The Ghoul’s Shrine
Posted by Joshua on Jul 1, 2009
The Ghoul’s Shrine is my entry in the One-Page Dungeon contest. It didn’t win anything, a fact which I can ascribe only to blatant favoritism on the part of the judges.
Not really, but anybody who expects me to pass on an opportunity to use a perfectly apropos quote from Tom Lehrer obviously doesn’t know me very well.
It has a couple of amusing features, and I’m glad I took the trouble to enter since it forced me to figure out how to use Chgowiz’s One Page Dungeon templates and the various tools I have to make a semi-decent looking free-hand dungeon map. But compared to some of the other entries I’ve seen (such as Michael Wolf’s astonishing Horror of Leatherbury House) it’s pretty weaksauce.
Randomized Initiative
Posted by Joshua on Jul 1, 2009
Randomized initiative is a hold-over from wargaming that I’ve never particularly cottoned to. Originally D&D didn’t even have it. Turn order wasn’t even specified, leaving it up to the referee to figure out. I’m sure Chainmail had rules, but the d20 vs. AC “alternate” system that was in the books which everybody actually used made no mention of it. Basic D&D officially had turn order alternating between the two sides, players and NPCs. In that context it made perfect sense to roll at the beginning of combat to see who went first. For some reason, though (at least by the time of the Mentzer Basic D&D) the rules called for rolling each round, which had the bizarre property that a side might go twice in a row. Unfortunately, strict alternation by sides is a) very “gamey” feeling, b) can convey a huge advantage to the side that goes first, or the side that goes twice in a row, leading to a lot of combats where one side or the other doesn’t even get a chance to react before being defeated, and c) doesn’t leave much room for having one character being noticeably faster than another (though Zombies did always lose initiative, no roll needed). Individual initiative feels more natural, and gives a much more fluid feel to combat resolution, allowing characters to react to changing battlefield conditions–perhaps unrealistically so, but a much better fit for adventure fiction. Oddly, to my mind, many systems with individual initiative rules nevertheless include a large, even overwhelming, random component. That puzzles me because it still feels very much like a game, and it inevitably leads to layers of extra complication to try to shoehorn character ability back in…plus slowing play down with extra die rolls and modifiers to arrive at a result that is arguably much less true to either reality or genre fiction. I grudgingly use Savage Worlds’ random initiative system when I run that, in part because the Edges that represent one character being quicker are fairly substantial, but in all my own games turn order goes strictly by the character’s speed. Usually that’s Dex or the equivalent. I’ve toyed with using Int (to represent “quick thinking”) and even incorporated it into a game once…but nobody who’s spent much time around my friend Russell–who is quite literally one of the smartest people on the planet–can take the notion of a strong correlation between brains and fast reaction time seriously. It’s probably better to represent quick thinking as taking some specific advantage (along the lines of and Edge or Feat) regardless of attributes.
The Problem With Murder Isn’t The XP Awards
Posted by Joshua on Jun 23, 2009
Over at Unofficial Games: Murder gets boring, Zzarchov writes:
This one deals with the problem of wholesale slaughter of your enemies. In this particular post I’ll deal with murdering opposing villains, the big villain or at least the stalwart dark lieutenant. Many GM’s are frustrated that they cannot have a recurring villain because PC’s will not stop until they murder them. Its like a party of Terminators.
This is a mechanically based flaw. You either get the same XP for killing, or its the only way you get killing added to the fact that dead villains can’t trouble you later.
I disagree. In my experience, this is a story-based flaw, not a mechanical one. Players will make sure that villains, particularly major villains, are truly most completely dead even in games where there’s full XP for defeating a villain without killing him, and even in games where there is no character advancement at all. What players are really interested in is that dead villains can’t trouble you later; tweaking the XP awards so that they have a reason to “farm” the villain for XP isn’t likely to work, particularly on any players that take the distinction between in-character and out-of-character motivation at all seriously.
GMs compound this situation by “teaching” the players that if they show any mercy towards villains the villain will return again later and only be stopped once something dear to the PCs has been destroyed (The Joker Syndrome) . If you want a recurring villain, you have to think harder about what’s in it for the players and the PCs. Some possible answers:
- Recurring villains and the PCs showing mercy to villains (and vice-versa) is part of the genre, and the players and GM agree that they’re playing according to genre. E.g., a standard “four-color” superhero game. For this to work, it’s likely the GM and the players should agree in advance that they aren’t going to try and push the envelope: once the Joker starts murdering scores of people every time he escapes from Arkham, it takes a special kind of player to still be satisfied with merely capturing and turning him over to the authorities that run the revolving-door asylum. The Joker may steal or threaten mass destruction, but Batman has to be able to avert it in the nick of time.
- The villains are “frenemies“: they don’t (yet) threaten the PCs with the loss of something that they find unacceptable, while sometimes providing the PCs with help or something they value. Perhaps they’re rivals, but not yet outright enemies.
- Villains often reform if shown mercy. This is a staple of certain genres, and can answer the need for recurring characters, though not necessarily recurring antagonists. Again, the GM has to stick to the genre and make almost all the conversions sincere or risk teaching the players that they’ll regret sticking to the genre conventions themselves.
- The setting has antagonists, but few real villains. Mature players are generally reluctant to murder well-meaning NPCs, even if they’re dangerously misguided and frequently in the way; immature players probably don’t appreciate any effort put into not rewarding them for slaughtering anyone who gets in the way.
- Along similar lines, mature players are usually reluctant to escalate. If the villain’s plans always involve theft but not murder, the PCs won’t (usually) respond with lethal force. If the villain keeps trying to kill the players, why exactly should they be reluctant to respond in kind? Just because it would be convenient for the GM?
- The setting is fraught with consequences for murdering villains. If the PCs are members of a Homicide Unit in a modern police force, killing criminals out-of-hand is likely to result in Internal Affairs investigations, suspension, or even jail. It’s not a genre convention, it’s the law. The problem with this is that if the players perceive the GM is exploiting this to frustrate them and undermine their success, they can lose their desire to play that setting. The course of action dictated by the setting needs to feel like a victory to the players. E.g. despite complaints about revolving-door justice and certain kinds of criminals being hard to keep incarcerated due to their clever lawyers, the modern justice system is quite successful at keeping serial-killers off the streets if they can be captured in the first place. If the GM starts using the “Joker always gets out” convention on the killers the PCs arrest while still holding them to realistic standards on the consequences of vigilante justice, that’s just asking for trouble.
- The recurring villain is out of reach of the PCs, literally or figuratively. You can prevent the PCs from killing the villain if you can prevent them from engaging the villain in combat. Perhaps the villain is a mastermind who operates from the shadows, never directly. Or maybe the villain is just a supernatural creature that can only be harmed by the Dread McGuffin of Uberness (to avoid TPK after TPK you probably need to make the villain have limited ability to affect the PCs in turn, or have its body/host be defeatable but final victory be elusive). This risks turning the entire campaign into a quest to get the villain, but that may be what you’re looking for.
In any event, as the GM what you should be thinking about is why do you want a recurring villain in the first place? What do the players and PCs get out of it? If the answer is just a bonus to XP if they play it right, you probably need to do some more thinking. Recurring villains work best when the stakes aren’t life-or-death, and when you can keep the players from feeling “I…have had…enough…of you!” Recurring characters are a lot easer than recurring villains in most genres, and I think you can generally get a lot more mileage out of former enemies, now rivals or allies (but are they really trustworthy? dun-dun-DUN) than having the villains all “Keep the money. Use it to buy a funeral. It doesn’t matter where you go… or how far you fly, I will hunt you down… and the last thing you see will be my blade.” unless you want the PCs to go emulating Mal Reynolds.
Karma Points, or Payback is a Botch
Posted by Joshua on Jun 18, 2009
There’s a discussion over at Robertson Games about using Luck points or the like to reduce the impact of a series of bad rolls resulting in character death. I’m not a big fan of them, preferring explicit script immunity if the game isn’t going to just let the dice fall where they may. I totally get why not every game needs to challenge the players and have character death or significant defeat be a live option, or at least give the players veto power to avoid stupid or anticlimactic deaths, but I think that Luck Points in the sense of a small finite resource than can be spent to reroll or force a roll to a certain outcome aren’t an adequate response. On the one hand, they’re too little: they don’t actually guarantee that unacceptable outcomes never occur. Eventually the party runs out of do-overs, and then they’re stuck even if another unacceptable outcome occurs. On the other hand, they do too much, since the players will almost certainly come to consider their presence (or absence if they’re running low) when evaluating their options. If you don’t want a TPK when the party foolishly attacks a sleeping dragon they happen across while on some unrelated quest, giving them Luck Points may actually encourage them to attack it; in effect Luck Points subsidize them making game-mechanically foolish choices.
Generally I prefer that the GM and players either agree in advance that they have script immunity, or they take up situations where a run of bad luck has derailed the game or killed a character on a case-by-case basis, deciding whether to live with the outcome or retcon it as an extraordinary measure. I’ve long felt it to be a mistake to roll for something if you’re not willing to abide by the roll; if I really don’t want characters to die as a result of bad rolls in combat, I take the option off the table, for instance by making less than 0 HP mean incapacitated, fate to be determined. It occurs to me, though, that it might be possible to craft a mechanic that answers my objections.
Suppose instead of a pre-figured supply of Luck Points which could be used to overrule or reroll a bad situation, you had an unlimited supply…but each time you invoked the rule you gained one Karma Point. The GM could then spend one Karma Point to overrule or force a reroll some time down the line, negating some good result you had rolled. That clearly solves the problem of a finite supply just kicking the can of reckoning down the road, giving the players a form of script immunity when it was just notably bad luck that screwed them over. It might also address the problem of the players counting on their immunity to let them try dumb things, since they would know it would cause them potentially serious trouble down the line. Yes, they could know in advance that whatever happens they can survive the dragon’s first breath attack…but at the risk of turning an otherwise easy situation later on into a fiasco. It wouldn’t anwer for players who really need script immunity so their fun isn’t all bashed out of shape by random die rolls, but it might do for players who were generally interested/willing to subject their character’s fate to the dice but wanted some measure of veto power over extremely inopportune rolls.
Huzzah! It is Mine!
Posted by Joshua on Jun 18, 2009
Starships & Spacemen (via RPGNow.com) that is. This was one of the earliest SF roleplaying games, and I remember enjoying the heck out of it with my brothers and sister. It was basically an unlicensed Star Trek game, with the PCs serving as crew on a “Confederation” starship. Classes represented various branches of the service, and there were various races that were analogs of the races of Star Trek: the logical emotionless Taurans, the telepathic Andromedans, the space-mercenary Rigelians, or the boring old Humans.
I was tempted to pick up Space Opera while I was at it, but my recollection of that was that it was so complex that by the time we had finished rolling up characters we had pretty much exhausted our interest in the game. I think we made it through a couple of sessions before giving up and going back to Traveller.