{"id":21907,"date":"2018-03-06T00:40:50","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T13:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=21907"},"modified":"2018-03-06T00:40:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T13:40:50","slug":"heartbeat-of-the-ninja","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/heartbeat-of-the-ninja\/","title":{"rendered":"Heartbeat Of The Ninja: exercises in effect and cause"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\nA short post this week, cobbled together at the last minute when the article I was going to write fell apart on me, and at the same time, I contracted a massive head cold that’s impairing me mentally. It happens.<\/p>\n

And yes, I have hidden a ninja in the image to the left. Subtle, but it can be found – if you look hard enough for it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You don’t have to be an aficionado of martial arts movies to realize that they have a tempo like nothing else. Move-move-move in lightning succession – then pause. Move-move-pause, move-pause, move-move-move. Pause. The more spectacular the move, the sooner the inevitable pause.<\/p>\n

Quite often, the pause is used for characters to dialogue, making up for the fact that they don’t do so while performing these actions. Immediately, that reminds me of many RPGs, in which players and GMs often have difficulty changing gears from combat mechanics to roleplaying.<\/p>\n

There’s one major exception to this dialogue rule: the Ninja. The pauses are still there, but nothing is said. But more than that, until the characters being attacked find the enemy, quite often the action isn’t even depicted (though sound effects may represent the fact that something<\/em> is happening), only the results are actually shown (and that often after a dramatic pause) – and that<\/em> is what the pauses are for.<\/p>\n

There are lessons for GMs to be taken from this approach, and a handy technique or two to think about incorporating into your game-play.<\/p>\n

The Mystique of the Ninja<\/h3>\n

Quite often, what isn’t shown can be more powerful and fascinating than what is.<\/em> There is a caveat: the underlying logic must ring true by the end of the encounter. If the GM hasn’t had time for everything to be explained\/demonstrated such that the underlying logic is revealed to the players, no matter what the game mechanics may say, the encounter is not finished.<\/p>\n

Mystery is a powerful motivator with the capability of intriguing. This poses a sometime-difficult challenge for the GM; maintaining verisimilitude is a lot easier if you explain everything. It can be easy to get into the habit of doing so, because it also appeals to every GM’s human vanity – it’s tempting to show how clever we have been.<\/p>\n

And whole plotlines can be derailed by players misunderstanding what is going on. Fortunately, I’ve already addressed that problem in Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s not There until they See it<\/h3>\n

The first lesson in technique is this: until the PCs know what it causing something to happen, all they should be shown, all that should be described, are the effects<\/em> that are taking place and what they can<\/em> see.<\/p>\n

The problem is the need to reconcile different perception capabilities with this principle. Every game system has such a mechanic, and it poses some genuine problems for GMs for all that it’s an obvious necessity. How do you have them make a perception check without alerting the players that there is something there to perceive?<\/p>\n

There are almost as many solutions to this as there are GMs, some better than others. I’ve tried most of them at one time or another – everything from getting rolls in advance to making them in secret myself – but there’s a simpler answer: simply rank the PCs in terms of their scores in this skill\/attribute\/whatever-it-is-in-your-game-system. Add the lowest to the difficulty or modifier that applies for the circumstances and then have the Ninja make a stealth check. Then have this stealth wear off, one modifier at a time, revealing a fraction of whatever there is to perceive.<\/p>\n

Not following me? Okay, let’s work an example (using game mechanics that don’t exactly match those of any<\/em> game system of which I’m aware):<\/p>\n

    \n

    Five PCs with Perception [Spot] Scores from high to low:
    \nPC A: 20
    \nPC B: 17
    \nPC C: 15
    \nPC D: 11
    \nPC E: 8<\/p>\n

    It’s dark, and the “ninja” is in dark clothing and using weapons that don’t make much noise. The GM rules or determines that the circumstances are worth +5. The Ninja has a skill of 16, so that gives him a base of 16+5=21, plus whatever he rolls on d20, against a target of 8 (from PC E) plus 10 (standard) = 18. The roll is a 8, giving a total of 29 against the target of 18. Success!<\/p>\n

    So the “ninja” gets to perform one action without being seen at all, only the effect is “visible” and described to the PCs. They then get to react. Then the “Ninja” (could be any creature or character that attacks by stealth) gets to act again. I take the lowest perception score off the target and add the next highest one, then compare it against the existing roll of 29: 18-8+11=21. Another success! So the ninja acts again without being detected, but – because we’re using the second character’s perception, the first character gets the vaguest of passing hints.<\/p>\n

    Again, the PCs mostly get to react to effect without knowing the cause. And then it’s the Ninja’s turn again. Adjust the target: 21-11+15=25. The total rolled is still 29, so that’s another success. We’re now using the third character’s perception, so the characters with the two highest perception will get to see something this time around, but still not enough to identify what it is that’s attacking them. But the difference is now less than the bonuses provided by circumstances and equipment. Let’s say that the PCs action was to light the area up, somehow, negating part of the bonus the GM gave the Ninja, dropping his total rolled to 26.<\/p>\n

    So, with just a couple of hints, the PCs again react to the effect without knowing the cause. Once again, it’s then the Ninja’s turn to act. Adjusting the target gets us to 27, which is now more than the Ninja’s current success total of 26. So this time, when he acts, the PCs get to see what’s been happening all along.<\/p>\n

    Note that we got to this point with the 4th character’s Perception value, so only the three characters with the highest Perception values will clearly<\/em> see the Ninja at all times. The 4th character can see the Ninja when the Ninja acts, but has at best a vague notion of where the Ninja is, the rest of the time; and the 5th character can’t keep track of the Ninja at all.<\/p>\n

    Why is this (or something similar, adjusted to your game’s mechanics) better? It preserves the essentials – the stealth of the Ninja, the perceptiveness of the characters, the situational modifiers, and an element of randomness. And then it’s all interpretation.<\/p>\n

    \nIf you really wanted to, you could make it an opposed die roll instead of using the “average result of 10” as the standard difficulty. So why not do it?<\/p>\n

    The more dice you add to a situation, the more the result will tend to crowd the medium ground. When you graph this, you get a “Bell Curve”, one that steepens with additional dice. With only two dice, the shape is that of a triangle.<\/p>\n

    But the probability is distorted from the flat line of the single die, that’s indisputable. Which is acceptable if that’s the way the game system is designed, but not otherwise. And even then, the problem of distortion is just as great.<\/p>\n

    So opposed die rolls are now on my dirty list, something that I employ only when I have no other choice.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/ul>\n

    Timing Is Everything<\/h3>\n

    Sometimes, you need to prompt a time out for roleplay, especially in combat. One of the best tools for doing so is unreservedly metagame in its approach: a deck of cards, or specifically enough cards from one suit, in sequence, to give everybody (including the GM) one. These should be shuffled and then dealt out at the start of combat. The GM should also take the Joker to use as a Wild Card on behalf of the NPCs.<\/p>\n

    At any point in combat, a player can play his card to interrupt it long enough to initiate a conversation. This conversation continues until whoever has it plays the next card in descending sequence to restart the battle from their Initiative count or their next action (however it works in your game mechanics). The player who put down the first card then<\/em> gets immediate XP for roleplaying, doubled if the conflict is resolved through roleplay. If the player ending the discussion can justify doing so in terms of his character’s profile in the GM’s opinion<\/em> then they also get XP. However, if the battle is not resolved in combat, no-one<\/em> gets combat XP, though they may get XP from resolving the encounter peacefully.<\/p>\n

    The conversation doesn’t have to be with the enemy on the field; it can be with another character on “their side”, or it can even be a monologue, i.e. a dialogue with ‘the smartest person in the room’, themselves.<\/p>\n

    What’s to stop players gaming the system, interrupting the combat purely to gain the XP? They need to have something to say – it could be something witty, or a reminder of a tactical consideration that’s being forgotten, or a verbal challenge, or whatever, but it has to be something that the GM considers relevant to the situation. And they only get one chance, they only have one card to play.<\/p>\n

    And, if a player’s long-windedness grows boring, the GM can play his joker to end the dialogue, announcing that “[the enemy] grows tired of listening to you and attacks with a snarl” or something along those lines.<\/p>\n

    What of those who don’t get to play their cards? They hold onto them until the next battle of the day; at the end of the day’s play, they get half XP for any un-played cards, +1 if they have a second card of the same suit, x2 if they have one of each suit.<\/p>\n

    This deliberately introduces a mechanism for creating the pacing from a martial arts movie – in other words, a time to change “mental gears” rather than having to do so while still remaining tactically aware.<\/p>\n

    Complicated motivations require complicated (often-boring) Exposition<\/h3>\n

    The best NPCs are those whose motivations, no matter how complex their mode of expression in terms of actions and decisions, can be boiled down into simple terms.<\/p>\n

    That doesn’t mean that they have to be obvious, or free of nuance; it just means that if all
    \n the backstory is known,<\/em> the personality will make the character’s subsequent path clear.<\/p>\n

      \n

      Thanos, as he appears in the source comics, makes a great case study of this. The character loves the conceptual entity of Death. That conceptual entity, in turn, flirts with Thanos from time to time, teasing at times, leading him on at others. Think of a jock and a fickle, manipulative cheerleader in a high school situation. This causes Thanos to continually see himself as falling short in her eyes (though he would never, could never, admit that to himself), and so he comes up with grandiose “romantic” schemes and plots in a perpetual effort to win her lasting affection.<\/p>\n

      Whether or not all this also applies to the character as he is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is unknown – we need to see Infinity War to make everything clearer.<\/p>\n

      The point is this: Thanos has an unrequited love for Death and continually tries to impress her. A simple motivation, when you boil it down, but one with lots of nuance and backstory – not all of it known. In particular, the origins of the relationship had not been revealed by the time I stopped collecting comics.\n<\/ul>\n

      In comparison, the comics character of Kang is a muddle because his motivations are inconsistent. By being selective, you can construct a consistent characterization whose motivations are reasonable and rational – but which leaves open the questions of all the times the character appeared that don’t fit this mold.<\/p>\n

        \n

        One explanation that I like is that they are all parallel-future versions of the same character who has evolved different motivations as a consequence of different experiences. So the parts that don’t fit one explanation are explained by being part of the history of a completely-different version of the character. But that requires continuity to be rewritten, because sometimes these alternate versions seem to remember events occurring to other versions of the character as though they had happened to them.<\/em><\/p>\n

        An alternative explanation is that Kang is the victim of multiple changes in personal history by time-travelers – it’s easy to theorize that some individuals are more susceptible to this than others, which in turn implies that someone has to be the most<\/em> susceptible. But Kang is a time-traveler (hence the susceptibility) and so is also partially resistant to these changes, retaining memories from after his personal timeline is rewritten, either by others or by himself.<\/p>\n

        But both of these seek to wallpaper over the fundamental truth – that the character has been mishandled drastically and treated inconsistently, throughout his existence. That would be fatal to a lesser concept, but there’s something appealing about the character, which is probably worth exploring on some other occasion.\n<\/ul>\n

        Here’s one more example, this time generalized and abstracted to represent a huge range of characters:<\/p>\n

          \n

          Simple motivation: The character has a cause that he believes in to the point of being willing to sacrifice lives to achieve. That may or may not include his own. The more fruitcake the cause, the more questionable his logic, and the more resistant to reason he will be; but the less fruitcake the cause, the harder it is to find flaws in the logic that compels them.<\/p>\n

          I once ran an adventure in which a character was obsessed with making pi equal to 4 – not by some half-baked legislation or mathematical trickery, but by attempting to alter the curvature of the universe. Completely loopy, and failed to realize that even if he succeeded, while pi might have reached a value of 4 relative to the old shape of space-time, it would still have its value of 3.14159269 relative to its new shape. That’s because pi isn’t a constant of the universe, it’s a construct of abstract geometry, which wouldn’t be affected by anything that this villain did. But the side-effects of his (failed) attempts were dangerous and devastating, so he had to be stopped, and he was completely immune to reason, which left only the hard way – and hence, opposing him was an adventure.<\/p>\n

          You could run a similar plotline in a fantasy campaign with a character who wanted to “Sanctify” magic, who had become obsessed with the notion that non-clerical magic was the Unclean gift of Devils, a corruption that needed to be cleansed.<\/p>\n

          Or, try this: All life derives from the positive energy plane, which is therefore diminished by its separate existence; to prevent the negative energy from gaining ascendancy over all, dooming all to destruction throughout eternity, all life must be returned to its source.<\/p>\n

          Obsessives make such wonderful overt villains, distracting from the more subtle movements in the shadows…\n<\/ul>\n

          Martial Arts movies. Like them or loathe them, they certainly offer up food for thought in an RPG context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          A short post this week, cobbled together at the last minute when the article I was going to write fell apart on me, and at the same time, I contracted a massive head cold that’s impairing me mentally. It happens. And yes, I have hidden a ninja in the image to the left. Subtle, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[66,67,70,288,74,89,12,13,95,96],"tags":[155,116,117,172,218,137,165,232],"series":[],"class_list":["post-21907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-combat","category-dnd","category-gm-ing","category-metagame","category-mike","category-npcs-etc","category-pcs","category-players","category-tools","category-write","tag-dd","tag-game-mastery","tag-game-mechanics","tag-npcs","tag-pathfinder","tag-plausibility","tag-tools-techniques","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-5Hl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21907"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21915,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907\/revisions\/21915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21907"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=21907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}