Lessons from a Campaign Ended

I ended Is This Foul? on Friday. The gang still got together and hung out, we just played Apples to Apples and 1000 Blank White Cards instead. (Note to those interested: Captain Kirk makes any 1000 Blank White Cards game 243% more awesome. Especially when people start thinking up cool ways to steal him.) We've got plans to get together next week, and I'll probably run a little megadungeon. But that campaign wasn't working.

The exact reasons behind that are probably beyond my powers of analysis. Mostly, it just never quite clicked. But I learned a couple things from it that I'm pretty sure will improve my chances with future campaigns. At the very least, it can't hurt.

Don't overload a short campaign. In a game with an indefinite time-span, sure, I can throw in as many plot threads as I want. The players will pick up on some, ignore others, and invent their own. They've got time. But in a game like this, with a definite end-date? My attempts at giving the players "choice" just ended up bogging them down with option-overload. They had too much stuff to get done, and too many looming loose ends. A short game doesn't need a whole lot of choice, because it's short. There's not as much chance of people getting bored, and they can get their self-determination kicks from figuring out how to handled whatever handful of problems I do present to them.

Don't mix old characters with new. This is an issue that's pretty specific to sequel games, and maybe even specific to the structure of this game in general. (More on that in a minute.) In hindsight, I should have had them all make new characters, and kept the old guard around as helpful-but-distant NPCs. Instead, I was running a party that included three well-connected, politically powerful masters-of-the-city with a lot of shared history, and a couple of people who had just kind of shown up. The latter two had their own reasons for being in the game, and interesting stuff to do on their own, but they didn't have a whole lot of reason to hang around or help out the first three. That caused a few problems.

Don't run two vastly different but interconnected parties. The idea of having one group of high-level city leaders and ambassadors, and another of their mid-level children and minions, sounded cool on paper. In practice, it created situations where one character would suddenly stop talking because his player's other, much more important character had just entered the room, and generally caused a lot of "who's talking now?" type confusion. Add to that the massive player/character knowledge problems that started when people's characters started to align themselves on opposite political sides (Which, I'll add, my players handled masterfully, but it's still something that's better to avoid when you can.) and this idea was just a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.

Don't run a game that I'm not completely sure I want to run. I'd mentioned the idea, and thought it sounded kind of cool. My players loved the last campaign, and were way excited about the idea of another like it, which is always awesome. I knew there were some neat political shenanigans I could try, and it'd be an opportunity to play around with some ideas I hadn't used before. But I wasn't sure I could handle the system. I worried that it wouldn't measure up to the last campaign. And I didn't know if this was really the game that I wanted to run. DMing is hard enough even when it's a game that I am consistently, 100% committed to. This campaign couldn't quite make that standard.

Edited the last paragraph for clarity.

Get Out of Jail Free Cards

One of the things I like about Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game is that it feels very deadly. That threat of death has a number of benefits to the game, not least that it keeps me focused and involved with the game.

But in objective terms, it's not deadly at all. We've been playing for half a year now, and no one's died. Honestly, it wouldn't be all that much fun if it death were a regular thing; beyond the usual fuss of coming up with a new character and re-integrating her into the ongoing campaign, one of the things I enjoy most about the game is learning about and interacting with the NPCs, and there wouldn't be much point to that if they were getting eaten or poisoned or whatever all the time.

Still, even despite that, the game feels ridiculously dangerous. Partly, this is just me as a player: I worry about stuff, even if it's not that huge of a risk. But more important is the fact that the main reason no one's died yet is what Trollsmyth calls "get of jail free" cards.

We've got a number of them in this game. Shields Shall Be Splintered is one; if I'm remembering correctly, the party's lost two shields so far, both times to nasty, horrible critters that probably would have killed us otherwise. The Table of Death and Dismemberment is another, and it's simultaneously comforting (having rolled on the table a few times myself, I know the odds of insta-death are actually pretty low) and terrifying (since Labyrinth Lord would otherwise be a dismemberment-free ruleset.) And, of course, there's more specific (and weirder) ones, like the potion that restores all hit points, neutralizes most poisons, cures most diseases. Then it changes your sex.

What all of these have in common is that they say, "next time you won't be so lucky." You won't have that shield, or that potion, or you won't roll as well on the table. The table in particular creates a moment of tension, as I wait for the DM to roll his dice -- and then another, one one of my allies hits the floor and I don't know yet whether he's just unconscious or completely dead.

And then, there's the fact that both the shield and the potion create decisions, which are to my mind the lifeblood of a good game. In the one case, deciding what weapon to wield gets a lot more interesting. In the other . . . as I discovered when it got used on Sunday, as if "death or sex change?" wasn't decision enough, since there is only the one, is "the first person to nearly die" really the criteria we should use to decide who gets it? Talk about roleplaying. I'm still kinda buzzed from that session.

Sort of a Death Frost Doom Review

Death Frost Doom has hit the top of Noble Knight Games "Most Popular" list, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess hasn't even officially announced it. There's some kind of Finnish legal business thing standing in the way. But that doesn't stop everyone else from talking about it.

I got my copy a couple of days ago, and I've put off writing anything because I don't really do the review thing, and more importantly, because Grognardia already wrote a review. It's good, and covers a lot of ground that I would have, and a lot that wouldn't have occurred to me.

But I still want to write something about it, because Death Frost Doom is darn cool. I mean seriously, I'm already happy I got the thing and I haven't even gotten a chance to run it. I'm leaning much more heavily towards running a location-based sandbox game in the near future now because it'd give me a chance to use it in an organic way. (I might run it as a standalone game for my summer group, but that's not too likely since I don't think they'd like it. More on that in a minute.)

So no exhaustive review from me, but I do have a couple of points to hit. First off, if you get it from Noble Knight Games, it comes with a comic book-style plastic slip case and a cardboard back. I got the Random Esoteric Creature Generator in the same shipment (also in a plastic sleeve) and the whole thing came wrapped up in a bunch of paper inside its box. If that's standard practice, I wouldn't worry too much about the books getting bent up or crushed or anything while shipping.

But on to more important things: this is a fun adventure to read. I don't have much experience with published modules; the few I've read and run were published by Wizards the Coast, and pretty dry in their style. This is not like that. There's a fair bit of snarky commentary (mostly concerning dumb things the players might do), and almost all of the areas are described in useful, engaging detail.

Really, though, the writing style is indicative of a larger feature of Death Frost Doom. This module has an attitude. James Maliszewski touched on this point towards the end of his review, but it bears repeating. This module has a very specific point of view, representative of its author's opinions on how gaming ought to be done. In particular, there's some pretty strong ideas in here on how players should behave -- there are some pretty clear signals to the players early on in that area, and it's rather unforgiving of stupid mistakes. (This is why I say I'm not likely to run it for my summer group. If your players think that horrible, horrible failure is funny, or would treat it as a learning experience, go ahead and run it, but be aware that it's also likely to frustrate people who aren't so flippant about dying in stupid ways or "accidentally" triggering small-scale apocalypses. No, I'm not kidding.)

I'm hesitant, though, to go on at length about the details of what that point of view actually is. Partly this is because I haven't run the thing yet, and I want I want to see how it actually plays before I make too many grand pronouncements about its "style." But largely this is because, like good fiction, it's already as a module a better incapsulation of it's viewpoint than any essay about it could be.

I know that doesn't give you a whole lot of information if you're trying to decide if you want to get it. All I can do to help you there is ask, "Are you interested in what James Edward Raggi IV has to say about gaming?" There's a clear enough connection between the ideas in this module and the stuff that he writes on his blog that you ought to be able to answer that.

The Real Problem with "Kids These Days"

Noisms has some interesting things to say about selling RPGs to kids today, commenting on some points Trollsmyth made on the same topic in a post on Mishlergate. They're both largely right, I think. I got into D&D with 3e when I was in middle school, but I was a kid who'd wanted to play D&D, and D&D specifically, since 4th grade. That's not usual. The group I play with at college is almost entirely composed of people who hadn't played RPGs at all before I met them, because even though they're all Grade-A RPGer material, they either never realized what RPGs actually are, or got intimidated out of trying them on their own. The industry doesn't reach a lot of potential players.

But that's partly reasonable of the industry. Though most of the people I knew in high school were perfectly able to spend the money to buy RPG books, most of them didn't. Why? Sometimes, it was because they'd rather spend that money on computer games or manga, both of which are much more expensive hobbies than RPGs if you're into them on the level that these people were.

But mostly, it was because they didn't see anything wrong with downloading PDFs illegally rather than buying books, and why spend $30 on something you could get for free? I can't generalize outside of the people I personally knew in high school (and know in college) but most of them didn't see PDFs as valuable. Either they didn't understand the work that went into them, or they didn't care. Likewise, they didn't understand the work that goes into distributing and marketing a product, so even if they did recognize that they were ripping someone off by downloading a PDF (or an mp3 file, or a movie, or a video game . . .) without paying for it, they just figured the main person they were hurting was "the company," which wasn't doing anything useful or properly compensating the artists to begin with.

So I can understand why a company wouldn't be interested in marketing their stuff to teenagers.

On the other hand, I won't deny that there's plenty of foot-shooting going on. The big issue is that companies are still making games for boys. But that's another post entirely.

(And note that, for the most part, I think my generation has a lot more good qualities than it's critics give us credit for. We vote, for one, and we've got pretty impressive volunteering and service numbers. But, for whatever reason, a lot of us do have this one obnoxious blind spot.)

The Peculiar Challenge of Play

I've been thinking a lot about the player side of things lately. This is unusual for me. Before Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game, I hadn't played in a regular game since before I started this blog. Short campaigns, the occasional one-shot, sure, but nothing like a long-term, meets-every-week game.

And heck, even before that, I've never done a whole lot of long term play. A couple of weeks ago that game became the longest game I've been in, period, and it became the longest game I've been in as a player a while ago. My group in high school always tended towards short games, and I was the GM as often as not, so my play experience is somewhat lacking in general, and deficient in the area of long-term play specifically. There are trade-offs to that -- I've run a bunch of different kinds of games -- but it's nice to get this experience now all the same.

And interesting, as it's an opportunity to learn about my playing style. First major item of note: playing is really different from GMing. I mean profoundly different.

Obvious, right? Different power level, different responsibilities, different rewards. And people tend to be one or the other, so that's a pretty powerful marker right there. But I'm thinking of one item in particular, that's at the core of all the other difference: as a player, I have only one in-put into the game.

I'm used to running NPCs, and even fairly complex ones, but a PC is an entirely different animal, and in ways that I'm only just now really appreciating. The surface qualities are pretty similar: I talk in-character. I make decisions in-character. I create a personality, appearance, backstory.

But when I'm a GM, and I create an NPC I turn out not to like, it's a pretty simple matter to kill him, ship him to another continent, or just plain forget about him. But as a player, I'm stuck with the decisions I make (to an extent depending on the GM, so if I end up with something really loathsome I can make an appeal) and those decisions take on a whole different kind of significance, because this character is the main, and in many ways only, way for me to interact with the game.

So that guides my decisions. If I want, I can make an NPC who's incurious, or obnoxiously argumentative, or sort of stupid. None of those are options for the only character I can play, because I'm curious about the world, need to stick with the team, and like to figure things out and try different ideas. My needs as a player drive the development of my character.

But that in itself is a fun sub-game, and one I don't get to play as a GM. In this game, my characters have started out fairly simple -- more playing piece than character, really, because I haven't figured out what would be interesting to play. I make decisions based on what I, as a player, think is interesting. But then that gives me something to work with. Once I find out that I like exploring dungeons and asking questions about their makers, I decide that my character is curious and likes history. Once I find out that the GM will let me get away with doing slightly crazy things as long as they're interesting -- and even reward me, occasionally, for taking risks like running off into the woods alone after the pixies who took our stuff -- I adjust my earlier idea of her being fairly cautious and make her, while not reckless, willing to take those leaps of faith that I'd discovered were so interesting.

Setting up a character before play and letting her run out like clockwork wouldn't be all that interesting to me. But exploring the tension between "this is what I want to do" and "this is what my character would do" fascinates me. It's a constant challenge, and a constant source of new ideas. The particulars of the rest of the group will encourage me to switch I a role I'd intended to play off of one party member over to another. An offhand comment and an NPC's reaction will spark an entire new dimension to a backstory. It's a very different kind of fun than GMing, but a very satisfying one.

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.

Quote of the Day

“I enjoy the challenge of building characters” and “I enjoy the challenge of playing (a character)” is the biggest division in the games hobby. It’s at the root of most other perceived differences new/old, tactical combat/roleplay, DM arbitration/Killer DM, crunch/fluff, “I walked uphill to the dungeon both ways!”/”gimmie fun on a silver platter”, 3d6 in order/point buy, character skill/player skill, etc/etc.

-- a comment from njharman of Troll and Flame on a "A Study of 2 different Playstyles" at Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer.

Guess What's For Sale at Noble Knight Games

Here's a hint: when people ask what you're playing, you get to shout "Death! Frost! Doom!" at them in the most dramatic voice you can muster.

That's why I'm getting it, anyway.

A Non-Obnoxious Angle on Theme in RPGs

Trollsmyth recently posted a discussion of theme in sandboxes which hits a lot of points I've been thinking about lately because the techniques he's discussing are all things he's demonstrating in the Labyrinth Lord game. Basically I've realized that theme doesn't have to be the province of railroaders and "art" gamers: the DM can set up the questions, the players can provide (or attempt to provide) the answers, and that's theme.

This is an idea that really works for me, since as an English major and a human being, theme is something I enjoy thinking about. Exploring a conceptual space set up by the DM is fun, satisfying, and keeps me involved in the game even when I'm not playing. I've never done a whole lot with theme in my own games, but now that I've got a framework for it I might have to change that policy.

A couple of observations to add: Part of what works about theme in Trollsmyth's game is how specific it is. (At least, the major one.) Are you for the gods and their empire, or against them? The history of the world suggests that this is the latest facet of the continuing struggle between empire and anarchy, which in turn is just a face of the cosmic conflict between law and chaos. But my characters don't interact with it on that level. They're aware of the cosmic side of things, and it may very well come up in play at some point, but it's not as important to them as how that empire might affect them and their families, their own personal relationships with the gods, and the relationships they've formed with people who have their own strong opinions on the issue.

Also, while that's the main, and most obvious theme in the game, there are at least a couple of smaller themes running around. One is trust: one of my characters has repeatedly had to decide who she can trust, and how far, as well as figuring out how much they trust her. Largely this is a result of the game being fairly serious about people and their motivations, rather than simply glossing over a lot of what adventure-type games often gloss over to get to said adventure. But I've noticed it as a thematic concern, because that's an interesting way to think about it. I doubt I'd have looked at it from that angle if there weren't some flashier thematic concerns running around, which given the fun I'm having thinking about it that way is a pretty spiffy side effect.

Scan of a Map

So I ran the megadungeon again last night, and Artemis drew this neat map. I've been hesitant to post scans of the main maps because (a) they're not all that interesting and (b) my players haven't seen most of them yet, but this handles both problems nicely.

Eight New Year's Resolutions: Sixth Months Later

Since it's half a year since I wrote up my New Year's gaming resolutions, I thought I'd go back and check on the ones I made. So far? Things are going well. I've gotten the important ones done, and made progress on everything else.

8. Pick up a copy (or two) of Fight On!
Done. Got #1 through #4. Once I've got a job and enough other things to pad out a Lulu order, I'll catch up again.

7. Post a little more regularly
This one was too vague to be a real resolution, but so far I'm happy in this area. I've switched to a MWF schedule and that seems to be working out fairly well. I did miss Friday, but for the most part the reduced schedule lets me get ahead enough to make up for my slacking off.

6. Train a new GM
Some progress here. I got boytoy to run a game, but I may have scared him off by getting frustrated with his dungeon. I also got some of one of my non-GM players to run a few NPCs in the Arcana Evolved, and that seems to have encouraged him.

5. Read a few Conan stories
Various factors (laziness, etc.) have kept me away from the library. But I should be able to get there in a few days.

4. Write up a megadungeon through 3 levels
I've almost finished level 1, so there's progress. On the other hand, I've discovered that I don't need to have it written through three levels to run it. My players have played enough Diablo 2 to have a healthy respect for stairs down.

3. Finish my Traveller Subsector
Another "sort of." I've got enough to play it, but it's not technically complete yet. This was supposed to be a summer project, but at the moment I'm working on other things.

2. Play in a campaign
Done! Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord campaign continues to rock.

1. Run a campaign
Also done. I've run two, in fact.

(Washington) D.C. Superheroes

So I spent the weekend in New York, and came back with another patch of roleplaying ideas. Last time I went I had some ideas about generating cities using random tables, and I gave a bit more thought to that idea. (Mostly about pregenerating businesses to drop in as necessary.) And I thought some more about hacking together a system to run a cyberpunk campaign. (Perhaps using Basic Roleplaying as a base?) But mostly I got this strange idea about running a superhero game set in Washington D.C., in the early 70s.

Setting a game in the 70s was an idea I'd had while surfing Wikipedia. Specifically, those pages where it lists all the events of importance from a particular year. This struck me as a great way to generate background and color for a historical game, and such a time period would have a number of advantages along those lines, even if I was making some tweaks in the timeline. The 70s in particular appeal to me as a decade because it's outside my personal experience but not remotely distant, the culture is distinctive and recognizable, and the mood contrasts with the current era's in interesting ways.

But I wasn't really sure what kind of game I would really want to run in a the 70s, until I remembered my long-standing interest in running a superheroes game. I put it off for a while because my group didn't seem into it and I wasn't sure what system I'd use, but now I've got enough superhero-obsessed players that I could wrangle the rest into it, and I've done enough research to decide that Mutants & Masterminds would be worth taking for a spin. Washington D.C. is the obvious choice for a home base, seeing as it's close by and I know it fairly well, and particularly the early 70s were an interesting time to be in the city. It also has some persistent institutional dysfunctions that would make it very attractive to crusader-types; this would be right around the dawn of (limited) home rule, and a natural time and place for such personalities to get involved.

After talking with my brother for a while, we decided that brand new superheroes with a street-level focus would be the way to go, and that works very well with both the city and the time period. The players would be one of the first real supergroups to start working together, and they'd take on the various gangs in charge of different parts of the city, all the while dealing with other territorial supers, a suspicious but embattled federal government, and the city government itself. There'd be politics and international goings on happening in the background, but the majority of the action would be based on fighting over control of turf and maybe solving a few of the city's problems along the way.

That Dang Supplement Treadmill

The other day, I realized why I've stopped playing 4e D&D. It has nothing to do with the system itself. The system itself is spiffy. Not perfect by a long shot, and I don't think I could run a really long, serious campaign with it, but there are a lot of games that fall into that category. Heck, I considered running it this summer. I like running it, my summer group likes playing it. If it weren't for the sequel they'd been bugging me to run, it should have been perfect.

Except for that dang supplement treadmill. The thing that really clinched that decision for me -- to run Arcana Evolved rather than 4e D&D -- was that I knew that a bunch of cool stuff had come up since the last time I ran 4e, and if I ran it again there would be a serious temptation to buy more of that cool stuff. This is true of Arcana Evolved as well, but to a lesser degree. Not as much stuff, and I've already got a ton of 3e books that I haven't gotten a chance to use yet.

And 4e D&D has the specific issue that using it rather than some other game would be largely about the cool stuff. If I wasn't going to be fiddling with weird party combinations or coming up with killer monster combos, there wouldn't be much point to playing it. I can enjoy that style of game, but it's not significantly superior to the kind of game where the focus is on something other than character tweaks (or where I can make that kind of thing up myself) and it's a lot more expensive.

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.

Neo-Classical Is Better For New Players

On Thursday, I'll be running a six or seven person foray into my megadungeon. (Or perhaps another adventure. Not likely, but I haven't ruled it out.) I considered using 4e, because it's been on my mind a lot lately and I've pegged it as a good system for one-shots, due to its consistency. Ultimately, I decided that Swords & Wizardry would handle the group size better, and I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce this gang to neo-classical play for a while anyway.

Another consideration is that we're going to have a brand new player at the table. (The younger sister of the boyfriend of an old regular from my high school group.) I've already sworn off introducing new people to 3.5 D&D. Despite my occasional frustrations with it, I like the system, but I've been playing it on and off for nearly seven years now. I've read all the core books, cover to cover, multiple times.

New players don't have that experience, and trying to introduce them to the idea of roleplaying and actually play the game while also explaining the system to them is an exercise in frustration, even if they are interested in its intricacies. More often, they aren't. The last few times I've tried to run 3.5 with people, it's turned into tedious frustration. Boytoy had decided roleplaying "wasn't his thing" partly because of his lack of interest in dealing with that system, which I'd originally used to introduce him to gaming.

4e isn't quite as convoluted as its predecessor, but it's still a decision heavy, rules-mastery focused system. I'm comfortable running it (and, presumably, playing it) but a large part of that comfort is based on that same experience I have with 3.5, and such systems generally.

For new players, it's just too much hardware. They don't need all that stuff to "get" roleplaying, and if they're not interested in it, it just gets in the way. If I suspected she'd be a rules junky herself, and we were starting up a proper campaign, I might consider it. But for a one-shot, and a player I know basically nothing about? Much better to go with a system that gets out of the players way and puts the heavy lifting on me, rather than the book.

Fun with Death & Doom

(And frost, too, come to think of it.)

Last Friday's session of Is This Foul? was pretty combat heavy. Beyond a little exploration and the usual scenery chewing, two fights took up almost the entire five hour period. In retrospect, I probably it was probably too combat laden; I set up said combats mostly because I was curious about how they'd play out, forgetting that at least one player has very little interest in combat, and the rest do fine without it.

On the whole, though, it worked out rather well. We had a guest with us, running an NPC, so the combat-focus was probably good for keeping her from getting too lost in references to backstory and the ever-more convoluted plot. And, of course, I had the always antic-prone Halden to keep things interesting, by nearly getting himself killed and attacking his brother (one of the PCs) at slow moments.

I was fairly pleased with how the fights themselves turned out, too. Both were interesting, and quite different from each other. The first involved three high speed "grave wolves" zipping around outside the radius of their (single) light source, based very loosely on the harrier class from Iron Heroes. Though well within their capabilities, it was tough enough to put Halden into serious danger, prompting some amusing attempts to protect him from his own idiocy by the more responsible members of the party.

The second was one of the most interesting pure combats in 3.5 that I've ever run. (I've run plenty of combats that were interesting for plot or character reasons, but it's unusual for me to engineer something that holds my attention just on tactics.) I set an ice golem, from Frostburn, in front of a stone door -- thus, a fairly likely candidate for the "vaults" they're looking for in the tunnels they were exploring -- and the PCs on a ledge across the ice cave from it. Normally, this critter is CR 9, but I cranked up its HD into the territory where CR calculations for such things get a little wonky. Suffice to say, it was well out of their league, even with five level 10 PCs and a level 13 NPC along for the ride.

Luckily, it didn't take them long to figure that out. Kheriim, their mage blade, summoned a fire elemental, and when it smashed that in one hit they became very cautious about engaging it directly. Which was smart, because a few of the lower-hp characters could have very well died after but a single lucky hit, and even Ax (level 13 and a warmain to boot) could only handle a few rounds next to it.

Instead, they figured out a bunch of ways to fight it without getting close to it. Tricks with runes, the aforementioned fire elementals, a dancing-sword type spell, alchemist's fire, and running away really fast were the order of the day. There was also some talk about pulling it away from the door long enough to try to get through it, though they were lucky enough to take it out just as they'd decided to pull back and regroup. In short, they sat down and started thinking, a much better result than I've ever gotten out of all of the "level appropriate" fights I've thrown at them over the years.

Neoclassical Roleplaying Games

So there's a new term running around, originally coined by Robertson Games, that attempts to describe the retro-clones: Neoclassical roleplaying games. The idea being that since OD&D and Basic are commonly called "Classic" D&D, and games released around that era have also picked up the term, a new, reimagined version would then logically be called "Neoclassical." And, as Trollsmyth points out, it accurately conveys the fact that, though they do draw upon older styles, these are new games, in a new era:

Yes! That is perfect, since most of us aren't exactly playing these games the same way they were back when. It's a reinvention, a new style, based on studying those games, tweaking them, exploring what those structures and styles mean.

Thus, it's a term that I can use without feeling faintly ridiculous. I like "old school," but I tend to avoid using it to describe things I'm doing. (You'll note that I have an "old school" tag, but that's mainly to make sure all my Swords & Wizardry stuff gets binned in "Legacy D&D" on RPGBN.) Neoclassical fits the kinds of games I've been getting into lately much better: I'm drawing on an earlier era for inspiration, without having been part of it myself.

Extra-Special Unnecessary Campaign Planning Time

So right now I'm in two regular games (playing in one, running the other), about to start a third, and running a fourth on an occasional basis. (It's awesome. Time-consuming, but awesome.) Naturally, my thoughts have turned, not to the game that I'll be restarting when school begins again, but to the game after that. Speculation at this point is useless, because by the time that game actually rolls around, I'll have a different set of immediate interests, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

Right now, the two top contenders are some kind of World of Darkness thing, and an exploration-based Swords & Wizardry game. They've both been on the list for a while, and the group at college has expressed a certain amount of interest in both ideas.

The main thing that's got me thinking about World of Darkness (probably Mage, maybe Vampire, and I still haven't ruled out Werewolf) is that college would be a pretty convenient time to run something like that. My home group hasn't expressed a whole lot of interest in it, and so far college remains (mostly) free of the scheduling conflicts that would make an exploration-based game more attractive. I'm fairly confident in my group's ability to maintain enough cohesiveness to run the kind of campaign that the WoD books encourage.

On the other hand . . . the Arcana Evolved game I'm running now is very plot-based. (By design, and demand.) The Traveller game has been fairly plot-based, and will only continue to get more so. I'm starting to get sick of that kind of game; at the very least, the volume of information to keep track of is a bit daunting. It might be nice to try something different for a while. A switch from working out what all the NPCs are plotting to designing locations would do the trick nicely.

Of course, whenever location-based gaming pops up as a possibility, I start thinking about West Marches, and the multi-party style. One idea that's been bouncing around in my head today would be to have one local pool of players, who play every week or so in-person, and another who play online, via chat. I'm not sure if it'd really be a great idea to divide up the pool like that, and I'm not sure just how much success I'd be able to have in recruiting for the chat side of things, but the idea is there. It would, at the least, be an interesting experiment.

The Case For World Mastery

I'm having fun running Is This Foul? I've got a good handle on my notes and prep, the players are contributing, and there's plenty at-the-table banter so the actual sessions are always a good time. I don't want to create the impression that I'm not having fun.

But like most things do, it's gotten me thinking. See, 3e D&D, and Arcana Evolved after its example, has a big emphasis on rules mastery. Pretty much everyone who's played it knows that: there's a lot of options, and some of them are better than others. It's an intentional part of the game's design. So I shouldn't be surprised when it takes over five hours to build two characters. Nor should I be surprised when the first thing most of the players do, when presented with a problem, is to start going through the book.

It's not that these things are bad. Mastery is fun. Learning a system, figuring out how to exploit it and the optimal solutions, are things I enjoy, too. More importantly, getting better at something is all kinds of fun. I get that.

But these days, this isn't the only D&D I know. I'm also playing in a (hacked) game of Labyrinth Lord, and I've been running a bit of Swords & Wizardry here and there, when the opportunity strikes.

Those games have mastery, too. A different kind of mastery, but there's still a lot to learn and get better at, and a lot that players can do to improve and expand their control over the game world. (Because that's fundamentally what "rules mastery" rewards you with: the ability to alter the game world more significantly and determine outcomes more efficiently.) A big part of what makes that ever-present threat of death satisfying, rather than frustrating, is it's something I can learn how to deal with. I may not be great at it now, but every time I deal with (or fail to deal with) a challenge, I learn something.

I've been growing to prefer world mastery to rules mastery. (Or perhaps inductive mastery to deductive mastery? One involves introducing fundamentally novel ideas to a pre-defined (but malleable) system, the other requires searching for pre-existing but undiscovered solutions within a rigorously defined (and perhaps, but not always, malleable) system.) For one thing, exercising rules mastery requires breaking immersion, and immersion is, I'm discovering, kind of a big deal for me. I'd much rather base my decisions on purely in-world data, when at all possible; the conditions of the environment, my character's personality, the effect an action might have on various NPCs, and other such factors are much more interesting to me than which feats I've got.

Likewise, as a Dungeon Master, I'd rather have my players pay attention to me than the rules. A bit selfish, but true: part of why the "pause to look up something in the book" response bugs me is simple jealousy. But I also prefer to reward the kinds of behavior involved in world mastery over the behavior required for rules mastery. I largely don't care how much time a player spends outside of game reading the rulebooks and thinking up new builds, but it very much matters to me how involved they are with the world.

Most importantly, world mastery, and games that emphasize it, are much easier for the new players I've introduced to roleplaying to get the hang of. The few people I've tried to introduce 3.5 D&D to since high school have hated it; there's a definite sense that you'll make the wrong choices, and it's hard to figure out just what the right choices are without a fairly good grasp of the system. (Especially in feats. Skills and classes are fairly descriptive, but feats suffer from excessive proliferation and a certain arcaneness in their effects and phrasing.) By contrast, they love Swords & Wizardry, and it didn't take them long to realize that equipment list is there to facilitate MacGuyver-like shenanigans.

Adventures Support Play

Now here's an idea for how a big company like Wizards of the Coast could make money off of people playing the game. In short: set up a big ol' database, and let users fill the database full of stuff. Characters, adventures, maps, encounters, that kind of thing. Other people rate, rinse, repeat.

I'm not sure it can be done. Not without the rating system turning into a morass of greifing, anyway. (Anyone played City of Heroes lately?) But if it can be done . . .

Heck, if access to the database was based on a subscription, then you could send micropayments back to people whenever someone downloaded their stuff. Even if all it could amount to was getting that subscription for free, it'd be a pretty good incentive for people to polish up their home adventures and send them in.

But pie-in-the-sky figuring like this is beside the point. What's important about that post is that it's another person who's come to the conclusion that the best way to build an industry off of supporting play is to publish adventures.

Most of the current industry out there has pretty obviously decided that publishing adventures isn't worth the time or the money. And they're probably right -- in the short term. In the long term? Adventures do a lot of things to grow the player base that can't really be done any other way.

The Ever-Present Threat of Death

Despite grim warnings to the contrary, we haven't yet lost a player character or an NPC henchman on the field of battle in Trollsmyth's game. There've been a couple of close calls, and one roll on the table of death and dismemberment, but so far all the traps we've triggered have rolled low on damage or been of the incapacitating variety, the wandering monster rolls have been fairly favorable, and the foes we have faced we've managed to trick, run away from, or defeat.

We've been lucky, and I'm aware that luck won't hold. The game feels very, very dangerous. Monsters do (at least) 1d6 points of damage, and at least one of the NPCs has just 6 hit points. Even my character, with 10, is just a couple of bad rolls away from death herself. And while I know Trollsmyth isn't going out of his way to try to kill us, that's usually because he's up to something worse.

Which is awesome. I've played in (and run) enough games where I was never afraid that a character would die to know that it completely changes the tenor of the game, and as far as I'm concerned, it's much better this way.

For one, I'm never bored in combat. I tend to lose interest in games where you're mostly just trying to figure out how you take down that monster, especially when it goes on for a while. In Labyrinth Lord, combat is ten minutes of terror. Most especially in that moment when I see that the monster has hit and done some serious damage, and I flip over to the table to see just what might be about to happen to my character, or to that cleric who I've gotten rather attached to over the past couple of months.

Secondly, it gets my brain going. It's not enough to set up what my character can do in combat and then wonder about what I'm going to do on my turn. I have to be thinking all the time. Where are the monsters and traps likely to be? Is there any way I can avoid running into them? Can I talk my way out of this fight? Is there any way I can distract a couple of them, maybe even the odds? What else is around that I could use rather than go head-to-head with this monster? And, above all else: when should I decide to run?

Sometimes, there's no way around it. I'm stuck in a room with two animated statues and not much else, and if there's a way to avoid crossing blows I'm just not seeing it. But even then, there's things I can do to make a messy death somewhat less probable. Having had the forethought to hire some help goes a long way, and occasionally I can think up some kind of stunt or trick to help during combat. At the very least, keeping out of fights when I can means I'm better able to handle the fights I can't avoid.

And that threat of deadliness means that I don't just think about the game when I'm not playing. I worry. I worry about whether or not my character's going to make it through the next session, about what might be around that next door that I haven't explored yet, and particularly about if and when I'm going to get those NPC henchmen killed. Now, partly that's just the kind of player I am (and that's definitely the reason that I think worrying about imaginary people is fun) but the ever-present threat of death (and doom) does increase the tension involved in that kind of investment, and makes it significantly more engaging.

Despite the occasional nerve that it wracks, I like knowing that if and when I slip up, or my luck finally runs out, bad things will happen. It's fun to work out ways to keep them from happening, and rewarding when I do. (And when I don't, well, dealing with that will be fun too.) It's got me thinking about ways to put a little of that sense into my own games. I've always felt vaguely that I pulled my punches too much when it came to character death, and now I've got some concrete reasons why that sense of danger can be a good thing.

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.

Campaign Toolkits

In between building dungeons, doing character work and planning for Is This Foul? I've been fiddling a bit with an all psionics 3.5 setting. Nothing terribly serious, mind; I have enough games that I'd rather run than 3.5 that it won't see play for a while, if at all. (I am considering converting it to Swords & Wizardry, but that's a whole 'nother ball game.) It's just a fun side-activity when I get bored with my regular games.

In the process, I dug out Sandstorm, one of my favorite 3rd edition supplements. I've never been able to use it as extensively as I'd like, but bits and pieces have found their way into my games over the years. Mostly, I like reading it, and getting ideas.

It's representative of the type of sourcebook that I love the best. I don't have much use for things like Complete Divine or Arcane Power. Player sourcebooks aren't helpful to me as a GM or interesting to me as a player. And while I enjoyed reading Eberron (and still wouldn't mind playing in a game someday) there's generally so much that I rip out of a setting in the process of getting it to conform to my whims that it makes more sense to just whip up a setting from scratch, or something close to it.

Sandstorm has a lot of the obligatory feat and prestige class type crunch endemic to books of that period, and it implies a fair amount of setting detail. But it's all very modular. There are a lot of things that logically fit if you used them all in one game, but no rules as to how they interrelate, no politics, geography, or star NPCs. What it does have is a lot of crunch for building desert-ready characters, some great monsters with intriguing world and plot hooks attached, and a lot of detailed information on desert environments and dungeons. It's a toolbox for building a campaign.

That's what I want out of a sourcebook. Game-focused, researched information. Spells, classes, and monsters that suggest villains and organizations, rather than handing them to me ready made. If that material is interconnected by a theme and sub-themes -- the environment of the desert, its races and their cultures, and the lost civilizations responsible for some of its monsters and traditions -- all the better.

These days, I'm more interested in systems that don't suggest or require as many sourcebooks as does 3rd. But when I go back to it, those are the books I get the most use out of. The environment books, Deities and Demigods, the alternate power sources, The Book of Vile Darkness. And I find that the best parts -- the desert terrain information in Sandstorm, or the classification of different kinds of pantheons in Deities and Demigods, are fundamentally system neutral. I can use them for Swords & Wizardry or 4th edition or even Traveller or Vampire just as easily as I can for 3rd edition.

Round-Robin Worldbuilding

So on Saturday we finished doing set-up for the summer game. (Minus character creation for a player who was in the original game but may or may not be in this one; I'm going to see about getting him to come over and do that sometime this week.) We even set up a campaign blog, complete with title: Is This Foul? Is It?

There was a bit of grumbling from some of the players, since no actual roleplaying occurred during the session, but I was fairly pleased with how it went. We have a decent idea of a starting point for next week's session, and a good level of player excitement and involvement. (Maggienotmegan wrote up everything that's currently on the blog, with no input from me! Go player involvement! I need to come up with a good reward scheme for that kind of thing, whether it's XP, "brownie points," or just more in-game story stuff.)

Most importantly, I've now got a surprisingly good idea of what the local area looks like, thanks to a neat trick I pulled. I worked out all the major locations, and wrote each one's name at the top of a sheet of notebook paper, along with few brief details. Then I passed out one for each of the players, and they each added a detail to theirs and passed it to the next player. This continued until each page was filled. As I told them, I won't use everything they listed (though that was mostly to spur creativity by keeping them from worrying about messing up the setting) but I've got a decent starting point.

And it was a lot of fun. The players enjoyed it, and it built investment in the world and the game. There's now a number of little details scattered about the setting that they'll enjoy interacting with, because they're responsible for them. (Like fire toads!) I enjoyed it, both because I participated to keep the ideas going and because it gave me a lot less work to do.

I liked it so much that I might try it again. It strikes me as a good session warm-up activity, and I've got a number of places that might benefit from the same manner of detailing. The main overland map, the nine cities, and even the five cantons of Xanadu itself would all take well to the technique.

Industry, Armor, and Divine Bards

A couple of things have popped up in blogland lately that deserve a response of some kind, but that I haven't been able to work up a full post for. So I figured I'd do the blog o' links thing, and hit them all at once.

Where the Pros Are Trollsmyth posted a very thoughtful response to my post on industrial irrelevance, pointing out that there are some real benefits to having a healthy industry supporting a hobby, but that the one we have right now isn't quite doing what we need it to, and may even be actively detrimental to play. I'm still not sure how to square the issues he brings up here. Is there a way for industry to remain useful and still make money? The only response I've been able to come up with is that this seems to be something the Old School Renaissance (or parts of it, at least) is trying to answer. It's got it's own specific variation (Is what happened to TSR an inevitable result of selling D&D and D&D supplements, or were there some specific mistakes that, once identified, we can avoid?) but if there's a general answer to that question, that's one obvious place to look for it.

The Failure of the Industry It's not exactly a response since it's really a continuation of what he's been saying for a while, but James Raggi mentioned my post in one of his own, and gave his own answer to what the industry can do to enable play: make adventures. I've never had much use for published adventures, but now that I've got a little more experience with site-based gameplay, I'm beginning to see how they could be useful in an otherwise homebrewed campaign, and he makes some excellent points in that regard. (I particularly like the idea of adventures as models for design and as touchstones for discussion.)

The Foundations of Medieval Europe and The Warrior's Kit in Medieval Europe They're what they sound like: Trollsmyth explains medieval history for the gaming inclined. Pretty anyone who runs D&D-like games should have at least a passing familiarity with the topic, if only so you know what you're ignoring. So go read them.

D&D Armor and Weapon Weights Somewhat less helpful, but entertaining, godlesspaladin rants about armor and weapon weights and how they're all screwy in various D&D editions. He completely misses the point (naturally) but the post is worth a look for the illustrations and the reenactment video. We have a fairly good idea of how fighting in the middle ages worked because the guys doing it wrote it down, and it's not quite how it is in the movies. (It's much, much faster. Less fencing, more "stab the other guy before he stabs you.")

The 4e Divine Bard, Divine Bard Character Sheet, Divine Bard Fluff, and Divine Bard Additions MacGuffin has a very interesting project going on in using alternate power sources for classes. Unfortunately, I'm of limited use in critiquing it due to my relative unfamiliarity with the latest-and-greatest as far as 4e goes. Those of you with more experience with the system, or just an eye for game design, should head on over and have a look.

Beware the Bat!

The second session of my boyfriend's Mayan/Aztec/Ghost Conquistador dungeon ended poorly for my characters. But not for the bat.

We were using Google Voice Chat, since it's summer break and we live in different parts of the state, and aside from a few technical problems that aspect of it worked fairly well. It's not as immersive as text chat, and I could see it quickly getting very confusing with more than two people, but particularly when the DM needs the occasional explanation of what dice to use for an attack roll, it's nice to have the speed of voice.

The game served as a lesson, and a good one for a new DM to learn: it's the players responsibility to get out of dodge when danger threatens, but it's also important for the DM to understand and telegraph that danger. He didn't quite realize how tough the monster was, and so he described it in ways that made it sound less fearsome than it was; much smaller than it should have been, for one. But at the same time, I was knowlingly flirting with danger: I had one PC and a henchmen going up against what I thought was a CL 3 or 4 critter. So I'm not annoyed about it (all my protestations and threats to the contrary), it's just a good lesson. For both of us.

Pausing to Appreciate the Game

I haven't been writing much about Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game, even though it's been (pretty much) weekly since late January, and we've had thirteen sessions to date. Mostly this is because, as a player, I'm not so much in the analytical mode that then causes me to write blog posts as I am when I GM, so discussion of the game where I'm a player gets crowded out by my plans for and reactions to whatever game I'm running at the time. But it's too bad, because that game has been blowing my mind on a regular basis.

First off, it introduced me to dungeons. Shortly therafter, I realized that I'm not a drama/actor player (in Robin Laws' player types, later co-opted by the 3rd edition DMG II and 4e DMG), as I'd always assumed since those are the players I get along with best as a GM. Instead, I'm pretty firmly in the explorer category. Which is kind of the opposite of how I am as a GM; I don't usually have the patience for world detail, and it's been ages since I put together a proper homebrew. But I used to love books like Dinotopia, non-fiction about imaginary places, and gaming can scratch exactly that itch.

Now, I'm finding out about the joys of discovering a character throuh play. Thirteen sessions is a long campaign for me, especially as a player. My record on the stranger side of the screen is 22, and I'd be surprised if, before the Labyrinth Lord game, I'd played in a campaign half that long. My first group had a lot of campaign turnover, and I've yet to establish a long-term group since then. While I enjoy the novelty of short campaigns, I now have a much better grasp on what I'd been missing. Figuring out details about a character (and dwarves in general, in this case) in response to the demands of play is fun, and not really practicle in a short game. Likewise, I'm enjoying the process of negotiating between what I think would be fun and "what my character would do."

Most importantly, I'm starting to understand this thing some call "immersion." I've always been aware of it in general terms, but I'm usually too busy responding to three different player queries at once to really get in to. (I wrote a short story once, but that was based on observing my players more than my own experience.) When I do play, I'm usually equally distracted, whether by books or my own weird conspiracy theories. ("Snakes took our hyperdrive!") 

But lately, I really have been getting lost in a fantasy world for a couple of hours a week. Some of it's the length of time I've been playing; I've gotten used to my character and the world and the genral feel of the game. It's also mostly been solo, which might have something to do with it. And a large part of the experience is simply due to the format of online chat. Sure, it's missing that at-the-table social experience, but it's also missing a lot of the distractions of the table, and I'm already pretty well trained to get absorbed into worlds of text.

Still, though it goes contrary to my usual inclination, dissecting the experience isn't as important as the fact that I'm having more fun as a player than I have in years. That's something worth posting about.

A Rough Homecoming

So on Friday we did character creation for the Is This Fair sequel that we're playing this summer. Or, I should say, started character creation. Spent five hours and no one's done.

Now, part of that is that the characters the players are making are fairly complex. We're using Arcana Evolved plus a couple skill tweaks from Iron Heroes and items from the Magic Item Compendium, and everyone's running one 10th level character and one 20th level character. About half the group already has a lower level version of their 20th done, but even if the idea's cooked up they've still got all the numbers and fiddling to do. One guy finished his 20th level while on site, but everyone else is still partway through one or both characters; those without pre-existing characters from the last game haven't even started their 10th levels.

Some of the player's really dig the complexity. That's why I decided on 20th level in the first place: one or two of them have been bugging me to run "epic" for a while. Others get kind of lost. They're not as experienced with the system, and what's fairly and simple and fun for the ones into rules-tweakery (and I go into that category; I'm not much of an optimizer but I do enjoy building characters) becomes an ordeal.

Which is what it was. Five hours, and we still weren't halfway done. I've been running Traveller and Swords & Wizardry for the past year, and playing Labyrinth Lord, and it kind of blew my mind. I'd forgetten how much of a pain it can be, wrangling all the skills and feats and everything. Until now, I hadn't fully appreciated just how fast early edition D&D is, compared to 3e. And while Traveller's not quite that fast, at least it's fun, and no one gets lost. You're discovering your character as it goes along, and all the decisions are fairly simple and come one at a time. There's no math, no calculation, no flipping through books and figuring out how much all your magic items cost.

The worst part, though, is that we spent those five hours figuring out stuff I fundamentally don't care about. Fancy combat tricks, largely. Arcana Evolved is not nearly so bad about that as 3.5 D&D proper, and not all of it was combat, but even in the non-combat area, there's a level of calculated codification that, I've realize, I neither want nor need.

What I care about, with these characters, is where they're from and what they're doing in Xanadu. I care about their goals, their enemies, and (for some of them) how they feel about their parents. I care about what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they like doing and what they'd rather avoid. I don't need to know all the situations where they get a +1 bonus to whatever to know any of that, but that's what we spent those five hours figuring out.

I still feel pretty fondly towards the system, and I'm sure things will get better once I'm actually running it, once we can focus on the things that matter and I'm back to running the system I know better than anything. (Though that's another thing that bugged me on Friday. I don't know the system as well as I once did, and what's easily handled if you know it well isn't necessarily so forgiving to someone who's knowledge is a little rusty.) And if we were starting out at 1st level, or somewhere in that neighborhood, I doubt I'd mind at all. But this? This has me just about ready to swear off the high-powered end of the game, at least as a starting point. I doubt the compensations will be worth the trouble.

Six Traveller Campaign and Adventure Ideas

It's tough to plan a Traveller campaign concept ahead of time. Character creation isn't completely random, but it's close enough that any given idea might easily run aground on an ill-fate dice roll. Luckily, that same character creation will usually give you more than enough ideas to hang a campaign on. Mine's been largely shaped by the one player who stuck a 12 in Social Status and then went on to get three boosts to the attribute when he mustered out of Noble. My original ideas about them being an unruly crew of rogue's and scoundrels quickly moved over in favor of this Duke Marlow Burrin's political aspirations, and the campaign's been better for it.

That said, it does help to have some idea of the shape of the campaign, even if it's conceived at the table during character creation. (And with help from the players; incorporating their input can make them fiercely loyal to the game.) The Mongoose Traveller book has a few campaign ideas to start with, but here's a few more specific ideas to help get you going:

The Love Boat: The characters are of the mostly respectable sort, the players enjoy a little interpersonal intrigue, and the ship's outfitted for a pleasure cruise. Pick up passengers, take them interesting places, and inevitably get dragged into their weird personal problems. One week the crew gets hired to find evidence of adultery, the next, they're outrunning bounty hunters and learning too-late about a passenger's criminal past.

The Voyager Knock-Off: Mis-jumps are a hazard in any game, and if you want a short-ish campaign with a set end point, a really bad mis-jump makes a good option. Stranded in an unknown part of space, all the characters want to do is get home, but they're broke. Adventure (and hilarity) ensues. You might work with each player to come up with a specific reason why everyone wants to get home now (Mary Jane will marry another man! The family farm will be repossessed!) or you can leave open the idea that they'll decide this part of space isn't so bad, and settle down into a comfortable existence as traders or freelancers. (And, simultaneously, a more long-term campaign.) The best part of a game like this is it gives you an excuse to throw in a lot of really strange stuff, to keep up the idea that the gang is far from home.

Space Ship Rockstar: This works just as well in space as it does with vampires. The crew is a band (famous or not) "on tour," hopping from planet to planet and holding concerts as they go. There's a couple of different approaches that would make this adventure-worthy. The band could be the Scooby Doo type, always getting involved in trouble on the way to, from, and at the venue. Or the game could focus on the trouble they go through to get paid: all those backwoods planets always have something that's got to get fixed before they'll have the promised cash on hand. Perhaps the most promising option is that the band is cover for another activity, whether it's bounty hunting, trouble-shooting, or smuggling.

Home, Sweet Home: There's no reason your players have to be the itinerant wanderers with a spaceship. Instead, they could be in charge of a space station themselves. Every week, they deal with a different batch of weirdos coming through, causing problems for quiet folks. This also gives them the opportunity to get a lot more involved with whatever the local problems are. Other variations on this option include all the usual possibilities of an urban campaign, (detectives, local politicians, or plain old adventuresome trouble-starters) set in a city that's a major hub of space-trade to allow for lots of Traveller goodness, or even a wilderness exploration game, where the players have been tasked with mapping and taming a wild planet.

The Lost Civilization: Whether it's alien or ancient human, exploring the ruins of another time spread across a sector or subsector makes for a good unifying hook for an exploration and study-based game. They might have been tasked with it by a higher authority, or simply gotten curious; either way, an interlocking series of ruins, with plenty of mysteries to uncover and solve, can be very engaging to a certain type of player. This one plays pretty well with a lot of other more general concepts, too; just drop in a ruin every so often, in between their other adventures.

Big Game Hunter: Travel to distant planets, track down the most exciting local wildlife, and kill it. (Or escort some rich nobles with plans for the same.) Another one that could fit inside a regular campaign without much difficulty, this one could work as a campaign on its own if the players like the idea of developing reputations as some of the best and most dangerous hunters in the galaxy. Beyond just coming up with new and more interesting critters, there's a number of variations that would make this kind of mission interesting: perhaps the creatures are protected by the Imperium for some reason, worshipped by the locals, or more valuable alive than dead. The crew might be tasked with recording the creature's rarely heard cry before they bag it, or have to discover the fates of the last group of fools to go after it. This would also be fun to reverse: perhaps the characters are a far-future version of Greenpeace, out to stop hunters (and other sorts of interplanetary despoilers) by any means necessary.

The Industry is Irrelevant

It occurred to me Tuesday night (late Tuesday night) that the roleplaying industry--as distinct from the hobby--is supported primarily by people who aren't playing. Not that they aren't playing at all, but that it's their non-play, outside of game activities are the ones that drive their purchases, rather than their actual at-the-table time.

I'm a prime example. I game a lot. I've currently got one game active (Trollsmyth's Labryinth Lord game), another on hiatus (my Mongoose Traveller game), a third about to start (Arcana Evolved Is This Fair? sequel), and then the dungeoneering with the boyfriend that will soon be getting more regular. I've also got a shelf full of various roleplaying systems and supplements. I'm obviously devoted to the hobby and the industry.

But the two don't mix much. Trollsmyth's game uses one book, Labyrinth Lord, plus his foul and unhinged decrees house rules. The Traveller game is the same deal. Much as I like the Mongoose Traveller core book, I have no interest in or use for any of the supplements, nor do my players. Dungeoneering? Swords & Wizardry. I've used a little material from Fight On! but any major modifications will likely be entirely of my own design. The Arcana Evolved game will likely use a few books from my collection, as the game it's based on did, but that's mostly because I have the books and want to use them. There's nothing I would have gone out and bought for the game.

I like reading roleplaying books. I like trying new systems. I like fiddling with things and building settings and characters and places. (That's how the Traveller game got started: I was bored and wanted to make a subsector. Then, hey, if I was going to make a subsector, why not go ahead and run a game?) It's a peculiar and fortunate feature of the hobby that there are so many peripheral activities to enjoy that aren't play, particularly when play can be so tough to arrange. I know those kinds of "rainy day" activities are a big part of what's kept me interested in roleplaying over the years.

But I don't need them to play. And that's the main thing that I'm here to do. And I don't need the industry to do that. I appreciate having it around, surely. But I don't need it.

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.

The Traveller Sandbox Starts to Self-Organize

One of the players in the Mongoose Traveller game has finally designed his own ship. I was waiting for this to happen: usually in any given group there's at least someone who likes to do a little building and tweaking. And the ship design rules in Traveller pretty much beg to be used by just such an enterprising player, because while there's a pretty extensive set of pre-made ships (enough to get up and start the campaign without stopping to design your own) players tend to have their own ideas about what's "optimal."

I encourage players to do stuff like this. Every game of serious length that I've run they've ended up making something. I've had players design personal hideouts, come up with new races, research new spells, stat up loyal follwers, and create new character classes. It helps put a personal stamp on a campaign, and encourages the players to invest in the game and the world.

In this case, it seems to be a sign that the campaign is maturing -- and not just in the usual way, where the players get used to each other and their character settle into a comfortable dynamic. The players have started to take control of the campaign themselves; I'm no longer having the trouble I did a couple sessions back where every session was a struggle to constantly generate new happenings. They're doing things now: making plans, coming up with theories, and having adventures.

It's gratifying, because it's a sign that my experiment in a more sandbox-y style of campaign is paying off. I've never been much of a campaign writing kind of a referee, but I do usually start a game with some idea of an overarching storyline; a villain or two at the very least. This time, though, I didn't have anything immediately obvious going into it, and I knew that Mongoose Traveller was built for a more world-oriented style of play, so I decided to go with it. Things were rough for a while, but now I'm starting to see the real appeal of sandbox style play: it's fascinating to see all those separate plot threads start to knit together into something coherent.

Thus, the ship. The player in question has always had a vague idea of what kinds of goals his character, Duke Marlow Burrin, had in mind. (To challenge KordCorp's control over the subsector.) But now that the campaign is coalescing into a more recognizable form, he has a much better idea of how specifically he's going to achieve those goals, and the ship ties into that. And maybe more importantly, he and the rest of the gang seem to be getting much more attached to their characters, and thus more willing to invest in the world. It's a very encouraging sign.

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.

Brand New DM's Sunken Ship Dungeon

My boyfriend has put up a post on his own blog (which is otherwise mostly non-gaming) about his experiments in dungeon design and some notes on his sunken ship dungeon. Of particular interest are the pictures he's posted of the part of his first dungeon that I've explored, and the reference material he's using to design the layout of the ship.

Game Master Nostalgia

Watching my boyfriend get into D&D and DMing has brought on some powerful waves of nostalgia. He's been getting all excited about his latest idea for a dungeon, a Napoleonic sailing ship that sunk on its way back from Egypt with mysterious cargo aboard, and it's been fun seeing him research it and plan it out and get to work. It reminds me of my own early game mastering, before I started worrying about whether or not I was "doing it wrong," and just played the game.

I'll be the first to admit, those early games weren't perfect, and I made a lot of mistakes on issues that these days I can handle without a thought. And he's been running into trouble on the skill side, too; he made his rooms way to complicated at one point, which caused some frustration on both our parts when it came into play. But there's a real joy there, when you first start learning and it's all about the sensation of discovery, that I miss.

It's something that the "old school movement" has brought back for me, at least a little bit. The whole "make something up and run with it" approach has reminded me of how I did things back in the day, and it's let me go back to it without also going back to not having any clue what I was doing and screwing up my games in serious ways as a result.