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The Warlords Bow to the HardCASE

The times, they are a-changing.

My post-apocalyptic game using the Riggers system is no more. I have some ideas on why this has happened. In essence, I don’t believe I managed expectations properly, the style was too great a variation on what my players were used to, and I spent too much time working on mechanics rather than being concerned about my players.

The game – which was under the title Warlords of the Wastes – was meant to be gritty and threatening. The PCs were members of an expeditionary party caught in a foreign land and trying to find their way home, or at least to someplace safe . . . or safer. I had set up an encounter early in the game – a checkpoint with a still-function tank – to try to telegraph the threat the setting presented. Even as they were getting their asses handed to them, the players continued to try to beat the opposing force. Only when I openly stated that they really should run for it, did they do so.

This is tied into the second problem with the campaign – the variance of styles. Centurion, playtested back in 2012, was the last time my players felt really threatened. They did really well in Centurion because they were still in the “we are mortal” mindset. Given that since the playtesting for Nefertiti Overdrive started in 2012, the games we’ve gone through have had the PCs as master-class bad-asses, I needed to do more than telegraph the switch back to mortals. I needed to put it in big, huge, neon letters. I needed to manage expectations. I should have been the slave in the chariot during a triumph in Rome whispering “never forget: thou art mortal.”

So, that change in styles: not only was it not made obvious front and centre, I don’t think it clicked with what my players enjoy. We have had a lot of fun since Nefertiti Overdrive. The system for League of Extraordinary Misfits was by no means as kinetic and cinematic as Nefertiti Overdrive, but the PCs were still pulp adventurers, and it had a very light-hearted tone (we had the monkey Schultz, who was a version of the Human Torch who was also the co-pilot).

Now Dream Riggers was a little tougher than League of Extraordinary Misfits, but the PCs basically had superpowers and were up against personifications of concepts like dreams, nightmares, and illusion – using the Greek gods/demigods for that purpose – in a future Johannesburg. The tone was still closer to pulp than gritty.

It can be fun to be the underdog. It can be okay to fail. But it’s tough moving from uber to under. The problem was also that while there were moments of victory, the taste of defeat came too often and at least one player really didn’t like that style of play.

And this leads into my third point. While I explained the story concept to the group (I have no concerns about “metagame” knowledge, from knowing where the plot is leading to knowing the number of successes needed to beat a particular challenge), I was very focused on getting the mechanics right. I discussed my work on the mechanics and my concern about certain system impacts here previously, and that was where I focused most of my efforts.

Sure, that needed to happen in order to get the mechanics to do what I wanted, but I also needed to put more work into responding to my players’ concerns. We had a discussion about story direction and style, but it came too late. Once investment in a game is lost, it can become a feedback loop. The setting had negative connotations, and I wasn’t sure I could get everyone back on board.

From Secret Avengers 19, Written by Warren Ellis, Pencils by Michael Lark, Inks by Stefano Gaudiano and Brian Thies, Colour by Jose Villarrubia, and Letters by Dave Lanphear

So we buried the campaign. That doesn’t bother me too much. It’s part of the learning curve. Our last failure was about the size of my gaming group. That’s been addressed and so far, that seems to have worked well. To replace Warlords of the Waste, we are looking at playing an espionage/black ops campaign in which the PCs are super-powered – kind of like Warren Ellis’ run on Secret Avengers, or John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. I’m hacking rules I originally designed for a “Borderlands” style game, so we are going to return to the PCs being asskickers.

This is going to be HardCASE – the PCs are members of the Clandestine Activities Special Executive.

I’m looking forward to this. I hope they are too.

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Derailing

There was a post and an article I read recently arguing that RPGs needed less story. You can imagine my surprise. Only what both were arguing was that a story is constricting, it forces railroading as the PCs must conform to the plot. It seemed that both thought of “story” only in the strict sense of a story one would read in fiction or watch in a movie.

That is not a definition of story I had ever encountered previously in regards to the RPG discussion.

Story, as I’ve generally seen it used in RPG discussions, refers to the narrative, the non-combaty parts of the game. And in that sense, it is no more confining or railroading than any other aspect of RPGs. In fact, I’ve been arguing – and trying to implement in my games – for more narrative, not less.

Sure I would like to see less railroading in RPGs, but there are some issues with implementing that. I personally see it as an issue of GM comfort. If you relinquish control over the narrative, if you do not have set encounters and at least the outline of a plot, you will need to be ready to create on demand. This is what I call improvisational GMing – it’s GMing on the fly. Not everyone is comfortable with doing it.

If you are comfortable with creation on the fly, it is easy enough to get started if your group feels the same. Don’t discourage players from interacting with the story elements and the other PCs. Give them control over events. If you don’t mind improve GMing, let them answer their own questions. When a player asks “do we find any clues?” your answer could be “you tell me.”

Giving players control over the plot is something into which you might need to ease them, especially if they have been involved in games with tight GM control, like how D&D, GURPS, and Savage Worlds are traditionally played. Players will likely flounder at first when you give them control, like a first-time driver nervous behind the wheel of a car. That will change.

Oh my, how that will change.

So I would agree that we need less railroading in games, but I also believe that some GMs are not willing to improv GM or comfortable with creation on the fly. It’s not easy.

But I do find it fun.

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Bunraku Redux

On Sword’s Edge, my blog where I talk about movies and writing and personal stuff, I wrote about the Bunraku effect. In that article, Bunraku refers to a very interesting movie with sets like a stage play, modern costuming and no firearms. The minds behind this movie decided to try to explain all of that with a prologue.

I found that to be the worst decision possible.

Now, in writing, it is possible to avoid providing causes or background to readers. Sometimes you want to do that. In Bunraku, the reason for the lack of firearms was not the point of the movie, so why even bother? There are no guns, live with it. Not knowing would not affect my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the movie.

I kind of feel the same with RPGs. You might be the kind of GM that loves to write pages of setting information and backstory for a campaign. You might even try to get your players to read that. But would the characters necessarily know all that information? And do they need to know it?

Do you really need to explain to a player why there are no gunpowder weapons in this fantasy world with Renaissance or even Enlightenment levels of technology? Nope. The character wouldn’t know. The character wouldn’t even know what a gunpowder weapon might be. So why is it important, other than providing a reason to argue?

I would say that for much of our history, a vast majority of the population did not know that history. Even today, those “person on the street” interviews reveal a huge swath of ignorance regarding history, technology, and the world around us. Should we expect the populace in RPGs to be any different?

I am not suggesting this as a way to keep players in the dark so the GM has an advantage. I am suggesting that you should consider if it is important for the players to know the complete backstory of the setting. If not, don’t bother them with it. Maybe you don’t even know, and that is totally fine. The PCs can learn about his world as they explore it.

You don’t need to provide a reason for everything in your setting, but it would be kind of nice if you provided a fun setting.

You can read that Sword’s Edge article here.

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The Languid and the Focused

Most of my games have some way for the players to communicate with the GM their desires and what they want their PC to do in the game. In Nefertiti Overdrive and Centurion, these are Pivots. Pivots are not only signposts for the GM, they are reminders to the players of what they said they wanted their PCs to be about.

Pivots are pretty important when I design adventures. The players are telling me this is what they want their characters to do, so I better make sure their characters get to do that. However, there is a large difference between using Pivots in a regular, ongoing campaign and in a one-shot or convention game.

In a campaign, having each character hit at least one Pivot during an adventure is fine. An adventure might last a single session if you are lucky enough to have six-hour sessions. For the adventure I’m running over Google Hangouts for two backers from the Nefertiti Overdrive Kickstarters, our sessions are two hours.

In a one-shot or convention game, the session is the adventure, and it has to fit into a specific timeframe – generally four hours. The adventure in the Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart was designed as a convention one-shot, and fits into a four-hour session. In it, each of the six characters can hit both of their Pivots. I’m finishing my Gen Con adventure right now, and I am wrestling with Pivots to try to make sure each character hits their two.

This is important because in a regular adventure, there might be scenes that have a purpose and might even spotlight a character, but that do not hit a Pivot. In a one-session adventure, each scene needs all three. That’s tough.

Think of the regular adventure or campaign as a novel while the one-session adventure is a short story. A writer can engage in diversions and sub-plots, characters that only tangentially touch on the story but are of interest, scenes that can explore at great length some small point. A short story needs to be laser-focused, everything contributing to moving the story forward.

A regular adventure can be languid and discursive while a one-session adventure must be focused.

You can find Centurion: Legionaries of Rome at Amazon and Drive Thru RPG.

You can find out more about Nefertiti Overdrive here.

You can find the Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart here.

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Fallout Noir

Those of you who have been around here a while are aware I’m a big fan of the computer games Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout 4 has been announced, and already it is providing inspiration. How is that possible, you might ask, given that we know next to nothing about the story? It’s the imagery that has piqued my interest.

One of the initial pics from Fallout 4 had me thinking of F:NV. F:NV is a mix of the post-apocalyptic and western genres. This image made me think that Fallout 4 would also mix genres, specifically post-apocalyptic and noir. Given that I’ve published a sword & sorcery noir, you can imagine how this might have grabbed my interest. So what about post-apocalyptic noir?

The one aspect of noir that I think is important is an urban setting. Post-apocalyptic adventures don’t really need urban centres. In fact, most work without them. Fallout, though, has regular urban areas of different sizes, from towns to cities. These are represented in the computer game by groups of buildings and characters of varying sizes, but all much smaller than the populace they are to denote. New Vegas is actually a pretty small geographic area, but one can imagine that it indicates one of the larger urban areas in shattered North America. Rivet City in Fallout 3 is the same.

With examples like those, and the urban density the image seems to suggest, it is easy to imagine cities with governments and rudimentary law enforcement in this setting. Most of the plots and macguffins of hardboiled detective fiction could be ported into such a world as easy as they could a sword & sorcery one.

You could easily take your standard travelling group of troubleshooters that are regularly getting into messes as they move between points of light in the wasteland and bolt that onto hardboiled plots. Imagine something like Raymond Chandler’s the High Window, in which the characters are hired to find a treasure their employer believes was stolen by an estranged daughter-in-law. This could totally work, and work well, in New Vegas or Rivet City. Instead of a rare coin, it could be a piece of technology – though this would make a couple of the twists in the story a little bit difficult.

There’s also something like the Dashiell Hammett novel the Thin Man, in which Nick and Nora Charles investigate a dead body and get involved in a pretty messed up family. The key points of the mystery and the family would work just as well in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Just take a look at that picture and try to figure out the story behind it. I’m pretty sure it includes corrupt officials, femme fatales/homme horribles, criminals, and snappy dialogue.

You can find out more about the Fallout series here.

You can find Sword Noir: A Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery at Amazon and DriveThru RPG.

You can find out more about the High Window here.

You can find out more about the Thin Man here.

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Edge of Inspiration: Bond Contains Multitudes

On Tuesday I wrote about niches and how important I believe them to be. What if you are looking for inspiration for niches from mass media? There you are in for a bit of trouble, because in many cases the niches are all wrapped up in one person.

In the very first Accidental Survivors podcast episode, we talked about James Bond. One of the pieces of advice we gave for adapting Bond to an RPG was to break him up into his constituent parts. Bond is good at everything. His sidekicks are truly sidekicks – they rarely do anything essential though they are sometimes useful. Bond needs no one.

With apologies to Walt Whitman . . . Bond is large. He contains multitudes.

This isn’t to say that you can’t find niches in a Bond movie or novel. You can go through any mass media property and look for the different obstacles the characters must overcome and what kind of role the character(s) assume when overcoming them. Those are your niches.

As an example, let’s look at my favourite Bond movie: From Russia With Love. This is a really simple breakdown of some of the challenges within the movie, ignoring the role of Red Grant in seeing much of it through to success.

The first real obstacle or challenge Bond faces is the surveillance of the Soviet consulate. Bond is being a spy or a sneak.

Then, in the Gypsy camp, Bond needs to ingratiate himself. So he’s a diplomat or a face.

There’s a big fight at the camp in which Bond mostly shoots the bad guys (though he also fisticuffs a couple) so we’ve got him as a shooter or marksman.

He assists Kerim Bey in killing an enemy spy, so maybe as a leader or controller?

Once he has the floor layout of the consulate, he plans the assault and theft of the decoder. I would say in this he’s a commander/leader or possibly an expert.

The theft goes really well, though this is very much Bond in command, leading others, so certainly leader or controller.

While it might not be obvious at the time, Bond does realize what Red Grant is doing during the escape on the train when he drugs Tatiana. This is him being a spy or a sneak.

The big fight on the train – which is actually kind of a boss fight but well before the end of the movie – is all fisticuffs all the time with Red Grant. In this, Bond is being the martial artist or maybe the muscle.

On the run, Bond shoots down a helicopter with a sniper rifle, definitely being a shooter or marksman.

The boat fight – in which Bond destroys some pursuers – is kind of based on resourcefulness as much as it does marksmanship, so I’d go with Bond as an expert or thinker (with a dash of shooter).

And then the final fight with Rosa Kleb, in which Bond is once again the martial artist or muscle.

Understandably for an action movie, Bond leans to the shooter/martial artist, but there are plenty of displays of his expertise, leadership, and diplomacy. In a game, you would want to add more scenes for those kind of characters, but depending on the rules, being an expert, face, or leader in combat can still be effective, if not as effective as a shooter or martial artist.

Mass media can provide inspiration both for challenges and for the kind of characters needed to overcome those challenges.

Even when it’s all the same character, like Bond.

You can find that podcast episode here. It’s kind of rough, since it was our first outing.

You can find out more about From Russian With Love at Wikipedia and IMDB.

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Protecting Niches

I believe niche protection is as important in simple systems as it is in complex ones. To me, niche protection means that each character has a unique role or purpose in a group, and that this unique role provides the character with the spotlight at certain times during the game. D&D does this with Classes. In Centurion and Nefertiti Overdrive, I have left it to the players to devise their own. I’m working on a new game, tentatively called Riggers in which the niches are set. That’s something different for me and it is causing one small headache.

Classes from D&D

In Riggers, I have six niches: leader, muscle, face, shooter, expert, and sneak. The thing is, my group now has seven players. In general, this is not a problem as we almost never have all the players in attendance. My sweet spot has always been four to six players, which is why I designed six niches for Riggers and six pre-generated characters for Nefertiti Overdrive. Now I have seven players and six niches.

I’ll be dealing with the problem for Riggers through consultation with my players, but I will institute some kind of niche and niche protection for the characters. Sharing out the spotlight is – to me – a very important part of keeping all the players invested. Isn’t that why we play? Don’t we want to develop our characters so they do something cool, something noteworthy? And when that is happening, do we not want everyone to see it? In my opinion, this is the most important reason to include niche protection in an RPG.

For some players, getting the spotlight is easy. Some players are confident or expressive, or have some other personality trait that allows them to dominate when they choose. Not all players are like this, and niche protection ensures that even quiet players will have a chance to show off. Without niche protection, one can’t always guarantee everyone gets a chance at that spotlight. If everyone is a sniper in your modern action game, how do you – as a GM – ensure everyone gets a chance to shine?

With niche protection that’s easy. You have a scene in which someone needs to get punched in the face, then one in which a computer needs to be hacked, and then one in which someone needs to sneak past the guards, etc. Having niches allows the GM to dole out the spotlight evenly and not have to worry about it at the same time as she is running the game. It’s hardwired into the adventure.

I don’t think it will be a problem to create one or two more niches for Riggers. As long as everyone has a clear idea what they want to be and what they want their character to do, niches can follow from that without much effort.

You can find Centurion: Legionaries of Rome at Amazon and Drive Thru RPG.

You can find out more about Nefertiti Overdrive here.

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Edge of Inspiration: the Black Fortress

Krull offered a lot more inspiration than just the Glaive – though that was mighty cool. The thing is, much of the objects of inspiration in Krull were themselves inspired by myth or other fantasy properties. Now the Beast’s teleporting castle probably was borrowed from some other source, but for me it belongs to Krull.

For those not in the know, the villain of Krull was called “the Beast” and he was kind of like Sauron (of the books) in that he was impressive yet absent. His Black Fortress would teleport to a different location each sunrise. From his Black Fortress he would send out his Black Riders . . . er Slayers to conquer the people of Krull (though that’s a good name for a barbarian, it’s the name of the planet).

Having a teleporting bad guy hideout helps with a few things. It makes the baddie extra mysterious and dangerous, considering he can appear anywhere and therefore nowhere is safe. Even if the PCs can gather an army big enough, there is no geographic focal point to attack. And if they do get in, where will they be when they get out.

But my favourite part about borrowing the idea of the Black Fortress are the quests on which the PCs can embark upon just to find the place. That’s most of the movie in Krull. And given that the Beast is an alien force, and his Slayers combine good old-fashioned fantasy terror knight with lasers, the quests might lead to more than just the next continent. This might be a good way to introduce magical interplanetary travel, or even inter-dimensional travel. If you are doing D&D, that could mean Spelljammer or Planescape.

Finally, when the PCs are triumphant, the Black Fortress might become the White Fortress, and become a teleporting base of operations that could take the PCs to distant realms or distant planets where they might find lands governed by completely different gods or magical systems.

Kind of better than capturing Barad-dur or Mount Doom.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

You can read more about Krull on Wikipedia or IMDB.

You can read more about Spelljammer and Planescape at Wikipedia.

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Edge of Inspiration: That Cutting Edge

Edge of Tomorrow provided a lot of inspiration, but I think we’ve done enough of that. I was thinking about talking about the movie Krull, because I think there’s a lot of inspiration there also. One piece of inspiration is that very special weapon – the Glaive. And then I thought: “wait, a weapon? Edge? Tee hee.”

So welcome to another Edge of Inspiration, but this time talking about the cutting edge – weapons. These are all weapons that provided a lot of inspiration to my gaming, most of which came very early in my gaming career.

Let’s start with the Glaive from Krull. This thing was cool because it was part ninja throwing star, part switchblade, and part guided missile. What’s not to love about that? I saw Krull before I started playing AD&D, but once I got the Player’s Handbook, I saw that the Glaive wasn’t a glaive, which is weird. Still, I of course had a character with exactly that weapon. When we went through the ICE Middle Earth sourcebook, the Court of Ardor, an enchanted axe became a very similar weapon for one of my character’s, lacking only the switchblade effect of the retracting blades.

And then there’s the Mindsword from Hawk the Slayer. That weapon had a very cool design, and among my group of gamers, became the standard image of a bastard sword – oh AD&D and your misappropriated naming conventions. There really wasn’t much to this sword except that it looked very light and had some kind of psychokinetic power. That was enough – given that Hawk the Slayer was my go-to RPG movie until the 13th Warrior came along – for the Mindsword to inspire many an imitation.

While it’s actually a rip-off a lightsabre, Thundarr the Barbarian’s Sunsword fit much better into D&D. We didn’t really know too much about lightsabre’s at the time, so the Sunsword’s wealth of abilities – cutting through anything, deflecting anything, having some kind of anti-magic effect – made it a much preferable weapon. And when one was to enter someplace without weapons, well, that’s just a decorative icon that looks like a hilt.

Finally, of course, there’s the Ranger’s bow from the D&D cartoon. All of the character’s had something magical, and while the Thief’s cloak of invisibility was cool – and may have actually been a cloak of immaterialness, if such a thing exists – it was that rockin’ fire-arrow launching bow that I ripped off. Again, like the Sunsword, such a magical bow could have a host of abilities, not just flaming arrows of flame.

These days, my RPG imagination is fired mostly by modern weapons, as my playing is mostly High Plains Samurai. Originally, my character – Mauser – had two Mauser C96s (Broomhandles) that were based on the .45 M1911A1s used by Orson Randall in the Immortal Iron Fist. Mauser channeled his Chi through them and he did so in very imaginative ways. The game has had a couple of re-skins, and now Mauser is a totally non-powered bounty hunter, who nonetheless has a special weapon – a Mare’s Leg, copied from the one carried by Steve McQueen’s character in Wanted: Dead or Alive. He’s also got a longarm – naturally a full length Winchester 1892.

I’ll bet you’ve each got a media property weapon that you’ve had your character use in some RPG or another. It’s one of the joys of games of the imagination.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

You can read more about Krull on Wikipedia or IMDB.

You can read more about the Court of Ardor here.

You can read more about Hawk the Slayer on Wikipedia or IMDB.

You can find one adaptation of the Mindsword here.

You can read more about Thundarr the Barbarian on Wikipedia or IMDB.

You can read more about the D&D cartoon on Wikipedia or IMDB.

You can read more about High Plains Samurai here.

You can read more about Orson Randall here.

You can read more about the awesome the Immoral Iron Fist here.

You can read more about the Mare’s Leg on Wikipedia.

You can read more about Wanted: Dead or Alive on Wikipedia or IMDB.

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Edge of Inspiration: Armoured Up

There’s a lot of really cool stuff happening in Edge of Tomorrow, but the thing that caught my eye first was the power armour. It seemed very low-tech, like some of the rigs that have been proposed and even tested. Given that my game Starship Commandos also uses power armour, I think it’s evident I dig the idea.

But how do you use power armour in your game. What does it do?

It really depends on the system you are using. It might not even be noticeable, just another power/talent/feat that gives some advantages but doesn’t super-power the PC. In other games, it might amp up the character so much, she is far more powerful than characters without it.

For Starship Commandos it provided a series of benefits, and if one of these benefits applied to the situation at hand, the character gained a bonus die (best two dice added together against a target number). Without power armour, the characters weren’t defenceless, but they came to rely on their “harnesses” a lot, so when they lost access to those benefits – say, when someone triggered an EMP – they felt exceptionally vulnerable.

MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor from Halo Nation

For a game like D&D, powered armour could basically be highly enchanted magical armour – giving AC bonuses as well as stat bonuses and perhaps some other benefits. In Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, power armour – like Iron Man’s – is simply the narrative framework for powers and does not necessarily make the character better or worse than any other character.

And, honestly, it’s not the mechanical benefits of power armour that intrigues me – it’s the aesthetics of it. Power armour just looks cool, whether it’s the armour from Edge of Tomorrow or something more like the suits in Halo.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

You can find out more about Marvel Heroic Roleplaying here.

You can find out more about Starship Commandos here.