Writing Every Day 29: Out of Ideas

What do you do when you're out of ideas? When you have a game session scheduled, everyone's ready to sit down and get some gaming in, and you the Game Master have no clue of what to do?

I've been in this position a couple of time. Often it's because I don't want to advance the plot of the campaign, usually due to a player being absent who I'd really like to have participating in the session. Rather than bail on the game, if possible I like to run a one-shot session with everyone in attendance.

When I'm really, truly out of ideas, I'll often let the players do the driving, so to speak. I'll remind them of where they are and what their present goals are, and then sit back and ask them what they're up to. Occasionally their responses will be enough to spark an idea and I run the game based on their ideas and the consequences of their actions. Some of the best sessions I've ever run are based on giving the players enough rope to hang themselves; listening to their theories and suspicions can give you great material to work with. Just be sure that they don't realize how much what they're saying influences what's happening at the table.

If that doesn't work, I'll steal and remix ideas. I'll grab concepts from whatever book I'm reading, scenes or characters from TV and movies, and mash them up until I have something that's familiar but still new. Some of my favorite game sessions have taken heavily from movies like The Thing, or interesting quests from Skyrim, or something. So long as it has the veneer of the campaign world and isn't a direct ripoff, it works perfectly.

Writing Every Day 28: Homework!

A bit of a deviation for today's update. I plan to talk about working from home and my limited experience with it.

Starting this morning, I began a several-week long period of working from home. This isn't totally new to me. Back when I was a freelancer working from home is all I did. Between then and now, though, I've spent three years working in an office environment. I'd gotten used to the conventions of office work, and I now find myself changing gears back to the old, yet unfamiliar, routine.

I wanted to share some observations I've made over the course of the day.

Your Workflow is Uneven

Of course, it always is, but working alone at home you notice it much more. In the office, the unevenness of your workflow is concealed by trips to the coffee machine or printer. By short conversations with your coworkers. By trips across the office to the bathroom. Whatever. 

When you work at home, you notice that unevenness much more. One moment you'll be blazing away on a project and making huge headway, but the next you're staring at the screen for minutes at a time, or looking up the origin of paragraphs on Wikipedia, or something.

In the aggregate I got far more done today than I think I would have in the office, but those unproductive periods were maddening. Time slows to a crawl when you're working in solitude and you tend to notice the periods that make you feel guilty about your progress, far more than the other ones.

In an attempt to even this all out, I'm working with the Pomodoro method. It's one of many Getting Things Done techniques you'll find on the internet, and it attempts to force you into a steadier rhythm of work and short breaks. Definitely trying it again tomorrow.

Solitude is Awesome

The fact that I can listen to whatever music I want, don't have to wear anything more intense than sweats and a t-shirt, and have my workspace to myself is amazing. Solitude can be a great tool for productivity, because there's nothing there to distract you but you.

Solitude is Terrible

On the flip side of the above, working at home alone can be horrible. Time, as I said, slows to a crawl. You don't feel as compelled to go out to eat, because you have food at home. I haven't left the house all day. Since I work in the living room of my house, my living room feels confined and like the office again.

To alleviate the starkness of my solitude, I keep my chat client open to communicate with workers still in the office. I feel bad for my boss, since he received the brunt of my solitary-induced nonsense. Mid-way through the work day I was sending off observations about the effect of lower income viewers on the commercials of daytime TV. A link to polar/grizzly bear hybrids (hilariously they can be called pizzly bears). That sort of thing.

What this illustrates to me is the importance of interacting with your coworkers in the office. You don't have to be talking about work, but every so often you need to talk about something. It acts like a rest-stop on a long road trip, where you can mentally get out and stretch your legs by talking about some random bullshit.

My Job Shouldn't Be Tiring, But it Is

A huge part of my job is reading. Another is writing. Another is just thinking about stuff, analyzing it to see if what you've read or wrote is wrong in some way. None of these tasks, taken on their own, is strenuous. Combined, they are exhausting.

I used to work an intense manual labor job. It introduced me to the kind of bone-deep weariness that intense work can produce. When I got my current job, I thought that level of exhaustion was in my past. Boy, I was wrong.

The first kind of exhaustion wears you down and can keep you from wanting to act. You don't want to do anything, because you've done stuff all day. This kind of exhaustion keeps you from wanting to think at all. You want to veg out with a movie, or close your eyes and listen to music. Anything passive. Anything to take a break from all the brain work you've done all day.

Writing today's post took some effort because of this. I spent all day writing, and more writing was the last thing I wanted to do. But here we are. Some weary comments at the end of a wearisome day. 

Let's see if I have this figured out tomorrow.

Writing Every Day 27: Sequels

I've mentioned in the past how I like to run a campaign to its dramatic conclusion and then put the PCs and situation on the shelf for a while. Tonight I want to talk about when I choose to pull them back down. This isn't about cinematic sequels, though I may reference them from time to time.

When I decide to return to a group of characters, there are some personal rules I like to follow. First is that the characters' situation must change. For example, I've run a few games set in the post-apocalyptic wastelands town of Covenant. In the first campaign, the characters were some of Covenant's founders. The game was about the danger and difficulty of establishing a home in the frontier. When I decided to return to Covenant, I knew that I had to change something, so I made Covenant grow.

It made sense to me. A successful town pushes back the edge of the wilderness. The next frontier lies beyond it, and as a waystation to reach it, people travel through, buy supplies, or decide to stop traveling and put down roots. I advanced the timeline by two years, I think, and the tiny town of Covenant had grown to support a population of nearly a thousand. Small by our standards, but booming by the standards of an irradiated wasteland.

Growing the town allowed me to "start fresh," so to speak. The PCs knew old Covenant and were forced to adapt to its changing face. Instead of keeping marauders at bay, now they needed to worry about organized crime settling into the town. Or they needed to worry about other businesses muscling them out. Or needed to worry about losing their political clout in Covenant as new circles of power rose in prominence. You get the idea. They couldn't follow the assumptions they may have had based on the previous games, because the situation had evolved.

When I set out to change the campaign world like this, it helps to remember some of the screenwriting advice in Robert McKee's book Story. In it, McKee talks about the emotional charge of scenes. I've never tried applying the theory to individual scenes in an adventure, but I suspect it could be made to work. Each scene has an emotional charge, positive or negative, when it begins. McKee suggests ending the scene on the opposite charge. So, if the PCs begin a scene on an "up" beat, by the end they should experience a "down" beat, and vice versa.

That flow of emotional charge is how I treat campaigns and their sequels. Or at least how I try to. I start by altering the status quo in some way, like the expansion of Covenant in our example. Then I examine how the last campaign ended. Was it an "up" ending? Then the feel of the next story is probably going to take a downturn. Sometimes there's a bit of work that is required to transition between the two emotional states, but I try to get the feeling of the new game out as quickly as I can.

Since Star Wars is such a shared cultural phenomenon, I'll use it as my example. A New Hope ends on an iconic up beat (for everyone but poor Chewie). Then we roll right into Empire, where the Rebels are on the run. You'll notice that things aren't presented as hopeless at the start of Empire... heck, the rebels commend themselves pretty well in the Battle of Hoth, but by the end they are grim as hell. In Return of the Jedi, we begin with echoes of Empire's grim ending, but eventually it pushes through to a happy Ewok party ending.

If you do decide to sequelize a campaign, I suggest taking the time to examine the previous one. Find out how you can modify the situation and reverse the emotional charge. Try to have a solid idea in mind before you tell the players to bust out their old character sheets. Try to make the experience just as new and exciting the second, third, or n+1 time as it was the first.

Writing Every Day 26: In Defense of Critical Failures

I was not going to write about this topic. I pretty much believe that critical failures are something that RPGs have moved beyond and that more interesting options exist. Well, believed.

Believed, you see, because just now when I tried to pour myself some wine from the Trader Joe's box, the spout popped off in my hands and wine started exploding out of two points on the nozzle, rapidly filling my wine glass and the closest vessel I had at hand, a crock pot.

My wife was laughing. I understand why. There I was, fingers jammed into two holes that both spewed out a spray of wine, like an alcoholic little Dutch boy. It was funny. That it was funny is why I think there's room in the world for critical failures, after all.

In game terms, what happened would fall in the realm of a critical failure. (Why I would be rolling to pour some wine begs for some consequences, like spotting a sabotaged pour spout, for instance). If that kind of event happened at the gaming table, I bet it would have caused a few players to chuckle at their fellow's misfortune. The moment would be funny and fun, and maybe inspire that player to improvise. Maybe it's just the crockpot of wine I'm drinking, but isn't that what games are all about?

I think there's room for that level of failure on an attempted action. Often I see critical failure results that are just malicious, that cause damage to a character or kill the character outright. I don't think that's what critical failures should be about. They should be manic, or comedic. Pratfalls and not unintentional self-immolation. A critical failure, handled carefully, can bring some levity to the game and provide the players with a fun and unexpected moment.

Writing Every Day 25: Transitions

In both writing and roleplaying games, transitions are important. They allow us to flow from one paragraph or scene into the next while maintaining a train of thought, or the arc of the campaign. Participants don't have to mentally shift gears from one block of information to the next, because the transition creates a mental bridge between them.

In writing this process is all on the shoulders of transitions (not to be confused with transitional sentences, which I almost did). I'll let people smarter than me break the concept down for you.

In roleplaying games, transitions are scenes that link between various locations and encounters. Depending on the game and the Game Master's intent, a transition between scenes can be played out fully, or it can be summarized with a line or so. Think of all the sweeping montages of walking in the Lord of the Rings film franchise. Other than giving us a vista, they don't add much to the plot. The director Peter Jackson wisely decided to sum up to bring us to the next major beat of the story.

In your games, I advocate using this technique. Unless you have something interesting planned, feel free to summarize journeys to keep the story moving. This is particularly true when days or weeks of travel don't have any challenges to overcome, characters to interact with, or interesting locations along the way.

Readers of the blog already know what I'm going to say next. I advise using discretion when deciding to sum up the events between scenes. After all, the Lord of the Rings wouldn't be an interesting story if it glossed over the trials of the characters between Rivendell and Mount Doom. If you know the campaign will take the PCs on a long journey, be sure to seed some encounters or events along the way. Think of them like milestones on a long road; they mark the progress the PCs have made. This isn't just geographic. It also helps to mark the PCs' progress as characters.

Depending on how long this journey is, word may have spread of the PCs' exploits along the way. They can overhear stories of their actions throughout the campaign, colored by the perspective of the individually telling the tale (or by the Game Master introducing a bit of misinformation about the story). You can use scenes like this to remind the players of where they've just come from, what gains they've made in the campaign so far, before leading them into the next piece of the story.

Writing Every Day 24: Choose your Words

The words we use as Game Masters are critical. The world of the game is expressed through how we describe it to the players. Choosing the wrong word won't ruin your game, but choosing the right one can make it far better.

This isn't a rehash of the "A man isn't very tired, he's exhausted!" speech from Dead Poet's Society. I don't advocate that a Game Master keep a copy of Roget's Thesaurus on hand while running the game. We flip through enough print matter referencing rules and tables. What I'm talking about is trying to tailor your descriptions to specific PCs.

When you first describe an environment, individual, or monster, it's usually directed to the whole group. That's the shared experience, the absolutes about what you're describing. If, for instance, the group approaches a six foot tall man with a dark, scraggly beard, you might tell everyone exactly that.

Once you've described the shared experience, individual players may prompt you for more information. That's when careful word choice can improve your games. If you're familiar with the PC, try tailoring your responses as if viewed through that character's eyes and experience. A rich character interacting with a commoner may hear from you that the NPC's clothes are drab or shabby. A poor one might hear that they're sturdy, or practical. It's a simple little narrative trick that helps you feed a player's immersion and can coax them into better portraying his or her character.

As with most Game Master's tricks, this technique can be overused. You don't want to confuse the group by feeding them misinformation, or providing too many contradictory cues. Picking a thing or two about a scene and considering how the PCs might think of them is enough for any game.

Writing Every Day 23: Unity of Purpose

The games I run tend to follow a pretty standard story arc, with branches based on sidequest the players want to pursue. Once in a while the night's game has nothing to do with the plot of the campaign. We just do something that sounds fun. But largely it abides by storytelling conventions, because that's the kind of game that I enjoy running.

Our games often follow the course of a single story, usually with characters united in some thematic way. I've done pirate games, where the characters are members of the crew. Law enforcement games, where they're officers pursuing the same case. Sometimes even survival games, where they're trying to outlast some horror that will destroy their sanity or consume their flesh. Each of these games have a sort of common purpose built into the characters. The PCs work together well because they share a unity of purpose, be it their professions or ultimate objectives.

Establishing this kind of unity is also helpful for games with much more open character creation. Getting a crippled interrogator, self-centered nobleman, war-weary barbarian, and demon-blooded rogue to work together isn't an easy task. Yet Joe Abercrombie did so seamlessly with his book The Blade Itself by providing them all with a common purpose when he needed them to work together. Seriously, guys. Check out his stuff. I'm a big fan of his books.

Joe pulled it off by using a character I think of as the Recruiter. This is typically an NPC, but you can certainly hash out a PC version of the concept if you don't want to feel like you're leading the players by the nose. The purpose of the Recruiter is to find individuals suitable for a particular task or role. This character collects all of the PCs and sets them on their journey to rescue Princess Leia or form the Avengers, or whatever.

Another way to establish unity among disparate PCs is by giving them a monumental task to complete, and give them a reason to complete it. The Lord of the Rings is a classic example of this. The Fellowship are unified by the goal of the One Ring's destruction, despite the vast differences between them. They do this because they're trying to forestall the apocalypse, more or less. Feel free to sub in lesser apocalypses (the loss of the community center in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is the stupid example that came to mind) for greater ones (like the extinction-level event brought on by an impending asteroid strike that only the PCs, a plucky group of off-shore drillers can prevent). You can also transition between the Recruiter example into the unifying task, as Star Wars did when the race to rescue the princess transitioned into the destruction of the Death Star.

One downside to hinging the group's dynamics on a unified purpose is choosing what to do once the goal is achieved. Sometimes the group sticks together because they become fast friends on their journey, and the players are okay with keeping the group together and the campaign going. Other times one or more characters will decide that their part in the story is over and fade from the campaign.

I wouldn't advocate pulling the unified purpose idea for multiple campaign arcs in a row. While it keeps the game going, it begins to strain belief that the PCs are the right people, at the right place and time, to deal with every single impending doom in your game world.* Essentially, sequels are hard. You need to find a decent reason for the characters to keep coming together and working together. Sometimes the initial thing that brought them together suffices. The Avengers Initiative is an ongoing thing that requires the participation of its members, both old and new. Other times it isn't enough.

When I can't think of a decent reason to continue a campaign after the death of the Big Bad, I'll put that storyline on a shelf. Once a cool idea comes to mind I'll pick it back up again, letting the players step back into the role of the characters they've played before.

So. Another somewhat rambling post for today. At some point I bet I'll return to this subject. There are more, smarter words to be said on the topic. Hopefully by then I'll know what a few of them are.

*As an aside, at some point I want to write about the PCs as a part of a dynamic world. A world where things happen outside their immediate vicinity with consequences based on what they choose to pursue versus what they leave alone.

Writing Every Day 22: Why am I doing this?

Man, on its own that heading looks like a cry for help.

Now that I'm twenty-two (plus extra) entries into this experiment, I thought I'd take a moment to explore why I'm doing this and what I hope to get out of it.

I wish I could say that there was some inspirational inciting incident that made me choose to put up a steady stream of posts on the blog, but there really wasn't. I suppose it is more like how certain sedatives work; the substance builds up in your system until it reaches a critical amount and boom, you're unconscious.

The reason the drug was in my system in the first place harkens back to my college days. Back when I was in art school, I had an incredible teacher who assigned all of his students a high number of life drawing sketches to execute each week. I forget the specific number now, but it was something like fifty pages full of hand studies, fifty pages of face studies, and so on. He told us that these sketches were like an athlete performing short sprints. It was steady exercise that we performed to drill our skills and increase our endurance.

Those assignments have always held the ring of truth to me. Sketches are important to the visual artist. Words are important to the writer. While I don't feel comfortable calling myself a "writer," I do have to respect that writing is what I do for a living. There are people gracious enough to give me a salary to do so. I feel like I owe it to them to practice as much as possible, to run those short sprints.

I could do so in private, building up a massive catalogue of words that won't ever see the light of day. In the past, that's exactly what I have done. The reason I choose to do so in such a public way is because I hope someone out there reads what I'm saying. I do it because having someone like you read this stuff keeps me accountable. At that point I'm not doing it just for me. I'm also doing it for you guys.

There are a small handful of people out there who take a moment of their own day to look over what I'm saying. That holds similar value to me as the people who decide to pay me to write. Your time is valuable. You only have so much of it to go around, and that you'd spend a minute or two to look at the rudderless, rambling text I'm putting out is so, so appreciated.

Presently, the solitary means I have to show my appreciation is to keep writing, both here and at work. So that's what I'll do. I'll keep running my short sprints each (let's be honest, work) day for as long as I can. I hope that at some point, doing so will provide for me the same kind of benefit that those pages of life drawing studies were meant to back in the day.

Again, thank you for the time you've spent on me. A special thanks goes out to the teacher who showed me the value of persistence in pursuing your craft.

This one's for you, Scott.

Writing Every Day 21: Death

When should characters die?

It's a complicated question without a good answer. Some games treat character death as a common occurrence. Of particular note are early editions of D&D and more modern games that try to emulate that old school feeling. There death is frequent and can occur as the result of a single action. "Save or die" effects, nefarious traps with no (or a hyper-specific and unintuitive) method of escape, and ravenous monsters claim countless lives in those games. The tone of the game is to keep the characters constantly under the threat of death, always on their toes.

Other games almost treat death as a cardinal sin. In order to die, actually truly die, the character has to suffer some pretty incredible amounts of damage or roll very poorly on an injury table. Or the game treats death like a minor speedbump, with plenty of room to bring once-dead characters back to life through magic, science, divine intervention, or some combination of the three. Interestingly, there is a bit of overlap between games that kill characters at the drop of a hat and those that allow this kind of freely-distributed resurrection.

When deciding if it's time for a character to kick the bucket, first consider the assumptions of your game. You can be much looser with these rules in a setting that allows for resurrection, cheap or otherwise, but in general I try to keep some of the following things in mind when a character is about to bite it. As the Game Master you're the ultimate authority of your own game world and only you can arbitrate when the time is right.

Did the Player Screw Up?

And I mean really screw up. This can mean ignoring the ticking clock on a massive bomb the character is using as a chaise lounge, picking a fight with a greater demon right out of character creation, or running head-first into the path of an oncoming mag-lev train and thinking that it will break first.

Sometimes the only logical outcome for such a screwup is the character's death. I advocate full disclosure in events like these (e.g., "You can certainly try to jump from the top of the Burj Khalifa onto a passing hovercar, but if you miss you're probably going to die."), but if the player wants to take the action anyway, let 'em. Let the dice fall as they may.

Is it Fair?

Character death should always be fair.

Time for a personal anecdote. I played in a game once where the game master killed every character in the game. It happens. See my post on Dread for a game where it's damn near supposed to happen.

The difference being, in this case, the deaths weren't fair. We were not provided any information about what was leading to our deaths. If I recall it was a colorless, odorless gas that had been pumped into the entire facility we were exploring. The reason it wasn't fair is that it was random, none of our inquiries provided us with insight as to how to avoid it, and it killed us stone dead without a chance to avoid it.

But life isn't fair, I can almost hear some people saying. I agree. Who can say how many people suffocated by spelunking in toxic environments under remarkably similar circumstances? The chief difference is, life isn't a roleplaying game. Roleplaying games are something we do to have fun, and arbitrary twists of fate like that, while a sometimes accurate simulation of the real world, feel petty and a whole lot like bullshit to the players who endure them.

Does it Matter?

This is a big one for me. You see, when we play a character we tend to get invested in them. When our character's die a meaningless death, it stings. When that death is for some greater good, though, we can remember it with a bit of fondness.

Character death can be a potent tool for the story of a campaign. A character nobly sacrificing him or herself to save the life of another, or to provide an opening for the rest of the party to destroy the ultimate villain gives that death dramatic weight. It's why you see it in so many books and movies, from Darth Vader sacrificing his life to save Luke in Return of the Jedi to Ian Malcolm sacrificing his life in Jurassic Park to protect Lex and Tim. (Ian's example is interesting, because it shows how a Game Master can take what is by all rights character death, and keep the character in the story afterward. I suspect the theoretical Game Master liked the way Ian's player portrayed the character and worked out a way to keep him around).

These noble deaths have one important element that cheaper deaths lack: character choice. Letting the player choose when a character punches his or her ticket keeps the character squarely in the player's control. It doesn't rob the player of anything, because the player is the one who decides when and how it happens.

Do We Need Death?

One last thought before I sign off. It may sound like I avoid killing characters like the plague. That's not entirely true. While I try to make sure that it fits within the above parameters as much as possible, I think character death is important. Peril is one of the strongest tools a Game Master has to motivate the players and their characters. There are few greater perils than death. Death isn't the only peril in our toolbox, but it is the big one.

When we're running games, I believe it's important that everyone plays by the same rules. If the characters are willing to pick up weapons that are capable of killing off the NPCs, it follows that the reverse should be true as well. A gun in the villain's hand should be as potentially lethal as one in that of a player's character. 

Writing Every Day 20: Food

This one will be shorter than previous installments, because there's a whole lot of cooking to be done tonight. Before I jump away for a bit, I wanted to take a moment and talk about food, fiction, and RPGs.

Food occupies an interesting place in genre fiction. Pick up any Brian Jacques or George R.R. Martin book and you'll find passages dedicated to describing the elaborate meals in which the characters partake. Science Fiction and Cyberpunk talk about food as well, though they tend to use it to illustrate the bleak future of synthetic foods or disgusting ingredients that go into the food substitutes of the future.

Food is an effective touchstone. Everyone eats, so everyone has a sense of the experience of what these meals could be like. For the Game Master, food can give you another tool to manipulate the players and their experiences. While I don't advocate devoting a whole session to describing a single meal, I think the occasional reference to cuisine can go a long way.

Are your players exploring a foreign city for the first time? Dress it up with streetside vendors offering unusual local delicacies. You don't have to look far for inspiration* Are they returning home after a long campaign abroad? Then offering them some familiar comfort foods can help cement the fact that they're finally home.** If the game is a dystopian cyberpunk, having a session that takes them to a high-quality restaurant that uses real ingredients, rather than vat-grown meats and processed kelp bars, can illustrate the luxury of their surroundings.

Foods can also add authenticity to a location. Places with a strong coastal population often fish and gather sea life for their standard cuisine, while inland you'll see more red meats and crop vegetables or tubers. Religious food restrictions can also be interesting, from temporary ones like the prohibition on red meat during Lent to broader restrictions against pork in Jewish and Islamic traditions, or the avoidance of beef in parts of India.

You get the idea. Food is a simple but powerful way to manipulate the sensation the players have during the session. I'm not one of those "event" Game Masters who prepares appropriate meals for the current game—in general I've got too many things to worry about to go to that effort—but I've heard of others who've done so and had a great time.

Okay! That's it for now. Think about how you can use something as simple as a meal to give your players a more vibrant and authentic experience in the game. Until next time, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.

Hey, maybe next time I'll talk about death in RPGs.

*This was the first Google result, and I'm in a hurry. I am not a fan for the way this author treats these local delicacies. Everything is weird to someone else.

** Feel free to take items from this list to sub them in for the previous one. As I said, everything is weird to somebody.

Writing Every Day 19: Simplification

Game design requires a tricky balance between simplification and complexity. In general you want to present a rule in the most straightforward manner possible so it is easy to remember and understand. I've mentioned before the workload a Game Master has while running the game. Simple and memorable rules mean the Game Master can keep more of them in his or her head at the same time, reduces confusion, and helps a game run smoothly.

On the other side of things, oversimplification doesn't provide as satisfying of an experience. A mechanic that strips things down to the barest of bones and doesn't allow for variation is dull and contributes to a less immersive experience. What's a designer to do?

One step I try to take when working on rules is to look at the number of component parts a single rule requires, often expressed by the number of rolls it requires a player to make. Almost always I'm of the opinion that a roll should only be required if failing that roll would have some kind of consequence for the character or characters attempting it. Sometimes the consequence is as simple as an inability to perform the desired action, other times the consequences can be much more dire.

If I spot a rule that has a bunch of different parts, I look for ones that can be combined or revised or handled with a prerequisite. Off the top of my head, I wouldn't ask a player who wants to read a book for a roll to see how well the PC comprehends the information within it. Unless it was some kind of Lovecraftian book that imperiled the character's health or sanity, I wouldn't ask for a roll at all. When a PC fires a pistol, I don't have the player make separate rolls for target acquisition, sighting the pistol, and firing. All of those steps are covered in the attack roll; a failure might indicate the PC fails at any one of those steps along the way, and tracking which one is rarely useful.

At their heart, all the rules in an RPG are abstractions that allow the players to work together under the same set of assumptions. They tell us that PCs with equivalent stats or skills are on roughly equal footing in regards to what those stats cover (barring rules that introduce exceptions, of course). If two PCs with perfectly matching Strength stats and appropriate skills attempt the same action, they should reasonably expect to have the same odds of success or failure. If that's true, the level of abstraction that apply to those rules are simply discovering the point at which the players are comfortable with the existing complexity. I feel that our goal should be to get as close to oversimplification as we can, without crossing that line.

Here's a good example of what I mean. There are numerous items in my home game that provide bonuses to particular types of rolls. In early versions of the game, each item's rules were developed independently of the others, creating a list of numerical benefits from +1 to +10, all based on how "good" we felt that item was. This drove me absolutely batty. I could never remember what benefit a particular item gave on its related rolls and couldn't present situations and challenges appropriately. After some deliberation, I decided to scrap these scattershot benefits and start again.

My first instinct took me deep into the territory of oversimplification. Every item provided the same bonus, differing only on the type of action they benefitted. It simplified things, but homogenized them as well and took some of the vibrancy out of the player's options. Fortunately I discovered this during the revision phase and it never saw a moment of playtesting. After some work, I landed on three broad bands of quality: Simple, Advanced, and Expert. Simple items provided +1 to related rolls, Advanced +3, and Expert +6. That wasn't all, though.

Breaking items into those three bands only made things three times more complex than the mono-benefit I'd decided was too dull. Fortunately this is a roleplaying game and not a board game, so I was free to introduce a different kind of complexity to the items: narrative and conditional benefits. I drop descriptions of how each item functions in addition to the static benefit it provides, as well as figuring out ways for items to circumvent other rules to give a richer, more immersive experience to the players who chose those items.

As an off the cuff example, let's look at two rifle scopes under this system, I'm making up the narrative portion of the rules as I go, so they're probably not what I would end up with after some revision, but it will give you a decent idea.

Scope, Digital Magnification (Simple)
Cost: Money
Description: This scope uses digital magnification to zoom in on distant objects, greatly magnifying their perceived size. A simple digital magnification scope can increase the size of an object by XXX times, allowing the user to spot objects at a far greater distance than normal.
While using this scope, a character gains a +1 bonus to aimed shots and ignores the penalty for shooting at targets beyond a weapon's effective range.

—versus—
Scope, Thermal (Simple)
Cost: Money
Description: This scope provides minor magnification and can detect and translate infrared radiation, allowing the user to see the relative temperature difference between objects. Warmer objects, like body heat or the heat produced by a vehicle's engine are brighter and warmer-colored, while cooler objects like concrete are cooler-colored.
While using this scope, a character gains a +1 bonus to aimed shots and living characters do not gain concealment against him.

That hastily-written example should give you an idea of the level of complexity I shoot for when we start testing out a new item in my home game. Some things will be added to answer the questions players bring up ("How far is a greater distance?" or "How sensitive is the thermal scope to temperature variation" come to mind).

Those questions will add back in complexity until testing reveals that an item is trying to do too much. Some things will be removed as rules and folded into the general description of the item. Others will persist as rules. Eventually the item will find that sweet spot between being simple, with just enough complexity to make it interesting.

Writing Every Day 18: Information flows both ways

Asking your Players Questions

I used to think of Game Mastering as a one-way flow of information. The players asked me questions and I filled in the details in my answers. In recent years, I've come to appreciate the results when you ask the players questions instead.

I listened to the One Shot podcast a bit at work this afternoon, and I was impressed by a technique the Game Master used. She very briefly set up the situation, telling the group the time of day, setting, and gave a bit of color, then turned to one of her players and asked him "Where are you?"

Question Choice

The Game Master's choice of question was smart. Often I hear Game Masters ask "What are you doing?" That's a fine question, but I don't think it's where you want to begin. That question can be too open-ended and leave a player struggling to come up with something interesting to say. By asking a narrower question, or a leading question, the player doesn't have to think as hard and the pace of the game flows smoothly.

When you set out to ask your player for information, you need to be ready to let them narrate. Choosing your questions wisely can keep them from over-narrating and placing you in an inextricable situation that derails your game. Even the above question could have led into some murky waters if the Game Master didn't first set up some parameters. (e.g., "You are all aboard the good ship Venus through the outer rim, travelling from planet Limerick to the Obscure Reference spaceport").

Even a carefully chosen question can lead you into trouble, so sometimes it is in your best interests to do the leading first.

Leading Questions

A leading question can force someone to respond in a narrowly defined way and restricts some of possible responses; probably the reason it isn't allowed in a court of law. For Game Masters, though, it has a lot of potential.

Asking a leading question forces the player to consider the question and respond within the boundaries of the narrative. It can be a heavy-handed technique that not all players are fond of, so I advise caution, but with the right group it can lead to some interesting roleplaying. An example of a leading question is something like, "Flames from the containment core burn through the corridor and a desperate maintenance crew struggles to fight them. Billy, you're close enough to feel the heat; why aren't you helping?" or "Captain Cousteau receives a verbal dressing down from the port authority. Billy, how does that make you feel?"

The first example is more extreme because it suggests player action. Maybe Billy wants his PC to assist in the firefighting effort, but your question tells him that he isn't. You might get a response that contradicts your question, or outright denial of your proposed scenario. The second is a bit more subtle and still leaves the player an out. Billy might decide that it doesn't make him feel anything, which is a fine response, but asking that leading question lets him know that you want him to consider the situation. It lets him know that you expect something from him, one way or another.

Questions as a Memory Tool

Okay. Last thing on this topic.

Often one of the PCs in my games will have a pet or sidekick or robot or something. While technically an NPC, I am terrible at remembering they are around and should be participating in the action, so I don't worry about it. During that PCs' turn, I'll simply ask them what their buddy is doing.

I like doing this because it allows me to worry about the dozens of other things a Game Master has to worry about during a game, but I also like it because it puts the control of that resource squarely in the player's hands. It's their sidekick/pet/whatever and the player probably has a cool mental image of how it interacts with the PC. Having the player decide when his or her hunting hound cowers and whines or begs for scraps by the table is totally fine. The most I'll do is add some color to the situation or ask for an Animal Handling roll for complex actions the PC wants the pet to perform, or what have you.

Giving the player control over this kind of incidental NPC frees me up and gives the player more control, both things that I wholeheartedly support.

Writing Every Day 17: Campaign Journals and Story Arcs

As I previously mentioned, a campaign journal is a useful tool for Game Masters who want to run games with connected events worked into the story.

A journal can take almost any form. The majority of mine amount to hastily sketched out crib notes in my binder of graph paper. Every session I prepare an initiative tracker with the names of all the participants and slots to check off as they take their turns which takes up about a third of the page. The remainder is given over to sloppy columns of NPC damage tracks, quick reminders about the specific items I've sold to PCs at what cost, and tons of quick notes on the names of people and place the PCs encounter during the session.

I didn't set out to create a journal at first; these notes just proved useful for me while I ran that night's game. Taken together though, they provide me with a clear map of where the game has gone over its course, the kinds of encounters the PCs have run into, and NPCs that have caught their attention enough to require names and traits.

In the past year or so, I've started keeping an unobtrusive tablet at the table next to my notebook. It serves as a handy resource for looking up information on the fly, generating random loot or ship names, and a host of other tasks. But it also serves as a secondary campaign journal for me. I try to sit down in the aftermath of a session and write out a handful of quick topics that came up during the game in a Word doc.

I clean these notes up and post it to all the players in our shared Facebook group. That way, players who missed a game can get up to speed before the next session, players who participated get a reminder of where the game left off, and I don't forget details that seemed to be important during the session.

I have to admit that I use both sides of my hybrid campaign journal in a sneaky, secondary way. See, I like it when a campaign has a satisfying arc to it, like the story arcs of traditional entertainment like books and movies. I'll use my campaign journal as a way of tracking where the campaign would be in a traditional arc and use that when planning what comes next. See my post about callbacks for a more specific example of this.

I don't force myself to adhere strictly to the three act structure with its pinch-points and such, but figuring out where in the arc our game stands lets me know when it would be satisfying for the main antagonist to escalate his scheme, or for there to be a major setback the players have to overcome. I do my best to not let this structure dictate the options the players have in the game. Instead, I use it to guide myself on how the world around them needs to change. Done right, it lends a dramatic and familiar sense to the story. Done wrong, it comes across as forceful and trite. If you want to explore this technique I suggest taking a light hand at first. If the players are into it, they'll let you know. They'll also let you know if they're not.

Writing Every Day 16: A Failure to Communicate

I have a love/hate relationship with languages in RPGs.

On one hand, I like the depth that languages imply for a game world. Having distinct languages and regional dialects helps make the world feel more real. It provides interesting talents for PCs to invest in. Our world has tons of distinct and often unique languages, so it stands to reason that the game world should too, right?

On the other hand, I loathe languages in an RPG because of the obstacles they can impose. Now, I'm not thinking about obstacles that I put in place for the PCs to overcome. I'm fine with those. Trying to interrogate someone when there's no shared language can result in some innovative action by the PCs, finding a manuscript written in a language the PCs don't speak can encourage them to visit a new location I want to showcase in search of a translator, and on and on.

The obstacles I'm thinking of are the unintended ones that I haven't prepared for and that don't do the game any good. A PC without a shared language with the rest of the party is fun for almost no time at all. It can prevent coordination and cohesion and either excludes that PCs character or pushes the PC into the spotlight far too often. It makes the job of the Game Master and other players harder than it needs to be.

One workaround many games use is the universal language. Some language that every PC is assumed to know regardless of their background. This sort of irks me too. I like the idea of a world where communication is not guaranteed, where, like in our own world, critical negotiations can falter because of a mistranslation of key terms. A world where linguistic complications can arise exactly when and where I need them to.

The way I've handled this situation in my own games is the idea of trade languages. A trade language isn't universal by default. Instead, it's usually known only by characters, be they PCs or NPCs, who would have a reason to learn them. In addition, a trade language is only as good as the ties between cultures. So, for instance, if I have the game start in Citystate A it will have a trade language that it shares with its closest neighbors Citystates B and C, as well as its trade partner across the sea Citystate D. Any PC or NPC with a decent excuse for why they would possess the language have it gratis. The reason I do this is so PCs have a reasonable expectation that they can communicate with characters in the surrounding area while they find their footing in game, with a few additional far-flung regions if I decide the game needs a change of scenery.

I also make the trade languages of my games pidgins or creoles of the languages that make up the trade partners. In my mind the languages have basic constructions with easy to parse rules. My reason for doing so is that even if a character doesn't speak the trade language, he or she can pick out a handful of keywords in any exchange because they're spoken in a language the character is familiar with. If the conversation is trivial, I'll often let the player know what's been said and tell him or her that they only get the general gist of what was said. If the conversation is more important, and misunderstanding could result in consequences or interesting encounters later on, I'll have that player make a roll to determine how successfully he or she follows the dialogue.

There's an important bit of info that's buried in the above regarding the spread of these trade languages: they only go as far as the trade does. When the PCs travel into the great unknown such languages still exist, but they have no assumption of knowing them and have to actually invest advancement in learning them. But if trade spans the globe in the game world some version of a trade language is widespread, either chosen from the language of a primary economic power or a nightmarish hybrid of multiple different tongues.

To send you out, one of my favorite world-building moments from one of my favorite films, relevant to this topic.

Writing Every Day 15: Doing the Thing

When I was a teenager, I read a list that outlined a number of different activities the reader should perform to be a "good" Game Master. It had a heavy fantasy, dungeon-delving focus and included items like, "Try to wield a sword in one hand while carrying a torch in the other," and, "Ride a horse bareback." I'm paraphrasing because it's been many, many years, but those are the sorts of items the list contained. The argument the author made was that to understand what common PC activities entailed, the Game Master should go out and do them.

I haven't done most of the things on that old list, but I agree with the general point. Whether writing fiction or running a game, it helps you to describe a situation if you've actually tried to do it. Reading about the activity can give you a starting point, but the actual experience helps give you deeper understanding of how complex or frustrating that task can be.

To that end I've tried my hand at a laundry list of different things, from archery to lock picking to sailing. Learning to do them—and I want to take a moment to differentiate between learning how to do something and being any good at it—has given me a point of reference I can draw on when describing to the players what happens when their PCs attempt a similar task.

When doing this, sometimes close enough is good enough. For instance, a while back I ran a prolonged game set in World War One. A number of the PCs had the ability to pilot the airplanes of the day and several sessions included tense dogfights. Before we started the game I devoured any resource I could find about the planes, weapons, and aerial maneuvers that went into dogfighting at that time. That was well and good for designing the systems that went into the dogfighting rules for our campaign, but it wasn't enough. Reading about the effect to a pilot's body when his or her plane pulls a maneuver doesn't give you an appropriate sense of the experience, and your description of the effect to a player can suffer for it.

Essentially, you're explaining the sensation based on incomplete data, filtering what you've read through your opinion of it to the player. I was fortunate enough that a good friend purchased a flying lesson around that time and let me tag along for the ride. Sitting in the plane as it went through those basic maneuvers, feeling the way it made my stomach lift and fall through minor changes in elevation, and even hearing the rumble of the engine and the sound of the wind over the fuselage all helped me to give my players a slightly more immersive and accurate experience at the table.

Obviously not everyone can afford to go out and take such a lesson, or be lucky enough to have a friend taking one around the time they're preparing for a game. To that end, I suggest a twofold approach. First, figure out the things you can afford to do, either monetarily or with the time you have. Any that mesh with the game you're running help you to gain deeper understanding of the world you control. Running a cyberpunk game? Spend an afternoon on a site that teaches basic coding, or go to a shooting range that rents firearms (your age and local laws permitting). Buy a cheap set of lock picks online and tackle a simple padlock. It's fun and surprisingly intuitive! Pick a handful of skills from your game and try them out, or the closest thing you possibly can.

Second, work the game around your experiences. If you spend an evening playing a good game of cards, consider adding a tense, Casino Royale style gambling scene to your next game. If you visit an interesting town or landmark, work a version of it into your world. Small, out of the way towns have a surprising number of local oddities, customs, and colorful history that you can adapt for your own purposes.

In short, spend some time going out there and doing the thing.

Writing Every Day Bonus Round: What's Your Gun's Name?

I might not have the energy to write tomorrow night and I've got an idea right now, so I thought I'd put it down.

In the past few weeks, I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas forlornly while my friends talk about their Fallout 4 experiences. In that same period I've been running my cyberpunk high-seas pirate game. The first has informed the second, because I love how the Fallout franchise treat's weapons.

For the uninitiated, there are a ton of weapons in Fallout games. Just a metric assload. They all have their respective qualities that different character types can benefit from. For almost every type of weapon in the game, though, there is a special weapon. These weapons are unique, named items that possess special qualities, higher damage capacity, and so forth.

Through my many—many—playthroughs of the Fallout games, I've gone out of my way to locate these weapons. Wielding them makes me feel like my character is special, like he or she has done something noteworthy. I think of them as measures of my character's capability and notoriety in the game. In the RPGs I run, I try to impart the same upon my players.

Back to the pirate game. Over the course of the campaign, I've dropped a number of named weapons into the encounters, only some of which the players have recovered. They range from special firearms carried by the main antagonists for the game, to suits of armor worn by the powerful lieutenants that defend them. When designing these items, I always start with something that already exists in the system and setting, then apply some minor variations to make them unique.

Why do these things matter? In short, because money doesn't.

In almost every game I've run, gold, credits, nuyen, or whatever system of currency the game uses is meaningless. It's a threshold a PC needs to cross to be able to pick up items he or she wants to own. It's a meter of how close the character is to the next cool toy, not something the player ever really worries about. Having "quite a bit," and having, "more than I can ever do anything with" are, functionally, identical.

Named weapons, unique one-offs, though, are special. You can't buy them. You have to find them, fight for them, or make them. They're not something you can walk into a store to purchase. There's only one of them out there, ever. That rarity brings with it a kind of specialness that my players appreciate.

Building these weapons doesn't take a lot of my time. In the system we're using, like in many others, there are a number of special qualities a weapon can possess. Like I mentioned above, when I decide to introduce a new named weapon to the game, I start with something common that the players are familiar with, then I tweak it by applying some of these special rules or its base stats. By way of example, the Sawtooth.

In our cyberpunk pirate game, vibroblades are common weapons. They are made of hyperdense materials with a microscopically-fine sawtoothed edge that pulse back and forth at high speed, designed to cut through dense materials quickly. Vibroblades typically have low damage output and high armor penetration.

The Sawtooth was a special vibroblade housed in a leather sheath embossed with the outline of a sawtooth shark. The weapon has the standard properties of a vibroblade, with a special rule that stipulates it gains a minor bonus to damage and armor penetration for each attack that hits the same target after the first (a common rule for weapons in the setting). Only a minor bonus to the basic weapon, with a bit of set-dressing to give the player who found it an idea of what it could do.

And oddly enough, once he had it this player decided to invest his character's advancements into the ability to use the weapon. It isn't optimal for his character, but I suspect he did it because what he found was special. No one else gets this blade. No one else can benefit from its unique rules. It means something to him, because its his and his alone.

Plenty of games have magic weapons as rewards, or otherwise powerful weapons. To engage your players imagination, I suggest taking a moment to give those weapons some character. I believe that adding implied story to special weapons results in the players being more invested in them an d wanting to acquire them more fervently. Plus? Until they kill your NPC, you get to swing those special swords around.

Writing Every Day 12: Poor Initiative

*Somehow I failed to post this installment. Sorry about that!

I feel bad for initiative rules. They have to handle so many different things.

In most of the games I've played in, a combat encounter has an initiative system to track who acts when. I know that there are games out there that handle initiative differently, but I'm speaking from my own experience here.

So, the way initiative typically shakes out the players each make a roll for their PC and the Game Master makes a roll for the antagonists. Sometimes antagonists get a couple of batches of rolls based on groups, or if there's a major villain or significant creature in the encounter. Once all the rolls are sorted out, PCs and NPCs act in order of the "best" initiative to the "worst" one at a time. Rinse repeat.

Why do I feel bad for initiative? Because often the rule has to represent a whole bunch of different stuff. It is used to sort the order of turns at the table, as above. But initiative also gets to represent the flow of time during the battle to a certain extent. While some games suggest that the actions of a round unfold simultaneously, in practice it's easier on the GM to cross off villains as they're destroyed and mark damage when it occurs, meaning characters who act first often get the edge in the encounter. So it acts as an organizational tool, plus a way of tracking time.

In some systems, initiative also acts as a cooldown clock for effects. Characters can have abilities that stipulate they can be used only once per round, or damage that is applied once per round (from the start of one initiative to the start of the next). Initiative is also used as a measure of readiness. A character who is surprised by an event can receive a penalty to his or her initiative roll, or be unable to even roll initiative for the round of the surprise.

Initiative is already doing a whole lot. Most of what it represents makes sense at first blush. After all, having all the players tell the GM what their PCs do at the same time is chaos. Having a measured unit to control powerful abilities or ongoing damage is useful. These things all make sense. I feel like initiative is a system worth spending time on as a designer; choosing how to determine which characters gain a bonus, if any, to the roll can be a significant advantage over the course of a combat encounter, particularly when PCs and NPCs all play by the same rules.

Which leads me to something that, if you haven't checked out, I suggest you spare some time for: popcorn initiative by the Angry DM. Angry is a prolific RPG blogger and way, way smarter than I am. If you haven't checked out his site I enthusiastically suggest you do so right away. He often writes with a slant toward the D&D mindset, but his advice is useful regardless of the system you use.

Writing Every Day 14: Callbacks

As a part of my job, I get to read manuscripts written by plenty of talented authors. While reading a revision to an upcoming novel, I noticed how the author cleverly worked a callback to one of the opening scenes into the novel's climax. Callbacks can be satisfying to the reader; a callback gives the story a pleasant symmetry, showing how the characters have grown from an early situation and use that experience to overcome a challenge.

I feel that callbacks have a place in a campaign or an adventure. At least, they can if we identify them and work them into the narrative. Using them can be complicated, though.

Due to the length of an ongoing campaign and the time between sessions, subtle callbacks might be overlooked unless there is some heavy parallel to a previous situation. For instance, if a PC failed to pick a lock early in the campaign and is presented with another one in the finale, the players probably won't draw any connection between the two. First, lock picking by itself isn't that significant of an action. Second, the PC may have attempted to pick any number of locks, with any number of failures and successes, in the interim. To turn that kind of an action into a satisfying callback, there should be symmetry between the situations.

If we use the lock picking example, perhaps early in the campaign the PC attempted to rescue a hostage behind a locked door in some sort of death trap, and the PC failed. That's the kind of moment I would make a mental note of, or write down in my campaign document (If you don't have a campaign document, you should, especially for longer campaigns. That's probably another post I'll make this week). Then, near the finale of the adventure or campaign, I would put forward a similar challenge: a death trap, a locked door, a hostage that needs rescuing. This time the stakes would be higher. The door has a better lock. The trap is faster and fiercer. The hostage or hostages are more important to the PC.

Since the situation shares so much with the earlier encounter, the player is much more likely to remember it. This kind of callback works best if the PC failed in their earlier attempt and had the time to level up and gain skills. It creates that satisfying symmetry we're looking for, and it also gives the player and PC a chance at redemption for an earlier failure.

I don't try to contrive the set up to these situations, but I capitalize on them when there's an opportunity. By that I mean I won't force the lock picking attempt to fail, but if it does I'll be scrambling to figure out a way to make that situation relevant to my story's conclusion. NPCs are perhaps the simplest expression of this theory. If an NPC beats a PC in any way, socially, physically, or whatever, then you can be sure the NPC will return later in the story's arc. In the interim I have plenty of time to detail out the orc, street thug, or hitman in question, presenting a juicy target to the player who he, she, or it overwhelmed.

I won't pretend to be an expert on the concept, but these kinds of callbacks make my job as a GM much more satisfying. I like the look on a player's face when they're confronted with a challenge from the early days of a character's life. I like the classic storytelling that these kinds of scenes can evoke. For a better explanation of the concept, I suggest checking out Dan Harmon's Story Circle concepts, or for those who want an in-depth look at the theory something like Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. Both of them have a much deeper understanding of the concepts behind this kind of storytelling, and though they approach it from different perspectives both are worth every moment of your time.

--EDIT--
A quick addendum on the above. My example only encompasses a single PC in what would be a larger group. Over the course of your game, you can pick out these kinds of moments and stagger them for all of your players, creating a series of callbacks building up to the final confrontation with whatever villain you have. You can certainly double up such situations in a single session, but I'd advise against dumping them all into the final session. Instead, give your players their own moments to shine up until that moment. If, and this happens rarely, there's a situation where all the PCs can experience a shared callback, save that for the final session before your falling action (another topic for a later time).

Writing Every Day 13: Weather or not?

I'm pretty late getting home today because of the weather. Slop a little bit of rain on the interstate and it becomes a free-for-all full of aggressive jerks and bad decisions. That got me thinking about weather and the role it plays in an RPG.

As with most things, I think the answer to weather's role is variable. In most games it can be relegated to tone or set dressing. If the session takes place on a down beat, heavy rains can drive that home. On an up beat, sunshine and gentle breezes and all that jazz. Sometimes weather plays a more significant part in the game, though.

For example, right now I'm running a high seas pirate campaign. I've used weather to set the tone and dress up some encounters, but it also plays an important part in the mechanics of the game. The shifting wind has let the PCs reach a destination faster than anticipated, but it's also caused them to show up too late. Heavy rain has prevented fire from catching or consuming ships. Fog has concealed enemy ships that the PCs would have spotted far off on a clear day. Storms bring lashing rains and white-capped waves that wash the pitching deck.

You get the idea. Weather is important in my game because it impacts the ability of the PCs to act and changes the kinds of things that can happen in the game. I wouldn't be anywhere near so specific in most games.

There are lots of methods for choosing weather in games. Plenty of games have random weather tables, there are random weather generators all over the place online (some with rules for certain systems), but my method is pretty bare-bones and simple because I'm lazy.

I run through a quick series of operations I run through during this game when it comes to the weather. This isn't something I consciously sit down to do; I'm just identifying the steps as I recognize them.

1. Ask if it matters. If the weather doesn't matter to the scene or session, I probably don't bother with it unless a player asks me about it.
2. If it matters, ask how much. Basically, how much would severe weather aid the players or screw them. If I decide I want to put the players on the back foot and ramp up the challenge of a session, I'll pick something appropriately severe to throw at them.
3. Roll a die. If I'm not picky about how much effect the weather would have, or if I'm trying to reflect the shift of weather over time, periodically I'll roll a die. There's no table or anything fancy. Low rolls mean that the weather is at the low end of severity that's appropriate for the season and region (light snowfall in northern mountains, light rain in springtime, whatever). If the roll is high, it's a nastier bout of weather (heavy blizzard, gale force winds, again whatever).
4. Choose the effect. Many games have rules for the outcome of different types of storm or blizzard. Look it up or choose an appropriate effect for your game.
5. WRITE IT DOWN. I always forget weather scene to scene. If I don't leave myself a big note by where I'm tracking initiative I don't include its effects. I'll write an Initiative 0 slot named WEATHER: [TYPE] at the top of my sheet.
6. Naval games only: roll a d12. I'm not a big fan of d12s, but they work fine for the task of determining the prevailing direction of wind. I'm lazy, so I use clock directions with 12 o'clock as north. If I wanted to get clever about it I'd figure out which direction the wind would tend to blow in a region, call that direction "7" and roll 2d6 instead, since results would weight toward the normal direction and deviate from that point. It's an adaptation of a clever rule I've stolen from David 'DC' Carl that I'd like to try out.
   In the naval game, I'll roll for a wind direction at the start of a naval encounter and draw a little arrow next to the weather note to remind myself. I'll only roll again if it feels like a dramatically appropriate moment, or if the players are taking too long to determine what they're doing as a means of shaking things up.

That's really it for this topic. You can see from my mental checklist that most of the time I'll just leave the weather alone until a player makes it significant, and then I'll pick something that I think feels right. Rolling dice isn't needed, but can provide unexpected results that force you to improvise.

Writing Every Day Series: Late Work Night

No update today due to a late night of work. Back to our regular programming tomorrow.

Writing Every Day 11: Goals

During a campaign there can be several different sorts of goals. The first, often most obvious goal is what the party is trying to achieve. Sometimes this is dictated by the story; if the characters live in a region plagued by an undead army directed by an evil lich, a goal of the party might amount to "stop the lich and destroy his army." Other times the goals have little to do with the Game Master's story and more with the party's desires, like, "we want to gather enough resources to buy a sweet-ass boat."

I tend to think of those as major goals. I often present the players with a handful of larger obstacles or situations, with the unspoken understanding that overcoming them or navigating them are their goals, from my perspective. They also present me with major goals, often expressed as, "We want to [achieve some kind of task]." Working the major goals together, theirs and mine, is one of the things I strive to do over the course of the campaign.

There are also minor goals, both from me and from the players. Minor goals run the gamut from acquiring a new weapon or making a new contact, to exploring a new region or trying to earn some finances. The interesting thing about those minor goals is that they help to inform and evolve a PC. By pursuing and achieving them I learn more about how the player views his or her character, what they're interested in doing with the character, and the place the character has in the story, the group, and the world.

To me, major goals are the skeleton of the campaign, while minor goals are the tissue that bulks it out. A minor goal can be the basis of a good night's game within the campaign(provided you can manage the spotlight while doing so). A major goal can be the campaign.

That said I don't think that one type of goal is more valuable to the game, their names notwithstanding. A PC's minor goals have the potential to be just as dramatic and revealing as any major goal. I think of it like a bottle episode in a longer-running series that provides insight into the motivation of a character or two; while it doesn't seem to advance the overall metaplot, it does give the audience a deeper understanding and connection to a particular character.

When we're playing a roleplaying game, we're both the audience and the creators. Sometimes a creator's goal is to provide a big set piece moment full of thrilling action. Sometimes it is to tell a smaller, more intimate story to make the audience engage more with the characters. In any game, I like it when both can occur, sometimes even in the same session.

Writing Every Day 10: Vehicles, man.

With this post I'm crossing over into the double digits with the Writing Every Day series. Hopefully I can keep my momentum up and the series improves over time.

Since I've had some harrowing experiences on my commute over the past two days, I've been thinking about vehicles quite a bit. I thought a brief observation about vehicles in RPGs was warranted.

In traditional fantasy RPGs, the Game Master doesn't often have to worry about vehicles. Sometimes you'll see the players get involved in a high(ish) speed cart chase or take a ship from one port to another, but they aren't often a major component of the setting. There's an exception to every rule, of course. Airships are a recurring trope, and D&D's lightning rail was an interesting way to get trains into the game, but vehicles are far less common in fantasy than many other settings.

Historical, Modern, and Sci Fi RPGs have vehicles by the truckload, and for good reason. High speed chases through crowded city streets are awesome, as are white-knuckle dogfights between fighter planes or spaceships. You can't run a good Akira homage without fleets of motorcycles buzzing around. But vehicles present a challenge to the Game Master. What do you have everyone do?

This issue crops up more in games where all the PCs are on the same vehicle. For a quick example of what I'm talking about, let's consider the scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon escapes the Death Star as if it were an RPG. (Skip to 2:30)



Luke and Han get to man the turrets to fight off the attacking TIE fighters. Chewie gets to fly the ship; admittedly his maneuvering is pretty prosaic compared to later installments, but it's something he gets to do. Leia only gets to say, "Here they come." Poor R2 only gets to put out a fire, and Threepio doesn't get to participate at all.

Of the characters in that scene, who's going to be the most invested and have the most fun? Probably Chewie, Han, and Luke's players. They get the most interesting stuff to do. Chewie rolls to maneuver and evade the fighters, Luke and Han get to blow them away. The Game Master throws R2 a bone by giving him the opportunity to repair damage—his player chose an astromech, after all, and probably wants to do some engineering and repair. Poor Leia and Threepio, though. Their characters just have to sit and enjoy the ride.

Now, not every character needs to have a huge part in every scene, but they should have something to contribute. A player who has no choices for actions to take is going to get bored, fast. You can offer up critical tasks to the other players, like R2 putting out the fire. Leia in the cockpit has access to the scanning and communication on board and can coordinate the actions of R2 and Threepio to deal with critical damage as it occurs. Depending on the capabilities of the Falcon, she might even choose to leave the cockpit and strap on a toolbelt herself, or help with the calculations to jump to hyperspace. Something. Anything.

Some systems have a selection of roles aboard larger vehicles. Rogue Trader has complex rules for each role contributing to the overall result. For Pathfinder, the Admiral of the High Seas supplement does something similar. No matter if your game has a system in place to handle these situations, read through those games to see how they deal with the problem of giving every player something to do during these vehicular engagements. It may help keep everyone's attention during what should be a tense and exhilarating action scene.

Writing Every Day 09: Character and Quirks

I love writing odd NPCs. Many of the games I run involve larger organizations, like government agencies, mercenary companies, military battalions, or even pirate crews. When the game starts, I'll begin to introduce a handful of NPCs by name. Those that get a bit of traction with the players start to move into a prominent role, while those that don't recede into the background. I'll often give a new NPC some quirk or habit to help set him or her apart from the others. These can be straightforward, like an interesting tattoo or scar, or complex, like "enjoys reading books on the history of the Achaemenid Empire."

There are numerous generators online, either presented as sites that you refresh to get a new list of quirks or a pdf with a table you roll on to generate a few. These tools are great to quickly get a handful of quirks for NPCs. I have several favorites that I use from time to time. I do not, though, think that quirks equal character.

Character is, in my opinion, an amalgamation of the NPC's personality, goals, beliefs, and so forth. Quirks are interesting or unique little details about that character. Compare the following examples:

• He is strong and has a stutter. This is a quirk, and a fine one to use provided you don't overuse it.
• His stutter drove him, from an early age, to commit himself to physical training. He believed that, if he couldn't influence people through his speech, he would do so through his strength. He tries to avoid speaking whenever possible, and becomes increasingly frustrated when he's forced to. He prefers to listen instead, dreading the moment when he meets a new person and they expect him to carry on a conversation. This is off the top of my head, and way, way more than a PC should get the first time they meet the character. For the overworked Game Master, this is probably too much to figure out for every desk clerk and street cop. Fortunately, you don't have to.

I picked two random traits off a list of NPC quirks to get the strong + stutter combination above. They're probably not something I would have come up with on my own, but I embraced the oddity of the combination and went with it.

In an RPG, like in writing, you can add detail iteratively. You can go back after a session and figure out how the players responded to a particular NPC, and how you, in that character's role, responded. A minor quirk is a decent starting point, provided you're willing to improvise and build off of it through interaction with the PCs. If you ever end up revisiting the NPC, you aren't starting from scratch; you begin with the quirk you assigned, your memory of how that interaction went, and how it was resolved.

From there, you can build out what the character's personality is. What his or her goals might be. What they believe in or what they don't. You don't have to figure all this out right away, though. Finding one more piece of the puzzle lets you refine how you take on the role of that character, gives you more data to use while improvising. Further on, you add more detail, figure the character out more, and keep building.

The advantage to this is you only begin to worry about it after the game. When the game begins, you pick a minor quirk or two, jump into your NPC's place, and let things begin to evolve. If the players don't bite, you haven't lost anything. If they do, you begin to construct a complex and interesting character that they get to learn more about over time. 

Writing Every Day 08: Fatigue

Man am I tired. Strangely enough, I didn't really do anything all day. Most of my work day involved driving to and from, proofreading text, writing different text, and running a playtest game. None of those compare with the physical labor I've performed at previous jobs, but the end result is the same: I'm exhausted.

Plenty of RPGs have a system to model fatigue. Characters who push themselves too far for too long can suffer from a number of different consequences. In some games, the character suffers from an increasing penalty to his or her rolls. Others have a fatigue track with unique penalties at each step along the way. Some treat fatigue as a kind of damage that whittles away at their vitality. The end result is usually a character that becomes decreasingly effective over time until they are taken out, incapacitated, or even dead.

Several systems I've seen have physical fatigue, but I've encountered fewer that make allowance for mental fatigue. Now, not every system is appropriate for this. Staying up late or being mentally exhausted isn't likely to make me suffer damage—directly. A mentally fatigued character might slip up more, though, or make worse decisions, and get into situations they would normally avoid.

Not every game wants or needs a fatigue system. In fact, it can be a detriment to certain games. High heroic games where the PCs are paragons of combat, magic, et cetera might not need to worry about the bone-deep weariness that comes from an all day march. Other games beg for a good fatigue system, though. I wouldn't want to run a game set in the trenches of the Great War without having something to represent the exhaustion the characters would experience from constant stress and battle.

In any case, I don't want fatigue (or any system, really) to stand as a barrier between the players and the game. Like encumbrance, a subject I might talk about at another time, it can become an irritating hurdle the players have to spend extra time worrying about before they get to the "good parts" of the game. If the system is at the heart of the story I'm telling though, I want one that can easily model physical, emotional, or mental drain on the characters.

For a good idea of a game where I would want a decent fatigue system, check out the Dan Simmons book The Terror. Set in an arctic wasteland, the characters are forced to endure physical and mental strain. If I were to run a game set in the world of the novel, I'd definitely want something that let me chip away at the characters both mentally and physically, though I'd want the system to be shared between the two. Something where the ultimate consequences—freezing to death, starving, going mad—were determined by the source of what finally put the character over the edge.

Sorry if this one is a bit rambling and repetitive. I'm just so damn exhausted. See you tomorrow, when I hope to be a little less fatigued.

Writing Every Day 07: All the World's a Stage

In RPG's, all the world is a stage, but it only has one spotlight.

There are tons of Game Mastering books out there that talk about the spotlight, or the amount of attention that is paid to a single player's character during a session. Ideally, as the Game Master we move the spotlight around, giving different characters equal attention as they come to the forefront. Combat encounters seem to do this naturally, since every character in the combat has their own turn in the initiative order when the spotlight falls on them. Outside of combat, though, the spotlight can linger on one or two characters longer than the rest.

Sometimes this is just fine. If the evening's game centers on a story involving a character's backstory, or it involves some personal goal of that character, it's natural for the Game Master to spend more time on the character's turns. A recent example from a game I participated in was in The Hoard of the Dragon Queen. One of the PCs had chosen a background that involved locating a missing childhood friend that was entangled in the activities of the adventure's villainous cult. When that missing friend arrived on the scene, the PC moved into the forefront for a while.

That's a perfect reason to shine the spotlight on someone. It moves the story forward, pays off a portion of a character's background, and informs the players about the adventure's world. Best of all, it was something the Game Master could expect and prepare for. Our Game Master spent more time with the rest of the PCs prior to the reveal of the friend and balanced the overall time spent among all of the characters. It was a great example of balancing focus on multiple players who all want to play the game and feel like important heroes doing cool stuff.

There are other things that can cause the spotlight to linger on a particular PC though, which can complicate the Game Master's job. Off the top of my head, the shopping scene is one nasty offender. In a shopping scene, a player walks into a shop to purchase some item. The player wants to talk to the shop's owner, bantering back and forth before finally making a purchase. Depending on the player, this kind of thing can take a few minutes or more. While it's immersive for the player participating in the conversation, anyone else who isn't there can rapidly lose interest in what's going on. Others will strike out for their own diversions, compounding the issue and delaying the game.

Is this kind of thing bad? I don't know. Not necessarily. A Game Master can use moments like that to advance the group's understanding of the present situation, backfill information about the world, and drop plot hooks for further adventures. However, care must be taken so the other players who aren't participating in the scene have something of equal value—that commands an equal portion of your attention—to do. For that reason, unless a large number of characters decide to head out together for these undertakings, I prefer to have that activity take place at the beginning of a session before the story gets rolling, or let the players perform it between sessions if the story permits.

I'm guilty of letting single players hold the spotlight for large portions of a session. Duels are notorious for keeping focus on a single player for far too long. So do scenes where a hacker tries to crack security of some computer network. They tend to involve more complex rules and narration and by their nature are performed by single characters. I've seen authors handle these scenes well in the past; check out the duel between Logen Ninefingers and Fenris the Feared in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy for an example of how other characters can have spotlight moments during a tense and prolonged duel. He sets up a series of challenges, some on the dueling ground and others off it, that give his ensemble of characters their own things to do over the course of the fight. Even characters standing in a circle around the dueling pair manage to contribute meaningfully to the outcome.

I don't know if I have a perfect solution to these moments, other than to suggest breaking up the duel, hacking effort, or other similar attention-holding moment, by presenting the group with other goals that must be achieved in concert. Find dramatic moments to break away from the "primary" action and swap focus to another character. Let their efforts build to the greater success of the group. Remember that everyone at the table is there because they want to be the star of the show and keep the spotlight moving.

Writing Every Day 06: Writing *Every* Day?

The observant among you may have noticed that no posts went up on Saturday or Sunday, which rightfully breaks my chain of writing every day. While that's true and you'd be within your rights to call foul on me, I wanted to take a moment to explain the reasons why.

The first reason is one that any person in any field experience at one time or another: family obligation. No matter what I'm doing, my family has first right of refusal to my time. This past weekend I spent a healthy amount of time with my wife, our roommate, and one of our close friends. Drinks were drunk. Food was eaten. A good time was had by all.

When we're working on something, it can be easy to let our social obligations slip by the side of the road. Rather than let that happen, I intend to temper my work and this ongoing writing experiment with time spent not working. Not working is often just as important as working. It gives you time to rest and evaluate what you're doing. It gives you the ability to learn from the errors in your previous work, and gives you a place to start from when you begin again. This leads to my second point.

There's something known as the creative pause. It is, I think, the basis for many productivity techniques like the Pomodoro Technique. While the real method is much more involved, a key component is that, for every major work that you undertake, you need to break it down into smaller chunks divided by periods of rest. Like organizing writing into coherent paragraphs gives the reader a place to pause between pieces of information, this lets you break away from your work for a moment to digest what you've done and prepare to tackle the next chunk. Trying to steamroll through large efforts can be akin to a wall of unbroken text. Not only is it tiresome to process, you can lose critical information among the clutter.

So, in this "Writing Every Day" experiment, expect there may be the occasional break in the flow. Sometimes I'll need to step away to clear my head and strategize on how to tackle the topics I have coming up. Other times the family will decide for me that I need to be available for them. When I can I'll try to keep these pauses to reasonable times—weekends, holidays, and so forth—and to a reasonable length. And if you haven't, I recommend trying out the Pomodoro Technique or something similar. You may find after half an hour of work, or a full hour, that stepping away for a few minutes gives you the ability to solve issues that previously seemed insurmountable.

Until next time.

Writing Every Day 05: Inspiration

Reading the fantastic Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, I ran across a line that stuck with me. You'll have to forgive me not quoting it, as I've left my copy at work. Go pick it up, it's worth the read. You'll run across it in no time.

The line said, in essence, to draw inspiration for things like game mechanics outside the medium you're working in—in this specific case, tabletop roleplaying games. It went on to say that taking something from another kind of game is inspiration, while taking clever mechanics from within your medium is closer to theft. I can respect the author's position, though I feel like there's a case to be made for spotting what you like in another game and adapting it to your own setting, aesthetics, and so forth. Look no further than the game The Bloody Forks of the Ohio for a great example.

Largely, though, I agree with the author. Looking at ways other kinds of games handle the issue of mechanics can provide the needed spark for you to develop your own system. Earlier today I was talking with one of the game designers at work about how certain mechanics could work, and our conversation included numerous references to different video games. "[GAME TITLE]'s method of handling [SPECIFIC SITUATION] could work for [CHARACTER ISSUE]," that kind of thing.

We weren't talking about stealing the mechanics whole cloth, because that would be impossible. The capabilities and needs of video games differ from those of an RPG or board game. In order to make the idea fit within the game we were discussing, we'd have to take the general concept and pull it apart to fit within our own rules.

The same is true of books, movies, and so forth. As an example, I am a big fan of China Mieville's book The Scar. In it, a character has a unique sword that manipulates probability, allowing the wielder to bend reality during an attack to make strike he could have made affect the target as if he did make it.

I loved that idea, and that nature of item worked well in the game I was running, so I took it. In the system I was running there existed critical hits, critical failures, success, and failure on attack and skill rolls, so I simply had the player make multiple attack rolls with his probability sword. Each attack was resolved simultaneously, and all results were treated as true. He could, in one flurry of potential reality, hit his target twice, critically hit it once, and critically fail, losing control of the weapon. There were other mechanisms in play due to the system, but that's the short version. It worked well enough like the weapon in the novel, and was memorable enough for me to write about years later.

So, cast a wide net when looking for inspiration. Try to puzzle out how the things that work in other games could work in your own. Halo's regenerating shield. Skyrim's skill system. Fear as a health mechanic from Fear Effect. The weapon degradation from Fallout. Figure out a way to plug it into your own game.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to fire up Steam and get inspired.

Writing Every Day 04: The Danger of Author Voice

When I'm writing essays, I worry how the reader interprets what I'm writing. Often I feel like the reader will misinterpret my intent and think I believe what I've written is an absolute. That's not the case. You can almost always add an unspoken "in my opinion" appended to a statement I make, particularly when I talk about roleplaying games.

In my opinion (there, I'm front-loading it this time), roleplaying games are pretty personal things. Not things that need to be kept private, but something that works for you when it works for you, and how it works for you. Some Game Masters are comfortable only when running a game within clear bounds, while others prefer a more freeform experience. Some of us do funny voices, others despise it. We gravitate to the style of play we enjoy and are comfortable with, and a GM's style of running a game can be as individual as the stories he or she chooses to tell.

What does this have to do with the author voice? Great question! Some players take what the GM tells them with the same degree of absolutism I'm concerned people think my writing suggests. This goes beyond Rule Zero, the idea that the GM is the ultimate authority when running a game and his or her word is law. I don't have an issue with that. What concerns me is when that perspective restricts how players interact with the world.

When a GM describes a situation, they are laying down the rules of that scene. Is it dark, is it bright, indoors or out, and so forth. Once those statements are out in the open, all the players have points of common knowledge about the scene. I've encountered players who then treat the situation as if those are the only things about the scene. If something hasn't been described at the outset, these players go through a quick session of twenty questions trying to figure out what other options they have in the scene. "Is there a big rock here, is it large enough for me to take cover behind, can I reach it this round," and on and on.

Once in a while, I run across a player who takes a different approach. Rather than waiting for absolutes to come down from the GM, they simply state the kind of action they want to perform, like, "I run to the nearest boulder or tree large enough to take cover behind." Sometimes the GM needs to clarify the situation further, such as telling the player that there aren't any such pieces of cover near enough to reach this round but close enough to reach by next round, in order to preserve the intent of the scene. If it doesn't interfere with the scene, I suggest just rolling with the punches. If it doesn't break anything, letting a player walk to a street side noodle vendor to blend in while he cases a building not only helps build the scene for everyone else, it takes some of the pressure off you.

This can be thought of as a part of the Rule of Yes, a position that states the GM should affirm suggestions the players offer up. There are more involved discussions about this rule, like the Rule of Yes, And/Yes But where the GM takes the player's inclusion and uses it to raise the stakes. ("Yes, you run behind the boulder and the security guards fan out into cover of their own," or, "Yes, you step up to the noodle counter but one of the mayor's bodyguards is sitting at the counter.")

Interestingly, the players I encounter who are most willing to treat my games this way are kids. I've been lucky enough to run games for younger players at conventions on multiple occasions, and by far they are the most willing to add details to the scene. I like it when a player treats an encounter's details as a starting point, not the end all, be all, of the world.

Writing Every Day 03: Visual Texture

So, what do I mean by visual texture?

It's a term that I think of to describe the kinds of complex environments you can see in some films and TV shows. It's a complex, layered sort of look that feels authentic, particularly in modern slums and futuristic environments. The sorts of sets on display in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Akira's fantastic backgrounds, and even oddly the Super Mario Brothers movie.

My favorite settings for RPGs tend to be dense urban environments, and my preferred genre skews to science fiction, gritty modern, and cyberpunk. The backgrounds in most of the media set in those genres have these brilliant, textural environments that lend all sorts of interesting set pieces for action scenes, chases, and tense negotiations.

In my daily life, I drive through an industrial district on my way to work, over a thick-sided concrete canal bridge that spans a shipping lane. To either side I have crumbling shipping cranes, graffitied warehouses made of corrugated aluminum, railroads, massive cargo cranes, and generations of old advertising plastered on the street posts. It's a highly-textured, messy, organic scene. When I'm describing a scene to my players, in my head the environment probably looks something like that, mixed with the genre conventions of whatever setting the game takes place in—cracked screens playing advertising for a massive corporation's new product, that kind of thing.

Getting the players to have that same sense of a complex environment can prove to be a challenge, though. If you ramble on about the setting for too long, you run into the danger of losing the interest of the audience. They won't care about the massive scaffolding that fills the back of the alley unless it can be used to their advantage or has some sort of relevance to their goals or current situation.

What I try to do is give a concise description of the environment that includes references to the kind of visual texture in the environment. Something like the description of my commute above. Enough for the player to get a sense of how filled out the area is without burdening them with too many specifics. Then, as the scene unfolds, I look for things that fit within the texture of the scene to exploit and force their relevance.

Back to the example of the alley and its scaffolding. That's probably not something I'd include in the initial description unless I had a player skulking around looking for an alternate method of entry into a building. It's a perfect bit of terrain to mix up a foot chase, though, so I may have the player's quarry sprint down that alley and into the scaffolding in an attempt to reach an adjacent rooftop. Not only does it break up the chase and offer a different series of challenges to the players to surmount, but it also helps to fill out the texture of the background and make the environment seem more fleshed out and lived in.

When keeping track of a complex encounter, particularly when running a theater of the mind game, I sometimes find myself losing the level of environmental complexity that I picture when I start the scene. Finding ways to make those details a part of the challenges of the scene help me to keep the bigger picture in mind, and give me a touchstone to return to when the setting begins to feel too sparse again.

Sorry if this post rambles a bit. I'm getting to it a bit later than I'd hoped to and didn't spend as much time preparing as I'd hoped to. It is a topic that interests me, so I may try to revisit it in the future.