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.