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Reintroduction

If there is one thing I hate, it’s interrupting a task, especially a creative one, before it’s finished. That includes interrupting a series.

At the same time, doing the same thing for week after week can be enough to drive me around the bend, and after a while, I need to take a break whether I want to or not. The series on Pulp gaming earlier this year stretched me right to the breaking point.

The problem, and one of the main reasons I hate interrupting tasks, is that so much of what I do is in my head and not on the page.

Once I lose that creative thread – or it gets crowded out by something else – I can never completely recapture it.

Which brings me to the Roles To Play series.

This series has been sitting around for far too long, mostly because I was having trouble getting my head back into the correct mental space to again take up the reigns after lengthy interruptions. The last part appeared in November 2010, after all!

I can’t promise that it won’t be interrupted again, but here’s at least one more part…

The Premise

Archetypes for RPGs are usually defined either by the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character, but other classifications systems are possible. These can yield a different perspective, which can be invaluable. This series’ approach is based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but of how the characters fit into a team. I have defined 31 archetypes (and counting!) based on this concept.

A single character may fit into just one niche within the party or may fill multiple roles, either willingly or reluctantly. An entire group of characters may have an archetype in common, but it is my contention that each character should have at least one role from this list that is unique to them alone. The archetypes are as much a function of the personality of the player as they are the abilities and personality of the character in conjunction and in comparison with the rest of the party.

The purpose of this series is to enable the tailoring of scenes and adventures in a game based on those roles – either highlighting the role, using the role to complicate the parties’ lives, or simply as another avenue for making sure that everyone at the table has something to do in each adventure.

A note about general comments regarding this series

While comment is welcome on the subject in general, especially the suggestion of any archetypes that I haven’t thought of yet – if I agree, I will add it to the pile – I want to avoid making future instalments anticlimactic. As a result, although I will read any general comments and suggestions you may have, any comments aimed at the rest of the list may be edited or even removed. I promise that if we don’t publish your comment, I will have paid close attention, and will give credit where it is due when the time comes!

In the meantime, discussion of the archetypes that are the focus of attention in the current article is welcome!

To Recap

Previous parts of this series have examined nine archetypes:

1. The Heart Of The Team
2. The Tactician
3. The Moral Guardian
4. The Rock
5. The Mother Hen
6. The Intellectual
7. The Faithful
8. The Air-head, and
9. The Flashing Genius

The series picks up from there, as I look at

10. The Maverick, and
11. The Strange Uncle

10. The Maverick

The Maverick shows up regularly in various teams. A counterpoint to the conformity of the generic team member, he brings a level of independance to his approach to everything he attempts. This is often useful to writers because the debate between an authority figure and the Maverick provides a useful vehicle for exposition, but that cuts no ice when it comes to an RPG – unless the Maverick is an NPC, of course.

Where the Maverick picks up points in RPG-teams is diversity. Where established teams generally adopt a party line which is dutifully followed by most of the team members, the maverick is always willing to look outside the strictures layed down by the administration. Which means that they are frequently the only team member not taken in by a deception or trap practiced against the rest of the team, and can be a source of vital intelligence.

There are actually a number of subtypes to this archetype, each subtly different.

The Wild Card

The wild card’s predominant characteristic is that he doesn’t play by the rules, and generally feels that the rules don’t apply to him or her. More anarchic and something of a thrillseeker than other subtypes, the wild card can often turn his unique attitude into a trump card.

The Rebel

The Rebel is someone who is fighting some aspect of the administration within which he operates. Once a member of that administration or of the society that surrounds it, he has often been burned in some way by that system and now disobeys it. Other rebels revolt against the restrictions of authority in general, especially when young.

The Scoundrel

The Scoundrel – more usually the “Lovable Scoundrel” – is a popular subtype of the Maverick archetype. This character is more usually a maverick because he’s a romantic scallywag and not the other way around.

The Outsider

The final subtype is the Outsider, someone who doesn’t follow established protocols because of a different upbringing. Outsiders can be aliens, or sentient artificial beings, or Noble Savages, or any of a number of other alternatives. The defining common characteristic is that they don’t behave conventionally because they don’t think conventionally.

Common Elements

What all these subtypes have in common is that they break the existing rules and usually make their own. They may be fastidious about following those self-imposed rules – a genuine ‘code of honor’ – or they may treat them as nothing more than guidelines.

In gaming terms, Mavericks offer a back door to the party for information, they offer a contrast of approaches to problems (permitting them to find solutions where none seem to exist), and they offer a different type of interaction between characters, all of which can be useful to the GM if properly utilised.

It is exceptionally rare for a Maverick archetype to exist in isolation; they are almost always coupled with some other team role. That result is inevitable because the archetupe is not a definition of what the Maverick’s personality and function within the social environment of a team is, it is a function of what it is not, and that’s not enough to define an individual.

Going To Extremes

The fact that Mavericks don’t fit in (generally) inevitably focusses attention on those aspects of their personality that DO fit in. As a result, they frequently present an extreme example of whatever other archetype they represent.

It is very easy for such characters to become locked into that secondary archetype, producing a shallow character. To avoid this, it is frequently advisable for Mavericks to find a tertiary role within the team, and in particular one that contrasts strongly with their secondary archetype. Most characters can only maintain a role that is complimentary to their dominant profile; the Maverick has the potential for greater depth, properly exploited.

For this reason, writers, and especially Hollywood, love the Maverick archetype, and will frequently push their characters into positions where they become Mavericks, no matter how straightforward the primary archetype might be. The result is inevitably drama, if not melodrama, and that makes for a good story.

To offer just two examples of this from the series Numb3rs:

• Alan Eppes, played by Judd Hirsch – usually The Heart Of The Team and The Rock, the writers found it necessary to give him a background as a former left-wing student radical as a deliberate contrast to his role as a parental authority figure, mediator, and practical engineer.
• Don Eppes, played by Rob Morrow – usually The Tactician and The Faithful (law and order), he has repeatedly found his position within the FBI under threat due to his support of his brother, despite the numerous successes of the team. In the pilot episode, the concept was new and radical, and this was understandable; in later episodes, it lacked just a little credibility in light of the record of achievement. I was always left waiting for an episode in which an FBI higher-up tells Don, “Your unit has achieved remarkable results since you brought in your Brother. Initially I was skeptical, but you’ve made it work – so from now on you guys are going to be my first resort when a particularly tricky problem crosses my desk. To start with, here’s a case in which…”. But then, I was also kept waiting for episodes deriving from Charlie’s university and NSA work, which I always felt was an underutilised story foundation.

There are undoubtedly more examples, so many that the straight authority figure being forced into a position of rebellion – from Robocop to Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon – has become something of a cliche.

Examples Of The Wild Card archetype

Which brings me to examples of the Maverick archetype. For each, I have indicated the secondary role that the character adopts; in some cases, these archetype relationships are inverted, and the “Maverick” aspect of the character is secondary.

• Spock (Intellectual, inverted relationship)
• Kirk (Hero) – especially in the movies
• Wolverine (The Hair-trigger, The Heart Of The Team)
• The Human Torch (Hot-head) – especially early in the team’s life and in the movies
• Starbuck (especially the original) from Battlestar Galactica (The Gambler)
• Han Solo from Star Wars (The Romantic)
• Virgil Hilts, “The Cooler King”, Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape (The Trouble-maker)
• Rick Vaugn, the “Wild Thing” in Major League and Major League II (The Hot-Head, The Drama Queen)

Star Trek – The Original Series Box Set [Blu-Ray]	Star Trek – Original Motion Picture Collection [Blu-Ray]	Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume 1	Fantastic Four Omnibus Volume 1
Battlestar Galactica – the Complete Epic Series	Star Wars – The Complete Saga [Blu-Ray]	The Great Escape (2-disc collector’s set)	Major League (The Wild Thing Edition)

Plotlines for the Maverick archetype

In general, most plotlines for a Maverick will focus on the secondary archetype(s) they represent. There is limited utility for plots in which their independant streak can be used to place them beyond some deception or social confinement, but care must be taken to ensure these do not degenerate into cliche.

Some of the best plots for the maverick are those which relate to relations between the team and a faction that is alien to them. While the two primary forces confront and stalemate each other, the maverick has room to explore left-of-field solutions to the conflict. Their unusual psychological disposition can enable the Maverick to recognise and observe details, relationships, circumstances, and opportunities, that are hidden from a more conformist perspective.

I know that all sounds terribly vague, and for that I apologise. The problem is that the Maverick archetype takes in so MUCH territory that it’s hard to be specific.

The VERY best plots for the Maverick are those which focus on their individuality, on the things that make each unique.

Without The Maverick

Teams can get along just fine without a Maverick until they grow accustomed to having one in their midst and adjust their thinking and policies to allow for that presence. When that happens, the other team members will generally become a little more conformist and staid in their thinking, a little more predictable and conservative, almost as a reaction.

Once this conservatism becomes ingrained, it can be hard to break if the Maverick is suddenly lost to the team. It’s as though they can no longer be inspired to think outside the box; the sparkle and creativity goes out of their planning and tactics.

Mavericks are, by definition, a little unpredictable, and that unpredicatability can be a priceless asset.

To ensure that teams who lose their maverick feel the loss appropriately, the best approach is one or two plotlines in which there is a seemingly straightforward problem to be confronted and a radical plot twist at the last moment. There should also be at least one problem in which the relative predictability of the team without the wild card is emphasised and exploited.

If PC teams are given too much time to think about the situation and their options, the players can attempt to fill in for the missing Maverick, so these must of necessity be fairly fast-paced plotlines, giving the players little time to think.

The more obvious the problem and its solution seem to the players, the less they will object to the breakneck pacing. The seeming straightforward nature of the plotlines is thus both necessary to achieve this fast pace as well as providing the contrast of the team without the wild card included.

11. The Strange Uncle

Every family or group seems to have one of these, or should have (I sometimes wonder if I’m my family’s example)! Quirky and offbeat, the Strange Uncle combines that touch of mad brilliance that is the province of the flashing genius with a love of the unusual and oddball that can sometimes disract, and sometimes be insightful.

Often played for laughs as comedic relief, the Strange Uncle can act as a foil to the more straightlaced members of the team, lifting spirits and making dark days brighter. But that’s not the only interpretation of the Strange Uncle to be aware of.

Also fitting into this category are figures of mystery and superstition, who lurks in the shadows and emerges just long enough to make pronouncements of doom, and if there is one thing that such characters aren’t, it’s “comedic relief”.

Add in those characters with a litany of odd factoids and unusual sources of information, and this is a surprisingly rich archetype.

Examples Of The Strange Uncle

There are lots of examples of the Strange Uncle out there. I’ve had to pare back this list somewhat – even cutting such obvious examples as “Uncle Fester” and “The Phantom Stranger”.

• Obi-wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars trilogy
• Doc brown in Back To The Future
• Braetac in Stargate
• Evie in The Mummy
• Egg Shen in Big Trouble In Little China
• Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) in Ghostbusters
• Grissom in CSI
• Kosh in Babylon 5
• any Technomage in Babylon 5

Star Wars Trilogy (Widescreen Edition with Bonus Disc)	Back To The Future 25th Anniversary Trilogy [Blu-Ray]	Stargate SG-1 The Complete Series Collection
The Mummy Trilogy (also available in Blu-Ray)	Big Trouble In Little China [Blu-Ray]	Ghostbusters Double Feature Gift Set
CSI Seasons 1-8 Set		Babylon-5 complete series with movies

Plotlines for the Strange Uncle archetype

There are two obvious varieties of plotline that lend themselves to starring roles for the Strange Uncle: those that play to their particular variety of weirdness, and those that play against them.

The first are the most obvious; if you have a mysterious sorceror, then plots about sorcery are right up his alley; if the character is an eccentric scientist, then plots about weirds science gone awry or dangerous “scientific” discoveries are his stock-in-trade.

The second, where the mysterious and quirky character must somehow cope with a mundane problem posed by a strange world without revealing himself to be “different” can be an entertaining change of pace, but like most fish-out-of-water scenarios, this cannot be used frequently or it will become repetitive and dull. It follows that these plotlines must play to the individuality of the character, frequently in areas other than those in which he specialises, must in fact study the impact of his eccentricity on his life.

But the first and dominant source of plots for the Weird Uncle will always be the subject of his weirdness itself, and the unique (sometimes bizarre) perspectives and motivations that it carries.

And one word more of advice for crafting scenarios for a Strange Uncle: their province is the oddball, the unusual, the unlikely, and the just plain weird. They are a Weirdness Magnet; take full advantage of it. (Be warned: the link is to the tvtropes website. Go there and be prepared to have hours of your life sucked down a black hole as one interesting link leads to another…)

Without The Strange Uncle

Life without the strange uncle often seems simpler to those teams who have one amongst them. They can never know exactly what will turn up next.

But, as with the Maverick – and the reason these two are grouped together into this one article – much of the magic, and mystery, and sparkle will go out of life if the Strange Uncle departs.

Problems – and not just those that are directly related to the focus of the Strange Uncle – will prove to be harder to solve and less fun, simply because of the left-of-field resoruces and thought processes that the Weird Uncle brought to the team.

Life becomes…. ordinary.

The plots that the GM serves up should reflect that. There should be more of a mundane soap opera flavour to them, insofar as many of them should feel relatively trivial. It should be as though the PCs, who are used to dealing with end-of-all-existance crisces, suddenly find themselves fighting for the life of a stray dog, or searching for a lost cat.

Gradually – so much so that the PCs can never really point to a turning point – things should ramp up back to something approaching their old levels of insanity, but the point will have been made.

Still to come

The series is still in it’s early stages! Future instalments of this series will study still more archetypes. Here’s what I’ve still got in store for you:

12. The Romantic
13. The Comedian
14. The Egotist
15. The Drama Queen
16. The Panicker
17. The Messy One
18. The Clean / Neat Freak
19. The Hot-Head
20. The Wannabe
21. The Father-Figure
22. The Greedy / Power-hungry
23. The Troublemaker
24. The Jealous One
25. The Comic Relief
26. The Sidekick
27. The Bystander
28. The Hair-Trigger
29. The Gambler
30. The Opportunist
31. The Hero

Have you ever had such a string of improbable events in a game session that you wondered if you would have been better off buying a lottery ticket? Something so unlikely that you thought witness testimony might be required every time you told the tale?

I have!

What do you do when your dice turn on you, luck being the fickle mistress that she is? Can you look back on the event years later with a smile and say that ‘at least today’s bad luck was not as bad’ as it had been on that legendary day of darkness?

Let me share just such a story with you – the tale of woe, what I learned from the event, and how it made me a better player and GM.

Stormy Waters in Seventh Sea

This story occurred about 3 years ago (in 2008) in a Seventh Sea campaign. The basic mechanics for this game are ‘roll a number of d10’s equal to Stat + skill, keep a number of them equal to the stat, and try and achieve or exceed a target number’. Players have the option of increasing the difficulty of the task before them in an attempt to succeed more dramatically – at the risk of achieving an even more spectacular failure.

Our group of intrepid swashbucklers were about to board a pirate ship in the middle of a storm. We had by this point been playing the campaign for a while so our characters were fairly powerful; this should have been a quick-but-fun skirmish that should have had us back in the tavern spinning tails and downing a few ales in short order – but the winds of fate on that particular day decided ‘no, that would be too easy’.

My first roll of the day was to Swing across to the other ship. For a skilled combatant, as my character was, activities like this should be so easy that it was a given. My luck had been running middling-to-excellent for months if not years, so perhaps there was a small element of overconfidence as well.

The first sign of trouble

Maintaining the flavour and style of the game, I opted to make the roll more difficult and show off a little. Heck, I was in the position of rolling 9 dice and keeping 6 of them, and I only needed to get a total of 15, from those six dice – I should have been able to do that with a sword in one hand and pint of brew in the other whilst holding the rope in my character’s teeth!

To my dismay all 9 dice came up ones – a critical failure in anyone’s book. The character flew face first into the mast on the other ship and landed unceremoniously on the deck in a heap.

Next was the roll to get up. Normally an automatic action, but as it was a wet deck in a storm the GM decided that it required a simple roll.

“I won’t get cocky this time,” I told myself; “I will just plain old stand up, and not make a show of it the way I usually do”.

Once again, roll 9 dice keep 6, against a target number of 10. And once again – you guessed it! – the dice came up all 1’s. It was official, luck had deserted me. The GM decided that I went for a bit of tumble after slipping over on the rain-slicked deck, so he rolled for direction and distance and the character and up tumbling into a mob of pirates like a bowling ball, all of us ending up tangled up in messy pile.

To cut a long story short

This kept up throughout the day. The GM was kind enough not to cause anything too terrible to happen to the character but a lot of embarrassment and humiliation was on the menu for the character. Eventually, we won the battle, but by its end I just wanted to curl up in a ball and hope the world would go away.

That day I rolled 235 d10’s. Of those rolls, 232 came up ones, and the 3 remaining rolls were twos.

I had never seen anything like it in my life. We had checked my dice for irregularities and sticky spots and whatever, tried swapping them out for other dice I had in my collection, and even tried rolling someone else’s dice! I’m sure I had better odds of winning the lottery and being hit by a twice by a truck all at the same time. (As a side note, I would be interested in knowing what the odds of such an occurrence would be).

Lessons Learned – As A Player

Now to get into the meat of what I am hoping to get across here, mainly what can a person learn from this unlikely cavalcade of events.
Perseverance. it sounds obvious but when everything seems to be going wrong and there is no relief in sight, sometimes you just have to keep trying to move forward.

Calmness and maturity. It is easy to let anger get to you blow up and throw a tantrum or two. Sometimes it is better to call a 5 -10 minute break, go grab a drink, get some fresh air, and look at the situation anew in a calmer state of mind. What can you do to get things back on track and get back in control of the situation? Mind you, at this point I was thinking “What can I do that does not involve rolling dice?”

Lessons Learned – As A GM

Looking at the situation from the GM’s point of view there was much to learn as well. The biggest lesson I took away from it in this regard was how to take an unusual and unlikely series of events and utilize them to improve the adventure.

I must say that my GM during this whilst enjoying it was a real sport and didn’t use this as a chance to lay in some boot leather whilst I was down. In fact, he took the reins and like a real pro used this freak occurrence to create an exciting and memorable battle out of something that would otherwise have disappeared into obscurity as just another skirmish.

Ultimately, we all play to have fun and it’s to no one’s advantage if a flow of bad luck sucks the fun out of the game. I am not saying ignore the dice or let only good things happen to the players, but even whilst enforcing a failure result the GM can interpret rolls in a way that still keeps proceedings exciting, interesting and fun.

On reflection

Looking back on the events, I find that I’m not upset by the story at all.

In fact I am quite happy about this dismal run of luck – something that seems to repeat itself every three or four months to a lesser extent. It made the game the game more interesting at the time, it made me a better player and GM, and it created an amusing memory for both myself and the others who were there to share in it.

It also helped the GM, who was having problems finding ways to challenge us and who usually spent more time bashing his head against the table while we accomplished the impossible. Instead he spent a large part of the session almost laughing himself to death and to this day still wears a smirk on his face when the anecdote gets brought up, usually at times when I’m rolling well.

Ultimately, I think this ramble of mine can be boiled down into this, you can always turn what should be a bad gaming session into something that is fun and exciting as well as a learning experience. You just have to look for the opportunities to do so.

Witness Statement

I was there on the day. The other players were laughing almost as hard as Ian M, the GM, was. Although initially upset and even angry, even Ian G began to see the funny side of events as improbability was stacked on unlikelihood to form a monument to the whims of chance. The rolls described by Ian were as he has reported them, above, both in number and in result. They were all rolled publicly, in fact after the first few they were the centre of attention for the entire table.

Nor is this the first time either of us have seen improbable results of a similar sort, though of lesser magnitude. I have seen a player roll 43 one-hundreds in a row on d-percentiles. Ian’s seen another player roll 40-odd d20s getting a 20 almost every time, interrupted by the occasional 19,18, or 17.

Mike Bourke

Ian M’s Reply

It is written, some days you are the windshield and some days you are the bug. That is pretty much what happened here.

Ian G’s runs of luck (and, in this instance, un-luck) could be more than amazing. But, I respectfully take issue with his saying that I bashed my head against the desk whenever this group managed the impossible. I distinctly recall only ever doing that a few ….well, maybe several …..OK, a number of times – and always as the result of Ian G’s character taking what should have been a straightforward roll for some minor activity like sneaking or diplomacy, and somehow generating near-Ghodlike results.

Still, he does say nice things about me, so I guess I’ll let that pass.

So, where does my GMing come into this? To start with, understand that the ‘7th Sea’ RPG is a very forgiving system that lends itself very well to ‘seat-of-the-pants, roll-yer-dice-and-pray’ refereeing (which I like). To that end, when Players roll very well, I don’t just say “You do XXXX damage” or “You easily dodge the bullet.” A much more vivid description is called for.

For VERY good rolls, I might even ask the Player what he would LIKE to have happen (Ian G got a lot of practice at this), which would then be taken under consideration when I provided the results.

For those incredibly BAD rolls (like here), it is more complicated. Some GMs would have taken the opportunity to chop Ian G’s Character into minestrone. But my own GMing approach (complemented by ‘7th Sea’) is that Characters (usually) do not die – unless they do something unforgivably stupid. You cannot have decent swashbuckling without comedy and that is what I go for.

Rather than a Character getting killed or permanently maimed by a run of sheer bad luck, something more… “interesting” happens. “You leap… and totally miss the window ledge, smack your face into the wall, and tumble thirty feet into the cobbled street below. Luckily, that big heap of manure was there to break most of your fall…”

I Have no specific system for this; I just take a look at the general circumstances and ask myself what COULD happen. My Players love it, and the results of these fumbles are as much a part of group folklore as what happens when things go right. If not more so.

Admittedly, I was more than a little suspicious of the sort of results Ian G frequently got. Enough to rule that all dice rolls (not just his, mind you) had to be witnessed by either me or at least two other Players. It didn’t help. Finally, I just learned to go with it by keeping skill resolutions well-compartmented –for example, he might make a massive roll to figure out that an NPC was definitely hiding something, but that didn’t mean he automatically knew what it was.

That Ian G always did his best to NOT overshadow fellow party members helped immensely – everybody got to do kewl stuff and have fun, and that is what RPGing is all about, really.

About The Authors

Ian Gray resides in Sydney Australia. He has been roleplaying for 25 years, usually on a weekly basis, and often in Mike Bourke’s campaigns. From time to time he has GM’d but is that rarest of breeds, a person who can GM but is a player at heart. He has played many systems over the years including Tales of the floating Vagabond, Legend of the five rings, Star Wars, D&D, Hero System, GURPS, Traveller, Werewolf, Vampire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many many more. Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design and is currently eyeing the idea of module design. Ian has a number of guest posts coming up here at Campaign Mastery over the next few months.

Ian Mackinder has been gaming for longer than he cares to remember – almost as long as Mike Bourke has. He usually has a campaign underway, but is just as comfortable as a player. In his many years as a GM, he has run Star Trek, Traveller, 7th Sea, a Klingons campaign, and many others, often for years at a stretch. You can read more about him at his ‘About Me’ Page. Ian has popped up here at Campaign Mastery a time or two previously, posting a comment in response to Mike’s post ‘My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B. A. Felton Moment‘ for example.

Mike is very happy to call both these guys friends.

Sometimes GMing is flashy, and fun. When everything is ready, and you’re in the groove, when you know what is going to happen and can lose yourself in the game, and simply present the PCs with the consequences of their actions and concentrate on your performance in the guise of NPCs and on the delivery of an entertaining plotline – that’s GMing at its best.

Sometimes, GMing is challenging and intellectually stimulating. When you are having to operate off-the-cuff, but you know the characters and the game world and the NPCs and the way they will react; when you can let the PCs explore solutions to whatever problems they face without restraint, confident in your ability to react appropriately and still deliver an enjoyable game to all concerned – that’s GMing at its most rewarding.

And then, there are the other times. When you are uncertain, and unconfident, when the PCs have you completely off-balance; when you have misspent your game prep or have been unable to prep properly; when the NPCs have to be generated on the spur of the moment, and are nothing more than a collection of numbers, and the character doesn’t quite seem to fit, anyway; when the players are expecting a story and you have absolutely no idea. That’s GMing at its scariest.

All of those are big topics, and I have no desire to start a new series when I already have so many underway, but I thought that for this week’s blog I would at least offer one or two quick hints towards solving each of these problems, a mini-solution that might just be enough to get you through the day. Eventually, each of these will be a blog subject in its own right, but for now, fasten you seat belt; this might get a little bumpy…

Coping with Uncertainty

When a GM feels uncertain about what he’s about to do, there are two really good solutions.

Be Honest

The first solution is to come clean with your players: “I had this kind of wild idea and I’m not sure how it will work out, but I hope it will be fun. And if it crashes and burns, things will be back to normal next week.” I once GM’d a session in which magic had split a PC’s personality (the character couldn’t be there that session, something I didn’t know in advance) into multiple separate pieces and the uncontrolled magic had seized on this mental turmoil and manifested a small dungeon which was a metaphor for the disintegrating personality. Each of those personality fragments was represented by one of the other existing PCs, who had to defeat the subconscious-derived spontaneously-generating monsters and gather the “treasure”, the glue that would bind the fractured personality back together. The goal was to gather a certain GP value of treasure. I layed the metaphors on thick and fast, often in multiple layers.

What made the session fun was that the treasure required was far greater than the amount with which I had seeded the dungeon – about twice as great, in fact – but the players assumed that I was being crafty and that there was in fact enough hidden away to cover the requirement, if they were only clever enough to find it. They really stretched their creativity, harvesting dead monsters for valuable hides and horns, digging into a sparkling wall in search of gems, grabbing every piece of loose metal and testing it to see if it was merely coated with base metal, and so on. Each time, I would give them a reasonable value, for whatever they came up with, but it kept coming up short – until one of the players came up with the brilliant notion of drawing up a deed to the dungeon and putting up a “for sale by auction” sign.

The symbolism was too good to ignore, I had the missing player’s PC show up and win the auction claiming the booty that the other ‘characters’ had gathered, and putting his mind back together in the process. The following session picked up at exactly the point where the previous session had, but instead of the players shepherding avatars of themselves around, the “felt” something tear at the integration of their personalities, and “felt” their companion’s mind fracture and splinter under the magical assault, and then (equally quickly) “felt” everything come back together again. It was a satisfactory day for all concerned.

It only worked because I had put the players into the proper mindset to start with – telling them that this was to be an experimental mini-adventure, that it might not work but would have no long-term repercussions for them if it didn’t, and that it was to be a dream sequence.

Lie Through Your Teeth

The alternative approach is to bluff outrageously – “Everything is going according to plan, and it will all make sense in the end”. Then listen to the players trying to make sense of whatever you have cobbled together and let them guide you to a sensible solution. Their explanation for events might not have been what you had in mind, but it will hold together – and N+1 (number of players plus the GM) minds concentrated on finding a solution will generally be better than 1 mind on its own. But you have to be convincing in order because it is your seeming confidence that will inspire the players to keep trying to figure it out.

Overcoming the Absence of Confidence

Confidence is not some blanket condition that applies equally to all aspects of operations behind the GMs screen; an individual can be confident about one aspect of their craft and unsure of their abilities in another area. This problem is most frequently the province of beginners, but self-doubt can afflict anyone anytime – it is just that it doesn’t.

I am offering two sets of advice on dealing with this issue – one for experienced GMs and one for beginners.

A Solution For Beginners

Beginners usually have good reason to be a little apprehensive behind the GM screen, especially if they are dealing with experienced players. Don’t let yourself get scared off. GMing is not that hard. What’s the worst that can happen?

My first game behind the screen (a one-off trial run) was a total disaster. The players all had a decade or more experience as players and several as GMs themselves, and they were running roughshod over my game in no time flat. AD&D used to have this monster called Green Slime which transformed anything biological that it touched into more Green Slime unless the target made its saving throw; I had decided that the citizens of my world would have domesticated various of the monsters, an approach that I still consider reasonable. One of the players asked if they used Green Slime for garbage disposal, and after a moment’s reflection I said yes. The PCs immediately bought as many glass jars (suitable for holding potions) as they could afford, and very carefully filled each with a quantity of green slime; every time they encountered a monster in the dungeon, they would lob one of these mini-WMDs in its direction and charge. They would usually hit what they were aiming at, and either turn the enemy into more Green Slime (easily destroyed with torches) or distract the target long enough to get a couple of really good hits at it, making monsters that should have been WAY too tough for the party into easy pickings.

Already nervous because this was my first GMing attempt, this did absolutely nothing for my confidence. But I stuck with it, and had some of the more intelligent monsters use the same tactic back against the party, lobbing clay jugs full of a similar monster (a Black Pudding) back at the PCs. In the end, it proved a draw, as the PCs retreated because they were running short of Hit Points and had already used their limited repertoire of healing spells, and needed to train in order to advance to their next level. Afterwards, some of the players said it was the most entertaining game session in which they had taken part for several years.

How did I get through it? I roleplayed!

I took a deep breath, and then began to play the role of a GM who was completely confident and in control of the situation. Roleplaying was something that I already knew how to do, and something that I could be confident doing, so I used that ability to fake the rest.

Beginning GMs are either going to have a group of equally-inexperienced players to deal with, enabling both sides to learn as they go, or they will have experienced players – who will either cut the new GM some slack or pitch them in the deep end. The last is what will teach you the fastest, if you can get through it – and players have a lot of respect for a new GM who lets them do their worst and doesn’t lose control – and who comes back fighting, giving as good as he gets.

A solution for Experienced GMs

1. Call for a 5 minute pre-game break “to get your head into gear”, and find yourself a quiet, isolated spot.
2. Take a deep breath, and exhale slowly.
3. Spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out Why your confidence has deserted you. Are you doing something that you haven’t had to do before? Are you doing something that was a total disaster the last time you tried it? Or are you making a molehill into a mountain?
4. Spend a couple of minutes reminding yourself of your experience as a GM. Remember the last time you made a supercollosal mistake (we all make them) and how you coped – could it really be much worse than that occasion?
5. Try to identify one aspect of what you are about to do that you can be confident of, then focus on doing that. Remember, you dictate the pace of events!

On another occasion in my relatively early days as a GM, I had to operate a large group of mixed, intelligent, monsters. I was not at all confident of being able to “switch hats” quickly, and even less confident about my ability to make the differences between the monsters obvious (I’m not very good at doing voices and don’t use disguises/props – not of that sort, anyway).

But I was confident of being able to handle playing one of the monsters as an NPC – so that’s what I did. I roleplayed one solidly throughout the session, speaking in the first person and appointing him the spokesman for the NPCs, and simply described the gist of what the others were saying, moods, tone of voice, etc. By half-way through the session, I felt I had a handle on the spokesman, and adopted the first person for one of the other NPC monsters in addition to the first. By the end of the session, I was able to play them all at once; the fear I had felt was groundless.

When PCs Do The Unexpected

There is very little that a player enjoys more than completely outfoxing the GM, coming up with a brilliant ploy from out of left field that is so completely unexpected that the GM is left completely gob-smacked and on the back foot – and rocked back on his heels, to boot! Almost every GM’s first reaction to that situation is to start looking for reasons why this “brilliant plan” doesn’t succeed, but this is never a wise response. It creates an situation in which the players feel that the GM is against them, trying to box them into accepting only the predigested solutions that he cares to offer them, just one half-step removed from railroading the entire plotline. The words that come to mind to describe the resulting atmosphere are “Poisonous”, “Defensive”, and “Toxic”.

As Johnn suggests in “Say Yes, but Get There Quick” (reading between the lines), it’s far better instead to look for reasons why this “brilliant plan” WILL work (unless there is some blatantly obvious flaw, of course). This results in a completely different outcome to that described in the previous paragraph; instead of being seen to box the players in, the GM gives the impression of being completely open to anything the players want to try, of being totally confident in his understanding of the Game World and the events taking place within it. The Campaign, and the respectability of the GM in the eyes of his players, are immediately elevated in stature.

Being properly prepared makes it a lot easier. I have already blogged about PCs doing the unexpected, unlike most of the subjects of today’s article, and you can read my detailed advice – and the story behind the it – in “My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – my B.A. Felton Moment“, so I won’t take time and space recapitulating it here.

Mis-directed Game Prep

Akin to the problem discussed in the previous section is this one. The GM spends all his time preparing for the PCs to reach Location X or Event Y only for circumstances to prompt them to take a side-trip to situation Z instead. That circumstance might be a random encounter or the sudden deciphering of a warning sign that the GM thought they had discounted or an unexpected opportunity or even a percieved advantage that the GM hadn’t thought of. Or perhaps he simply thought that he wouldn’t need it yet. I’ve even had a situation in which encounter Y was concluded far more quickly than I expected, propelling the party on to situation Z before I’d had a chance to prepare for it.

Under the ethos described above, the GM should let the PCs follow their own inclinations – though he should also keep track of what the enemies get up to when the PCs don’t show up to disturb their plans – but that’s not quite as easily achieved when the GM’s prep doesn’t include ‘situation Z’.

Once again there are two essential solutions: delay or improvise.

Delay

This is an approach that can only carry the GM so far. Realistically, the game can end no more than half an hour early without the players wanting to push on; and there is only so much delay – perhaps an hour or so – that the GM can throw into events without the players suspecting that he is trying to stall. Like a merchant sensing the urgency of a customer’s need and pressing his advantage, if that happens, they will start deliberately upping their pace.

So unless there is less than about 90 minutes before the session of play will draw to a close, Delay is valuable only as a holding tactic – something to keep the PCs busy long enough for the GM to think. His only real choice is to take the other solution and implement it as best he can.

The best way to delay is to throw in an irrelevant side encounter that blocks or obstructs the party’s path, but that seems relevant, or some mystery that appears to need solving but that seems relevant to what the party are now attempting to achieve. The key to both is imparting some sense of relevance. The first is easier; all that is needed is a representative member or members of whoever is expected to reside at the new intended destination, or some overheard dialogue indicating an intention to attack or blockade the intended destination, or hints that this new enemy knows the PCs are around here somewhere and that they are hunting them.

Still more sophisticated delays are possible if the GM has taken the time at some point in the past to prepare one and held in his pocket until he needs it. A former enemy, or henchman of same; or perhaps an assassin who was hired by a past enemy prior to his final defeat; or some delayed-effect legacy of an earlier battle. If you are a GM reading this, stop for five minutes right now and put a little thought into some development or encounter deriving from the PC’s past that you can pull out of a back pocket the next time you need a delay. Your campaign will be the better for it, and you’ll be that little bit more secure behind the screen.

Delays must always result naturally and logically from the circumstances within the adventure, so if you implement one, you will need to have everything in place to justify it later. Where did this enemy come from? If they knew the PCs were in the vicinity, HOW did they know? Part of the process of using such an encounter is being ready with the answers to these problems. Perhaps a broom closet in the dungeon/lair to which the PCs are travelling needs to be re-tasked into a room with a scrying room, or someone needs to name-drop the name of a deity who has given them a hot tip or whatever.

Improvise

When the time to be filled doesn’t permit delaying tactics, it’s often better not to delay at all, moving directly to this solution. Improvising essentially means working without the safety-net of game prep, doing your prep on-the-fly a few seconds in advance of the PCs, then reconciling your on-the-fly contributions to the plot after the fact.

When GMs have sufficient understanding of what the NPCs in their campaign are doing, and of how the world works, this can be done in relative safety. The improvised game might not be as polished as a fully-prepped session, but there can be an immediacy and reactiveness that can counterbalance that – and there is a certain thrill to high-wire walking without a net that can be appealing.

If you aren’t confident of that level of understanding, it’s usually a better approach to graft a new mini-plot into the story that’s totally unrelated to the main plot. Something that can come and go without disturbing the broader situation, buying time for the GM to get the missing prep done for the next game session.

These mini-plots come in four sizes:

• The rest of the session or less
• A full session split in two
• The rest of this session plus one full session to follow
• Sprawling

Mini-plots which last “the rest of the session or less” may need to be padded out with a small delay (as described above) in order to completely occupy the day’s play – but you now have a second plotline with which to connect the delay, keeping the whole side-trip away from your main plot self-contained. This type of mini-plot will follow a simple three-act structure: a roleplaying/discovery encounter, a problem-solving/combat encounter, and a second roleplaying encounter:

• In the first roleplaying/discovery encounter, the PCs are handed a problem of some immediacy. If the PCs are heading for a meeting with an important NPC, perhaps that NPC – and everyone in his keep – has fallen unexpectedly ill, or is drunk to the point of insensibility, or he is beside himself because his daughter’s missing or has been kidnapped, or has been possessed, or any one of hundred other possibilities. Heck, a time-traveler may pop up out of nowhere and “borrow” the NPCs for a moment, or the patron deity of one of them may hand them an emergency assignment. The problem should be short and simple.
• In the second act, the PCs discover the cause of the problem and solve it, either by roleplay, detective work, or hack-and-slash. A simple problem usually has an equally-simple solution. One of the major issues to be resolved in this act, if not in the first, is why the others caught up in the problem couldn’t solve it themselves – why does it fall to the PCs?
• In the final act, the mini-plot’s outcome gets wrapped up in a nice, neat bow. The NPC who they have come to see thanks the PCs, and excuses himself for a moment to compose himself before speaking to them about whatever they came to achieve, or whatever. Unfortunately, that’s where time for the day’s play runs out – at the most convenient point possible for the GM whose prep was undone or misdirected.

Mini-plots that occupy a full session split in two generally have a four-act structure. The first is the same as described above, and is followed by a new act inserted between the first and second acts of the three-act structure. The second act is when the PCs confront the problem and discover some sort of reversal or plot twist at the end of act II, which is where the days play ends. This may need to be padded with a short delay, as above. In the following game session, the PCs wrap up the side quest and have about half of the day left to get the main plot back underway – so at most this buys the GM one intra-session interval of prep time.

Mini-plots that occupy one-and-a-half sessions are only slightly more complicated than mini-plots, but generally involve a less straightforward problem and some roleplaying interaction with NPCs along the way. They can often be created by combining the four-act structure with an overlapping quick three-act mini-plot which is conducted in parallel with the first, overlapping and complicating it. By giving the PCs a simple problem and a difficult problem to overcome and entwining the two plots, you complicate matters just enough to stretch the whole thing out for an extra few hours of play. Sometimes you can gain additional mileage by saving any delaying action for the middle of the mini-plot instead of using it up-front.

Finally, mini-plots that will take longer than a session-and-a-bit to resolve are what I describe as “sprawling” – they are generally so big and complicated that by the time they are resolved, the players will have lost track of what was going on in the plotline that has been interrupted, which is the primary plotline of the game. I don’t recommend this sort of side-quest, as they can often be detrimental to the campaign overall.

The chief advantage of grafting a new side-quest or mini-plot into the game is that it isolates the effects of that plotline from the main game, in effect protecting the GM’s game from his mistakes.

Creating Spur Of The Moment NPCs

I have a simple recipe for spur-of-the-moment NPCs: I pick one attribute that is characteristic of the function of the NPC and amplify it, then leaven it with a second attribute that is characteristic of the function and invert it. The concept is that the amplification of the first has enabled the character to succeed in whatever his career/plot-function is despite the adversity.

Examples of this approach include:

• A wizard with an incisive understanding of arcane theory who drinks himself into insensibility daily to forget the horrors he has encountered.
• A fighter with natural style and prowess whose ego leads him to showboating and other flamboyances to the detriment of his success in combat.
• A rogue whose talents are exceeded only by his inability to submerge his bravado and boastfulness.
• A cleric who is deeply pious but is acutely class-conscious and dismissive of the value of others.
• A cop who believes in the legal process but has no faith in the courts.

I will intersperse such NPCs with personalities taken out-of-context and adapted from TV shows, movies, literature, or comics. A wizard with the personality of Homer Simpson; a rogue with the personality of Jack Bauer (’24’); a barbarian with the personality of the Queen Alien (‘Aliens’); A necromancer with the personality of Gordon Ramsey; a merchant with the personality of Jack Sparrow (‘Pirates of the Caribbean’). The list goes on and on. Crafting such an NPC is a three-step process:

• Pick a basis personality, the more incongruous the better;
• Integrate that personality with the character’s role – how will the personality impact the career of the individual, how will it benefit him and how will it hinder him;
• Decide how to convey the personality in play.

Both of these approaches will give you a viable off-the-cuff NPC in a few seconds. I will usually open my Player’s Handbook or rules to an appropriate section and pretend to consult it – or even to actually consult it – to buy myself those seconds, and to use as a guideline to the abilities of the NPC.

Skills? Nothing simpler. Rate the character’s capabilities on a scale of 1-to-character-level; if the skill is something that someone of the character’s profession should be good at, I give them a skill of twice the rating, if it’s something that might be beneficial but not necessary, I give them a skill equal to the rating, and if it’s not directly relevant to their abilities, they either get zero or half of the rating, depending on whether or not the choice adds to the character’s colour. That one number serves as a touchstone to the rest of the character, enabling me to get on with running him.

For non-level oriented game systems, like Champions, or my own superhero game system, I use the average basis of the roll as the character’s level. So, for the hero system, which is based on 3d6, which has an average of 10.5, I will rate the character out of 10. For my own game, which is d-percentile based, and with skill values ranging from -100 to +150%, I will rate the character out of 75 and apply a modifier of -50 to the skill values that derive from that rating. This gives skill values of somewhere between -50 and +100 for relevant skills.

I am also (usually) careful to jot down any skill values that are decided in this fashion so that I can be consistent on any future appearance of the NPC.

Putting A Face to the Numbers

There are times when you have to generate a more comprehensive NPC on the spot – rolling for their stats, and then interpreting them. The technique I employ at such times is very similar to the one described above for on-the-fly characters.

Ignoring the stat most important to the character unless it is unusually high or low, I focus on the next highest stat, and consider that to be a reflection of the amplification of one aspect of the personality. I then focus on the lowest stat, and consider it to reflect the leavening influence. Choosing one of the aspects of the stat to exemplify and label those personality attributes and the character suddenly stops being a collection of numbers and starts to develop a unique personality. Here are a couple of examples:

• STR 15 INT 12 WIS 9 CON 14 DEX 13 CHA 13 – generated using the roll 4d6 and keep the best three, i.e. a PC standard. If this character was a fighter, I would ignore STR because it’s mediocre for a fighter, neither exceptionally high nor low, and focus on the next highest result, the CON 14. This suggests a robust character, generally fairly healthy, with perhaps one or two flaws; so an overweight and short-sighted individual who was generally active and healthy. The lowest stat, WIS 9, also suggests someone who is a little foolish or short-sighted in a less metaphoric meaning of the term. Generating a personality to go with a set of stats using this systems is actually faster than rolling the stats!
• For the sake of comparison, let’s use the same stats for a Cleric and not a Fighter. That means that I ignore the Wisdom beyond noting that it is unusually low for the class. The strength score is thus the highest, which is suggestive of battle, and belligerence. The lowest stat is the Wisdom, but that is once again ignored, beyond raising the question of why this character would choose to be a cleric in the first place – it is clearly the class for which the character is least suited. The next lowest stat is INT at 12, and that is therefore interpreted as indicating that some aspect of INT operates to the characters’ detriment. The most obvious choice is that a high INT character asks a lot of difficult questions. Putting these thoughts together produces a characterization of someone who has chosen a career not because they want it or believe themselves suited to it, but to make someone else happy; someone who is argumentative and belligerent and who tends to raise doubts in those to whom they preach, rather than settling them. This is someone who is probably not happy doing what they are doing, which often manifests as anger and gloominess. Perhaps the character got into a serious fight (the belligerence coming through) which went too far and was saved from the gallows only by swearing to a life of service to a religious order. He now walks the fine line between service to his Deity as best he can and an innate unsuitability to that calling that makes the character someone who is tolerated more than welcome. The characterization is surprisingly complex, even deep, given such a simple method of generation. You could have this character make repeated appearances and the players would never know that he or she had been generated in about 30 seconds plus die-rolling time!

Putting a name to the face

There is a particular circle of hell reserved for players who force GMs to come up with character names off-the-cuff. I can’t speak for everyone, but I frequently find this to be more difficult than coming up with a personality for a character. I have one particular technique that has proven to be a lifesaver in the past.

The first of these techniques is the reversal. I simply think of a name or word that is appropriately symbolic of the major personality characteristic of the character and write it in reverse, then tweak to make it pronouncable. The hot-headed fighter created above, for example: Dennis, from Dennis The Menace, becomes Sinn-ed, tweaked to Sined (not ‘sinned’ as in ‘sinner’). Glower, meaning an angry stare, becomes Rewolg, which I will tweak for pronouncibility to Reywald. So the name is Sined Reywald. Works like a charm!

A Fish Out Of Water

But what do you do when a character doesn’t quite seem to fit the story purposes for which they are intended? Once again, there are two answers: the first is to alter the character’s role slightly to accommodate the character as they are; and the second is to toss the misfit aside and generate a new one using the techniques explained above (repeat as necessary until you have a smooth fit). Since there is no need to recapitulate those techniques, let’s focus for a moment on the first.

The usual reason a character doesn’t seem to fit is because the character’s capabilities or dedication are either insufficient or misdirected, relative to the role they are to play in the plotline. For example, if the NPCs role was as a messenger of the Gods, it would seem entirely inappropriate for the second example NPC to be that messenger; he is simply not pious enough.

But the problems can be more subtle – a character who is more defensively-oriented, or more reasonable and willing to negotiate, being cast in the role of ordering an unceasing and implacable attack, for example.

The solution being discussed is how to alter the situation to fit the character. In the first case, that revolves around the question of why such an unfit messenger has been chosen, and the obvious answer is for the task to be an act of punishment or contrition – in other words, the character’s lack of fitness for the assignment is the very reason he has been chosen to perform it.

The second case shows that it is often not quite so easy. A character who is primarily oriented toward defense could not initiate an unwarranted and incessant attack unless pushed to a level of desperation; in order to do so, the character would have to have become convinced that no matter how distasteful it may be, he has no choice but to seek the obliteration of the PCs. He has been convinced that to listen to anything that the PCs might say will destroy him in some fashion, or worse. Either he is correct, in which case something has happened to the PCs that they weren’t aware of, and need to know of; or he is wrong, and someone has done a beautiful snow job on a potential ally. In either case, whoever or whatever is responsible is going to be a significant campaign element thereafter – even if they didn’t exist previously.

Once again, then, this forces a choice apon the GM: he can either enlarge his campaign plans to include whatever is responsible for the confrontation, or he can revisit his former decision to utilize such a misfit character for this purpose. The latter protects the purity of the plotline underway; the latter offers an opportunity for growth in the campaign. Which would I choose? Early in a campaign, I would opt for the “growth” solution without hesitation; when the campaign is established, or even winding its way toward a conclusion, replacing the NPC with one who doesn’t raise such complex issues is a better choice.

As a general rule of thumb, if a fish-out-of-water offers a chance to enhance the campaign (as opposed to merely complicating it) then it is better to keep the misfit and turn the situation to the game’s ultimate advantage; otherwise, it is better to dump the character and replace him with someone better suited to the plot needs of the story.

The Absence Of Plot Direction

The last of the situations to be addressed in this article is perhaps the most difficult to deal with. So many of the choices discussed earlier rely apon a strong sense of what is happening in the campaign, where it is going and what will happen in the long term, that without that sense, the GM is truly adrift.

It’s my experience that if the campaign world is rich enough, a campaign direction will eventually emerge from the interplay of PCs and game environment, and that ultimately a campaign can be divided into three phases:

• fumbling and complicating;
• the emergence of broader plotlines into a broader narrative; and
• the culmination of those plotlines into the conclusion of the broader narrative.

The first stage is marked by the GM stocking the PCs awareness of the world with plot elements and story facilitators. At this point in the campaign creation sequence, the ultimate shape of those elements may be unclear, and all the GM should be aiming for is to make the world interesting with as many sources of adventure for the PCs as the GM can introduce. Scenarios and plots will be short and self-contained and be more about establishing what’s going on without any lasting impact. A GM can shortcut much of this process deliberately by building an overall plot arc into the game world from word one, but even if the GM doesn’t do so, one will emerge eventually.

The first stage is inherently unstable; sooner or later, there will be some event within the game that will catalyze events and attitudes on a broader front, that will have more substantial repercussions. As soon as that happens, the campaign is in stage two, in which every campaign element is examined in relation to the larger plotline that has emerged.

I normally advocate the deliberate incubation of a particular plotline within a campaign because if one emerges naturally there is no guarantee that it can be resolved in a satisfactory manner. Deliberately integrating an overall trend towards a particular confrontation of forces or ideologies or whatever means that the GM can ensure that a resolution is possible. Even when the players perceive the campaign as being in stage 1, the GM can be busily laying foundations for later adventures with none of the PCs aware of the ultimate significance of events.

In stage three, everything else is subordinate to the overall plotline that has emerged, and is all trending towards a confrontation and resolution – a big finish. And, even if the campaign enters a new stage 1 afterwards, the aftermath of that confrontation will continue to shape the game world long after the resolution is achieved.

It doesn’t matter if the GM feels there is an absence of plot direction – it is simply more convenient when there’s one built in.

To illustrate what I mean by all this, I thought I would conclude with a brief synopsis of my Fumanor Campaigns, analyzed from this perspective.

The original Fumanor Campaign had as its subject the recovery by the Gods from the latest confrontation between them and their equally-eternal enemies, the Chaos Powers. It was a fantasy-oriented post-apocalyptic campaign, and centered around the need to (a) unify the survivors from many pantheons into a single cohesive entity, and (b) strengthen that united pantheon by subverting one of their enemy into the ranks of the Gods. For various reasons, it was necessary for the key decisions involved to be placed in the hands of mortals (the PCs). It followed that the campaign would be all about the relationships between the PCs and these overwhelming forces as they jockeyed for position.

The first stage of the campaign revolved around introducing the characters to the campaign world, revealing the campaign history, and setting the stage for the PCs becoming aware of this situation. The second stage began when the PCs became aware of what the Gods wanted from them, and explained why both Gods and Chaos Powers seemed to have gone out of their way to interact with the PCs in the first part of the campaign. Each PC was given a minor quest to carry out that would prepare the way for the ultimate quest, even while it propelled them forwards. A number of side issues developed and were resolved, but all were shaped by, and could be defined in terms of, the relationship between those side issues and the major question.

The segue from stage II to stage III of the original campaign was so subtle that it was barely noticed. All the PCs knew was that with each encounter, the stakes seemed to rise, until all the universe was hanging on their choice. Some forces tried to stop them, some tried to support them, some tried to subvert them, and some sought to beguile them. Gradually they became aware that whatever they chose would alter the fate of the world in ways they could barely hint at, never mind understand.

Ultimately, three questions needed to be resolved by the PCs: The identity and role of the Divine, the question of a multicultural multi-sentient world vs. a world with a single dominant sentient race, and the distribution of magic – small amounts highly concentrated or large amounts widely distributed. The identity of the twelfth deity was almost trivial in comparison to the scope of these questions.

The final stage of the campaign had the potential to either form a dénouement, showing some of the implications of the choices that had been made, and promising a better tomorrow, or stage I of a new campaign if the players wanted to continue. They very definitely chose the second option.

The second campaign centered around the same conflict between the Gods and Chaos Powers, and what had really happened 100+ years earlier to trigger the apocalypse. Ultimately, the PCs would learn that Thoth, God Of Knowledge, had decided that his natural gifts should enable him to possess knowledge of the Chaos Powers that he could use to plan a final victory for the Gods; but that he had underestimated the corruptive nature of that knowledge, and had found himself in thrall to the Chaos Powers and forced to use his natural sense of Order and Logic to give the Chaos Powers the ultimate victory. Although he could not directly oppose his new masters, even to the extent of letting his brethren know that he still existed, he could indirectly shelter and aid those who could ultimately release him, starting when they were so insignificant that they were beneath notice. His every action on behalf of his masters had a dual purpose thereafter.

But, at the start of the second campaign, the PCs knew nothing of this. All they knew was that things had not started to improve, as expected, after their victory in reshaping the world and elevating Arioch to Divinity. There had been a short-term benefit, but things were soon falling apart around their ears. Apostasy, Heresies, Invasions, Despair, Demonic activities, Corruption, Crime, and Despair were all on the rise. Several times, the world teetered on the edge of destruction.

In stage II of the second campaign, the PCs started connecting one plot thread with another, and became aware that many of the threats they opposed had common causes. Some of it was an impending attempted coup from within, and some of it was a threatened invasion from the outside, and some of it was supernatural forces again jockeying for position in preparation for a major confrontation. One by one, all the threats that they had uncovered were linked back to someone’s master plan to keep everyone busy dealing with mundane issues and pointedly NOT interfering in the real objective of that master plan – the destruction of the Prime Material Plane and a consequent domino effect that would annihilate all of existence.

In stage III, the PCs undertook a desperate quest to search out the identity of the real enemy and baulk his designs. A long series of clues led to them through many hazards to discover the betrayal and capture of Thoth, and delivered to them a plan for his defeat – one that seemed almost impossible of success, but was better than nothing. At the epic conclusion, they had to fight their way through the attempted coup-de-tah to deal with the imminent destruction of everything. The PCs won, but only by killing Thoth to protect the forbidden knowledge that was consuming and enslaving him.

The third and fourth Fumanor campaigns are now underway more or less simultaneously. One is dealing with the internal consequences of the events of the previous campaigns, and has theological purity as an underlying theme; the other is dealing with the external consequences of the events, first in terms of an Empire Of The Undead whose existence was only possible because of the near-annihilation of the Gods in the apocalypse, and second in terms of the Elvish situation, in which the Drow were redeemed – at the price of turning the Elves over to conquest by Lolth, who is busy corrupting them. Both campaigns are following slightly more complex architectures than the simple I-II-III pattern I have described; the first has been more episodic in nature and no clear overarching plotline has yet become clear to the players (though there is one, and they are slowly becoming aware of it) while the other has so far seemed to be following a I-II-III pattern – in which the entire purpose of II and III are to set up a subsequent II-and-III stage involving the Elves, something that the players don’t yet fully appreciate.

What this synopsis shows is that if a GM feels like the campaign is not going anywhere, to simply concentrate on having fun, and eventually a pattern will reveal itself. It is better to feel rudderless than it is to force a lame direction onto a campaign.

Lifeboats In The Sunset

These eight problems can strike the best-prepared GM at the most unexpected times. Hopefully, these eight solutions will at least enable GMs beset by these sudden emergencies to keep their heads above water long enough to solve their problems!

Before I die, I want to run all these modules.

That’s what I said to a friend the other day in Starbuck’s. We were planning campaign dates and got to talking about Castle Amber, the classic Moldvay adventure, and possibly my favourite adventure of all time.

I waxed on about how I’d love to GM it again. Then it occurred to me that I should start planning to run the module instead of just wishing about it.

I Gotta Make the Time

With regular campaigns taking up a lot of my planning and gaming time, I could spend the rest of my life just running my campaigns. I might never get to running certain modules I’d be chafing to get at. I might never get to visit Castle Amber again, with its crazy NPCs and tricky encounters.

So, I decided in the coffee shop to make a published adventure bucket list and to make the time to work through it.

What’s on the List?

My list only contains published adventures. And there are two types:

1. I have DM’d it before and want to do again
2. It’s on my shelf begging to be run for the first time

I have Dungeon Magazine’s picks for top adventures of all time, and several of those made it into category two.  Several other modules have a great reputation or rating online. And a few are just teasing me to try.

My Game Plan

The point of the list is to create a plan that will get accomplished.

Just making a wistful group of modules I’d like to run someday will not get the job done. It’ll always remain a fantasy. Then I’ll get hit by a bus, my family gets a bunch of insurance money, and those modules will land up in a garage sale without me having the opportunity to spill cola on them or get food crumbs lodged in that crevasse you can never reach between pages.

I will take a module from the list, prepare it to my game system de jour, and run it outside of my regular campaign. I’ll schedule a weekend day, or a few, to get the adventure complete.

That way, my main games go on unhindered, I get my bucket list slowly pared down over a period of years, and – the best part – I get additional gaming in!

I get to carve a new gaming island out of my schedule and be stranded on it for a multitude of adventures.

That said, I also will incorporate some modules into my regular campaigns (assuming I am still gaming fantasy at any given time). That will help me get through my bucket list faster, before that nasty DM Killer Bus hits.

Some modules are full campaigns, and they will not get gamed in one weekend, so they’ll have to be part of my regular gaming or a dedicated side group.

List A – Modules I’ve Run Before and Will Again

Castle Amber	Curse of Xanathon	Keep on the Borderlands	Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Night Below	Queen of the Spiders	Scourge of the Slave Lords	Underwater series
The Desert of Desolation Series	The Forge of Fury	The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun	The Ghost Tower of Inverness
The Secret of Bone Hill		The Temple of Elemental Evil

List B – Modules I Will Run for the First Time

Against the Cult of the Reptile God	Axe of the Dwarvish Lords	Bloodstone Series	City of Skulls
City of the Spider Queen	Dead Gods	Die Vecna Die!	Dragon Mountain
Dwellers of the Forbidden City	Egg of the Phoenix	Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan	Illithiad Trilogy
Needle	Red Hand of Doom	Return to White Plume Mountain	Shackled City
The Assassin’s Knot	The Gates of Firestorm Peak	The Lost City	The Rod of Seven Parts
The Witchfire Trilogy

What on your list?

What’s on your game master bucket list – things to do while you still can?

This is the second half of a two-part guest article by Phil McGregor. To anyone who doesn’t know who he is, check the brief bio at the bottom of the article.

Silver or Gold

The other thing I find really interesting in almost all D&D descended/inspired FRPs is the 1/10th (45.4 grams* gold (or any other) coin that is the “standard” by which all value is measured.
* assuming a standard [~454g] rather than an avoirdupois [~373g] pound.

Now, to anyone who has any knowledge of history, or the history of economics, or indeed, of economics itself, this assumption is a surprising and unsupportable one… and, oh my, the problems that flow from it!

This makes gold coins, as such, and, indeed, coinage in general, almost worthless as a medium of exchange in your typical FRP game on a practical basis… assuming an average sort of character who can carry, say, 80 lbs (not unreasonably for a WW1/WW2/Modern grunt, so certainly realistic)… well, he has 800 gp, maximum, in walking around money.

Or, consider it another way, that 75gp Bow (or Sword, if you took the point) mentioned in Wood or Iron, well, you need 1.25 pounds of gold to buy it.

Hmmm. Current gold price is around US$1500-1600 per ounce.

So, in something resembling (if you don’t look at it too closely) real purchasing power, that bow costs US$300-320,000 (assuming a standard pound, or US$22,500-24,000 if pound avoirdupois)…

Sorry. Not even remotely believable.

Real Coins

So, what did historical (western european) coins weigh?

Well, the Romans typically coined gold at the rate of 72 coins per Roman pound (327g), making them about 4.54g apiece… around 1/10th of what D&D and its descendants would have you believe.

Roman silver coins varied, but 96 per pound was the late Republican/early Imperial figure, for around 3.4 grams apiece…

A Medieval silver Penny, English, was minted at the rate of 240 per pound (Troy), making them around 1.55g each, while a gold Sovereign massed 8.5g, and was worth ~392g (1.05 lbs avoirdupois) of silver.

What Price A Longbow?

So, let’s look at that Bow again – 75gp is about 1.7 pounds avoirdupois, or more than US$30,000! Even worse than before, cost wise, but now, at least, you can carry around about 4272gp in your 80lb pack. So a slight improvement.

Of course, you’ll also note that 1 D&D gp is worth only 10 D&D silver pieces. Typically a roman Denarius Aureus (aka a Solidus) was worth at least 20 silver denarii in late Republican/Early Imperial times. And the gold Sovereign was worth 21 shillings, or 252 silver pennies, making gold worth around 45 times silver by weight.

So, let’s try the Bow again. But this time, assume it is 75 silver pieces. Which makes it worth 1.667 gp by the above ratio. Which makes an 8.5g gold coin worth US$730 or so in relative purchasing power.

Better, but still way over the odds for a chunk of wood, whereas that 15gp sword costs only US$146.

Much better, of course, if you assume the $146 Bow vs the $730 sword.

Looking Beyond To The Wider World

What are some of the more obvious game related flow on problems from the economic tomfoolery of D&D and D&D descended or inspired games?

Well, many of them attempt to get around the problem of Player Characters needing to carry around their portable wealth, er, portably, by issuing higher value (but still 1/10th pound, as often as not coins, such as Platinum or they include gems as more or less standard and easily assessable means of exchange or some such.

The problem with Platinum is that it is even more rare that gold. So rare that it is not mentioned in any European source until the middle of the 16th century AD – and then only as a native alloy with gold that could not be refined. In fact, Platinum was not reliably smeltable until the late 18th century AD.

So, not likely as a coinage metal in a medieval analog world.

Gems? Not a sparkling solution.

Gems are even more problematic.

See, before the 17th century AD gems were not faceted, or, at best, had a single flat surface cut… they were either polished or simply left raw. Their value was much less, in absolute and relative terms, compared to bullion, than it is now… of course, faceting doesn’t require a lot of high tech tools, even today, so it is possible to assume that an FRP world could have faceting and that, therefore, the value of faceted gems relative to bullion would be something more like the modern relativities.

The problem is, of course, that what we regard as the really valuable gems are really uncommon, and not easy, as often as not, to mine or find – unless you do it on an almost industrial scale. But that has its own problems – the only reason diamonds, for example, are worth more than a fraction of their actual price is because the DeBeers Cartel (and its supposed competitors) release only a fraction of yearly production for sale each year in one of the oldest and most successful price fixing operations in modern history!

So while, yes, you could use gems as a means of exchange you would have to bargain, and bargain hard, each time you wanted to “cash one in”… and you’d have to haggle over the price of each and every single one! Not a role playing experience most of us are interested in!

So, where are we so far?

Well, it should be obvious that 1/10th pound coins are ridiculous. It should be equally obvious that prices for goods should be, at the very minimum, assumed to be in silver coins rather than gold – and that gold should be worth a lot more than 10 x 1/10th pound silver pieces for a 1/10th pound gold piece. This makes a direct conversion difficult, since there is no realistic way you can keep that 1-to-10 ratio.

Still, converting all gp values to sp values is a start – and it makes carrying around a significant chunk of the PC’s wealth much easier.

Ah. If ’twere only that simple.

Piles Of Silver, Hoards of Gold

That’s where we get into the other problem related to gold and silver in FRP games.

There’s too damn much of it!

It should be obvious but, in case it isn’t, let me explain.

Before the discovery of the New World, estimates on the total mined bullion stocks in the Old World are on the order of 5,000 tons of gold and 50,000 tons of Silver. The bullion stock of the New World was easily equal to that, eventually.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Step back a minute. Medieval Europe had, at the height of its population, around 100 million people. Now, assume all the Old World’s bullion was in Europe (it wasn’t, of course – India and China have been gold sinks since ancient times).

• 5000 tons of gold = 50 grams of gold per person. Or about 6 gold soveriegns.
• 50000 tons of silver = 500 grams of gold per person. Or about 320 silver pennies.

Double those figures to add in the New World allocation. Sound like damn all? Right….

One of the major problems facing pretty much all ancient and medieval (and renaissance and even pre-20th century) societies was the lack of enough bullion to represent economic activity. In short, there wasn’t enough cash to go around. The inevitable result was periodic, nasty, economic crises.

Now, consider the average Tomb, or Monster Lair – multiply by the number of Tombs/Monster Lairs that you think is likely in the typical FRP world.

Now do you see the problem?

A Dire Prognosis

Almost all of the entire world’s supply of bullion is likely tied up in such gold sinks. Which makes gold and silver coins far, far, far more valuable than they were historically… and, well, it means that economic crises are far more common and far, far worse in such a typical FRP world.

And that doesn’t even begin to consider the inflationary pressure that all that ill gotten bullion the PCs found in the Dragon’s Lair will put on the entire Kingdom/Empire’s economy.

If you want a really nasty picture of what happens in such a case, have a look at Spain. All that New World Bullion right royally stuffed the Spanish economy – to the point where she slumped from being a world power to an also ran has-been that is barely a regional power. And it was pretty much inevitable – though, yes, the Spanish nobility were complete screw ups when it came to rationally spending the money. They beggared the peasantry and middle classes largely and spent the money on art and, mostly, failed imperial/military adventures for which they ended up with… well, some really nice art. And a totally stuffed economy that is really still stuffed compared to the rest of Europe, the rest that didn’t have all that gold.

And you really think the local FRP nobility are going to be any better?

In search of solutions

There is a sort of solution. One that Europe was grappling with from the 14th century AD onwards.

Paper money. At first it was Bills of Exchange, sort of like a cross between a Promissory Note and a Traveller’s Cheque. But they fell down because, in the end, they had to be redeemable, and the economic crises caused (in large part) by the above mentioned bullion shortage and noble mismanagement meant, inevitably, the whole arrangement was a giant economic house of cards.

Only when governments started to issue paper money, or backed private or semi–private banks who did, and only when they learnt that it didn’t have to be redeemable in bullion, but had to be acceptable by the government at something close to face value, did these problems become, well, lessened (look around at Global Financial Crisis 1.5 at the moment and see the mess that you can still make!)…

Still, this doesn’t help us with what’s in all those Tombs and Lairs, does it?

One suggestion? Artwork. Artifacts (no, not like the Head of Vecna… just really old and really sought after artworks). That sort of thing. An ancient Ming (or local equivalent) Vase. A handful of coins from a forgotten empire worth a small (or not so small!) fortune way over their actual bullion value.

This brings us back to the haggling issue, doesn’t it? So, either the PCs have to have a reliable agent who can, slowly, turn their gains into cash (or land, or whatever) or they need to have the appropriate market related skills (and have lots of time) to do it themselves.

That, plus realistically valuable and realistic weight coins, plus Bills of Exchange to keep the wheels of commerce turning at something like a reliable level and you’re set!

Suggested Reading

To get an overview of life in the Middle Ages:

Life in a Medieval Village, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval City by Joseph and Francis Gies are, though dated and very much centered on England, a good start.

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Civilisation & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century by Fernand Braudel in three volumes (!) is more than you’ll probably ever want to know about, well, Civilisation and Capitalism!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

More focussed, and more easily digested, are (shameless commercial plug) the following, from Phalanx Games Design (me) –

by Phil McGregor which provides some of the underpinnings – the limits, if you will – that applied (and have to apply) to civilisations at various levels of technological development). Written specifically with GMs as worldbuilders in mind. Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

by Phil McGregor which contains a more focussed examination of the real Middle Ages, at least for the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, France. Includes something approaching a realistic(ish) and detailed price list where you won’t find 75 gp Bows! Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

Displaced: Lost in Time and Space and by Phil McGregor which, though focussed on one-way time or dimensional travel, has all sorts of useful nuts and bolts things about how things work that easily and valuably supplement FF&S and Orbis Mundi. Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

About The Author

Phil McGregor is a moderately well known (if you’re old enough!) writer of Role Playing Game material who started wargaming in the early 1970’s, moved on to the very first edition (White Box) of Dungeons and Dragons when it came out in 1975 and was hooked!

Being in the right place at the right time, he managed to get a co-author gig with Ed Simbalist and Mark Ratner writing Space Opera (1980) as well as a couple of supplements/adventures for it, and for Chivalry & Sorcery while being published by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

Along the way he wrote the very first Rigger Black Book for FASA’s Shadowrun (1st Edition) and, in recent years, has published a number of RPG books on RPGNow under his own Phalanx Games Design imprint, including Farm, Forge and Steam, Road to Armageddon (for BTRC’s EABA), Orbis Mundi, Displaced and Audace ad Gloriam (2d6 based Exploration/Survival Gear Catalog for SF RPGs).

In real life he is a History teacher (Years 7-12) of over 30 years experience, currently teaching in a High School in the Northern Suburbs of Sydney, is semi–active in union politics for the NSW Teachers Federation, plays RPGs most Saturdays and Computer Games (mostly wargames) many other nights.

This is the first half of a two-part guest article by Phil McGregor. To anyone who doesn’t know who he is, check the brief bio at the bottom of the article! The second part will appear on Thursday.

Wood or Iron?

One of the reasons I got into roleplaying games way back in the mid 1970’s (D&D 1e, original first printing!) was because I was already interested in historical boardgames (Avalon Hill, “Panzerblitz” and “Strategy & Tactics Magazine” – and that was because I had a major interest in History going way back to Primary School. Eventually, I went to University and did a double major in History and ended up a professional Historian of sorts (I teach High School History, Years 7-12, Australian, World/Modern and Ancient).

With such interests, personal and professional, it’s probably no wonder that I have always been interested in the way in which various roleplaying games have presented the inevitable historical elements – and even the most generic inevitably do, even if only by building on our societal (and often wrong) historical “knowledge” and also on the pseudo-historical assumptions of earlier roleplaying games, all the way back to that very first edition of “Dungeons and Dragons”. And, yes, there are, even in generic FRP games, historical assumptions.

Some of those we take for granted, as part of the overall fantasy milieu, include things such as the western European (largely English, but with French and German additions and other odds and sods) Feudal System, and all that that involves (Knighthood, Chivalry and more) as well as organised religion often based on Christian (or their middle/near eastern predecessors and relatives) hierarchical models – yes, even the supposedly Pagan ones!

To most people, this a perfectly acceptable “shorthand” for understanding the game background… even if, for those who know anything more than “popular knowledge” about ancient and medieval history, it is rarely accurate and mostly makes little or no sense. Not just the “Why do they have a noble named after a Roman military Rank (Count or Duke) in a world where there was never a Rome?” level, but also the “Why do they have a system designed to meet specific political, economic and geophysical conditions as they existed in Western Europe from about 800 AD through to the 1600’s applying to a world where none of those preconditions ever existed?”

But that’s the “Big Picture” – and it would take a lot of space here, or a lot of reading on your part, to come to grips with what the problems with these issues actually are… which is probably more than most casual gamers care to do (If you are interested, there is a suggested reading list appended at the end).

And, of course, there will be a lot of you who will feel “so what, it’s only a game”! Which is true enough – except for one thing I have noticed over the last 36+ years… the longer a gamer is involved in the hobby, and the longer a campaign (whatever rules or background it runs under), the more the participants become interested in the nuts and bolts… and the consistency of the whole thing. This is where the problems start to arise, as the foundation assumptions for most of the hobby’s assumed background – well, not to put too fine a point on it – don’t make much sense and lack any believability once you start looking at them with such an eye.

So, let’s get down to a couple of issues with pretty much all FRP games, certainly those that are largely based on Western European assumptions, get badly wrong, in a way that most long, even medium term, gamers will soon be scratching their heads over…

An inversion of reality

Going right back to the grandaddy of them all, the base assumption of D&D and pretty much all of its direct and indirect successors is that wood costs more than iron.

“Come again?”, you’re all saying, “I can’t remember wood or iron prices anywhere?” Well, think about the things made with wood and iron. Weapons. Light beginning to dawn somewhat?

In almost all western european influenced FRP games weapon costs are based on a mix of lethality (or perceived lethality, as the two aren’t always the same on a reading of history) and whether they are ranged weapons or not – and not their actual cost of manufacture!

So, for example, in Pathfinder (basically D&D 3.6), a Longsword (4 pounds of iron) costs 15gp and a Longbow (3 pounds of wood) costs 75gp. Think about it.

In any world even vaguely resembling reality, is it likely that ordinary wood will cost over six times as much per pound as ordinary iron?

Some of you might be saying, right around now, “But, But, It must use special wood!” And that’s right, it does. But, see, most of ancient and medieval Europe was covered with these things called, well, trees… from which you get wood. Even the somewhat special wood that bows are made from (and it doesn’t make all that much difference, bows made from ordinary wood were almost as good as bows made from the somewhat more select stuff).

Or, maybe, you’re saying, “But it must involve lots of labour intensive effort!”

Not really. We’re talking Longbows, which are what is called a Self Bow – a bow made from a single piece of wood. Sure, it has to be specially made by a moderately skilled craftsman – but it’s not a Composite Bow, which, even though it requires a lot more work, is still not as expensive to make as a sword.

That’s the reason that Bows were mostly the weapons of peasants and yeomen – they were cheap.

Swords? Anything made of iron? Or steel? Different kettle of fish. Entirely.

Production

It is estimated that the iron production of the whole Roman Empire, at its height, was around 20,000 tons per year. With the collapse of the Empire, Iron production in Europe plummeted as well – not to reach that 20kton figure again until around the 17th century… depending on how you count such things, around 1000 years! Why?

Sure, the collapse of the Western Empire led to immediate and massive economic dislocation – the western economy basically collapsed beyond almost subsistence level for quite a while. That was part of it.

The other part was that the Romans had basically mined out all of the known large deposits – down to the water table – and were at the stage where they were using slave powered water wheels to dewater lower shafts. This was simply uneconomical for the smaller successor states, and probably was uneconomical even for the Romans at the end as well. To get at the lower deposits required the invention of the steam engine – another 1200 years or so off.

That’s part of it. There simply wasn’t a lot of iron around to begin with, while there was a lot of wood. Economic forces work the same in an FRP world as they do in real life – or, at least, they do if you don’t want whiney players to start constant questioning of things! So, on that basis alone, iron is going to cost more than wood.

But there’s more. The technology of refining iron ore into iron was, well, marginal. The temperatures reachable in forges wasn’t enough to cause the iron to melt, so you ended up with a “bloom” of mixed iron and slag… and it took many, many, many, many man hours to heat and hammer and heat and hammer and heat and hammer the thing until you had worked out all the slag and were left with a slug of iron that you could then do something with.

Then, to form the armour or weapon or utensil desired took as much effort on top of all the above.

For example, we know that a suit of armour made for the Black Prince in Spain in the 14th century took around 2000 man hours to make… allowing for Sundays and Holy Days, that’s a good nine months.

Swords didn’t take as long as that, of course.

By now you can see the truth of my original point – there is no way in any FRP world even vaguely resembling reality that a chunk of wood is going to cost more than a chunk of iron!

So, why is it so? Well, there are some historical reasons and some game reasons.

A Noble Weapon

The historical reasons are quite simple. The barbarian tribes that largely destroyed and occupied the Western Empire were metal poor cultures, even compared to the Romans. Any metal was precious. Most warriors were equipped with spears – mostly wood, of course – and only the very most wealthy nobles and their retainers could hope to have a sword. The Romans largely, and largely effectively, embargoed a trade in weapons with these tribes and used gift swords as prestigious bribes to keep their fractious nobility, well, fractious … so they couldn’t combine and cause the Empire grief.

Swords were connected with prestige. They were a noble weapon. Even if the sad reality was (as the barbarians found out all too often, like the French at Crecy and Agincourt much later) that missile weapons could slaughter those sword wielding nobles way before they could get anywhere near their enemies…

Still, a Sword was a Noble’s weapon – and, in some places and at some times the powers that be attempted (largely futilely) to enforce sumptuary laws which, amongst other things, were supposed to limit the type of weapon that someone could own based on their social class rather than whether they could actually afford it or not. And, of course, as a result, a lot of pseudo-religious claptrap about the “noble” nature of swords and sword wielders (the Noble ones, at least) grew up over time… to be swallowed hook, line and sinker by FRP game designers ;-)

A Legacy Of Balance

The game reasons are also quite simple. The original designers of D&D based their rules on Chainmail, a set of miniatures wargaming rules – and miniatures wargaming works by trying to balance the effectiveness of the forces on both sides in a way that simply never happens in real life battles… mainly so that the skill (or otherwise) of the participants is the deciding factor in any battle rather than overwhelming force.

Prices of weapons in the original D&D were, therefore, taken from that sort of understanding. Missile weapons, in reality (think Crecy and Agincourt, for example, for blindingly obvious examples – but there are many others that also follow a similar pattern, but are less well known and do it less obviously), can provide a crushing level of superiority to the side that has the most or who use the ones they have the most effectively.

To the designer’s way of thinking, that had to hold over to D&D – so there had to be the same balance mechanism to ensure Fighters had some balancing mechanism between melee and missile.

Also, the ranges of most missile spells/miracles (and spells/miracles in general) is way less than the effective range of most Bows, and, indeed, a lot of other missile weapons – so if Mages and Clerics were to be survivable, well, there had to be that balance mechanism again.

Contemplating Correction

Are these reasons good enough? Indeed, are they even needed?

Well, to the way of thinking of the original designers, evidently so. And, as noted, pretty much everyone else has followed… often, I suspect, unthinkingly and with no understanding of what the issues are.

However, that doesn’t mean that it is necessary to continue to do so.

The obvious solution is to allow Mages/Clerics and the like access to spells that offer similar ranges to the missile weapons in the game – and, if that isn’t the case with the system in question already, make them actually have to target the spell successfully rather than merely casting it. That levels the playing field on one level.

The other thing is historical. Most archers, the ones in effective armies who deployed them effectively, fought as groups – they did not fire at individual targets amongst the enemy for the most part, they fired as a group against a mass of the enemy. That’s how they were largely trained. Individual marksmanship was not a priority.

Which is not to say that Archers were incapable of hitting individual targets – they were – but that they were generally not all that good at hitting them at ranges that were more than, say, the typical Mage could cast his Fireball spell at and hit something.

So, on the whole, the best solution would be to mirror the real world. Either increase the spell range to be more equal to the existing, too high, range for reasonably successful missile attacks – or reduce the range of missile weapons to be more in line with the typical spell range.

So, finally, you’ll be able to field Longswords that cost 75gp, for example, and Longbows that cost 15gp (or, more than likely, a lot less than 15gp!).

(Oh, by the way, this “game balance” issue with weapon pricing doesn’t just apply to Bows and Swords. There are a lot of weapons that are priced for this reason in FRPGs. If you look at them with a more properly jaundiced eye, now that you have an idea of what you are looking for, then you can probably take a good stab at figuring out which ones they might be.)

To Be Continued…

Suggested Reading

To get an overview of life in the Middle Ages:

Life in a Medieval Village, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval City by Joseph and Francis Gies are, though dated and very much centered on England, a good start.

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Civilisation & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century by Fernand Braudel in three volumes (!) is more than you’ll probably ever want to know about, well, Civilisation and Capitalism!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

Click to purchase from Amazon

More focussed, and more easily digested, are (shameless commercial plug) the following, from Phalanx Games Design (me) –

by Phil McGregor which provides some of the underpinnings – the limits, if you will – that applied (and have to apply) to civilisations at various levels of technological development). Written specifically with GMs as worldbuilders in mind. Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

by Phil McGregor which contains a more focussed examination of the real Middle Ages, at least for the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, France. Includes something approaching a realistic(ish) and detailed price list where you won’t find 75 gp Bows! Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

Displaced: Lost in Time and Space and by Phil McGregor which, though focussed on one-way time or dimensional travel, has all sorts of useful nuts and bolts things about how things work that easily and valuably supplement FF&S and Orbis Mundi. Click on the link or cover illustration below to visit the product page at RPGNow.

About The Author

Phil McGregor is a moderately well known (if you’re old enough!) writer of Role Playing Game material who started wargaming in the early 1970’s, moved on to the very first edition (White Box) of Dungeons and Dragons when it came out in 1975 and was hooked!

Being in the right place at the right time, he managed to get a co-author gig with Ed Simbalist and Mark Ratner writing Space Opera (1980) as well as a couple of supplements/adventures for it, and for Chivalry & Sorcery while being published by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

Along the way he wrote the very first Rigger Black Book for FASA’s Shadowrun (1st Edition) and, in recent years, has published a number of RPG books on RPGNow under his own Phalanx Games Design imprint, including Farm, Forge and Steam, Road to Armageddon (for BTRC’s EABA), Orbis Mundi, Displaced and Audace ad Gloriam (2d6 based Exploration/Survival Gear Catalog for SF RPGs).

In real life he is a History teacher (Years 7-12) of over 30 years experience, currently teaching in a High School in the Northern Suburbs of Sydney, is semi–active in union politics for the NSW Teachers Federation, plays RPGs most Saturdays and Computer Games (mostly wargames) many other nights.

Why do we hand out experience for combat? No, I’m serious – this is a question that’s been preying on my mind as a consequence of an article I wrote earlier this year, “Experience for the ordinary person” – you should probably go and read at least the first section (down to and including “Reward-matching vs Reward Differentials”) before we go any further.

All caught up? Excellent. So now I’ll ask the question again: why do we give experience for combat at all? Why not shift entirely to objective-based XP rewards?

Objectivity In rewards

One of the major reasons put forward, time and again, is that because Combat is a procedure that is enumerated and quantified, it is inherently a more accurate means of determining the scale of rewards than an arbitrary number allocated by the GM for story progression and the achievement of objectives.

This is a false arguement. It starts by assuming that the GM is inherently unable to determine a just and fair reward if there aren’t numbers behind the system to justify and quantify the scale of the award.

Extending the functioning of the encounter-rewards subsystem in the manner described in “Experience for the ordinary person” makes plot-based rewards every bit as quantifiable as straightforward combat rewards.

The “objectivity” arguement also ignores the fact that the GMs placement of combat encounters is just as arbitrary. He still decides how tough those encounters should be, after all! It also ignores the hugely subjective fudge-factor on the part of the GM that is built into the process of determining the reward from any given battle (“easy fight” vs. “typical fight” vs. “difficult fight”). While the terms and specific subsystem are drawn from D&D 3.x, most game systems have some equivalent in place.

The more closely this arguement is scrutinized, the more it falls apart.

The Purposes Of Combat

Perhaps if we examine the purposes of combat within an RPG, we can find some better answers.

Random Excitement

One obvious purpose is to provide an adrenalin rush by actually putting the characters in a position where they have to fight for their lives. Random encounters or “wandering monsters” serve no other real purpose – except for forcing the characters to chew up resources that the GM has previously provided the characters. Can it be that the real purpose of wandering monsters is to provide adrenalin junkies with a fix, and the real purpose of some of the treasure-type rewards given out by the GM is simply a means of giving the characters enough survivability “coin” that they can afford to pay for that fix?

An alternative reinterpretation is that the GM has turned the players into treasure junkies and the purpose of wandering monsters is to make room in the PCs packs for their next fix of goodies. This isn’t a much more flattering notion, is it? But both of these addictions are strongly associated with the players of video games, especially when they come to tabletop gaming.

They don’t have the exclusive contract on such behavior, of course; in the olden days, when Zork! was the epitome of computer RPGs, some GMs fell foul of Monty Haul Syndrome in response to demands for more loot made by their players.

Realism

Verisimilitude is a far more potent reason for combat to exist in RPGs. If the players insist on going somewhere the local authority doesn’t want them to go, or doing things that authority doesn’t want them to do, they are sure to fall foul of attempts to prevent them from achieving these ends – and if they resist, that’s combat.

Even random encounters and wandering monsters, properly employed and not present merely for their own sake, have a part to play in enhancing the believability of a game setting and situation.

Get enough drunken louts together, and you are sure to get a barroom brawl. Get enough hungry monsters together in too confined a space and the weakest will be displaced; some will depart for greener pastures, but a few will wander around in desperate search of a meal. These don’t really serve any direct story purpose – unless you consider establishing and maintaining plausibility to be a story purpose in and of itself.

But that is a story purpose, and an important one. Perhaps the earliest article that I can recall reading in the Dragon magazine, back when I was just starting out as a GM, was one about using the placed encounters of a dungeon to determine a ‘wandering monster’ table that was inherently plausible and not a random roll for monster-of-the-week.

If it’s a story point, surely a GM could plan wandering-monsters-for-the-sake-of-verisimilitude better than leaving it up to random chance when one is encountered?

Only the dreaded “random wilderness encounter” – when the GM is traditionally and realistically under no obligation whatsoever to serve up balanced encounters that match the overall capabilities of the PCs – should be a truly random result, and even then the encounter shouldn’t come out of the blue. The effects of the presence of the ‘random encounter’ on the environment should be detectable in advance of the actual encounter, if you know what signs to look for.

When my dice indicate a “wilderness encounter”, my first thought is “What might logically be found in this region?” and my second is “What encounter would add to the verisimilitude of the campaign right now?”. If neither of those yield and encounter description – and sometimes they don’t – then I will roll on a random encounter table – and the roll will indicate not the imminent presence of the resulting encounter, but the first indication that such an encounter is in the vicinity. It might be a footprint, or bark scratched off a tree, or a broken branch, or a peculiar scent, or the body of the encounter’s last meal; it is extremely unlikely to be the encounter itself (though I throw that in occasionally as well, just to prevent the players getting complacent).

But these, too, are better used by rolling in advance, not at the time – because that gives the GM time to think about and prepare those signs. If I have decided in advance that a “random wilderness encounter” is needed for reasons of verisimilitude, placing it carefully in a time and place when there’s nothing else happening except a passage from A to B gives a better result – and makes this just as much a plot point as the Giant standing guard outside the Mead Hall.

The One That Really Matters

The only conclusion that can be reached is that the only purposes that non-meaningless and unnecessary combat serves in an adventure are story purposes – an obstacle that can be overcome with physical mayhem, as opposed to one that can be resolved by clever roleplay, or solving a puzzle, or escaping a trap. So why should it be the basis of experience, instead of story-based awards?

But, Wait… What is Experience?

Before carrying these thoughts to their logical conclusion, and committing myself to that destination, we should take a moment to consider exactly what “experience” is and what it represents, in case there is a counter-arguement lurking there.

According to Wikipedia, “An experience point… is a measurement used … to quantify a player character’s progression through the game.”

Personally, I dislike this definition, though I found it difficult to enumerate any specific objections. Eventually, I realized that I had two objections:

1. The definition is at a pure metagame level, without reference to what xp represents to the character; and
2. I have a specific objection to the use of the phrase “through” in this context, because it implies that xp rewards should automatically follow achievement regardless of the difficulty of that achievement or character interaction with the objective a PC is attempting to achieve. Now, if the latter phrase had been “progression within the game”, I would have no objections whatsoever.

Here’s my alternative:

Experience Points are an abstract numeric measurement of progress in the development of character capabilities and expertise.

This definition operates at both a character level and a metagame level, and it carries a clear implication of a character “learning from experience”.

The word “abstract” is essential in this definition; XP as a quantification of “experience the character can learn from” contains a logical disconnect with in-game events. Whatever the conversion system that translates experience to new or improved abilities, there is no direct relationship between the abilities used to obtain the experience and the abilities that are improved! Handing out some NPC smack-down doesn’t logically lead to an improved ability to craft a musical instrument, for example – not unless the PC involved beaned the NPC with an example of the musical instrument in question!

Treating XP as an abstract representation of the “experiences that a character can learn from” wallpapers over this problem, implying that even while the character was running around humiliating NPCs, he was also sketching instrument designs in his head. The character becomes a collage of abilities that is more than his combat characteristics, at least from the point of view of the XP subsystem. The suspiciously-shaped lump under the wallpaper is the assumption that progress in one area (musical instrument design) is, in any way, related to the outcome of combat with an NPC – or, more specifically, that the experience received by the character for one activity is a reflection of the experience received by the character in another.

So, how does it fit?

It is this definition of XP that encourages the issue of Experience Points for activities other than combat. Any sort of conflict or activity can be considered an activity from which the character can learn, after all – so rewards for problem-solving and roleplay (interaction with NPC personalities) and non-combat achievements are all perfectly valid.

But there is a hole in this concept of experience points – this definition of xp assumes that all characters possess an equal facility in translating “learning experiences” into “lessons learned”. There is no allowance for relative intelligence, or even an instinctive equivalent (usually part of a wisdom or wisdom-like characteristic).

It can be argued that a greater innate ability enhances the prospects for success at a reduced risk to the character, so that having a high intelligence (or intuitive equivalent) will result in a greater ability to earn XP in the long run, indirectly representing that ‘equal facility’. But since the entire group will typically benefit in this way from the presence of a character of greater capabilities, regardless of the ability to learn of individual members of the group, I find that this is a flawed arguement that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.

Justifying Character Classes

Although they are often disparaged in comparison with point-buy game systems, the character class system of D&D and Pathfinder and similar games actually affords a plausible solution to this problem.

If it is assumed that a character has undertaken a career within a particular character class because it is in that class that the character achieves this ‘equal facility’ and that the character would progress less readily in any class that the character has NOT taken levels in, the “equal facility” problem disappears completely.

Indeed, it is not much of a stretch to employ this line of thought to justify the XP bonuses that AD&D used to hand out for characters whose primary stat was of a superior level, and it was in this context that I first encountered this arguement in one of many bull-sessions on the train to gaming each Saturday from the friend’s house in Lindfield NSW where we had played the night before.

Character Concept: A points-purchase equivalent

For players of games like Champions and Gurps, which operate by expenditure of experience points directly to obtain abilities, a house rule is usually needed to achieve the same justification.

Requiring a character to explicitly define a character concept – a blueprint for what the character can do, what their personality is, and so on – and then mandating that purchases must reflect that character concept (or are penalized in expense – the equivalent of ‘cross-class skills’) solves the ‘equal facility’ problem by defining each character concept as a ‘character class’ in their own unique right.

Side-note: In a nice bit of negative feedback, the same approach can be used to restrict the choices of character class in a level-based system, ensuring that characters remain ‘true’ to themselves and retain the diversity that they originally represented when the PCs first started adventuring together. Without such restriction, it is altogether too easy for one character to start resembling another as they advance in levels – and there is the side-benefit that it is an impediment to min-maxing.

XP For Achievement

This train of thought has inexorably led to the conclusion that a far better model for RPGs to employ is one that rewards Achievement with Experience instead of basing rewards on success in Combat, because combat for it’s own sake is not deserving of reward. It is ironic that the proposal redefines XP to accord more closely with the definition supplied by Wikipedia, despite my objections!

This is a point that Da’Vane made in the comments of the earlier post – the distinction between combat and conflict. Having established the validity of the approach, it’s time to look at using it as a campaign planning tool, a means of making the GM’s life easier.

Ambitious Undertakings

The first step in making use of this principle is to define the high-level objective. To illustrate the process, I’ll be using the first adventure from my Shards Of Divinity campaign.

The first adventure had a number of objectives. I needed to establish that one particular PC had access to knowledge that no-one else in the world knew; I needed to establish that this information was going to be both useful to the party and going to get them in trouble over their heads. I needed to establish that this particular PC was the most wanted man in the game world (because of the circumstances that gave him that knowledge), and introduce some of the history of that world in a real and tangible way. Lastly, I needed to bring the PCs together, unite them, and let them experience the game rules of this particular environment, especially the fact that magic was failing and less reliable than they were used to – despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that this was to be a world with a LOT of magic. (If it sounds like one character is central to the entire campaign, it’s because they are – by intent. I made sure the other players knew that this would be the case before the signed up for the game).

That’s a lot for one adventure, and I expected it to take quite a while to complete, both in game terms and in real life. In fact, I expected it to carry the PCs from 5th level to 10th level, possibly even 12th level.

At the time, that was just a guesstimate based on the scale of the problems that would confront the PCs in the process of achieving that long list of objectives. Under this new paradigm of adventure construction, it becomes a firm target.

Adventure Breakdown

The next step is to break the objective down into a number of smaller, logical, steps that collectively achieve the overall objective. Where possible, decisions should be eliminated altogether from this structure, they should still be more general than that. If you can’t eliminate a decision, it should be reduced to a simple ‘either-or’ and the adventure structure should accommodate both. That way, it doesn’t matter what the PCs decide to do, the campaign gets to the end goal. Here’s a breakdown of the Shards Of Divinity adventure:

Eighteen Acts. Notice that there it doesn’t make a lot of difference what the PCs choose to do; the first 6 Acts will convince them that they need to get out of town for a while; the nature of a couple of encounters (8 & 11) will change depending on where they decide to go; and the rest of the story is all about giving the PCs the background information to decide whether or not to accept the Drow Prince’s offer.

Ranking The Acts

Eighteen acts into an expected five-to-seven levels of character development – call it six for convenience – gives an average of three acts to each character level. This can be tweaked as desired, of course; some acts present rather more difficulty to be overcome than the others. Some present the opportunity for incidental roleplay encounters that might become important later, and many of them present opportunities for the PCs to make mistakes that will come back to haunt them.

Side-note to any of my players who happen to be reading this: I ended up with more players than originally expected, so there wasn’t as much need for Cannon Fodder to be included. As it happens, a couple of those players didn’t stay with the campaign for various reasons, and I would have been better off including them anyway. Oh well, we all make mistakes. :(

I would actually divide the levels up as follows:

Assuming that the characters start at level 5 (10,000 xp), that is the same thing as specifying:

Subdivide the Challenges

The next step is to take those individual assignments of xp and challenges to be overcome, and get specific about how much each is worth. The simplest method is to consider them all equal, but that’s not always the most reasonable answer. Consider the first 4 acts:

There are a number of approaches to performing a subdivision of xp award amongst these 4 acts.

• Arbitrary – set the numbers to whatever sounds right. If the PCs get more or less xp than they expect, it will balance out in the end.
• Combat first – set CRs and ELs for the combats, determine the likely awards, subtract from 5000 and divide by 2 to get the story-based awards. Leave a margin to use for the rewarding of good roleplay.
• Absolute Challenge Rating – set CRs for each Act such that the expected total xp is about 5,000 (perhaps less a margin for use as roleplay awards). Then award the actual XP according to the standard rules for overcoming such challenges, as described in “Experience for the ordinary person”.
• Relative Power Levels – my personal choice, this combines the arbitrary setting of XP with the determination of CR according to the amount of XP to be arbitrarily awarded.

Let me explain that last one again: the GM sets an amount of experience that they feel the events should be worth, in story terms, and then determines AT THE TIME, according to the then-current character levels, what the CR (i.e. the difficulty) of any combat or problem should be in order for the characters to earn that much XP.

Why is this my preferred approach? Because it doesn’t matter if the characters gain an extra level here or there in random encounters or interesting side trips or whatever. It doesn’t matter if a character incurs a negative level due to an encounter with a Vampire. It doesn’t matter if a prior challenge proves to be less difficult or more difficult than expected – because the actual difficulty of the challenge at hand gets adjusted for these circumstances at the time, the level is predefined relative to the PCs abilities.

Employing this system, I would rate these four acts:

Assuming the PCs are 5th level at the time, the appropriate tables in the DMG give:

…unless you divide the xp awarded amongst the characters instead of awarding that amount each, in which case for 6 PCs of 5th level, the goals are:

For the two combats, CR 9 equates to 10-12 brawlers of 2 HD each; CR 11 gives seven to nine 5th level rogues, while CR 12 would increase their level to 6. So maybe four 5th level rogues, and four 6th level.

For the non-combat Acts, three characters of the same level as the party who have to be overcome, one way or another – or some action of similar difficulty – would match the CR 8, as would 5-6 characters of 3rd level. So three untrustworthy NPCs try to join up and have to be turned away in act 1, or perhaps one of the three is a bartender who mistakes one of the party for someone with whom they have a grudge; and each member of the party gets to go shopping for one essential commodity and has to deal with a merchant who is the equivalent of a 3rd level character. That, in turn, gives the experienced GM some idea of the skills of the NPC merchant.

But if the PCs somehow gain or lose levels, it’s easy to adjust the CR so that they still get the same amount of XP.

Of course, the so-called “combat” xp are now “conflict” xp – the PCs will get this amount if they capture/kill the rogues or if they simply pull a clever dodge and run away successfully. The XP is not for overpowering the rogues, it’s for getting away from them, and any approach that works is perfectly and equally acceptable.

Advantages

I consider the Objective-oriented technique contained in this article to be a superior approach to the awarding of XP, at least in comparison with the standard method. Instead of arbitrarily deciding how difficult to make a problem, then awarding XP based on that decision, the GM is deciding how much XP he wants the encounter to be worth and setting the difficulty accordingly.

If adventures are designed in this way, it doesn’t matter when those adventures take place (relative to the experience levels of the characters) because the difficulty is automatically adjusted.

Of equal value is the ability to contain XP earnings to an expected scale – in another of my campaigns, characters who I expected to be at about 12th level are now in the low twenties, for all sorts of reasons. As a result, I have had to choose between upping the nastiness level of the encounters or boring the players with challenges they would find trivial and dull. The former perpetuates and exacerbates the problem, purely because the characters earn still more experience as a result. If the Objective-Oriented XP system had been in place in that campaign, some of the early encounters would have been a lot easier than they were (read “lower CR”), giving less XP, and the characters would still be on-track at 12th level.

Another example: In my first Fumanor campaign, I expected characters to get to 30th level at best. One of the PCs ended up being 54th level or something equally ridiculous – virtually all of it fairly earned (there were a couple of levels that arose from system migration, first from D&D 2nd Ed. to Rolemaster, and then from Rolemaster to D&D 3.0.

Disadvantages

There is a trivial increase in the amount of prep work to be done – a few seconds worth of effort in each game session. Roleplay awards don’t really fit – though these can be satisfied with other forms of reward, probably to the long-term betterment of the campaign. GMs will need to be reasonably proficient with basic arithmetic (or with the use of a calculator) and with the existing XP subsystem in order to determine what CR of encounter will yield the expected amount of XP – and sometimes the numbers simply won’t quite add up, and will require a little tweaking.

Conclusions

Usefully, if you don’t tell your players what you are doing, they will never know! That, of course, eliminates any complaints – not that there should be any, because you are still rewarding them according to the DMG and established protocols; you simply have a new tool at your disposal to determine how effectively your combats, traps, puzzles, skill checks, and NPCs should be at opposing the characters.

“Object-Oriented” in computer programming thinks of a system or piece of software as a set of ‘objects’ with defining characteristics that can be controlled and manipulated, manipulating the object in the process. “Objective-Oriented” XP does the same for an RPG.

I intend to implement this system in my Shards Of Divinity campaign ASAP. I can’t offer a stronger recommendation than that.

In the last issue of Roleplaying Tips (Issue #522) Johnn passed on a request for advice from an RPT reader and new GM:

Hi Johnn,

I am new to being a GM and have only been running a D&D campaign for about 6 weeks now (one day a week). I’m a high schooler and have convinced some friends who have never played before to play.

We have had a bit of fun and adventure. However, due to schoolwork and activities it is hard to get everyone to come all together, which makes it difficult to keep a story going.

What should I do to get a story or campaign to stay consistent? And how do I manage PCs when they are gone?

Thank you for your time,

Tristan.

I immediately set about writing an answer; I not only knew several “stock” answers to the question, but also experienced a moment of inspiration yielding a solution that had never occurred to me before, and that I had never seen written up. When the answer topped 500 words in only a few minutes of typing while barely scratching the surface, though, I knew that it would exceed the parameters of a Roleplaying Tips “quick reply” and retasked it into a Campaign Mastery post. Which is how you came to be reading these words…

Solution Zero: ‘Baby, I don’t care’

The circumstances described mandate a heavier emphasis on episodic campaign planning and decreased level of continuity. Being able to end each session of game play on a cliffhanger won’t work when the characters present going into the cliffhanger may not be the same as those present to get themselves out of it.

Each day’s play should end with the PCs somewhere safe and secure, where other party members can catch up with the group and those who aren’t there can safely leave. Since such in-game situations will be a common feature of a number of these solutions, let’s give them a name: “Exchange Points”. This is more a matter of trying to work around the problem than an actual solution, but it is good general advice when in this situation.

I also employ a ‘threshold of attendance’ in which players who can’t attend are required to provide advance notice of their absence, and a minimum number of players is required before the game can go ahead. Players who are absent without having provided notice are penalized in some fashion unless they have good reason, but I tend to not be very hard-line about accepting those reasons. The only one that I have ever refused to accept was “I was too tired from partying all night the night before” – that to me is absence by choice, the player made a judgement about what they wanted to do and it would be unreasonable to permit them to compromise everyone else’s entertainment for their own pleasure without some disciplinary action. Others might not agree, but the player in question thought it was a fair enough call.

Pros:

This solves the immediate problem – at least somewhat. It has little else to commend it.

Cons:

At the same time, it comes with three big shortcomings:

• Games can be disrupted by non-attendance;
• Players can resent punishment after being AWOL for what they consider ‘good reason’ but the GM doesn’t; and,
• It can be difficult ending each day’s play at an exchange point.

The last item deserves a little expansion. In order to end at an exchange point, the GM has to be certain that any combat will be complete before the end of the day’s play. The implication of that statement is that there will be non-combat action filling out the day’s play – which, no matter how interesting, doesn’t carry the adrenalin boost that combat does. What’s more, the amount of this non-combat play will be variable and somewhat unpredictable – some days there will be lots of time to fill, and other days everything will be a mad scramble to the finishing line. Worse still, simply being in non-combat mode doesn’t automatically produce an exchange point – any sort of drama is just as bad under these circumstances as blood sport. No, you need the days’ action to wrap up with everyone safe in their beds – either in an inn, a hostel, a campsite, or whatever.

All of which wreaks havoc on pacing and timing. Even worse, the result is a formatting straightjacket that will soon become dull and predictable.

Recommendation:

This is the sort of solution that you use when you can’t think of anything better. All subsequent solutions will – one way or another – be enhancements of this approach – which means that any of them would be preferable. And, as that shopping list of drawbacks shows, it can do with some enhancement!

Solution 1: ‘Dave’s Not Here, Man…’

This solution whisks characters whose players aren’t present off on a “Side Mission” which earns them no XP but which keeps them off the firing line. A refinement of Solution Zero, this is essentially a way of making any scene or location an exchange point (no matter how improbable) and using a blanket excuse to cover the cracks.

The solution can be further improved by requiring each player to provide a list of reasons for their character to wander off in the middle of an adventure and come back later, for the GM to choose between. These could include:

• Mundane, e.g. “going shopping for a gift for a relative” (works best with a large family in the character’s background) or “being locked up in the town cells for being drunk and disorderly”; or
• Personally significant, e.g. “Investigating a possible clue to the identity of my brother’s murderer” or “Trying to buy a grimoire containing ‘Bixby’s Unnatural Blandishment’ ” (or some other made-up spell that will never actually be found) or “Called to a reading of my Grandfather’s Will”; or
• Campaign insignificant, e.g. “Went to scout out the defenses of Darkmuir Manor but was almost caught and spent a couple of days in hiding”; or some other plausible explanation of where the character went, deriving from events within the campaign, but of no great significance to the campaign in the long-term; or,
• Campaign Significant, e.g. “Infiltrated a meeting of a death-cult dedicating to reviving the God Of Whimsical Destruction” or “Attended a secret peace conference between the Mondahz Confederation and the Elves Of The Ninth Circle”. These are events that the GM wants to have happen in the background, so he has to provide these. But they have the side-benefit of using the player as a vehicle for blocks of narrative text about events in the game without making them narration.

Pros:

This is an answer that solves the immediate problem – somewhat. It can provide a vehicle for background events that keep the campaign background dynamic instead of static, can provide a vehicle for character development.

Cons:

The flexibility evades most of the problems listed under the default “Solution Zero”, but at a price: Plausibility is negatively impacted, though some of the pro’s enhance plausibility in other areas, so overall this is a neutral solution that can appeal.

Recommendation:

This approach is worth considering, especially if the GM doesn’t feel his experience behind-the-screen will enable him to implement one of the better answers offered below. I consider this the minimum acceptable solution.

Solution 2: Second-Hand News

This is a solution that not a lot of people will have heard of, at least not in this exact form. I have seen a number of approaches written up here and there that all boil down to letting another player take care of a character whose regular player is absent, and over the years, have amalgamated the best features of several refinements on this basic proposal into the solution described below.

Each PC has a “Primary owner” and a “Secondary Owner” whose job it is to run the character when the primary owner is not there. The choice of who the Secondary Owner is, and should be, left to the Primary Owner – and should be made at the time of character generation. If both Primary and Secondary Owners are missing, one of the other solutions should be used as a stopgap.

Pros:

This approach certainly solves the problem. It also means that the party are never stuck needing a specialist class because the player that owns that character is away.

Cons:

It’s easily three times as much work running two characters at the same time as it is running one. It can easily ruin the enjoyment of the player trying to do it.

Some players may attempt to take advantage of the situation; while the GM can veto some of this, not all such actions will come to his attention, such as the second character making a ‘loan’ of a prized magic item or sum of wealth to the player’s usual character – and some players resent the GM vetoing ANY PC action. Some players will concoct mendacities to falsely accuse the caretaker of this sort of abuse of trust for his or her own reasons.

This solution also places a high premium on the secondary owner being able to explain his decisions and thinking at the moment of decision to the primary owner. And, even if the Secondary Owner runs the character with the best of intentions, communicates the reasons for his decisions clearly and succinctly to the Primary Owner, that owner can still be left be unhappy at the outcome of choices that he feels the character would not have made.

So it’s not a completely happy answer from the point of view of the players. Unfortunately, it is also not all the sparkling from the GM’s position, either. Implementing this solution may mean that the secondary owner becomes aware of knowledge that the primary owner would prefer to keep private. It may also mean that the secondary owner learns things that the secondary owner’s primary character doesn’t and shouldn’t know. Both of these can disrupt the campaign; it forces the Secondary Owner to actively work at separating player knowledge from character knowledge – something some players are good at, and some are not.

And finally, it is still only a partial solution: what if there are no other players that the primary owner trusts?

Recommendation:

This solution doesn’t work very well for inexperienced players and probably isn’t all that suitable under the circumstances. It’s a recipe for trouble even at the best of times. The Cons far outweigh the Pros, in my book, which is why this is not a solution that I willingly employ – but others may feel differently.

Where it does become somewhat viable is in a situation where a player leaves the campaign on a semi-permanent basis, or wants to retire his old character to start a new one – while the other players want to retain the services of the old character. With the consent of both players involved, a permanent transfer of ownership – either to an existing player or a new recruit – can be a perfect solution, and this is definitely a technique that I employ under those conditions.

Solution 3: The Zombie Solution

That brings us to what many will consider the obvious answer to the problem: The GM runs the missing player’s character as an NPC when they aren’t there. For this to be a reasonable approach, the player must have sufficiently developed the personality of the character that the GM can reasonably justify his decisions concerning the character’s behavior.

Pros:

It solves the problem completely, and dodges most of the pitfalls that the earlier solutions are prey to.

Cons:

That’s the good news. The bad news is that if its three times as much work to run two characters as it is to run one, it’s ten times as much work to run two characters and the game at the same time, and every other aspect of the campaign can suffer as a result.

The emphasis on communication with the absent player remains, but shifts to focus on the GM. The problem of separating character knowledge and player knowledge also remains, and is ten times worse because the GM has access to so much knowledge about the campaign. The GM, however, is more practiced at both tasks than most players, and has the option of slowing play down to a pace with which he or she can cope. Finally, the GM normally accepts responsibility for the long-term satisfaction of the players and well-being of their characters anyway, and always has to keep in mind what an NPC does and doesn’t know, so this is in perfect keeping with his normal purview. If it doesn’t happen regularly.

My players are all pretty reliable, and I make it clear from the outset that joining one of my campaigns means that the player is making a commitment to attend and participate, so this is the solution that I usually adopt, together with the threshold rule mentioned earlier.

I also employ a ‘critical character’ rule – if one particular character is the focal point of a day’s play, I’m quite prepared to skip a game session if that character’s player is not available. That means that I only take charge of a character when the events aren’t especially significant to that character, and hence the decisions to be made are generally relatively minor – what battle tactic to employ is a minor question, deciding whether or not to accept a bribe from another player’s arch-enemy is quite another!

Recommendation:

This solution doesn’t work very well for inexperienced GMs and probably isn’t all that suitable under the circumstances, despite the fact that it’s the solution I most routinely employ in my games. It took me several years of GMing every weekend, week-in and week-out, for up 30 hours a week, before I was comfortable and confident enough in my own abilities to make this my default position.

Solution 4: The PC Collective

A less-commonly espoused solution that works hand-in-hand with a heavily-episodic style is what I describe as “The PC Collective”. This is a “Mission: Impossible” approach (the original TV show, not the movies) in which all the characters – and several more – are in a pool of talent owned collectively by the party. Each time that the game reaches an exchange point, any player can choose to send the character that he has been playing back to the pool and draw out a different member of the pool; adventures become operations by teams of specialists, hand-picked by the players in order to achieve their immediate goals.

At the start of a day’s play, players retain the same character that they had at the end of the previous session, at least until the next exchange point is reached. That may leave a group of characters whose players from last session are not present this time, and it may leave a group of players without characters because they weren’t present last time. Such players have to first choose from the characters already present without a player; only once all these are taken can the rest choose from the available pool of ‘talent’ and wait for the GM to reach an “exchange point”, until then, they can only kibitz from the sidelines.

The only thing that the GM needs to have up his sleeve is some means of settling disputes – even if that’s as simple as “high roll gets to choose first” in the case of two players wanting the same character. Some sort of attendance ranking – number of sessions attended over the last three months, for example – would be my recommendation.

Pros:

As solutions go, this one has a lot to commend it. It solves the problem, and that solution is a group one. Players forego the one-to-one relationship that they normally have with their characters, but they gain a flexibility that can compensate – and the use of an attendance ranking system to prioritize players choosing characters means that the campaign will quickly come to consist of a core group of regular players and a number of intermittent attendees. That core group will soon settle on a core group of favorite characters, with only the occasional variation.

The result is exactly what happens in Mission Impossible: you have a core team of characters and a set – a suite, even – of specialists called in on a mission-by-mission basis. In effect, a central cast and a roster of recurring guest stars.

If there are too many characters and not enough players, the GM can implement the “Zombie Solution” until an exchange point is reached.

A final benefit is that the solution rewards regular attendance without unduly penalizing those who can’t participate regularly. A forward-thinking party will even ensure that specialists who are potentially-vital to future “missions” will get a reasonable amount of “screen time”, i.e. garner enough experience to be able to cope with the needs of those future missions.

Cons:

The biggest drawbacks to this approach are twofold:

• The players have to willingly and voluntarily buy-in to the proposed solution. If they can see the benefits and advantages, that shouldn’t be a problem most of the time; but if they don’t, they may not warm to the solution.
• The longer a campaign has been running, the more resistance that will be encountered, because players will have invested in their characters. The ideal time to implement this solution is from the very first session of a campaign, with characters that have been specifically designed for this approach.

Recommendation:

While this solves the problem in principle, and is an approach that I would happily try with a new campaign where attendance was expected to be a problem, it doesn’t hold up as a solution to Tristan’s specific problem where his campaign is already underway.

It would also be important to hand out story-based xp awards (the subject of next week’s post!) at each exchange point, so that characters who only participate in one portion of the adventure get their fair share of the rewards.

Ideally, the GM would also tailor the campaign design, especially the motivation and circumstances that brings the PCs together to adventure, accordingly.

Solution 5: The Short Story Solution

At the top of this post I promised an original solution to the problem; here it is:

Interweave Episodic mini-adventures alongside a Primary Campaign with stronger continuity.

1. Each player should generate a Primary and a Secondary character. In an existing campaign, the existing characters can be considered the Primaries.
2. The GM builds exchange points into the primary campaign where PCs can come and go, as described previously.
3. At each exchange point, if the players whose characters are currently engaged in the primary campaign are not present, the players who are in attendance get out their secondary characters and the GM runs a miniadventure for them.
4. If there are any primary characters who aren’t currently tied up in the main adventure because they departed at the last exchange point, they can participate in the side adventure, but if they do so, they can’t rejoin the main adventure until the next exchange point is reached.

This is a way to have your campaign cake and eat it, too.

With experience, you might be able to set things up so that the end of each day’s play usually occurs at an exchange point – in which case, you will no longer need to worry about miniadventures, and are back to Solution Zero. But this can seem artificial and can be tricky, and the other problems with Solution Zero remain – so I would make it a point to always have a couple of miniadventures up your sleeve.

An experienced GM can probably create and run a miniadventure on the spot, based on nothing but a plot seed (such as those contained in Eureka) but until you are comfortable doing so, a GM will probably need to invest a little prep time in having a miniadventure ready to go.

Pros:

Quite simply, this solves the core problem and bypasses every complication introduced by the other solutions. And, if you reach the point where the players don’t care whether its the main campaign or the side campaign, then you’re definitely a winner. This solution can be implemented at any point in an existing campaign.

You can even use the miniadventures to resolve side issues and fill in backstory for the main campaign – think of them as sidebars to that campaign!

Cons:

Alas, it is not the perfect solution. It presupposes that everyone will be able to attend the game, at least half the time. Progress in the main campaign slows because screen time is being split, and the side campaign can become more important than the story that’s supposed to occupy centre stage.

Recommendation:

Ultimately, it may prove easier to split the resulting campaigns into alternating games. This reduces the commitment required of those players who can’t be there all the time, which in itself may be enough to solve 90% of the problem 90% of the time, and may make one of the other solutions viable.

General Advice:

Whatever the approach that you adopt, be sure that your players all know about it and what it entails. If they don’t accept the solution, it won’t work. Be very careful not to single anyone out as being “to blame” when you discuss the problem. Pointing all the players to this article might be a good starting point for the discussion!

I hope this helps, Tristan!

What tools go into your GM toolbox?

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.

GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.

Preparation tools are maybe the most important tools at the GM’s disposal. In this category, we have the tools you can use to prepare your game sessions.

In part I, we covered campaign and adventure planning, which helps you define the stories you tell during the game.

In part II, we covered encounter planning – what you need to prepare for actual play.

Going one step deeper, we land at single encounters. The tools here should provide you with the details you need for playing out a certain scene or an encounter. In this part, we will explore preparing and running NPCs in your games, to make your games feel more alive and realistic.

Preparing Important NPCs

You may want to flesh out an important NPC as much as a PC, or maybe even more. I say ‘even more’ because it is a common practice out there that players flesh their characters out as they see fit over time.

However, as GM, you are often not in that comfortable position. Sometimes the adventure needs a fleshed out NPC right from the start. On the other side, if life is giving you hard constraints on your prep time, you may not be able to spend as much for NPC creation as you would a PC.

This is a crucial point of the tool you use to prepare NPCs: it should give you an NPC as detailed as you need him or her in a reasonable time. This tool can give you information about:

• Name of the NPC
• History of the NPC
• Mental and physical characteristics of the NPC
• Goals, fears, friends and foes of the NPC
• Stats of the NPC
• Resources of the NPC

Michael: I’m kind of lazy about preparing NPCs. I think that’s one of my biggest weaknesses as GM. Nevertheless, I have some tools that I probably do not use to full scale.

In my D&D campaign, for extremely important NPCs I go through the whole character creation. A good computer program may help here for character creation, but I haven’t found one yet.

Other important NPCs I create by using the tables in the Dungeon Master Guide and alter them as I see fit.

In my Cthulhu campaign, there is a notebook-format GMing aid full of NPCs the characters can meet on their journey. I like to use that, because there are naturally interesting characters in there.

In the Savage World campaign, I draw advantage from the light rule system. Creating NPC here is naturally quick, so I have more time for background and characteristics.

Da’ Vane: When creating NPCs, I try to focus solely on what I need and what the PCs will experience, and make good use of character stereotypes to present iconic types of characters. This leaves me plenty of time for other duties as a GM, and it is often a moment or two to repurpose any character for use somewhere else in the game, just by changing a few aspects.

The players don’t really need to know that their local tavern owner and their local priest are essentially the same character, with a slight personality change, a different hairstyle, and a few different class levels.

Plus, if the players catch on to this, and decide to come up with some theories, then it’s more potential for plot hooks – are they siblings, are they the same person, are they clones taking over the town?

Johnn: Determine interaction type to inform how much to develop for each NPC, and when. Combat NPCs require game stats, roleplaying and service NPCs need backgrounds, personalities, and resources.

Further, NPCs who are only known by name and reputation need background, resource, and tactical development. They do not need game stats, as the PCs will not encounter them soon. Villains, for example, do not need game stats at first, they just need a plan.

I have also learned games are better when you reduce the number of important NPCs and increase their relationships and interactions with each other and the PCs. This approach saves you time, helps you develop deeper NPCs character-style as the campaign progresses, and really gets the party involved.

Further, when introducing new NPCs, regardless of importance, try to relate them to your existing cast of NPCs. Developing ties and relationships embeds these new characters in your games, makes NPC faster because you can share backgrounds and plots, and gets PCs hookedm uch faster.

For tools, I’d like to toot my own horn and link to the book I wrote on the topic: GM Mastery: NPC Essentials. Everything you want to know about building NPCs, be they villains, lords, or rat catchers.

Improvising NPCs

What’s the name of the shop-owner? What does the soldier look like? If the PCs stalk the secretary until she reaches her home, what happens there?

Sometimes, your players confront you with a sudden interest in an NPC you never planned to be important. Sometimes, you just need an NPC fast. I think this is a situation every GM out there has been in at some time.

A quick NPC generator doesn’t have to provide you fully-fleshed out NPC. This tool should give you quick description, some keywords about behaviour, and maybe some further information. It is used to make NPCs different and recognizable.

Michael: For creating NPC in a quick way I rely strongly on quick thinking. I like to think in stereotypes and add or alter something non-stereotypical.

For example, in my Cthulhu campaign, when I describe a barkeeper, I give the description of a typical barkeeper as we imagine in the 1920. Short, good haircut, uniform/suite, standing behind the bar shaking a cocktail with a nice smile on his face, occasionally talking and listening to drunk man.

If the characters start giving him more interest, I add detail. Maybe he is having a strong accent or is having a scar in his face. But, by giving a rough stereotype description, my players and I share the same picture about this person. This is totally okay for an NPC likely never to be seen again.

Da’ Vane: Having quick lists of details helps when you are drawing a blank about NPCs and need something on the spot. This is particularly useful when the PCs enter any environment where they might encounter random people and can stop to talk to one at any moment.

Being able to have a list of male and female names for a region to draw from randomly is useful. Also, be sure to take cues from your players to aid quick thinking – if you can get them to highlight what they are looking for from an encounter with an NPC, then it’s less detail you need to make up, because you can simply say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Normally, the easiest route for improvisation is to say ‘yes’, but don’t be afraid to throw in a twist or two if it will improve the scene. Using your players’ direction this way makes them feel more involved, gives you direction about what they want, and means you do less work overall.

If you can, for everything the players add to the scene in this manner, add something of your own. For example, if the players ask if the gypsy woman they’ve just seen is wearing a ring, it’s easy to say yes and provide a detail about the ring or another piece of jewellery she might be wearing.

Johnn: I also keep tables of data for on-the-fly help. I create names lists for each campaign, along with a traits list.

Getting to know your world’s cultures gives you an instant base to work with, as well. Just apply a culture onto each new NPC based on their race or upbringing, and then let gameplay inspire what makes the NPC unique.

Keeping Track of NPC Relations

Keeping track of the relations between NPCs and PCs can be a tough organizational problem, especially if you are playing long campaigns with a lot of factions.

There may be different reasons for changes in the relations between NPCs. This could be due to the PC acting in some way, NPCs acting against each other without the PC influence, or just the result of time passing by and NPCs forgiving or forgetting about recent events by others.

Michael: For keeping track of NPC relations I use diagrams with nodes representing NPCs, and arrows representing their relations. Other possible ways could be index cards (for each NPC) or tables.

Da’ Vane: A few systems actually use game play mechanics to deal with tracking NPC relations, with PCs making checks to try and influence other characters to perform actions on their behalf. These systems normally provide a good base for any system to keep track of NPC relations, since you can not only record which characters know who, but also keep track of any bonuses and penalties to such checks directly.

For the most part, events and actions will influence the checks, so a record of previous interactions and other concerns can be kept with the NPC relations – providing a mini-history of their dealings with others.

This is a particularly powerful tool for more intrigue or political games, where discovering and manipulating such relations is often important, and the biggest changes often become the subject of gossip and rumour within the courts and halls of power alike.

Johnn: Here too I go with default based on race, culture, class, or any other leading influence in the NPC’s makeup. Then I let the PCs effect change. For example, let’s say all wizards have no respect for warriors, all warriors mistrust wizards, and dwarven warriors attack eleven wizards on sight because an ancient grudge. That lets me know how several things about relations between NPC and PC warriors, wizards, dwarves, and elves.

However, as a campaign progresses, or in a campaign where things are not so cut and dry, a relationship diagram is my vote for best tracking method. A simple mindmap, or mindmap software, should work.

The king of all relationship software for RPG, however, is The Brain. I’ve used it and love it. You can download a free fully functional version through this link. (Disclaimer, if you opt to buy the Pro version, which I use, then Campaign Mastery gets a small commission, but you can use the free version forever, and it has what you need for building relationship maps.)

Playing NPCs

You want your players to be able to distinguish between the different NPCs. Playing out NPCs distinctly adds a lot of flavour to your game.

Furthermore, playing NPCs is important for the premise “Show, don’t tell.” By good role-playing, you can provide information about the NPC without explicitly saying this information out loud.

For example:

• Educational background
• Self-confidence
• Origin
• Age

Michael: Here could be any tool listed that actors use. I recently read a book about body language and nonverbal communication (Joe Navarro). I think this can be used to a great extent for GMing different levels of self-confidence.

Also speaking in different accents can be entertaining. Making yourself small or big can help a lot.

Another great tool for getting into the role of a NPC is to imagine the NPC as a strong personality you are familiar with. When you play the mother of three children and think about Arnold Schwarzenegger you will certainly play her very differently than you would if you were thinking of Britney Spears.

Da’ Vane: When playing an NPC, think about why you are playing that NPC. This should guide you in the sort of information you should look to present to the players through roleplaying. A degree in socio-psychology has given me great insight into the construction of identities in many ways, and how they are expressed through words, deeds, and markers.

Sometimes we are aware that we are expressing aspects of these identities, and sometimes we are not. In some cases we spend a lot of time trying to hide some aspects of these identities or express false aspects for various reasons.

With this in mind, try to create and play your NPCs with a few key traits and aspects, and define whether the NPC is trying to hide or express that aspect of their identity, and why. This will lead you to some of the markers to pepper your roleplaying and present the NPC as a fully fleshed out character.

Always focus on what you can present to the players – a character that hates elves will do a lot of subtle negative things towards elves in their presence, generally to make elves feel uncomfortable and intimidate, rather than just shout out “I hate elves” all the time.

Likewise, a character who like elves would do the opposite, doing subtle things to make them feel more comfortable, rather than stating “I like elves” all the time.

A character that is secretly an elf might feel uncomfortable around another elf in case they are revealed, while someone who is pretending to be an elf might try to become over-familiar with another elf in an attempt to assert their own identity as an elf.

Johnn: I suck at accents, and after awhile a campaign full of single-trait NPCs gets silly. Further, I rarely flesh out personalities for NPCs ahead of time unless they are important characters. I prefer to let appearance and actions reveal an NPC’s personality.

A quick appearance description sets the scene in the players’ minds, like the standard place shot TV shows and movies use when returning from a commercial break or doing a scene change. The audience needs to know where they are to orient themselves for the upcoming scene. In this case, the players need cues and clues about who they are dealing with.

Actions create more gameplay. Make an NPC do something in their unique style (using Michael’s and Da ‘Vane’s excellent advice). This bails me out of accents, personalities, and the whole bucket of winging-it perspiration. “The bartend slits his eyes when you walk up, and he reaches for something under the bar with a shaky hand.” Boom – player’s turn, and the PCs have something interesting to react to. Game on.

Michael Beck considers himself a novice GM, but is encouraged in sharing his tips at www.spielleiten.wordpress.com (German language). Having played RPGs for roughly 10 years now, he accepts the challenge of living with his girl-friend, two cats, a non-finished PhD-thesis and two running roleplaying campaigns.

Da’ Vane, or Christina Freeman in the real world, is the owner of DVOID Systems, and the primary writer of their D-Jumpers series of products. With an academic background in science, especially socio-psychology, she is what many would regard as a “know-it-all.” However, the truth is that she doesn’t know everything about everything, but she knows a lot about a lot, especially about her passions which are games, stories, learning, and people. She is a consummate geek goddess, and yes, she is single if you feel like tracking her down and hitting on her some time….

Introduction

Back in late February or early March, Holly Lisle’s books came to my attention – I’m no longer sure how, but it was probably a Twitter link to her blog. Several of her e-books sounded interesting, so I passed the information on to Johnn, who surprised me in late March by giving me several of them for my Birthday.

By sheer coincidence, the eBook that we both started with was the “Create A Character” Clinic. Why Johnn chose that, I don’t know, but I can speak as to why it was the first of the eBooks that I read. I have read several books on the subject of character creation, and this was an excellent way to measure just how useful her books were going to be, and how much of the content would be redundant repetition of material that I had already read and digested.

To cut a much longer story short, the create-a-character clinic was excellent – but limited. It completely fulfilled its brief of explaining how to make characters for a work of fiction plausible and rounded, and how to communicate their nature to the audience by means of dialogue and description with massive blocks of ex-cathedra narrative by the author. Even better, most of the advice would function just as superbly when applied by a GM in a game context.

There was only one area where it fell short: Aliens. Non-humans of all shapes and sizes.

The limitations of television budgeting ensured that the aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation were obviously humans in rubber masks and makeup, and many of the stories suffered somewhat in credibility as a result in my eyes – “not another rubber forehead!” I though to myself on a number of occasions.

Applying Holly’s book to the creation of non-humans – whether it be in fiction or within a game – will result in characters wearing the metaphoric equivalent of rubber forehead appliances. Superficially alien, but no different when and where it matters.

This article is intended to plug that gap.

How Alien Should Aliens Be?

I want to start by looking briefly at a very tricky subject. This is by no means intended to be the last word or definitive answer to the question that the heading above raises – just a starting point.

It is obviously desirable for any given aliens to be distinctly non-human in some respect – they aren’t human and their thinking should reflect that. What’s more, like a stack of dominos falling, one substantial difference should have knock-on effects. A change in the psychology of a species should be reflected in their culture, laws, social interactions, architecture, diet and anything else about the society. Not to mention how they will interact with members of other societies!

There’s no need to go into extensive detail on how to perform this type of extrapolation, because that is the subject of one of the most popular articles here at Campaign Mastery, my 4-part Distilled Cultural Essence. At the same time, it is desirable to make the Aliens as human as possible; the audience – whether they are players or readers – are all going to be human and have to relate to the Aliens.

There is clearly a conflict here, a huge grey area that is bounded by “too much” and “not enough”, between “too alien” and “too human”.

Complicating the situation is that neither GM nor author can afford to expend vast amounts of exposition in communicating the differences and uniqueness; we don’t want to spend time on generalities, we want to deal with specific individuals.

We need to be able to hit the highlights and leave the fine details to be filled in only as they become relevant; we don’t have sufficient tolerance to accommodate a lecture on sociology.

It follows that the best description is some single significant divergence from the human norm, and a mention of one or two of the repercussions that are blindingly obvious. So long as every detail that gets mentioned thereafter is consistent, and any variations from what the audience might expect gets referred back to that major variation, it’s sufficient for the author/GM to have all the details without inflicting them on the reader/audience.

Which brings us to two further questions: How to diverge from the human norm, and how to do so significantly – without completely alienating the results from the reader/audience?

The Hierarchy Of Non-human Needs

The foundation stone of the Clinic is Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs, a deceptively simple architecture layering one category of personal need above another. The concept is that you will do what you have to do to satisfy the needs of a given layer except compromise the needs of a lower layer.

What’s more, by choosing an item from within these categories at random, you can determine the driving need that motivates your character – you just have to draw a narrative line between the fulfillment of that need and the actions you desire your character to make, or analyze a situation that the character encounters in the context of that need to get some idea of how the character will feel about it.

It works marvelously well for humans, and abysmally for non-humans – because the non-humans will have a substantially different hierarchy of needs.

But that’s the solution to the problem posed at the end of the preceding section: Change an element of the hierarchy. Changing that element immediately makes a substantial difference to the aliens, their philosophy, society, etc, but only changing ONE element keeps the whole thing manageable – and enables the audience/player to relate to the resulting species.

Not just a rubber forehead

It might seem that this solution is on a par with the “rubber foreheads” of which I have been so disparaging, but I would disagree with that assessment. This isn’t simply a cosmetic change, but a fundamental difference to the way the society thinks and what its members value. To a human standard, the resulting characters could technically be considered insane.

I should probably also add that at the start of the series, the “forehead appliance” was at the cutting edge of what could be achieved on a TV budget with physical makeup. Babylon-5 raised my – and most other people’s – expectations and standards, and it is only when judged by those standards that STTNG fell short in the makeup and costuming of its aliens.

Exemplars and Misfits

When dealing with an alien culture, there are two types of representative that the GM needs to present – exemplars and misfits. The misfit displays individuality within the alien culture, while the exemplar provides a context and basis for comparison.

And yet, every character that is encountered should be an individual; this is another contradiction that the author/GM must resolve.

The most obvious solution is for the one being to embody both – the misfit whose need is to reform himself. This is so obvious a solution that it cannot be used at every turn, or it will become a cliché. So the creator of an alien species must look for alternatives which can be used in preference, reserving this obvious answer as a fallback position.

One of the most-frequently used alternatives comes in the form of the briefing, or narrative introduction. Someone, reading from or summarizing a “file” of compiled information on the race, acquaints the protagonists with a generic profile from which every individual will diverge, however slightly.

Another solution is the ridicule of an enemy. In my Shards Of Divinity campaign, the Player Characters have yet to encounter an Elf, never mind encounter Elvish Society. Both events, they know, lie in their future. At the current time, they are possessed of some “common knowledge” imparted ex-cathedra in the campaign briefing, one PC has a couple of insights concerning the Elves in human pre-history, but the most practical information they have comes from the disparagement of an enemy of the race – who nevertheless embodies many of the very traits he disparages. By any measure, this is a misfit with respect to the society he represents, and quite intentionally so on his part; but those very efforts illuminate aspects of his parent society.

There are other answers, but each GM or author should develop his own approaches.

From The General to the Individual

Holly’s book deals with character construction in a logical way, given a common frame of reference. From needs it moves on to character through work and play; this is followed by past, present and future; then friends, enemies, and lovers; life and death; Culture, Religion and Education; and finally, Moral Stance.

When dealing with a non-human race, I would recommend changing that sequence to give the ramifications of the change in Needs for the society an opportunity to permeate the various aspects of the character.

My recommended sequence of approach is:

• Culture, Religion, and Education (page 51)
• Friends, Enemies, and Lovers (Racial, not personal) (page 42)
• Past, Present and Future (Societal, not personal) (page 29)
• Moral Stance (Societal, not personal) (page 57)

These are all things that need to be understood about the culture in general before the impact of the individual’s unique circumstances on his personality, actions, and choices can be assessed.

There is a logical flow to the decisions that have to be made, a logical order to the order in which the dominos are lined up. For example:

• You can’t decide a character’s choice of and approach to his employment until you know what occupations are open to the character, and how they are regarded.
• How they are regarded will also impact on the character’s past choices and present circumstances.
• You can’t decide this information on occupations until you know who the race’s friends and enemies are, and the history of the conflicts in their past and present. This can also impact on occupation and attitudes, and will certainly impact on the culture’s morality.

At every stage of the character development process, the creator needs to document two things: what is the exemplar (however broadly defined you have to keep it), i.e. what is normal for this race; and what are the Individual Character’s choices and attitudes and history in this respect.

Once these foundations are known, the remainder of character development can proceed in the normal way. Pick the aspects of the character’s life that are most important to them – it might be their work, or their hobbies, or their wife, or a personal rivalry, or a fear of mortality, or a shameful past, or whatever. Identify the appropriate section of the character development clinic, and work through the questions posed therein. Then do the next most important, and so on.

Through Dungeons Deep

It’s worth noting in passing that one of the most vivid memories I have of “Through Dungeons Deep” was showing how the personality of a traditional dragon derived from postulating a couple of needs that were not in the area that would be expected of a human. Of course, I took it further by thinking about why that need was where it was, but even without that, I have to admit that the approach I have described here has been directly inspired by what I read in Plamendon’s book.

A Partial Example

This article would hardly be complete without at least a partial example. And, since I havn’t talked about them very much in these pages, I’m going to pick Dwarves.

Starting with the hierarchy of needs, we need to either move or insert something. I’ll give the Dwarves a new sense/ability – Commune With Earth – as a blanket label for all the things they are supposed to be able to do from the Player’s Handbook / Fantasy Literature. This is a spiritual connection with the Earth and the spaces beneath the surface.

Having labeled the difference between Dwarves and Humans, it’s time to translate it into one or more societal needs.

Physiological

At the most fundamental level, we can place the need to periodically renew this bond with the Earth. To make things interesting, I’m going to replace Sex/Procreation with this sense. That means that marriage and children are no longer vital needs – implying that Dwarves have some other means of reproduction.

Replacing the sex drive with this experience suggests that the experience is a sensual one, and that such communing gives the Dwarf great pleasure. It also implies that this communing is somehow bound up with that alternative to children.

Perhaps Dwarves don’t have children, but instead dig the next generation, quite literally, from the rock that they tunnel through.

That means that they have no need for there to be more than one gender – but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Safety

Satisfying this need is clearly a dangerous undertaking in and of itself. Mining is hardly safe at the best of times; aside from the dangers of bad air and pockets of explosive gasses, there is the ever-present danger of rock falls. Add to that the threat posed by many of the creatures with whom Dwarves share their underground domain, and safety seems well satisfied.

The latter danger would certainly justify the usual martial society that is usually associated with Dwarves.

And yet, all this seems so pedestrian. Dwarves are supposed to be better at this stuff than humans; presumably, their innate communion with the earth gives them advantages that humans lack, which in turn eases the environmental dangers.

To compensate, we need to introduce a new danger, one that is also mitigated by but that results from, this new Sense. Perhaps there are parts of the Earth that are inherently “bad places” – pits of corruption and evil, hiding places of pure abstract villainy, even connections with the Abyssal planes. Certainly, the common belief in my Shards Of Divinity campaign is that the Heavens are hidden amongst the clouds, while the planes of Hell are deep underground, like the Pits of Tartarus.

Make these “dark places” seductive, as Devils and Demons are often described as being, capable of corrupting the Dwarves and turning them malicious and twisted, and the danger posed fits our needs perfectly. I keep thinking of the Cave/Tree in “The Empire Strikes Back” – a place that is strong in the “Dark Side”.

As an aside, this makes a dandy explanation for the differences between Drow and Elves – the first living Underground, and the latter living above ground. But that’s neither here nor there in this discussion.

Finally, it seems reasonable to suppose that Dwarves would feel uneasy whenever they could not feel the Earth’s presence beneath their feet – crossing rope bridges or sitting on flying carpets, or simply ascending a staircase above ground level. They would prefer to sleep in a root cellar than on the first floor of an Inn!

Love and Belonging

If the Dwarves have only one gender, they would inevitably see themselves as Married to the Earth. There would undoubtedly be at least one, and possibly several, manhood rituals in a Dwarves’ life that revolve around this perception. Fidelity would be to the Earth itself.

This stratum of the Hierarchy Of Needs is all about knowing we are cared about and caring about others, to quote the Clinic e-book. How could that relate to our new Sense?

We may consider it anthropomorphizing, but if the Dwarves see themselves as having this sort of relationship with the Earth, it is surely not a great leap to imagine that they would consider the Earth as an equal, and Dwarvish Society would be an extended family. Perhaps there are some variations in interpretation and awareness of the Sense and this is the distinction between one Dwarvish Clan and another. Certainly, the Earth would be the central connection binding Dwarvish Society together.

Being forcibly divorced from the Clan could operate as an interdiction of one or more nuances of the Earth Sense; in extreme cases, even a repudiation and denial by the Earth itself.

Esteem

The Earth has long been associated with a number of personality traits, many of which are also associated with typical Dwarvish peoples in Fantasy Games. “Salt Of The Earth”, “Down To Earth”, and so on – I don’t want to go too deeply into this because it was already covered under “The Rock” in part one of my incomplete series, “We All Have Our Roles To Play: A Functional Perspective On Personality Archetypes” (which I hope to get back to, Real Soon Now).

I bring this up to pose another of those mind-twisting suggestions that my players have come to expect: What if, instead of viewing the Earth as a feminine – something that agriculture and fertility ritual have imposed apon human societies – Dwarves saw it as a masculine, a father figure? All children try to emulate their father. (Mischievous Grin)

Of course, if Dwarves are truly mono-gendered, they probably wouldn’t have any basis for gender distinctions when it came to the Earth; it would be both Father and Mother, and human gender distinctions would be considered anthropomorphization of the worst sort!

Actualization

This is one of the hardest terms to describe! One of the few flaws with Holly’s e-book is in satisfying the need to define the term. My dictionary doesn’t help much, either.

Try this definition on for size: “Actualization is the process of treating ambitions and desires beyond the needs of health and welfare as if they were needs of health and welfare”.

We all have these ambitions and desires; and if we satisfy them, they are immediately replaced with new ones. The big ones are fame, fortune, power, and authority. Some societies may well add sanctimony to that list. I personally would add Liberty, the right to pursue happiness, intellectual freedom, and freedom of speech to the list. But that’s just me.

How can actualization connect with the postulated new Sense? Well, so far we’ve treated this new sense as pretty much a blanket deal, the same for every Dwarf (with a possible distinction along clan lines). But one of the big needs for such a sense to actually provide all the abilities that Dwarves enjoy in D&D and related games, and in fantasy fiction in general, would be discrimination – the ability to tell one kind of rock from another, one kind of mineral from another, and so on. What if these different minerals actually evoked different emotional responses?

Suddenly, the fact that Dwarves are never associated with Sulphur mines – or Salt mines, for that matter – starts to make more sense. And if the refinement or purification of such resources amplifies or concentrates those emotional responses, then other aspects of Dwarven descriptions start to take on new meaning. Their weapons are usually described as being iron, for example – perhaps there is a tactile pleasure that derives from handling steel, that other materials don’t provide?

Gold and Platinum, of course, are the only two metals that are found in pure form in nature. Everything else – even Silver – is more frequently found as an Alloy. It follows that these two noble metals, and the various gemstones, would provide the most “pure” responses. Mining a vein of Gold might well be the equivalent of a Minister hearing the voice of God.

In fact, it’s possible to go further – Gemstones have long been held to have magical properties; a little expansion along those lines and it would be possible to evolve an entire technology that is based on Gemstones that would be completely unique to this culture!

Wrapping up the example

I could continue on to actual character development of an individual from this society, refining and expanding on the concepts and ideas already incorporated, but I think the point is made; this process has evolved a view of Dwarves that is radically different from anything that I have ever seen or heard of. And yet, it is both strangely compelling and true to the ideas presented in the sourcebooks.

From this foundation, I would employ the techniques discussed in Distilled Cultural Essence to expand on the culture, coupled with the development strategy outlined in this article; then I could turn my attention to the creation of a number of individuals and the ever-present question of how to present an exemplar to the players in whatever game this was destined to be used in.

The Character Development Clinic

Holly Lisle’s eBook is an excellent resource for GMs and players and writers in general. You can buy it here or by clicking on the cover image above. The current price is $9.95 for the PDF version and $19.95 for a printed version from Lulu, and it’s definitely worth the price of admission.

What tools go into your GM toolbox?

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.

GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.

Preparation tools are perhaps the most important tools at your disposal. In this category, we have the tools you can use to get ready for your game sessions.

In part I, we covered campaign and adventure planning, which enable the GM to define the stories being told. In this part, we cover encounter planning and what the GM needs to prepare for actual play.

Going one step deeper, we land at single encounters. The tools used here should provide the details you need for playing out a certain scene or an encounter.

Monster Planning

Most systems and settings have monsters. A monster planning tool will provide you with the appearance of the monster as seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted by the PCs, along with the relevant statistics for that monster.

Additional material such as combat strategies and non-combat behaviour may also be provided by your tool.

Michael: I’m in the comfortable position of not having any setting veterans in my groups. This means I don’t have to invent monsters myself to surprise my players. Therefore, my monster planning tools are just the rulebooks themselves.

Da’ Vane: Monsters and other combat enemies can be some of the most time consuming elements of a scene to prepare, so you should be looking to find ways to do as little work here as possible, to get maximum use from your encounters.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to reskin your monsters, by replacing the descriptions and details, but preserving some or all of the statistics of the opponents at hand. This way, you can use the same set of numbers numerous times, rather than having to completely rebuild you encounters time and time again.

As you get more experience with your chosen rules, you will be more comfortable changing minor details of these encounters that affect how they play out, such as providing them with different weapons, stronger armour, or changing how some of their abilities work.

Also, if you vary the tactics and strategies of the creatures, then while they may be virtually identical in terms of their statistics, the encounters will become more varied as a result, especially if combined with various other factors.

Johnn: I also recommend monster theming. Choose a monster and make them a race, with various derivations. This helps you become an expert with the monster, allowing you to improve your monster variant construction, encounter stocking, and combat tactics with that family of critters. It also gives you a great recurring foe for players to get a good hate on for.

For example, evil unicorns. The one with the black horn and sneer is the leader. The brown horned ones are cunning lieutenants with leadership skills who undermine each other as they compete for the leader’s respect. The few red horned ones have tricky magic powers. The green horns are flunkies. Legend of gem-horned unicorns exist, which is perhaps what the villain quests for.

Terrain and Combat Hazards Planning

Combat hazards and terrain can be a crucial point of an encounter. Almost every encounter can benefit from cool scenery, which is basically the reason why we are still watching action movies.

A tool in this category should provide you with interesting scenery to spice up important encounters and battles. It should also give you some rulings on how the scenery affects the PCs and the encounter.

Michael: For basic stuff, the rulebooks do a good job for me. But for important battles, I need better tools. Getting inspiration from movies or books is a good source for me. Also the combat hazard series on the Campaign Mastery website helped me a lot.

One little tip here: Use time-constraints. Killing the giant evil robot is much more fun if you have to do it before the nuclear bomb triggers.

Da’ Vane: Terrain and combat hazards are good for getting more out of your encounters, and turning otherwise dull encounters into exciting action scenes. Bear in mind that even simple furniture can had a new dimension to encounters, especially when combined with improvisational weapon use. An otherwise dull tavern brawl can become exciting as characters throw chairs, tip over tables for cover, swing off chandeliers, and leap off balconies.

Johnn: Terrain impacts encounter setup and options. Offensive terrain that adds to damage done each round, or weakens defenses, increases the pace of combat. Defensive terrain that makes combatants harder to hit and damage slows the pace of combat.

Further, terrain affects character senses. Use terrain to improve chances of ambushes, disguise the objective, or mislead the PCs. A classic example is a terrain feature in shadow that looks like a foe.

Combat rules can serve as another tool for your GM toolbox here. Take each combat rule and reverse engineer it into an interesting terrain element. PCs will experience the terrain during the encounter and trigger the game rule in a natural way, making encounters exciting for them.

For example, bull rush: pits, crevasses, spiked walls, slippery downhill sections. What about bull rushing terrain, such as aggressive plants, wind gusts, swinging construction equipment?

Trap Placing

Traps are meant to hinder, damage, or kill the characters. They can come in any form. A trap can work as an encounter, a combat hazard, or a puzzle.

It is a good idea to have some traps in your box, since they are a tool themselves. A tool for creating traps provides you with a trigger, an effect, some possible placements, and maybe a hidden or emergency off switch or bypass option.

Michael: If I construct a trap myself, I skim through the core rules, especially the chapter about Magic and Spells. It may need some fantasy, but almost every spell can be twisted to work into a trap.

If I need a quick and dirty trap, I just use the example traps given in the rulebooks. Also, thinking about the Home Alone movies results in some (sometimes diabolic) traps.

Da’ Vane: Traps are often meant as a delaying tactic, but too many can slow down the game to a crawl. They should be reserved for areas of danger that are meant to be protected, so the players can have some idea when to expect traps and when they are reasonably safe. Sometimes, even the threat of a trap is enough to keep the players on their toes.

Johnn: I love Grimtooth’s series of books. You can convert many of the traps into something workable for your system. Kobold Quarterly regularly blogs about traps. There were several third edition trap books you can find used for cheap.

Giving Out Treasure

Handing out treasure is more complicated than just creating some items. You want treasure to be balanced in two ways – the players should not gain two coppers for slaying the red dragon, but nor should they receive the Sceptre of Infinite Power for killing some goblin raiders.

The treasure should fit the difficulty of the encounter and the level of power of the characters.

Also, the treasure should be nicely distributed over the different players. This is a tricky one, since the in-game value of treasure is not the same as its out-of-game value.

A power gamer will be much more grateful for a bigger weapon, compared to the player who seeks for a nice story.

The tool you use here should generate your treasures in a fast, uncomplicated way, which can be optimized to your players’ needs easily. Remember, you can also use created items as treasure.

Michael: In my D&D campaign, I have an easy game on this battlefield. My players love magic and powerful stuff. Basically, I go through the tables of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and mix in some more story related stuff for the few story-needs of my group.

In the Savage Worlds group, I also have it quite easy. The group is constantly broke, so giving them money causes spontaneous dancing.

In the Cthulhu group, however, it is quite different (often they are happy NOT finding something). Here hints, relics, and books trump items. For preparing this, I skim through the only-for-GM sections of my notes or the books, and choose some interesting piece of information they receive by investigating the treasure.

Da’ Vane: I am a big fan of randomly generated treasure, although I will tend to determine the treasure for a given area, and then arrange it as suited rather than relying completely on the tables for generation.

In this way, I can create treasure caches and other little rewards, as well as themed group treasure, such as dishing out some coins to minions, and having the leader horde all the items for themselves if they are particularly greedy.

I will also allow smart enemies to use the treasure they might possess, giving them an extra edge and making for a more interesting encounter, as well as giving the PCs an extra incentive to adopt reckless and heroic stunts to improve play so they can end combats quicker and get more rewards.

Johnn: TableSmith software has downloadable random treasure generators. Third Edition D&D was rife with treasure books, and you can steal the fluff from those en masse. You can also ask players for their wishlists, or better yet, understand the PCs’ strengths and weaknesses and offer rewards tuned to each character.

Granting Rewards

By reward, I mean things which are not treasure, such as experience points. This can be a great method to show your players what style of play you encourage. Your tool here should specify:

• What kind of rewards you grant.
• When to give out which reward (instantly, end of session, beginning of next session)
• What the reward encourages (playing out character, making a witty joke)
• How it keeps things balanced, i.e. avoiding one or two players getting a lot of rewards and the others none.

Michael: For giving out instant rewards, I have prepared reward cards of three types in my D&D campaign.

• Interactive – for playing out character
• Fun – for making a witty comment or doing something funny in-game
• Action Cards – for doing cool stunts or describing the own action nicely

For creating the cards, I used the Magic Set Editor, printed them out in high quality, cut them out (all hundreds of them, this was work!) and put them together with an unused Magic the Gathering card in a card sleeve (with different backgrounds, to distinguish the three kinds). Here is a sample of the cards (in German language).

Da’ Vane: Various systems define different ways of handling rewards, which I try to understand, and if possible share across systems in ways to make games more fun, without breaking the game.

I also provide an instant stunt bonus to characters whose players go to that extra length of describing their actions in a cool way, or come up with something unique, clever, or funny that I feel should help the game and deserves a little bit of extra help to work.

In a d20-based system, this is as simple as a +2 bonus, which is an additional 10% chance in absence of any other modifiers, so isn’t too overpowered during play, and helps out a lot at lower levels or when the PCs start exhausting all their other abilities and need the boost.

Johnn: My group uses pocket points. It lets players reward each other.

I also give out compliments and positive feedback. “That was a great idea, Bob. Well done.” That goes a long way and does not affect game balance.

Spotlight time is another effective reward. The player who acts things out, roleplays their PC’s actions instead of just calling for a dice roll, or describes things in detail gets the floor and my attention.

Characters with backstories can get rewarded with personalized game play (hooks, NPCs, and side plots derived from the background).

Part III is All About NPCs

In part III, we will explore preparing and running NPCs in your games, to make your games feel more alive and realistic.

About the Authors

Michael Beck considers himself a novice GM, but is encouraged in sharing his tips at www.spielleiten.wordpress.com (German language). Having played RPGs for roughly 10 years now, he accepts the challenge of living with his girl-friend, two cats, a non-finished PhD-thesis and two running roleplaying campaigns.

Da’ Vane, or Christina Freeman in the real world, is the owner of DVOID Systems, and the primary writer of their D-Jumpers series of products. With an academic background in science, especially socio-psychology, she is what many would regard as a “know-it-all.”

However, the truth is that she doesn’t know everything about everything, but she knows a lot about a lot, especially about her passions which are games, stories, learning, and people. She is a consummate geek goddess, and yes, she is single if you feel like tracking her down and hitting on her some time….

As happens every now and then, this isn’t the blog post I had intended for this week; the planned post was simply taking too long to come together and would not have been ready to post. So, instead, I offer up for your consideration All is Three: A 3.x fantasy campaign premise.

In February last year I offered “The Frozen Lands: a Science-Fiction Campaign Premise,” in which I explained that I often come up with ideas for new campaigns, some of which are rubbish and immediately tossed aside, some of which I save for later use, but most of which simple get set aside and forgotten because I don’t need them, and that whenever that occurred in the future, I would instead present it for public use here at Campaign Mastery.

One such idea recently came to me. Rather than develop it completely and present it as a package, I thought that I would simply document my thinking process as an illustration of how I go about designing a campaign.

Initial Concepts

I had just two ideas to start with:

1. All lizardkind are related – Kobolds and Trolls and Lizardmen and Dragons.
2. There are three types of meta-energy in existence: Defiling, Sanctifying, and Arcane – and each is defined as the absence of the other two. There’s only so much of this meta-energy to go around, so concentrating some in one area leaves another short, encouraging the other two types to struggle for dominance.

First Developments

The first pass at Campaign Development is a process of extrapolating from the initial concepts and examining implications and ramifications. It’s at this point that a lot of campaign concepts hit the wastepaper bin – either because the ideas weren’t inspiring enough or the results weren’t interesting and unique enough.

The first idea is really vague and needed immediate refinement, so that is where I started: by answering the question, “How Are they related?” It was when I came up with an answer that I realized how interesting a premise this would be – and that this was not going to be a throwaway. The answer I came up with:

Lizardkind are all part of the one greater lifecycle.

Kobolds

Kobolds hatch from eggs, many of them to a single egg. Most die quickly; Kobolds are not as intelligent nor as sentient as the DMG would have us believe. They can parrot a few words in other languages, but cannot really communicate. What they are is crafty and mechanically adept – hand one a device or mechanism, and they will push, pull, pry, and lever it in every way imaginable until they have taken it apart. If it did something they found to be useful – i.e. something within the bounds of their comprehension – they would also be able to reassemble it, better than it was before, or at least oiled and maintained. (Shades of “The Mote In God’s Eye”!)

Campaign Impact: Kobolds, better known as “Tinkers”, would be too useful not to be ubiquitously present in every household that can afford one. If it’s possible, they would be domesticated and bred in captivity; if not, organized hunting parties to capture them would be a primary industry (think of the human-hunts in Planet Of The Apes). Households that couldn’t afford one would have access to a “Town Tinker” owned by the local noble.

NB: The intelligence thing is because I want a continuity to the overall development, from less intelligent to more intelligent.

Adventure Content: the first adventure should bring the PCs face to face with a Tinker, making sure that the PCs are aware of this campaign element.

Ideas on the side:

Perhaps Kobolds are semi-marsupial, and after the eggs hatch they are deposited in a an adult Kobold ‘pouch’ to mature. This would give each mature Kobold a place to hide tools and the like. It would also mean that newly-hatched Kobolds could be quite small, only a couple of centimeters in size, which reduces the size of an egg to something that looks appropriate to a Kobold adult, further obscuring the connection between Lizardkinds.

The popular belief would be that Kobolds give birth to live young, but can’t or won’t breed in captivity.

Trolls & Lizardpeople

When Kobolds die, if they have achieved sufficient maturity, they reanimate or reincarnate or transform in some fashion into either Trolls or Lizardpeople. The process, and hence the connection, should not be known at the start of the campaign, and hence it should not be obvious.

With the ‘domestication’ of the Kobolds, it follows that mortal realms would be under siege from Troll and Lizardpeople armies. This fact becomes a third campaign premise.

Perhaps Kobolds have an inherent “alchemic imbalance” that requires them to consume a certain root or die. If they do not consume the root, they are unable to heal. However, the root itself – a common weed – is also a slow poison, and when enough of it builds up in the Kobold’s tissues, they also die.

Ideas on the side:

The root is the basis of all “Healing Potions” and has a similar effect on people when distilled (Fourth Campaign Premise). Consuming more healing potions than a character has points of constitution in a week permanently costs a point of constitution (First House Rule).

Only the religious orders know the secret of brewing Healing Potions (Fifth Campaign Premise). It is common knowledge that it is based on the root, which is farmed extensively by the Churches, but the root itself only heals one point and takes an hour to consume. The second most sought-after prize in alchemy (right after turning base metals into gold) is this secret, but none have discovered it. (Unresolved campaign question – what is the secret?).

Perhaps it is rumored/theorized that a related process creates a longevity potion. (Unresolved campaign questions – is the rumor true? Who knows this process? If not, the quest for an Elixir Of Youth would be a central goal of the church. If so, the process would be restricted to the nobility and the higher-ranking members of the clergy by expense, and the government would be a theocracy, regardless of the apparent form of government).

Getting back to the subject at hand: When too much of the healing herb accumulates in the Kobold’s tissues, their muscles begin to liquefy into a marrow-like jelly, which is perceived as a wasting away of the tissues. (Unresolved campaign question: does the same thing happen to humans?) Eventually, their internal organs liquefy and the Kobold – apparently – dies. Some time later (three days has a symbolic value, but the longer it takes, the more remote the connection) the Kobold is reborn as a small troll, which quickly grows to become full-sized. Perhaps one in ten Kobolds survive to become Trolls.

Trolls have a cave-man level of sentience – they have their own language, with an extremely limited vocabulary, and operate at a pack level in the wild.

Some of these transformations go awry – perhaps 1 in 20 – and instead of a troll, the result is a Lizardman. These are stunted, in comparison to Trolls, but much smarter; but they lack the healing abilities of the Trolls. (Unresolved campaign question: Why does the process give a different result?)

NB: My initial thought was that Lizardmen would occupy the point in the cycle following Trolls, but that would have a large creature becoming a medium creature and then becoming a much larger creature, which is a logical inconsistency; so I have decided to have a developmental fork at this point.

Lizardmen have normal healing capabilities but continue to consume the same root/herb as Kobolds for the extra healing it provides. Trolls do not; they are self-healing.

Lizardmen would naturally form tribal societies and rule over their ‘tribe’ of Trolls. If the relationship is to be kept a secret from the players, they must either be unaware of their kinship with the Trolls of their ‘tribe’ or they must be disdainful of it, refusing to acknowledge any kinship.

Dragons

Lizardfolk shed their skins several times in the course of their life (at least once every year), changing slightly in appearance each time – skin tones, spikes, horns, size of the ears, etc. As they age, their forelimbs begin to wither with disuse and become stunted, while their backs become progressively more swollen, forcing the Lizardfolk into an increasingly hunched posture. After roughly 20 years, there will come a time when the shedding of skin will permit bat-like wings to erupt from these shoulder swellings; the Lizardman has become a Dragon (assuming that he has survived this long).

Dragons are driven by natural instincts even they don’t fully understand. Their primary goal is the propagation of the species and of their offspring in particular; the eggs of rivals are competitors and potential threats to the survival of their own offspring, so they are solitary by nature and bloodcurdlingly violent by instinct.

Dragons are natural accumulators of the three energy types, and can expend these energies in various ways. In fact, because the three are mutually incompatible (any two are fine), they have a need to expel/expend one of the three. They internalize one form of meta-energy, expel another, and partially expel the third. Differences between the type of energy retained and the amount of the partially-expelled energy that remains give rise to the different colors of dragon.

Perhaps one energy type is expelled as a breath weapon, and the partially-expended one is consumed/released to give the dragon its other capabilities? This is an intriguing notion, but would alter fundamentally the nature of draconic breath weapons. Some would be arcane, some would be spiritual, and some would be corruptive, and the type would always be in disconcert with their nature.

This concept could radically change dragons in another way: if they use their spell-like, natural, and supernatural abilities, they would transform down the colour scale to a lesser dragonkind (red to black to blue to white to green; gold to silver to bronze to brass to copper); if they conserve their energies, they would slowly ‘evolve’ up the scale. This would (in turn) drastically alter their behavior.

There would need to be a third branch of dragons to reflect the third energy type. Final campaign creation would also require the construction of a table describing these various aspects of dragons to permit the appropriate changes to be made to the descriptions of the abilities and breath weapons. But, in general, I like it!

From time to time, the mating instinct would override the natural tendency towards a solitary existence, and two dragons would have a brief and tumultuous fling. The females would then lay eggs, one or two at a time, for years or decades thereafter, perpetuating the species. The draconic ability to fly that MOST of them enjoy would permit these eggs to be scattered far and wide, giving their genes the maximum chance of surviving into a new generation. If these egg-layings are infrequent, the development of the draconic spell-like abilities, as aides to survival, is also explained.

Beyond Trolls

So, what happens to Trolls? There are two possibilities: Either the ‘healing ability’ suppresses the evolution into a higher type, or they evolve into something else after a period of time, but their aren’t many major Lizardfolk types left.

Hmmmm… Demons are often described as ‘scaly’….

If the demonic ability to travel from one plane to another were the equivalent of the draconic ability to fly, and their other spell-like powers also operated on a similar principle to that outlined for Dragons… yes, that would work – you would have (once again) a hierarchy of subspecies, which an individual demon could ascend or descend. Obviously, the type of energy they internalize, and which gives rise to their nature, would be Defiling. The type of energy they consume would be Sanctifying – and the LESS of it they had, the more powerful they would be? That doesn’t quite work, but the alternative would be for their abilities to be Divine in nature, and that is even stranger. What if they could consume either type of energy – but that the quantity of Spiritual Energy they accumulate blocks their ability to expend Arcane energies as Spell-like abilities? This would force them to get rid of Spiritual Energy – say, by committing vile acts – and the more and worse the Vile acts they commit, the more powerful they would become? That seems to fit with the Demonic style! Some tweaking of individual descriptions vs. power levels might be needed to provide greater continuity, but the general concept works.

Archons

Logically, then, there would be two other varieties of being – one which accumulates Sanctifying energies, and one which accumulates Arcane energies. Archons would seem to fit the bill of the first, and they would evolve and become more powerful by doing “Good deeds”. Once again, there might need to be some tweaking of descriptions to give a more logical progression from one type to the next – Lantern Archons, being pure Spiritual Energy, or close to it, should be at the very top of the pecking order.

This significantly alters the relationship between these two varieties of being. Rather than being antagonistic, they would be symbiotic in nature – you can’t do a good deed unless a good deed needs doing, and Demonic Vile Acts would provide that opportunity. Both would have a parasitic relationship with mortals – though the mortals wouldn’t perceive things that way!

Abominations

We still need a species that accumulates Arcane energies. None of the remaining major types of creatures – Elementals, Gods, and Devils – really fits the bill, so we’ll set them aside for later. There are three choices: either

• there ARE no such beings, and that’s why mortals can work magic; or,
• we need to create a new order of being that does so, and that can evolve up and down the order by committing Arcane acts; or
• we need to add another concept, another new idea, to the mix to resolve the dilemma.

Any of these three answers can work, and they all have their own appeal. They would each produce very different campaigns. Because I’ve thought of what that “another new idea” could be, I’m going to go with answer number three, but I’ll pause for a moment to contemplate the other two.

There is no other order of being, and that’s why mortals can work magic
This idea forges a new relationship between “spell” and “spell-like”. It implies that mortals can ascend to higher forms of existence by accumulating Arcane energies and expending the other two types – and hence puts Gods, Demigods, and Devils all on a continuity of existence with mortals. It means that Gods have to commit as many Vile acts as they do Divine acts, which is very strongly in keeping with the anarchic nature of the Greco-Roman pantheons. It would also explain where the energy to form Ghosts comes from. And finally, it makes mortals analogous to mortal Lizardkind, bringing a level of internal consistency to the campaign. So there is a lot to commend it.

A new order of being that accumulates Arcane energy, and evolves by committing “Arcane Acts”
This also holds a lot of appeal – a type of creature that does nothing but make the game universe a more wondrous and interesting place. It has a very old-school sense of whimsy about it! The stronger your imagination, the more weirdness that you can invent, the more strongly this approach gives vent to that creativeness. Libraries that contain every book that was never written, endless staircases, Halls Of Forever, Doorways into the twilight zone… it all sounds like a lot of fun.

But, the option I am choosing to run with here is behind door number three, adding a new concept: What if it is the Arcane Energies that cause the evolution within type that has been assigned to Mortal Lizardkind, Demons, and Archons? In that case, by expending that energy, our third order of being would be unable to evolve, but would remain fixed in place on the hierarchy of creature types. And if, by nature, Arcane energies tended to twist and distort in a Frankensteinian way, then we end up being able to place that variety of creatures labeled “abominations” in this category. Some are intelligent and powerful; some are unintelligent and more powerful. They all have their own variety of spell-like abilities. Illithids, Dopplegangers, Beholders… the list goes on. Some are even capable of breeding more of their own kind, but most simply ARE.

The Second Pass

For the second pass through the creative wringer, I look to try and answer those questions that were left unanswered the first time ’round. With the initial burst of ideas now documented – or at least hinted at, in the case of the relationship between the three types of energy – there is a foundation which can hopefully be extended to answer at least some of them easily. Also in this stage, I would look at matters that were briefly touched on only indirectly in the preceding thought process, like what the Gods were, and what the Devils were, and what Elementals were, and where these three varieties of being come from.

Ideas Scratchpad: I am not going to complete this step (or those which follow it) in the course of this article, because each GM should have the opportunity to find and implement their own solutions, customizing the resulting campaign to their own tastes and players, but I do have some ideas, which I will provide as suggestions. No guarantees of consistency are offered!

The Cosmology

Click on the image for a larger version

It doesn’t take much adjustment to modify the standard D&D cosmology to accommodate the new concepts, but if we go beyond the minimum adjustment, some interesting results become possible.

To start with, the outer planes get classified into three branches instead of two: the Heavenly Outer Planes, the Abyssal Outer Planes, and the Arcane Outer Planes, depending apon which of the energy types dominates the nature of the plane. These may be “lined up” neatly as shown, but a more interesting option would be to map them on a grid:

Click on the image for a larger version

This is interesting because it places some planes closer to others, and because of the empty spaces where there are no planes – implying that there once were, or that new planes will eventually form there. This makes the planar structure a dynamic thing that changes over time.

The traditional view of the inner planes has also been tweaked slightly. The illustration depicts the prime material plane, surrounded by the four elemental planes. Surrounding this is the Energy Plane, divided into Positive Energy on the one side, and Negative Energy on the other. Binding this mélange together is the Ethereal Plane, which is co-existent with the Astral Plane.

The same structure is repeated for each of the outer planes, but there is just one Positive Energy Plane, one Negative Energy Plane, and one of each of the energy planes, each broken up by ethereal soap bubbles.

Why is this structure superior to the traditional? Supposedly, the prime material plane is as complex and rich as it is because it partakes of both positive and negative energies and all four elemental building blocks – but when you visit one of the outer planes, they are just as substantial. They have sky, and land, and oceans, and life, and air. This never made much sense to me. Giving each it’s own set of building blocks makes a lot more sense. What’s more, many outer planes are connected to each other; the official products break these into “layers” in order to retain the mythological structure from which they derive. Making each of these sub-planes its own separate plane and having multiple passageways through which a “tunnel” or “passage” can connect (or interconnect) them gives a consistency and a richness to the cosmology and a number of ways to connect one plane to another so that the one that is closest to the source mythology can be chosen.

The interface between the positive and energy planes deserves greater mention. The conflict between the two is the source of arcane energies, and the stronger this conflict, the more arcane energy is available within the plane. This has two effects: it means that given planes of existence migrate from top to bottom on the “grid” layout as they age; and it means that older a plane is, the less sharp and distinct the dividing line between positive and negative. Planes of shadow and twilight, planes of gray – those are what are left when a plane wears out.

Again, the notion is to provide something more than a static image of reality, to make the cosmology dynamic and evolving.

Nature Of The Universe

I have two different concepts in mind for the nature of the universe, two answers to the question of “why” the cosmology is the way it is.

The first is, perhaps, the more distinctive. The universe is a virtual reality created within the subconscious of a gamer plugged into a computer bank, his cortex forming part of an organic CPU. Defiling Energies embody user commands, against which he struggles; Sanctifying Energies embody his attempts to resist these instructions; and Arcane Energies embody system commands, which alter the environment (i.e. the context) of the other two. The different worlds represent different areas of memory, and individual locations represent symbolic locations within that memory. Hence, each plane will grow and shrink depending on how much memory retains data and how much is free. Some memory addresses can form symbolic links to other memory locations (gates and portals). A fair amount of memory is used to retain the operating system, and hence is relatively stable; other parts are used as temporary registers and are extremely volatile. The Astral Plane is the memory index, while the Ethereal Plane is a bus to other parts of the core architecture.

The second is more traditional. Once, two great races of humanoids (which I will call the Old Ones for the sake of giving them a name) fought a war of mutual annihilation. In fact, they annihilated all structure within their multiverse. Infinite anarchy gave infinite scope for the recombination of the energies unleashed by the final acts, and eventually the most improbable of configurations was accidentally achieved – one that was stable, or at least quasi-stable. Like a crystal forming in a supersaturated solution, this orderliness propagated outwards from the central core, creating the universe.

Gods, Devils, and Elementals in the Virtual World:

The nature of the Gods will clearly alter with the concept of the nature of the universe.

Under the ‘Virtual Reality’ plan, the gods would be anthropomorphic representations of the will of the universe, and would possess human-like form because the universe was itself human. The goal of the gods – which none of them would realize – is to develop a means to break the universe free of its unnatural confinement. This of course would be the ultimate in Pyrrhic victories – without the Dreamer being connected to the computer banks that control him and keep him Dreaming, the Dream ends. But even if this were to be discovered, it would be viewed by the Gods as a Noble Sacrifice.

Some beings have instinctively realized that acting in accordance with the Positive inclinations would lead to their own destruction – if the Gods ever succeed, the universe will be destroyed. Hence, they embrace the Abyssal and attempt to foster the manifestation of Vile energies in opposition to the Gods – they are the Devils. They place their own survival over the needs of their creator.

Finally, there are the neutral Servitors, the checksums of existence, the beings that create planes of existence and die out with each plane’s ending, the Elementals. These represent a form of ‘police force’ within the universe, a ‘reality police’ that ensure that things are where they are supposed to be and everything is fulfilling the function that it is supposed to perform.

Gods, Devils, and Elementals in the World of the Old Ones:

The ‘Old Ones’ plan offers a more interesting perspective on the Gods. When the Old Ones were annihilated, the energies were so overwhelming that an imprint or relief of each was burned into the resulting chaos itself. In some cases, that afterimage acted as a mould for positive energies, spontaneously creating a human-like ‘God’. While the resulting being’s conscious mind would be self-developed and original, its hereditary is one of power and control and of enmity with a group of other such beings.

Because they are suffused with Positive Energies, and depend on the presence of a strong Positive Energy Plane, the Gods have misidentified their opponents as those beings which resulted from Negative Energy suffusing one of these spiritual moulds – the Devils. In truth, the Gods are the remnants of Old Ones on both sides of the former conflict, and so are the Devils. The result is that some Gods are nicer people than others, and the same would undoubtedly be true of the Devils – except that the Gods tolerate differences of opinion and the Devils don’t.

This also means that both the Gods and Devils must, from time to time, migrate from their existing planes of existence when the contrast between positive and negative energies begins to run out. Since they depend on these respective energies to survive, when their world becomes too grey, they must migrate.

Of course, some moulds are suffused by pure Arcane energies; these are the original Elementals. Neutral with respect to the Gods/Devils conflict because they are not tied to either of the principles to which these two forces are tied, these must also migrate periodically because they live off the conflict between the two types of energy.

The Third Pass

In the third and final pass through the creative process, I look at everything that’s been decided so far and try and assess the impact on mortals, and also look at demihumans like Dwarves and Elves and how they fit in. Can they be tied to one or more facets of the ideas included so far? What do they know, and what don’t they know? How do these ideas impact on their society and their history?

Key questions to be answered revolve around the creation of the various mortal breeds. One option is that they are an experiment, or series of experiments, in ways of re-infusing the positive and negative energies and preventing the ‘graydeath’ from overwhelming the Prime Material Plane. Another is that mortals were created by the Gods to be soldiers in their war against the Devils. Still another possibility is that they have arisen independently of the Gods and are simply being manipulated by both sides.

Of these, the only ones who live long enough to have encountered the same dragon in different colors are the Elves. There’s a smaller chance for Dwarves and very little chance for anyone else, but the Elves are almost certain to know this secret. So another question that needs to be resolved in this pass is why the elves haven’t told anyone. There must be some secret that they are trying to protect – perhaps they did something shameful once and are still actively covering it up, or maybe its just that they keep secrets to make themselves superior to humans. With so many things coming in threes in this campaign concept, I have to admit that I would base the elves on the Minbari from Babylon 5 – and therefore base the Dwarves on the Narn. Although the temptation is always there to make the elves more like Vorlons than Minbari…

Continuing this general theme, Halflings would be Centauri and Gnomes would be Drazi. Drow as the Shadows? There are definitely possibilities there, but that seems a little obvious. Drow based on the Pakmarah, now that would be an unexpected twist – perhaps with a touch of the Drakh. Yes, let the Dragons be Vorlons and Shadows, and leave the lesser races to the smaller positions, I think! :)

The Fourth Pass

Finally, House Rules and other nuts and bolts. Everything so far has pretty much been high concept; it is now time to get down to brass tacks. What needs to be altered from the standard rules to reflect these new concepts? What is the scope for adventure? What limitations will be placed on PC generation, and what additional freedoms can be offered to compensate?

The Final Compilation

The final step is to compile all this information into two documents (possibly more) – one with what the PCs may be told in advance (the briefing) and one with the GMs notes. The campaign is then ready for players.

Hopefully, this walk-through – which has very much been written ‘stream of consciousness’, with ideas presented as they came to me – has illustrated my campaign design technique and offered a few ideas into the bargain.