Sunday, January 31, 2010

Minotaurs

There are some things that are really hard to sculpt properly at miniature scale--foxy women, hydras.

And then there are some things that are very easy to get right--or at least people regularly manage to do it.


Dwarves come out ok quite a bit--and minotaurs.

Man are the miniatures people good at making minotaurs.

I am firmly of the opinion that there should usually be minotaurs. Minotaurs hang out in laybrinths, which are the coolest places to hang out.
Even that Warcraft-looking anime-ish guy up there looks fairly decent.

For more information on minotaurs, visit your local library, or just click
here.









_______
Video is Kyle Kinane. He rules almost as much as minotaurs, and his first CD just came out.

I Don't Care What C.S. Lewis Said, Here's The Truth

"Fantasy", as a concept, encompasses and confuses two distinct ideas: escapism--which is stupid--and invention--which is awesome.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Totally Random Day


Placing my faith in the roguish work ethic, I went into yesterday's game with nothing but a sandbox worldmap and a bunch of random tables.

"Meanwhile, in the library...Ladies, what are we doing? Lady Smashalot, since you're a barbarian, you can't read."

"I want to...find a very interesting book, like a book of spells, and it's in her language and be like...I wanna find this book that's like 'aaah-aaa-aaa' [angel noise] like this and be like 'Gruh uh uh uh, look at this.'"

"So what you're saying is you want me to roll on the random book table?"

"Yes."

"Roll a 20-sider."

"15,"

"You find a book that looks interesting to you..."

"Ok."

"Are you gonna take it over to Mandy?"

"Mandy, look, I found this book, it's glowing and it's very interesting."

"It's not glowing. It has a picture of a tree on the front. It's very nicely bound, however..."

"I'm gonna, um, open and try to read it."

"Ok, it is full of pictures of women being caressed in lewd ways by plant life--it's called 'The Fondling Tree'."

"Awesome, I'm gonna keep it and show it to [the only male PC] when we're alone together."

"Is this how you spell 'Barbarian'?" (Twittering.)

"Alright, Mandy what are you gonna do?"

"Can I roll to find a book?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Do I just roll a 20?"

"Ok, when Kimberly looks for a book, she looks for a random book, because she can't read. So, other than just pulling a book off the shelf, you could actually look for a topic of a book."

"I'm looking for a spell book."

"Ok, well you can just keep looking if what you find isn't a spell book."

"I rolled a 3."

"Ok, um, you didn't find a spell book right now, you found a book called 'The Clutching Cow'. It's about a cow that grabs people."

"Do you have any actually relevant books on that table?"

"Umm...maybe."


________
Lizard owned and fed by Kimberly Kane, idea for a random book table from Jeff.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Two Campaigns At Once

Circumstances demand I start running two campaigns at once.

Which means everybody needs a second character.

For some people, especially new players, this is tough because that first character is their D&D character. Like that's them.

What they are interested in about fake medieval europe is entirely encapsulated in that character and they haven't yet become fascinated by something else.

For some people, it takes a while to feel like whatever need or urge is being fulfilled by pretending to be this little medieval person has been fulfilled enough that they can happily be some other and fundamentally different medieval person.

Frankie rolled up a brand new sneaky dark elf rogue the other day. The only difference from her last PC was her stats were worse. That didn't strike her as too terribly fun.

KK is so totally the right person to be a barbarian werewolf that I'm not entirely sure if she'll wanna go any other way, either.

Were you like that when you started? Or did you immediately start going in a million different directions?

If you were, when did your interests grow, if at all?

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Is There A Hidden Flaw Here?

Mass Battle System To Drop Into D&D when The Situation Calls For It

(EDITED: when I tested these rules, I applied them to everyone except the PCs and main foes.)

-Rather than rolling initiative, every mini just goes in reverse Dex order counting down from 18 (or whatever's the highest).
(EDITED: what I actually did for the first test was simply assign each unit an initiative rank--1st, 2nd, 3rd, based on how on the ball and well-trained I figured they were. PCs and enemy main baddies were allowed to go at any time in the initiative so long as they only went once in the initiative countdown. This worked fine.)

-PCs control their own characters plus anybody else on their side, DM controls the other side.

-Hit points of all models = normal # of hp divided by 10 rounded down with a minimum of 1.

-All weapons do 1 hp of damage per die ordinarily rolled to determine damage. (i.e. a weapon that does 1d10 or 1d4 will do 1 hp of damage, a weapon that does 3d6 will do 3 hit points of damage.)

-PCs "killed" are assumed to be captured or maimed (note to self--make a chart) unless someone specifically takes a round to kill them.

-EDIT: Armor class will be changed to ascending 1-20. i.e. A version 1 ac of 1 = a version 3.5 ac of 19 = a mass battle system ac of 9.

-Close combat: each side rolls, adds their close combat bonus (these numbers can be used if you're playing type 1 or type 2 D&D), high number does damage unless the target can roll a d20 under their (new, converted, ascending 1-20 scale) armor class.

Ok, anybody see a hidden flaw in these rules before I send the ladies crawling across the floor with rulers in their hands?

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Things I Learned From Watching Tapes of Myself DMing For Four Days

-When I announce any feature of the dungeon, there is a 90% chance someone will say "Gross."

-I don't know if all that group-dynamics social theory stuff about how women seek consensus is sure, but they sure do spend a lot of time deciding how to kill monsters.

-Smart monsters should know to take out the cleric first.

-No matter what's going on in the dungeon, if the party keeps following the monsters, the game will be about fighting monsters.

-I'm not bad at doing voices but I am bad at remembering which one goes with which NPC.

-The default voice seems to be a sort of Gollum/Yoda hybrid.

-You can tell Satine has been playing since she was 15--not only is she all: "I have a grappling hook!" "I have a rope!", she also will risk death to retrieve them after using them.

-I need a haircut.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Help Name The Show

Got suggestions for the name of the TV show?

It can't have the words "Dungeons & Dragons" or "D&D" in the title.

Winning suggestion gets...something. I don't know. We'll talk.

Also, we're going for something that lets people know what the show's about even if they don't know the game.

Lipstick & Lizardmen is the frontrunner so far.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Are You Twittering? There's No Twittering in D&D!

Last week me and Mandy and one other person were over at Sasha's big house watching movies and she said "This is the most people we've ever had over here."

3 people.

Point being: Sasha Grey is a workaholic.

Personally, I give Sasha Grey a lotta static about not taking time out once in a while to enjoy being the world's most famous porn star/model/actress/musician/whateve-else-she's- doing-this-week. "You don't know how to have fun!""Quiet, I have to watch french movies and answer e-mails!"

So anyway, we managed to get Sasha to take a break between Paris and editing her upcoming book long enough to learn to play D&D on the first episode of this D&D T.V. show someone's paying us to make. Details in the future.

It went alright--it's not hard to make a game of D&D interesting when nearly every player at the table has had sex with nearly every other player at the table plus the DM and the cameraman--but I have to remember to make a No Twittering rule next time.

Satine:
Playing d/d with @KimberlyKane @mandymorbid and friends!

Satine:
Its sasha's first time.

Sasha:
D&D @sashagrey @mandymorbid & our dungeon master @zaksmithsabbath http://post.ly/JgXR (via @KimberlyKane)

Frankie:
o hai, just sitting across from you playing d&d!

Satine:
yea and u suuuUre r sneaky!

KimberlyKane:

@SashaGrey Your not really playing your just snickering! LOL

Connie:

Shit! I just got a critical hit to my head and fell down a 60ft shaft. I'm Fucked!

Kimberly
Spider D&D battle


Kimberly:
@sashagrey and my character sheet


Kimberly:
Zero will save

(they had gotten into the wine by this point)

Connie:

We killed the dark elves and spider ladies. We have entered the goblin palace. Game over.

Sasha:
Just finished playing D&D for 8 hours straight...so tired I feel like a Zombie!

_________________
Sometimes I feel like Tom Hanks in "A League of Their Own".

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

She's a tiefling wizard, if you're wondering



Yep.

Purposefully Mysterious Post

Later, people will ask me: "When did you start [the secret D&D project you all will find out about later if it works out]?"

And I will say "January 20th, 2010. Around noon."

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Discuss...

Ok, so the poison dart room is here, and then the ice-statue room is here.

No, wait, I'll do it the other way around.

No, wait, actually, it doesn't matter does it?

I mean, I'm pretending it does, but really, either way, it's a dungeon and the PCs can go wherever they want and they're just as likely to wander into one as the other. Or both, or one first and then the other.

I mean, I could just have a blank map and roll randomly for every room.

Ok, no, that's not exactly true, some rooms have a teleologic--boss goes at the edge, eerily quiet room goes in a very specific place, the mystery tunnel goes there, the plot-seed rooms must be choreographed with some care, the gears must be next to the grinding room, etc...

But, honestly, half the rooms, they could go anywhere, right? Why pre-determine them? Just have a random table of random rooms like wandering monsters.

Ok, so:

Assuming:

-it's a small dungeon where the PCs won't level up in the middle, and...

-the "plot-important" rooms, and rooms that mechanically relate to each other are already properly placed and properly spaced, and...

-whatever architectural model the dungeon is supposed to represent is accurately reproduced (like if it's an old house it has bathrooms, kitchen, etc, in basically the right place).

Then why not just have an empty map with a random table of pre-written rooms and you roll on it each time the PCs go into a room?

Pros? Cons? Discuss...

Attempts To Distract You From My Failure To Post Anything Today



Sunday, January 17, 2010

Say "Why not?" and THEN ask "Why?"

Well now, Caroline, your old character just died, what's your new one gonna be?

I guess I'd better be a cleric since this time I'm thinking we're gonna want some healing.

Ok, you're a cleric. Who's your god? The default god would be Vorn, grim and gaunt god of iron and rain.

I'm thinking a goddess of healing with really big tits.

Ok, how about we call her...Titivilla?

Isn't that just a feminization of the patron demon of typos and/or that guy from the Monster Manual 2? Wait, I didn't actually say that, why are you typing that?

Because it's for my blog and I am using what happened during our game to demonstrate certain principles of setting-design. So I am saying you said that even thought actually I just thought it. In fact, I am going to keep doing that, in order to keep this example going. In fact, from here on through nothing I write will be what you actually said but just a sort of conversation-formatted version of my own thought process as I develop Titivilla into an actual in-the-game setting element.

Oh, ok, carry on.

Anyway, Titivilla. She has large breasts.

And what else?

Well, we all know that popular images of Satan are derived from the pagan god, Pan, and I like the implied spiritual ambiguity there. Like, is Pan a god, or a demon? Is he god to one group and demon to the other?

Well, that kind of moral relativism makes sense in your game because, y'know Vorn is the god of both McCormick's very moral paladin and Mandy's less-than-reputable tiefling cleric.

Yeah, also, I like the idea that the world is in some way suspended between the heavy, dark, monotheistic, Christian culture we associate with Medieval Europe and the sort of weird, anything-goes polytheism associated with both more eerily primeval times and the best fantastic literature. It allows you to make use of the imagery of either mode of thought.

Kickass and peachy keen! What else?

Well I worry about a healing goddess being a hippie. We wouldn't want that.

Indeed, by no means.

No sandals, no rural imagery, no flowing robes, no sort of sideline-standing, heart-warming, whole-wheat eating, non-mace-to-the-head-sending crap. That shit is dull.

Indeed.

Plus, people making up gods tend to get all crisp and neat about it, but back in the day, gods were like gods of all kinds of random things which seem unrelated to the contemporary mind, like, "Mischief, Pythons, and Flanking Techniques". Or whatever.

Such, at least, the impression I get from Deities and Demigods.

Ok, so let's say she's the god of healing plus also, y'know, something actually interesting...

Plus, remember, she has to be able to be perceived as evil.

Plus she has to have big breasts because, Caroline, as you said, you want her to have big breasts.

Ok, let's say she looks like a succubus, only with big curling goat horns to balance out those boobs, visually.

Why are we balancing the boobs? Can't we just tip the balance in the direction of boobs?

I feel gods should have things coming out of their heads--it makes them seem regal and intimidatingly static.

Ok. And she's a goddess of both medicine and...change, the body, the warping of the body.

Yeah, like Tzeentch.

Totally.

So she can heal you, but she's also a goddess of mutation, illness--anything else that happens to the body.

Excellent.

And of course the monotheistic culture will see her as a demon of mutation, change, illness, etc.

Because in a monotheistic society, there is one god, the way you come out is the way that god intended, changes to that plan would not be tolerated.

All very philosophically consistent. We are clever indeed. But which is she really?

Who knows? We mere mortals don't need to know. All we need to know is how she's worshipped down here.

And what kind of spells I get.

Which we've established: Spells providing dominion over the earthly forms of living things.

But is there a general principle of D&D design we can derive here?


I believe there is. It relates to the principle of gonzo anything-goes-ness.

How so?

Well if you take something in D&D that's serious, and then take it not-seriously, you get zaniness, wackiness, goofy blog stuff, owlbear jokes. However, if you take something goofy, and then take it seriously, then you get...well you get whatever we just got with Titivilla, Horned Goddess of All Flesh.

It reminds me of the technique suggested in this post.

Indeed.

Anyway, it seems to have worked out alright.

Yep.


____________________
Painting by Jean-Leon Gerome, carved ivory relief thing is a bookplate of the 4 evangelists from Germany or Northern Italy.

Friday, January 15, 2010

How Much Do You Want To Be A Wizard?

Once in a while I look over at the Forge and I see a game like Shock or The Pool and I think--"That sounds fun, I'd play that."

And I don't.

The reason is because there's nobody to play with.

What do you mean, Zak? You've got players, right?

Ok, but they're a different kind of player than the players you'd need to play most of the more interesting indie games I've seen.

Here is what Mandy playing The Pool would be like:

Me: "Ok, now you have to describe your character in 50 words. Anything you want."

Mandy: "Fuck this."

Somehow this request creates a social or mental situation in people that "pick a race, pick a class" doesn't. To some people these 50 words sound like freedom, to some people, it sounds like work.

One indie-narrativist game battlecry is "Story now!" It seems like a fairly decent description of how their games work: in the most interesting and original indie games I've seen*, the players are all put on the spot at one point or another to come up with some interesting and creative story elements.

Here's the hitch--in order to play you either have to have faith in your on-the-spot creativity or be unselfconscious enough not to give a fuck.

And, if the latter, you have to have faith that even though you don't give a fuck, this game is still going to be fun and worth doing.

In other words, it's not true in RPGs that "the only limits are your imagination". A huge limit is the amount of energy you've got that day and your faith in the notion that sitting around using your imagination (and very little else) is going to be a fun way to spend the next 2-4 hours.

In the gaming community, I would guess that 90% of people who have that particular kind of faith in their own on-the-spot creativity or who are unselfconscious and faithful enough not to worry or who are always sure their imagination is more fun than their xbox are GMs or prime GM-material.

Basically, these are the people who run the games, own the books, and write the blogs. These are the people who like to think about the game when they aren't playing the game and who know who Kevin Siembieda and Ookla the Mok are.

And, if you haven't noticed by now, this blog is largely about how you can play and have lots of fun with only one or two of those people at the table and have the rest of the people just be players.

At least, you can play D&D that way.

Essentially, in order for a game to work, I think there has to be a certain critical mass of creativity at the table. The available sources are: the players, the GM, and the game itself.

In a video game, the creativity is supplied largely by the game. Your input is optional--Mario will grow when he eats a mushroom whether you provide an explanation or not. In, say, The Pool, none of the creativity is supplied by the game (obviously, it took creativity to design the mechanics, but what I mean here is, it doesn't readily suggest a scenario for play), it's all on the players. In a D&D scenario, the creativity is shared between the GM and Gary (or whoever else wrote setting elements the GM is using in the game) and the players can, in a well-run game, pretty much provide as much or as little as they want.

If we imagine this continuum, with Super Mario Brothers on one side and improv theatre on the other, you can see most indie games as an attempt to raise the creativity ante for players and lower the creativity ante of the game publisher--moving toward the improv side. On this scale, all D&D would be in the middle (as well as most other similar games--Palladium, Games Workshop, White Wolf, etc.), with old school D&D being closer to the indie games and more branded and defined versions of the game being a little more toward the Mario side.

My point here is not that one side or the other is good or bad--after all, there's a name for what happens when all the creativity is supplied for you and you find it engaging--it's called "great art". My point is that the Mario side is a good place for players who aren't yet sure that the game they're playing will automatically be fun.

____

What's it like in the middle?

I think of D&D working kind of like a dinner conversation.

Imagine a table at a wedding:

There's a conversation going on. Everyone can hear it but not everybody has to talk. There's rarely an embarrassing silence, though, because there's at least one person there who just really wants to get to the heart of the matter of whatever this conversation is about and so will start talking if there's a lull.

Once in a while, no matter who you are, you will be called upon to perform simple, well-defined tasks. "Can you pass the peas?""Are you going to hit the rust monster or do something else?" This is easy for pretty much anybody and doesn't put you on the spot.

Nothing necessarily stops you from doing something mechanically novel like, say, putting olives on your pancakes, but the conversation and the meal will keep on even if you don't.

Nothing stops you from interjecting with your own ideas "Well I think Sigmund Freud was full of shit!""I think we should tie the displacer beast up before we try to sell it to the mountain gnome," and thus taking the conversation in a whole new direction, but the conversation will keep going if you don't.

This is normal, this is what all kinds of people do every day. They are shy and insecure or apathetic about the subject or the company they're in and when they become comfortable or the conversation moves to a place they have ideas about, then they talk.

In D&D, as a player, you can (often, not always) choose to grapple hard with the scenario ("I look in the desk,""I write 'xvarts suck' on the wall with a rock", "I mix the growth and shrinking potions together to see what happens") or you can sit back and roll dice when it's necessary and just regard what the DM and the more aggressive players are doing as entertainment, like a movie where you have a choice.

In other words, D&D supports several playing styles simultaneously (assuming the DM's any good). In a good game, everybody's playing the game they want to play, even if it's eight different games.

Right here, I should say something: the 'passive player' is rarely forever passive.

You can't just go "passive players suck" because what happens is the table is an evershifting patchwork of active gaming, passive gaming, metagaming, snack-eating, etc. Most people move easily from one mode to the next and do it all the time--players have moods, and the mode fits their mood, and I can tell you that, at least in my game, the mood of a Los Angeles porn star can change faster than any observed phenomenon yet discovered. The only person who has to be steady-state is the GM.

Also, as I am discovering, players don't really need to know the rules. I mean, they can, that's fine and good, but the penalty for not knowing--at least in the beginning--isn't that big. A D&D game that's basically "Tell me what you want to do, I'll tell you what you need to roll to do it" will work perfectly well for a player's first session or two--long enough for them to learn the basics. The game can grow as their knowledge, confidence, and faith that the game will actually be fun grow.

A lot of the innovative new games, however, seem to require that everybody know the rules and/or that everybody be inventive (or at least confident and energetic) at regular intervals.

In a broad sense this is just the price of democracy--with the power to control the world, comes the responsibility to help keep it interesting. On the other hand, I think it'd be a nice challenge to create an newbie-friendly game that still offers the player a lot of narrative control if they want it, yet doesn't make the wallflower player feel like a useless spectator if they don't seize the bit immediately. Probably it's already out there.

The concept I'm getting at is, I guess: Buy-in.

"Buy-in" is, basically, the feeling that a thing will be worth the amount of effort asked.

It's not just "Do you want to play a game where you're a wizard" but "Do you want to play a game where you're a wizard for x amount of effort?".

The GMs of this world are the ones who say "I want to play a game where I'm a wizard for almost any amount of effort" the player-only people have their limits. I see those limits when I introduce new players to the game "Will I have to....?""What if I...?""I'm gonna suck, you'll see!"

For many people, it's embarassing to be seen putting out mental effort and failing. "Ha ha, noob!" And so, to new players, RPGs are scary. You can practice a video game in the comfort and solitude of your own home and then play with others once you're good at it. With RPGs you can't. The fear many people feel (or just the distaste or disinterest which masks fear) is really akin to the fear people feel about public speaking or having a story or drawing they've made critiqued in a classroom. One of the big things I have to do as a GM with new players is say "Don't worry, you can't really do it wrong."

In D&D, the DM has to be on--s/he has to be up and awake and paying attention and also has to be enough into the game of D&D that s/he has a scenario ready to roll and roll smoothly. But nobody else does. They can show up diffident and hungover and largely unconcerned with the genre of fantasy literature and the direction of the campaign and still have a blast.

In the indie games I've seen, this appears to not be so. You need a handful of GM-types at the table or else the game won't do what it's supposed to do. I am cool with this. You need a handful of good musicians to make great music and we all need great music.

However, I think that people working on designing games should be aware that despite the fact that it's derived from wargames and stories about white men in Medieval Europe, the world's oldest RPG is actually astoundingly comfortable for newbies to get into because it is so flexible in the demands it makes on them.

____
Addendum: Road test of this theory...


________________
*Note this phrase "the most interesting and original indie games I've seen". Mountain Witch and Dogs in the Vineyard do not fit into this category. Not by a long shot. This post is not about all indie games or all story games, it's only about the ones I find interesting. (note added after this happened.)

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Stuff I Thought About Before Breakfast

Good morning, Mr. Sun.
Brush my teeth.
Marmalade, I like marmalade.
So, let's see what we've got today...

Grognardia posting about Tolkien and Gygax again--I don't know why anyone argues with you about this, James, you are right and they are wrong. There are a lot of creatures and people from Tolkien in D&D because Tolkien wrote about creatures and games need creatures. Duh. Just because a painter uses perspective in a painting doesn't mean Giotto is her most important influence.

Grognardia posting about Dante's Inferno being sold as "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game". That's so fucked. Between this and Haiti I'm really not sure I like this 2010 guy very much.

Jeff's Gameblog posting about Mutant Future
--Wherein Jeff mentions that he has players roll on a random chart to see which game they will get a random mutation from. This is wise, noble, and good. Privately, I think of Jeff as "the God of Fun". At least, y'know, Safe For Work fun.

Mighty Thews And Non-Euclidean Geometry
--Kicks off with a completely excellent metaphor for how D&D works and then goes on to a play report from Castle of the Archmage. The game style described in the report is kind of Gonzo Naturalism. Like--y'know how in D&D there are these ways to tactically exploit the rules which make perfect sense in the ruleset but are weird and goofy? And y'know how clever players can do these things so often and so regularly that they go far beyond anything in D&D's literary models and just become a genre of their own--kick a chicken down the stairs to check for traps, control the skeletons and use them as "disposable front-liners" etc.? And you know how that is awesome, right?

At The RPG Corner Shiro is talking about GMing a day in the City State of the Invincible Overlord that bears a striking resemblance, adventure-design-principle-wise to my own players' very recent hell-raising, sweeping-reflection-inspiring trip to Vornheim. (A city which I was inspired to write up in detail by his own post about the last time his PCs went to the City State. So it's a serpent eating its own tail and all that.)

Thanks to Christian at Destination Unknown I now know that the Los Angeles Role-Playing Game Network has about 24 more members than I thought it did and I decided to look up A-plot/B-plot structure and it occurred to me how much of the screenwriting-talk I absorbed as a kid may contribute to the art of GMing. And made me think: in this town where there are (literally) more screenplays than business cards, there must be an awful lot of GMs tucked away.

Monsters and Manuals
--Noisms is talking about Avatar. My thesis: it used to be that because believable sci-fi was so hard to do, all sci-fi was either the amazing and wonderful product of amazing dedication or hilarious in its awkward badness. (Or both, like The Black Hole.) Now that we have cheap CG, bad sci-fi (and fantasy) movies are just going to be bad the way regular bad movies are bad. A terrible cultural loss.

Elves Ate My Homework--Is arguing against the "all-weapons-should-do-d6-damage" thesis. I have to say I'm with him, at least for my PCs. With my PCs, I like to make weapons as different as possible, and remind them of stuff like how a hammer is going to do more damage to a living statue than a sword. Why? Because my players were not born with the boyish obsession with comparative tactical combat effectiveness and so anything that reminds them that tactics matter and that there's more than one way to skin a cat is a good thing and they seem to appreciate it. It's a little thing with weapon damage, but it does, perhaps, make them think about bigger things, like whether to set something on fire or drop a shelf on it or just run away.

Old Guard Gaming
has an interesting solution to the Raise Dead problem. I like it. My own solution is less about rules and more about player mentality. If your PC dies, you have a choice of rolling up a new one or not doing anything for a few hours or days or weeks while waiting for your loser friends to have their PCs recover the body and drag it to civilization and then maybe, possibly finding a cleric willing to resurrect you. If you can just make a new PC at the same level, most people would rather just play.

Ok, I have to eat something now.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

They're Everywhere

So I was working on a set today...

It was in this big loft/studio where they shoot tons of porn movies.

And also, the big deal mainstream porn people who run the studio also live there. Like AVN Porn Hall Of Fame members.

And so, anyway, as usual, I am doing a lot of waiting around.

I start noticing stuff, like--

They've got The Complete Conan stories lying on an end table.

And I go upstairs and look at the bookshelf and I notice they've got tons of Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. Like everything they ever wrote in hardcover plus a few vintage paperbacks.

And then...


And I'm like--Hurrrrm...a la Rorschach...and start looking more carefully...

And sure enough...

Monday, January 11, 2010

Rogues And Sandboxes (Basic Edition)

So I wrote this post about how roguish characters and sandbox-style play go together very well.

Lots of people liked it.

However, lots of other people seem to have misunderstood it.

So I'm explaining it all over again, hopefully more clearly:

Let's start by defining some terms. This is not what these things mean all the time everywhere, just what I assume they mean when I'm talking about them on this blog, ok?

Sandbox:

An imaginary location (dungeon, city, country, continent, world, universe, etc.). The location may have unusual adventure seeds or plot triggers embedded in it (the bank teller is an alien!), but it may not.

Adventure:

An episode involving conflict (often violent) between the PCs and some other entity that keeps the DM and players entertained for at least one session.

(And yes, I know how narrow it is to insist on conflict as a necessary component of adventure, but I'm just talking about stuff that happens in RPGs I want to play.)

Ok, so, example: I have made a super-simplified sandbox. There's a map of it up there at the top of the post.

We must imagine that this represents roughly the sum total of knowledge the PCs have about where stuff is in the world, and that all these places (church, etc.) run more-or-less the way you'd assume such an institution would run in the real world.

(I know that's silly, but this is a simplified example.)

Also, assume there is a list of NPCs (some known to the PCs, some not) that the GM has described in enough detail that s/he knows how they'd react to most situations.

Now, looking at this map, and desiring only money and/or power, a roguish PC could devise any number of schemes:

-Steal a car from the used car lot, use it to aid in the getaway from a bank robbbery, ditch the car by the church.

-Bribe an orphan into aiding him in the commission of a crime since nobody would suspect an orphan.

-Steal a car, pile lots of orphans into it, ransom them off.

etc.

(Obviously if my sandbox was more complicated and the PCs knew that complicated new info they could generate more and better schemes.)

Now, the thing about all these schemes is: if the PCs try to enact these schemes during a game, and thus turn them into adventures, the adventure writes itself.

The players know more or less what kinds of things they can expect to happen if they try to steal a car, and can plan accordingly.

I, as a GM know how my cops, security guards, etc. (either because I have them pre-written as NPCs or because I run them as typical examples of their profession) would react to the movements of these roguish PCs if they saw them, and can simply have them react accordingly.

As the GM, I can choose to add complexity to the situation during the game, but I don't have to if I don't want to.

The point is: because I have a sandbox and a group of rogues, I already have the minimum amount of stuff necessary to play the game for several hours. I don't need to design a conflict, the PCs have done it themselves.

Now, looking at this same map, a player who is playing Superman likewise has many options:

He could go to the orphanage and try to cure a disease some sick orphan had.

He could try to free Mon-El from the Phantom Zone (in the privacy of his own home, I suppose).

He could go to the used car lot and ask if there was any trouble over there.

He could go to the church and see if there was any trouble over there.

He could try to help out with the church's canned food drive.

He could try to make sure the bank's security situation is up to snuff.

etc.

But here's the difference:

While any of these things may result in a conflict (and thus an adventure), the Superman PC--unlike the rouguish PC--has no idea of what the shape of that conflict will be.

(And neither does the GM--unless s/he's already planned for the possible eventuality that the PC might do that thing. "Oh, I have a 'helping with the canned food drive' villain all ready.")

Superman does not choose to sketch out a violent conflict. The rogue does. Superman chooses from a set of options whose consequences (conflict-wise) are mostly unknown.

Now, obviously if the Superman PC decides to go to the church, then the player playing Superman at least can reasonably expect to have a conflict somehow involving a church, and if Superman goes to Planet Sigma 12 then the player can reasonably expect to have a conflict in outer space, but beyond such broad strokes, s/he does not choose.

For Superman, choosing between the orphanage and the bank may be choosing between fighting the Joker and fighting Darkseid, but the player doesn't have any way to know that. So Superman is not designing a conflict by choosing a course of action, he's just blindly walking into option A instead of option B.

____________

In the case of the rogue, the PC (some bank robber), the player of the PC (a real person), and the GM all have (in a way) the same goal: to initiate conflict. In the case of Superman, the PC (Superman) and the player (Doug or Jimmy or whatever real person is playing the game) have different goals. The player, if s/he's playing more-or-less in character, has to "trick" his/her PC into entering conflict, or else simply have him/her vigilantly wait for whatever conflict the GM wants to provide.

____________

In other words:

If a GM is dealing with rogues in a sandbox, s/he can "front-load" a very large part of the creative effort by putting it into describing the location yet still offer the players genuine choice. "Here, I made a place full of goodies and resources to help you get those goodies and obstacles of various shapes and sizes to getting those goodies, pick your poison."

(Not that the GM has to tell the PCs every pre-written detail of the sandbox. But the idea is the GM doesn't need to throw in unknown twists and details if s/he doesn't want to. The rogues are already choosing a course of action that will lead to chaos, change, and adventure. Even the simplest bank robbery with stereotypical cops is going to result in enough dice rolling that unexpected stuff will be generated by the mere playing of the game.)

On the other hand, if the GM is dealing with Superman in a sandbox , the GM cannot just "front-load" the creative effort by putting it into describing the location (the sandbox) and its people and still offer the player as much choice. This is because the GM must also pre-plan or improvise wholly unexpected conflicts that will occur if Superman chooses to interact with these locations.

(Note: This applies to my example. None of what I'm writing here is true if Superman is on Apokolips or in Hitler's Germany or something--for a discussion of those kinds of situations, see below.)

Or to put it another way: Superman doesn't start an adventure by designing a conflict for himself. The rogues, on the other hand, know that just doing their job will generate conflict, so they're designing a conflict as soon as they decide to go to work.

_________

A guy named Fat Alibert pretty much said it all this way in the comments section of the original post:

Having a character move to a location to initiate a DM prepared encounter, select a plot hook from a plot hook dispenser, or choose to perform a task that doesn't bring him into conflict ISN'T the same as a character who initiates his own choice of conflict based on what he knows of the sandbox and his own motivations that run counter to the status-quo.

-------------

Here are some things I'm NOT saying:

-I'm not saying sandboxes are the only way to go.

-I'm not saying rogues are the only way to run a sandbox, merely that they make it easier.

-I'm not saying that the DM shouldn't ever throw in plot things or improvise or add in new, creative ideas once the PCs have started playing in the sandbox, merely that this is made optional rather than mandatory by the rogue + sandbox format.

-I'm not saying there's no good reason to play Superman-type heroes.

-I'm not saying that you can't give rogues plots. Merely that they don't necessarily need them just to play the game.

-I'm not saying that you couldn't create a sort of world that was unusually inimical to Superman (like a fascist state or a post-apocalyptic world) and thus transform Superman's role completely and make him as pro-active, schemey, and conflict-shaping as any rogue (see below for a taxonomy of ways to do that).

_______

For the benefit of people who are coming to this discussion late, I'm posting the entire original post below--it contains a number of important ideas glossed over or ignored above, so read it if you care...

_______

Gamma sloths have a low AC and are immune to radiation, so I announced their fur must be shiny and metallic. Joe latched onto this fact and decided that his lich's biker jacket needed a fur lining. Have I mentioned that my players are rad to the max?
-Jeff Rients

Heroes have morals...villains have work ethic.
-Reminder written on whiteboard in office of the development team for City of Villains

Ok, so picture this:

A GM somewhere writes out the city of Metropolis and the city of Gotham and the rest of the world of DC Comics in excruciating detail. The train lines, the shopfronts, which hot dog store owners are secretly shark-men, every inch of it. It's all ready to go.

Now here comes a PC playing Superman, into this sandbox.

"So what do you want to do today, Supes?"

"Uh, I guess I'll go on patrol."

Off he flies.

"Do I see any crime?"

"Umm, nope, not much, Metropolis is a fully-functioning independent world going about its business."

"Ok, I keep going. Now do I see any crime?"

"Ok, some jamoke is robbing a bank."

"Well then I stop him!"

Now, what I want to say here is that this isn't really a sandbox. Why? Because Superman doesn't have any strategic choices here, really. He could decide to patrol (say) the docks instead of (say) the south side of town, but that's not a meaningful choice--i.e. it's like arbitrarily deciding "left or right"?

If nothing much is obviously going on, he keeps looking. If there's a crime, no matter how small, he has to stop it, because he's an Upright Hero. If there's a bigger crime, he has to stop that one first, because he's an Upright Hero.

While he has many interesting strategic and tactical choices about how to stop a crime, he doesn't have choices about which adventure to go on. ("Adventure" in the traditional sense--on his day off he could choose to stay home and read or curl up with Lois by the fire, but you get the point.)

Now let's say we have this same sandbox but the player is playing Lex Luthor.

"What'll we do this morning Lex?"

"Hmm...I say we send out some drones and look for weak spots in the worldwide nuclear security apparatus."

"Do you have drones?"

"I'll roll on my Drone-Making. Oh, also, I want to blackmail the president, did I already say that? And then, hmm, I notice on this geological map that a mound of Fuckeverythingupium is just lying there underneath a mountain in Madagascar, I'll want some of that, and..."

In other words, whereas a villain confronted with a sandbox world will immediately start generating ideas, Upright Heroes (typical heroes) need a plot. Without the bank robbery, Superman would just endlessly circle Metropolis, then go to work at the Daily Planet. Without the whole problem with the Ring, Frodo would just sit and hang out in the Shire forever being wholesome and loyal and sipping tea. Without fires, firemen just hang out in their firehouse, Ever Vigilant, playing cards.

Now I don't actually want to talk about playing villains, I want to talk about playing Roguish Heroes. Grey Mouser, Conan, Cugel, Han Solo, and the stereotypically larcenous Old School D&D PC.

Now a Roguish Hero is not the same as a villain, and I am not saying everybody should play Lex Luthor but, functionally, pulpy roguish protagonists and villains have an important thing in common: they want something from the world. Gold, power, the admiration of attractive members of the opposite sex--something. The Upright Hero doesn't really want anything--or at least not anything that would bring him/her into violent conflict with the world as-is. The Upright Hero is not usually proactive, s/he waits until s/he sees injustice (even if it was an injustice that was there all along).

I bring this up because two big ideas associated with the Old School renaissance are:

-Sandboxes instead of Pre-Written Plots, and...
-Roguish, Pulpy Heroes rather than Epic Fantasy (Supermanish) Upright Heroes.

And my idea here is: sandboxes and roguish protagonists don't just go together by coincidence, they go together because they work together extremely well.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I set my (thoroughly amoral) PCs loose on the sandbox city of Vornheim and realized that I had to do absolutely zero work to make a day's play out of it. The girls were in the city, they wanted some money and some answers, they basically wrote the adventure themselves. I sat back and did voices.

There's a reason why the stereotype of Old School D&D is a bunch of amoral bastards running around killing things and taking their stuff--and it's not just because of the x.p. system. It's because people who just want treasure don't need to be given a reason to go into a cave or a lair or an abandoned city or the HQ of the local Wizard's Guild and they can pick freely which one they want to do first, since the fact that the lair contains a despotic vampire that plagues the countryside and the cave just has a dumb animal with big teeth in it doesn't automatically impose a moral imperative on Roguish PCs to deal with the vampire first.

Likewise, there's a reason that, as pre-plotted adventures became more popular in the mid-80s, D&D tended, more and more, to assume the PCs were Upright Epic Heroes.

A hook isn't automatically a hook for a bunch of lovable rakes:

"A cleric has been found dead in the town square."

"Well why should we care?"

"The church is offering a reward of 600 gold pieces to find the killer."

"Um, couldn't we just sack the church and make more than that? I mean, who was this cleric anyway? Maybe he deserved it..."

When you're a thief, the world is your sandbox. When you're an Epic Hero, it's a big fire house you sit around in waiting for a fire.

Many additions, axioms and qualifications to point out here:

-Obviously just because you got into trouble due to greed, venality, or someother roguish or rakish motive, doesn't mean you can't then become, in one way or another, heroic. Ask Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser--or Conan. Point is, Rogues can make their own plots in a way Upright Heroes can't.

-Gary noticed some of the contradictions here, which may be one of the reasons he proposes a Sandcastlebox--that is, in the AD&D DMG, there's the idea that in order to build a stronghold you have to clear out all the monsters in a (something)-mile radius. This makes the PCs sorta Upright Heroic (they're killing monsters that might prey upon the townsfolk) but makes them proactive and gives them choices (which monster-den to explore first?). It's maybe worth noting that I can't immediately think of any literary antecedents to this kind of large-scale-teratocide-as-an-end-in-itself behavior. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

-There are, of course, any number of other reasons to go around adventuring, I'm just talking here about the two main genre-defining ones.

-There are also lots of other reasons that mid-to-late-era D&D became more about heroic fantasy than pulp catch-as-catch-can, but this is clearly one of them.

-The entire formulation above assumes that the world is, more-or-less, "good" or at least innocent. Or at least the non-hidden parts of it are. If the entire world is corrupted by some single terrible force, then the PCs might be revolutionaries, and thus wake up every morning free to hatch this or that scheme to weaken the vast empire. Morally, these revolutionaries would be like classic Upright Heroes (they're idealistically motivated), but functionally, they'd be like pulpy Rogues (opportunistic, free to choose their targets, free to scheme). This is one possible way you could run something like, say "Vault of the Drow". A sort of Anti-Sandbox.

-Then there's the Quicksandbox. The world isn't dominated by a single evil, it just completely sucks. This is the basic post-apocalyptic set-up. (It also could just be any old world if you're desperately poor.) Basically--anything any PC tries to do (find water, ammunition, eat pie) is so hard and beset with so many mutants or gangsters or cave bears that heroic effort is required just to do anything. In this case, it doesn't matter if the PCs are Upright Heroes or Roguish because either way they have to act Roguish (i.e. plot, scheme, choose their battles) because otherwise they'll just die immediately. Survival is the plot hook. The only trick in making this kind of thing a true sandbox would be making sure the GM gives the PCs enough information about what's around them that they have different options about where to look for various commodities. Supermarket? Army barracks? Spooky old house?

-A mix of the above two ideas would be a world that completely sucks AND is dominated by a single evil but this evil is not something the PCs could ever dream of fighting on their own (absent some Plot helping them)--like the Warhammer 40k world. In this case, Upright Heroism is a weirder motivation because the Upright Hero is pretty much constantly aware that no matter how hard s/he tries the Emperor is still the Emperor and the Upright Hero will have to choose at what point moral action is beyond his or her abilities. The Upright Hero could become a proactive schemer by selectively deciding to get all outraged and proactive about certain given injustices (and not others) with no plot help. It'd be a somewhat strange campaign, but it'd also be a lot like real life.

-There are examples of proactive, scheming Upright Heroes in comics and elsewhere--an obvious example being The Authority. However, it's worth noting that, if the world is a more-or-less fully functioning, not-obviously-always-evil one, this stance is inherently political. Which makes them sort of like the revolutionary anti-sandbox type hero and/or involves them in all sorts of moral ambiguities which the campaign may or may not want to be about.

The Nevada Gaming Commission Is Not Responsible For Results Shown On Dice With More Than Six Sides

8:38 pm

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.

"Total party kill," I'd said.

"Yep," they'd said.

I'm thirsty and I need caffeine and all they have in the hotel's in-lobby gift shop is Mug root beer.

Mug is substandard and sickly-sweet at the best of times, and now, after already having one, I can't bear the thought of another.

"I'm sleepy," Mandy'd said, gazing regretfully at the once-promising (18 str! 18 Con!) character sheet.

"Alright," I said, "I'm gonna go down to the lobby and get a drink, y'all decide what you want to do."

Two-odd hours in and they were dead. Only two of them, but still, while many consider it an essential rite of D&D passage, nothing totally kills a party like a total party kill.

I settle for cranberry juice, and figure I'll get room service to send up some coffee. With Bailey's.

How did this happen?

___________

Rewind.

11:22 am

This morning, Palazzo Hotel, Las Vegas. Day of the 2010 Adult Video News Adult Film Awards.

It's one of those mornings you spend with the curtains shut and the lights off, waiting for everybody else to wake up and for the taste of tequila to go away. Staying on a couch kindly lent to us by the biggest porn agent in Hollywood.

What's he doing? He's on a bed in a little pool of light created by his laptop, on the other side of the dead quiet room, wearing what he slept in, checking his mail.

On this side of the room is Mandy and KK asleep on the fold-out couch. On the bed in-between is another porn actress the agent represents who stumbled in about three hours ago and has spent the entire weekend arguing with her boyfriend.

I have to run a game in three, maybe four hours, out of a room in the Rio hotel. Because we rarely get to play with C.P., since she lives here.

It's a continuation of a game I ran in...September? October?

Anyway, point is it's hard to remember where anybody was. Most of the best tricks and monsters have already been cannibalized for other adventures.

I should probably stop blogging and start writing this dungeon.

I should do that, but Las Vegas during the Adult Convention is immensely distracting, as I probably don't have to point out.

___________

11:50 am

Someone e-mailed me that they found a forum where I am despised and it is openly presumed that I harbor immature and contemptibly deviant sexual fantasies. Not because I am in porn, or because I frequently and loudly disparage both organized and disorganized religion, not because of my extremist political views or my terrible haircut, or even because I play D&D--but because--dig this--I play a different edition of D&D than the people in the forum. Oh, and also because I use funny charts. That is amazing. All the things I've done wrong and I am getting static for homebrew D&D. The boundless variety of human experience just rocks on toast, does it not?

Another shot, please.

___________

6:12 pm

Should we go to the porn awards? No, the awards are boring. Excruciatingly boring and long. And there is horrible mainstream smooved-out live hip-hop every time.

KK has to go, though, she's nominated for things.

She starts doing her make-up while Mandy rolls a new character.

C.P. helps KK apply her false eyelashes, then helps Mandy fight a mutant in a pit.

Then Mandy and C.P. make their way around the creepy tower, and get room service.

Mandy's dwarf fighter is knocked unconscious during an ill-advised attempt to steal a tapestry.

C.P.'s half-elf magic-user drags the dwarf away and they rest.

During the night, a goblin thief (poorly-armed and, helpfully I thought, loaded with healing potions) tries to catch C.P. unaware.

And on account of some absolutely pitiless dice, C.P.'s wizardess is slain.

And that's that. Total miniparty kill.

__________

8:40 pm

So there I am, down in the Rio gift shop, trying to decide how to spend the next few hours til KK gets back from the awards.

It's too late for the Pinball Museum. Bowling? Arcade? Strippers? There's an orgy party but Mandy's feeling too sick for that. Mandy's asthma makes it hard to do anything here since everybody smokes all the time.

I have no idea. I get back to the room.

"So what are we doing, ladies?"

"We're rolling up new characters."

"You're going back in?"

"We're going back in!"

So, you know, I rig it all up: Beloved sister, if I do not return from my expedition to...etc. etc.

So the new PC's are in there, and they are both hilariously average--10s and 11s in almost everything. Things occur.

So now, in this tower there are many glasses of night-sky-deep wine. These cups of wine are actually souls of people who died in the tower.

Not knowing this, Mandy's dwarf, Aquafina*, drinks this wine.

So then she has two souls. Like Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in "All of Me".

So then I gotta figure out who this extra soul is. I roll randomly. Race: half-elf. Class: magic-user. The exact race and class of the character C.P. just lost. Chances of that happening--the way I was doing it--are 1 in 77.

So that's all Ouija-board scary and so of course I decide that indeed that is C.P.'s just-slain character is indeed inside Mandy's new dwarf.

So they're both role-playing voices in the same character's head. And they've both been hitting the Bailey's. "Who are you and why am I so short and what's my sister doing here?" and all that.

In the middle of this KK texts us that she just won Best Actress**.

And a movie she directed wins Best Music.

And she gets up there and gives this awkward unrehearsed unexpected acceptance speech which I guess we can all examine in detail when this year's AVN awards are televised on cable in March or April but which reportedly was roughly:

"Thanks to all my fans! Thank you all the geeks who love X-Files as much as me, I love you, I just started playing D&D this year, oh my god, thanks!"

So, y'know, Vegas sucks and all and I'm glad to be home, but any day that ends with two players getting total-party-killed and immediately wanting to keep going and another one actually thanking the hobby for no conceivable reason in an internationally-televised acceptance speech for some whole other thing is a pretty good day for D&D, I guess.



______
*It's that kind of thing when you've been awake so long you start naming PC's after the nearest object. C.P.'s was named "Tabasco".

**AVN's "Best Actress" award is for actually acting, oddly enough. Though KK already has AVN's for best Group Sex, Oral Sex, and All-Girl 3-Way Scene, so she's got some crunch to back up the fluff.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Type IV, I'm Thinking

Off to the porn convention in Las Vegas. Not posting for a few days.

What'll that be like?

Cue it up to 3:17

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Sandboxes And The Roguish Work Ethic

Gamma sloths have a low AC and are immune to radiation, so I announced their fur must be shiny and metallic. Joe latched onto this fact and decided that his lich's biker jacket needed a fur lining. Have I mentioned that my players are rad to the max?
-Jeff Rients

Heroes have morals...villains have work ethic.
-Reminder written on whiteboard in office of the development team for City of Villains

Ok, so picture this:

A GM somewhere writes out the city of Metropolis and the city of Gotham and the rest of the world of DC Comics in excruciating detail. The train lines, the shopfronts, which hot dog store owners are secretly shark-men, every inch of it. It's all ready to go.

Now here comes a PC playing Superman, into this sandbox.

"So what do you want to do today, Supes?"

"Uh, I guess I'll go on patrol."

Off he flies.

"Do I see any crime?"

"Umm, nope, not much, Metropolis is a fully-functioning independent world going about its business."

"Ok, I keep going. Now do I see any crime?"

"Ok, some jamoke is robbing a bank."

"Well then I stop him!"

Now, what I want to say here is that this isn't really a sandbox. Why? Because Superman doesn't have any strategic choices here, really. He could decide to patrol (say) the docks instead of (say) the south side of town, but that's not a meaningful choice--i.e. it's like arbitrarily deciding "left or right"?

If nothing much is obviously going on, he keeps looking. If there's a crime, no matter how small, he has to stop it, because he's an Upright Hero. If there's a bigger crime, he has to stop that one first, because he's an Upright Hero.

While he has many interesting strategic and tactical choices about how to stop a crime, he doesn't have choices about which adventure to go on. ("Adventure" in the traditional sense--on his day off he could choose to stay home and read or curl up with Lois by the fire, but you get the point.)

Now let's say we have this same sandbox but the player is playing Lex Luthor.

"What'll we do this morning Lex?"

"Hmm...I say we send out some drones and look for weak spots in the worldwide nuclear security apparatus."

"Do you have drones?"

"I'll roll on my Drone-Making. Oh, also, I want to blackmail the president, did I already say that? And then, hmm, I notice on this geological map that a mound of Fuckeverythingupium is just lying there underneath a mountain in Madagascar, I'll want some of that, and..."

In other words, whereas a villain confronted with a sandbox world will immediately start generating ideas, Upright Heroes (typical heroes) need a plot. Without the bank robbery, Superman would just endlessly circle Metropolis, then go to work at the Daily Planet. Without the whole problem with the Ring, Frodo would just sit and hang out in the Shire forever being wholesome and loyal and sipping tea. Without fires, firemen just hang out in their firehouse, Ever Vigilant, playing cards.

Now I don't actually want to talk about playing villains, I want to talk about playing Roguish Heroes. Grey Mouser, Conan, Cugel, Han Solo, and the stereotypically larcenous Old School D&D PC.

Now a Roguish Hero is not the same as a villain, and I am not saying everybody should play Lex Luthor but, functionally, pulpy roguish protagonists and villains have an important thing in common: they want something from the world. Gold, power, the admiration of attractive members of the opposite sex--something. The Upright Hero doesn't really want anything--or at least not anything that would bring him/her into violent conflict with the world as-is. The Upright Hero is not usually proactive, s/he waits until s/he sees injustice (even if it was an injustice that was there all along).

I bring this up because two big ideas associated with the Old School renaissance are:

-Sandboxes instead of Pre-Written Plots, and...
-Roguish, Pulpy Heroes rather than Epic Fantasy (Supermanish) Upright Heroes.

And my idea here is: sandboxes and roguish protagonists don't just go together by coincidence, they go together because they work together extremely well.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I set my (thoroughly amoral) PCs loose on the sandbox city of Vornheim and realized that I had to do absolutely zero work to make a day's play out of it. The girls were in the city, they wanted some money and some answers, they basically wrote the adventure themselves. I sat back and did voices.

There's a reason why the stereotype of Old School D&D is a bunch of amoral bastards running around killing things and taking their stuff--and it's not just because of the x.p. system. It's because people who just want treasure don't need to be given a reason to go into a cave or a lair or an abandoned city or the HQ of the local Wizard's Guild and they can pick freely which one they want to do first, since the fact that the lair contains a despotic vampire that plagues the countryside and the cave just has a dumb animal with big teeth in it doesn't automatically impose a moral imperative on Roguish PCs to deal with the vampire first.

Likewise, there's a reason that, as pre-plotted adventures became more popular in the mid-80s, D&D tended, more and more, to assume the PCs were Upright Epic Heroes.

A hook isn't automatically a hook for a bunch of lovable rakes:

"A cleric has been found dead in the town square."

"Well why should we care?"

"The church is offering a reward of 600 gold pieces to find the killer."

"Um, couldn't we just sack the church and make more than that? I mean, who was this cleric anyway? Maybe he deserved it..."

When you're a thief, the world is your sandbox. When you're an Epic Hero, it's a big fire house you sit around in waiting for a fire.

Many additions, axioms and qualifications to point out here:

-Obviously just because you got into trouble due to greed, venality, or someother roguish or rakish motive, doesn't mean you can't then become, in one way or another, heroic. Ask Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser--or Conan. Point is, Rogues can make their own plots in a way Upright Heroes can't.

-Gary noticed some of the contradictions here, which may be one of the reasons he proposes a Sandcastlebox--that is, in the AD&D DMG, there's the idea that in order to build a stronghold you have to clear out all the monsters in a (something)-mile radius. This makes the PCs sorta Upright Heroic (they're killing monsters that might prey upon the townsfolk) but makes them proactive and gives them choices (which monster-den to explore first?). It's maybe worth noting that I can't immediately think of any literary antecedents to this kind of large-scale-teratocide-as-an-end-in-itself behavior. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

-There are, of course, any number of other reasons to go around adventuring, I'm just talking here about the two main genre-defining ones.

-There are also lots of other reasons that mid-to-late-era D&D became more about heroic fantasy than pulp catch-as-catch-can, but this is clearly one of them.

-The entire formulation above assumes that the world is, more-or-less, "good" or at least innocent. Or at least the non-hidden parts of it are. If the entire world is corrupted by some single terrible force, then the PCs might be revolutionaries, and thus wake up every morning free to hatch this or that scheme to weaken the vast empire. Morally, these revolutionaries would be like classic Upright Heroes (they're idealistically motivated), but functionally, they'd be like pulpy Rogues (opportunistic, free to choose their targets, free to scheme). This is one possible way you could run something like, say "Vault of the Drow". A sort of Anti-Sandbox.

-Then there's the Quicksandbox. The world isn't dominated by a single evil, it just completely sucks. This is the basic post-apocalyptic set-up. (It also could just be any old world if you're desperately poor.) Basically--anything any PC tries to do (find water, ammunition, eat pie) is so hard and beset with so many mutants or gangsters or cave bears that heroic effort is required just to do anything. In this case, it doesn't matter if the PCs are Upright Heroes or Roguish because either way they have to act Roguish (i.e. plot, scheme, choose their battles) because otherwise they'll just die immediately. Survival is the plot hook. The only trick in making this kind of thing a true sandbox would be making sure the GM gives the PCs enough information about what's around them that they have different options about where to look for various commodities. Supermarket? Army barracks? Spooky old house?

-A mix of the above two ideas would be a world that completely sucks AND is dominated by a single evil but this evil is not something the PCs could ever dream of fighting on their own (absent some Plot helping them)--like the Warhammer 40k world. In this case, Upright Heroism is a weirder motivation because the Upright Hero is pretty much constantly aware that no matter how hard s/he tries the Emperor is still the Emperor and the Upright Hero will have to choose at what point moral action is beyond his or her abilities. The Upright Hero could become a proactive schemer by selectively deciding to get all outraged and proactive about certain given injustices (and not others) with no plot help. It'd be a somewhat strange campaign, but it'd also be a lot like real life.

-There are examples of proactive, scheming Upright Heroes in comics and elsewhere--an obvious example being The Authority. However, it's worth noting that, if the world is a more-or-less fully functioning, not-obviously-always-evil one, this stance is inherently political. Which makes them sort of like the revolutionary anti-sandbox type hero and/or involves them in all sorts of moral ambiguities which the campaign may or may not want to be about.

__________

Addendum:
So I wrote this post about how roguish characters and sandbox-style play go together very well.

Lots of people liked it.

However, lots of other people seem to have misunderstood it.

So I'm explaining it all over again:

Let's start by defining some terms. This is not what these things mean all the time everywhere, just what I assume they mean when I'm talking about them on this blog, ok?

Sandbox:

An imaginary location (dungeon, city, country, continent, world, universe, etc.). The location may have unusual adventure seeds or plot triggers embedded in it (the bank teller is an alien!), but it may not.

Adventure:

An episode involving conflict (often violent) between the PCs and some other entity that keeps the DM and players entertained and for at least one session.

(And yes, I know how narrow it is to insist on conflict as a necessary component of adventure, but I'm just talking about stuff that happens in RPGs I want to play.)

Ok, so, example: I have made a super-simplified sandbox. There's a map of it up there.

We must imagine that this represents roughly the sum total of knowledge the PCs have about where stuff is in the world, and that all these places (church, etc.) run more-or-less the way you'd assume such an institution would run in the real world.

(I know that's silly, but this is a simplified example.)

Also, assume there is a list of NPCs (some known to the PCs, some not) that the GM has described in enough detail that s/he knows how they'd react to most situations.

Now, looking at this map, and desiring only money and/or power, a roguish PC could devise any number of schemes:

-Steal a car from the used car lot, use it to aid in the getaway from a bank robbbery, ditch the car by the church.

-Bribe an orphan into aiding him in the commission of a crime since nobody would suspect an orphan.

-Steal a car, pile lots of orphans into it, ransom them off.

etc.

(Obviously if my sandbox was more complicated and the PCs knew that complicated new info they could generate more and better schemes.)

Now, the thing about all these schemes is: if the PCs try to enact these schemes during a game, and thus turn them into adventures, the adventure writes itself.

The players know more or less what kinds of things they can expect to happen if they try to steal a car, and can plan accordingly.

I, as a GM know how my cops, security guards, etc. (either because I have them pre-written as NPCs or because I run them as typical examples of their profession) would react to the movements of these roguish PCs if they saw them, and can simply have them react accordingly.

As the GM, I can choose to add complexity to the situation during the game, but I don't have to if I don't want to.

The point is: because I have a sandbox and a group of rogues, I already have the minimum amount of stuff necessary to play the game for several hours. I don't to design a conflict, the PCs have done it themselves.

Now, looking at this same map, a player who is playing Superman likewise has many options:

He could go to the orphanage and try to cure a disease some sick orphan had.

He could try to free Mon-El from the Phantom Zone (in the privacy of his own home, I suppose).

He could go to the used car lot and ask if there was any trouble over there.

He could go to the church and see if there was any trouble over there.

He could try to help out with the church's canned food drive.

He could try to make sure the bank's security situation is up to snuff.

etc.

But here's the difference:

While any of these things may result in a conflict (and thus an adventure), the Superman PC--unlike the rouguish PC--has no idea of what the shape of that conflict will be.

(And neither does the GM--unless s/he's already planned for the possible eventuality that the PC might do that thing. "Oh, I have a 'helping with the canned food drive' villain all ready.")

Superman does not choose sketch out a violent conflict. The rogue does. Superman chooses from a set of options whose consequences (conflict-wise) are mostly unknown.

Now, obviously if the Superman PC decides to go to the church, than the player playing Superman at least can reasonably expect to have a conflict somehow involving a church, and if Superman goes to Planet Sigma 12 then the player can reasonably expect to have a conflict in outer space, but beyond such broad strokes, s/he does not choose.

For Superman, choosing between the orphanage and the bank may be choosing between fighting the Joker and fighting Darkseid, but the player doesn't have any way to know that. So Superman is not designing a conflict by choosing a course of action, he's just blindly walking into option A instead of option B.

____________

In the case of the rogue, the PC (some bank robber), the player of the PC (a real person), and the GM all have (in a way) the same goal: to initiate conflict. In the case of Superman, the PC (Superman) and the player (Doug or Jimmy or whatever real person is playing the game) have different goals. The player, if s/he's playing more-or-less in character, has to "trick" his/her PC into entering conflict, or else simply have him/her vigilantly wait for whatever conflict the GM wants to provide.

____________

In other words:

If a GM is dealing with rogues in a sandbox, s/he can "front-load" a very large part of the creative effort by putting it into describing the location yet still offer the players genuine choice. "Here, I made a place full of goodies and resources to help you get those goodies and obstacles of various shapes and sizes to getting those goodies, pick your poison."

(Not that the GM has to tell the PCs every pre-written detail of the sandbox. But the idea is the GM doesn't need to throw in unknown twists and details if s/he doesn't want to. The rogues are already choosing a course of action that will lead to chaos, change, and adventure. Even the simplest bank robbery with stereotypical cops is going to result in enough dice rolling that unexpected stuff will be generated by the mere playing of the game.)

On the other hand, if the GM is dealing with Superman in a sandbox , the GM cannot just "front-load" the creative effort by putting it into describing the location (the sandbox) and its people and still offer the player as much choice. This is because the GM must also pre-plan or improvise wholly unexpected conflicts that will occur if Superman chooses to interacts with these locations.

(Note: This applies to my example. None of what I'm writing here is true if Superman is on Apokolips or in Hitler's Germany or something--for a discussion of those kinds of situations, see above.)

Or to put it another way: Superman doesn't start an adventure by designing a conflict for himself. The rogues, on the other hand, know that just doing their job will generate conflict, so they're designing a conflict as soon as they decide to go to work.

_________

A guy named Fat Alibert pretty much said it all this way in the comments section of the original post:

Having a character move to a location to initiate a DM prepared encounter, select a plot hook from a plot hook dispenser, or choose to perform a task that doesn't bring him into conflict ISN'T the same as a character who initiates his own choice of conflict based on what he knows of the sandbox and his own motivations that run counter to the status-quo.

-------------

Here are some things I'm NOT saying:

-I'm not saying sandboxes are the only way to go.

-I'm not saying rogues are the only way to run a sandbox, merely that they make it easier.

-I'm not saying that the DM shouldn't ever throw in plot things or improvise or add in new, creative ideas once the PCs have started playing in the sandbox, merely that this is made optional rather than mandatory by the rogue + sandbox format.

-I'm not saying there's no good reason to play Superman-type heroes.

-I'm not saying that you can't give rogues plots. Merely that they don't necessarily need them just to play the game.

-I'm not saying that you couldn't create a sort of world that was unusually inimical to Superman (like a fascist state or a post-apocalyptic world) and thus transform Superman's role completely and make him as pro-active, schemey, and conflict-shaping as any rogue (see above for a taxonomy of ways to do that).

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Chaotic Something

Fifteen Hours To Game Time

We are playing early this week since many of us are going to the porn convention in Vegas next weekend.

It's 10:10 pm.

Game time in fifteen hours.

More than half of which I would like to fill with sleeping. So, really...

Six hours to write an adventure.

That's not so bad.

Hold on, wait here, I'm gonna get a snack...

Mmm...that was good, ok, where was I?

Oh, yeah.

When last we left our heroes, they had just reached the great city of Vornheim, KK had been turned into a werewolf, and it had been discovered that one of the eyes of the ancient god Vorn is being secretly held by the White Elves, a female one of which Mandy has just woken up in bed next to thanks to the Extended Carousing Mishaps Table...

...and now....
I have no idea.

Ordinarily, we might expect things to wend their way toward Mandy (cleric of Vorn) telling the higher-ups in the faith about the fact that some guys have the object of their devotions' 20-foot eyeball squirreled away and then I could just assign some McGuffin-Finding Quest via the local Vorn Pope to make it all cool.

But Mandy is way too much of a cynic, an anarchist, and all-around Moorcockian to trust the official Church hierarchy. Plus there was that one time they all turned into bug demons and she had to fight them. So that's a bit of a wash.

This whole waking-up-in-bed-next-to-a-dead-elfette thing seems a bit more promising...

Ordinarily if I have no idea what to do, I'd just start writing a dungeon, but the party just spent all last session trying to get to the big city, so I figure they deserve a city adventure, right? Right.

Plus it might be a good way to test out the Urbancrawl Rules.

Ok, let's get shit sorted:

- There'll be the first part of the adventure, where Mandy deals with the consequences of her d20-assisted debauchery.

- Then the second part, which I can probably just wing, where everybody just is all "Ok, we're in the big city, whatever shall we do now?"

- And then part three, where I slowly and by stealthyness funnel them toward some kind of fighting of monsters.

That should be more than enough for a day's play, right? Right.

The most obvious problem with part one here is making it so it doesn't involve splitting the party. I am not in a splitting-the-party mood.

Two ways to roll then:

-The ladies all wake up in an inn in various beds it's just that Mandy's happens to have this corpse in it, or...

-The ladies all wake up totally displaced in some alien locale and Mandy's next to a corpse.

Now, I find the second one a little less philosophically acceptable, since the idea of the Extended Carousing Mishaps chart is that a player voluntarily chooses to temporarily relinquish control over their character for a night (through the in-game device of alcohol) in exchange for x.p..

Mandy chose that, the other PCs didn't. I feel like, all other things being equal, I'm gonna let everybody wake up in their bed. Plus I really love the oh my god you wake up and none of you know what's going on beginning and so I don't want to over-use it.

Ok, so everybody wakes up in an ordinary inn.

(Question for DMs: Do PCs in your game have homes? Do you know? Do they? Do they care?)

So now the question is:

Either I let Mandy freak out about this corpse and the authorities and all that and see what she does, or I just have the magistrate or somebody show up immediately.

Considering KK won't be playing tomorrow and so won't be begging for blood at every turn, I'm gonna take advantage of that and let this one go a little role-playey: there's a corpse, whatever shall you do?

So: construct the situation such that hiding this corpse will be difficult.

An inn. A helpful but nosey innkeeper. Well-meaning. If he's too much of a jerk they will probably just off him. So: a nice guy. "Hey ladies, what's all the commotion? Brought you some brownie-root tea! Y'know, when I was a lad..." All that. Ok. He needs a name: Vorkenhauler. Mister Vorkenhauler. Also: various other inn residents all more-or-less friendly with said Vorkenhauler.

(What if it goes all Weekend At Bernie's? "Mister Vorkenhauler, say hi to my cousin, umm...Corpsica! Wave hello Corpsica!". Rad.)

Ok, physical impediments to hiding the corpse:

Inn is in a tower. No windows. No: a window, but the window looks down onto a very public place?

If there's no window, what we have is essentially a dungeon. With a window, we have the potential for access to the city, its scenery, its dangers, and its resources. So: a window. High above a crowded market.

And the tower is surrounded by other towers, also tall, potentially filled with potential witnesses.

Ok. Write out the neighborhood or wing it?

Leave it for now, write it if we feel like it/have energy later tonight.

Now...

(Originally this entry went on and on and for dozens and dozens more paragraphs of Best Laid Planning, but none of that is relevant because, well, see below:)


Fast Forward: Game Time The Next Day

Everybody's sitting round the table. I have a sandwich. There is about to be D&D.

"Zak, we shouldn't pick up where we left off last time, we should run something else."

"Ummm...why might that be, Mandy?"

For various medical reasons Mandy has gotten zero sleep last night and so Mandy (the actual Mandy, the player) is in an extremely bad mood. From the point of view of me, this mood looks roughly equivalent to what the observed mood of a woman during painful childbirth would be like if there were no drugs, no ameliorative system of biomedical bureaucrats and/or pancho-wearing holistic childbirth hippies telling her it was all going to be fine and, of course no prospect of any cute fat little suffering-woman-clone showing up and goo-gooing the pain away.

Nevertheless, the other girls have showed up and are ready to play, and are watching this conversation.

(Don't worry, this story has a happy ending.)

Mandy: "Because I don't want to deal with the stupid dead elf thing right now!"

"Um, and, uh, why might that be?"

"Because I just don't!"

So now begins an excruciating back and forth, where I try gently to figure out what the problem is with the dead elf, figure out if I can re-route around the dead elf, and try to figure out, in general, What The Fuck, while Mandy steadfastly refuses to either explain or budge. It is all very weird and tense and it's like we're 12 years old in here.

On the one hand, I know Mandy's mental health takes precedence over a well-run game of D&D. On the other hand, I have yet to encounter a mental health problem that cannot be cured by a well-run game of D&D.

Then Mandy says:

"Well what if I just summon a monster to eat the corpse?"

"Well then the corpse is eaten and we play from, ok, the body's gone because a monster ate it."

"But I don't even want to deal with the whole corpse thing."

"Ok, but you just did deal with it. You summoned a monster that ate it. It's dealt with."

"But..."

"O-kayyyy, so you all wake up bright and shiny in an inn, feeling refreshed except Mandy, who stumbles out of her room looking a little worse for wear, and Connie whose lost her character sheet and so has had to approximate her character and so we'll just say she's hungover and is not quite herself today..."

"Jeez, girl, I don't know, when you get to drinking it's like you turn into a whole other person."

"Yeah, different hit points, different reflex save, totally..."


Newsflash: Chicks Dig Shopping

"Ok, so anyway so you're in the big city. What do you want to do?"

What they want to do is sell stuff, then use the money to buy new stuff.

Ok, think I, this is ok, I know how to do this, there's a guy, he has a funny voice, he buys things from them, he has some shop somewhere, no problem. I have charts for that. this will keep everyone busy until I figure out what actually to do this afternoon.

Then there's still the problem of Mandy, who says "I'll see you all later, I'm going to the Church of Vorn to hang out with the sisters," and puts her head down on the desk. Rock. Oh, it will be a fun day.

Step one is actually Appraising. Satine has Appraise. Connie might, but who knows? So fuck that. Anyway, thank you 3.5 for the Appraise skill, I appreciated it during today's session even though I'm sure you would've rolled over in your grave had you seen the mechanics I used to execute it.

Inexplicably, Mandy invites everyone to do all this appraising in her room, the room containing the murder scene she is trying to pretend didn't happen, but at the moment, it just smells funny.

Also inexplicably, we have to assume that this means that Mandy didn't actually go to the Temple of Vorn but actually stayed and hung out in the inn, but that's normal--if you're not ok with people saying they're doing stuff and then, seconds later, saying they're doing totally different stuff then you can't DM D&D with porn stars. If nobody lost hit points in the interim, I say fuck it.

So Appraising happens. Then everybody crosses town (completely ignoring a random encounter with a disshevelled damsel being pursued by a goblin with a dinner fork) to the Thriving Marketplace.

Here' some stuff I learned:

-The jewellery guy sounds like a mob hitman. Also, when you give him an item, I have to stick a bottlecap in my eye and pretend like it's a magnifying loop.

-The weapon-selling guy has a magic oil that, if you rub it on a magic weapon, it glows.

-If you tell Connie that she has a magic weapon, then she'll decide to sell it, but if you tell her again, she'll change her mind.

-The weapon-selling guy gets annoyed when you tell him you're going to sell him a weapon and then all of a sudden change your mind and will tell you to get your fickly ass out of his shop.

-The other weapon-selling guy around the corner is fond of women and has a thick French accent and will try to sell you a magic rapier that isn't actually magic. Also, he will sell you a magic ring that is magic.

-The desk clerk at the Bell and Bone Inn is a Jewish lady who sounds exactly like my aunt.

-The armor-selling guy has no personality at all, but will give you a good deal.

-Aside from Frankie, the girls don't necessarily remember how much money they have, but like getting more of it.

-What appears to this DM as a Whole Lotta Improvised Nothin' is, to his players, (including, thankfully, Mandy) an exciting and invigorating afternoon of role-playing and acquiring imaginary stuff.


And Now: Crime.

Toward the tail end of all this, the girls apparently decided their rap sheets were far too short.

So, in addition to Homicide and Improper Disposal of A Corpse, the girls proceded, in the next 45 minutes, to rack up Petty Larceny (stole their money back from Frenchy), Grand Larceny (stealing the book from Death Frost Doom back from the Sister Superior of the Church of Vorn--along with everything else of obvious value in her office), Involuntary Manslaughter (accidentally stabbing a constable while trying to stab a cat--long story) , Assault (drunken pub brawl), Arson (accidentally setting The Dead Dog Pub alight), and Prostitution (providing sexual favors with the owner of the Bell & Bone Inn in exchange for hiding them from the authorities).

150 x.p. The only combat was with the cat. To be fair, it was a magical cat. It was also the only thing in the whole game that was there on purpose.

"I like this city adventure, I think it's my favorite one so far."


The Moral of The Story

Before running a city adventure, make sure you have three funny accents and all your PCs are antisocial psychotics. The rest writes itself.