Conan's 11

I am going to run my next 4e game like a caper, simple as that.

It actually takes surprisingly little in the way of preparation to make the transition. Characters are already highly capable and aware of their capabilities, the only real difference between the standard dungeon crawl and a caper is a simple matter of information management. All of the material is already in place, the trick is to change the players from the reactive group experiencing the dungeon[1] to a proactive group exploiting it.

Now, I could use almost any pre-published dungeon to do this, but I will definitely be a little bit picky. First off, I need ones where the motive to go into the dungeon is clear and is more nuanced than "There's treasure there" or "The Bad Guy Lives There". Those are flat motivations, and flat motivations make for flat capers. The characters are badass professionals, not simple thieves, and there should be a reason they are directing their considerable talents to this task rather than something else. Additionally, a clear motive helps make for a better adventure because players can come back to their true goal when they consider plans. For example, if they're just after loot, then the plan is unlikely to get more sophisticated than a smash and grab. If, on the other hand, the goal is the recovery of a specific item, then the players could still smash and grab, but they might also try to trick the owner into moving it, swap in a substitute, con the owner out of it or almost anything else. A clear goal allows for specific, thoughtful action. A murky goal allows for only mess.

As such, a certain amount of urgency is usually called for. Without it, players can afford to wait for the perfect moment, and that can be dull taken to its extreme. In a caper, the characters have a LOT of information, but they shouldn't have ALL the information, so there needs to be some sort of reason why things need to happen *now*, rather than the next time the bad guys are going to town for supplies.[3] Dungeons that also are strongly personality driven, that is ones that are the base of operations of a well fleshed out villain[4], also tend to be a lot more useful for a caper since they're usually designed with more flexibility of response.

But with those simple ground rules, it's a simple matter of handing the players most of the information you have about the dungeon. Give them a map, give them a breakdown of who is where and doing what. Don't give them stats or anything, but rally give them enough information to accurately describe everything in the dungeon, then let them come up with their plan.

Now, naturally, there should be a few surprises. Pick a few pieces of information to keep in reserve as surprises - tunnels that aren't on the original map, secret resources of a lieutenant, and unexpected twist or whatever. This doesn't take anything hugely sneaky or cunning, just find the things the author clearly put in as twists and then make them real twists.[5]

And seriously, that's all there is to it.

Ok, yes, I'm skipping over a big chunk here and just handing the players the information, with the assumption that they've already successfully done the footwork and research to get it all together. On some instinctive level, it feels like I should set up some skill challenges and die rolls to make this investigation part of the play process. But that instinct is dangerous. See, the caper is not a familiar model for players, so the first time I do it, I don't want to dwell over the supporting details, I just want to get to the meat of it. Based on success or failure of this, I might take that to inform on my decisions for the NEXT caper, allowing for some rolls beforehand to tune what information the players do and don't get, but at no point do I want that to be the *focus* of play. If I really want to make players work for information, I'll make getting THAT information a caper of its own.

Anyway, that's how I'd do it.



1 - Does that sound mean? It's not mean to be but it's really what's going on in most dungeons. There's an illusion of proactivity through player directed action as they explore, but that's mostly sleight of hand. Excepting certain key decisions like when to rest, the set pieces in a dungeon might as well be coming to the players on a conveyor belt.[2]

2 - Yes, the players might decide between right and left and that impacts the order things happen in, but that's still sleight of hand. Which does not make it a BAD thing. The dungeon is a very efficient adventure delivering device.

3 - Doing this also spares us the kind of convenient timing that guarantees the demonic ritual is underway JUST as the players bust into the room - fun once or twice, but absolutely trite after a while. If the players know that the ritual is coming and will happen in 3 days, they have a timeline to beat.

4 - Owen KC Stephens' adventures tend to excel at this.

5 - More snark, I know, but the reality is that a "twist" in the context of a dungeon is virtually meaningless. It's a disposable environment, and all the information within it is disposable too. Twists are merely unexpected. It takes some investment (as in the case of the knowledge that players are given) to give a twist some weight.

A Random Day

A few Random thoughts for today

- I got a new phone, which would not merit much comment normally, except I’m a gadget nerd and got one of the Verizon Droids. I’m pretty much shackled to Verizon, so it came down to the Droid or the Pre Plus, both of which are pretty sweet. Droid sold me on its google integration and web browsing, and a couple days in I’m still pretty much delighted with it. Biggest complaint is the app store: while it’s worlds better than the blackberry app store, there is really no filtering of crap from non-crap, so finding anything useful is pretty much a crapshoot. I’ve grabbed a few things on recommendations or because I know the brand: notably Evernote, astrid, Advanced Task Killer and Twidroid but I figure I’m still missing out on quality, so I put out a request for suggestions to anyone out there.



- I’ll be going to Dreamation up in Jersey this coming weekend, driving up early Friday morning and staying through Sunday. I have signed up for exactly nothing. This was not a cunning plan on my part, just a result of constantly forgetting, so I intend to play it by ear. I’ll probably hit the signup sheets for things, but I’m also totally up for some pickup play, and may even see what supplies I can bring to help that out. As a heads up, I have a bit of a Dreamation/Dexcon tradition of doing an open breakfast. I usually do this in the hotel, but I don’t know what the facilities are like this year, so I’ll be playing that by ear. Anyway, it basically goes like this: around 7:30 to 8, I’ll go an grab breakfast, and there’s an open invitation to join me that is limited only by whatever chairs can be scrounged up. So if you see me, please, come grab a seat.



- On the topic of Dreamation, if I introduce myself to you and we’ve already met, please do not take offense. At some point, my ability to keep online handles connected with names connected with faces with icons really took a hit. It is entirely possible that I will make that connection sometime halfway through any conversation, and while that’s funny to watch, no offense is meant by it.



- On a similar topic, I come to these things to talk to people. Playing games is an awesome bonus, but the context to randomly shoot the shit about games and gaming is a pure delight for me. So while I sincerely doubt that anyone in my VAST[1] readership would be inclined to shy from conversation, I just want to lay it out there for the record: say hi. I am totally happy to talk.



- The podcast suggestions covered a wide range, but there was no clear winner, so I’m going to call out for a tiebreaker! Of the podcast suggestions I got, the ones which got multiple suggestions were the following:

• Podgecast
• Return to Northmoor
• Atomic Array
• Actual People, Actual Play
• Canon Puncture

So, I will be picking one of these. Given that list, people are welcome to suggest which one I go with!

1 - Har har

Two More Obscure Ideas Worth Stealing

Lines of Experience
So, the recent Marvel Superheroes RPG, the one with the stones system, was really interesting, but as I understand it, died because it was published by a comic book publisher. Good numbers for an RPG are bad numbers for a comic, or so I am led to understand.

Anyway, even if you never get to play it, it's worth nowing about its advancement mechanics, "Lines of Experience". Characters were medium-grained in detail, and when you gt advancement, it was given as "lines of experience". Now, mechanically, each waas basically a point which you assigned to the thing you wanted to improve. if your kung Fu was a 7, you assigned lines to it, and after you accumulated 7 of them, it became an 8. Easy peasy.

But where it got interesting was that for each line you actually wrote a brief description of what you had done with that skill durng the adventure, like "Fought the Sinister Frogmen of Yslar in their underwater lair" and if on a subsequent adventure you are in a similar situation (fightign underwater, say) you could use that line of experience to temporarily boost your skill from a 7 to an 8.

I love this idea, and Fred Hicks ended up riffing on it nicely in Don't Rest Your Head, but I think there's a lot more to be mined out of it.

Player Contributions
I sometimes need to actively remind myself that the Amber Diceless RPG is a small, niche game. This is hard because it's SO big and SO influential on me that I sometimes forget that not everyone else has is burned into their heart. And that means not everyone has been as exposed to the ADRPGs player contributions.

So Amber had a simple point-buy system, with 100 points to spend, but plyers could get extra points, usually in 10 point blocks, for maing contributions ot the game. Contributions included drawing pictures of the characters, keeping a character journal, writing stories about your character and so on. Over time different groups expanded what qualified as a contribution to include things like hosting or buying food.

Now, bear in mind, this was the time before Livejournal and fanfic communities, so the fact that the game provided a legitimate outlet for other types of creativity was a huge win in terms of creating player investment. What's more, by granting players the leeway to author a lot of "offscreen" materials, it proved one of the few ways to really get player investment in setting that's on par with killing Elminster[1].

Now, not every game necessarily calls for fiction or the like, but every game calls for _something_. If there's some sort of behavior or investment you want to encourage or acknowledge, then consider formalizing in-game rewards for player contributions. It's not fair in the traditional sense, but that tends to make it more motivating: you recognize your contributing members and provide others the opportunity (and clear direction on how) to do the same.

1 - This gets its name from a tale told on the Sons of Kryos podcast, of a D&D game where the opening even is the murder of Elminster, the iconic NPC of the Forgotten Realms. This sort of actionis a clear dramatic statement that the game is not going to be dictated by the official canon of the setting, and that the table owns the game.

Three Obscure Ideas Worth Stealing

If you are not stealing ideas in your game design, I might suggest you are doing it wrong. There are a lot of games out there that have hit upon really good ideas, even if the games themselves have met with a variety of fates.


Margin of Success Tricks

There was a game once called Secrets of Zir'an. It was a clever, interesting game, but it suffered the kind of printing problems that make it a cautionary tale rather than any kind of real success. It's a shame, since it had some clever ideas, and one in particular really caught my eye.

SoZ had a system where you could learn various tricks to use with a skill, things like combat tricks for extra damage, extra spell effects, and so on. There were a lot of these, and they allowed for a lot of differentiation between skills. The trick was that each one had a particular cost, and that cost was paid out of the margin of success of an attack.

To illustrate, imagine a fairly D&D type-attack, where I roll d20, add a number, and hit you to do, say, 2d6 points of damage. I only needed to roll a 19 to hit you, and I rolled 24: that's a margin of Success of 5. I have a few tricks: for 1 point, I can increase damage by 1. For 3 points, I can knock you down. For 5 points, I can perform a disarm. So using those 5 points, I could do +5 damage, +2 damage and knock my enemy down, or do a disarm.

There's a downside to this in that it's a little math-ey, but it's got a big upside (beyond just cool fiddliness), since it clearly calls for description after resolution, so you get to incorporate your awesomeness.[1]

Inverted Pricing
Wilderness of Mirrors is an innovative game in a a number of ways, but one of my favorite elements to it is often overshadowed by the other novel elements, and that is role pricing. WoM doesn't have skills, rather there are 5 roles you buy not representing the roles on the spy team. The danger with such systems historically is that the benefit of having a broad skill at all is usually much greater than the benefit of incrementally improving it, so there's a strong incentive to buy many things at low levels rather than specialize. This is especially true if prices get progressively higher.

WoM turns that on its head by making the first rank cost the most, and each subsequent rank cost lest (so the price is 4:3:2:1, not 1:2:3:4), and I dig the behavior that encourages. It leans naturally towards niche protection and excellence within your niche.

"Wild Card" Skill
Eden's "Buffy" system was a lot of fun, and it's a shame it's vanished down the licensing hole, but I want to see if we can hang onto one particular idea.

Buffy had what I would describe as a medium sized skill list. Long enough that I couldn't rattle it off by memory, but shorter than 15-20. It's a good size, since it allows for skills that are neither too broad nor too narrow, but it's a bit of a crapshoot. See, at that size list, you have the greatest chance of having overlooked something important to one of your players.[2] Buffy's skill list included one blank slot where a player could insert any skill he needed, so if it was really important that his character is an excellent accountant, he could put that in the Wild Card Slot.

There's an obvious benefit to this - it introduces a bit of flexibility into the skill list without demanding that players come up with the skills on their own. But there's also a subtle benefit: whatever skill the player put in that slot is a flag - he is more or less calling out the GM the thing he thinks makes his character stands out, and is inviting plot hooks to be attached to it.



There are, of course, lots and lots of other ideas worth stealing, but you can't steal them all at once. I figure three at a time is probably digestible.


1 - Something similar was done in another brilliant-but-gone game called Fireborn[3]. The difference between them us subtle, but potent. In Fireborn, you effectively paid for actions in the difficulty. So if I want to do extra damage, I increase the difficulty to hit by some amount. There's a compelling logic to this, but it has the downside of making cool behavior (stunting and the like) less likely to succeed - players are punished for doing something risky. It's more 'realistic' (harder tasks are harder), but not necessarily more fun.

2 - With fewer skills, odds are good it falls under the penumbra of one of them. If there are lots of skills, then adding another is pretty trivial.

3 - Going from memory here though, so apologies if I'm misstating.

Serious Play

I always enjoy the Penny Arcade comic, but I often get something useful out of the column as well. Today's in particular got me thinking. He was inspired by another post about the "daddening" of video games (the idea that in video games it is becoming more common that you play someoen who is a father than someone whose father is an important part of the story) and more generally observed that there are issues which are common and powerful but which are rarely touched upon in video games. Issues like relationships, marriage, family, kids and so on. A lot of it rings equally true for RPGs, and that got me thinking.

First off, I need to echo the sentiment that getting married and having a child were both genuine thresholds for me. before actually crossing them, their meaning were pretty nominal to me. I got their importance on paper, but it was very different for me to actually do it.

With that in mind, it's interesting to apply that general lens to my games. I can think of many game I've played that were generational in nature, literally or symbolically, but they almost always revolve around the emergence of the new generation[1]. Sure, there's always the occasional jokey one-off, of playing an Amber game where you're elders dealing with these wacky kids, but it's not quite the same.

Now, some of this is kind of understandable. Players should be the focus of play, and kids take focus. It's hard to make kids as important as they should be without that overshadowing your going out and shooting orcs or whatever, and more the introduction of kids introduces all kinds of questions like "how responsible is it, really, to go out and shoot orcs when you have a kid at home?"

At its worse, the introduction of family and kids seems like a threat to suck the fun out of a game in favor of the mundane details of life we may be playing to escape. It's only natural to flinch in the face of this, but it might be worth overcoming that reaction. No, no one wants to be playing a glorified versionof house, but the same things that make a 'family' game challenging can make it awesome. Consider:

• Heroes with families have something to go home to. I've mentioned this before, but I'll reiterate: having a reason to *not* adventure demands that the reasons for an adventure be good ones. This makes for more work for the GM, but it's "eat your vegetables" kind of work - the reward is more than worth it.
• On the flipside, heroes with families tend to be more engaged once you get them on board. If this is tied to the health and happiness of their wife or kid? The heroes are all in.
• Players are used to lacking authority but having freedom. Parents have just enough authority to be frustrated by its lack, and trade that off with responsibility. This is frustrating, but also makes for some interesting play.

That said, I'm not suggesting this is something that suits every game. But look at the thresholds you and your group have crossed, and consider how that might alter your play. Before i was married, a plot centered around a wedding was just color to me, but having actually gone through one (with all the madness that entails) it would not be hard to hook me into caring a lot whether or not the wedding goes off well. Kidnapping someone's spouse? Standard trope of villainy, but allow me a second to think of that in terms of my wife? It is ON.

There's a lot more to this than just spouses and kids. As we get older and our understanding of our parents change from our own experience, it get harder to rage against surrogate father figures in a game[2]. The richness of generational play starts becoming more evident as your own place shifts away from the edge of the generational spread.


1 - The only game I can think of that bridges this gap smoothly is Changeling: The Lost. It's not truly a generational game, but it offers a premise whose meaning depends upon where you are in life. The game begins with the presumption that you have been taken away from everything important in your life by a powerful being and used as its plaything. Meanwhile, a duplicate is living your life in your stead.For one type of players, the driving motivations fury at this powerful figure who has been bossing you around. For another, the prospect of what you are losing in your life is genuinely horrifying. Players with strong ties (which usually means having gotten past the point in your life where you're striking out on your own) can get entirely gut punched by that sense of loss. It's a magnificent idea and a magnificent game.

2 - I watched "Big Fish" with my dad. it's a beautiful movie, and if it does not move you then, in the words of Pete Thurston "you might want ot call a doctor because you're probably dead inside". It's a generational story of stories, and my dad's comment at the end was that he's no longer sure if he was the dad or the son (in the film). At the time, I knew where I stood, but it's been a few years, and I now have a son of my own who is going to make me ask the same question someday.


EDIT: I read this again and I fear it might sound like "You need kids and a marriage to get this deep stuff" and that's not the point at all. What I'm saying is look at what has become important in your life. Maybe it's a family and kids, maybe its something else, but whatever it is you can use the WAYS it's important to you and your players to tell stories that resonate more with them.

Podcasts and Me

The sad reality is that I don't listen to as many gaming podcasts as I used to, mostly because my favorites ('Have Games, Will Travel', it's sequel 'For a Few games More', Sons of Kryos and the Durham 3) are more or less done and many of the remaining ones I enjoy are nearing completion (Ryan Macklin's Master Plan), intermittently updated (That's how We Roll) or in unknown status (Theory from the Closet).

There are still a few consistent ones. I try to stay up with Voice of the Revolution, the IPR podcast, but I admit I am not too diligent about it, partly because I track a lot of that stuff through other channels. 2d6 feet in a Random Direction is always solid, but after that I taper off. There are several good podcasts I check up on regularily, bt don't subscribe, notablye: The Ogre Cave, Independant Insurgency, The Game Master Show, Canon Puncture, Stabbing Contest and All Games Considered. They're all solid, and I keep hearing great things about Return to Northmoor, but the problem is I kind of got burned when I branched out and started looking for other gaming podcasts. I found one, which shall remain nameless, that really put me off the whole thing. Listening to it went something like this:

Host 1: So, I enjoyed the writing on this game, but I think it meandered a bit.
Host 2: I agree. The author clearly had some solid ideas, but wasn't really clear on how to express them.
Host 3: I JUST TOOK A SHIT IN YOUR FOOD!
H1: The good news is a lot of the confusion doesn't actually come up in play.
H2: Howso? It seems like it would really throw things off.
H3: SERIOUSLY GUYS, I MADE POOP RIGHT IN THE STEW!
H1: A lot of the confusing stuff handles edge cases that really didn't come up at the table.


I'll spare you any further transcription. The bottom line is that I've ended up feeling a bit alienated from gaming podcasts, and given the sheer volume of them, I've been hesitant to dip my toes back in the water because sorting through them promises to be daunting at best and outright painful at worst. This makes me feel crappy because there are many I'm genuinely curious about (Walking Eye, Eddy Webb's White Wolf Podcast, Open Design, Dial P for Pulp, Green Ronin's Podcast, other's I'm totally forgetting).


I also have a little less time for Podcasts these days. I changed jobs a while back, and my commute is shorter now, and that throws a wrench in my listening habits. It definitely makes me much more time sensitive, and it attracts me to the 5 minute podcasts of the Grammar Girl or Get It Done Guy, which i can mainline much more easily. Anything over a half hour is a commitment I am hesitant to make. That said, if I find something good, I will commit to mainlining it, and I've been working through three seasons of Terry O'Reilly's "Age of Persuasion" podcast and enjoying the hell out of it.

And that, by the by, tangentially touches on something about podcasts. Gaming is the biggest hobby in my life, and a huge part of my life in general, and as a result, I get less out of 15 minutes of gaming talk than I do out of 15 minutes talking about something I don't already know intimately. There are lots of gaming podcasts I enjoy as I would a friendly conversation, but which I'm only going to get so much out of the time spent. This is no sleight to those podcasts; as much as it would be nice if every media was tuned to my taste and needs, that's not a reasonable expectation. But it does mean that gaming podcsts have a harder time fighting for a slice of my attention as a result.

The ones that succeed have, to get all marketing-ey, a unique selling proposition. Things like Paul Tevis's depth of boardgame knowledge, Chris Hanrahan's hands-on retail experience, or nearly anyone's genuine passion for a specific topic are what I need to elevate a podcast from "this is good" to "I need to be listening to this".

That said, I'm open minded. Suggest a podcast in the comments. Whichever one gets the most suggestsions, I will commit to giving it a serious listen.

When the fall is all there is, it matters

Gamers crave absolution.

For an array of reasons, we don't like to lose. Some of that comes from the "game" part of the hobby but that's not all of it. We most get into this because we have ideas of heroes triumphing over overwhelming odds through pluck, cunning and sheer force of will, and we don't want to come up short[1]. We want to hold the line. We won't let it happen on our watch. We will run barefoot across broken glass in Nakatomi plaza because somebody has to.

This creates a lot of problems, especially when you're trying to do something that depends on players losing. I'm not talking about randomly losing a fight or pulling off a TPK, but rather the kind of defeats and setbacks that mark the second act of a lot of stories. Even the most trivial of these sorts of problems will often be met by players digging in their heels, putting up their fists, and refusing to let it happen.

At this point, things get ugly. Even if the GM is totally fighting fair, the players may be angry and resentful, and accusations are likely to be thrown about (or worse, linger unspoken). The easy fix for this is, of course, to skip the second act entirely, and that solution works - it's demonstrably worked just fine for gaming for decades - but sometimes you just want to push it a little farther.

This is where absolution comes in.

The trick is that defeat is not about the characters, it is about the players, and as a GM, you need to address those players. You need to get across that the tragedy is coming, whatever the characters do. It is not on their heads, so with that settled, are they willing to get onboard with making it awesome?

It's a simple proposition, but one that is not natural to all players, but usually one or two in a group can pick it up pretty easily, and they provide an example for the rest. An example of what? That's the trick: once players have bought into the idea that things are going to go bad, you need to give them the ability to really direct how badly it goes. Given that, players will generally be much, much nastier to themselves than you would EVER be willing to be.

It's one of those balancing acts of trust and control. Because they know the outcome, the trust level is high, but they still want to maintain control. They're willing to fail, but they need to be allowed to fail big. By absolving them of the normal responsibilities that come with failure, you free them to go for the gusto in ways they never can normally[2].

One of the best examples of this is in Exalted. It is a fact of the setting that the Solar Exalts of the the First Age fell, and the heroes of the game (by default) are the reincarnations of those dead heroes. Because they're tied to that past life, it is not uncommon for events from the first age to come up, most notably in how the character died back then. Players given leeway to describe how that went will, provided they've bought into the idea, make sure their own falls are magnificent, enthusiastically throwing themselves into their character's death because they accept it as inevitable. There is no way for them to be so cunning or charming or stubborn that it won't happen, and with that relation, they seize on the one thing they can do, which is to make it awesome.

1 - This is, incidentally, one of the hardest parts of trying to use fighting anime (and other fighting material) as source material for gaming. For all it's visual awesomeness, the default mode is that the hero gets beat to crap, but won't give up and fights harder at the end, and that's enough to win. Very dramatic, but it makes for crappy play.

2 - The closest you can come is announcing that this is the last session of a game. That can, at times, be intensely liberating.