Putting a Bullet In It

There are three endings that have been kicking around my brainspace this week, each shouldering the burden for a different medium. The movies have John Carter as their representative. Books are spoken for by Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. And the internet is alight with discussion of Mass Effect 3; and although I don’t have first-hand experience with the franchise, boy do people have opinions, enough so that it’s on my mind as well. Not only is each ending different by medium, they’re different by the inspired reactions. And I kind of suspect there’s a lesson to be carried away here.

Exhibit A: John Carter. It might be a little early as I type this to get into spoilers, but let’s be honest with ourselves, nobody is expecting a surprising ending, and nobody in charge of the production really wanted to give us one. It’s an adventure romp, an actual big-budget sword-and-planet film the likes of which I’d never expected anyone to finance (and, sadly, which I now expect won’t be financed again for a while), and as you’d properly anticipate, they’d love to have this become a franchise. So, we have an origin story, we establish main characters, and at the end of it all there’s this hopeful presentation of the idea that now John Carter of Mars would be a great franchise to keep on rollin’. It’s so charming and puppyish: it’s an ending that wants to be a beginning, the vain hope to keep telling stories in this world. It’s pretty sad to compare that to the actual box-office numbers going on around it.

Exhibit B: Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Comparably, Pelevin ends his book as befits a literary standpoint: he ends the story of A Hu-li as it naturally completes itself, with no such expectations of sequels or further “adventures.” It’s closure that leaves you with a few questions, but clearly ones you’re meant to answer yourself. And this makes me sad. Not that I think there should be expectations of sequels; that would rather spoil the point of the book, and undercut its morose beauty. But I enjoyed spending time with these characters, the language, the satire. Personally, I wound up with that greatest of feelings when something you’ve enjoyed has: the bittersweet sadness that it’s not going on any further, the lingering presence of the characters, that intellectual afterglow of lying on the couch on a weekend and just thinking about the characters and any remaining questions. I like that much better than finishing a book and saying to myself, “phew, glad that’s over with.”

Exhibit C: Mass Effects. And now I get to the ending that I experience only as hearsay. Mostly via the magic of the Internet, though yesterday I did get some level of collateral damage on the topic. Long story short, a co-worker decided to rant through his dissatisfaction with the ending by coming over and targeting me, as “writer-guy,” on the pretext of talking about how you should never end a game. And I see a lot of that online, too: claims that the character choices mean next to nothing, the heroic endings of the prior two games are undercut by the crapsack ending of the third, dramatic tonal shift, and so on. Most interestingly, it seems that some have accused the game of trying to kill the franchise, making it unappealing to experience sequels and the like. Vicious closure. Somewhat the reverse of John Carter, really.

So you can take various lessons from these endings. One does what is expected but its intended effect may not matter thanks to other factors. Another is pretty much spot-on, and the third is… well, I’m not sure of authorial intent but it sure does seem as though it’s not making dedicated fans happy. All have different ideas of closure, and different levels of success in achieving whatever closure they want. These are interesting lessons that I intend to take into account…

…as soon as I actually end something. It’s bizarre, actually. I’ve never written fiction longer than a short story, so I have no experience ending a book. I run long campaigns, but the one that sort of came to a natural end is now half-resurrected, the players wanting to revisit it now and again — and all the others have failed to end. (Even the one that could have ended with one more session, the players standing there next to the end-boss as we completed the last session.) The only things I can think of that I’ve given closure to were Werewolf: The Apocalypse (and to lesser extent, Changeling: The Lost, which I finished twice) and even then I didn’t do act as a creator. I was more of a director, and the writers did the bulk of the heavy lifting.

I think I know closure when I see it. Can I craft it, when it’s time? Personally? I don’t know. It is a question that will probably stick with me until I get a definitive answer — and the only definitive answer will be “yes.” “No” is too easily confused with “not yet.”

 

Wolves and Hearts

I admit it. Many people get testy around Valentine’s Day, and they go off to express that on the Internet. And I’m about to be one of those people.

But not for the usual reasons. In fact, it’s one of those usual reasons that ticks me off.

It’s not the lament of the single person who feels excluded from a holiday like this. I can sympathize, I’ve been single on February 14th before. It’s not a great feeling.

It’s the lament of the person who mounts up on their particularly high horse and talks about how celebrating Valentine’s Day is for suckers. For people who want to take the “easy way out.” For people who fall for the marketing slogans, for people who have to be reminded to do nice things for their significant others.

And I’m sick of that.

Point one: It’s not about marketing. I write my wife stories as presents. I’m a writer, this is my skill, and she enjoys them. There is not a single vendor who makes a penny off these things, except maybe the electric company because my computer is on.

Point two: It’s not about failing to realize that you cultivate romance every day and any day instead of just one day of the year. We get that. I also get that I could do something nice for my wife any day of the year and don’t need to celebrate her birthday, and I do that. I also celebrate her birthday. I could say “Gosh, 14 years of marriage!” on any day, not just our anniversary, and I do that anyway too. I also celebrate our anniversary. This is not an either-or proposition. If, as one friend put it, you want to celebrate romance 24/7/365, then shunning Valentine’s Day is failing to do that. It is committing yourself to 24/7/364. Maybe you want to do that because you and your spouse hate the day, that’s great for you. But just because you hate the day doesn’t mean everyone else has to.

Point three: Sometimes it’s nice to have structure. I’m a writer, like I said. And writers need structure. Some of us react better with deadlines. I have a deadline to complete the story I’m writing her? Fantastic.

Point four: Oglaf said it pretty well, but I think I’d better not link that here. Not everyone is ready for a criticism of this “it becomes more about obligation than love” attitude if it involves an image post-coital naked men. (Even if artfully drawn.) If you are curious, search-engine away.

All told, I think I prefer Valentine’s Day to Lupercalia. Lupercalia is all about fertility, and I can’t think of a worse mood-killer for romance, at least under this particular roof. Oh, wait, I think I can: the priests of Jupiter would sacrifice a dog on that day, see. Yeah, no disrespect to those dead Romans, but nuts to that. I’d sooner buy a heart-shaped box of crappy milk chocolates.

 

Werewolves, Ruint

The anecdote behind that neologism above has its roots in Appalachian talk. As the story goes, it was an exchange with a neighbor, wherein the speaker said “That dog is pretty spoiled,” and the neighbor said “That dog is ruint.”

Fantastic word, “ruint.” Deserves more exposure.

And werewolves are ruint for me.

Whoa-ho-ho, it might be said. You spent a decade-plus of your life working on games starring werewolves. You use them in your home games. You’re a sucker for werewolves. How can they be ruint for you? Well, the trouble’s a simple one: tradition. See, the tradition is that werewolves are monsters. Villains. Antagonists. And I just have a hard time with that these days.

It comes down to learning about wolves, basically. The big metaphor of werewolves is that they’re what happens when people turn into wild beasts, but wolves… aren’t really a good example of wild beasts that behave much worse than people do. The archetypal werewolf, the monster that tears things apart by the light of the full moon, doesn’t behave much like a wolf. It’s become a gnawing disconnect I just can’t get past. A Three Panel Soul comic would go well here, I think.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for that beast within concept. But I think it’s scarier when you’re dealing with Mr. Hyde. Yeah, Stevenson’s novella seems kind of tame and vanilla compared to the Grand Guignol villains we’re used to seeing all around us today. Shoot, in the effort to stir up the jaded sensibilities of readers who have seen it all, there are piles of books about much more horrible human beings that don’t really have much of an excuse. No special formula involved, they just happen to be written by Cormac McCarthy or Bret Easton Ellis or, if you stick to your genre fiction, George R.R. Martin and his many imitators. But I think there’s still something evocative about the Jekyll/Hyde formula, because it actually shackles a monster like this to a good man, and it implies that this could be any one of us.

But werewolves? I have to figure out a way to rationalize why they’re worse than a hybrid of human and wolf would theoretically be. And it’s tricky. What about wolves says “frenzy?” What about wolves says “must taste human blood?” What about wolves says “attack you with their claws?” It was a lot easier for the ol’ ancestors to put all this stuff together (although even they didn’t really picture werewolves using claw attacks) when they were just basically ignorant and fearful. And then here comes science and empirical observation, ruining things.

Nowadays, if I use werewolves as villains, particularly in a setting where the players are not expected to be werewolves themselves, it has to be about the personality involved. The beast is more frightening not when it’s running amok for hazily explained reasons, but when it’s directed by a human intelligence. In effect, they draw from that Mr. Hyde archetype, only with a more animalistic side. And when they run mad and frenzy, then yes, they get a little more classic — but at that point I’m drawing on the image of the rabid animal. They’re murderous and violent in part because they’re sick. And a sick beast winds up having a bit of pathos to it, even as it’s alarming for all the reasons werewolves are supposed to be alarming — it’s out of control, it uses its strength like an animal does, and you can’t reason with it.

But werewolves as monsters and villains because that’s how they’re supposed to be? Because it’s their nature? I’m broken on that front. It feels a little sad to me, but then again, I think Werewolf did this to a lot of people. You don’t see a lot of movies where the werewolf is wholly bestial and unintelligent when it changes any more, and when you do they’re either not all that successful (sorry, Benicio), or they’re working on a different metaphor entirely (um, hi, Ginger Snaps). So I’m not alone.

Still, it seems kind of ironic that working on werewolves for so long means I’m not as versatile at it as someone who came at the subject fresh. If there’s a way to even come at the subject fresh any more, I suppose. And while I’m being honest, I don’t really miss the mindless werewolves — the intelligent ones whose monstrous nature is rooted in their human side are the ones that do it for me. I guess I’m spoiled. No, wait, ruint.

 

Fistfuls of Intrigue

I used to dread running urban games. There’s a reason, of course. I was terrible at them. The density of a city meant that while there may have been a lot of things to do, it was easy to tell myself that NPCs would do those things before players got involved. Fact of the matter is, many of my cities were unreasonably nice places to live. Sure, there were horrible things in the shadows as needed. But while you often want a fictional city to be “nice” enough that players want to identify with it and call it home, I would too often have Good Men in positions of power, Commissioner Gordon-types who would be staunch allies to heroic players. This is a good thing in many ways, but it does mean that sometimes you have trouble when players ask “Why don’t we just tell the police/town guard about this?”

(The best answer, of course, is “Cops got better things to do than get killed.” But it does not always apply.)

So gradually I began to live by the principle that even in nice, orderly, well-run cities there are things going on that will occupy the attention of the various powers-that-be. I needed situations, basically. Not adventures, but ongoing situations. If you were to walk into the captain of the guard’s office and ask him “What’s going on?”, and he trusted/liked you enough to tell you, there should be a more interesting answer than “Nothing.”

One of the first methods I tried was borrowed from the World of Darkness, of course. I refer to the relationship map: start figuring out who the people in power are, and link them. Naturally, you want to have interesting people in power. For me, it’s not a dynamic relationship map unless it’s got a lamia or werewolf or doppleganger or djinn somewhere involved. (Or something else if it’s a map you’d expect to be all werewolves, for instance.) I like maps like this best if they fit on a Post-It, something I can tuck into a book. I have great admiration for more complicated maps like this one which Zak S. redid from Warhammer’s Enemy Within, but I am unlikely to hold myself to this standard.

The other method I’m very fond of (which is compatible with the former one!) was devising intrigues by social circle. The idea is that the dominant concerns among each social circle naturally form intrigues, presumably ones that would intersect with one another. The social circles may vary by what game you’re running. In a Werewolf game, I’d likely pick one per tribe, and possibly one per major pack or territory. Even if I didn’t have all the packs mapped out, answering these questions might help flesh out those packs better. Comparatively, a D&D city intrigue questionnaire is based on what I consider the “four adventuring food groups”: military (fighter/martial), arcane (wizard/arcane), religious (cleric/divine), and criminal (rogue/seedier martial). To these I would also add “noble” (ruling/governing class) and “mercantile” (merchant/middle class), as these social circles are traditional co-chairs of the Most Likely To Hire Adventurers Club. You could probably also add “peasantry” (lower-class) or “nature” (druid/primal) if they seemed apt, or racial social classes like “elves”, or your favorite fantasy motif like “death” (necromancers/death priests/undead). Whichever you feel are most relevant.

So let’s take D&D as an example, and assume a group of six social circles (food groups + noble/mercantile). The questions are to suggest situations of import both for the elite in a social circle, and for a more street-level concern. The idea is that players of relatively low social standing are likely to run into the lower-level situations quickly, but might clue into the higher-level situations if they’re savvy or well-connected or just roll really well. I would then ask myself these questions about a city:

1- What is the dominant concern among the military elite? What is a low-level military concern?
2- What is the dominant concern among the religious elite? What is a low-level religious concern?
3- What is the dominant concern among the criminal elite? What is a low-level criminal concern?
4- What is the dominant concern among the arcane elite? What is a low-level arcane concern?
5- What is the dominant concern among the nobility? What is a low-level aristocratic concern?
6- What is the dominant concern among the merchant elite? What is a low-level mercantile concern?

Yes, twelve basic concerns are probably more than I’d be likely to address in play: but the idea is that if characters talk to any NPCs at all, they will talk to NPCs who are loosely connected to either an “adventuring food group” (military, religious, arcane, criminal, nature) and the Most Likely To Hire Adventurers social classes. No matter who a player contacts, they’ll find out something interesting going on in the city — but the information and intrigue is personalized by source, so it feels relevant that, say, the paladin talks to a church superior and gets a religious-facing intrigue. Said intrigue may also be more pertinent to the paladin’s interests.

For my part, I didn’t need detailed answers. Just enough to give me some ideas. So, let’s take a sample city, something like an Arabian Nights-styled port city.

1) Higher level, military: The sultan’s elite mamluk regiment is ailing from a strange disease, or perhaps curse, that they are trying to hide for fear of showing the city to be weak. Lesser concern: A captain is press-ganging warriors to go against a particularly fearsome band of corsairs.
2) Higher level, religious: An imam has suspicions about the mamluk regiment, and is attempting to discover if they have profaned a holy site while on campaign. Lesser concern: Dervishes have arrived in the city, seeking a stolen holy scroll of prophecy.
3) Higher level, criminal: A crimelord plots to steal the Sultana’s enchanted sword, and has seeded three agents in her court. Lesser concern: A gang is doing a brisk trade in a narcotic derived from ghul saliva.
4) Higher level, arcane: A jinn bound into the pommel of the Sultana’s enchanted sword schemes to be freed. Lesser concern: A clockmaker-artificer is creating automata to assassinate old enemies.
5) Higher level, royal: The Sultana suspects that her eldest child is not entirely human, and worries that a supernatural being — perhaps a jinn — lay with her in the guise of her consort. Lesser concern: An infatuated and unscrupulous noble schemes to kidnap or charm the daughter of a notable.
6) Higher level, mercantile: Unscrupulous merchant-lords are promoting the threat of war with a nearby city-state in order to drive up demand for steel goods. Lesser concern: Trade caravans are going missing at a nearby oasis. Wait, is this an intrigue or an adventure hook? An intrigue, so some of the local merchants must be suspected responsible, or responsible and trying to cover it up.

Those took me about as much time to think up as they did to type up, and it was easy to brainstorm some just by linking them to others — the Sultana’s sword, for instance, or the threat of war coinciding with the ailing elite regiment. (Extra bonus: they’re fun to think up.) And when the players started poking around, I can easily tell which rumors they may run into just by who they’re asking. If they run into a particularly well-connected barber or storyteller, I could always roll a d6. If I need a reason why potential allies can’t just drop everything and help them, these intrigues supply an answer: the captain would love to help, but is caught up in this press gang mess, for instance. I would happily run a game that revolved around this city.

I’ve field tested these techniques a couple of times. So far? They work quite well. The players are almost spoiled for choice when it comes to options, but the neat thing about intrigues is that they aren’t mandatory: if the players aren’t interested in a particular one, it will eventually resolve itself by morphing into another intrigue. There’s no need to punish the players for not solving every problem that exists in the world — when they step into more than one intrigue at the same time, they will probably feel “punished’ enough. Or at least, beset with adversity — in a good way.

It surprises me somewhat that I now enjoy running games in urban environments. As a person, naturally I am still a creature of trees and mountains and fields and streams, not of alleys and cramped streets and too many damn people. I want nothing to do with intrigues in real life, I suppose. But the gameable kinds, the sorts that involve socialization and treachery and outbreaks of violence — yeah, those have grown on me rather nicely since I figured out a way to get them to work for me.

 

ES 5: Against the Dragons

Like many — and I mean many — of my friends, colleagues and co-workers old and new, I dived into Skyrim last month. I have since come up for air, though I haven’t drained the pool for cleaning yet. I still play in bursts whenever the mood takes me. Naturally, it resurges since one of my Christmas presents was Jeremy Soule’s soundtrack for the game. When I get a new soundtrack, you see, I audit it and see what tracks need to go to what playlists, for gaming purposes. And the process of listening to the music for audit makes me thing “oh yeah, time to escape the mine…”

Anyway. The thing that’s struck me most about Skyrim is that its pre-loaded narrative is… well, it’s okay. Gets the job done. There are several questlines that are exemplary, and many scripted moments that are quite cool, but with the sheer amount of questing to be had in the game you know it can’t all be incredible. A really strong narrative cuts out the superfluous details, but a game like Skyrim is all about superflous details, about presenting you with so many choices that you focus on the things you like and disregard the stuff that doesn’t sing to you.

But as a game it inspires so much water-cooler conversation. That’s the most interesting part. Everyone has a Skyrim story. Maybe it’s something your faithful (or hapless) huscarl did at an inopportune time. Maybe it’s the moment a dragon pounced on you in an unexpected context (and then went off and fought a mudcrab instead of you). Maybe it’s an experiment in the Fus Ro Dah shout, blowing someone off just the right wall or cliff. It varies, and that’s the point: people create largely unique experiences within a shared, familiar context.

It reminds me, to be honest, of tabletop RPGs.

The best Skyrim stories, like the best tabletop stories, are those where there is enough context to be familiar yet enough of a unique occurrence to be worth the telling. It’s different than talking about a movie or an episode of Mad Men or whatever: those are discussions where all the context is familiar but there’s not really personalization. But it’s also different than the worst tabletop stories because those things are often bereft of context. The more personalized a gaming world is, the more personalized the scenarios you explore, the more exposition is necessary to set the scene for a listener.

Skyrim is, in effect, The Keep on the Borderlands. It’s G1-3 Against The Giants, or whichever of those old-school D&D modules that were so widespread that most people gaming in the ’80s had played through them. Those modules are so fondly remembered not just because of the experience people had playing through them, but because those experiences were easily shared. They did a lot to build a community, in ways that personalized adventures and tales of “my level 88 drow cleric/assassin who married Lolth” didn’t. It’s fascinating to see that coming around again.

Tragically, I look at the games I run and I realize I am not a community-builder. I don’t think my players could really go talk to other gamers about my games as easily as they could if I were running modules. There must always be exposition, the necessity to set a scene like “Okay, so this was in the game where we were political exiles in a penal colony set in a giant abandoned subterranean city.” If my players can amuse other gamers with tales of my games, it is because they are very good storytellers and not because my games are founded on commonalities. They’re certainly uncommon by compare. And of course, the choice of RPG you play is much less common than it was back in the day, with many systems and many editions. Another barrier to the community.

Don’t get me wrong, I have not begun thinking about forsaking tabletop RPGs for video games. There are still, to tread the proverb already worn smooth, too many things that tabletop RPGs can do that video games just flat-out cannot: the improvisation, the customization, the infinite “assets” available to you. But it’s fascinating to me that video games are now doing this one thing that tabletop RPGs did, and doing it very well: spawning war stories that actually have a lot of variance even as they have a lot of commonality. And with the advent of the Internet, the best war stories spread faster and farther and find more listeners. That’s quite impressive. It’s a shame that things like edition wars probably mean that tabletop RPGs may never catch back up.

That said, I wouldn’t go back and try to be more of a community-builder with my own games to try and boost the tabletop side. I love my customized games: they are those things that I still can’t get in something like Skyrim. They’re unprompted dialogue trees that go beyond what any voice acting budget can provide, quests no content writer could anticipate, romantic subplots with characters not “flagged” for romance, vistas that even the most powerful PC couldn’t handle. If Skyrim is the new X1: Isle of Dread from a war-story, community perspective, I think I’m okay with that. We’ve still got what X1 means from the perspective of possibility. And of course, a selfish bastard like me has both.

So there I was, life-draining daedric sword in one hand and sweet roll in the other, when…

 

The Nineteenth

At present, nineteen is not an auspicious number for me.

Eighteen, yes. I was married on an 18th. And a couple of months ago, although we were gravely worried about the future, we went out to Aileen’s favorite (for here) Italian restaurant and decided to have a good time, and deal with what the next day would bring.

And the next day, we both lost our jobs. It was really not one of the best times of our lives, to be sure. It wasn’t just us, either — it was a lot of folks who’d been with the company for a variable amount of time. But anyone with White Wolf credits to their name was going on two decades with the company.

Today, the nineteenth — two months later — is when the last vestiges of White Wolf as a position, as a day job, run out. I will gravely miss my old white-wolf.com email account, for instance — a silly thing, but I grew attached to it. I have a lot of good friends that are “former co-workers” now, and that sucks. Many have managed to land new positions at exciting new companies, but many (including Aileen) have yet to find another good place. It’s hard not to be morose about that.

But that said, White Wolf refuses to die. Aileen’s in the “library” while I type this, watching Jeremy Brett sleuth while she works on converting a White Wolf book to a better electronic format. I have a writer discussion about Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition raging in my inbox. (Or Raging, if you will.) And I still have friends at CCP, fighting the good fight for the World of Darkness.

And although the 19th is inauspicious, I am lucky. I’ve been picked up by a company called Xaviant. They were generous, even excited to take a chance on me. I’m enjoying the opportunity to take a chance with them. I have a feeling my position will involve a lot of different tasks, but one of them at least is world-building — and that is something that in some ways I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do again. Even though it’s a different world.

So, yeah, I have a least favorite number at present. And I profoundly dislike the effect it’s had on all my friends these last couple of months. But it hasn’t won yet. I hope to have the opportunity to spit in its eye.

 

Interchangeable

First, let it be clear: I am a child of the pinkish-purplish-reddish box with the Erol Otus art on the cover, the “Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set” that came out and helped shove D&D into a full-bore fad. (It is my mother’s fault.) If anyone can be hit with the nostalgia bomb, it’s me. I have piles of great memories of being carefree with paper and graph paper and pencils, of running the Caves of Chaos countless times (but ignoring things like the mad hermit because who cared?), of Morgan Ironwolf and that poor unloved sap Black Dougal.

Therefore, I find the OSR — that movement to play as it was done in the olden days, with rulesets that are little more than tweaks to one’s favorite version of D&D circa 1977-1985 — intellectually fascinating. It’s all about the experiences people had back then, and moving them forward and refining them.

Intellectually fascinating, yes… but not emotionally engaging. That struck me as a little odd. Why doesn’t the OSR work for me? Why do I spend time wrangling with monster builders and power lists running 4e, instead of something more akin to the game of my youth? I played in an OSR game run by Justin Achilli some time back, and it was quite enjoyable. It didn’t suck me in, though; I certainly felt it was time well spent, but I didn’t get the fever to play again.

And when it comes down to it, I think the primary reason that the OSR doesn’t take root in my brain is the same reason I don’t use published adventures: I’m just not as interested in playing out scenarios that are designed for a generalized group. Old-school D&D, beloved a place as it has in my heart, is about one-size-fits-all adventures. The differentiation in the adventure is in what the players do; it doesn’t matter why they’re in there or what their goals are beyond money and power, the adventure is the adventure. And from the perspective of a game world that is what it is, not shaped by consensual reality or the players’ very presence, that’s a valuable thing. The Tomb of Horrors doesn’t care why your thief decided that going in there for riches was preferable to doing anything else with his life.

But the part I like about RPG worlds is the way they interact with players. Sometimes they’re player-agnostic “this is the way it is” adventures, sometimes they’re immensely personalized scenarios that result directly from player action. The OSR approach is that “character background is what happens between levels 1-5″ — and I’m just not interested in playing a character that has had no meaningful interactions with the world up until the point he’s started play. It messes with my suspension of disbelief. I like a scenario that is at least a little collaborative, that the GM has gone out of his way to say “Here is a particular hook for you to get you started,” because that way I feel more connected to the events about to throw down.

Being a child of the B/X has apparently given way to being a product of my college gaming circle, where it was about the campaign. Characters fell in love, were betrayed, suffered weird retcons from time to time, set down roots, took over territories, had cynical conversations about philosophy and religion at all hours of the night. We played our characters without dice, paper or scenarios whenever someone had a loose idea like “Oh hey Thomas wants to talk to you again.” That was where RPGs became seriously addictive to me. Nothing quite beats that rush.

I’ll say it again, the OSR is fascinating, and I find it fantastic that a mode of play like that has a place to flourish. But I just can’t root myself in a play style that promises that maybe I’ll get the things I like — interesting NPC relationships, scenarios that spun out of decisions my character made, callbacks to background elements — if I play the game long enough and don’t die. For all that it’s a simpler, easier play style with fewer rules, levels 1-5 (or their equivalent) is asking a lot of investment, particularly in the adult “we have less time to play” phase. I don’t want to wait until 5th level to have a character that is not interchangeable, that has personal hooks embedded in the world, that may run into an old friend at any time. To me that’s not a reward for sticking through the “work” part of the game — that is the game at its finest, the part that I most delight in playing. Give me those early sessions to work on chemistry with my fellow PCs, and to work on some details refining the broad strokes. But as a personal preference, I’d rather not be asked to be interchangeable. There are plenty of other players for that.

 

Wherein I Boast About My Players

This is a tale that I must relate, even though it is the dreaded social faux pas of “telling you about my game.” The players deserve it.

So, the context: D&D 4e ruleset, Renaissance Italy-flavored homebrew setting, swashbuckling theme. The players have spent the first five levels of their career making reparations for background troubles, fighting against a plague-cult, even at one point acting to prevent the assassination of a prince’s champion. They are graduallly making a name for themselves, as protagonists in a heroic fantasy mashup are given to doing.

And then they hit Cinquedea. So far the cities they’ve visited have been “Tuscan-inspired metropolis in agrarian heartland, sunny and boisterous” and “Forest-enclosed city built on ancient ruins, tenor of the supernatural.” Now they move to “Cramped port city full of intrigues, jealousy and duels.” They’ve roughly been chasing a subplot of plague-apples sold to a brothel within the city, investigating this as the “mission” that keeps them together but what the players are really looking for is more social intrigue. The rogue is coming home, after having had to flee the city for sleeping with the wrong girl. The mercenary is looking to get recruits and build her own company. The peasant-turned-landowner is looking for a good husband for his daughter. The necromancer is investigating the rise of a new, potentially troublemaking Sorcerous House.

As they investigate the plague-apples plot, they get mired into those intrigues they’re chasing. The rogue finds that his family has some troubles of their own, and sets up the former peasant and his daughter with the matchmakers his family has produced. The necromancer finds a sword school and begins speaking with other adepts in the city. The mercenary learns of an all-female street gang, and joins them with the intent of converting them into a proper company.

And then things start getting… out of control.

Situation: A partly-failed infiltration of the brothel in question brings out a ledger, wherein it’s revealed that some of the apples have been sold to the Prince of Cinquedea’s champion, along with other city dignitaries.

Result: The rogue makes plans to call in a favor with the local assassin’s guild to have the champion assassinated (in a fantastic reversal of their “prevent the prince’s champion from being assassinated” plot of two cities ago), and the apples brought to light.

Situation: The ex-peasant landowner starts trying to raise awareness of the plague-apple symptoms by openly spreading word among doctors, healers and the like.

Result: He finds himself tailed by a wererat, revealing that wererats are part of the forces aligned with the plague-apple vendors, and that they’ve noticed him.

Situation: The mercenary discovers that the Cinquedean branch of her House (the Rovino) are leaning on a master swordsmith, trying to encourage him to produce more, shoddier weapons that they can still sell at high prices due to his name. She starts getting involved with the local Rovinos, hoping to guide them subtly out of this process.

Result: An open standoff near the swordsmith’s results in the rogue revealing himself to the Rovinos — the very same people he originally fled the city to avoid after sleeping with one of their young ladies. In addition, it’s clear that he’s standing alongside a Vargari (who the Rovinos hate) and a Sespech (the necromancer). The Rovinos start to wonder about conspiracies.

Situation: The mercenary attempts to convince the paranoid, belligerent head of the Rovinos that there’s no telling who might be aligned against the house if it’s a conspiracy, and tells him to lie low. She critically fails the check.

Result: The players discover that the Rovinos are now shoring up allies among other Houses, contacting assassins, gathering street-level soldiers to incite riots, and preparing a strike to cripple one of the Houses they suspect of working against them to make an example. Their target? One of the Sorcerous Houses. Who are themselves, of course, completely innocent.

So as of last night, the players discovered where their intrigues have gotten them: they’re behind an assassination plot reaching up to the Prince’s court, wererats are looking for them, and one of the Houses is about to start a civil war in the city if something isn’t done. None of this was planned by me, except maybe the wererats. This is what is going on when the city reacts to the players.

“This is going to end with the city in flames,” they said last night. And it might. And it might not. It depends on what they do.

I have no doubt they’ll do something, though. They are an amazing bunch that way. And they deserve to have it said. Cheers, guys. Looking forward to next session.

 

Loot Up Front

I finished Disgaea 4 this last weekend. Well, to be fair, I finished the main story: I’m not sure it’s possible to finish a Disgaea game, but whatever. And along the way, naturally I was addicted to the Item World subgame of power-leveling items and raking in the loot. And there’s something very interesting about how they handle the gambling aspect there.

If you’re not familiar with the Disgaea series, it’s a turn-based strategy RPG. You get loot in one of two ways: you can steal it from your enemies before you kill them, and you can get loot-table bonus rewards when you clear a stage. There are nine slots on the bonus gauge, filled with random items, XP bonuses, extra money, etc. The more you fill the bonus gauge, the more stuff you get.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that in the Item World, you can powerlevel an item by running through stages, but you don’t have to finish them. You can just race for the exit for the next level, and that counts for adding a level to the item you’re running through. Whether you stay to fight the enemies depends on two things: if you’re trying to level your characters as well as the item, or if you see some nice, rare stuff on the bonus gauge. If it’s worth the effort you stay and fight, if it isn’t you don’t. But the point is you see the results of the random loot when you start the stage. You know what items the enemies have (you can mouse over them), you can check the bonus gauge before you deploy a single character.

It’s a fascinating system, and it’s profoundly addictive. You know what you’re going to get, and you can go for those rewards, or dive down another level and “roll again.” You don’t fight the same mob over and over again hoping to see the reward you want. By listing off the rewards at the start, you can choose your engagements. You still aren’t guaranteed most of the rewards (it’s hard to steal items, for instance, unless you really grind up a thief), but you know what you can get.

It really makes me think about how you could use a similar arrangement outside of the Disgaea series. Much as I’d love to see it replace the “commit to the fight, then see if you were lucky” loot system of the average MMO, I confess it’d be near-impossible there: the only way to hold most groups of players together is the hope that there’s something for everyone. If you see right up front that the dungeon’s gonna be dropping mostly druid loot and nothing for warriors, the warrior will probably drop the group instead of running the dungeon anyway. You get something similar with event-type loot — the seasonal boss will be dropping X loots this week — but it’s still not really the same model. It’s still “commit to the fight, then see if the gamble paid off,” rather than “gamble, then decide to commit to the fight or not.”

All told, though, I think it’s an approach worth considering. Yes, it lets people pick and choose their fights instead of spending more time in the game — but it becomes remarkably addictive in its own right. So much so that I’m pretty glad I can now set the game aside with a clear conscience, telling myself “I’m done for now.”

Until Skyrim hits, of course. Urgh.

 

Dastardy and Rascalry

If you’re in the business of running games, you’re in the business of generating antagonists. If you run a game with a pretty high lethality index like D&D or the average WoD game, then you have to generate a bunch of them. Players chew through them quickly, pick through the bones, then hand out their bowls and request another. It can be pretty draining, especially if you make the mistake of getting attached to your little preciouses.

I think most everyone has a favorite villain trope: the remorseless noble with the code of honor, the Jokerish nihilist comedian, the dumb brute, the woman scorned, whatever. And of course, players will burn through them quickly if you let them. Sure, the antagonist doesn’t have to be dumb, and he will probably take whatever measures he can to stay alive, if staying alive is the sort of thing that’s in his motivation. (It isn’t always, and sometimes those guys who would rather die in a manner that spites their opponent are pretty memorable.) But if players are clever and competent, they will probably figure a way around those defenses and 23 stab wounds later, your antagonist is lucky to gargle out a quick “et tu” before he bleeds out. So that leaves you thinking about the next villain, and whether or not you’re going to do a new spin on your favorite trope or explore another one — and basically, wondering how to make the next blackguard stand out.

By this point, I’ve built a lot of exercises to stock up the next bunch of jackasses. It’s a process that’s relevant for work as well as recreation, though admittedly some of the techniques you’re going to need to disguise a lot better for work. You’ll see what I mean.

- Motivation: This is something you have to do for antagonists anyway if you want them to have as many as two dimensions, but it’s a brainstorming motivation anyhow. I have a list of motivations jotted down in one of my graph books that runs from “revenge” and “avarice” through “nihilism” to “bad romance.” Selecting a motivation from the list I haven’t used in a while is a fine starting point.

- Organizations/Numbered Villains: Antagonists are sometimes easier to build if you buy in bulk. Let’s say as a brainstorming exercise you’ve got a group that is meant to parallel Dante’s Inferno, one for each circle of Hell. If you pick out all nine at the same time, you can look at stuff like gender ratio, complementary roles, if all your guys are old and maybe you should have some younger ones in there, etc. If it’s a fairly symbolic number, all the better; to use the Inferno example, you know that the guy representing the Fifth Circle will have something to do with anger, and that’s something to build in. And players loooove killing numbered villains — more on that another time, I guess.

- Veiled Allusions: I’m kind of susceptible to doing this. This can be associated with the organizations/numbered villains concept above; say that you have seven villains, and each one represents one of the Deadly Sins (for simplicity’s sake, the most familiar incarnation, not the version where it’s sinful to feel sad). Now, they aren’t all together because they recognize that they’re references to the sins, it’s just an allusion. But it’s easier to brainstorm them if you know that, say, the disgraced general is in some way influenced by Envy. Even if it manifests as nothing deeper than a penchant for wearing green — that’s still distinctive. The trouble is when you start getting cheekier (or nerdier), doing things like placing antagonists that are carefully veiled takes on Batman villains or the Scooby-Doo gang. If you hide this right, your players never have to know — but be real careful if you’re doing this for work or the like.

- Existing Relations: This is great for well-realized settings like a city full of interesting characters. Pick a character you’ve already got in place. Now figure out what sort of antagonist would play off that character well. A relative? Someone with a diametrically opposed philosophy? Professional rival? Romantic entanglement? This gives the antagonist a more immediate hook into the setting than the plot-related one you already had in mind for her. And if that existing character is not the focal point of the plot (the assassin targeting the Prince is an old rival of the protagonists’ mentor, but cares more about the Prince’s assassination at the moment), then that villain becomes more fleshed-out by default — she cares about something in the setting other than the plot that has mandated her appearance.

- A Hobby: This is an odd starting point, but it can work. Think about an odd, interesting hobby that an antagonist might have, and then see if that suggests anything about their personality that could help you build them out further. Take Wee-Bey from The Wire. While he almost certainly wasn’t created with this method, consider how you could start with “he keeps exotic fish in several aquariums” as a basis. Who’s interested in watching fish? Someone who doesn’t need excitement all the time; someone who’s got a certain level of serenity. Now consider an antagonist whose hobby is bonsai. It implies someone meticulous, who likes things to be controlled, doesn’t it? What about a falconer? A scholar of history? A pickup artist?

- A Visual: Sometimes I just pick a miniature and use that as a basis for an RPG villain, it’s true. The visual is one of the easiest ways to brainstorm a new character. Maybe it’s a certain color — you want to do someone who wears yellow, for instance. Or a villain that looks brutish, but oddly civilized in an expensive tux. It’s very useful. Why is it all the way down here instead of one of the first ones I picked out? Well, because a visual doesn’t always suggest a motivation — or when it does (like “he looks like a Goth, he’s probably a nihilist”), it may be a little too simplistic to make someone nuanced.

Of course, the amount of nuance you put into a given antagonist depends on what you’re using them for. As I noted earlier, if your players are chewing through them, you probably don’t need lots. But everyone should have something. If your players or readers notice that there’s really no such thing as a generic bandit lord or Brujah thug in your game — that everyone with a name has something that makes them stand out as a little more real — you’ve got them. And to be honest, coming up with that nuance is fantastic exercise.