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RPG Blog Carnival: Life and Death in RPGs… – Pt. 1 – Life

March 4, 2011 in blogs, Gaming, PCs, Resources by Fitz | 16 comments

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is Life and Death in RPGs (see here for the kickoff article) and shockingly enough in the insanity of my last few weeks, I have some ideas to share…

Let’s start with Life, and then we’ll work on Death in the next post.

Dice for various games, especially for rolepla...

Image via Wikipedia

For me, “life” in RPGs is more than deciding who lives and dies in a combat or trying to keep my PCs alive. It’s the roleplaying side of the house that keeps me interested and excited. So I try to define more than what a character can do and delve into why they can do it, when they learned it, and how they learned it or use it.

In the original Moebius Adventures system, we broke character creation into two large chunks – Childhood and Professions. Childhood covered everything up to age 12 or 14. And a character’s childhood might be very different than their choices of Profession. Look at a character like Conan. He was a normal child until he watched his family and village get slaughtered and was then taken as a slave. You think that might have shaped his attitudes, knowledge, and skills a bit?

So I propose that when folks are creating characters that they think about it in those two major buckets. What did the character learn as a child that has stuck with them into adulthood? And what choices might they have made as far as their professions go (or what choices were made for them)? Obviously not all skills you learn as a kid are useful. But many we continue to develop throughout our entire lives.

You could even go so far as to build in a tree of known associates. Who did your character grow up with? Have they kept in contact with any of those folks? Or did they part ways? Was it an amicable departure or one with enmity? Is it someone you might encounter during a game? What happens if a childhood enemy faces you as an adult? How is that different from a random monster encountered in an adventure?

Perhaps your character did or didn’t have a great family life growing up and they simply wanted to get out and explore the world or get away from what they knew before… What events shaped the decisions to learn particular skills? Did your parents teach you to forage and hunt or were you orphaned early on and forced to scrounge for food, learning what you could to stay alive? Did you gain any scars from early practice of weapons skills? Did you witness the death of a family member that you still seek revenge for years later (think Inigo Montoya)?

Not only do you end up with a basic history of your character to go with the skills they have, but you end up with contacts you can leverage in-game and that your GM can use to help tie things together and make them easier to relate to for your character. It works to the benefit of both the player and the GM to develop more backstory to better inform future events.

Yes, I know that D&D only gives you a few skill points here and there. Other games have the same issue. But slot a third or even a half of those skills towards defining your knowledge from childhood and you’ll end up with a better idea of where your character came from.

Next time we’ll talk about Death in a variety of ways. Stay tuned for part 2!

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Book Review: D-Jumpers Volume #1: A Gate to Adventure from DVOID Systems

November 2, 2010 in Books, D-Jumpers, Da' Vane, DVOID Systems, Gamemasters, GMing, NPCs, Ouroboros, PCs, Places, plot, Resources, Reviews, supplement, systemless by Fitz | No comments

When Da’ Vane (Christina Freeman) dropped me a note about the first D-Jumpers product from DVOID Systems, I was definitely intrigued. Da’ Vane is another of the folks going through Yax & Johnn Four’s Gamer Lifestyle Project. She started in April 2010 and in six months has released a book with help from Ouroboros I (Sebastian Klement), which is an impressive feat to begin with!

With that in mind, I started to dive into a final copy (minus artwork, which had been delayed) of D-Jumpers Volume #1: A Gate to Adventure… As a fan of cross-genre rules systems, my interest was piqued by the very first paragraph and the question – “Why limit your games to one genre, to one setting, to one world, to one imagination?” This product provides four different encounters in very different worlds – from fantasy and space opera to the great beyond.

Each of these mini-campaigns is presented as “systemless,” which should allow you the freedom to mix/match ideas and concepts but use any rules system from Storyteller and d20 to any other system you like or no system at all (though I’m not sure how that would work, it’s an interesting idea). As you go through each “Encounter,” they’re set up the same way, with an Objective, Hooks, Details, Development, Options, and a Checklist. This makes it easy to hop from one encounter to the next with a known structure.

“Gate Keeper” introduces characters to the multi-world concept of D-Jumpers. The PCs meet an inventor who’s managed to create a tool (i.e. spell or device) allowing adventurers to go to various places to gather critters, items, and information for him. He then can better plan how to take over the weaker worlds and gain more power… Of course, this evil genius doesn’t let the PCs in on his ultimate goal of controlling the multi-verse, so they won’t know what they’re getting themselves into...

→ Read More at Game Knight Reviews here...

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PC Therapy?

September 13, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | 2 comments

A concept came up in discussion a couple of weeks ago about how to resolve inter-party issues. We’re not going to try it ourselves, but I wanted to write about it a bit to share it and ponder the idea a bit.

It’s simple really…

For each other character in the group, a player will write down in a few sentences what their character thinks of them. So if you have four PCs in a group, character A will write about B, C, and D. Character B will write about A, C, and D, and so on.

And if you really want to make things interesting, you can also ask for feedback on what the players think about their character and the others in the group.

The GM would then gather these little summaries and… then what?

That’s really where the idea stopped. What would the GM do with these little snippets of information? Would they distribute them to the players after sanitizing the text a bit to protect the players? Perhaps come up with the top 3-5 things for each character and distribute that?

But how does that information help the player? Once a character is created, it’s tough to change their personality or how they behave towards other PCs or NPCs.

Would this technique be more useful to a group just starting out or a group of more experienced roleplayers?

I think in our case, this technique would be very interesting, but ultimately self destructive. I’m not sure any of us would be prepared for what might come to the surface.

Any thoughts?

–Fitz

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More thoughts about Typography, or the tools used to create it…

August 13, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | No comments

Hittite Cuneiform Tablet
Image by voyageAnatolia.blogspot.com via Flickr

Long title, I know…

But basically I am wondering how we might take the small things, such as the method of writing, and use that in a game. And by “method” in this case, I’m thinking of the tools used to create the work. For example, were the letters painted onto wood or stone? If so, how old are they? What remains?

Let’s think about a few different tools… brush, stylus, chisel, and pen – just for a representative sample.

If you look at the cave paintings in Lascaux, they’re estimated to be around 17,000 years old. That’s a lot of years. That could come into play in numerous different genres of games. The paint used, colors chosen, or even the brush strokes can tell a lot about the artist and how fast a particular piece was finished. The prehistoric artists at Lascaux took their time and it shows. Some gang banger simply marking gang signs on an underpass probably won’t use a brush and will instead opt for a can of spray paint…

Another example would be the good old cuneiform tablet. Clay tablets and a sharpened stylus worked pretty well to document lists of payments or property somewhere around 3500 BC. It may not be the most expressive language in the world, but it works. Consider for a moment some priest documenting the steps for interment of a royal family member and warning anyone not to disturb the dead or face the consequences. Scratches on the wall are probably going to be ignored by most game parties I’ve been in – so who knows what might be behind that cuneiform-labeled door?

Why not use a simple chisel? It beats having to find some wet clay and where you put your stylus down… Some chiseled petroglyphs may be 800,000 years old. More recent ones, for example from Pompeii or Rome, are probably a bit easier to understand if your Latin is up to snuff. (Mine isn’t.) Chiseled stone is kind of like the permanent record for many civilizations we still don’t know much about.

Pen and paper don’t last nearly as long as paint, clay, or stone, but they can be much more expressive and perhaps in a more modern language a PC might understand without too much research. Paper and papyrus have been around for nearly 6000 years. But unless your paper and pen is stored somewhere the paper won’t mold, mildew, or wear away with sun and sand, it’s not going to last very long. Crayons don’t last nearly as long, but can leave a brief reminder on a sanitarium wall that someone did in fact live there for a time.

Cuneiform sign
Image via Wikipedia

So how might you use these different tools?

Take for example a Cthulhu campaign or any other setting that relies on the “previous civilization” model. Can you imagine a scientist from our era stumbling upon the ruins of a temple to the Old Ones and finding 10,000-, 20,000, 100,000-year old markings that get translated (correctly or not) to form the basis of a summoning spell? Or perhaps the previous arrival of aliens or monsters from other worlds or dimensions? Lastly, consider how much you could play with your players heads if it turned out to be graffiti from some punk with a paintbrush in the last 10 years who wanted to spark a hoax…

And then keep in mind the effects of time on a particular piece of art. Has some of the paint disappeared, leaving a message that may be misinterpreted? Or were large portions of a chiseled stone destroyed, leaving only a partial text that may not include the stringent warning about letting whatever was locked deep inside the tomb free?

Endless possibilities.

From fantasy to modern and beyond (computers anyone?), the tools of the trade have a lot to offer as far as inspiration. So don’t forget the little things…

I’ll leave you with some of the sacred text of Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

Chapman as King Arthur in Holy Grail

Image via Wikipedia

  KNIGHT:  There!  Look!
  LAUNCELOT:  What does it say?
  GALAHAD:  What language is that?
  ARTHUR:  Brother Maynard, you're our scholar!
  MAYNARD:  It's Aramaic!
  GALAHAD:  Of course!  Joseph of Aramathea!
  LAUNCELOT:  Course!
  KNIGHT:  What does it say?
  MAYNARD:  It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of
      Aramathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail
      in the Castle of uuggggggh'.
  ARTHUR:  What?
  MAYNARD: '... the Castle of uuggggggh'.
  BEDEMIR:  What is that?
  MAYNARD:  He must have died while carving it.
  LAUNCELOT:  Oh, come on!
  MAYNARD:  Well, that's what it says.
  ARTHUR:  Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aaggggh'.
      He'd just say it!
  MAYNARD:  Well, that's what's carved in the rock!
  GALAHAD:  Perhaps he was dictating.
(quoted from Sacred-Texts.com)

(Funny enough, this article was inspired by something programmer-related at Design for Hackers and not Monty Python – but hey. You take inspiration where you can get it!)

–Fitz

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GMing and Playing Styles… What’s yours?

July 23, 2010 in GMing, PCs by Fitz | 10 comments

Hi there…

Recently I watched the new documentary Dungeon Masters that featured a GM who managed to kill his whole party simply because they were dumb enough to charge into a Sphere of Annihilation… And it got me thinking.

Over my nearly 30 years of playing RPGs, I’ve encountered a variety of GMing styles. Everything from being adversarial to strictly hands-off “see what happens”, from lockstep “don’t go off the path” to “wow did we just roleplay a NPC-NPC conversation for the last 45 minutes?” They all have a place, but I have to wonder if it’s a progression through which most GMs work through in their gaming careers.

At the beginning of the cycle is the newbie GM and at the end is the battle-hardened GM…

When I was young and just starting out in RPGs in junior high, the GMs I played with were mostly focused on the critical path. Whether it was a pre-written module we were going through or something they had thrown together, we focused on getting the job done. It was less about roleplaying and more about roll-playing at that point. Combat was everything on both sides of the table.

In high school and college, we started getting more into playing the characters. Combat was still important, but less so. We became enamored with the collaborative effort within the party. But our GMs started to diverge a bit. Some were interested in the all-important story, pushing combat to something that only happened rarely. Some were focused on trying to kill players, which made the players more apt to simply trying to defeat the GM’s nefarious schemes.

After college, wow there have been even more extremes. In one Vampire game we played, I swear the GMs (it was a boyfriend/girlfriend pair where one typically played and the other GMed) simply wanted to hear their own voices. However, we were really able to focus on character development to the max. And in one game I GMed I lost control of a game simply because two players became more dominant than I was.

Now I haven’t GMed for a while – at least nothing more than the occasional playtest or one-off adventure. But my goal would be to offer a focused sandbox that gave enough wiggle room, but could accommodate combat and roleplaying in equal amounts. I’d probably sway more towards the roleplaying than roll-playing these days, but there are plusses and minuses to both approaches.

The odd thing to me is the advent of RPGs on the computer in the last 25 years. Everything from Bard’s Tale and the Gold Box games from SSI/TSR to World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights… none of them have managed (beyond Planescape: Torment maybe) to capture the roleplaying/storytelling aspects of the tabletop roleplaying experience. As such, when new folks want to try playing tabletop after playing CRPGs, they tend to focus on the roll-playing combat aspects more than anything else and have to work through all the things the rest of us who started with tabletop years ago went through…

Anyway… Where are your GMs in the continuum? Where are your players on that same continuum?

Where is your GM at on the Continuum?

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–Fitz

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Is it time to ask your character some questions?

June 29, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | No comments

Yes, I’m probably going out on a limb here by asking you to talk to a fictional character – which can be further construed as asking you to talk to yourself. (Though recent articles say that talking to yourself isn’t necessarily a bad thing – see here.)

Characters are rarely just numbers and words on a page. There’s more to them than that more often than not.

So why not ask your character, on paper or out loud, a bit about themselves? Consider it an interview. I’ve done it for characters in my pale attempts at writing fiction (had a long talk with a serial killer once that unnerved me a bit). But what do you ask?

There’s the usual stuff psychobabble stuff like:

  • What was your mother like?
  • Where did you grow up?
  • Who were your friends? Your enemies?
  • How was your relationship with your father?
  • When did you realize you wanted more for yourself than an average life? (Most characters lead extraordinary lives.)
  • Why are you here?

But how about some not so obvious questions… A recent article by Alicia Rasley at WritersDigest.com brought up 9 interesting questions to ask… Here’s a few from that article…

  • When you walk into a party, what do you notice first? The mood? The people? The decorations? The things that need to be fixed? The background music? The food on the buffet table? Whether or not you fit in?
  • Do you usually notice problems around you? What is your response? Do you write an angry letter to the editor? Shrug and move on? Analyze what’s wrong and how to fix it? Take it as evidence that the world is falling apart? What about problems within yourself?
  • Are you more interested in the past, the future or living in the now?Are you one to keep holiday traditions? If you had to move tomorrow, how long would it take you to make new friends?
  • How do you decide if you can trust someone? By experience with this person? First impressions? Intuition? Do you test the person somehow? Or are you just generally disposed to trust or not to trust?
  • Are you a deliberate, careful speaker, or do you talk without thinking first? Do you use slang, or do you use diction your old English teacher would approve?

I think these are interesting questions to ponder on a quiet evening or afternoon. Any extra tidbits you learn about your character makes it more interesting to play in my book. It’s those little things that sometimes make a huge difference.

Where does all this lead? Hard to say. You might write up a small biography for your character that you can pass along to your GM. You might simply compile a list of adjectives to remind yourself about your character’s personality and quirks. This could even be useful for a GM trying to further define the party’s arch nemesis or discover the motivations behind a local lord who thinks the PCs should be tossed out of town on their rumps…

What do you think? Have you spoken with your characters recently?

–Fitz

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Magazine Review: Kobold Quarterly Fall 2009 Issue 11

November 12, 2009 in Uncategorized by Fitz | 2 comments

Hi all!

Along with many other folks, I had an opportunity to check out the Fall 2009 issue of Kobold Quarterly in October… And I’m just now getting back to writing up the review. But here I am!

I have to admit that I’d only seen one other issue of the magazine a couple of years ago and though I was impressed, I wasn’t blown away. This time it hit me more like the old Dungeon or Dragon magazines of yore and from the cover on I was hooked. Not only does it have great art to capture your attention, but the content covers everything from vampires to the myth of the Philosopher’s Stone and far beyond.

Kobold Quarterly, Fall 2009, Issue 11As with many magazines, there are quite a few ads – but I’m guessing KQ (like many other magazines) uses ad- and subscription-revenues to keep providing us great content every quarter. On the plus side, most of the ads are well designed, colorful, and definitely meant for the target audience (of which I’m definitely a member).

The issue starts off with “A Broken Mind – Sanity and Mental Disorders” by Scott Gable – and I love the idea of merging in sanity rules with D&D. Ever since I played Call of Cthulhu in college, I’ve been fascinated by usually slow (sometimes quick) slide to madness that can occasionally overcome a character. Gable’s mechanic of adding “Mind” as a 7th ability score and a pool of sanity works great to bring in the dark overtones of a world where mortals are not meant to experience everything the world might throw at them… And I just love describing a character’s sanity points as “the currency of madness”… [insert evil laughter here]

Gable’s article presents not only the base mechanic for sanity, but how to use it (and lose it) as the character reacts to the bizarre things an evil GM might throw at his or her players. Having lost my sanity in CoC long ago, I remember going Berserk and killing the rest of my party, so I was pleased to see that slip into the list of “Temporary Insanities”. And among the “Indefinite Insanities” you have things like Fear, Obsession, and Paranoia – a trifecta of mental illness sure to cause a player to stretch some roleplaying skills!

Another great article is “Howling Werebeasts – How to Play Lycanthropes as PCs” by John E. Ling, Jr., which covers a bit of the history of Lycanthropy and how to integrate it into a game. Unless you’re playing White Wolf‘s Werewolf, I think the templates covered presents both sides of the were-beast picture. As a player, you must take the bad with the good. It hurts to change. People will react to you differently. And it requires a it of work on your part. As a GM, it offers logical responses to how to work it into a game without throwing the balance off.

What I really liked about the article was how it broke the Wererat, Werewolf, and Werebear into actual, playable characters. I don’t think I want to play one soon, but it might be something to consider as a NPC should I need to throw some PCs a curve ball. And once you’ve introduced it as an NPC it’s not too much of a stretch to see your PCs get infected… [insert more evil laughter here]

The other articles in the magazine are just as good, covering the “Ecology of the Vampire,” “Uvandir: The Pride of Craftsmen” (great details about dwarven life), “Running Across the Screen (A GM Roundtable)” (great roundtable interview with 16 GMs!), and more. The book reviews were also welcome, presenting a few fantasy and science-fiction titles that might inspire GMs and Players alike.

In 82 pages you get a bit of everything, which is awesome. Be sure to check it out at KoboldQuarterly.com today!

Looks like I’m going to have to break out my wallet and purchase a subscription just in time for the holidays. :)

–Fitz

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