A Sense of Novelty, and Giving Players Control of the Plot

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, mostly on account of a lack of momentum -- I let myself get out of the habit of posting regularly, and it's a tricky one to pick back up. So there may be some more rambly-type posts like this one, as I try to catch my footing again.

And then there's the campaign I'm running. For a while, I felt like I was just going over old ground, which meant there wasn't much for me to write about concerning it. More importantly, that feeling over going over old ground was causing me some vague dissatisfaction with the game. When I game, particularly when I run a game, I like trying new systems, employing new techniques, learning new things. Using a system I'd used ages ago to run a sequel to the same game I'd used it before just wasn't satisfying on that level.

That's better now, I think. For one, I've started doing more with the social aspect of the game. Trollsmyth's tea parties are rubbing off on me, and at least a few of the players are interested in that kind of thing, so now we have things happening like major world-shaking plot points hinging on who's sleeping with who, and who else knows about it. Which is new, and good.

More significantly, some of the things I set up at the beginning of the campaign in an attempt to make it more open-ended have started to pay off. Without delving too deeply into fiddly, campaign-specific details, (and without giving too many of my future plans away) a four-way battle for the throne of the empire the game centers on is stirring on the horizon, as well as at least two separate invasions from foreign powers. Each side is either driven by or heavily depends on the actions of at least one of the PCs, and while I will admit to meddling in favor of chaos, destruction, and general good times, what happens next is largely up to the decision the players make.

This is a pretty major change, for me. Historically, I've avoided railroading on principle, but for a long time I prided myself on being very good at getting players to do what I wanted anyway. Whether it was a kidnapped NPC, a shiny object, an enemy on whom they'd sworn revenge, or simply the stirrings of great drama, it was never hard to exert gentle pressure on the party in the direction of my convenience. I always left the details up to the party, and I was generally happy to accommodate their own plans when they had them, but in my best campaigns I always had a master plot, a final villain, and an ending in mind.

This was always fairly popular with my players, since I had the good sense to leave the details sketchy and to use plots and villains that interested them, but the new approach is much more interesting to me. Before, I always knew how the game was going to end, and it was just a matter of how they'd get there. This time, I'm playing to see how it's all going to turn out.

Never Have a Plan

So, after Friday's session, Artemis asked me if I'd expected them to fight the ice golem, or try to sneak around it/negotiate with it. She'd interpreted my placing an obviously overpowered monster in their way as evidence of some kind of plan.

Which I didn't have. Yeah, I set up the terrain, with the ledge and everything, in a way that gave them a chance at dealing with it without getting completely hosed, but (to be entirely honest) that wasn't what I was thinking when I set it up like that. I was thinking "hey, Ax has that neat gliding ability, and his player seems really into it, I should give him an opportunity to glide into combat." So I did. Only once the scene had gotten rolling did I realize how smart of me it was to do that.

I didn't have a plan. I never have a plan. I didn't know whether they'd sneak around it, or figure out a way to kill it, or just charge in and get themselves all killed. I hadn't even given much thought to how they'd deal with it. I knew it was possible for them to deal with it somehow, even if that might involve bringing in their parents and mentors, but I figured it was up to them to work out exactly how that was going to go down.

It's not just that I know the players will mess up any plan I come up with, though that is why I originally adopted the policy. More fundamentally, any plan I come up with can't possibly be as interesting as one designed by four or five people very motivated people. If I come up with a plan ahead of time, I'd be tempted to say that whatever crazy idea the players came up with was "wrong," and that would make the game less interesting. It requires a certain comfort with improvisation, but I developed that quite quickly when I realized it would get me out of doing work.

So I don't plan. I come up with ways to motivate my players, and then I get out of their way. Less work. More fun. Your mileage may vary, as always, but it works for me.

Secrecy in the Early Game

The new campaign kicked off Friday. All in all, it was a success. Lots of fun character moments, plenty of antics, and fairly neat ending, with the lower level group all packaged up into a team and kicked out the door to go do some quest-type things. So next time won't have as much "which character am I playing right now?" type confusion; we'll be able to cut between the two groups rather than managing the whole gang all in one place.

It also had three private, out-of-the-room conversations between me and one or two players, lots of note passing, and a bit of attempted blackmail. Which is pretty much par for course for a new game of mine. The last two major campaigns I've run all started out with a lot of intra-party intrigue. Secret agendas, spying for outside (and possibly hostile) powers, and sneaking off for one's own mysterious purposes is typical behavior in the first few sessions, and while it tends to calm down once everyone gets settled, sometimes it comes back to explode later down the line.

It's partly my fault. Even when I don't start the campaign by handing each player a secret piece of information, as I did in this game, I sometimes start up the note passing, and I'll suggest the private conversations. Although I'm sure that at some point this kind of thing will go terribly wrong, in a player-vs-player kind of way, for the most part I think it's a good way to get a new party used to each other, it gets players thinking about their characters backgrounds, and it encourages PC-on-PC roleplaying. (Though I'm usually careful to apply a bit of outside pressure; a dangerous common enemy works well to keep even characters who don't like each other together.) And this campaign has a lot of political considerations going on, so I'm quite pleased at the level of player involvement and interest in that aspect of the game.

But it strikes me as peculiar that this always happens. While I intended for Is This Foul? to have a conspiratorial tone, the intrigue that's infected the Traveller game was largely my players doing. Certainly I've encouraged it, since they seem to enjoy the note-passing and discovering each others secrets, but I wasn't the one who said "I want my character to work for the people Duke Burris is trying to overthrow, because they've captured her fiancé."

It could be just the kind of players I attract. But it also occurs to me that, if given the opportunity, players have some pretty powerful incentives to give their characters a bit of secret agenda. It gets them more one-on-one attention from me, and it gets them more attention from the other players, both in the "what's that person up to?" stage, and when they finally orchestrate their big reveal. Once one person starts doing it, everyone wants to do it, because they see that other player getting more spotlight.

So is a certain amount of secrecy a fairly common attribute in player-dom? Does anyone else have these note-passing kinds of early games? And has anyone ever had secrecy go horribly, terribly wrong?

Process & Procrastination

As usual, while setting up the new campaign I've started obsessing about process and how to format my notes. Handwritten or computer? Files or wiki? Tiddlywiki or Google Page? Rich text files, .doc, or .odt? Binder or notebook? Or both? The list goes on.

While I do have an urge to "go traditional" with this campaign, my gut feeling is that it's an ideological urge, rather than one based on practicality. Given that I'm managing a lot of my player interactions through a campaign blog, it makes sense to keep my notes digital, for easy access and interface with that set up. I've already got a campaign, the megadungeon, that's all hand-written, and I'm still feeling my way through that.

But my usual system of files and folders doesn't quite work. Mostly, I'd like to be able to put things in multiple buckets. It'd be convenient, for instance, to file NPCs all together in an NPC folder, while simultaneously accessing them each from their locations.

I've been fiddling with TiddlyWiki, and I have high hopes that it'll do what I need at least as far as NPC-tracking and at-the-table notes go. But it still gets me stuck on process. How should I set everything up? Am I doing this or that right? What if I change my mind later? Too often, what should be an aid to getting things organized turns into an obstacle to getting them done.

Permission to Fail

It's weird how things work out sometimes. I'd originally planned for the Mongoose Traveller game to just last for one semester. Plan was, I'd be wrapping that game up around now, and then start a new game (maybe Vampire, maybe Encounter Critical) next year. I didn't have a clear idea of how the Traveller game would end, but I figured that was something that would resolve itself.

Now here I am, getting set to run another semester of it. (At least.) That's not a bad thing; I'm doing it because the players enjoy the campaign, and there's still quite a bit left to wrap up just on the plot threads that are already going. I still don't feel like this is going to be one of those games that lasts forever (could be, but some of the players are already talking about doing something different someday, though they're still having too much fun for someday to be soon) but it's kind of nice to see it go a little longer than planned.

And if it hadn't, that would have been okay, too. Intending for the game to be short (though not building it in to the premise) helped it get this far. There were a couple of points earlier where I was frustrated with the game, and would have considered shutting it down then and there, except that I knew that it was only going to run until the semester ended anyway, and then I could be done with it. Now that I'm there, it's good enough to keep going, but it wouldn't have gotten this far if I hadn't had permission to end it in favor of something new when I got to this point.

Sometimes the Game Master Tweaks Back

Last Friday we had this semester's second-to-last session of the Mongoose Traveller sandbox game. (Last session of the semester was on Wednesday: we moved from the usual date due to finals.) A fun time was had by all; the players got up to enough hijinks that I didn't even need to use the pirate attack scenario I'd whipped up. (Got to use it last night, though. Very impressed with Mongoose Traveller ship combat.)

One of those hijinks got me to thinking. In brief, or something like it: one of the characters, Alice Dice, is a pirate, ruffian, and sex fiend. (Before the campaign started, she'd slept with all the male PCs, and with several important NPCs in the female PCs backstories. Blame the event tables.) Lately, she's been sleeping with Zane Archer/Sir Dave Bowman, space accountant/ship engineer who is terrified of her.

At one point that night, Alice brought a (male) rugby player back to the ship and suggested to Zane that they have a threesome. I'm pretty sure her player (my roommate, incidentally) thought this would be funny, and would freak out Zane, me, and the rest of the table. A typical player antic: she was looking for a reaction.

But Zane turned out to be rather more enthusiastic about the idea than she'd been expecting, which brings me to the point of this story: Game Masters like getting a reaction out of the players just as much as players like freaking out the GM. Now, sure, it fit the character, and I also wanted to make a broader point about the setting and society. But I also knew it'd throw her and the rest of the party for a bit of a loop, especially the player explaining to her that "guys are less open to that than women are." And that's an opportunity too good to pass up.

Traveller Plans: Taking Advantage of the Summer Hiatus

Things I want to get done this summer for the Traveller game:

• Map out the rest of the surrounding subsectors, in preparation for the inevitable misjumps, and so I'm ready if and when the campaign gets less focused on the Kordovia subsector.
• Detail a bunch more planets. There's a number in Kordovia that I haven't sketched out yet, and I'd like to do at least the major planets in the neighboring subsectors as well.
• Clean up the planetary notes I already have. Each one has somehow developed it's own unique format; I'd like to standardize their presentation a bit, move everything that's in my chronological notes pertaining to a particular world to its entry, and iron out each world's timeline.
• Update my NPC list. I have a bunch of notecards, but they currently only cover about half my NPCs. At the very least, I need to get all of my NPCs written down and accounted for. I'd also like to get a hold of a card box and some manila dividers, so I can organize the cards by world, for easy use in play.
• Update the campaign wiki. I have one, but I stopped using it after doing the session recaps became too much of a chore. I'm not sure I'm going to start doing recaps again, but it would be nice to get at least some kind of "Season 1: the Story So Far" general recap for the whole campaign done. If I'm really feeling ambitious, I'll wiki-fy all my planet notes and NPCs, but to do that I'd have to decide if I wanted it to be a player resource (and thus censored of secret details) or a way for me to keep track of my notes.
• Make up a better calendar. At least get some holidays on there or something. Both Imperium-wide and planet specific; there are a few planets that I know would have some really entertaining festivals.
• Get a little bit more of the setting fleshed out. This is really the least important item on the list, but it would be good to give some though to this at some point. I have a few sketchy ideas on this score already, but they mostly pertain to historical backstory. Details, for instance, on Imperial politics could be useful to establish.

Game Day Rituals

One of the things I like about running a game is the demands it puts on me. Most of the time, I don't have to be at peak operational capacity. It's nice if I am all there, but when it comes to hanging out, school, and most of my other hobbies, I can get away with running at 50% or 60%. Gaming doesn't give me that luxury: I have to be 100% there as much as possible. It takes pretty close to my full mental capacity to simultaneously visualize the game environment, track player interest and involvement, easily call up important backstory details, remember where all my different notes are, roleplay NPCs properly, and think up interesting responses to player actions.

Accordingly, I've got a lot of little things that I do to get myself into the right state of mind and stay there. In no particular order:

Shower: And all my other hygiene routines. If I'm not clean, I get uncomfortable. If I'm uncomfortable, I can't run the game.

Power Shirt: At the very least my clothes have to be clean. But it helps me to get into "game mood" if I'm wearing the right clothes: jeans and t-shirt, usually black, generally geek related. My batsignal shirt is best, but I've got a bunch of other ThinkGeek type shirts that will do the trick.

Food: Need to have eaten some food. Need to have eaten the right food. If I haven't eaten, I get grouchy. If I've had too much sugar or caffeine or junk food, I either get way overstimulated or I go to sleep. I generally stick to baby carrots and cherries at the game table. Tasty, crunchy, and won't make me crazy.

Water: At the table, I drink a lot of water. Ludicrous amounts of water. I'm drinking water constantly. It keeps my voice from going out and keeps me from getting dehydration headaches. Best of all, it gives me a great excuse to leave the room and take a five minute break to think. (My players get all nervous when I do that, too.)

Books: It helps to have a big ol' stack of game books nearby, even if I'm not going to use them. I did this unconsciously for a while: when I was running a d20 system, I'd just cart out all my d20 stuff out of habit, even if I was running Arcana Evolved and so my d20 Modern books and so on weren't going to be much help. (I've got about two feet worth of books for various d20 system.) These days, I like to have my AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide close at hand, even when I'm running Traveller, so I can tap the Awesome Power contained therein. (NPC charts, mostly.) And I brought my copies of Fight On! to the last game, for pretty much the same reason.

A Theory On Player Antics

The Zane Archer/Dave Bowman incident prompted a comment from me on the weirdness of players, and how "normal people don't do this kind of thing." The players responded with a theory of their own: that players pull bullshit stunts like that because they're trying to freak out the GM.

This isn't news to us. Several of them have straight out said that their goal is to get me to put my head in my hands in amused exasperation. Which I do, on a fairly regular basis. (Though only while GMing, I'm much more expressive than usual while I'm running the game.) I'm generally more entertained by their antics than annoyed, so things work out fairly well.

But it does strike me as a good theory for handling player weirdness in general. They're out to one-up or freak out tick off the GM, who tends to be fairly invested in the world and the campaign and thus responds when they do something bizarre to it. A bit of (hopefully friendly) competition.

Minor Perils of a Combat Light Game

No Traveller on Friday, which was both fortunate and unfortunate. It's been three weeks now since we played, but we were missing two players, I wasn't totally prepped, and it was the finale of Battlestar Galactica. (I don't watch it, but one of my players does.)

I feel bad about cancelling a session like that, especially since it's been so long since we played, but I wasn't feeling totally confident about running that night, and there were enough other factors that I had a decent excuse. The fact that I was kind of glad that we didn't play worries me, but I think things should be okay once I've put my evil plan into action.

One thing that's been throwing me off is that the tempo of this game has been different from what I'm used to. Part of this is just that there's the whole trading aspect of the game, and so it's got it's own rhythm, apart from anything else that's going on, and that's taking some time for me to learn how to manage it. But I've also been noticing that the game moves a lot faster than I'm used to; they get a lot more done, and "getting things done" a lot of times means leaving for a whole other planet.

Some of this is just that I haven't (cranked up the adventure) yet, but there's also just been a lot less combat. They avoid combat, and when combat does start I tend to just wing it rather than break out the books and risk getting a bunch of bored looks because I don't have the rules totally down yet. In D&D, and in most of the games I've run so far, if things are dragging a bit or if I need time to think it's totally permissable to bust out the Monster Manual and ambush the players with a bunch of monsters to get some breathing time, or fill space until the end of the session.

Not so much in this game. Partially it's because it's Traveller, and there's a different paradigm. Partially because the game's a lot more social. Partially because we don't all know the combat rules by heart a million times over. (At one point, I even had the 3.5 grappling rules memorized. I have an unwholesome love for those grappling rules. I don't see why everyone hates them.) Whatever the reason, though, it's hard for me to adjust to not having that buffer.

Campaigns I Won't Run This Summer

The rest of my group and I have different tastes. At some points, they overlap, and those are the games that we play. This leaves me with a number of games that I'd like to play, but have to put off until I find the right group; I assume it leaves them in a similiar situation occasionally. (Though it's possible that I take these things a tad more seriously than the rest of them, seeing as I'm the only one of us who blogs about games.) That's the case this summer.

Promethean: the Created. This one, I crossed of my "possibles" list almost immediately. I had a number of reasons for that, but first and foremost was that I didn't think the group would take it "seriously." When I showed a couple of them the book, their immediate response was to sit down and start designing character builds -- which is normally a tendency I like, or at least don't mind, but in this case I feel like that's missing the point. There are other games that encourage that style of play, no need to go grafting it on to a game with a different intent. Add in that my serious "character drama" players don't seem particularly enthused about the specific themes that Promethean handles, and you've got a game for another day. (And a game I'd rather play than run, anyway. But only with a perfect GM.)

Encounter Critical. I threw this one out as a possible game, but they all seem to hate it. Apparently it's too silly for a "real campaign." Even though we've had a lot of fun with our goofy-ass one-shots, they want (or claim to want) something more serious for an on-going game. Ah, well. I have high hopes for my college group, some of whom have shown signs of understanding that stupid and awesome go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Feng Shui. This is one that my group would like to play again, but that I have no interest in GMing. I'm the de-facto GM this summer, for various reasons, so it's off the list. We've had fun with it in the past, but once my initial excitement wore off I realized that I really dislike the shots sytem, and a couple of the other more fiddly elements it contains. There's another guy who does still like it but who's out of town this summer, so I'll leave it up to him to run when it's his turn.

There are a couple of games that are still on the "possibles" list, but just barely. Superheroes and Megadungeon in particular both face heavy resistance from a couple of the other people playing this summer. I suspect that resistance is based on prejudice more than experience, and that I could convince the objectors to at least give it a try, but I've got other games in the line-up that wouldn't require such efforts.

A Little Case of Concept Trouble

The other day, as I was writing up the list of campaigns I've played, it occurred to me that I've had a shift in my thinking about campaigns over the past seven-odd years I've been gaming. With all the games I'm thinking about running now, I consider the system first, and then think about what I'd actually run with it. When I came up with my first couple of games, that order was reversed: concept first, then a system to match. I don't think this is a good trend.

There's a certain degree of inevitability to the shift. I know about a lot more systems than I did when I first started playing, I own a lot more systems, and I have a lot more interest in trying systems just to see what they're like. Back in the day, I couldn't think up a campaign system-first, because while I knew there were other systems out there, I didn't have any idea what they were like. I pretty much had to come up with a concept, and then go looking for a system.

But still, I don't like it, especially since my last few campaigns have been a bit thin in the concept department. They picked up more character over time -- Traveller got a big ol' burst of concept during character creation, and Is This Fair ended up with some honest-to-Gygax nuance in the end -- but the danger there is that they get defined by the loudest player's character. Next time around, I want to see if I can make the setting and concept itself a bit more vivid.

Questions Regarding Sequel Campaigns

One of the possibilities for the summer campaign is a sequel to an Arcana Evolved game I ran two years ago. (Others top contenders include high level 4th Edition D&D and Vampire: the Requiem. I'm not running the megadungeon, mostly for player compatibility reasons, but I plan on running it on an ad hoc basis both before then and during that time.) We've been talking about it for a while; two of the players have desperately wanted to play it again pretty much since the thing ended. I decided against running it last summer because one of those two players was out of town, and because I was too psyched about 4e to want to run something d20-derived.

This year, both of those problems have been have been (more or less) resolved. Both players will be here for the whole summer -- and this might be the last summer that this is true. And while I'm not as off of 4th Edition as I was six months ago (and my interests of late have been turned towards the old ways) I'd be more than happy to spend a few months back in the d20 world. Especially with Arcana Evolved, one of my favorite books from that era.

But I'm wary. That game was good, yeah, but it was also a product of a very specific set of influences. We'll have at least two players who weren't in the original game, and we'll be missing one or two who were. I won't have the same over-riding desire to "fix" the Oblivion ending that gave me a very strong but flexible structure to hang the plot of the game on. We might have the same characters (I'm considering a couple of different approaches to that) but we'll also all be two years older, with different concerns than produced that particular party.

The setting won't even be the same. One of the things we've established, in our post-game discussions, is that the end of that campaign produced some serious changes to the status quo of the setting. And I've never been completely happy with a lot of the details, both geographical and historical, that I established for that game, so I'd probably go back and clean some of that up, if I was going to spend another four months with it.

My players must know this. I've mentioned it to them, they agree, and it's all fairly obvious anyway. Which leaves me wondering why it is that they want to play this sequel game so badly. There wasn't anything magical about that campaign; the only substantial difference, in my perspective, between a sequel and wholely new endeavor would be that the sequel would invite a lot of comparisons with the old game, most of them unfavorable.

But I have to admit, I'm intrigued. It'd need to be shaken up a little bit, but the new status quo is certainly interesting -- they're in charge of the ancient, recently un-sunken city that housed the nexus of its fallen empire's magical power. I could do something with that set-up.

Hence, the post. Has anyone else out there run a sequel like this? Or considered it? How'd it go? Any overwhelming arguments against such an endeavor that I'm missing? Or are there any benefits that I haven't considered? And those players of mine who read the blog, why does the idea attract you so powerfully?

Tweaking the Campaign

So I'm thinking about doing a reboot of the Traveller game. The last session was kind of painful and stressful in places, and I still haven't done the session re-cap for it. I don't want to make any serious changes, mind. I'm just not quite happy with the pattern that we're settling into, and I need to do something about it before running the game becomes a major drag.

The problem I've identified, in my thinking about this over the last week, is that I'm not putting enough pressure on the crew. Traveller itself provides pressure, in the mortgage payments they have to make, and the potential for mis-jump and all the trouble that causes. But all that's lead to so far is "we go out looking for leads," or, "we ask the passengers we picked up if they have any problems." Which is something that I want to change how I'm handling; in the next session I'm going to see if I can make them work a little harder for that. I'd rather that they actually go out to specific places and talk to specific people, rather than just getting a list.

Anyway. Beyond "we need to make some money," they don't have any serious problems. The money motivation still just brings everything back to me; I still have to drive events in the session, or nothing happens. One of the players is a Duke, and as cool as that is in some ways, it's meant that they kind of ignore a lot of the "problems with the law" that the Traveller book seems to assume they'll have. That generates a certain amount of adventure in and of itself ("Hey! Let's negotiate a peace settlement between these two warring nations! They'll listen to us!") but it removes a default problem, and thus makes my life harder.

Oh, and the group has a tendency to split up. Which so far I've been sort of encouraging, but it really needs to stop, or at least get scaled way back. There's a lot of "I'm going to sit around and watch the other players doing stuff," and that's not good. So part of my motivation in making their lives harder is to give them a reason to stick together, and stop making me manage three different scenes at once.

None of this is to say that I'm not enjoying the game. The players are (for the most part) enthusiastic and involved, and while last session was rough in spots it also featured a religion based on Marvel Comic books and the cult of Wolverine, "the religion of what I was going to do anyway." It's still fun. But it's a brand new group, and it's a much more picaresque style of game than I'm used to, so I'm still tweaking the mix.

I have a pretty specific plan for what I'm going to do next session; I'd say more, but a few of my players read this blog, if only sporadically, so I'll wait until I've seen how it goes down. I'm not going to back off from the "no particular plot, just sutff happening on different planets" thing that I've got going in the game, but they have pissed off several people without really paying attention to it. So I'm going to cash in on that.

The Problems I Noticed Are Surely Outnumbered By Those I Didn't

Game night tonight, but I thought I'd squeeze in a little blog time in just the same, since I don't want to break the short little streak I've built up. I've been trying very hard to avoid the mistakes I made in my last long-running campaign (at least, the ones I noticed). This isn't a long list, but they were major enough to bug me.

First, the map and the history were both kind of incoherent. If I ever get around to running that sequel that some of the players keep bugging me about (which I am considering) I'm going to have to go back, redraw the maps, and rewrite the history, so it all conforms to my specifications. This is mostly a peeve; the players never noticed, so I'm not too worried about it if it happens again. I'm mostly dealing with it by avoiding detailed references to ancient history, which isn't too tough in a space game where the secret backstory mostly amounts to "some bad stuff happened, and then there was an empire." And Traveller has built in controls on maps. (The ones that matter, anyway. My planetary maps are still a mess.)

Second, and a much larger problem in theory but again, in execution, something that bothered me much more than the players, my last campaign fell prey to a bit of the ol' GMPC. I had one character who I put more thought into than strictly necessary, and had this whole "lost heir of an ancient empire" plot attached to him. In that specific case, it worked out okay because he spent most of his time getting kidnapped and rescued, one of the other (female) players really liked him, and tagging that plot to an NPC let me avoid playing favorites amongst the PCs. But still -- I'm avoiding world-saving plots in general this time around, just to bypass that whole issue.

Lastly, the largest actual problem with the previous game was that almost all of the plot revolved around two characters. The two active characters, with the most complete and hook-filled backstories, and the ones who really went around doing things, but still. I could have put more attention on the quieter characters, even if it would have been more work. Which is exactly what I'm doing this time around. Mongoose Traveller helps some; the two quietest characters both have hook-laden NPC relationships from character creation. (One of them is of the "secret mission" type, which honestly bugs the heck out of me but which I'll leave off complaining about for another day; it's something I can work with.)

The only problem with the way I've been handling things so far is that I've been leaving my two most active characters sub-plot and personal-villain-less, even though they do have those things in their backstories, because my attention has been on the quieter people. Which is okay, since they give themselves things to do on their own, but I'm still working on the details of the balance.

Anyhow. Should be a fun session tonight; I've done something mildly ridiculous with one of the planets they'll be hopping off to, so if they figure that out (and don't strangle me for it) I'll definitely have to post about it here. And I still don't think I've done justice to Trollsmyth's game, yet. But these are matters for another post. It's Friday! Go game!

How Much to Tell?

Sometimes I wonder just how much I should let the players in on my process. I tend to make up a lot of stuff on the spot. I've run whole session's pretty much off the top of my head -- both one shots and sessions in a continuing campaign. And I have a habit of just throwing things out into the ether, without a whole lot of explanation, and defining them only when they need an explanation or if the player's come up with something interesting.

And it works. I've run some good games this way. But I've gone back and forth on whether it's a good thing for my player's to know exactly how much I'm making stuff up on the spot. On the one hand, I want them to know that they can pretty much do whatever they want. I might need a minute to think, but I can handle a new direction, if it sparks their fancy.

But then I feel like talking about "oh, yeah, that was totally on the spot" undermines the sense that the world is real, and exists regardless of their actions. That's a sense that's largely created by making it true -- for instance, if and when they get back to Zalcrat and discover that a bunch of things have gone wrong since their last visit -- but there's a certain amount of sleight of hand involved, too.

Mostly I just never feel mysterious enough, as a GM. I was into the "evil secret plans! evil laugh!" thing for a while, and while these days I'm much happier responding to (and complicating) the weird hijinks my players get up to rather than thinking up ways to screw them over, I do kind of miss the mystique of it.

My Ideal Player Mix

Over the last couple of campaigns I've run, I've started putting together a theory about player types, and the mix of them that works for me. It's inspired by the Robin Laws theory, which I snagged a bunch of names from, but I've focused in on the specific types that interest me, and tweaked a couple of the definitions.

First, there's instigators. I need at least one in a four or five person group, and if they're capable of working together it's okay to have two. These are the schemers, people who stir things up because they're going after their own fun. They crash weddings, assassinate NPCs, and generally keep the game going and energy high. They don't have to be off-the-wall wacky; the Duke Marlow Burrin in my current Traveller game is one, and he's a fairly low key personality, who just happens to keep himself busy directing the team and finding new jobs for them to do.

Then there's character actors. I like to have one or two of them in a game; they're not as vital as an instigator, but they also don't have quite the same destructive potentional. Not nearly as highly charged as instigators, they won't just run off and do things because they seem interesting; they need to have a reason to do things. Luckily, they tend to be pretty good at supplying those reasons, and give me a lot of material to throw interesting events at them. They also tend to provide a lot of fuel for instigators, providing events and ideas for instigators to plan around and interfere with. Sigrid Halstead was the main character actor in Is This Fair; she wasn't always coming up with crazy schemes, like Blank, but she acted as a foil for his antics, and her own dependable motivations drove the heart of the game.

Another important type are lurkers. These might have a touch of the character actor in them, and often give me long backstories, and come up with strange goals for their characters to work towards. But at the table, they're not nearly as active as the first two types -- they tend to go along with whatever the instigators or character actors have planned. If they do have their own goals, they tend to let the instigators in the party come up with avenues to attack them. This makes them vital as a glue for a party, and my best games have all had at least one.

Then, finally, there's power gamers. They're in it for the numbers. Easy to motivate, easy to please, and as long as they don't badger me about how they "should" be allowed to use this or that power combination, easy to manage. I don't consider them vital to a game, but I don't mind having a couple along for the ride; they often use the game system to come up with creative strategies, and if they get along with the instigators can provide valuable "jam partners."

The important thing about my ideal player mix is that it is a mix. I've had trouble with games that were all instigators; they tend to get into fights over who's mad scheme gets enacted first. A too-lurker heavy game would have obvious difficulties; too many character actors, and there's just too much material for me to completely incorporate into the game, if it doesn't turn into one big talk-fest where no one ever does anything. A power gamer heavy game could work, but I don't think it'd be all that interesting; that type is best in a support role.

But an instigator, a couple of character actors, a lurker, and a power gamer make for a great game. Just the right mix of random chaos, story-building motivation, and "there for the ride" resources. I don't know just how universal this combination is, but it's worked for me.

Running A Few Short Campaigns

So here's the plan. Over the next to years, I'm going to run between four and six campaigns. One per semester (not counting the one I'm running now) and maybe one this summer and one the next, depending on whether the other GMs in my home group decide to run anything, and whether I need a break at that point. If one of the semester campaigns really takes off, and most of the group involved will still be at school the following semester, I'll consider extending it for another half a year or so. But barring that, I'm going to indulge my "gamer ADD" a little, since it's fairly convenient to do it this way right now.

I've got a lot of different games to run. I'm running Traveller now, so that's off the list, but sometime in the next two years I'd like to run (or play) Vampire or Mage, futz around with Encounter Critical, start up a OD&D/S&W megadungeon, and maybe even give 4e D&D another try. A couple of my players have been bugging me about running a sequel to my Arcana Evolved game, so that might get dropped into the lineup, and part of me wants to see what I can do with GURPS, now that I'm a little older and a little wiser. And that's just games I've already got -- nevermind the countless new obsessions I'll likely accumulate over the next two years.

I've spent a lot of time grousing about how I'd like to run long, epic campaigns, but really, I've had a lot of success with short, focused games. The players like the sense of accomplishment, and I like being able to move on to the next project. And right now is a pretty convenient time to be running a lot of short campaigns -- the semester structure encourages it, lots of turnover in the player base, fairly easy to find new possible players. So for now, that's what I plan to do.

Players Love to Fail

The Traveller game I ran Friday was a smashing success. Lots of mad hijinks, and everyone's jazzed to play next time. They even managed to pay off the costs of their first jump, and are well on their way to making their monthly mortgage payment. (I mentioned that the game really ought to be called "Space Accountant," because we've never had so much fun keeping track of money.) The interested will find detailed descriptions of the game at the campaign website.

The game reminded me of one of the first things I learned about game mastering; one of the "secrets to my success," if you will. Players love to fail. Not consistently, not exclusively, and not crushingly, but the most memorable sessions I've run were when the villain got away. (Closely followed by sessions where they finally got the villain that kept getting away, but the point still stands.)

The key is making failure interesting. Having the villain escape is a pretty interesting outcome for a combat, since it gives the players a fun, straightforward goal -- get the villain! (Barring bullshit GM shenanigans, but most decent GMs know not to set up invincible super-villains. That's not cool.) Generally, players will accept any failure that opens up an obvious avenue for adventure, or that makes their situation dramatically and entertainingly worse.

Mine weren't, for example, super pleased when Nina botched her Medic rolls and let an at the time nameless NPC die, but later they found out that the NPC had been the daughter of the Warden of the planet, prompting a small "oh, nice," moment. Later, when Alice Dice failed her streetwise roll to find out where some escaped prisoners were hiding out, she was told that, "Arr, there are some prisoners hanging out in the woods! They'll probably be eaten by dragons!" instead of a simple declaration of failure.

And there are the usual reasons why failure is a good addition to a campaign. Failure gives PCs a sense of consequence to their actions. Their successes are meaningful because they work for them, not because the GM hands them out. But players also like failing; it's not just that their successes are sweeter once they finally do achieve them. (Assuming they have some hope of success -- there's no faster way to destroy a players interest in the game than to convince them that the GM is arbitrarily out to get them.)

Sure, they'll groan and throw their hands up when the villain gets away, or one of their best NPC buddies dies, or their character gets eaten by a dragon -- but those are moments when they're involved in the game, and those are the sessions that they leave ready for the next one.

A Roleplayer's Mailing List

I got another crazy idea the other day, and I'm just getting around to implement it. It's an attempt to solve two simple but common problems: How do I find games to play in? And how to I find players for games I'm running?

I solved both problems by making friends with people who turned out to be interested in roleplaying, but especially here at college I wish there was an easier way to get in touch with people who share my hobby. The traditional solution would be to start a club, but I don't really have the time or the patience to deal with the college bureaucracy required to start and maintain such things. I might get dragged into one anyway, so we can reserve rooms and post flyers and such, but for now, all I really need is a way for potential players to identify themselves and potential GMs to contact them.

Thus, I've created a Google Group -- a mailing list. Even if it doesn't take off in the way I hope, it'll make it easier for me to manage recruitment for my games. And if it does succeed? If other people start using it to recruit for their games? Not only would it now be much easier for freshman and the curious to get into games (one reason I might end up creating a club anyway: advertising) the roleplaying community in the area would really be a community, aware of each other and what people are doing, rather than a bunch of little sub-groups that don't talk to each other much.

What's going on now works, so far as it goes. I've got players, most of the GMs I know have players. But things could be better, especially since one of my longer-term gaming goals is to get to know enough people to run an irregular player group dungeon crawl, and something like this would be great for scheduling sessions. At the very least, it'll be an interesting experiment