there was only time for one – unless we started earlier and interrupted the first game with a meal break in the middle. Did we start earlier? Any guesses?

We started at exactly the same time that we had become used to starting. And people started adjusting their lives to take into account a departure from home timed to get them to the game within the Noon to 1:30 window. People started sleeping later, for example.

The Fifth Principle

And that brings me to that fifth and final Principle: Any ingrained habit will persist until people are forced to change it.

It didn’t matter that we had more time available in which to play – because it would have meant starting at a time earlier than that which had become convenient and routine, it simply didn’t happen. The best that could be done was ensuring that everyone got to the game as close to the regular starting time as possible rather than being a little more casual about it, and even that could not be done with any regularity.

The Final Principle

The final thing that I have noted over the years is that Regular Breaks break immersion – but strengthen it the rest of the time. While I haven’t exactly nailed down how often they should come and how long they should be, I do have some guidelines to offer.

When I was working for the Australian Bureau Of Statistics processing the Census in 1996-97 and in 2001-2, OH&S rules mandated a 5 minute break every 2 hours as the absolute minimum for workers using computer screens or performing tasks which required high levels of concentration. Having slightly more was found to actually increase productivity and attention to detail, especially on the part of decision-making. To ensure that the productivity targets were achieved within OH&S guidelines, the breaks were mandated as a scheduled 10 minutes, every hour. This meant that if necessary while working on an urgent task or to meet a deadline, staff could miss a break without violating the OH&S guidelines.

With the increased use of tablets and laptops even in tabletop gaming, those OH&S guidelines – and especially the serendipitous effects on concentration, decision-making, and attention to detail – seem to be entirely valid as guidelines for gaming.

Putting It All Together

Ultimately, session lengths are the result of a confluence of other factors – start time, finish time, and meal times. The latter form natural boundaries that should always be taken into account. The worst possible session length is two hours; the first hour, everyone is distracted with chatter and food and non-game social activities, and the last hour can produce time pressures that lead to poor decision-making. Every hour in between is at maximum efficiency and attentiveness provided that regular breaks of 5-10 minutes every hour are taken. Sessions longer than about 6 hours are unsustainable unless they are considerably longer (at least 2 more hours and preferably 3-5 more) and broken by a meal. The same sloppiness/distraction effects also affect the half-hour before and the half-hour after a meal break. Don’t bother trying to change when those meal breaks happen – it won’t work. Build your session times around those meal breaks and natural partitions and you’ll get more play squeezed into the hours available.

Gaming at other times

Having tried gaming on occasions other than Saturdays now and then, I have some additional advice about scheduling games at such times. I’m presenting these as something as a postscript for the sake of completeness, because they aren’t part of the main subject of the article. A recent survey that I saw showed that 90% of RPG gaming happens on a Saturday; the remainder of these comments are addressed at the other 10%.

Some weekday comments

Weekdays are problematic because there is always the consideration of work the next day to take into account. I’ve seen games break up as early as 9PM as a result – and when you started at about 6:30 or 7PM, that’s a problem. Beyond this additional complication, all the advice about Saturdays still applies.

Some Friday Night comments

The one exception to the preceding comments comes on Friday nights. For more than a year, I used to precede my Saturday games – first at the Blue Room and then at the MLC Building – with a Friday Night session. These have been supplemented with other occasions from time to time.

And what I’ve noticed is that there is little urgency and less focus. People want to unwind after the working week and don’t want to do anything that feels too much like more work.

I’ve seen some games that took advantage of this state of mind – Paranoia worked especially well – and some that tried to swim against the tide, and they failed spectacularly. Old-school mindless hack-and-slash also works quite well.

If your thoughtful, intelligent players turn into savage barbarians in every game sessions, and you’re playing on Friday Nights, a change of schedule might produce more roleplay and less mayhem.

Some Sunday comments

Sundays are just like Saturdays except that they also have the problems of a weeknight insofar as most people will have to go to work on Monday morning. The exception is a long weekend, when they really ARE just like a Saturday.

Nevertheless, there are a few differences, psychologically, between a Saturday and a Sunday. The latter is usually a little more relaxed, the calm-and-casual point of the week. Saturdays are a little more business-like. Again, this can be important to the style of game that you want to run. It’s not a major factor, but it is nevertheless a contributing factor.

A Caveat and a Conclusion

Of course, all of this relates to gaming in Sydney, Australia, in an organized group or the remnants of such a group. The majority of tabletop RPG gaming is conducted in people’s homes, and of course, most of it is outside Australia. So your experiences may be different to mine, and so far as the advice is concerned, YMMV.

When do you play – and how do the principles I have identified vary, based on your experience? Your comments might be invaluable advice to a novice gamer whose circumstances are more closely related to yours than to mine, so don’t hold back!

Based on an enhanced scanning electron image of a flea from the CDC's Public Health Image Library, Identification number #11436

One of the most under-developed game mechanics in D&D is the Curse. This has so many problems its hard to know where to begin, but I’ll give it a shot:

• Only clerics can curse because its a clerical spell.
• They hold no fear for anyone because they are so easily lifted.
• The suggested effects don’t even come close to matching human inventiveness when it comes to curses.

Curses are an untapped source of creative and roleplaying potential.

The Shards Connection

Having realized the above some time ago, when the proper opportunity arose while preparing the house rules for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, I seized it. The Shards campaign was intended to be a marriage between Gothic elements and High Fantasy, and giving Curses a bit more bite was essential to capturing that genre meld.

My solution was based, in part, on Curses Large and Small by Lloyd Brown III, which appeared in Knights Of The Dinner Table Issue 115, published by KenzerCo in 2006. I modified the contents of that article to suit my campaign’s needs at the time, and have revised them somewhat in light of experience for the appearance of the House Rules here.

The Anatomy Of A Curse

A curse consists of three elements: the effect, the misdeed, and the deity inflicting the effect in response to the misdeed. A fourth necessary element is a DC for the breaking of the curse. In addition, there are a couple of optional elements that may be included – triggers and duration limits, for example. Each of these subjects is considered in detail below.

Anyone can cast a curse – sometimes – at a price

The first major change is this: Anyone can beseech one of the Gods to bestow a Curse apon their enemies.

If the Curse is being bestowed as a dying act, the decision as to whether or not the Curse will be inflicted depends on the relationship between the Deity, the person requesting the Curse, and the circumstances. If the petitioner has been a faithful follower of the Deity, or the request accords with the portfolio of the Deity, the Curse may be bestowed. In making the request, the petitioner pledges his spirit to the service of the Deity in the afterlife. The GM may also rule that a Curse can be bestowed under other circumstances, such as when the petitioner is the last survivor of a family or group. Such curses must target the non-divine non-demonic non-devilish being responsible for actually carrying out the act. In return, the petitioner pledges his life to the service of the Deity.

If the point of death has not been reached, the proclivities (alignment) of the Deity becomes a factor.

• If the Deity is of Good alignment, a Curse will only be inflicted as punishment for an evil act.
• If the Deity is Neutral, a Curse will only be inflicted as a measure of Balance or unnatural act. It is not sufficient for the Curse to be in retribution for an act of extreme alignment. Furthermore, the act being punished must be in direct opposition to the portfolio of the Deity in question. For example, polluting a waterway would justify a curse by a god of Nature.
• If the Deity is Evil, a curse will only be inflicted if it will benefit the petitioner and be in retaliation for a specific act of a Good nature that directly impacts the petitioner.

When a Curse is petitioned, the Deity will announce a price in response. Depending on the personality of the Deity, they may or may not haggle, and may or may not demand payment in advance. This payment will usually be in the form of service, though that service may be indirect – the construction of a shrine or temple, the commission of a statue or artwork, the publication of a book of prayer or philosophy, the sponsoring of a charity or orphanage, the creation of a park, the sacrifice of the first-born or mate, the sabotage of a trade agreement.

It is usually easier to prepare a “price tag” in advance for deities when one of their followers is likely to be encountered.

Not all such requests will be granted, even as a dying act. People die, and get killed, all the time, and even the promise of service in the afterlife may not be sufficient to convince the deity to grant the request. Something about the circumstances needs to be exceptional, or the character making the bequest must be particularly valuable as a follower to the deity. Being a cleric or priest of the deity, and having been a faithful servant, is enough. Being the last of your kind is probably enough. But something exceptional needs to be involved – otherwise every sentient killed by a PC would inflict a curse!

The intent is not to make Curses as commonplace as the sunrise, but to make them more common, and more significant, than they currently are.

The role of Bestow Curse

Clerics (and other classes with access to clerical spells) can bestow Curses using the clerical spell without all this fuss, because they have been granted the authority by their Deities to act as their representative.

An additional requirement

A Curse cannot be successfully cast on a creature that could somehow benefit from it; if one is, the effects should be reinterpreted by the referee as much as necessary to inflict harm on the target. For example, a Curse which bestows a negative level, when cast on an undead, the referee should treat the ‘negative’ level as a positive one, reducing the number of HD of the target by 1 die, having the same effect that the Curse would have if it was cast on a non-undead creature.

The Nature Of A Curse

Curses come in two varieties: Temporary and Permanent (the latter including Curses of indefinite duration). In general, permanent Curses are less powerful than temporary ones because some of the energy of the Curse is diverted into making it last.

Curses as an Anti-Feat

This requires a standard to be set in terms of the effectiveness of Curses. Fortunately, such a standard already exists, codified to set a standard for the effectiveness of Feats. This standard is common to all my d20 campaigns, and I discussed it – amongst other things – in Exceeding The Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats. In a nutshell: A feat can confer +4 to a single specific check, +2 to two related specific checks or one type of saving throw, +1 to four related specific checks or to a single combat-related numeric value, an ability normally useful no more than once per round in combat or a more powerful combat ability that can only be used in specific circumstances or is otherwise constrained, or a non-combat class ability.

It seems entirely reasonable as a basic standard of effectiveness of a Curse to consider it to be an “Anti-feat”.

Relative Strength Of Curses

But there is a caveat: Because of the permanency of the effect, Bestow Curse must necessarily be weaker than other spells of equivalent level. This should be borne in mind by the GM when assessing proposed effects. Even minor curses can be life-threatening if the target never has the chance to remove it, and this should also be a consideration by the GM when adjudicating a Curse.

Permanent/Indefinite Curses

Most Curses are intended to last, until the subject of the curse has atoned for whatever misdeed prompted the curse. Such curses are the bedrock and standard apon which Curse mechanics are built.

Temporary Curses

A temporary Curse applies only until the target achieves some specific task, such as a pilgrimage to some specific shrine or temple, or fulfilling three tasks for the high priest of the city.
This alters the effectiveness of the curse by +25%, +0%, -25% or -50%, depending on the difficulty of the task to be achieved.

Until the task is achieved, a Remove Curse will only grant 24 hours relief. The basis of comparison should be the difficulty of completing the task.

• If the difficulty of the task is easier, there should be a +25% increase in the severity of the Curse.
• If about the same, there should be a 0% change.
• If a little harder – the equivalent of obtaining a Remove Curse from a specific priest – then the effectiveness of the Curse should be -25%.
• If a lot harder, then the effectiveness should be reduced 50%.

Sloppy wording of the condition eg “Until you atone for your transgressions” is considered to be equivalent to the default, as it is presumed that a priest will not Remove the Curse until he is satisfied that the character has done so. The final arbiter of any such judgments is the referee.

The subject of these curses can be absolved of the Curse as soon as the specified conditions are met.

Practicality and Idealism

Some Deities are realistic about the conditions to be fulfilled for absolution from a temporary curse, insisting that the condition be within the capabilities of the subject. Others are more idealistic and pay this no attention. The personality and attributes of the deity in question should be reflected in the specifications of the Curse. A curse establishes an extremely personal relationship between the caster, the subject, and the deity, which should be referenced every time the Curse’s effect has an impact on play. It may even be possible for the subject of the curse to pray for temporary relief if that would be in the best interests of the deity. A curse is an ongoing opportunity for roleplaying that should not be wasted.

Conditional Curses

A little additional ingenuity in the wording of a curse can greatly expand their functionality. “May [Curse] happen if you [do | do not do] X” is a perfectly acceptable syntax – “May your sword arm wither and rot if you betray your oath” for example. Where the “X” is an ongoing task, such as adhering to an oath, this is considered a permanent/indefinite curse which will last until the character is relieved of the obligation; where it is a task with a measurable conclusion, such as “erect the shrine within 30 days” or “place Baron Huschfeld on the throne”, it is a temporary curse.

Removing a Curse

One of the first questions a player will ask when his character is afflicted with a Curse should be “How do I get rid of it?”. Under the standard mechanics for Curses, the question is more likely to be “Where’s the closest cleric with Remove Curse” – assuming that another party member doesn’t have the spell, or even the character himself.

A key aspect of the changes to Curse mechanics is the alleviation of this condition. A Curse should be more significant and less of a passing inconvenience. It’s a third level spell in 3.x (and from memory used to be a 4th level spell in older editions of the game), after all.

There are two conditions under which a Curse can be removed without difficulty, so lets look at those first.

Lifting a Curse

The character who bestowed the Curse can lift it at any time – provided that it was not inflicted as a dying act, of course. Even then, it may be possible – but the difficulties are much greater; the subject can’t exactly intimidate the bestower, after all. However, the third party to the curse should also be involved; blackmailing or threatening the bestower of the Curse will not win any favors with the deity in question, and far from lifting the original curse, the subject may well find himself saddled with a second.

Absolution

Curses with built-in limited duration conditions are subject to Absolution as soon as the conditions are met. The effects of the curse are lifted immediately, though the curse may be re-imposed if the subject then acts on opposition to the condition. You can’t be cursed until a shrine is built, build the shrine, and then immediately destroy it. You can’t put someone on the throne and then immediately attempt to undermine, usurp, or make the new ruler a figurehead. In other words, the spirit of the curse is just as important as the letter.

To be released from the danger of Re-imposition, the subject requires a priest – any priest or cleric not opposed to the deity who empowered the original Curse – to Absolve the character, ie to acknowledge that he has completed his penance, learned from his mistake, and forgive the original offence. Once this is done, the character is free to act however he sees fit with no sword of Damocles hanging overhead.

This places a reasonable amount of responsibility on the shoulders of clerics and priests, and senility sometimes causes absolution to be granted when it should not be. Religious orders are usually fairly wary of failing faculties and will often retire a priest they suspect of becoming a little vague, because it is their reputation that is on the line.

Absolution can also be granted retrospectively if the subject dies in the attempt to redeem himself.

Absolution & The afterlife

Absolution has a second effect that can be quite significant – it means that the crime for which the curse was imposed can no longer be held against the subject when he enters the afterlife and faces judgment. This can be a significant spur to a character’s decisions. As a character gets older and more aware of their own mortality, some may choose to find a cleric and confess to the worst of their past misdeeds, requesting a curse that permits them to earn absolution before it is too late. Of course, the choice of which Deity from which the character chooses to make this request has a very big bearing on the outcome – and on what is considered a misdeed.

The net effect is that behavior tends becomes more extreme as characters get older. This is especially true of NPCs – PCs generally being less willing to bow to any restrictions on their behavior will tend to take their chances and worry about tomorrow on the day after.

Again, this is a source for a roleplaying encounter or two if the party includes a cleric. An NPC or two seeking absolution makes an excellent subplot and a nice seasoning as a cohort or other follower.

Breaking A Curse

The other way out of a Curse is to Break it. Once broken, a curse can be Removed. Curses can only be broken be a cleric, a deity, or another character type with access to clerical spells.

Breaking a curse is a violent act, as is implied by the name of the process. The act of casting Remove Curse triggers a metaphysical confrontation between the bestower of the curse and the cleric attempting to break it. The former is represented by the DC of the Curse, while the latter is on hand. It should also be obvious that unless the Deity who granted the curse is especially capricious in nature, the cleric must have a different patron to the original deity.

The cleric attempting to break the curse generates a Spellcraft total and compares it to the target DC while casting Remove Curse. If the result is equal to or greater than the DC, the Curse is broken.

Curse DCs

If the Curse was bestowed by a Cleric, that cleric should roll a Spellcraft check which becomes the DC for breaking the spell. If the curse was bestowed by someone other than a cleric, the DC is 15. These values may receive a +5 if the Deity bestowing the curse is strongly in favor of the act. Dying-act curses may also receive up to an additional +5. A Curse bestowed directly by a Deity automatically has a DC of 25, plus the +5 for being strongly in favor, for a total of 30. In practice, the average DC is going to be around 20-25.

If the cleric attempting to break the Curse is of the same alignment as the original bestower, he receives a -5 to his Spellcraft check to Break the curse. If he is of an opposed alignment, he receives a +5. This means that the best person to break a curse from an Evil deity is a cleric of Good, and vice-versa.

Despite antagonistic alignments, deities may refuse to break a Curse if there is presently no strife between them and the deity who empowered the original Curse. Breaking someone else’s curse is a hostile act, and earns the enmity of the deity who imposed it. Some people will attempt to boost their chances by stirring up rivalries and ill-will in advance – but this can in itself be a dangerous business; if the deity being beseeched was offended by the actions of the subject, they may add a curse of their own to the mix.

Failure is a definite set-back – each cleric gets only one shot at a Curse at the original DC. If they fail, they can’t try again until they have gained another level as a clerical spell user, and there is a -2 penalty to their Spellcraft check for each failure. It only takes a few failures for the DC to exceed the capabilities of the cleric, effectively permanently. This encourages those wishing to break a Curse to seek out the highest-ranking cleric they can find – and those fellows usually charge a lot of money for their time and effort.

Compound Curses

Being Cursed by two deities of antagonistic alignment at the same time is the worst of all possible outcomes, because clerics of either alignment will recognize the ‘taint’ of the Curse to which they are not antagonistic and refuse to aid the character. Characters who are subject to multiple Curses are in real trouble even if the cleric agrees to make the attempt, as the cleric’s target DC is the sum of the DCs of BOTH curses, which usually puts the target beyond the abilities of all but the most powerful.

Curses and Spell Focus

Spell Focus can be used to raise the spell’s save DC, unlike most Necromantic Spells. It follows that there are three groups whose Curses are especially potent, and hence exceptionally difficult to break: Deities, the High Priest or Archprelate of a particular faith, and clerics who specialize in bestowing Curses.

Spell Focus can also be employed to assist in Breaking a curse.

Inheriting A Curse

If a deity or the beseeching individual is especially put out, they may choose to make a Curse generational, affecting not only the subject but their entire family, or their first-born in each successive generation, or all their descendants of a particular gender, or all their descendants, or all their relatives. This sacrifices some of the DC for breaking the Curse in exchange for generalizing the target.

• Entire Family (by blood): -2
• First-born descendant each generation: -4
• All descendants of a particular gender: -6
• All descendants: -8
• All relatives now living and their descendants: -10
• Excluding the original target: +1 (offsets the above modifiers only)

Detecting A Curse

Detecting the presence of a Curse is easy – just cast the first level spell. Clerics can even make a WIS check while holding the hand or blessing a character to get a hint that the character has either been cursed themselves or that they have been associating with someone who has been, especially if the effects of a Curse have actually affected the person being examined. The DC of such a Wisdom check is 40 minus the DC for breaking the spell – so the hardest Curses to break are the most easily detected.

Identifying the specifics of a Curse is equally easy, once the presence of a Curse is proven (not merely suspected). It merely requires the cleric or religious figure – a Paladin can do it – to pray over the character for a while. The number of hours of prayer required is equal to the DC of detecting the Curse as specified in the previous paragraph.

While being examined, the subject of the investigation must not perform any activity that would require a skill check, and must not do anything relating to a deity other than the one being invoked during the investigation. Priests, Clerics, and Paladins will normally insist on Blessing the character before commencing, simply to remove any spiritual “aftertaste” of other deities that the subject might have with him. It is also normal for the subject to remove all magic items and clothing, wearing only a simple penitent’s robe – essentially, a smock of cotton, wool, or burlap – for the same reason. Individual faiths may have further requirements, but for most these are sufficient.

As the prayers continue, the Minister conducting the prayer service will begin to sense the intensity of the Curse (ie, how difficult it will be to break), the name of the Deity who granted the Curse, the nature of the curse’s effects, any conditions attached to the Curse, and finally the reason for the curse – the deed that caused the subject to be Cursed in the first place. Only when all of these are known and acknowledged by the subject can the process of Breaking the curse begin.

Cursed Items

“I curse this weapon. Any who claim it will be driven to avenge me.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a desirable weapon with a curse attached as a plot device. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a magic item. Once the Curse is complete, the character gets the weapon. If he should fall in the process, it will wait for the next person to come along and take his place – however long it takes.

Such curses are not part of the weapon, they merely use it as a conduit, but they will still be detected by a Detect Curse spell. However, even putting such a weapon into a backpack or other storage device with the intent to sell or analyze it later is enough to invoke the curse, and actually selling it does not relieve the curse, simply passes the potential to another like a time bomb with no visible timer. Only when the PC succeeds or dies will it go off.

Such curses have to be broken not once, but twice. The first time breaks the curse on the character, freeing him, but leaving the curse itself lurking intact within the item. The second Breaking must be directed at the weapon itself. This circumstance is the only exception to the rule about multiple attempts at breaking a curse, since the second Curse Breaking can only proceed after the success of the first. That still does not grant multiple attempts at breaking either curse, it only permits a single attempt at Un-cursing the item once a religious figure has successfully broken the hold of the curse on an individual.

Note, also, that the item must be present to be prayed over in order to break the curse within it.

Sneaky Moral Tricks

PCs will already be wary of treasures after players read the above section. At the same time, the potential for a desirable weapon with a built-in mini-quest would have to be tempting, if the item is attractive enough. The problem is that characters have to “buy” the item before they get to inspect the merchandise – or, in this case, accept the curse before knowing how useful the treasure will be. Alignment questions can also become entwined in the whole issue – a character can break the curse but still be compelled by his alignment to complete the task that would have nullified it.

More subtle variations

If the GM suspects that even this might not be tolerable by his players – contrary creatures at the best of times – he can place am item with a more subtle Curse, for example a temporary curse that only affects the character when he scores a critical hit – or when her is subjected to a critical hit – or when he uses a specific skill or ability. How tempting would a +4 or +5 weapon or suit of armor be, even with such a price-tag? And if the player is truly unhappy with the price tag, he can always expend money in attempts to break the curse; either way, the GM gets a plotline out of the deal.

A list of suggested Curses

I’m going to close this article with a long list of suggested curses. These should be just a starting point for your creativity… Have fun out there!

1. -3 penalty to the three physical characteristics (STR, DEX, CON) or -3 penalty to the three mental/emotional abilities (INT, WIS, DEX).
2. -1 penalty on all characteristics.
3. -4 to one particular variety of Saving Throw (Fort, Reflex, or Will).
4. -8 to saves against a particular magic descriptor.
5. All spells cast by the target henceforth have an additional material component of 25xp per spell level.
6. The Cursed creature cannot speak except to cast spells.
7. -8 to all skill checks tied to a single specific ability.
8. -4 penalty to all skill checks.
9. -12 penalty to all skill checks against a single specific skill.
10. -4 ‘clumsiness’ penalty to AC.
11. -6 ‘clumsiness’ penalty to all attack rolls.
12. Save DCs against the Cursed creature’s spells or innate abilities are reduced by 4.
13. The creature cannot declare any creatures to be allies for the purposes of flanking, moving through squares, spell effects, etc.
14. Every 2nd attack made by the subject creature must be against an ally. The subject will drop his weapon to change to a ranged weapon and/or move up to his maximum as necessary to achieve this.
15. -3 penalty to all attack and damage rolls.
16. The creatures damaging spells only inflict half damage.
17. The creature cannot confirm critical hits.
18. The cursed creature always receives the minimum healing from spells.
19. The character loses all special sight (low-light vision, darkvision, etc) and is immune to any spells which bestow such abilities.
20. The target cannot make attacks of opportunity.
21. The target suffers 1hp of sonic damage every round that someone within 30′ speaks, per speaker.
22. The target can no longer cast spells with an alignment descriptor (any alignment descriptor).
23. Any time the creature rolls a 1 in melee combat, he must make a reflex save against DC 14 or drop any and all weapons used in the attack.
24. The target cannot heal wounds except by magic.
25. The target cannot eat or drink and therefore cannot benefit from magical potions or effects like Heroes Feast.
26. The target loses the ability to read.
27. The target cannot use any Metamagic Feats.
28. The target is affected by a Nightmare spell (Caster Level 9) every night.
29. The target loses all armor proficiencies.
30. The target loses all weapon proficiencies.
31. The target must make a Balance check at DC 15 to move more than half its speed in a round.
32. Every time the target uses a charged item, he causes the item to expend an additional d6 charges to no effect.
33. Every time the target uses a charged item, he causes the item to expend an additional charge which is inflicted apon himself.
34. All possible critical hits against the target are automatically confirmed.
35. Ability damage inflicted against the character is treated as ability drain.
36. The target is denied its Dexterity bonus to armor class.
37. The target is Slowed whenever it is within an enemy’s threatened squares.
38. Allies must defeat SR 21 to target the Cursed Creature with spells.
39. Making a single attack becomes a full-round action for the target. The target cannot make iterative attacks or attacks with two weapons.
40. Any time takes damage (magical or otherwise) from flame or heat (including Fireballs, etc), the character catches on fire (refer DMG for consequences).
41. The character suffers from a phobia or fear. Whenever the object of the phobia or fear is encountered or threatens the character, he must make a Will save against a DC of 15 or cower in fear. If the save succeeds, the character is Shaken. Phobias include darkness, open spaces, confined spaces, heights, depths, running water, open water, thunderstorms, spiders, undead, insects, birds, dragons, etc etc.
42. In melee, the subject of the Curse cannot move to flee or threaten another creature (but can attack any enemies that move into its threat range).
43. All allies of the target suffer a -2 on attack rolls and skill checks when within 60′ of the target.
44. The character’s ranged attacks are limited to a single range band.
45. The character suffers -4 caster levels (to a minimum of 1).
46. The character must eat 4 times as much food as normal in order to survive (but gains weight as though they did not). If the character fails to eat sufficient food, he is considered to suffer from Starvation.
47. The character must drink 8 times as much water as normal. If he does not, he is considered to be suffering from Dehydration.
48. The character loses up to four magic item slots. Items in those slots have no effect. The caster of the Curse must specify the slots using a single word description.
49. Whenever the target strikes an opponent in melee combat, he suffers 1d6 damage (doubled if the character achieves a critical hit).
50. The target’s Spell Resistance (if any) is reduced by 4 points.
51. The creature bleeds at the rate of 1hp per round per dice of damage inflicted in melee.
52. The creature is required to provide an attack of opportunity each time he takes a 5′ step in melee.
53. The creature earns only 75% of the experience they would normally receive.
54. The target suffers 1d6 damage per round that they hold or touch a particular type of weapon or object.
55. The target suffers 2d6 damage per round that they hold or touch a specific weapon or object.
56. The target experiences the effects of a Polymorph spell for approximately half a day, every day. The caster of the Curse must specify either a daily trigger event (eg midnight, noon, dawn, sunset, moonrise, moonset) or specific time interval with a one-word description (eg daytime, nighttime) or other similar condition which activates the Curse. The character acts as a normal member of the population of his Polymorphed form would but remembers his actions in that form when he is restored to normal. The other form must be of a half-hit-dice creature or less.
57. The target experiences the effects of a Polymorph spell for approximately 1/4 of the time, as specified by the caster of the Curse. These must be linked to a particular season, phase of the moon, or other such naturally-recurring phenomenon. While in his other form, the target acts as a hostile member of the population of that form. The other form must be of a 1-hit-dice creature or less.
58. The target experiences the effects of a Polymorph spell for 1 hour after experiencing a specified common event of activity. The character acts as a rabid or extremely hostile member of the population of that form. The other form must be of a 2-hit-dice creature or less.
59. The target spends any money that comes into his possession (above 25 GP per character level) as quickly as possible. He must make a will save against a DC of 20 to refuse any offered item. He cannot give this money away, or tithe it, or give it to someone else for safekeeping, or store it.
60. The target spends any money that comes into his possession (above 100 GP per character level) as quickly as possible. He must make a will save against a DC of 20 to refuse any offered item. He cannot give this money away, or tithe it, or give it to someone else for safekeeping, or store it. He must immediately sell any magic items he possesses whose values exceed this limit.

One Final Mention

One final thought that’s worth mentioning, and which has also had its part to play in inspiring some of the content above: a slight reimagining of the Curse of Edaemus from The Shining Ones by David Eddings, (Book 2 of The Tamuli). Edaemus cursed the waters of the lake where his people lived, which already caused them to glow, so that their touch inflicted the rot of the grave in mere seconds AND gave them a telepathic link to those they could see. In time, they learned to control these ‘gifts’ – but consider the horror of the situation before they did. They not only caused sufficient fear in those who beheld them to provoke insanity and gibbering in terror, the telepathic link meant that they would have felt every moment of their victim’s pain and terror, and feel the rotting of tissues as the curse manifested.

Talk about your Gothic Fantasy! That’s the power of a well-constructed curse to add flavor…

Some game systems have rules built in for character aging. Others don’t.

Some of those aging rules function gracefully. Others don’t, or are shockingly clumsy.

This post is all about how I handle character aging in my campaigns – gracefully and relatively painlessly.

The Harbinger Of Aging

Quite early on in my GMing career, I wrote up some sophisticated aging rules for AD&D, which took the rather loose guidelines provided in the PHB and DMG and turned them into a functional system. A couple of the key features of the system were:

My original system for aging

Aging checks

There were no automatic “X years older gives X points of stat loss”. Instead, characters made a CON-based saving roll against a target based on their age and history. If they failed, it indicated a characteristic loss or other ageing symptom. On a critical failure, this occurred immediately and permanently. If they succeeded, the size of the next potential characteristic loss increased, and the target for the next check became harder to achieve, but there was otherwise no effect. If they got a critical success, the target for the next check still became harder, but there was no other impact.

Shrinking intervals

These age checks took place at intervals across the entire average lifespan of the race in question that steadily declined in size. When characters first started adventuring, they could look forward to making their first check in about a decade, game time, for humans, about 50 years for Dwarves, etc. These intervals would gradually get shorter until they became once a year, at which point the rate of increase would slow eventually becoming twice a year, then three times, and so on.

In fact, it was tracked as the number of days until the next check.

Modifiers

There were all sorts of modifiers – to the number of days until the next check, to the number of days since the last check, to the target required for success, and to the size of the potential impact of a failure. Each night spent “roughing it” while adventuring counted as two days toward the next check, for example – hard living brought aging forward – but it also counted as a day of exercise, and every ten days spent exercising between intervals improved the chance of success by 1%. Each day spent in decadent luxury counted as three days towards the next check, but also counted as a day of rest. If you rested ten days in a row, you negated the extra days accrued by ten days hard adventuring.

In particular, each time that the character was reduced to 25% hit points was counted as an extra day; each time the character was reduced to 10% hit points or less counted as two extra days.

Warning Niggles

The system was set up to reward an appropriate “work-life balance” long before the term came into vogue. After each adventure, the characters needed to rest – how badly they needed to rest, and for how long, were dependant on the character’s constitution. If characters rested too long, they would get out of condition. Both of these would result in “warning niggles” – passing mention of an ingrown toenail, a stiff back in the mornings, and the like. As an aging check approached, this would also be signaled by a series of warning niggles.

Abandoning this subsystem

This particular aging subsystem didn’t last beyond my first couple of campaigns (I’m a little surprised that I remember it so clearly). But its legacy lives on in the approach that I use for aging in my current campaigns. (NB: this is the first time they’ve ever been codified in writing)…

Growing Old Gracefully

I always felt that growing older didn’t change the personality or expectations of a person. They still wanted to do the same things as they were doing twenty years earlier, but no matter how willing the spirit was, the flesh was weak; an accumulation of little niggles handicapped the ability. Having aged a few decades since first formulating the aging subsystem discussed above, I stand by that perception. I don’t feel 49 years old – I feel 25 with encumbrances that prevent me from acting like I was 25.

Another part of the aging process is learning to manage those encumbrances. Compromising how much I do, how hard I work, permits me to achieve more in the long run by not aggravating the various infirmities that have accumulated. Compromising how I do things slightly – relying less on my own memory, for example, and more on my ability to take reminder notes – is actually more efficient because I spend less time getting up to speed each time I resume a task. My particular case is compromised by a degenerative ailment, but the principles are the same – the tolerances are just tighter.

I don’t run any more, for example. My knees and back won’t permit it, save in cases of emergency. That doesn’t mean that I can’t do it – just that the price of that type and level of exertion would cost me more in lost capacity in the long run. I stop and rest after walking a few city blocks, if I can – not because I can’t walk any further, but because doing so will leave me bedridden the next day. At the same time, there are limits to how far I can walk comfortably, and exceeding them not only causes distress and reduced capacity for some months afterwards, part of that loss is permanent.

Aging, then, is an accumulation of niggles, and an increasing cost of performing activities, and a diminution of the ability to recover.

Life Increments

My whole approach to aging is somewhat different, these days. I no longer enforce stat loss on characters, instead suggesting that the players make appropriate adjustments. They key to determining how many such adjustments are needed is the concept of Life Increments:

Life Increment = (Average Lifespan – Age of maturity)/20,
+0.5 for each physical stat 16-20
+1 for each physical stat 21-25
+1.5 for each physical stat 26-30, and so on;
-0.25 for each physical stat 6-10,
-0.5 for each physical stat 4-5,
-0.75 for each physical stat 2-3,
-1 for each physical stat 0-1 (D&D scales, adjust as necessary for other game systems).

Physical stats in D&D are STR, DEX, CON, CHAR.

EG Generic D&D Human:
Life Increment = (65-25)/20 = 40/20 = 2 years. So every 2 years after they achieve maturity is an additional 5% of their allotted span.

EG2: D&D Human with STR 18, DEX 15, INT 22, WIS 14, CON 16, CHAR 16:
Life Increment = 2 +0.5 (STR) +0.5 (CON) +0.5 (CHAR) = 3.5. So every 3.5 years after they achieve maturity is an additional 5% of their allotted span, gone.

When the appropriate time comes, I simply inform the player, “Your character is another 5% older than he was” and ask how they think that will affect the character’s stats. As part of the process of justifying their decisions, I will also usually characterize what the character has been doing for that time – “Adventuring too hard too often”, “maintaining a reasonable balance between rest and adventuring”, “spending too much time sitting down and arguing politics with the king and not enough exercising”, and so on. In general, there will be minimal changes until the character is about 50% old. I keep track of the number of life increments consumed.

Why this is better: No rolls, easy to calculate, rarely consumes game or prep time, very fast.

Serious Injuries

Every time a character drops to 10% of their hit points or less, assuming they survive, their life increments drop by 10%, and I add another life increment to the “consumed” tally. So the character gets 5% older prematurely, and their overall lifespan reduces. This is regardless of any healing that may be done and represents accumulated wear and tear. However, a character gets a number of these as “freebies” equal to their CON bonus (D&D scale), minimum of zero. The serious injuries count resets at zero each time the total triggers an adjustment.

Why this is better: No rolls, easy to track, minimal time & effort required, but still very responsive to individual circumstances.

Going Hard

Another key component of my current approach is the need to rest after any period of prolonged exertion. Every 2 days of adventuring or rough living adds one day to the total rest required to get rid of the accumulated discomforts and niggles that have built up.

Every 2+CON BONUS (D&D scale) days that the character has spent adventuring counts as 1 day that they need to rest. Before they can start counting rest days toward this total, they first need to rest for 1 day for every life increment they have lived.

Hard living adds discomforts to daily life, which are expressed as Niggles. On the assumption that a character will be more attuned to changes in their highest stat(s) and more susceptible to changes in their weakest stat(s), I will choose a niggle appropriately.

These niggles arrive at Niggle Intervals.

Niggle Interval (D&D scale) = 4 + CON – Life Increments consumed, minimum 1.

Eg CON 12, Age in Life Increments 4 gives Niggle Interval = 12 days.
Eg CON 12, Age in Life Increments 12 gives Niggle Interval = 4+12-12 = 4 days.
Eg CON 17, Age in Life Increments 12 gives Niggle Interval = 4+17-12 = 9 days.

Each niggle received reduces the Niggle interval by 1. So the next niggle arrives a day sooner. When the interval gets to zero, the character needs to rest (if he hasn’t done so before then). When he rests for long enough, the Niggles go away and the Niggle Interval resets.

Combat Effects of Niggles

None, nada, zip. Niggles are strictly a roleplaying cue. But as a character gets older, they will arrive more quickly, and give the impression of an older character. See also “Long-term consdequences” below.

Resting

Resting means loafing around for a day. In the wilderness, even in an idyllic location, each day counts as only half a day for resting purposes. In a civilized environment (eg an Inn), Spartan accommodations also only count as half a day, while luxury counts as a-day-and-a-half. Luxury accommodations in an idyllic location might count as double. As GM, I tweak these values constantly to reflect the circumstances. Characters can read, relax, feast, drink, stroll the markets, buy goods, play games, gamble – in fact, do just about anything that might normally be done on a vacation or day off. But they can’t undertake any strenuous activities, engage in combat, conduct serious spell research, or anything of that sort – if they do, the day doesn’t count.

Again, what is acceptable activity and what is not is variable depending on the character and circumstances – spending a day in solitary contemplation might count for a Monk or a martial artist, but would not do much for mage fascinated by politics or a fighter with a low threshold of boredom. This is about roleplay, not system mechanics!

Going Home

Soft living relaxes one’s tolerance for discomfort. This is a progressive effect:

• when characters are actively adventuring, a period of rest eases any accumulated discomforts, so when they first set out on a new adventure, I will make no mention of such.
• If they stay inactive for a little longer – say twice as long – when they do finally get going again, the first day or two (perhaps as much as a week) will be a compound of niggles as they work the kinks out and get back into shape, annoying discomforts as they get used to roughing it again, and a slightly giddying elation at the sense of independence and liberation from tedium. It will be an adventure, and overall, it will feel good to get back in the saddle.
• If they stay sedentary and inactive for longer again – say three times as long – any exertion will trigger niggles and discomforts, which I will work into the flavor text describing their day’s activities.
• If they stay sedentary and inactive for a lot longer – say, ten times as long as it takes them to rest up – they will start to experience niggles even without a triggering exertion. This might include having trouble fitting into clothing as they gain a few pounds, a shortness of breath after climbing a long set of stairs, and so on.

Long-term consequences

If characters don’t rest, or adventure too long, what are the consequences? At the time, none whatsoever. These niggles are just a cue for roleplaying, and the players are perfectly at liberty to ignore the prompts.

In general, though, they won’t. Firstly, because they give them the opportunity to put a different aspect of the character on display for a while, and do something different, Secondly, because there are always useful things that can be done in down-time; and Thirdly, because they will always be concerned that I might impose a combat modifier due to their niggles if they grow too frequent or pronounced.

Misses, Failures, and Fumbles

I feed that fear by frequently describing the results of any sort of failed die roll in terms of niggles (if any). So when characters are freshly out of town, a miss might be due to a lucky dodge by the opponent, or a leathery hide, or a blow bouncing off armor – but when they’ve been on the road for a while, it might be a muscle twinge, or a sudden cramp, or a moment of reverie. When the rogue blows his stealth roll, he might stumble – or he might sneeze.

Why this is better: Minimal math, no die rolling. Easy to track. It adds to roleplay and verisimilitude without becoming burdensome, gives you a source of flavor text, but doesn’t straightjacket players with an arbitrary aging system that has to be slavishly followed.

It’s not a set of rules; it’s a set of guidelines – and inspiration. It’s a way of Simulating ageing without forcing anything down a player’s throat – or onto their character sheet.

Most game systems are great when it comes to a precise definition of what a character can or can’t do, but there are any number of occasions when the level of precision they impart and entail is overkill. The result is that character generation takes a lot longer than is really justified by the intended role of the NPC within the campaign.

While preparing an NPC for my shared pulp campaign, I had a moment of inspiration. A short-cut to NPC generation that I immediately put into practice and which immediately proved its value. Now, I’m going to share that moment of insight with GMs everywhere. I’ll start by looking at the specific case that led to this idea, and then move on to a more generalized description of the technique.

“Creepy” as a skill

The NPC that I was creating was a butler. While he was to be no particular threat, we wanted his personality, tone of voice, manner of expression, behavior, etc to be, well, “creepy”. Now I could have spent a lot of time specifying skills and abilities and disadvantages and so on in order to define exactly what “creepy” meant in terms of the system mechanics – but time was short and there were better things to expend it on.

The solution was to define “Creepy” as a skill like any other within the Hero System. Suddenly, there was a full set of game mechanics at our disposal – whenever he interacted with a PC, we could simply have him roll his “Creepiness” skill and – if successful – describe the reaction he had engendered in the listening PCs. If they wanted to resist the effect, we could have them oppose the roll.

In effect, we plugged an abstract quality directly from the character description into the game mechanics, hardwiring it to the rules system. It was that simple.

The Limits of the solution

The more involved with the PCs an NPC is going to be, the more closely that NPC should be built to PC standards. An NPC who adventures with the PCs should be as fully-detailed as they are.

A lesser standard is required for characters who are just there to be in a fight. There’s not a lot of need for background skills, but battle-related stats will need to be specified. In D&D terms, for example, the minimum would be Attack, Damage, AC, Initiative, HP, and Saves. In the hero games system, OCV, DCV, Damage, SPD, Body, Stun, and END would be the absolute minimum.

But when the NPC is just there to be a personality or an advisor, this approach offers a way to dramatically reduce the requirements, saving a lot of time and effort.

The General Technique

Using this technique is a two-step process.

Define an abstract quality

The abstract quality that the system is summing up should be defined as simply as possible, and should encompass as much of the uniqueness of the character as possible, preferably all with a single word.

Set the Associated Skill Level

You have two contrasting and possibly contradictory considerations in the second step. The first is deciding on the absolute frequency with which the abstract quality that you have described is going to come into effect; the second is the relative measure of how easily you want PCs to be able to overcome or resist the effect. If necessary, come up with two separate numbers and average them, but most of the time there will be a compromise available.

Results probabilities of 3d6

This requires that you really understand the system mechanics and their basis in probability. If you are talking about rolling 3d6 and aiming to get the target score or less, then you have to know how increasing the target by 1 affects the likelyhood of success.

Of course, this is really easy with a d20 system where each +1 growth in the target equates to a 5% increase in the likelyhood of success.

Assessing the relative level requires some understanding of the attribute scores that your PCs (or NPCs) can bring to bear in opposition or resistance to the desired effect. If the average resistance is d20+3, then d20+5 appears to give a 10% chance of success – but examining the statistics tells a different story. If the goal is to get the bigger total, as it usually is in these opposed rolls, then the actual number of cases out of 400 (20×20) that result in success for the d20+3 is 17+16+15+14+13+12+11+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 153 out of 400, or 38.25%.

How did I get that result? Well, the minimum result of d20+5 is 6, so the minimum result to beat that result on d20+3 is going to be 7. Seven minus 3 means that the lower score wins on a roll of 4 or better – which happens 17 times out of 20. With each +1 to the result on the d20+5 roll, the minimum result required for success goes up by 1 – so if the d20+5 roll is a 2, the target is 7, so an 8 is required, which requires a roll of 5, which happens 15 times in 20. The pattern obviously continues until you get to 0 times in 20.

That gives the string of numbers that I added together – the one that runs 17+16+15+… and so on. Multiplying the number of possible results on each die (20 x 20) gave me the 400.

I also cheated on the addition. If we set the “..+2+1” part at the end aside, and add the highest to the lowest, we get 17+3 + 16+4 + 15+5 + … and so on. It only takes some quick counting on fingers to find that the eight result is “10+10” – but there’s only one ten, so that also has to be set aside. So the total is 7×20 + 10 + 2 + 1 = 153. I only pulled the calculator out for the last part – converting 153/400 to a percentage.

Some more examples

There are all sorts of ways this technique can be applied. Here are just a few of them:

• “Emotionless” – on a fail, the character exhibits an emotion.
• “Rigid Self-control” – on a fail, the character exhibits a reaction when surprised, given bad news, given good news, etc.
• “Foolish” – on a success, the character does something stupid or silly.
• “Deceptive” – on a success, the character projects the reaction or impression that he desires to express and not his true feelings or intent.
• “Politician” – on a success, the character says or does whatever he thinks is going to be the most popular/beneficial regardless of his true intent or belief.
• “Charming” – on a success, the character makes the person he’s speaking to feel comfortable, safe, secure, at home.
• “Wealthy” – on a success, the character attempts to use money to solve whatever problem he currently has.
• “Pious” – on a success, the character exhibits his faith, resists doubt, disbelieves evidence to the contrary, etc.
• “Redneck” – on a success, the character acts like a redneck. (duh!)
• “Italian” – on a success, the character acts like a stereotypical Italian.

Any adjective can be treated in this fashion. Just choose your description and let it be your character!

Going Even Further

It doesn’t have to be just NPCs, either. This approach also works – perhaps better than anything else I’ve ever seen – from defining organizations…
 

• Formal
• Casual
• Greedy
• Public-spirited
• Arrogant
• Militaristic
• Progressive
• Conservative
• Radical
• Violent
• Pro-Farmer
• Bookish

 
…to governments…
 

• Stuffy
• Sanctimonious
• Defensive
• Paranoid
• Martial
• Subversive

 
…to laws…
 

• Protective
• Permissive
• Conspiratorial
• Vengeful
• Fiery
• Myopic
• Effervescent

 
…to anything else that can be described with an adjective! Weapons, animals, cars, wagons, pets, spices, novels, music, poetry, clothing, artwork, recipes… these can all exhibit a personality, as I discussed in With An Evil Gleam.

An organization example: “Florid 14/-“

“Florid” means ornate, flowery, showy, ruddy, or high-colored. So, an organization that is “florid” has:

• A lot of bureaucracy, especially detailed forms that need to be filled out and about which they are very fussy;
• A very strong and showy public relations department;
• A penchant for dramatic gestures and big, showy projects;
• A tendency to make big, even boastful claims;
• A liking for making speeches;
• The habit of using flowery and long-winded statements, filled with grandiosities and showy excess, and probably short of a lot of practical detail.

So whenever a PC interacts with this organization, or reads about them in the paper, or whatever, you simply have to roll the die and interpret the results.

A government example: “Repressive 5/- Paranoid 5/- Blunt 5/- Militant 10/-“

There are 25 combinations when you have 4 attributes. Any given action by the government can be:

• Repressive but not Paranoid, Blunt, or Militant
• Paranoid but not Repressive, Blunt, or Militant

…

• Repressive and Paranoid but not Blunt or Militant

…and so on, through combinations of three at a time, culminating in a final:

• Repressive, Paranoid, Blunt, and Militant

There are so many combinations that it is really quite inconvenient thinking about them, even counter-productive. Instead, think about each attribute, and it’s opposite.

• Actions can be Repressive, ie designed to pick on one particular sub-population or practice that would normally be tolerated or even accepted – or encouraging, designed to make a particular practice or policy more attractive to the general population.
• Decisions can be Paranoid, targeting enemies real, theoretical, or imagined, or they can be optimistic, assuming that people will support the government.
• Phrasing and applicability can be blunt, or they can be subtle and discrete.
• Decisions can be militant, emphasizing enforcement, or passive, expecting cooperation.

For example, consider a change in tax policy. A repressive policy might be to triple the number of annual audits while targeting one particular group for no specific reason. An encouraging one might be a tax rebate equal to half the additional tax recovered to anyone who (in confidence) informs on a tax cheat. A Paranoid policy might add imprisonment and/or steep fines or even seizure of property to be paid on suspicion of tax evasion and pending the investigation, while an optimistic one would assume that everyone is trying to do the right thing to the best of their understanding and hence levy no punishments whatsoever short of a bill for the additional tax owed. Blunt tax laws might start by describing tax evasion as a crime and then referring to people throughout the tax code as “suspected criminals” or “criminal tax evaders”. A subtle and discrete tax law would use four paragraphs of dense legalese to define the word “tax” – “a debt incurred through the accumulation of profits and revenues consequent to employment, labor, ownership of business or property (whether encumbered or otherwise) and on and on and on… . Finally, we have militant (automatic mandatory audits and if you don’t lodge a return, nosy people come around asking “why not?”) or passive, which assume that people who don’t lodge a return don’t have to pay taxes at all.

In practice, I think that four such traits are too many. Pick one that’s overwhelming and one secondary choice at most. “Militant 10/- and Paranoid 5/-” is enough to characterize a government.

I could continue with more examples, but I think the point has been made…

Skill Applications

One final note, added at the very last minute: you can use the same technique to synopsise tricky skill sets. “Lensman 15/-” works perfectly well. So does “Green Lantern 10/-“. Or “Mad scientist 16/-“…