Gaming and Related Services

Do I still use this blog?

2011-12-16T16:46:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes I do. Just very occasionally.

So, just to keep everyone up to speed on what's going on: I still blog over at my Livejournal (which is here). That's the spot for most of my online blather, but that may change. There's just not much going on in LJ-land anymore, and honestly this site is easier for me to access. So I may move my four main blog projects (cooking, actual play reports, movie reviews and character creation) over here soon.

I'm currently in the process of putting curse the darkness together, with the help of Michelle, Sarah and lots of other awesome people. There's a Facebook page for the game (here, so go Like us) and a Twitter that I'm using to update about the game and to post funny things my gamers say (here, go follow us). And, of course, the main development of the game is ongoing over at cursethedarkness.net.

So that's where we are. You might be seeing more activity here real soon-like.

Speakin' Out With My Geekin' Out - Part 2

2011-09-16T08:47:00.004-04:00

Cooking!

I've always loved food. I understand that there are people who'll pretty much eat whatever - they have the attitude of the daddy rat from Ratatouille (whose named is Django, by the way). Food is fuel, and as long as what you're eating keeps you going, it doesn't matter what you eat.

I, however, am not a rat, nor am I unfortunate enough to be in a position where any nourishing food is acceptable. I do recognize that millions of people live in conditions like that, however, and that's maybe a good thing for a foodie to reflect on occasionally. My favorite cooking show, Chopped, is promoting No Kid Hungry at present, so maybe slide over there and have a look?

Anyway: Cooking. I never really paid attention when my mother was cooking, I just sort of marveled at the result. In fairness, she didn't really ask for my help or offer to teach me, either, and mom can be a little...off-putting in the kitchen. That's her space, and she flies around, busy, a whirling dervish of culinary activity (she's slowed somewhat in her later years, but only the pace, not the level of intensity - seriously, you should see the stuff she makes for our parties), but it's a hard environment to learn in. Some of that is because she has trouble talking about what she's doing while she's doing it.

So I learned to cook gradually. I lived on my own and would occasionally throw stuff together rather than make Hamburger Helper, but I was largely winging it and I didn't know any technique. Even for the first several years of my marriage, I would cook dinner, but it would safe stuff, stuff I knew how to make. And I'd call mom for help, and I made a lot of easy stuff like casseroles.

And then Chopped came on. If you don't know, Chopped is a show on Food Network wherein four chefs compete for $10,000. They each get a basket of three or four ingredients, then they have to make an appetizer for three judges in 20 minutes. After that, one of the chefs leaves the show (is "chopped"). Repeat for dinner, and then dessert, last chef standing gets the prize.

I don't know how I got into the show. I think that it probably came on before or after some cupcake show that Heather was watching and I got sucked in. I used to love watching Iron Chef, and this hit some of the same buttons - improvisation and working under pressure is sexy. But what I discovered as I watched was that the basics of cooking aren't that hard. You have to know some things about your ingredients and you have to know some basics (learning to make a good roux was one of the best things I ever did), but mostly, cooking successfully is about creativity, time management, and having a good palate. Which, apparently, I do.

So with that in mind, I had Heather and Teagan choose four ingredients and I made dinner (I did not, however, hew to a time limit). I don't remember offhand what that first dinner was, but I remember absolutely loving what I was doing. Solving a problem, being creative on a deadline (because although I don't restrict myself to 30 minutes for dinner, I gotta get it done in enough time to eat before bed!), and making sure that it tasted good - these were challenges that I wasn't used to.

A couple of years later, I'm still doing these "Chopped dinners" a couple of times a week (doing one tonight, in fact). Michelle chooses ingredients most often, though Sarah, Heather, Aaron and Teagan all contribute. My players in my ongoing Misspent Youth game consistently bring ingredients, as do players in my other games, occasionally.

I generally blog these dinners over at my LJ, but I'll do one here, just so you can see what I mean. Last weekend, I was to Lima (Ohio, not Peru) with Sarah to visit her mama. Her mama had come to visit and had dinner with us once before, and enjoyed my cooking, and so I wanted to cook for her again, with her choosing the ingredients. After her initial protests about making me work (c'mon, this ain't work), we got some ingredients picked.

My ingredients here were: trout, strawberries, moscado, cream crackers, and brussel sprouts.

Now, I've cooked with all of these things before, except the crackers (but I tried one, and it was just a cracker - like a thick saltine with no salt). I knew from experience that brussel sprouts play nice with bacon, so I got some bacon, fried it in a pan, and used the fat to sautee some onions and scallions. When those were getting soft, I threw in the brussel sprouts, cover the pan, and let them soak in the delicious bacon.

Strawberries are sweet and the moscado is a sweet-ish white wine. I knew they'd go well together, but I also didn't want to make a sauce, necessarily (I always seem to do that with fruit). Instead, since we needed a starch, I got some jasmine rice and made that, and then I boiled the strawberries in the wine until they got soft. I fished out the berries and mixed them into the rice, which was perfect - sweet enough to counter some of the bitter from the brussel sprouts, but not too sweet that it didn't go with dinner.

The fish, well. I love trout, and I like to keep fish simple. I brushed the non-skin side with egg white, mashed up the crackers to act as a kind of crust, salted the fish, and put it in the skillet in some hot olive oil. The trick with fish is letting the skin-side go until the skin gets crispy, which winds up cooking it most of the way anyway. Then I flipped it and let the crackers get cooked (fortunately, not burned).

Wound up being a good dinner, but the brussel sprouts came out really exceptional. Bacon makes everything better.

Anyway, bottom line, here is: Cooking is easy and fun. Try it. Stuff that you cook yourself just tastes better.

Speakin' Out With My Geekin' Out - Part 1

2011-09-13T11:33:00.007-04:00

Oh, I know, I don't really update here anymore. But blackhatmatt.com is out there as "my website" in a lot of places on the web, and I'll post this to my LJ as well as to Facebook and everywhere except Twitter ('cause I don't, not yet). But anyway.

Monica Valentinelli came up with this idea following on the heels of some pretty egregious nerd-baiting. The idea is: This week, post about how you geek. And I can get behind that. So I'm-a gonna talk about three of the ways that I geek. Ready? Go.

#1 My Kids: Best for last? Eh. I'm putting 'em first because they are.

Teagan was born in October 2004, and she keeps getting more awesome every year. She's internalized what I've told her about paying attention, about being kind to people, and about being curious. She loves listening to stories, telling stories, and generally interacting with the world (though, of course, she's as susceptible to the glowing lure of the Idiot Box as anyone - don't blame your kids for this, folks).

Last week, Teagan was playing soccer on her munchkin team and a kid on the other team got knocked down. Teagan immediately stopped, asked if he was OK and moved to help him up. This behavior, this kindness, which took me years and deliberate cultivation to achieve, is instinctive for her. I'm often surrounded by people who claim they don't like people very much, and so it's balm for my soul to be around my daughter, who does.

And then there's this monster:

Cael (born June 2008) does not have his sister's intrinsic regard for life and kindness, it's true. He's not a mean kid, just...enthusiastic in some ways. But he is scary smart, articulate and he has this cherubic smile that I know is going to get him in trouble one day. My biggest hope for him is that his resemblance to my father bleeds over into his temperament, because Dad was seriously one of the most respectful and well put-together men I've known. And Cael's a dead ringer for him.

At the same soccer game, Cael was hanging out with me while I watched Teagan play (Cael's munchkin team played before hers). He started head-butting my chest and I said, "What are you, a billy goat?"

Without missing a beat: "No! I'm a silly goat!"

Cael wins.

I geek out about my kids because I'm a parent. Most parents will geek about their kids given half a chance, and folks without kids will sometimes bag on us for that. That's fine. You don't have to get it. You don't even have to listen. Just understand: Literally everything in my life is less important to me than my kids, and that's not to say that other things are unimportant. It's just to say that when my daughter was born after that long night in 2004, I fell in love, and then it happened again three-and-a-half years later.

Part 2: Cooking coming later!

[ctd] New Systems

2010-12-13T16:43:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't posted about curse the darkness in a while, but I've been working on it. Some changes I'm making, with input from Sarah, Matt and Michelle:

Streamline the Removal Challenge system. This is something that the playtesters have consistently not been real thrilled about (one of the playtesters mentioned it was like playing an RPG and then a bridge game breaks out).
Add a story creation element. I admit to being influenced by Ganakagok here, but also games like Don't Rest Your Head, Misspent Youth, My Life With Master and many other indie games that eschew "GM does lots of prep" for "quick improvisation by entire group."
A way to make the whole group invested in the immediacy of the scenario. curse the darkness was never supposed to be about saving the world. It's about what's happening right now. That's why mortality needs to be high, and that's why I focus so much on Memory and not as much on, say, long character arc.

So, with all that mind, here are the changes I'm making (some have been playtested, some haven't):

Character Challenges: Instead of discarding a card when you go through a Character Challenge, you put it into the bank. Your "bank" holds three cards, and you cannot be involved in a Removal Challenge until it's full. Your bank cannot hold more than three cards, but you pick which ones. Example: I have 3H, 2S and 8S in my bank. Multiple suits are nice, because they help in Removal Challenges (see below), so when I play my next card (7S), I can choose to replace the 3H, or keep that, for whatever reason, and replace either of the other spaces.

Removal Challenges: So, instead of gathering up all your cards, you just use your bank and your Active cards. You don't pick anything up. The system otherwise works much the same, and so the "bridge" problem might remain, but in playtest we found that if you're playing cards that you have face-up as the Removal Challenge begins it doesn't disrupt things nearly as much.

So let's say I've got the bank above (3H, 2S, 8S) and my Active Cards are 7S, 9H, KC, and 10D. We start a Removal Challenge. I have those seven cards to play to Suit Assignment. I play my KC, 8S, 10D and 9H, since I don't have much in the way of high cards and I'm hoping the GM gets shafted on his draws.

The GM plays 10S, 2H, JC and 10D. We tie on diamonds, GM wins on spades and I win on hearts and clubs. I used three of my Active Cards, so I turn over new ones: 4C, JD and 7H. I now have those three, 7S, 3H and 2S to use in Condition Assignment.

I go first because my king of clubs is high. I only have one club left in my Active Cards and none left in my bank, so I assign clubs as Succeed/Leave. The next high card is the GM's 10 of spades. I have a bunch of spades, so naturally the GM calls spades as Fail/Leave. My nine of hearts is next, and I call it Succeed/Remain. That leaves diamonds (left till last because we tied) for Fail/Remain.

The GM grabs the aces from the Players' Decks (just four, though I've found that eight works better for Removal Challenges with more than three people). I contribute two cards from any cards I control - bank or Active. Duh. I put in the 2H from my bank and the 7H from my Active Cards. The GM can spend Between points to add more cards (from my bank, discard piles, but not my Active Cards) and I can spend Memory to remove them. And then I draw and see what happens.

Passing the GM's Hat: And here was the other idea we had and liked, though we haven't playtested it: If you leave play during a Removal Challenge, you become the GM. The former GM takes a character card (and should make a character, at least the numbers, at the beginning of play), writes the character into Memory, and joins at the next opportunity.

Yes, that might seem like a big jump, but here's the thing: GMing curse the darkness is mostly about narration and difficulty adjudication, and I'm going to include charts for the latter. The former, well, everyone, including all the players, will know at the outset what the stakes and goals are for that session (or story). How? Read on.

Story Creation: At the beginning of play, you draw four cards. The first one indicates what He wants and on what scale. So the suit indicates what the target is (same ideas as the attributes; Focus, Humanity, Stamina, Stability) and the number indicates the scale: Ace is one person, all the way up to a whole city. (I have charts for all of this, which I'm not going to reproduce here, though I'll be happy to post an example.)

Next card is the Between Card, and that indicates how many Between Points the GM starts with and how many are necessary to get His attention. What this means, basically, is how important this mission is to Him - the higher the number, the more points are necessary (and thus the less important this is to Him - or maybe it means that characters are better hidden? That's for the group to interpret).

Third card is the Situation Card, which is basically "where are we when this all starts?" Suit breaks down like it does for Scenario, the number raises the tension of the situation. So the ace of spades is the end of a sprint to catch a target (physical in nature, but not a lot of Between-related danger) while the king of spades is an armed firefight between two factions (which adds a Between Point right off the bat, it's so risky).

Finally, the Complication card adds a wrinkle into things. Might be a natural disaster, a sugar crash, the sudden arrival of another group of rebels from the Between. The GM keeps it secret and the players can ask the GM to play it any time to reduce the number of Between Points in front of the GM. Or, the GM can cash in a black joker, if he has one, to introduce it (but more importantly, screw the players out of the chance to do so).

So! That's where we're at. Been trying to playtest this, but life, weather and illness haven't been cooperative. Next Monday, I hope. :)

[ctd] Playtest B

2010-09-18T20:05:00.001-04:00

Maybe I should summarize the changes we made last week?

Death and Memory: We had some deaths, though we haven't been able to test the Memory system yet because the deaths occurred at the end of the session. We did, however, decide that players should get a play mat, rather than a character sheet, and then use an index card (or I'll probably make a character pad and sell it cheap-like with the book) to make the character. Once I make a mock-up, this will make more sense, but the idea is that the players can make one character at the start of a session, and then make another (just distribute the numbers and define one Scope, but nothing else) that they can pick up in the midst of the session if their first character dies. We also talked about taking over NPCs, and decided that players should absolutely have the option of taking on an NPC (and thus statting him up real quick, with the GM giving some input for Scopes and the like).

We also talked about letting players play a red joker to switch characters without having their existing one die.

Between Points: On that subject, NPCs opening gates does add to the Between point total.

Removal Challenges: Some good changes here.

If you've got a relevant Scope during a Removal Challenge, you can draw an extra card during Resolution (this rule worked out nicely, because it gives you a fighting chance and makes burning Memory to remove cards from the deck more useful).
We need to nail down the order of players who draw during the Resolution of a Removal Challenge. I'm planning to say "common sense," but it just needs to be addressed in the book.
I'm thinking that 8 aces is too much to form the basis of the Resolution deck; gonna try it with 4 next time.
A Removal Challenge refreshes all decks for all survivors.
We removed the Reserve deck entirely. We're just using two cards from any that the player has access to to form the Resolution, plus the aces.
A suggested rule: The GM and the players each choose four cards, one from each suit (if they have 'em) and turn them over at the same time. No escalation unless the GM plays a black joker, or maybe just ditch that rule entirely.
Another thing to try out: You can donate a result card if you're involved in a Removal challenge with another player (or request one). So if I draw a heart and that means I'm safe, but another player draws a spade and that means they're fucked and I'm OK with dying but they aren't, we can swap. We have to make that make sense in the context of the game, but that's not usually hard.

Character Challenges: If you go from a four to a king, there should be some roleplaying accompanying that. It can be as simple as "second wind," but players should use that progression to flesh out their characters more.

Card-Caps: Characters can accept a card-cap voluntarily (in our game, Matt's character was blind, and so he had a cap on actions requiring sight). We decided that when such a cap comes up and hinders a character, the GM loses a Between point.

OK, next step: I want to make up a playtest packet that I can send out to other folks.

The Breakdown of Society

2010-09-16T10:50:00.001-04:00

He removed ethnicity, religion, politics, economics and all of the other artificial divisions we'd made for ourselves. He forced them out of us. He killed those that didn't comply, and that result in a dip in the world's population that's nothing short of surreal. He commanded us to use our skills, whatever they might be, for the good of all humanity. And then He disappeared, maybe into the Between, maybe on some now-depopulated estate somewhere.

It's easy to picture Him in a dark room somewhere, maybe one of the Hindu temples in India, nothing but rats and Them around, looking through a thousand shadows, searching for hints of dissent.

But as the world's gotten smaller, he has to look harder. The number of people has shrunk, but not the number of shadows. You just don't see Them as often anymore. You don't see shadows opening randomly.

It's not that He's gone. He makes his presence felt. The fact that the Symbol still works is evidence of that, because I firmly believe that They would kill anyone in the Between without His will to keep them back. That said, when I've been in the Between lately, I've felt something different. There's a hunger that wasn't there before, and I don't know if that means His grip is slipping or if He just doesn't care as much.

If He has any conscience at all, any concept of the billions of lives He ended and what that really means... I hate to say it, but I really hope He doesn't. I think we might need Him.

Remember?

curse the darkness

[ctd] Setting - What do characters do?

2010-09-09T12:57:00.001-04:00

OK, the long-awaited post on what characters do.

Lemme tell you, I've been dreading this post. Not because I don't have any ideas, because I do. But because...hell, I don't know. Because I hate explaining things like this. I hate telling people what my stories are about; I'd rather you read the story. "Mistress" isn't really about dogs, it's about loyalty and submission, but when I tell people about it, I usually say it's about dogs. Argh.

Anyway, curse the darkness is a game about what's important. It's about survival and about freedom, and which you choose when you're really up against the wall. It's about a world where stupidity really does get punished...but how that reveals that all of us have our blind spots. It's about memory and which details of people stick with us.

So how does that translate into the game itself? Well, let's consider the setting. The world is largely fucked. Some years ago, He showed up and killed off many of the most powerful people in the world. World leaders, military leaders (both of official and unofficial armies), CEOs, religious leaders, drug kingpins and anyone else who had built a cult of personality and was using it to exploit, all vanished or died openly. Monuments to ideology were destroyed, starting with obvious stuff like the Dome of the Rock and St. Peter's because it's obvious. He completely annihilated Jerusalem, and used that as the staging ground to reveal Himself.

Then He made the Riyadh Address, in which He outlined the rules for the world. No more religion, no more ideology. The whole of the law, basically, was that you did what you could and you took care of the rest of the world - one race, one planet, one nation. Except that He backed that up with "or else you're dead," and He only ever delivered the Address in English. It was translated and retranslated, and yes, it spread across the world, but it wasn't always delivered in pure form. It hasn't reached everywhere, and it's not enforced evenly everywhere.

Overt displays of religiosity or fervent belief in a...well, belief system, spiritual, economical or otherwise are a good way to get killed. Covert displays aren't safe, either, but they're safer for longer. Entrenched belief dies hard...but it's dying, because He's been killing off the people who are willing to fight for it. Parents take a big risk by teaching their kids to pray, because as any parent knows, kids don't know when to keep their mouths shut. You instruct your kids to believe in God and they say something at the wrong time, He might hear, and if He hears, They aren't far behind.

But quite beyond that, the world is in shambles. In some places, basic amenities like water and power still happen, because people are willing to go to work and produce them. But officially, money is verboten, and that means you don't get paid for your work. You're supposed to have everything provided for you by providing for everyone - if people were involved in production before, they still should be, only now they're doing it because that's how they keep their part of the world running. And in some places, that might happen, at least for a while.

But remember Office Space, and the discussion about the hypothetical "what would you do with a million dollars" question? Michael's response is that it's a bullshit question, because if everyone went by that there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean up shit if they had a million dollars. And something similar happened here - the people on the other side of the world are out of sight, out of mind. There's some import/export because you can Open a gateway (Openers aren't uncommon, but no one knows how common they really are) and go anywhere, but people are afraid to cross the Between. Communities grow insular because it's hard to sustain a larger community (every person not working is a burden on those who do), but people are afraid to set up any kind of working system for fear He'll take issue with it. As a result, people live hand to mouth, people steal, people kill and prey on each other.

Now, why doesn't He prevent it? He does...if He knows about it. But despite what people believe, He can't see everything at once. Life in this world is a constant fear that He's going to open a shadow at exactly the wrong moment, peak in and hear you say "thank God" or something out of reflex and send Them to kill you. Life in this world is fighting for food, shelter and other basic necessities, and then worrying once you get them that He'll see and figure you're hoarding. Mortality rate is high, and it's small victories that matter.

But I want PCs to be outside that, in some ways. There's got to be some resistance, people that figure that if they can learn enough about the Between, about Them, Him and what's happened to the world, maybe they can change it. I want the PCs to have some hope, and to have some reason to be brave. So a game of cure the darkness might involve hooking up with other resistors, transporting data, trying to get people established and communities running smoothly (so there's a base of operations), figuring out how the Between works and under what circumstances the Symbol works and doesn't, and other such dangerous work.

Need some suggestions, here. Brainstorm with me, folks. Oh, and you can read the existing curse the darkness posts by clicking here and working backwards.

Rules summary to playtest A

2010-09-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

I'm running a playtest game of curse the darkness on Friday. As such, I need to note the workings of the system as I'm seeing it now. This post is mostly just for summary's sake. What I would like from the dedicated band of systems tinkerers (and man, you guys are awesome) isn't so much suggestions on how to change the system, but on what I'm missing that needs to be there so I can run the game.

So:

Chargen:

Distribute 10 points between Focus, Stability, Stamina and Humanity. Minimum is 1, max is 5.
Define Scopes (1 per point in Attributes) - optional.
Sacrifice a point in Humanity to be an Opener, or a point in anything to have a cool piece of gear that's hard to come by.
Name and quick description.

Game Setup:

Decks: 1/player (Character decks) + 1 (Reserve deck), and 1 for the GM. GM's deck is shuffled and set aside.
All aces removed from Character decks. Separate into suits, shuffle suits, deal out cards to each player equal to Attribute for the appropriate suit (Hearts = Humanity, Spades = Stamina, Clubs = Stability, Diamonds = Focus).
The rest of the character cards are kept separated for Refreshes.
Players choose one card at random from each suit to be the Action card for that Attribute. It is placed face up in the appropriate slot on the sheet, with the other cards of that suit face down below it.
Players each draw X cards from the Reserve deck (x = number of players, excluding GM) and place them face down in their Reserve.

Character Challenges:

GM describes the situation requiring the Challenge (or player initiates). GM assigns a difficulty, which he may or may not tell the player, depending on the situation.
Player can: Play the current Action card in that Attribute (equal to/higher than difficulty succeeds, card is discarded, top Action card revealed); play the Action card from a different Attribute at a higher difficulty (GM's discretion; otherwise plays the same way); play the Action card but pay a Memory point to keep it; play the Action card but keep it (only if the card value > difficulty by 3 or more).
A player can expend multiple cards on a Character Challenge if the Challenge is within a character's Scope.
A player can expend a card with a lower value than the difficulty. By itself, this means the character fails at the action, but the player can use this as an opportunity to get shed of a low card or to define a Scope.
Player can use Character Challenges to define Scopes. A player that does so receives a Memory point. The GM can require a Scope for specialized knowledge, but the player still gets the point.
If player has no cards in an Attribute (he is Exhausted), he may draw a card from his Reserve (Exhaustion Draw). If it is the correct suit, he can keep it. If it's not, he can pay a Memory point or give the GM a Between point to keep it. He can keep drawing until he gets the right suit, but this depletes the Reserve.

Removal Challenges:

GM assesses which players are initially involved in the challenge. GM draws 5 cards from the GM's Deck, adds them to any cards gained from Memory point expenditure.
GM describes the situation. Player(s) explain responses. GM plays a card of a given suit, player responds. This continues until all four suits are represented (either party can pass, and you don't have to play even if you can). Players can "open" a suit. At this point, the player can up the stakes by playing a new card of any suit. When the players pass, the GM can play one more card.
Player of highest card in a suit defines it, starting with the highest card on the table (ties go: Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades). Definitions are: Fail/leave, succeed/leave, fail/stay, succeed/stay.
If a suit isn't represented, it is defined last. If two aren't represented, the GM defines them both.
Resolution deck is composed of aces from the Character decks + the highest cards from Suit Assignment + two cards from the Reserve decks of all involved players + 2 cards from the GM. GM can spend Between points to remove cards from the deck before drawing, players can spend Memory points to do the same.
Players cannot choose not to put cards into the Resolution deck. They must put two cards from the Reserve (if they have them), though they can choose which ones.
Players and GM can choose the cards their removing before the Resolution Draw (so you choose the suit you're removing, otherwise it doesn't make much sense).
Active player draws for Resolution. Players can choose to draw for their own Resolution or accept another player's. Player that assigned that suit gets narration rights.

Memory and Between:

Players can give the GM Between points. Doing so allows a player to keep a card during Exhaustion draw, to Refresh a pile (points equal to the Attribute), or the Reserve (2 points).
Players can spend Memory points for any of those things, as well as spending Memory to remove cards from the Resolution Deck.
Every time the players spend a Memory point, the GM draws a card and sets it aside for use in Removal Challenge.
Players get Memory points for bringing up and discussing fallen characters, for discussing their own histories, for defining Scopes or for helping to define the world.
Players are not permitted to take notes on other characters.
Shutting down a Memory exchange grants the GM a Between point, but it allows the player in question to change the Action card on the appropriate Attribute.

Jokers:

Jokers beat any other card, except another Joker (black jokers win ties).
If a player draws a black joker, he immediately passes it to the GM and something unpleasant happens to him.
If a player draws a red joker, he can keep it or put it on the table. If he puts it on the table, he gets to swap out any one of his Action cards or discard the active one and draw a new one (and take his chances). No Between point for that. Doing so increases any existing card-caps by one. Any player can use that joker, but only once.
The player can use a red joker to Refresh any pile on the table, even if they don't control it.
The GM can use a black joker only in Removal challenges.

Refresh/Redraw/Discards:

If an Attribute pile is empty, you can do an Exhaustion Draw from the Reserve.
If the Reserve is empty, you can spend 2 Memory points or a red joker to Refresh it.
Reserve is automatically Refresh after a Removal Challenge.
Character decks get discarded by suit. Reserve gets discarded separately and reshuffled when there's no deck to draw from.

Assists:

A player can assist another player, donating an Action card during a Character Challenge at a -2 penalty to the face value (so it's usually more economical to just take on the Challenge yourself, but that might not always be possible).
During a Removal Challenge, a player can donate cards from his Reserve to make up the difference for a player that doesn't have 2 card in his Reserve, but the total is always 2 Reserve cards/player (before spending Memory to remove them).

Items:

Openers:

System 1.1

2010-09-05T11:09:00.000-04:00

Some really good suggestions from the last post. To wit:

One thing that I was concerned about, and from the comments rightly so, is that there just aren't enough cards in one deck to use suit the way I was. In a 5-player game, if everyone gets dealt 8 cards (one for each suit, plus 4 in the Reserve) you've lost 40 of the 54 cards. There's a fair to middling chance that someone's not going to have a card of each suit, etc, etc.

Someone on my LJ points out that while my desires for the Memory system were pretty well defined, I didn't spend a lot of time talking about the way I envisioned other systems running. So let's think about that:

Where non-lethal conflicts are involved, I want players to be able to succeed if they want to. I hate the "chuckle behind the screen" model of GMing. I like torturing players with twists in plot and the eventual realization of the consequences of their own actions, when it's thematic (which it may not be here), but the point is, I like it when the players make the story happen. One of the reason I like GUMSHOE so much is that this is built into the system - you get the facts, but you have to figure out the truth.

So for curse the darkness, I want non-lethal conflicts' success to be mostly determined by the player. Failure is useful because it can be memorable, which can help the group later (after you die). Success is useful on its own merits. And I know that players might deliberately fail at a non-lethal action just to get a bad card out of their Action slot, especially if it's the kind of the thing that another player can pop in and say, "Hang on, I'm good at this" and throw down a king. And that's fine - I'm good with people using the system like that. That's what it's there for.

Ooh, I got it. I want non-lethal conflicts to help define characters. Tell you what I mean.

I'm playing a character who (currently) has a king in Focus. We find a survivor (maybe a new PC) who just popped through the Between and fell onto some debris, breaking his leg. Setting the bone is a Focus action, the GM sets that at 10 because it requires specialized knowledge and we don't have the right tools to hand, but again, I've got a king there. My character steps forward, says, "OK, calm down. I'm going to help you."

Now - why does my character know how to do this? I need to figure that out, because someone in the group is going to ask.

"How the hell do you know how to set a bone, Jack?" one of the other PCs asks.

"Well," says Jack, "Dad took us off the grid right after Jerusalem. We lived up in the mountains in Tennessee, and Dad taught my sister and I all kinds of stuff like this. Setting bones, what plants are edible, building fires, trapping."

"Cool," says the other character. "How'd your Dad know all that stuff? He in the Army?"

Jack shrugs. "Actually, I don't know how he knew. Dad wasn't the kind of guy who talked about himself."

We have now defined a great deal about Jack's life, and, you guessed it, this will be of great help later when he dies and folks need to remember him.

Now, right off the bat, I can see an issue forming: If I have a high card in a stat, I'm god. If I have a low card, I'm for shit. The fact that this can happen quickly is actually OK with me - you can get second winds, you can push yourself or run out of gas, and that's fine. But what I do worry about is that a guy with a King in Focus, for instance, is a surgeon as well as a genius and mapmaker and everything else.

So, with that in mind, here's a revised system:

You still have the same four stats: Focus, Stability, Stamina and Humanity. They still mean the same things. But each of those stats has a numerical value, 1 to 5. That's the number of cards you can have in that Action's slot. When you create a character, you get 10 points to spread out. For each point in an Action slot, you can put down one...defining point (I need a better name. "Scope" comes to mind, as in "scope of practice"). You can do these during chargen, but it's perhaps better to do them in play.

So let's take Jack, up there. He's got, let's say, Focus 3. When he tells his little history, I jot down "survivalist training" under Focus (that could also work under Stamina, if I wanted to double up, which is acceptable - maybe even advisable). This defines the scope of my training. It means that while Jack might be good to set a broken bone, he's not going to be performing appendectomies anytime soon, no matter what my active card in Focus is.

Also, having multiple cards in a given Action allows for better use of Refreshes. Offhand, let's say I can spend a Memory point to Refresh any given Action slot. I'd need to burn more Memory to Refresh all of my Action slots (that might also happen, as Jon suggests, when something important happens in-game - after someone dies might be a good idea).

And, obviously, one deck isn't going to be enough. One possibility is one deck stays broken down into suits, and one deck remains shuffled all together. I don't know what I'd use that breakdown for, but it's there.

Lethal Actions: OK, when you're taking a lethal action, it means you stand a good chance of dying or otherwise being removed from the game. As I may have said, mostly that'll involve dealing with Them, but getting into firefights with loyalists and the like works, too. So how's this gonna work?

Lethal actions have two phases, Exchange and Resolution. In the Exchange phase, you either win or lose quickly. If you win, you get to assign a suit to one of the four outcomes (which are, remember, escape but fail, escape and succeed, die and fail, die and succeed). If you lose, the GM makes that assignment. After an Exchange, the winner can attempt to force a Resolution.

When Resolution happens, the player takes a card at random from his Reserve. This determines the outcome. The odds are already stacked in favor of death, which I want, but this gives the player a little bit of edge - the GM doesn't necessarily know what's in the player's Reserve.

OK, so two issues right off the bat: 1) What if I have no cards in my Reserve? and 2) What if the Resolution pulls up a card that hasn't been defined in an Exchange?

Well, 1 is easy enough. If you run out of cards in you Reserve, maybe you automatically draw X cards. Maybe you draw the top card of the player's deck - or choose randomly from the GM's hand or deck. Either way, if you don't have a Reserve you have no idea how to play the Exchange.

But what if you Resolve but draw a suit that isn't defined? One option: The player defines it with one of the options left open. That might be good or it might utterly fuck you.

OK, we need to figure out how Exchanges work. They need to be quick, so let's make it a straight-up high card wins kind of thing. The GM puts down a card and says what's happening. The player puts down a card from one of his Action slots and says his response (this allows the player to either win or lose right away). The winner then defines an outcome, and can force an outcome by immediately playing a second card that beats the winning card (any suit).

Concrete example, for the love of God. OK, so let's say Jack slipped into the Between and now They are coming for him. This is a lethal conflict - Jack basically needs to get away before They catch him (once They catch you, you're done). The GM plays a 6 of hearts (suit is actually not relevant for GM purposes), and says, very simply, that They are slithering out of the Between and coming toward Jack.

I respond by playing a 7 of hearts from my Stamina slot. I say that Jack runs back toward the opening, hoping that it's still there and that I can make it somewhere safe. Maybe They won't chase me. I won the Exchange, so I get to define a suit.

In my Reserve, I have four card, three diamonds and a spade. I've obviously got the best chance of drawing a diamond, so I define diamonds as "escape and succeed." If I have an 8 or better handy, I can force Resolution. It's actually in my best interest to do that if I can, because I've got such a good chance of getting away. I play an 8 of something out of one of my Action slots, force Resolution, and the GM picks a card at random from my hand. If he draws a diamond, I'm home free - Jack gets out of the Opening, They don't chase him, and we're golden.

But that's too easy. Let's say the GM draws the spade. Spades aren't defined, so I now have to define them as one of the other three options. Assuming I like Jack and I don't want to make a new character (and you never know, sometimes it might feel like a dramatically appropriate thing to let a character die), I should choose "escape but fail."

This is a weird situation, in that "succeed" here means "escape", but I suspect that's really not going to be all that uncommon. OK, so moving on, I say that spades means "escape but fail." So I get to the opening, but They do follow me through. The circumstances have changed significantly (we're out of the Between, there might be more characters about, etc.). So what's happened, here?

Obviously if there's not an easy definition to the "succeed/fail" portion of the scene, then "fail" should fuck you in some non-lethal way. I'm OK with it leading to another lethal action scene, though maybe any cards already defined should stay defined? Like, Jack's outside, the circumstances are different, but we immediately enter a new scene but keep diamonds and spades the way they are? Yes, that favors Jack just at present, but that won't always be the case. Or maybe we enter a new scene and ditch the original definitions.

I think, at this point, I'm drifting beyond the level that pure discussion is helpful. Need to playtest.

Before that, I need to consider the important question: What do characters do? But that's another post.

More systems

2010-09-04T09:51:00.001-04:00

OK, try this:

Each character has five slots on the character sheet. Normally, four of them can only have one card at a time (Actions) while the fifth (Reserve) can have any number. The PCs share a deck, while the GM has a deck all to himself. Both decks have both jokers. For sake of argument right now, let's call the four actions Focus (diamonds), Stability (hearts), Stamina (clubs) and Humanity (spades).

Focus: If you've got a high Focus, you can apply your mental faculties to the task at hand. Covers remembering facts, finding your way through an unfamiliar (or formerly familiar) area, performing medical procedures (though this might be combined with Stability), and coming up with plans. If you've got a low Focus, it doesn't mean you're stupid, it means you're fried, hungry, tired, whatever, and your brain just isn't online right now.

Stability: If your Stability is high, it means you're coping well with the world. Yes, it sucks, but you're able to push the horror of the situation out for now and do what needs to be done. You'd make Stability actions when coping with loss, blood, death, grief, addiction and things that just scare the crap out of you. If your Stability is low, you just cannot cope anymore, and you might get too loud, cry, feel suicidal or just shut down.

Stamina: Physical tolerance. If it's high, you can run, carry, lift, engage in non-lethal combat (like restraining a low-Stability PC), defuse a bomb (again, probably also involving Stability). If it's high, your muscles are burning, your lungs are bursting for air, your heart is pounding, or maybe you're just so fucking exhausted that you can't even lift your arms.

Humanity: If this one's high, you can deal with people. Not the people in your group specifically (but them, too), but everyone. You see humanity as worth saving, and you've got some hope for the future. You'd use this Action to convince people you don't know to follow a plan, to counsel another person through a tough time, and probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of right now. If you've got a low Humanity, you're being really misanthropic and emo. It's not that it's not understandable, of course. You're making tasteless comments about the destruction of Jerusalem or any of the other massacres that have taken place, and you just don't give a shit that your friend lost his wife because she forgot and crossed herself on impulse.

OK, so, you've got a card in each of these. The higher the card, the better you're doing. When the game starts, you draw X cards and assign four to these Actions, and keep the rest in Reserve. You cannot refresh the cards in your Reserve until it's empty (normally). It makes sense to start off with higher cards across the board, if you're starting from a place of strength and respite. If you're coming into the game already on the run, maybe having one or two low cards isn't a bad idea. Also, say I wanted to play a character who is a dedicated misanthrope, or has a physical handicap of some kind, or who has ADD and can't focus, or whatever? I might never put a card higher than 5 in that Action, and consistently fail those types of things.

Now, why would I do that? Because it'll make my character easier to Remember. It might not be the nicest thing in the world if the other characters make use of my character's Memory by calling to mind how he almost got us killed because his gimpy leg made him slow, but it's a legitimate memory of the character and it'll work to allow refreshes and whatnot. Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself.

When a character takes a non-lethal action, the player plays a card from one of the Actions. It doesn't matter what suit, though the number can be higher or lower as a kind of "setting difficulty." If all four of your Actions are low numbers, you're tired, wasted, emotionally beaten down and you're seeing movement in the shadows even if there is none.

It's possible for Actions to require more than one type of suit. For instance, say my character is trying to defuse a bomb, for whatever reason. I need Stamina to cover the manual dexterity of it all, but also Stability because I'm freaking right the fuck out (this assumes my character knows how to disarm a bomb, but I'll get to that). The GM says I need a 5 or better in Stability (not so bad; that's 10 cards that are successes and only 3 that aren't, not counting jokers) and a 9 or better in Stamina.

(Now this is actually a bad example because if the bomb goes off, that'll kill me, which is pretty much the opposite of a "non-lethal" situation. But I think what would happen then is that the situation becomes Lethal, and we make everyone who's not at a safe distance take a Lethal action, which we'll get to).

If you can't or won't play a card at difficulty, you fail the action. Failing a non-lethal Action cannot lead to a character dying or otherwise leaving the game. It can result in injury, card-caps, and a situation immediately turning lethal.

Card-Caps: Say you go to jump across a gap in a bridge and the GM tells you "take a Stamina action." He doesn't tell you the difficulty because it's dark and you can't see how far it is to the other side. You take a leap of faith, and are immediately rewarded with an object lesson in how stupid an idea that is. Your character falls and lands badly. Your Stamina is capped at, say, six. You immediately check your Refresh for a heart of 6 or lower. If there aren't any, another player can (but does not have to) donate one. If that doesn't work, you just don't have a card in Stamina and you can't take Stamina actions until you can heal up (until there's some kind of Refresh happening). If They choose that moment to pop out of the shadows and come from your group, you stand a much better chance of dying.

Refreshes: When the PCs' deck runs out of cards and one player runs out of cards in his Reserve, all discarded cards are reshuffled.

Players can use Memories to force a Refresh.

A player can spend a red joker to force a Refresh.

Memory: You can Remember a dead or gone character at any time. It has to be stated in character, however (in soliloquy counts). Example: The unfortunate bridge-jumper (let's call him Bob) from above died shortly thereafter; he couldn't run fast enough to get away from Them. My character (who apparently survived his ill-advised bomb defuse attempt), is sitting on a pile of debris, other surviving characters nearby. My character reaches into his pocket and pulls out a photo. "Bob's kids," my character says. "He gave me this picture before he jumped. I guess I forgot to give it back in the confusion afterwards."

Now, at this point, my GM gives me a Memory, probably in the form of a chit or glass bead or something.

Another player picks up the cue. "Did he mention their names?"

A third player glances down at her sheet. She's currently got a 3 of Spades in Humanity. "Who gives a fuck? They're dead anyway."

That's a dick move. If it's a big enough dick move - like, it changes the topic of conversation and we drift away from Bob and his kids, the moment is lost and we can't follow the Memory more, that player gets to make a Swap on her sheet, changing out a bad card (including that Humanity) for a better card in her Refresh. She doesn't lose the bad card, she just tucks it back into her Refresh. If the other players ignore her and keep talking about Bob, that doesn't happen.

But let's say she doesn't take the dick move, and says, "I know the older one is Andy. I can't remember the little girl's name, but I remember he said she was named after her aunt."

Holy shit. That's two more Memory points, and the player that asked the question ("what were their names?") gets one, too, for setting it up (which wouldn't have happened if the third player had shut down the conversation).

So obviously it's possible to get lots of Memory points for free-form conversation. It's up to the GM when a Memory conversation has run its course, but there will be some guidelines. But here's the deal about Memory - you can't just make it up. You can misremember details (maybe it wasn't Andy, it was Adam), but you cannot make up another character's story. And, the player cannot write down these details. The player has to be memorable enough in her portrayal of a character for the other players to be able to use that Memory later.

Yes, that means characters are going to blur together in a long game where lots of people die. Yes, that means players have to pay attention, put their goddamn phones down and stop texting, and interact. Yes, that means you need to think about the specifics of your character's situation and how to bring that out. And, yes, that means this game rewards freeform, conversational RP. All of those things are things I want for curse the darkness.

The GMs' Deck: The GM has one deck, but reshuffles as needed. The GM does not normally play cards during non-lethal actions, though sometimes characters will take contested actions and it becomes "beat this card" rather than "beat this difficulty." During Lethal scenes is where the GM really gets to use cards.

The GM has a hand equal to the (number of players) x 1.5, rounding up, so 6 cards for a four-player game. The GM, like the players, does not draw to replace lost cards - he needs a Refresh for that. The GM gets a Refresh when:

He's out of cards.

Someone ends a Memory conversation in order to better their own situation (the "dick move", which will need a real name).

The GM uses a black joker for whatever reason (the Refresh is just a bonus).

A PC dies or leaves the game.

Jokers: Red jokers are good for players. Black jokers are good for the GM. When a red joker comes up in a players' hand, he can do one of two things with it: Keep it or put it on the table. If he keeps it, it becomes part of his Actions or Refresh as usual, and beats any other card except a black joker. If he puts it on the table, any player can use it to force a Refresh for the players, or any player can use it in an Action (non-lethal or lethal). Any player who puts a red joker on the table gets a Swap, but unlike a Swap gained for a "dick move," a joker-induced Swap you can use to discard a crappy card and draw a new one from the deck (so it might not get better, but then again, it might).

If a player draws a black joker, it immediately gets passed to the GM, and the player that drew it redraws. The GM should immediately do something unpleasant to the character that drew the black joker; a temporary card-cap is one possibility. Whatever is done, it should relate to Them or the Between in some way.

If the GM draws a red joker, it immediately goes on the table for use by the players. Any existing card-caps increase by one (that is, if you were capped at 3, you're now capped at 4) as the characters get a second wind.

If the GM draws a black joker, he keeps it out on the table for future use.

Lethal conflicts: Hokay. I said before that lethal conflicts have one of four outcomes: You die but fail, you die but succeed, you escape but fail, you escape but succeed. Here's the deal: In lethal conflicts, the usual suit breakdown doesn't apply. You are fighting for your life, and so you are using everything you have available to you. Running out of cards in the players' deck doesn't force a Refresh during a lethal conflict, but using a red joker or Memory points will work.

If They are the opponents, usually everyone's involved because you can't really hide from Them. If you're fighting, say, a bunch of loyalists with guns, then it's feasible that one character might hide and wait it out, and is therefore not involved. If you're not involved, you can jump in, but until you do, you can't assist.

More on lethal conflicts when I return from Teagan's first day of soccer. Meantime, anybody spots any obviously holes, punch through 'em.

Systems

2010-09-02T08:50:00.001-04:00

So, I've been thinking about curse the darkness a lot lately. One of the things I've been thinking about is using cards as the random element, rather than dice. I know gamers like their dice, but I also know that you can grab probability from a deck just as easily as a dice bag, and I have some ideas about using suit and number that make cards more ideal for what I want.

The other thing I've been considering is that I'd like two types of conflict resolution. For the moment, call them "non-lethal" and "lethal."

A non-lethal conflict is pass/fail. You know the fact or you don't. You find the clue or you don't (and with all due respect to Robin Laws and the awesome GUMSHOE system, if the game goes off the rails because a player missed an investigation roll, the problem is with the GM, not the game). The stakes in this kind of conflict are non-lethal and, for the most part, binary. Yes/no, pass/fail.

A lethal conflict, though, has four possible outcomes: You escape and succeed, you escape but fail, you die but succeed, you die but fail.

That is, you've got a 50/50 shot of living through this, and a 50/50 shot of failing. This kind of conflict gets used for life-and-death conflicts, or, more specifically, conflicts with Them.

I want conflicts with Them to be a bad idea on the face of it. Unavoidable, sure, but if you're fighting Them directly, you're going to die sooner or later. That's why He was able to conquer the world so quickly - He controls Them. You can still "win" in the sense that you can achieve the goal of a given conflict, but odds are even that you won't live through it. And I want high mortality, here, which I know is going to turn some people off.

But see, here's the thing. One of the things I like about Chill is the lethality. Most creatures of the Unknown aren't vulnerable to bullets, and a lot of them can kill you easily. For people who are risking their lives because it's the right thing to do, that kind of lethality is appropriate. In a lot of games, it's not, because the protagonists are the PCs and so on. But in curse the darkness, I want character creation to be fast and life to be short.

I also want some kind of trait that lets people draw on your character memory after s/he's gone.

Anyway, just my thoughts for now. More coming.

Loyalty

2010-06-08T07:46:00.001-04:00

He doesn't have any "followers."

If He did, mind, I'm sure they'd be the worst combination of bullies and zealots you could find. I'm sure they would look for people trying to pray in their basements, or teach their kids about what life was like before, or set up some kind of system of ownership.

I'm sure they'd be scrupulously non-violent, but irritating and inflammatory as all Hell, just pushing already stressed-out people to the breaking point. I'm sure they'd be happy to take a punch in the gut or a broken nose in exchange for trigger Their approach to get their "attackers."

I'm sure they'd would never discuss - or even admit - their loyalty or their motives in doing what they do.

But again, He doesn't have followers. That wouldn't make sense - He has Them. Why would He need people to help Him?

And besides, wouldn't that kind of loyalty trigger His hatred of ideology?

I'm sure. I'm sure it would.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Pattern Recognition

2010-05-26T12:51:00.001-04:00

In a primitive society, a false negative can kill you.

You're sitting around your fire at night, and you see something moving. It might be just a shadow, but it might also be a predator. Your brain says "Predator!", puts you into fight-or-flight, and your eyes resolve the shadows into the shape of a panther or whatever. And you get up and grab your spear.

There are two possibilities. One is, it's a panther, you stab it, you win, you get to pass along your genetic material because your brain saw "shadows" and made your eyes perceive "enemy." Or it's a shadow, but you saw it as a panther, so you're awake but no skin off your nose.

But if your brain says "Shadows, never mind, going back to sleep," and it's really a predator...well, you're fucked. And that's why we hear voices in the wind, see monsters in closets, and Jesus in tortillas. We're genetically designed by evolution to see patterns, specifically faces.

So when people tell you that They look human, just keep that in mind.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Them

2010-05-22T17:04:00.001-04:00

Not everyone has seen Them. Most people think they have.

They don't come out of the shadows and lay waste to everything in Their path. They've done that exactly once, that we know of, and that was Jerusalem. Mostly, They wait for you to fall into a shadow and then They do whatever it is They do with you.

Those of us who have been to the Between have seen Their natural environment a little more closely, of course. But it's always disappointing to folks who want information to use for strategy or analysis. They're "home" is just...dark. Nothing really there. You get some sense of topography, but...well, the Between's hard to explain, and They aren't easy either, so I'll try and stay focused.

Even if you've seen Them, you probably haven't really seen Them. When we see Them, it's usually because They're dragging someone near us away. And we look straight at the person being dragged, and usually what we remember is the screaming and the terror and sometimes the abrupt snap when the...It...carrying the person decides "fuck it" and just kills him. But we're looking right at It, and the thing is that They are always shrouded in shadows.

So if you look at Them out of the corner of your eye, where the greatest concentration of rods are, you see Them better. Rods are the bits of the eye that see better in dim light, which is why your peripheral vision is better in the dark than in the light. So if you really want to see Them, you look out of the corner of your eye.

While they're dragging someone away. Yeah, I didn't think you want to see Them that badly.

But really, you want to know the worst part? Think about all the times in your life - before He took over, I mean - when you thought you saw something move in the dark? Just some little flicker of activity, just for a split second, and you looked into that corner or behind that door or under that bed and there was nothing there except shadows, and you thought, "Hell, I thought I really saw something?"

I'm betting you did. I think They were just waiting for something.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Things We Don't Talk About

2010-05-20T08:13:00.002-04:00

We don't talk about being American, or English, or Mexican, or Canadian, or Chinese, because nations don't exist.

We don't talk about being black or white or Hispanic, because race doesn't exist. He's never specifically forbidden that (after all, some folks are different colors than others, it's just that when people mention it at all, they're usually talking culture rather than skin color), but it's considered a taboo subject. Especially after dark.

We don't talk about religion or the religions we used to follow, if any.

We don't talk about the old days. Here's why.

They never happened.

This wasn't part of His explanations of the law in Riyadh. It was something that's kind of evolved since. You don't talk about ideas of nation, race, religion and other ideologies because they were never valid to begin with. God never existed, so there's no point harping on what people used to believe. Nations were never more than people standing on a patch of dirt and screaming "Ours!", so there's no point rehashing their slogans and songs. Race was never a valid reason to deny or extend anything to other people, so there's no point mentioning it.

As usual, He's got a point, but the larger issue overshadows it. Maybe he's right that nations, religion and race are artificial constructs, but that doesn't mean they weren't important or that there's no value in studying them. And even ignoring that, the fact of the matter is that they were worth killing and dying for, to a lot of people for a lot of years. And now He's saying, "Forget these parts of yourself ever existed, or else the monsters come in the night and kill you."

It's been 10 years, don't forget. Slowly but surely, They are taking out the people who just can't let go. The fire, the passion, the desire to stand and fight is becoming a less desirable trait.

Call it "unnatural selection."

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

The Whole of the Law

2010-05-19T07:36:00.001-04:00

He delivered it in English, of course. In His weird, non-accent accent, He stood in Riyadh, flanked by an army of Them, and told us how it was going to be.

It wasn't short. There are recordings, of course, and for a while it was just a matter of searching them online, but now that "online" doesn't mean the same thing as it once did, that's not as easy to arrange.

In that address, He explained Himself as clearly and concisely as He ever would. To my knowledge, He hasn't spoken since. Most of what He said was clarification on His statement three hours before Jerusalem. Ideology was the problem. Believing in something so strongly that you lost sight of what was real. Pursuit of an ideal, even when that ideal was untenable and counterproductive.

He made it clear He wasn't interested in debate. He wasn't interested in hearing about people's "right to believe." He mentioned, somewhere in that speech, while the world watched and tried to understand, that He couldn't control what anyone believed. But He could damn well keep them from acting in accordance with those "outdated, moronic, Bronze-Age ideals."

Mostly, He was talking about religion. But if you listened to the address, you started to understand: It wasn't just religion He wanted to dismantle.

He wanted a world where people realized that money wasn't actually worth anything. He wanted a world where people treated each other like people, related to each other on a direct, one-to-one kind of level, rather than seeing the vast majority of others as "them." He wanted a world in which greed, possessions, entitlement, victimization, were all gone.

Naturally, pretty much every major religion and government (what was left of them) stood up and said, "But that's what we wanted all along!"

More realistic folks stood up and said, "Um...how is this going to work?"

It's been 10 years. It's not working. But you can't say that too loud.

Tune in Tomorrow

curse the darkness

The Meaning of the Symbol

2010-05-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

He never tried to keep people out of the Between. Of course, He never warned anyone, either, but that's sort of His way in a nutshell - do what you want, as long as what you want isn't clashing with the way the world should be.

Openers learned very quickly that the Between was useful, but not safe. And He set up the Symbol...maybe five years after Jerusalem. Like a lot of events of the time, it just kind of happened, and most of the world didn't see it until it was already there. But it was there, if people had been looking.

The Symbol is...well, it looks kind of like a spiral, or a loop, or a series of loops. I don't know. It's hard to describe. People define it in terms of symbols from their own culture. What letter it looks like, what alchemical symbols. Runes, Egyptian hieroglyphics, symbols from the Mayan calendar (even though we're well past that expiration date). But I think it's just something He made up. What frustrates people about the Symbol is that you can't cheat with it.

They know the intent behind the Symbol. That's the only way to explain it. If you're just using it to try and sneak through the Between and hook up with other resistance-types, They'll kill you. If you're using the Symbol to get through the Between to deliver a letter or something, They let you by. If you're delivering a letter and hooking up with resistance...well, then you're trusting your luck a little. They might kill you. They might not. And if there's a way to make this reliable, to really use the Symbol to your benefit, I don't know the secret.

It all points to Them communicating in ways other than what we use. Letters are symbols, of course, and depending on the nature of the symbol system a letter can stand for a concept or a sound. In English, letters stand for sounds and we group them together into words. In other systems, they stand for concepts, and as concepts are grouped you get bigger and more complicated concepts. But I think They understand symbols on a deeper, or more complex level - They know, somehow, what the intent was when the Symbol was made. I have no idea how that might work.

But if you watch the footage from Cheyenne Mountain, you can see Him nodding, almost imperceptibly, to the shadows around him. Acknowledgment of Their presence? Subtle, silent commands?

Like I said, that's His real power. Communicating with Them. We always assume He's controlling Them, but what if He is just the one person out of billions that They can understand?

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

The symbol

2010-05-11T21:03:00.000-04:00

I heard about an Opener who got the Passage Symbol tattooed on his arm.

His wife found his arm on their bed the next week.

You can't cheat the Symbol. Jesus. How many people have to die before-

Well. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Resistance

2010-05-02T09:35:00.001-04:00

This is the stuff I can't talk about.

All I can say is that...it's like living in every dystopian novel you've ever- Jeez, OK. The movies where there's computer security everywhere and they can track you flawlessly by a fingerprint? That, except you can't get away from it by going "off the grid." The grid isn't made of wires and nodes anymore. It's made of shadows. Anywhere you are, your body gives Him the window He needs to hear you, just by blocking light.

And, yes, the chances against Him listening in at any given time are pretty high. But when you think about how many people disappear every week, and the fact that He makes no attempt at all to hide what He's doing, you're left with two possibilities.

First, He might not be able to keep tabs on the whole world. That would make sense, right? Too much space, too many people, and He's got to sleep sometime, doesn't He? He might just grab people when He finds them (or they get reported - that's the other thing, it's not like He doesn't have followers), and takes enough people to make anyone thinking about resisting think twice.

The second possibility is scarier, but we have to consider it. He might actually be able to monitor the entire world somehow. He's already demonstrated that He can do things most Openers can't - direct two-way gates, controlling Them, expanding gates once they're open, and so on. Maybe He can listen to millions of people at once and sort through what they're saying for what He wants to hear. If so, that makes Him a savant and it makes Him even more terrifying, but honestly, my gut tells me this is what's really happening.

I say that because it's in keeping with how He's always behaved. He's never shown any desire to kill people. He's only ever killed to make a point, and He's going gone whole-hog at the very beginning, when He needed to make sure we all knew He wasn't fucking around. Since then, there haven't been any attacks on the scale of Jerusalem, and only a few on the scale of Cheyenne Mountain or Saint Peter's. He hasn't spoken to the world since the address he gave from Riyadh. Hell, to my knowledge He hasn't spoken since then.

The resistance, from what I've heard...hang on.

OK. Quick, now. From what I hear, most people who consider themselves "resistance" just want to be free to be religious again. It's a good, easy source of outrage, but it faces two big problems. First of all, it's dying out. Religion only works if people teach it to the kids, and teaching your kids about God is dangerous not only to you, but to the kids. Since there are no Churches anymore, urging you to send kids to Sunday school and give money, there's no community based on belief anymore, which is what He wanted in the first place, I think.

Second, the different religious factions still hate each other. They don't actively fight - radical Islam learned pretty quickly that any real violent activity against the West or the Jews was going to result in shadows opening up and a quick visit from Them - but they don't mingle and they don't help each other, either. And, in a show of bone-headedness that makes me want to sit down and cry, they blame each other for all of this.

They still. Blame. Each other.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

I Miss Music

2010-04-29T17:16:00.001-04:00

It's so quiet.

I used to get online and fire up Pandora or iTunes or Youtube or whatever. I'd get recommendations from my friends and I'd listen to them, I'd buy the music if I liked it. And I had such weird tastes in music, too. Run DMC rubbed shoulders with Old Crow Medicine Show. Metallica, sure. Cannibal Corpse if I feel like listening to a garbage disposal try to sing (sometimes, you do). Hell, I'll call up Beyonce or N'Sync or whatever other poppy shit I want to hear, because sometimes it's in your head and that's the only way to burn it out.

I mean, I did do that. I used to.

No one records anymore. Everyone's too scared. There's no anonymity anymore. Every shadow is a camera, and He's always watching. Yes, He doesn't send Them out for people telling the truth (though you do hear stories), but one mention of God or how it was better when you could still buy stuff or, hell, any ethnic or national sentiment...that's enough to get you killed. And there are no secrets anymore. There's only things He doesn't notice.

Everyone's terrified. They have every reason to be. And I start thinking about that, about how every shadow is a gateway, how they open seemingly at random, all hours of the day or night.

I don't even sing in the shower anymore. I hum, quietly, when I'm feeling brave. I play the music in my head. Mostly it's one song, the song that was playing when I drove by Monarch.

I drove by Monarch right before it happened. I stopped at a red light, and I saw people listening, heads out their windows. I turned off the CD and opened my window, and cocked my ear toward the Center.

I heard screaming. I heard that godawful noise that They make, though I didn't know at the time what it was. I saw the windows crack, then shatter, like they'd been heated up and then doused with cold water. And then the walls buckled and the building fell down.

The song playing on my CD player was "Imagine."

Imagine there's no Heaven. It's easy if you try.

I don't have to try.

I don't think this is what John Lennon meant.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Learning the Between

2010-04-27T17:29:00.001-04:00

You learn about the Between the way you learn about anything. Through experimentation.

Except that experimenting can and does get you killed. The first time I went into the Between, it was with an Opener who was in his second year at UCLA. Majoring in something technical, I forget. Engineering, maybe? I don't remember. He told me that learning about the Between is like this card game he used to play, call "Mao."

I'd played Mao. It's this weird little game where you try to get rid of your cards, and talking about the rules is against the rules. So you have to learn as you go, by observation and trial and error. And you lose the first time out.

The Between is like that for Openers. They discover they can Open in response to stress. Problem is, stress attracts Them, and Openers attract Them, so stressed-out Openers usually die the first time they Open. That's one reason no one has any idea how common Openers are, or ever have been. Anyway, they Open a shadow or a dark area, and suddenly there they are, Between.

I'll describe what the Between is actually like some other time. Doing that requires thinking about it. Time in the Between is not time you want to dwell on, believe me. Logistically, the Between connects all points of darkness everywhere. An Opener can guide you through the Between to any location he has seen, as long as there's a shadow or a big enough dark patch there that he can Open to get out. Also, travel through the Between doesn't take very long; I've gone cross country in less than a minute.

Let that sink in. Gateways to anywhere. Near-instant travel. It's a miracle, right? Well, if it is, God's a sonofabitch, because the Between is home to Them. And, again, I'll talk about Them some other time.

Now, even though Openers can't control Them the way He seems to, you'd figure that this was all pretty potent, right? And it is, but still, He's got edges that the rest of us can't touch. Cheyenne Mountain showed us that.

Right after Jerusalem, Cheyenne Mountain just lit up. The big-brass generals of the Army were gone, but that's the thing about the Army, there's a chain of command. The lower-ranked officers just stepped up and someone got the brilliant idea of mounting a resistance in one of the most secure locations on the planet. It wasn't a bad idea, as plans go, but of course they didn't know what was really happening. People started flocking to Cheyenne, because it was obvious that there was activity. No one got in, but people were camped outside the installation for miles.

And then it all got quiet. Lights went out. No more movement. Everyone feared the worst. That lasted about six hours, and then the doors leading into the facility burst open.

And out He walked. It was twilight - enough light to see a bit about what was going on, but not enough for anyone to get a good clear pic of Him. He was walking through those massive doors, hands outstretched, with a wall of water on either side of him. He didn't say anything that time, He just looked out, down the mountain at the hundreds - maybe thousands - of people who just wanted somewhere safe to go.

And He let the ocean have them. He released the water, and He disappeared. The water flowed out from the mountain - from a mountain in Colorado - and washed over everyone there.

Not everyone died. Fatalities were actually pretty limited, all things considered, because the water spread so quickly. Best guess I ever heard was about 500 dead, mostly children, old folks, handicapped, folks who couldn't swim or get to higher ground. He never made a statement about Cheyenne Mountain, and most people assume what He meant by that act was, "Don't bother hiding, I can find you anywhere."

But really, I think He meant to demonstrate something to the Openers of the world. Yes, they can open gates to the Between and walk to places they could picture in a few minutes. He could open gates to any place he could visualize. And so what stops Him from opening a gateway into space and just sucking Earth's atmosphere out? What stops Him from opening a gateway to the sun during an eclipse - it's just a big shadow, right? - and burning us all to death?

I have no idea what's stopping Him. I assume, personally, it's because He figures things are OK the way they are, now.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

They Came for the CEOs

2010-04-26T11:59:00.001-04:00

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Everyone's heard that, either in history class or as part of some anti-government rhetoric when someone your party didn't like was in power. And it's a good sentiment, but one that folks never really understood. Or maybe His campaign to take over the world was just so different from what folks were used to that the comparison just doesn't work.

He came first for the politicians, the priests and the CEOs. He came for the people that we all hated. The people who were out of touch, who argued talking points and bottom lines when we were here on the ground working for a living. We knew that Congress was gone, and we heard - second and third hand, usually - that the richest and most powerful people in the world were just disappearing.

But the day-to-day didn't change much. The people who really did the work came in and punched their clocks like they always did. The breakdown started from the top, and because so much wealth and power was concentrated in such a small number of people, it didn't matter much that they were dead.

Well. We didn't know that they were dead. I guess technically they might be alive, but They aren't known to take prisoners when They don't have to. I imagine that the big corporate fat-cats, the Senators and Representatives, the important people, they turned off their lights to go to bed...and the darkness just came open, and they were gone.

And the world turned on. And even once we noticed, we didn't care, because it wasn't us disappearing into the dark, dragged off by monsters, dead before we knew anything had changed. It was them. It was those rich guys. Those guys that fired us, that voted for that piece of legislation that we hated, that said stupid things on camera, that spent our taxes dollars on that thing we didn't like. Serves them right.

It's tempting to feel guilty. To say we didn't do anything because of who they were. But that's overlooking two very important points. First, we put them there. We built our culture to be what it is. We, collectively, the whole world, made abstractions more important than concrete reality, and that was what He couldn't abide. I'm not saying we deserve what happened to the world. I'm just saying that the world was what we made it.

And second...what the hell could we have done about it? The point of that quote is that the people should have stopped it, shouldn't have turned a blind eye. But even if every single person had noticed and clamored for a response, where would it have come from? Who is like Him, and who can fight against Him?

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Speculations

2010-04-21T19:55:00.002-04:00

No one really knows anything about Him.

Well, that's an overstatement. We know He speaks English, though His accent certainly got picked to death after Jerusalem. It's a testament to bias of expectation that a lot of folks thought He sounded Palestinian (never mind that the Dome of the Rock was destroyed first). He doesn't have an Arabic accent, or an American one, for that matter. He just sounds...weird. There's a bizarre, hollow quality to His voice, which a lot of people assume is because He's speaking from the Between.

That could be. I've heard other theories, though.

For one thing, I've been to the Between. It doesn't make your voice sound hollow. Sound doesn't act right in the Between, and it certainly doesn't echo - that's one of the reasons we can use it at all, because there's no echo to make sound travel farther. For another, His voice isn't "hollow" like he's talking from the bottom of a well. It's hollow like he doesn't give a shit. He inflects in the wrong places, and His voice is just one degree of pitch off from being utterly monotone. I didn't attach any significance to that until I heard about Monarch.

The Monarch Center for Autism is a special school in Ohio. They treat folks on all levels of the autism spectrum. It's a subject with some significance to me, and so I knew quite a bit about the disorder before He ever showed up. I knew, for instance, that it had increased something like 600% in incidence over the last 15 years or so. That the latest numbers put it at roughly 1 in 150. That, yes, some of that was because of more sensitive diagnostic technique, but the cases of autism were just showing up like they hadn't been a couple of decades ago. Ask any special ed teacher.

Actually, you'd get a different answer now. The numbers took a sharp dip after He took over. And I've got some speculation about that, too.

Anyway, after Jerusalem but before Cheyenne Mountain, there was a lot of speculation about His origins. Everyone with some nationalist or racial or ethnic grudge had a theory. White supremacists thought He sounded black. Taiwanese thought He sounded Chinese. Pakistanis though He sounded Indian, Indians thought He sounded Pakistani, and English though He might have sounded both. It was absurd. Maybe it's because I'm an American mutt without any particular ethnic leanings, but I didn't think He sounded anything. Just flat. And of course no one ever saw Him.

To my knowledge, the only time anyone alive has ever seen Him was when He came walking out of Cheyenne Mountain with the ocean behind him.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

My First Meeting With an Opener

2010-04-17T22:17:00.002-04:00

Her name was Julie. Her hair was dyed a sort of auburn red kind of color. I remember thinking I'd have found that very attractive as a younger man.

I don't know why she chose to confide in me. By that time most of the area was abandoned. People were moving into the cities or out into the farmlands, and the suburbs, those symbols of the world that was still choking on it own blood, were getting like ghost towns. She might have confided in me just because we were among the few who didn't want to leave.

She came up to me and whispered, "I can do what He does." She looked terrified. She hadn't slept. She was unhealthily thin. I took her to my apartment, turned on every light in a vain attempt to minimize shadows, and asked her what she meant.

She said it again, a little more confidently. "I can do what He does." And then she tipped a lamp so it cast a big shadow on the wall, and she gestured at it. And it Opened.

Of course I'd seen the Between. It's not uncommon for shadows to open seemingly at random, and for Them to glance out, looking for insurrection. But to see it so close was terrifying. The Between isn't empty. It isn't silent. They are in there, and the Between is Their home, Their hive, Their nest.

But as terrifying as it was, I was elated. Maybe she could help us fight back! Maybe she could turn the tables. And if she could do it, maybe there were others!

I turned away, wanting to get my glasses, to look at her, to watch her do it again, maybe. I don't know. It's moot. When I turned around, she was gone. One of her shoes hung half in, half out of the open shadow on my wall. And then it closed, and the shoe was cut neatly in half, and she was gone. She never made a sound. I didn't hear Them take her.

She thought she could do what He does. She was only half right. She could Open the shadows, yes, but as it turns out, that's only the first step. Once you're in the Between, you need a way to deal with Them. For whatever reason, He can control Them. The rest of us just have try and find a safe passage through the Between.

Those of us that are stupid enough to go there at all, that is.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Terror

2010-04-16T22:40:00.001-04:00

Of course we had recordings. The whole world listened to what he'd said. We tried to make some sense of it all.

It was hard to get anything worthwhile, though. Most of the world was convinced it was the Apocalypse. Religions that didn't have an "end of the world" scenario made them up. Bible verses were reinterpreted, ancient prophecies "discovered," and folks made their signs and walked around with them.

I remember some cynic saying that the world was so far gone that we didn't know how to do anything except stage meaningless protests. But really, what were we going to do? We didn't have anyone to turn to. Government was gone. Every single member of Congress was dead. The President, the Vice-President...everyone on down the chain of command. The British Prime Minister. Heads of state the world over. All gone.

But He didn't stop there. We didn't find out until a little later, but generals and other top brass in armies all over the world disappeared. Not just the official armies, either. I don't remember how long after Jerusalem - maybe three or four weeks, couldn't have been much more than that - we found out that al-Qaeda was gone. A soldier in the Middle East somewhere put footage on the 'net of sixteen gutted bodies. The faces were intact, and the press wasted no time in identifying them as the terrorist masterminds that the US and its allies had been hunting for since 2001. The War on Terror was over.

Well, sort of. You could say that He was a kind of terrorist. It fits, I guess. The choice He's always given the world is the same one that terrorists did: Comply or die. His methods are similar. His minions can strike at literally any time and from anywhere. The only difference between Them and suicide bombers is that They don't die in the process of an attack. So, sure, He's a lot like a terrorist.

But I have a hard time thinking of Him that way. When I saw Jerusalem fall, or when the news cameras showed the rubble that used to be Saint Peter's Basilica, I didn't feel the same thing as I did when the towers went down.

Those terrorists hated us. And "us" meant "Americans" or "Christians" or something. It meant me. It was personal. I didn't feel that when He began His takeover. After His first speech, when He warned us about Jerusalem, I got the sense that it wasn't personal. He didn't have that same kind of hatred. He wasn't a zealot. He just knew that, as a species, we were regularly killing each other and starving each other to death and date-raping the world and all of the people in it for nothing. For what He saw as nothing, anyway. And he just happened to have the power to do something about it.

I seriously doubt He was the first Opener. The power to open shadows isn't unique, and I can't believe that no one ever did it before He came along. I do think, though, that He was the first one who could control Them.

I've never met another Opener who could. In fact, They usually kill Openers first.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

...And Salted The Earth

2010-04-16T18:50:00.002-04:00

The helicopter cameras showed it, but we didn't know what we were looking at. I recorded some of the feed. It's not illegal to own it, despite what people think. He's not that kind of dictator. He doesn't care what you say about Him, and He takes full ownership of everything He did. He just thinks it was right.

Anyway.

The 'copters saw the city swallowed. Every shadow opened. Every single one. The buildings crumbles and fell into a billion tiny sinkholes. The people, the ones that They hadn't killed, just vanished into the Between. The 'copters kept their lights and their cameras on it. About five seconds in, they killed the sound feed.

It was bad enough we had to see it. No one wanted to hear it.

I've heard that some of the crew jumped from the copters. I've heard one of the copters crashed when the pilot had a heart attack - or maybe he put the copter down on purpose. Who wants to live in this world?, I've heard, is what came over the radio, but I know that's not true, because I was listening, and there was no sound. Just the Holy City vanishing into the Between.

When the dust settled, there was nothing but black. The shadows hadn't closed, they'd joined like mercury. Nothing below the copters but a puddle of blackness. And then every shadow in the world opened. The shadows in the room with me opened. We all heard the voice, again speaking English in that weird, stilted, not-quite-accented voice that we would come to know as His.

This is the end of your world. This is what will become of ideology. How many lives lost over the centuries for this place, which you now see is so impermanent? No more lives lost for Jerusalem, not after tonight, not ever again.

Have your riots. Convene your armies. Launch your missiles. Rant, rail, gnash your teeth. I will allow you that, for you need time to grieve your world. But when I speak to you again, know that it will be as your authority. You will do what I say to do, or They will come for you from the Between.

There is no question. There is no debate. There is no compromise. There is only the world and the whole of humanity.

Much of the world didn't know what to make of it. Hell, much of the world didn't understand it. But the Internet was still global at the time, and translations - a lot of them inaccurate, a lot of them with Biblical or Qu'ran quotes appended - starting making the rounds. While He never addressed them, I can't help but feel like they proved His point by doing that.

Some folks did analyze exactly what was going on. They started combing historical archives, Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical Apocrypha, conspiracy theories, anything, anything, for a hint of what was happening. What was the Between? Was it Mictlan? The Underworld? Hell? Heaven? Was He an angel? God? Satan? The Antichrist?

The short answer: No. The longer answer: It's 10 years later, and we still don't know exactly who or what He is. But I've heard some good theories.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

What I Saw That Day

2010-04-16T18:50:00.001-04:00

The voice from the shadows told us - told everyone, all over the world - to watch Jerusalem in three hours. It was 5:05PM local time for me when it started.

We saw it through cameras on the ground, and then from helicopters. We saw Them for the first time. They had come through before, of course, but always under cover of night, always striking quickly and efficiently, tearing down walls, yanking people through shadows. They had never been given free rein before.

That night, He let slip the leashes. He opened the shadows, pointed toward Jerusalem, and said, "Go."

And They came. They came out of the shadows underneath cars. They came from the shadows cast by the cooling buildings. They came from the shadows people cast walking home that night, or fleeing the city in terror. They boiled out of the shadows like fire ants on the warpath, and They destroyed everything They touched.

They caught the people first, of course. They didn't carry them away. They tore them into pieces. I remember watching one of Their massive hands closing over a camera lens, and the feed stayed on long enough for us to hear the screaming stop, the desperate gasping breaths, and then snapping. No biting. No chewing. They don't eat people. They don't eat.

The cameras on the ground died off, and the feed went black. And I sat there in my apartment watching the feed. I had my desktop, my laptop, my spare laptop and my TV all running different newsfeeds, and they all went black. And the day around me was quiet. I heard crying from outside the window, but no traffic. There was no movement. There was nothing we could do but watch.

And then someone had the presence of the mind to switch to one of the helicopter cameras, and we realized just how bad it really was.

Tune in Tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Graffiti on a wall in Chicago, a week after Jerusalem

2010-04-16T18:49:00.003-04:00

I lost my aunt my uncle three cousins and my father
Where was the UN where was the USA where was anyone?

The answer, of course, was that they were all already dead. But we didn't know that then.

We all had questions.

Tune in tomorrow.

curse the darkness

Here's What Happened

2010-04-16T18:49:00.001-04:00

Everyone remembers where they were when the Vatican fell. Or when the Dome of the Rock was pulled down. Or when Parliment and Congress were simultaneously invaded from the inside. Any one of the attacks, we know where we were.

But where were you when you found out about Him? That it was all connected?

So many crazy stories before the truth came out. Honestly, if the Internet had survived, those crazy stories would have, too, I'm sure. You don't remember because you're too young, but the Internet was a place where any insanity could thrive. You could spout any story you wanted and not only be heard, but be believed. The ubiquitous "they" that said mankind never landed on the moon, that Catherine the Great died having sex with a horse, that the late President Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim - "they" found their voice and their pulpit on the Internet.

When you think about it, what He does isn't so different than the 'net. He opens a gate, and out they come. The gates are everywhere on Earth, because they're nowhere. They just open, and he knows them. A server, a website, a router... Hell, never mind. Like I said, you're too young.

I remember where I was when I learned the truth. I was in a big box store buying supplies. No riots that day, but the police were out from watching the store; it was one of the few in the city that had anything left. I had turned off my radio. I just couldn't listen to death tolls and speculations and fanatics anymore. And then the lights flicked, and the TVs in the back of the store went dark. And I turned on my radio, and I heard what everyone else heard.

It's over. What you knew is over. Ideology is over.

Ideology is the poison at the soul of the privileged. In the First World, people talk ideology over full bellies. In the Third World, people have been trained to kill and die for ideology over and above their own survival.

Some of our greatest heroes have said this, though never in so many words. They have said that to make any meaningful change in the world, we must let go of the chains of religion, politics, economics, and all of the other systems of beliefs that interrupt the real and true cycles of life. The hungry must eat. The cold must be given shelter. The world must be saved, and as long as ideology - any ideology - festers at the heart of the leaders, no salvation is possible.

Now it is possible. Now the shadows are open. Now the world has a savior.

From this moment on, ideology is forbidden. Any idol at which you worship - be it mythical figure, figment of economics, ephemeral political position - is shattered as of now. You have seen what I can do when I open the shadows. And now you will see it again. Turn your eyes, world, to Jerusalem in three hours' time.

And we stood there, not knowing quite what to make of it. I heard people crying. I heard a man near me say that he had family in Israel. And all I could think was, "He's going to nuke it."

I wasn't wrong. The effect was much the same.

Tune in tomorrow!

curse the darkness

Failure Is Not an Option

2009-09-05T08:57:00.012-04:00

I made a discovery a few years back. I don’t remember what exactly triggered it, or indeed if there was a single event or moment in a game that led me to this realization. I think it’s more likely that I knew it subconsciously long before I ever spoke the words, but the discovery was this:

The players like to win.

I say it a lot now, both to myself and to other Storytellers who pride themselves on chuckling evilly and muttering about how they like to make their players’ lives difficult. Most of the time, when I repeat that mantra they look at me funny, and then say, “But you can’t win a role-playing game!”

Well, the truth is, you can win a role-playing game. You just have to keep in mind what the goal of such games is: To have fun. That said, what I mean when I say “the players like to win” is, “the players like it when their characters succeed at the tasks they choose to undertake.”

And yet, there are an awful lot of games and systems within games that seem to indicate that playing failure is fun, too. In this essay, we’re going to talk about characters with crippling deficiencies, how to interpret failed die rolls, how Storytellers can spin planned failure and avoid having dice bounced off their heads, and the many faces of Pyrrhic victories.

My Character is Lame: Flaws, Drawbacks, and Disadvantages

Most games include a system wherein you can take traits that act to the detriment of your character. They’re variously called Flaws (World of Darkness, et al.), Drawbacks (Chill, et al.), or Disadvantages (GURPS, et al.), but it all boils down to the same thing: Your character is less capable than the “base,” therefore you get a few more points to build her up in another area.

If you presume that player characters represent the base capability of any given person in the game world, the logic behind these traits is horribly flawed. I am not the equal of everyone else in the world, or even everyone else in my age and cultural group. The bum staggering down the street toward me might, if statted as a character, have such crippling flaws as Alcoholic, Mentally Ill, Homeless and Smelly, but that probably doesn’t mean he’s stronger, smarter or faster to make up for it. Indeed, most flaws, in real life, wind up being detrimental to development in all other areas of a person’s life.

The presumption is most games, however, isn’t that the characters are just normal folks. It’s that they’re the protagonists of this story (so right away, it should be obvious that we’re operating on a different level from real life), and thus they are more capable than most folks. Going back to the bum, he doesn’t need to built on the same point base as the characters, because he’s a supporting character at best, and more probably an “extra.” Even when the NPC in question is closer to the player characters’ capabilities (say, in a game of Vampire: The Requiem, the character in question is another vampire), the NPC doesn’t need to have the same “point base” as the characters.

On this premise, the “flaws balanced by extra points” model works a little better. Most games explain taking flaws by saying something about players being able to make their characters a bit more well-rounded, “realistic,” dramatic, and so on. Some games are even honest enough to say something like, “you probably won’t have enough points to build the character you want, but you can get more by taking flaws.” The truth of the matter is, though, that players who take flaws for their characters do so for one of two reasons: Because they like playing characters with flaws, or because they want the extra points.

Now, wanting the extra points doesn’t mean that the player isn’t going to play the flaw, or that the flaw isn’t an important and interesting part of the character, or indeed that the player is some sort of twink. It means that the player is using a game mechanic as presented, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that (I almost always take flaws for characters I play, and I play ‘em to the bone, but I also spend those extra points). Certainly I’ve run into players who sneak in flaws that they assume will never actually deter their characters, just to get some extra points. As a Storyteller, I recommend letting them take these flaws if at all feasible and then using them to best advantage the very first session (pure silliness, like taking a phobia of the ocean in a game set in Utah, should be disallowed, unless you’re playing a game that rewards silliness, like Toon).

But what about the players who like playing characters with flaws? Characters in role-playing games are most often defined by their power, be that by the supernatural or mundane skills and abilities that they possess or simply by the fact that they are powerful in comparison to the rest of the world. Even in games where the characters are the underdogs (like Hunter: The Reckoning and All Flesh Must Be Eaten), the characters are still superior to most of their peers — once again, because they are the characters. Playing a character defined by a flaw, be it physical, psychological, or supernatural is indicative of a player who wants something different out of the game than simply besting opponents and racking up experience points (it could also be indicative of a player who sees himself as flawed in some way, I guess, but that’s rather out of my depth).

So, what does all this have to do with success or failure? Consider this: Flaws and disadvantages in role-playing games should be impediments and character facets. They should be obstacles to be overcome during the course of the story, meaning that as Storyteller, you should present opportunities for characters to recognize, fall victim to, and ultimately overcome their flaws. Players, when you choose these traits, you should expect your character to suffer from them occasionally.

As an example: A friend of mine played a character in a game of Dark Ages: Werewolf with the Lame Flaw. In game terms, this means that the character suffered from a limp and couldn’t run as fast as her packmates, and that’s really about it. But the player took this a step further; the character didn’t tend to get into combat because her packmates usually reached the enemy and killed it before she had a chance. As such, the character was “apart” from her pack during dire circumstances, and even during the few times I ran the game, it was evident that this was having an effect on the group dynamic (I’d have been very interested to see how that dynamic evolved over a long period of time).

Note, too, that flaws don’t have to give you points to be important and necessitate attention during the game. A personality trait that you decide (or discover) in your character can be detrimental to the character or to the group, as long as it isn’t detrimental to the story. Some games, for instance, give point bonuses for traits like “Impatience” or “Curiosity,” and that’s fine; it tends to get the group moving when things bog down. “Honorable” is another trait often listed as a flaw, the logic there being that a character who can’t lie well is going to suffer penalties on attempts to deceive people. From a strictly game mechanics point of view, that makes sense, and if the result of that flaw is such a game penalty, well and good. If the only "effect," though, is "you should roleplay your character as being curious/honorable/etc.," I wonder about that trait's efficacy in the game. Does everything need a number attached to it? No, but my experience has been that folks who don't like rules ignore them anyway, and those who prefer that the rules work get annoyed when they get handwaved. Silver Age Sentinels from the now-defunct Guardians of Order stipulates that Defects are traits over which the character has no direct control — things like nemeses, physical defects, and so on. Personality traits can be fun to play, but they don’t give you extra points.

Another way to run flaws, incidentally (and the World of Darkness system does this), would be for the players to receive experience points or some other benefit when the flaw actually comes into play during the game. This would prevent people from taking ridiculous flaws, and would only reward players who play to their characters in their entirety. Games using the FATE System, including Spirit of the Century and Houses of the Blooded, use something like this; when one of a character's Aspects causes his trouble, the player can accept a Style point for it (or spend Style to avoid it). Ubiquity, which powers Desolation and Hollow Earth Expedition, does something similar.

Another category of flaws that bears special mention are those that have a bearing on a character’s ultimate destiny (you’ll sometimes see positive traits, like “Merits” or “Advantages” labeled Destiny, too, but taking such a thing as a flaw puts a different spin on the idea). If a character has a flaw like “Dark Fate,” this puts a couple of big obligations on the Storyteller. Not only do you have to screw that character over in some hugely dramatic way, but you have to make sure that nothing happens to the character before the boom falls (or if it does, you’d better be prepared to spin it in such a way that it fulfills the flaw’s parameters). I’m of two minds about flaws like this. On the one hand, it can be a cheap dodge of players who don’t want their characters to die and know that very few games ever actually end, meaning the moment of destiny will probably never arrive. On the other hand, it’s cool when players try to work out what their characters’ story arcs are going to be; I had a Storyteller ask me once what my character’s “tragedy threshold” was and then arrange a chronicle event accordingly. Some games ask during character creation what a character's path or story arc might look like, building in the notion that every character has a destiny (though it's typically kept loose; hard to account for everything that might happen during a game).

The Dice Hate Me: Incidental Failure

I talk about dice and when to use them in another essay, but I want to address a couple of points here on the subject of failed die rolls, more for players than Storytellers.

I’ve seen it happen a million times; the player throws the dice, the rolls fails, and the players says, “Can I try again?” with no hesitation. Yes, failure is a bummer, but next time, try considering what a failed roll really means. It might mean that your character doesn’t know anything about what’s being discussed, and, that in mind, might decide to stop thinking about it (especially if you took those extra points for flaws like “Impulsive” or “Impatient”). A failed physical roll might involve a muscle cramp or a sudden loss of steam. A failed social roll might involve a sudden burst of laughter or gas (if you have to ask why such a thing would constitute a failed roll, you need to get out more). Yes, the Storyteller can adjudicate some of this stuff, but she’s probably already overworked. Besides, if you take a little of that responsibility on yourself, you’re contributing to the chronicle and exerting greater control over your character, both of which are usually good things.

Failure can lead to character beliefs and hang-ups, too. I played in a game with a guy who, every time his character tried to use a specific power on were-creatures, failed his roll. After a while, he decided that his character figured that the power simply didn’t work on lycanthropes, and so stopped trying it. Yes, the player knew full well that the power had no such limitation, but the dice seemed to indicate otherwise.

The point here is that even the dice — which don’t hate you, remember, all they do is choose numbers — can provide interesting character bits, provided that you as the player are willing to let go of the mentality that says, “Aw, crap. I failed,” and instead adopt a mentality that says, “I am learning about my character as s/he experiences this story.”

God Hates Me: Setting the Players Up to Fail

I occasionally see pre-written scenarios that include scenes that the characters are supposed to fail. Mostly, these are combats that the characters lose so that they can be taken before the Grand High Muckety-Muck and charged with a quest/given a threat/sacrificed on an altar/what have you. As with most things in gaming, there’s a right way and wrong way to do this sort of thing. Also as with most things in gaming, the right way depends entirely on your players and what their preferences and thresholds are.

Some players, and I have to admit that I’m often one of them, don’t like to lose combats. But, for me at least, it has less to do with the notion of losing and more to do with the fact that if a combat (or indeed, any situation) has a predetermined outcome, I’d prefer not to have the illusion of choice. I played in a Mage: The Ascension game many years ago wherein our characters were ambushed by a bunch of Men in Black (now that Mage: The Ascension is over, that reference isn’t going to make as much sense, I guess) and the Storyteller told us we could each have one cool moment before being overpowered and render unconscious. That, to me, was fine — it made the combat quick because we didn’t each have to get beaten to a pulp (which in that system took forever anyway), and we weren’t under any illusions about whether or not the Storyteller was fudging dice rolls or otherwise “cheating.”

What if your players aren’t of this mindset, and refuse to roll over and let their characters fail without a fight? Well, ignoring the obvious trust issues plaguing such a group, you have a couple of options. One is, of course, to cheat. You let the players have whatever moments or successes they can manage out of the scenario…but your rolls are behind a screen, and you can very easily add in more enemies, a sudden rainstorm or any other wrinkles you need to bring about the result you want. The trick is doing it without being obvious, and the problem is that when you go from a defeat into an obviously well thought out scene, your players are probably going to pick up on what happened (hopefully, they’ll see why it was necessary and not be too put out).

The other option is to make the scenario difficult, but let the chips fall where they may. If you’ve got a sense of what the characters can do and how the players usually react and strategize, you can probably set up a situation that’s too tough for them, let them try and fail, and then continue on with the story. The caveat there, of course, is be prepared. In my essay "Living with Lady 10-Sider", I advise never to call for a die roll unless I’m prepared for failure. The reverse is also true: If you aren’t prepared for a successful roll, better just to stipulate that the action isn’t possible. This doesn’t work at all in combat, of course, but it’s fine in investigation scenes.

If you’re going to set the players up to fail, however, you need to be damned sure that they’ll have a chance to get their own back before the night is over, or at least to see where the action is heading. I love cliffhangers, but a Storyteller-imposed cliffhanger is very different than a player-imposed one. By that I mean, if the characters go marching into the dragon’s mouth and are immediately confronted with potentially deadly repercussions, they shouldn’t be surprised and can’t really blame you. In that case, ending the session with the henchman pointing weapons at the characters (or whatever other danger is fitting) is fine, and will probably have your players thinking about your game all week. But if you lured them in, or forced them in, they don’t have the same emotional attachment to the situation because they didn’t choose it. As such, you need to let them a little farther into the plotline before winding up, otherwise the conversation next session will consist of people saying, “What happened last time? Oh, right, we got our asses kicked and then some other stuff happened.”

A final word on setting the players up to fail: Don’t make it cheap. When I play Dungeons and Dragons, I tend to play magic-user characters. Mages and other spell-casters grow quite powerful with experience, and the sheer amount of power they can throw around is somewhat daunting to some GMs. So, I’ve noticed that as the final confrontation looms (or during any confrontation they don’t want the players to win “too easily”), suddenly magic just stops working. I hate that.

Ignoring the fact that mages in D&D (3^rd Edition, anyway) are completely useless if they can’t use magic, disallowing a character’s special powers because you feel it would make things “too easy” is cheap, lazy and shortsighted. If you feel that the abilities or powers that become available to characters in your chosen game system are too potent, change the system ahead of time and explain why to your players (and be prepared for a player to say, quite legitimately, that you should consider running a different game). Don’t allow the players to purchase traits for their characters that you don’t like and then toss in cheap methods for your NPCs to bypass them (now, when players become over-reliant on their characters’ special powers to the point that they stop thinking, which I’ve found happens often in Mage: The Ascension, then it might be time to arrange a story in which they can’t simply magic their way out of everything, but that’s a separate issue). This applies not just to magic, but any special power that characters might acquire. A fighter in D&D is optimized toward fighting, so you should allow that character to get into fights that are challenging, but not sure losses or stonewalls.

If a character must fail at something that should be his/her forte, try to find some way to work it into the story rather than just saying “Yeah, I know you rolled five successes, but nothing happens.” At least make it experiential: “You cast the spell correctly. You know you did, you felt the power leaving your body toward the target. But about midway there, everything in the room went cold, and your target still stands, unfazed.”

Pyrrhic Victories: We Won, But it Hurt

I like costly victories, myself. I like consequences to actions, and I like the notion that to gain something, you must sacrifice. I also recognize that this attitude might be a by-product of my employment with White Wolf, however.

A Pyrrhic victory, as you probably know, is a victory in the academic sense — you won, but another such “victory” would kill you. In a role-playing game, such victories are rare because normally you’ve got a group of people working toward whatever the goal of the current story is and therefore several minds all working out a strategy. Also, players tend to come with ideas so cool they should work. I tend to side with the players when they come up with great ideas. At the very least, I don’t go adding extra obstacles because I feel the players are having too easy a time of it.

But there’s a difference between upping the difficulty level of a story while it’s still in progress and allowing the NPCs to think on their feet. If I’m running a game of Vampire and I start adding dots of Disciplines to an enemy character while my players’ characters are chasing him down, that’s cheap. If I decide that he recognizes that he’s not going to win this fight and he starts fighting appropriately — that is, takes no prisoners, sets fire to the building, bargains for his unlife, or takes other actions that aren’t normally in character for him — that just means the supporting characters are responding to the situation that the players’ characters have created.

In short, every victory should cost something, but not just because you don’t want to make it easy on your players. Every victory should cost something because they need to know that they earn what they get.

But what about a true Pyrrhic victory, the kind that after the dust settles the characters are thinking, “If this is winning, must’ve been some way we could have lost.”? Here are some ways that victories in RPGs can become Pyrrhic:

• Character death: The characters accomplish their goals, but one or more of their number dies. This is a bigger problem in some settings than others (because in some settings, you can have your dead comrades resurrected), but killing off characters is often a touchy issue. It’s a great way to make the players realize that their situation is serious, but it’s also a good way to piss them off. Make sure everyone’s OK with the possibility of character death during the course of the story.

• Character injury: The characters might not be dead, but they’ve certainly got one foot in the grave. They’ve fought off their enemies or escape from their prison or whatever the case may be, but one even relatively minor fight and someone’s going to die. Now, obviously this has more of an impact in games like Chill or even most forms of Exalted, where healing takes some time and effort, but even in a game like Werewolf enough of the right kind of damage can make the characters (and the players) recognize how perilous their situation really is.

• Depleted resources: Most RPGs have some kind of “fuel stat.” In Vampire, it’s Vitae. In Werewolf: The Forsaken it’s Essence. In Chill, Stamina and Willpower can both rise and fall. In any case, the characters don’t necessarily have to be physically injured, but if they’ve burned all of their “magic points” during the course of the battle, they have most assuredly earned whatever victory they’ve achieved.

• Dead friends: I’ll admit: One of my greatest problems as a GM is that I hate playing NPCs. I’ll do it, but I’d rather they sit in the background and let the players do the important work. But once in a while, I’ve seen relations between an NPC and a player’s character become really strong. What happens, then, when said NPC dies — especially as a result of the PC’s action? While playing Nehemiah (a Vampire: The Masquerade characer, though the game was a weird homebrew quasi-World of Darkness setting), I found myself having to choose between going after my dire enemy or save a character to whom Nehemiah had become very attached. He chose to kill his enemy, for a number of very legitimate reasons. The lady to whom he was attached, however, wound up losing much of her sanity. (And kudos to the Storyteller in question, by the way, for making that decision hard and allowing me to kill Nicholas — that’s what made it a Pyrrhic victory). This only works, however, the players actually have some attachment to the NPCs, and that requires that you play them well.

Ending on a Downer

When players fail at a task, they tend to want to try it again. Some things, though, you only get one shot at. I already recommended never asking for a die roll unless you’re prepared for the results, failure or otherwise. Let’s take that one step further — if you give the players a piece of information, be prepared for them to follow it. Players don’t tend to do well with cryptic warnings of dire danger (because PCs are normally the only ones with enough gumption to go on in defiance of said warnings, so a lot of time when GMs say “Danger! Here be monsters!” players hear “Come on! Here be plot points!”).

If the players follow your cues into the plot points (or ignore your warnings and wind up in the soup) and fail miserably, what then? Ending on a down note isn’t a great idea, usually, but you don’t have to end on resounding victory. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What am I ending? A session can certainly end on a tragic or fearful note. The players will get the chance to right the wrongs next session, and sometimes a week away from the game can be a good way for them to gain some perspective and come back ready to solve their characters’ problems. If you’re ending a major story arc, the characters should be able to point to something in the story as an accomplishment, even if the overall story ended badly for them.

• Can they try again? If the mission was “stop the assassination” and the characters didn’t, then they probably don’t get another chance. If the mission was “retrieve the Golden Whatsis” and it slipped through their fingers, they can probably still track it down. They just might have very little time left, or it might be in their worst enemy’s hands, or something equally dire. If they can’t try the same mission again, perhaps now they must deal with the repercussions of their failure.

• Do they want to try again? My character in a Dark Ages: Fae game ran afoul of a demon in one story arc. During the five years of downtime between stories, he stayed the Hell away from anything that looked like it could be demonic, because he wanted nothing to do with them. “Know thy enemy” didn’t occur to him, because he was scared. If the players decide their characters are letting discretion be the better part of valor, fine. Don’t feel you have to chase them with their mistakes.

In closing, remember that we play these games for fun, but also to tell a story. Don’t worry about “realism,” worry about “drama.” Don’t sweat “balance.” Instead, think about “conflict.” Learn your players’ thresholds for failure, and scale the challenges accordingly. Even if the characters fail, the players will talk about the story afterwards, and consider it a success.

Information Wants to Be Free

2009-08-18T10:31:00.007-04:00

One of the greatest challenges to a GM is giving the players enough information that they can resolve the conflict of a story, but not so much that they have detailed instructions on how to go about it. This problem leads to some of the most frustrating tropes I’ve seen in roleplaying games, and can result in the players feeling helpless within the context of the story and in the GM looking rather like a jerk. In this essay, we’re going to examine some ways of disseminating information to the players (and thus their characters), both good and bad, and the consequences of those methods.

Let’s begin with the bad ideas.

Three Common Informative Mistakes

• Infodump: This method involves long, long explanations, usually delivered straight from a book and not in-character. Typically, this covers information the characters “would already know,” and that’s fine. The problem is that listening to people read from books is boring, and that the players aren’t likely to retain the information (especially if you ask them to engage different parts of their brains — i.e., playing their characters — after the infodump is over). Infodumps can happen in character, as well, and this presents problems of its own (see next point).

• The Jive-Talking Wizard: I saw this term on Beth Kinderman’s website, and I think it’s pretty appropriate. It refers to the all-powerful being who appears in order to get the characters together and set them on the right track, but won’t, for reasons only known to himself, impart enough information to do the job well. When asked for details or more helpful information, he typically simpers, changes the subject, vanishes, thunders “That’s not for you to know!” or otherwise says “Screw you” to the players. I’ve seen him as a god of humor, an actual wizard (Gandalf is almost a literary example of this tactic, but Gandalf also takes personal risks and gets down and dirty in battle, too, so he doesn’t really count), a computer, a Sidereal Exalt, and mentors and rulers of all kinds.

As is probably obvious, the Wizard is a bad way to dispense information for several reasons. First, it puts the characters in an obviously subservient role. That’s sometimes appropriate, depending on the game in question, but it chafes a lot of players, especially when it’s so apparent. Second, it flies in the face of logic: Why does this guy need the characters as pawns? Why can’t he just handle things himself? Why is he being so stingy with information if he wants the characters to succeed? (The answer to these questions, of course, is that having too much information would make things too easy on the characters (this is a fallacy, but I’ll cover that later), and the GM wants things to be challenging. The Wizard makes things less challenging and more annoying, though.) Finally, the Wizard does nothing to engender any kind of interest in the storyline. In fact, he does the opposite: The players feel like they’re being ordered around, not told what they need to know, not given control over their lives, and generally treated like machines. Most of us get that kind of treatment at our jobs, and we don’t want it during an escapist hobby.

• File and Forget: Most GMs, myself included, make up most of the happenings in their stories on the spot. That’s fine. Some of the best storylines I’ve come up with involved me taking a flippant comment from a player and running with it. The problem comes not when GMs make up information on the spot, but when that information doesn’t remain consistent. If you give the players a juicy clue that wasn’t part of your original plan, write it down. Information that turns out to be false because the players interpreted it incorrectly or didn’t cross-check their facts (I’m amazed at how often players assume that anything out of the mouth of a sympathetic NPC is unassailable truth, but that’s a separate issue), that’s fine. If the information turns out to be false or irrelevant because you forgot what you told the players, that’s a failing on your part.

Informing Players and Making them Happy

With all of the above in mind, how do you, as GM, give your players the information they require without teasing them, annoying them, misleading them or inundating them? Here are some suggestions:

• Use the Supporting Cast: Having NPCs tell the players what’s going on is fine. Just remember a few simple principles.

First, the NPCs are not omniscient. A character’s mentor might be truly wise and powerful, but said mentor has a limited scope of knowledge. Asking for information outside of that scope results in no information, or, worse yet, misleading information. I recommend always mixing in something useful with misleading or useless information. After all, a game session only lasts so long and every hour spent chasing false leads is another hour that players will remember as pointless.

One way to keep in mind what a given NPCs knows is to stat that character. I’m not as stringent about statting everybody in the world as I was 10 years ago, but important supporting characters still get write-ups in my notebook. If I know, for instance, that Dr. Jones has a high rating in Archeology but nothing at all in Occult, his information about the Dread Book of Niffugcam is going to be skewed appropriately. Having NPCs with limited bases of knowledge serves a number of purposes. In addition to avoiding the Jive-Talking Wizard problem (since the NPC doesn’t withhold information, he just doesn’t know everything the players need to find out), it also helps the players see the NPCs as individuals. Once they know that Dr. Jones can help them translate Sanskrit, but that he doesn’t know a thing about art, they won’t bother going to him to help them identify which artist drew the prints found in the Dread Book.

Second, the NPCs have their own agendas, but you need to know what those agendas are. Sometimes, a character’s agenda lets him work closely with the players’ characters, and sometimes it involves keeping information hidden. By way of example, consider Orpheus. In case you don’t know, Orpheus is a game in which the characters work for a company that solves ghost-related problems, and the company has a somewhat…checkered past. In the chronicle I ran some years back (that I unfortunately did not log, or I'd link to it), the characters’ boss was obviously uncomfortable with some of the goings-on at the Orpheus Group, but wasn’t ready to share everything with the characters for fear of endangering them. As such, he told them what he could when he could. They suspected him of being a villain a couple of times, but when the chips came down, he was unequivocally on their side. The bottom line here: Know what your NPCs want as well as what they know, and have their behavior reflect both.

Third, pay attention to what the players ask. If they ask the wrong questions, give them the wrong answers. I’m not talking about letting them discuss how to translate the Dread Book with Dr. Jones in the room and then later having them find out that Jones could have helped translate it, but didn’t speak up because the players didn’t ask. That kind of nonsense (always followed by a simper and a “tee-hee”) is comparable to the Jive-Talking Wizard in its irritation level. What I mean is, don’t allow the NPCs to be psychic. An example: The characters come across a body mauled by an animal and find wolf-prints nearby. They immediately start asking poor overworked Dr. Jones about werewolves. Now, in fact, the creature responsible was a were-coyote, which has very different implications for the story, but the players have jumped to a conclusion (admittedly, it’s a pretty easy one to jump to) and so Dr. Jones can’t really correct them.

• Let them learn gradually: A way to avoid the infodump problem is to let the players find out crucial information over a period of time. It’s been my experience that groups often split up during investigation or information-gathering phases (“OK, I’ll hit the library, you go talk to Dr. Jones, and you get on the Internet”), and this is a golden opportunity for you as GM. By letting each of the players find a nugget of information, you aren’t asking all of the players to remember pages worth of data. The players can put everything they’ve learned together and analyze it as a group. This also plays directly into my next point…

• Let them earn the info: …which is, nothing’s free. The characters should have to work to find out what they need to know, even if the only work involved is deciding whom to ask. Note, though, that it’s incumbent upon you as GM to present more than one avenue of approach for investigation, or, at the very least, to avoid shutting the players down if they come up with something that you didn’t think of. I’ve played in games where the GM had very specific ideas about how problems should be solved, how the players should go about getting from point A to point B, and what the players should know at various stages of the game. I accept that sort of thing in computer “role-playing” games, because the computer program has to proceed in a specific way. As a human being, however, you are above this sort of linear progression, and can allow players to learn from whatever sources they can think of. (And this really all goes back to a point I’ve made before: Players like it when their ideas pan out. They don’t like it when they try something clever and the response from the GM is “That’s clever, but I didn’t think of it first, so it won’t work.”)

• Give ‘em what they want: I played in a World of Darkness game once many years ago in which our characters found it necessary to infiltrate a Technocracy base. For those who didn’t play Mage: The Ascension, that’s a bit like infiltrating the Death Star, only the Stormtroopers can shoot straight, don’t all carry master keys, and generally aren’t complete idiots. It’s walking into the meat grinder, we knew, so we wanted to be prepared. So, calling in our contacts and a lot of favors, we got a complete readout of the base, a schedule for the guards, technical data on how everything worked, and lists of staff and their capabilities (from a scientific/magical standpoint). Far from making it too easy on us, we discovered exactly how screwed we were. Having the information gave us the possibility of victory; without, we’d have been dead. To take a cinematic example, consider The Usual Suspects. The characters know that the job they are being forced to do is a suicide mission, but they know everything they need to know to pull it off.

My point, here, is that if the characters go into a situation blind, they can justifiably blame you if things go wrong, especially if you’ve been coy or downright misleading up to that point. If they know everything they could have known (or if they skimped on their research), they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

This isn’t to say, of course, that things can’t go wrong or that the enemy can’t have tricks up its collective sleeve that the characters couldn’t foresee. Such surprises are very much in-genre for most of the settings of role-playing games. The point is that there’s a difference between information the characters could not possibly have known and information they should have known, but you wouldn’t tell them.

An example: Against my better judgment, I played in a Dungeons and Dragons game run by a first-time GM. She had her story all planned out, she said (which should have been a big warning sign). I played a druid, one of the other players made a duelist character, which is some jumped-up form of fighter that uses two weapons or something (I don’t like the d20 system and I don’t keep abreast of the 1.4 billion prestige classes currently available). Anyway, his character and mine walked into a bar and got jumped by a lot of toughs. The duelist hit one of them with a blow that should have killed him, and the player, quickly doing the math, figured that the “bar brawler” had to be a high-level fighter to survive. Turns out all of those brawlers were high-level fighters.

Ignoring the cliché of a bar fight breaking out in a D&D game (I'm not opposed to the classics), the GM really should have given the duelist’s player some kind of check to notice that these guys were all armed, that they carried themselves like professional fighters, that they look battle-hardened, etc. Instead, she chose to lure the player into a sucker bet. That’s not a good way to get people excited about playing in your game.

• Don’t tell them everything: The more you reveal to your players, the less they’ll fill in the blanks. I love it when players come up with explanations for what’s going on. Sometimes I even replace my actual plots with player-inspired lunacy. It’s a question (like most of Storytelling) of balance — give them as much information as they need, but not so much that they don’t need to find out how the story ends.

Four Simple Tricks to Avoid Under-Informed Players

• Know what there is to know: When I write scenarios and settings for game companies, I tend to spend a lot of work count on an area’s history and what has come before the players arrive. That’s because if the GM knows what’s happened, he’ll know what the players can potentially discover. I can’t predict, as a writer (or as a GM, for that matter) what the players are going to do, so the best I can do is know what information the players can find and let them find it. In my opinion, writing down the history of your setting or events is more important than statting out your antagonists. You can make up stats on the fly or use characters out of a book. Making up history and keeping it consistent is much trickier.

• Some Information is Crucial: One of my guiding principles as a GM is that I don't ask for rolls if I'm not prepared for the result. This principle is especially true in the information-gathering phase of a story, and I tend to run highly investigation and mystery-focused games, so I have to be conscious of what the players know and how they can find out the truth. In any given investigation-focused scene, thinking about what information the characters must walk away with. I'd even advise giving players the same information in a couple of different ways; it allows for confirmation and nuance. For example, a group of characters are looking into the disappearance of a local high schooler. Her parents think that she was a model teenager, but investigating her online presence (avenue of investigation #1) reveals chat logs and a browsing history of a decidedly more prurient nature. Discussion with her friends at school (avenue of investigation #2) reveals that she had an "older boyfriend," but that she had been "caught behind the bleachers" early in the school year. Same information - the girl was secretly sexually active and engaging in risky behaviors - but two points of reference and several opportunities for follow-up investigation.

For further consideration, have a look at the GUMSHOE system. I haven't played it yet, sadly, but I've read Trail of Cthulu, which uses GUMSHOE. The basic idea is that rather than rolling dice to have your characters obtain clues, you spend points. As such, you'll never miss a clue or a plot point due to a failed roll. You can spend points based on different investigative skills, though, so you'll get different information depending on how your character goes about it.

• Consider the characters’ avenue of approach: If you’ve got a group full of combat-ready characters who can barely read, they aren’t likely to spend days in the library looking through hoary old tomes. They’re more likely to go beating people up for information. Look over the character sheets, pay attention to how the players like to do things, and structure the information and the vectors of the information accordingly (players, this also means you need to play your characters appropriately — your hulking barbarian with no idea which way to hold a book probably shouldn’t suggest going to the local scribe and asking to poke through scrolls, though he might well suggest poking the scribe with sticks until he finds the information for the party).

• Everything is fluid: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Be ready to scrap a plan, a fact, a character or a plot point the second your players come up with something better, especially if they have all the information and come to a completely logical conclusion that just happens to be miles away from what you came up with. You’ll usually find that tweaking a few details makes all the difference, and that you don’t need to change everything, just enough.

In closing, remember that you aren’t telling the story to the players, you’re telling the story with the players. They should be informing you just as you inform them.

Single Serving Adventures

2009-07-25T09:47:00.002-04:00

As I get older, I find myself relying on printed material more when running games. I suspect that’s because I’ve only got so many hours in a day, and I can’t devote as many of them to creating chronicles whole cloth the way I used to. That’s fine, because most games have more than enough information to play them for years without ever resorting to making up a thing. In particular, most games have pre-written stories (also called adventures, scenarios or modules) that GMs can run for their groups.

You can’t usually just pick one of those stories up and plug it right into your game, though. There’s definitely a certain amount of skill that goes with running such stories, and in this essay, we’re going to discuss the tips and tricks of doing so.

First Step: Know the Material

If you’re considering running a scenario for your group, the first thing you need to do is read it in its entirety. Read all of the characters and their statistics (if provided), look over the maps, read through the descriptions of the rooms or the events and make sure you understand what the story is about. If the scenario references books or rules you haven’t read in a while, go back and re-familiarize yourself with them.

The reasons for this scrutiny should be pretty clear. For one thing, if there are mistakes in the scenario, either in the rules portions (it’s not uncommon for writers of scenarios to be a little fuzzy on the system parts of the game, so make sure that the numbers make sense) or in the events of the story (plot holes happen, after all), you’ll want to know about them ahead of time so you can correct them.

More importantly, though, you need to figure out if this scenario would work for your group and your chronicle. Some scenarios are meant for beginning characters or, in some cases (such as the demos for Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening) for a specific group of characters. In games that work on a level system, scenarios are usually labeled as being appropriate for characters “of 4^th to 6^th level” or the like, but in games without such yardsticks, you often just have to read the scenario and go from there.

Sometimes the tone or content of the scenario is completely wrong for your purposes, too. The very first book I wrote for White Wolf was Giovanni Chronicles IV: Nuovo Malattia for Vampire: The Masquerade. It included some adult subject matter, asking the characters to procure prostitutes, commit murder and undertake all manner of unseemly actions (and that was before they became vampires). Even a group accustomed to the blood, violence and torment that Vampire can include might balk at some of the material in that book. Likewise, if your players like to throw down, as it were, and the scenario doesn’t include any winnable combat, you need to be aware of it.

Second Step: Customize, Customize, Customize

I’ve run a great number of pre-written scenarios in various RPGs over the years, but I don’t think I’ve run a single one of them without making a few changes. Sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking a character or two so that they fit better into what I’ve already established, other times I’ve excised whole portions of the scenario because I had my own ideas about where the story should go. After you’ve read and digested the scenario, be willing to pull it apart and put it back together in a form that works for you and your group.

One important point of customization is making the story your own (and by “your own” I mean the entire gaming group, not just the GM’s). That means that if the scenario includes a slimy informant that the characters need to shake down for information and one of the characters in your existing chronicle already has such a contact — wonderful! Use the existing contact in place of the character in the scenario. Some pre-written games actually abstain from detailing non-essential characters, simply mentioning a “leader” or “lawmaker” so that the Storyteller can customize freely.

Customization also has the advantage of preventing a player who has read the scenario from automatically knowing everything that is going on. I personally can’t imagine what benefit there is to reading a scenario before participating in it as a player, but some players become stuck on “winning” the game (which is, as you probably know, not possible in any conventional sense in an RPG).

That said, however, I don’t advocate changing details in a pre-written game solely to “make it different from the book.” If there’s no real reason to alter the material…don’t. Don’t be resistant to the players’ changes to the scenario (because, of course, no game survives contact with the players), but don’t feel the need to change things around pointlessly. I’ve met game-masters who feel lazy or cheap using pre-written scenarios as written. I even endured jibes from a player when I used printed material at all, rather than writing my own games (although she quieted when I pointed out that I’d developed much of the material originally anyway). But using printed material in an attempt to save time and effort is a perfectly acceptable reason for doing so, especially if that material is well-written and appropriate for you game. As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

As an expansion on that last point, be careful about pulling the rug out from the under the players, if they have expectations going in. What I mean by that is, if the players have created their own characters, they have a sense of what those characters can do and probably have plans. They might look forward to casting a particular spell or using a particular maneuver or power, or they might just be interested in some aspect of the game. If you turn around and alter things in the game so as to make that power useless or that aspect absent, you might wind up cheating your players.

By way of example, I ran a one-shot game of Necessary Evil, a setting for the Savage Worlds system (you can learn more about Necessary Evil here, and about the game I ran here). The book includes a whole chronicle, not just one adventure, and so I picked the one I liked the best to use as the one-shot. It involved breaking into a dead supervillain's lab, and the way the game was written, it would have involved the characters shrinking down to ant-size to get in to the miniaturized lab. Nothing wrong with that, very in-genre, and if I'd been running the whole chronicle, I'd have used it as written. But for a one-shot, I felt that dumping the players into that situation wouldn't fit their expectations of the game, and that it would detract from the overall feel I was going for. I might be wrong about that, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry (and anyway, it wasn't a hard fix; the mutated fire-ants just became giant mutated fire ants!).

Third Step: Rehearse

Many scenarios include blocks of text with instructions to read them aloud to the players. Even those that don’t have these helpful sections still include descriptions of rooms, characters and situations that the GM can simply read out of the text. It’s beneficial to read such sections ahead of time, making sure you understand the material being presented and how to pronounce and define all of the terms used, and, of course, checking to see if you want to change any of the details. Reading directly from the page with no rehearsal (what’s called “cold reading” in theatrical terms) is difficult even with training in public speaking. It’s easy to stumble over words, slip into monotone and generally lose your players. The best course of action is to absorb the information that you need to convey and present it in your own words, using natural speech and pausing to see if your players want to ask or do anything during the description.

Expanding further on that last point, another part of the rehearsal (and even the customization) phase is making sure that “cutscenes” (sections during which you’re reading and the players are listening) make sense. If the characters are expected to sit through a long section of dialogue, what’s to stop them from interrupting, or leaving, for that matter? If the characters are slaves on a ship and the scenario assumes that they have been for some weeks, what stopped the sorcerer from magically lifting the keys? This all goes back to knowing the material, but taking the time read aloud pertinent sections of the text will bring to your attention details that you otherwise might have missed, and allow you to make sure that your players’ characters actually fit into the scenario as presented. It would be intuitive to think that all pre-written scenarios are playtested with a group of real gamers, and such kinks worked out (or at least addressed) before the game is sent to press…but that’s not what really happens. Some scenarios are playtested, but other times deadlines intrude, and some game writers don’t actually play RPGs (which still wierds me out). As such, don’t take for granted that the scenario you’re reading will naturally work itself out. Take the time to read it and look for plot holes.

Likewise, take time to consider how your players might approach the problems in the scenario and decide whether you need to change anything based upon that assessment. For instance, if your players have a habit of jumping at plot hooks without bothering to do any investigation, a game rife with red herrings is probably going to be laborious because they’ll pursue any apparent lead. A group that shoots first and asks questions later probably won’t do well in a scenario in which the opponents are all high-powered and bloodthirsty. This doesn’t mean you can’t use the scenario, it just means you have to do some tweaking. In the first instance, trim the red herrings down and make sure that any lead the players can follow serves a purpose in the greater scheme of the plot, or at least has some interest to the characters and might merit revisiting later. In the second, you might consider having the characters hear rumors of how other people have been slaughtered to a man by the fearsome Death-Bears (or whatever), or better yet, have them witness themselves being thusly slaughtered in a portent or vision of the future.

Running the Game

When you actually sit down to begin the scenario, consider how you’ll bring the characters into it. Some scenarios, like the aforementioned “slave ship” situation, have a prearranged beginning point…which might not work for your chronicle. If you’re beginning a chronicle with a pre-written scenario, such an opening can actually be helpful (because pulling a group together is difficult, as discussed in this essay). But if you’re working the scenario in your ongoing chronicle, you’ll have to do some spackling to make sure it fits. A good method for building up to the scenario is to work NPCs from the scenario into your chronicle before the main action start. For instance, if the scenario requires the characters to converse with a morally shady sorcerer, seed some rumors about this person in an unrelated story or have the characters meet him on neutral turf. That way they have some history together, even if it’s just a brief exchange, and you’ve got some practice portraying him.

This is true of the end of the scenario, too. Some scenarios include an “Aftermath” section that discusses what future ramifications the game might have on the world at large, but not all do, and none of them are written with your chronicle specifically in mind. It’s easy for scenarios to feel like sitcoms — at the end, everything is back to normal. That probably isn’t the feel that you want, though, unless your chronicle is meant to have a TV-episode vibe to it. Consider how the events of the scenario are going to change your chronicle, and whether or not you want those changes.

Something to consider is how linear the scenario is. That is, how many different methods can the characters use to get from one plot point to the next? If they need to get through a magic portal to continue with the game, does that portal have more than one key? Can a magic-using character cast a spell to open it? If the pathway through the scenario is too rigidly defined, you’ll have to exert a great deal of control over the characters and their actions in order to keep the game on track, and that feels constrictive and frustrating to the players. The option, though, is to allow things to veer wildly off course, moving away from the plot of the scenario and letting the story evolve on its own.

If you’ve read my other essays, you can probably guess how I feel about that latter course of action. If the players are having fun, if their actions are guiding the plot and they are interested in what their characters are doing, go with it. If you can steer the action back to the scenario’s plot later, fine, but if not, remember the goal (to have fun and tell a compelling story).

Player Issues

I mentioned before that some players don’t like pre-written scenarios or feel that the GM is being lazy by using them. I disagree; scenarios are tools for the GM, and so we’re perfectly justified in using them. The key is to make them work within the chronicle, rather than letting the chronicles themes, tones and history take a backseat to what a book says. What specifically can the GM do to make the players feel as though the story is still about their characters, even when it was written by a total stranger?

• Know the characters. Good advice for GMs in general, but especially appropriate here. If a character is arachnophobic, maybe that encounter with giant spiders isn’t such a great idea (then again, maybe it’s ideal — depends what game effect the phobia has in your chosen system). If a character is married or has a strong love interest, supernatural seduction takes on a quite different tone than for a swinging single.

• Don’t bury your nose in the book. Know the material, know the twists and turns of the plot, know where the stats are and know what comes next. If the players see you reading right out of the book, their eyes will glaze over and they’ll lose interest. I said before that using pre-scenarios is not laziness, but using them in lieu of preparation is. That said, if you're running a system for the first time, of course you're going to be checking rules a little more, and everyone should know that up front.

• Decide on alternate endings. If the scenario is written with the assumption that the good guys (or at least the players’ characters) will prevail, is it even feasible that they might not? If the players make some really bad decisions or suffer a run of bad dice-luck, can you help them salvage victory without relying on NPCs or GM fiat? (This is one reason I’m leery of running stories with world-shattering consequences; if the players screw up in a story in which only their lives or the lives of those close to them are at stake, the world doesn’t change drastically and the outcome matters more to them, to boot.) Figure out ahead of time how things might turn out, and be ready to veer off the beaten path if an outcome not in the book would be more true to your players’ characters.

• Work with the bookworms. Suppose a player has already read the scenario. You could exclude that player (bad idea), you could rewrite the game so that he doesn’t know the details anymore (OK, but unnecessary and a lot of work for you), or you could enlist his help. He might know what’s going on behind the scenes, and he might know which wire to cut (so to speak), but he doesn’t know how the other players will react and he doesn’t know what the dice will do, so there are always some unknown elements. Plus, this puts a player with a good sense of being Conscious in the position to nudge the plot along if it gets bogged down or starts to wander.

• Take notes. You know what might happen, because it’s there in the book. Jot down what does happen. Note how the characters react to NPCs. Heck, note differences in how they’re portrayed in the book and how you played them. Write down what your players did and how it changed the world (on whatever scale). This is good policy for Storytelling in general, but especially with pre-written scenarios, since reading the book as a reminder can be misleading.

In closing, pre-written scenarios can be an overworked GM’s best friend. Even if you can’t just crack the book and run a game, having a plot and supporting cast lightens the load considerably. Just know that it doesn’t take all the work off your shoulders, and you (and the players) are ultimately still responsible for making your own fun.

What Makes a Beautiful Player? (Part 4)

2009-07-20T16:14:00.002-04:00

We all have goals, and so should well thought-out characters. A character’s goal may range from revenge to domination to leading a normal life, but players don’t always define those goals well enough to pursue them.

A player with Initiative, however, does. These are the players that start trouble among NPCs, that organize raiding parties on the villains: in short, players that are pro-active. Quite a lot of players react; they wait for a situation to present itself or an adversary to act against them. Players with Initiative (the adjectival form would be Initial, I suppose, but that’s a bit much!) don’t wait. They create the situations, in so doing, do much of the Storyteller’s work for them.

As such, it’s a matter of opinion as whether or not Initiative constitutes one of the traits of the Beautiful Player. Some Storytellers like to keep a firm grasp over the plotline of the story and it annoys them when the player come up with their own machinations that matter more than the presented story. I’d like to remind such Storytellers that the point is to have a good time, and if the players are having fun and agreeing on a course of action, you are doing your job by encouraging it. So what if your ingenious and sinister plotline gets thrown by the wayside? Save it, spruce it up and serve it later. Reward the players’ Initiative.

Pro-active players are often the ones that have been gaming a while. They create characters who have agendas and follow those agendas, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. For some Storytellers, who run character-driven games and keep their plotlines loose, this can be a godsend. For others who run a tighter ship and have intricate stories that require the characters to stay focused on what’s presented them, it can be a nightmare.

A player with an agenda will analyze everything the group comes across in terms of that agenda (not unlike real people with agendas). Keep this in mind - you are fully justified, as the Storyteller, in exploiting a character’s drive to achieve his/her agenda. A driven character (and said character’s player) may let little inconsistencies slip by her if she’s focused too much on the proverbial brass ring. That kind of oversight can be the source of some great role-playing later when said oversight causes the Big Plan to fail - or causes all kinds of other problems but aids the Big Plan. At what cost success?

Initiative can apply to situations as well as entire stories, of course. A player who acts as leader in a group (pack alpha in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, for example) is probably someone who inspires the others. She must be perceptive enough to recognize each other characters for their talents and capabilities and decisive enough to utilize those talents. A player with Initiative is often one of those rare individuals who can give out orders and make them sound like suggestions (because while characters may understand the need for a chain of command, players rarely enjoy being ordered around). A Clever player may decide on the strategy before the assault, but it’s the player with Initiative who assumes command when the dust starts flying.

The differences between Cleverness and Initiative are subtle but distinct. A Clever player enjoys problem solving, but a pro-active player cares more for the results than the process. The Machiavellian world of Vampire: The Requiem and the survival-horror milieu of All Flesh Must Be Eaten reward Initiative - those with the courage to act are noticed and rewarded. Those who flinch fade away (or are devoured, in the latter case).

One of the big advantages to having Initiative-laden players around is that they will pick up on your hints and act on them. With such a player in your group, you won’t have to do much prodding to get someone to suggest investigations; the player’s Initiative will provide the motivation. Likewise, this is usually the player to whom you’ll have an NPC make a suggestion or confess a secret to - the player who will take the bait and look deeper. Oftentimes, the player does this out of a desire to find out the plot of the game, and is therefore helping said plot along by investigation (which overlaps a bit with Consciousness, of course).

A pro-active player doesn’t always concern herself with foresight, however. Throw a clue to such a player and she’ll pursue it, sometimes putting her character at risk. Such players’ characters are great stalking horses because they’re easy to lure, but don’t rely on that. If the character picks up on a clue in a way you hadn’t anticipated (an NPC is seen as dangerous rather than intriguing, for example), she may act in ways that derail your plot. Again, about the only thing you can do is be ready.

When a player makes it obvious that she will investigate any clue the Storyteller provides, the temptation arises to exploit that tendency mercilessly and lead the character into all kinds of bad situations. Resist the temptation…to do it too much. Using Initiative as a plot hook works once or twice, but after the fifth time that peeking around a corner after a shadow has resulted in sudden ambush, the character will stop peeking (and her character will stop picking up your cues). Then, you’ve lost a pro-active player, and that definitely is a loss.

Do you take the Initiative?

• Are you the official or unofficial leader of your group?

• Does your character description include words like “curious” and “inquisitive”?

• Do you take notes?

• Does your character often try to stir up trouble for the ruling classes?

• Have you ever uttered a phrase like “Viva la Revalución!” in character?

• Has the Storyteller ever given you OOC information because she knew you’d do the right thing with it?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you’re probably quite pro-active.

As you can probably guess, any given gamer is capable of being a Beautiful Player, given time, guidance, and the right circumstances. The “example” players above fit any number of players I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the years, and of course a player’s comparative “stats” can vary greatly from game to game. Also, some stats are more important in some games that in others (you can be as Clever as you like in Paranoia, but you aren’t getting any breaks!).

The overriding theme here, as you may have noticed, is for players to be aware of the game and the group around them. The best moments in gaming, as any “vet” will tell you, are when the group functions well together, and the players leave feeling they all accomplished something. It’s at moments like that when you have not a group of Beautiful Players, but a Beautiful Group of Players.

What Makes a Beautiful Player? (Part 3)

2009-07-20T16:06:00.002-04:00

Appearance, or What? I’m Only Three Hours Early!

I’ve long been plagued by non-punctual gamers. I had given it up as a regrettable, if necessary corollary to gaming: people just can get to the game on time. It always starts an hour later than the “official” start time.

Then, I moved to Cleveland, and started a new gaming group. The first few times we met, I tried to make it clear that because we were playing on a Tuesday (school night for some of the players) and because a couple of players had to leave at certain times (work, curfew, etc.) I wanted people there by six. That didn’t seem to help much; I had a couple of problem players who showed up a half hour late consistently. By the third week, I was annoyed, so I took them aside and explained that I was serious about running this game and that if they were serious about playing in it, they would show up on time or at least call if they couldn’t.

They showed up early from then on. I love it when people pay attention.

Appearance has nothing to do with how a gamer looks (mostly, it doesn’t, but we’ll get to that). It has to do with putting in an appearance. An Apparent player shows up on time, with all the necessary accouterments: his/her notebook, a pencil (they disappear real quick around my place), and dice in hand, ready to play. It all goes back to the gaming group being a commitment, and respecting that.

Are there acceptable reasons to be late or to miss a game? Of course, and even the most Apparent player will run afoul of these things sometimes. However, whereas a non-Apparent player won’t call, or waits until the last possible minute to do so, an Apparent player calls as soon as a crisis emerges, so that the Storyteller can compensate. An Apparent player realizes that the Storyteller should never have to play a player’s character because the player didn’t show and the character is too important to sideline. I commonly cancel games or run one-shots instead of the planned game because of one last-minute no-show, just because the missing character was that important to the plot. I have also given characters fates far worse than they deserved because their players weren’t there to save them. (Vengeful, yes, but it’s therapeutic, and even death’s reversible in some games.)

So, showing up, as Minnie Driver says in Grosse Point Blank, is a good start. But there’s more to the Apparent player than simple physical presence. The Apparent player considers the feelings and preferences of the group and tries to work within them.

For example: I hate cigarettes. Anyone who knows me also knows that I’m a total psycho about smokers. I have bad habits, too, and I do unhealthy things to my body, but the difference is that what I do won’t give anybody else health problems. You may smoke, but if even one gamer in your group doesn’t, you should respect her wishes. It is not disrespectful or inconsiderate for a non-smoker to ask a smoker to go elsewhere to indulge; it is inconsiderate for the smoker to do so.

That in mind, the Apparent player does not show up smoking and expect to be let in, if the rules of the house prohibit indoor smoking. Players who smoke should also wait until their characters are not immediately involved in the action or until a break in the game to trot outside to smoke. And, once outside, they should pick up their leavings and throw them away, not leave butts all over the place. Eww.

The Apparent player also knows how to abide by house rules. By “house rules” I don’t mean rules of the game (though that’s a consideration, too) but literal rules of the house. If the Storyteller doesn’t want the player drinking alcohol during the game, the players need to abide by that. If there are players in the group who are underage, this shouldn’t even be an issue. This principle also applies to other mind-altering substances; the Apparent player not only shows up on time for games, but shows up sober, or at least able to function. I knew a fellow who routinely showed up to our games high; I didn't notice until he mentioned it. It's great if you can do that. I can't, I'm a total lightweight, so I don't alter my brain chemistry with anything but coffee during games.

Apparent players must also be aware of their general appearance. I’m not referring to physical beauty or attractiveness, of course. By appearance I mean silly things like hygiene. One of the unpleasant stereotypes about gamers is that they are plump men who don’t bathe and wear the same clothes day in and day out. The Apparent player breaks that stereotype over his knee. Show up for games clean, and using the proper tools of personal cleanliness (toothbrush, deodorant and so forth. And before the female gamers reading this get too smug, I’ll gently mention that the only instance in which I actually had to speak to a player about this involved a female player. I won’t get into detail, but you can probably figure it out).

On the subject of physical appearance, one last note should be made. A lot of younger gamers live with their families, and that might mean that gaming night is held in mom’s basement under her good graces. I was fortunate in that I have parents who didn’t regard gaming as a demonic act and were kind enough to buy us pizza or cook for us quite a lot. However, the Apparent player understands that sometimes parents get freaked out easily and that means that weirdness sometimes needs to get curbed. That can mean not dressing like a total gothed-out freak, going easy on the makeup, turning a piercing so it isn’t visible, and choosing one’s T-shirt with care. It can also mean being careful with language, both in terms of profanity and subject matter. Rant all you want about how folks can be closed-minded and how they don’t understand about gaming but in the end, respect the people to whom the house belongs and try not to offend them. (This is especially true if they happen to be your parents!)

Sometimes, players get a little too zealous. This drives them to show up early (anything more than about 20 to 30 minutes before the established time should merit a phone call), or bring guests along to play or watch.

Some Storytellers might have issues with uninvited guests showing up. I don’t mind so much as long as they abide by my rule for “gaming voyeurs” - which is, simply put, “Stay out of the way and shut up.” If you want to bring a friend along to the game to watch, ask them to bring a book or some homework, in case they get bored. Make sure they understand that you won’t be able to explain everything to them right then, as you’ll be involved in the game. You should probably make sure that the Storyteller doesn’t have a problem with an audience, if for no other reason than it might require an extra chair.

If, however, you want to bring a friend and actually have them play in the game, you must clear it with the Storyteller first. Some games are loose enough to allow a character to float in and out in a single session without wrecking the game’s rhythm too much. Much of the time, however, it’s difficult to suddenly introduce a new character without either leaving the new character largely out of the action or forcing him into it. Neither of these options are good starts to gaming.

If you’ve got a friend who’s interested in gaming but doesn’t wish to or is unable to join an existing group, talk to the Storyteller about running a one-shot or a spin off of your current chronicle. Do not bring someone along and say “We made a character this afternoon. My friend can play, right?” I’ve been put on the spot like this and I’ve turned down such requests. Remember, gaming is communistic, and the Storyteller has to make the decision that works best for the group as a whole. If you make those decisions easier for the Storyteller by giving him/her warning about guests, you’re making a good Appearance.

By the same token, stay off the phone during games. If you’re having family or relationship troubles, don’t try to work them out over the phone during a gaming session. If it’s that serious, apologize to the Storyteller and the group and leave. But don’t put the entire game on hold while the group waits for you to sort things out with your girlfriend. That’s inconsiderate (of both you and her), and it puts the Storyteller in the uncomfortable position of having to either listen to the arguments or wait for them to end.

How’s your Appearance?

• Do you show up twenty minutes early for all games and pass the time chatting with the Storyteller about the ongoing chronicle?

• Have you ever broken a date because it conflicted with a game?

• Have you ever voluntarily missed a concert, play, or other one-time-only event to make a game?

• Do you take notes?

• If other players are short on pizza money, do you cover because “it’ll all equal out sooner or later”?

• Have most of your friends “guest-starred” in the game you’re playing in?

If you answered affirmatively to any or all of these questions, it’s apparent that you’re Apparent.

What Makes a Beautiful Player? (Part 2)

2009-07-20T15:56:00.003-04:00

Consciousness, or Sleeping Through the Apocalypse

Gamers love their hobby. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. It takes a certain amount of trust (read: masochism) to lovingly craft a character, place their stats with care, design a background, and then hand it over to the maniacal genius that is the GM. Enthusiasm is important. Once you’re at the game, you’re there to game, not to sleep. But there’s a lot more to Consciousness than remaining awake.

A Conscious player remains so during the entire game. She doesn’t nod off on the couch or wander into other rooms to play video games when her character’s involved in a scene. (If the Storyteller is cross-cutting between two groups of characters, of course, this is probably acceptable, but you still might want to ask.) Most especially, a conscious player does not begin chatting OOC with other players during important scenes (at least, not in the same room). This kind of behavior is rude, and belittles the time and energy the Storyteller puts into the game.

Conscious players often take notes, whether or not they are currently involved in the action. I’m of two minds about this. The strict GM in me says, “Nope, if you’re not there, you won’t remember it, so don’t be writing it down.” The Storyteller in me says, “It’s a game, Matthew. Besides, if s/he doesn’t write it down, who will? You?” I usually let it slide except in extreme cases. Besides, if players get in the habit of taking notes all the time, odds are they’ll write stuff down that they think is important. Then, I can look through their notes later (backs of character sheets are good places to take notes, and I always hold onto character sheets) and find out what they thought was important, and adjust the plotline according, if necessary.

Another hallmark of the Conscious player is staying in character, especially during interaction with other characters. Some players route all interaction through the Storyteller, even when the person to whom their characters are speaking is sitting next to them. I prefer dialogue, complete with eye contact and everything, because it’s great role-playing and it’s fun to watch. Conscious players do not drop out of character every other sentence, to quote movies or make silly jokes. To a degree, that sort of thing’s okay. After all, it’s a game, it’s a social situation, you’re here to have fun with friends, right? So what’s the big deal with making a few jokes?

The big deal is when it gets distracting and annoying. A gaming session is not a party; it’s a gaming session. If you’d rather watch a movie, invite the group to your place to do that sometime. But don’t start quoting during an intense scene and don’t slip out of character to make dumb jokes when the dialog train is starting to chug (and by the way, I've seen way, way too many GMs burst in on that dialog train with a setting detail or a correction - don't. Consciousness applies to the GM, too).

An example of what a Conscious player wouldn’t do: I was running Chill a few (well, a lot) of years ago. I ran a game where the group ended up locked in a factory with a huge, spider-like beast called a chimneyrue that lives on smoke. (You can find this creature, and 66 other nasties that work incredibly well for all sorts of horror games, in GURPS Creatures of the Night by Scott Paul Maykrantz.) The thing was stalking them and they didn’t know what could hurt it (they all carried firearms, but were quite used to them not having any effect whatsoever. That’s Chill for you). The factory foreman, standing close to a vent, started babbling about “the ‘rue! The chimneyrue!” He told them to kill it, they asked how. He screamed (I didn’t really screamed, just tensed my voice. Learn to do that; screams in close quarters are bad form), “Kill it with your glack-”. He didn’t finish the sentence because the chimneyrue had crept up through the vent and put one of its claws through his stomach. He meant to say “guns”, of course.

One of the players, however, picked up the cue and finished “glack” with “enspiel!” (Get it? Glockenspiel?) Everybody cracked up. I could have killed him. Until then, everybody was tense, a little shook up, picturing the smoky, darkened factory, the foreman’s sweaty face and darting eyes as he raved…and with that one little joke, it all fell apart. I was pissed. The fact that the joke was funny as hell isn’t the point. A large part of being a Conscious player is being conscientious, and that means not mucking with the Storyteller’s moments.

Staying in character in the face of adversity, including the opportunity to make your fellow players laugh, is a hard task. I appreciate that (and it’s not like I’ve never broken character to lighten things up, either). However, try to have some sense of tact.

On that subject, a Conscious player knows what subjects to avoid. In my essay entitled "When Things Go Horribly Wrong," (which I haven't ported over yet, but it's here for now) I mentioned a number of topics that are sensitive spots for many people (specifically, rape, molestation, drugs, pregnancy, and family member death). These things can and do happen in real life and can happen in a game as well. Understand, however, that you should no more use these topics for their reactionary value that you should slap a player in the face to get a reaction. This goes for players as well - if you know that a fellow players has issues with a topic, avoid them. If you don’t know and someone brings it to your attention, respect that. If you have issues with a given topic, tell the Storyteller as soon as it becomes a problem. Communication is key: be Conscious of that fact.

Another common practice of the Conscious player is helping the Storyteller out. Some players feel that they are going the extra mile by taking actions which result in problems for their characters (or the entire group) and saying, with a pained expression, “But it’s what my character would do.” To that I usually respond, “Nah. It’s what your character might do.”

Think back to the last choice you had to make, important or not. Was there only one decision you could have made, or could have chosen to do several different things for different reasons? People are unpredictable, and you won’t catch any flak from the Storyteller for finding a way to include yourself in the proceedings, even if doesn’t seem strictly in line with your character’s concept at first blush.

Yet another example: I played in a game of Hunter: The Reckoning that probably should have been more structured. The Storyteller really hadn’t considered how he was going to get all of the characters into the action, just assuming that we’d fall into place somehow. That’s a dangerous assumption. One of the characters remained alone at her apartment for most of the game, out of the action, because her player didn’t feel it was “in character” for her to follow the messages she was getting and drive to where the action was. In this instance, while the Storyteller certainly could have planned things a bit better (especially considering he had seven players who weren’t connected in any way, which is a bit much), the player should have been more Conscious. (She did, eventually, decide that the messages and hints drove her to distraction enough that she had to get in her car and drive “wherever”, just to clear her head. That’s a great way to get characters involved, by the way).

Being a Conscious player doesn’t mean you make choices that are totally opposed to your character’s concept simply to further the plot. It means that you don’t go out of your way to make trouble simply because it’s “in character”. It’s a fine line, and a certain amount of self-limitation in the name of concept is a good thing, but at the same time, if the game is obviously straining because people are drifting apart, you might consider taking another course of action that your normally wouldn’t, if only to give the Storyteller a break. (Storytellers, again, reward this behavior.)

The last trait of a Conscious player is the most obvious. They pay attention. That means no sleeping, no chatting, no reading or drifting off to La-La Land while their character is ostensibly present during a scene. No damn laptops at the table, either, or at least keep them closed unless you're using them right at that moment. If you suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, take your medication. If you’re easily distracted by books, write on a clipboard and keep the books out of arm’s reach. Take notes - it’ll give you something to do with your hands, but keep you in the moment (beware of doodling, though). If you find yourself growing tired, sit up straight, drink a can of pop (soda, to all you non-Ohioans), ask the Storyteller for a stretch-break, whatever. If you find you really can’t remain awake or Conscious anymore, ask the Storyteller to sideline your character (or play him/her as an NPC, which is something I refuse to do) and go home. The other players will find your absence preferable to your unConscious presence.

Are you a Conscious Player?

• Do you write down everyone’s characters names and descriptions, so that you’ll remember when you speak to them in character?
• Do you take notes?
• Have you ever cried in character?
• At 4 AM, when the Storyteller is yawning and getting ready to call it quits, do you encourage “making this an all-nighter so we can get to the bottom of this”?
• Have you ever written down a thought or joke that was funny as hell, but would have completely ruined the moment?
• Have you ever suggested making a spouse, sibling, or good friend character to one of the other player’s characters?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you’re probably Conscious.

What Makes a Beautiful Player? (Part 1)

2009-07-20T15:47:00.003-04:00

(I originally posted this essay on my website back in 2000 sometime. I like it, though; I think it's one of my better ones, and so I'm starting my transfer-of-essays with this one. It's long, though, so it's in two parts. I've done a little bit of editing, but the content is the same.)

Much of my time and energy goes into being a Storyteller, but not a player. As I’ve mentioned in other essays, it’s task that’s stuck with me for years, and a hat (black, natch) that I wear well. When it comes to role-playing, I prefer, hands down, to be in the proverbial driver’s seat.

But then, it’s nice to get to play, too. Focusing on one character is great, rather than trying to wrangle a bunch of supporting cast. It’s nice to try to decide where to spend experience points, to try to figure out a Storyteller’s next move (dangerous on the best of days).

All of which got me thinking about what makes a good player. The knee-jerk response is “creativity”, but frankly, that doesn’t say a whole lot. After all, a painter can be creative and not be able to role-play his way out of a paper bag. So, to define a “good” player, we need to be a bit more specific. I’ve divided the traits of a perfect gamer into four categories. We could call them Attributes, or Characteristics, or Basic Abilities...

Ahem. The four traits (Traits works, too!) are Cleverness, Consciousness, Appearance (it’s not what you think) and Initiative.

Cleverness, or Oof! No Illusory Walls Here!

We can’t all be geniuses. We all try to come up with witty one-liners, great dialogue, and combat tactics so incredibly simple-yet-effective that William Wallace would smack his forehead and said “Ach!” But it ain’t always so. Some players, however, have minds like steel traps. They seize upon whatever crisis or problem you present, looking for a way to solve it.

A Clever player knows the spirit of the rules, as well as the letter. If a tactic or twist on a rule is theoretically possible but either unlikely, totally out of character, or completely outside of the game’s tone, a clever player will ignore it and think of something else. However, a clever player knows the rules. In fact, it’s the clever ones who say to you, “Hey, I had an idea for a new spell/Gift/Discipline/skill/whatever that my character could learn or create. How do this system look for it?” A marginally clever player will drop the idea, but not bother with the system (which is fine; it gives you free reign to tweak without stepping on anybody’s creative-toes). A very clever player will give you the system and say, “And I know how to work it into the plotline that we’ve got going!”

Clever players are observant, too. They ask questions. Lots of them. They ask for names for any NPC they meet, as well as descriptions. It can get annoying sometimes. Never, ever let it get to you. The clever player asks for informational purposes, not to tax your Storytelling ability. Answer their questions, and be patient.

Tactics are the clever player’s bread and butter. Some clever players enjoy chess or go or other strategy-based games, and enjoy applying that kind of logic to the problems presented in role-playing games. That’s fine. Throw them subtle clues, literary allusions, deviant behaviors in NPCs, and other puzzles. They’ll miss some of them, but that’s why you give them more than one clue. Watch which clue a player picks up on - it’ll give you some ideas as to how the player’s mind works.

Dangers of the Clever Player

Well, the first one should be obvious. Clever folks can sometimes skip to step C without going through A and B. And that can be annoying as hell, if the Storyteller hasn’t thought through to C yet. The only thing the Storyteller can do is try to get a feel for how his/her players think, and try to step one step ahead of them. (Hint: If you’re making it up as you go along, they can’t outfox you. You can, however, outfox yourself, which is fun.) Don’t - repeat, don’t - get annoyed and penalize players who think of ways out of or around your insidious little traps that you hadn’t considered. Reward that behavior. That’s good; it tests your abilities and makes them feel like a million bucks.

Clever players can be excitable, and sometimes they blurt out their assumptions or conclusions even when their characters aren’t present. An example: I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game wherein one of the characters (Jack), weakened from hunger and stressed beyond belief, knocked on the apartment door of one of the other characters (Nova). Nova’s servant (a ghoul, which means still mostly human) opened the door and Jack immediately flew into a hunger frenzy, pounced on the ghoul, and started drinking. Nova pulled him off, but not before he’d drained most of the blood from the ghoul’s body. Nova’s player (and Nova herself) wasn’t really cognizant of what was involved in creating another vampire, she only knew that her friend was dying, so fed him some blood to try and revive him (this, by the way, is how you create another vampire: drain someone of blood, then feed them some of yours).

Meanwhile, on the other end of the couch, two Clever Players were whispering “Aw, shit, she’s going to end up turning him into a vampire.” I docked them both a point of Willpower. I let them off that light because nobody heard them. If Nova had known that was going to happen, she might have acted differently - or not. But she didn’t, and neither did Nova’s player, and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

Note, by the way, that this isn't about keeping secrets from your players. But dammit, you only get one chance to learn that Luke is Darth Vader's son (too soon?). After that, you might appreciate the moment when you see it, but you can't really get surprised by it, and that "gasp!" moment is fun. Don't take it away from other players.

If you get a reference or a clue that no one else does - and your character has no way of saying anything - don’t give it away OOC. Sit there and squirm. Pass a note to the Storyteller if you must. I’ve actually had people leave the room because it was too painful to watch other players struggling with a riddle they’d figured out ten minutes ago. Do whatever you need to do, but don’t give away information your character doesn’t have.

Another problem that clever players tend to have is remembering that the game is about role-playing, not problem-solving. A clever player’s character may be dumb as a box of rocks, but that player still retains her intellect and she forgets to curb it. I recommend not playing characters that you have to dumb down - it’s hard to role-play, and I don’t find it to be a lot of fun. If you’re capable of playing a less-than-bright character, however, and you’d be entertained by that sort of thing, go on ahead. Just don’t be surprised if the Storyteller asks for Intelligence rolls to see if your character can come to the same conclusions you can. (The corollary to this, of course, is not to player characters that are too much smarter than you, but that’s hard to gauge.)

Finally, clever players don’t always ask what they want to know. They’ve got everything pictured in their minds, so when a player asks, “How wide is the alley?” what he might really want to know is, “Do I have enough space to charge the thug and knock him over, or should I just walk up and slug him?” Often, questions aren’t nitpicking, they’re part of a logical chain of thoughts that the Storyteller isn’t privy to. So, if you aren’t really sure how wide a city alley is (24 paces in Cleveland. I checked), ask why the player wants to know.

Are You a Clever Player?

• Does your Storyteller pause between details during descriptions to see if you’ve got anything to ask?
• Do you take notes?
• Within ten seconds of meeting an NPC, do you have her class/clan/tribe/tradition/race/whatever pegged?
• When your Storyteller drops a subtle clue and your character isn’t there to hear it, do you have to bury your face in a pillow and scream?
• Does your Storyteller often glare at you and hold up a gag or roll of duct tape?
• Does your group look to you for rules clarifications more often than the Storyteller?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, chances are you’re a Clever Player.

I'm on the Internet!

2009-07-17T14:24:00.001-04:00

I mean, you knew that. But I got interviewed or podcasted or whatever the hell it's called over here at Atomic Array. Go check it out!

Origins 2009 - A GM's Report Card, Pt. 4

2009-07-02T09:41:00.006-04:00

And now, the exciting conclusion.

So, Friday night, we sang, other people danced, we went to bed. Saturday, we woke up, and headed downstairs for more gaming!

Saturday morning, my 10AM game was Edge of Midnight, the second of the games that I ran. I've been running a chronicle of this particular game since December 2008, and I'm really enjoying it. Partly, that's because I've run little else than World of Darkness games for a long time and it's nice to keep the dark but play with a new setting and genre (noir), and partly that's because Edge of Midnight is just an awesome game and it's a hell of a lot of fun. So getting some new people to play it was a good plan, I thought.

The scenario was a murder mystery. Basically, prominent citizen dies at a club, and the PCs have until sunset to figure it out or else the victim's fans are going to riot. Oh, and the victim (and said fans) are gaunts, and a riot would tear the city apart. The characters got a chance to play with magic, investigation, learn about the city of Terminus (much like New Orleans, which is where my ongoing chronicle is set, too) and generally a good time was had by all. If I have one regret, it's that I didn't find a way to work in a more involved fight, but I hadn't set up the scenario to include combat and I didn't want it to feel forced (no orcs, thanks). I think the players dug it, though.

Following the game, Michelle and I headed to the dealer's room again. I scooped up a copy of Ars Magica, Fourth Edition for all of four bucks, and I finally bit the bullet and bought Unhallowed Metropolis. I've played UnMet a couple of times, I've really enjoyed it, and it's the sort of game I should own. And I've got players that I think would really get into it.

I also talked with Filamena Young and her husband, and got a chance to meet their delightful little girl, Tina (sadly, my family had already left by that point, so we couldn't see the singularity of cuteness that would occur if Teagan and Tina got together - maybe next year). Too brief a meeting, but I had a 6PM game to get to.

And that game was...Hollow Earth Expedition. Last tabletop game of the con, and the one I had the highest hopes for.

See, Hollow Earth Expedition is a pulp game, but unlike Spirit of the Century, it gives you a very specific setting - the Earth is hollow (bet you figured that, yeah?) and there are natives, dinosaurs, Amazons, the whole bit. I bought and read the game last year following GenCon, and I've been very keen to play it ever since. This particular game had a blurb that involved dinosaurs and capturing a tar pit. Awesome.

Warning sign right off: The GM hadn't made characters for the scenario, but had just photocopied the pre-gens from the book, put them in plastic sheets (OK, this is maybe just me, but I think it's cheap when players can't at least keep character sheets from con games), and handed us a great big stack. I picked on at random (the Big Game Hunter), and we started out on our airship in Hollow Earth.

Yep, just like that. No attempt at backstory or group cohesion. No explanation for why these characters were together. Just, here we are, on our airship, and then the air pirates attacked.

Now, at this point it's pretty clear we've into beer-n-pretzels, and that's disappointing, but OK. I co-opt Jonathan's Hyde's character from Jumanji to inform my portrayal of Col. Stanley Admunson (I promplty get a style point for naming my character, which encourages everyone else to do the same) and we get down to the business of killing air pirates. We win, but our ship is damaged badly, so the Fortune Hunter (played by a 16-year-old boy, who seems to have the emotional maturity of, say, 13) puts the ship down. The rest of us don parachutes and bail the heck out.

Splitting the party is fine; I do it all the time. But five to one isn't a split I like, because it puts too much focus on one dude, and that's especially true if the one dude is being...well, a fishmalk. So while the five of us are fighting a T-Rex, he's met a tribe of crazy Amazons (led by a woman named Sinestra) and patching the hole in the blimp with a bag of monkeys.

Things, clearly, are getting out of hand.

Eventually, we meet up with the other tribe of Amazons (at which point the GM makes it a point to tell us that some Amazons remove one breast, but not these Amazons...sigh). The gamer OMG GIRLZ is getting a little thick, especially for Michelle. I remind the 16-year-old that there is, indeed, a woman present and maybe he should be quite so juvenile, but his dad (also playing) is encouraging it a bit. We keep things on track, more or less, fix our blimp and land in New York City with a crew of Amazons (this is a shift from the GM's original intent, but it was the ending we liked).

Now, a little GMing theory: If you've reached the end, stop. We landed in NYC, the blimp burst through the subway tunnels, we're given applause and fame, awesome. That's the end of the story. Except, just then, not only did the Amazons reveal themselves to be the bad Amazons, but the freaking T-Rex jumped out of the hole and attacked. It had been tracking us. From the ground.

GMs, not every game has to end in a fight, even at a con. Here, watch this episode of Dexter's Laboratory.

Note that when DD runs the game, she keeps things exciting, she pays attention to what the players want for their characters, and she doesn't waste words or events? That's good GMing. (Yeah, she needs to learn the rules, but that'll come in time.)

Thoughts on the game: Pre-gens, cookie-cutter story, villains that show up once and never again (what happened to those ors, er, pirates?), gratuitous breast references, and an overdone ending scene? Man, it could have been so much cooler. My grade: D+

After that, I had to rush downstairs to play Rising! Only I didn't really have to rush, because the 10PM game didn't have any players but me. So I arranged to play in the 11PM game, which was a VIP event (and turned out to be all kinds of fun), went back upstairs for a while to watch Michelle sing karaoke. I didn't get to sing; the rotation was insane at that point.

Then, back downstairs for Rising. The VIP event involved them handcuffing us, blindfolding us, and letting us fight our way out of the lab that was doing experiments on us. They even took our pictures and did up little dossiers (apparently, my previous occupation was "cartoonist", which is funny if you've ever seen me try to draw). I played an engineer, which means I got to solve puzzles, and I discovered, now having played all four classes, that I'm happiest with Marksman. Engineer's fun, but I don't really solve puzzles under pressure all that well. Hunter isn't bad, but I like guns. Doctor's OK, but then you can't fight as well and you rely on other folks for protection. Nah, gimme guns.

Thoughts on the game: Rising isn't strictly an RPG. It's a LASH (Live Action Survival Horror), and mostly you don't really play a role as much as play yourself with some weird skills and rules with zombies trying to eat you. That said, Zombie Buddy Productions went the extra mile on the game, so RPG or not, it was bloody awesome. My grade: A

So the scenario ended, I survived, got my swag bag (awesome), and headed the heck to bed.

Sunday: We got up, got packed, took our stuff downstairs, and hit the dealer's room one last time. We (Michelle and I) had originally been scheduled for a game of Eclipse Phase, but that got canceled, and our other choice just didn't happen. So we wandered a bit, played some demos, did some more shopping. I picked up a copy of Agone for $2 (even if it sucks, that's less than a cup of coffee some places) and a copy of Trail of Chthulu, which I'm informed doesn't suck. That brings the total of new RPGs to five; that sounds good. Also bought a cool board game called Gemlok, which Heather enjoyed and wanted to grab.

All in all, lots of fun this year at Origins. Definitely got me in the mood to start serious essay writing about GMing again, so I'll get right on that.

Meantime, next con is GenCon, even if only overnight. We'll see how the grades fall out there.

Origins 2009 - A GM's Report Card, Part 3

2009-07-01T14:00:00.005-04:00

Right, moving on. Friday!

Friday, we got up and grabbed some breakfast. Michelle and I had a 10AM game of 7th Sea to play.

Now, I'd never played 7th Sea before, and I don't own a copy. I know about the game in a vague sort of way; it's about swashbuckling and sailing and pirates and Musketeers and that sort of thing. Since several of my other games this year leaned toward pulp, I figured this wasn't too far off the mark.

Promising start! The GM was there before we were, had character sheets and drama dice spread out, had his screen and his books and whatnot set up. Michelle and I grabbed characters. I always grab a character at random for con games, if I can. That forces me away from playing to my usual standbys (whatever those are - jumpy/flippy characters, going by my chargen project) and makes me flex my improv muscles a bit. This time, I got Felix. We were all Musketeer-types, fighting on the side of the Emperor of Montaigne (which is "France" in the same way that "Rokugan" in Legend of the Five Rings is "Japan," I suppose). Felix was a gun-fighter, in a setting where guns aren't terribly accurate and have one usuable shot before you have to spend an hour reloading them. And that's fine; some gun-fu is never inappropriate.

The rest of the players showed up and picked characters, and we got our set-up: There's an assassin on a boat coming from "England," we need to intercept it and stop him. That means getting to the coast and getting a ship. Most of the scenario was the "getting to the coast" part, and that wasn't bad, though I do think that the GM could benefit from considering Chekov's Gun a bit. That is, if you see a gun on the mantle in Act One, it needs to go off in Act Three. Our "Act One" was taking horses to the river and then sailing up the river to the coast, and we got jumped by some highwaymen.

While I was happy to have a chance to try out the combat system, I had two problems with this set-up. First, they highwaymen fought like orcs.

OK, a slight digression here. One thing that annoys me in RPGs is when the bad guys fight until they're all dead, even after it becomes clear that they're going to lose. That reminds me of old school Dungeons and Dragons, where the enemies were "monsters," even when they were supposedly intelligent. I once threw a DM for a loop in a D&D game by pointing my bow at the last surviving kobold or goblin or orc or spee-lunker or whatever we were fighting and yelling "Surrender!" See, my character didn't see the monster as just a vehicle for XP, and this being, y'know, a role-playing game, I figured I'd play the role.

And yes, I know there's a place for beer-n-pretzels gaming. That's why we have Kobolds Ate My Baby and HoL. Anyway.

So, the highwaymen didn't exactly fight to the death, but pretty close. And then it turns out that they were just...highwaymen. They weren't in on the plot, they weren't trying to stop us from finding the assassin, they had no connection to the story at large. Just a random encounter. Bad form, GM.

Well, we made it to the coast, chartered a boat (and that scene went on way too long, which wasn't entirely the GM's fault; we were making it harder than it needed to be), got out to sea, boarded the assassin's boat, and killed him pretty handily. In most systems, I find, five dudes vs. one dude means a quick fight. Which is fine, incidentally; I have no problem with the final fight of a game being not much of a fight, provided that solving the mystery or otherwise getting to the fight is satisfying. This...was kind of a foregone conclusion.

My thoughts on the game: Now, for all that, the game was actually pretty fun. I didn't find myself looking at my watch (well, I did, but because I had a game to run at 2PM and I didn't want to be late), and I enjoyed the game and the system and even the story set-up. Some of the other players spent a little too much time boozing and whoring (all together now: "If there are girls there, I wanna do them!") and ignoring the fact that, hello, there was an actual female sitting at the table, but not everyone in our little hobby has figured out that a little decorum is not a bad thing. I just wish the story had been a little tighter, and our choices would have influenced said story a little more. My grade: B-

And then, zoooom! Across the hall to run Geist: The Sin-Eaters. Now, Geist is the next World of Darkness game from good old White Wolf. They weren't actually at the convention, however, and my game was the only Geist game being run. They sent me some copies of the quickstart (which you can download here) to hand out, and I had a copy of the pdf of the book (which I'm not linking, obviously) so I could run the game.

I made up characters ahead of time, and did my usual blurb + six questions routine. The characters were all people who wound up on a bus in NYC for various reasons, and then "died" when the driver got distracted and drove them into the river. They bonded with geists, became Sin-Eaters and formed a krewe (which is not a mispelling of the word "crew," by the way). This particular story saw them investigating a warehouse in which ghosts dressed in fashions of the last 50 years were partying away, but there was no evidence that they'd actually died at that warehouse (if you know how the World of Darkness treats ghosts, that makes a little more sense).

The players got into it well, even considering the massive info-dump that's involved in playing a new World of Darkness game. I run investigation-heavy games, and the characters did well with splitting up (which allows me to cross-cut, which allows players to get food or do potty breaks without wasting too much game time) and using their powers in interesting ways. They tracked down the blood bather who was killing lots of people every decade and took her down; again, it's not about the final fight, it's about getting to that fight.

I'm not grading myself, but I'm happy with the way the game went. There are some tweaks I'd make if I run it again, but mostly just so the story flows a little better.

Following Geist, Michelle and I headed to the Big Bar on Two and sang karaoke a bit. I didn't do anything challenging; "Zoot Suit Riot" and "Fortunate Son," both of which I'm familiar with and I sound pretty good doing, I think. I did, however, come to a conclusion:

If you are putting in your slip for karaoke, and you think "Turn the Page" is a good song? You are already drunk, and should not be allowed to make decisions.

Conclusion coming soon.

Origins 2009 - A GM's Report Card, Pt. 2

2009-06-30T15:06:00.000-04:00

So, following Dread, we went to bed. (I am not going to continue rhyming, I swear.) Sleep happened, then waking up, then coffee, then Thursday.

The day doesn't officially start until there's coffee, y'know. Which means some days don't start until noon.

Before the first game of the day, which wasn't until 1PM, Heather and the kids and I walked over to the North Market for foodstuff, including Jeni's ice cream. Now, if you've never had it, and you've been in Columbus, you're missing out. Go get some next time. The market is about a two minute walk from the convention center, and you can get yummy brats, there, too.

Anyway, following lunch, we headed back for a game of Aces & Eights. It's a Western game, and I've not really played many of those, beyond Deadlands, which is a different sort of animal. I do like Western as a genre, though, so I figured that the game (which won an Origins award last year for best RPG) was worth a look. Beyond the genre, however, I knew very little about it. Having now played it, however, I have a few things to say, so let's consider both the game itself and this particular game.

The game itself is, as the kids say, crunchy. That means the rules are very dense. Where that really got driven home to me was in combat. It's not the turn-based thing that most of us are used to. Instead, you act in an order based on your Speed, and depending on what you're doing you'll be moving faster or slower than other folks. Drawing a gun takes some time, firing it takes some time, and so on. And every increment of time is one tenth of a second.

On the one hand, for a gunfight, I get the appeal. Coupled with the (high) lethality of the system (getting shot is likely to kill your character), the combat system makes for a pretty darned good simulation of what a gunfight might be like. Appropriate for the genre, methinks.

On the other hand, it takes freaking forever. I think that with a group that knew the rules and enjoyed them, it would move faster and probably be pretty cool. It's a crunchier system than I usually enjoy, but I'd play it again...just not with this GM.

Which brings me to talking about this session of Aces & Eights. The GM hadn't made any characters at all. He told people they could bring their own (which I personally think is a lousy idea on its face), didn't even look at them, and then handed out pre-gens to the rest of us. Except the pre-gens he handed out weren't meant to be played, they were stock NPCs. And that means that, quite apart from any mythical issues of "balance," they were useless in the scenario (which, by the way, was basically "this old guy wants to hire you as cowboys, so you gotta go prove yourself"). The character I played was conceptually OK, but he had no traits that made him useful except a decent Riding score. A high Speed rating (which isn't good, you want that trait low), which meant in combat other characters would act twice for every action I could manage. Oh, and there were eight players.

Thoughts on the game: This game failed for me not because the game itself was bad, but because the GM was careless. The scenario was boring, the characters were cardboard cutouts, and there wasn't even really any attention to bringing out the flavor of the Western genre. I heard later about players who'd played with this GM asking for their money back; I don't do that, because, y'know, caveat emptor. My grade: F

Following Aces & Eights, we had a break in which we tooled around the dealer's room. There were some noticeably missing booths - no Wizards of the Coast (which I really don't care about, personally, and as I recall they weren't there last year, either) but also no White Wolf, which was weird for me. The dealer's room felt a lot emptier than in past years, though from what I heard, attendance for painting minis was way up, so maybe the attendance numbers weren't as bad as some people are saying? I don't know. Ultimately, not a subject I have any real data on.

As we toured the dealer's room, we found the booth for Bucephalus Games. I wasn't familiar with these folks, but I'm always looking for new and interesting board games, both because Heather and I like them (she's not a role-player, so games we can play together are nice) and because it's good to find games I can play with my students. We discovered, first, that their booth was adorned with these horrible purple...well, I'll just post a picture.

Teagan just had to have one. I love my daughter. Sadly, they didn't actually have the Lab Rats game available; the tell me September.

Another stop in the dealer's room was at Geek Chic's display of gaming tables. They're not all that expensive, and since my dining room table is old and getting ready to collapse, we may actually get one of these puppies soon. Heather was just as enthused as I was. I love my wife.

Now, on the subject of shopping for RPGs, here's something I've learned about myself. Rather, something I've rediscovered recently, as I think I've always known it. I really love buying new games. I love reading new games, and I love running new games. But I don't have to run the games to get the pleasure of reading them (and making characters; if you haven't, maybe have a look at my ongoing character creation project). So last GenCon, I decided that I would start buying new games at cons again, and not sweat whether I'd ever run them. And that worked out well, as without that attitude, I'd have missed out on such awesome games as Edge of Midnight and Spirit of the Century (but more on those later).

So while wandering the dealer's hall, I came across the booth for Khepera Games. I'd heard about this Hellas game a bit, and had people recommend it to me as something that I'd enjoy. So I talked to one of the designers, and he was very friendly and very enthused about his game. I wound up buying it, because dangit, it looked awesome. What's funny is that I didn't really notice the space opera bits of the game until I started reading it, but I was so hung up on the dynastic aspects (that is, over the course of a chronicle, your initial character will die and pass along what he's accrued to a new character) that the sci-fi didn't really sink in. I'm looking forward to reading it more in-depth.

Anyway, we grabbed dinner, and then it was time for Spirit of the Century. Oh, baby.

Now, I'd been looking forward this. I read Spirit of the Century a few months back, and made a character just recently. I knew that this game was a Martian Chronicles kind of thing, and I figured we wouldn't be using the usual method of character creation (which I did use for my chargen project; go have a look), but I was very keen to try out the Aspects system. I'm familiar with it from playing Dogs in the Vineyard; basically, if your character has the "Quick Healer" aspect, and it applies to the situation at hand, you get a bonus. Spirit of the Century takes this in a different direction; if your Aspect would compel you to act contrary to your best interests, the GM can offer you a Fate chip to do so and you have to pay a chip to act differently. I love systems that reward flawed characters, so I was jazzed about this. I was not disappointed.

I played a green Martian, the last of his kind, his family and people slaughtered by the evil Emperor Xang. The other PCs were likewise rebels, part of a ragtag band hunting down the Emperor in this novel, The Swords of Mars. My character wound up heroically sacrificing himself, but taking Xang with him, and the group restored Mars to its rightful Princess while unleashing the power of the Elders, turning the Sea of Tranquility into a real sea.

Bloody awesome. Best line of dialog, for my money: During a fight on an Imperial airship (which we totally owned through superior tactics), my character goes to destroy the ship, sending it to the bottom of a canal. One of the other characters talks me out of it, since we can use the ship in our struggle.

Him: "Stop, Throk! Think of all we've done for Mars!"
Me: "Think of what Mars has done to me!"

I love angst.

Thoughts on the game: There is no substitute for a well-crafted story. This GM knew the genre he wanted, he fashioned the characters appropriately, he responded to our suggestions and desires for the story, and he didn't ever, ever work against us just to keep things from being "too easy." The result? I remember that game vividly. I could see Xang being crushed in the gears of the big machine, with Throk (my character) hanging on with him, willing to die in order to free Mars and avenge his people. My grade: A

By the time that game wound up, it was after midnight, and so sleep was in the offing.

Origins 2009 - A GM's Report Card, Pt. 1

2009-06-30T10:11:00.000-04:00

I love conventions. They just allow me to revel in a lot of the things about this hobby that I really cherish, namely: Playing new games, meeting new people, and drinking too much Mountain Dew.

The first con I attended was Tol-Con, back in Toledo, and I couldn't tell you what year that was. Tol-Con wasn't the sort of con that attracted people from all around the country. It was presented by Mind Games, my FLGS in Toledo (which I've learned has closed, balls), and took place at the Scott Park Campus of the University of Toledo. I ran Marvel Superheroes there for a group of strangers, and it was there that I first saw someone first take a character that someone else had created and really make it his own. It was also at Tol-Con (though not that year) that I saw how horrible even a game that I loved could become with a careless GM. Pay attention to that note, incidentally, we're going to come back to it.

Tol-Con declined over the years; last time I went, it was just a one-day deal and I forget where it was. I moved around, I wound up in Cleveland, and I realized, hey, I have some money saved up, I'm not living check to check anymore, maybe we could hit a con this summer? I found MarCon, a convention over Memorial Day weekend in Columbus. Bigger than Tol-Con ever was, but not as big as the "important" industry cons like GenCon or Origins. I went that first year, and I had a great time. Lots of people in a hotel room, some really awesome games, and once again, the lesson driven home that a careless GM can really mess up a good game.

That was May of 2001, and this (2009) was the first year since that I've missed MarCon. Financial issues, nothing more, I'll be back next year. But since that first year, I hit as many cons as my schedule and wallet would allow. I've done the big guys: Origins, GenCon, DragonCon, but I've also hit some smaller ones, like Arisia (which is really more medium-sized than small), Trinoc-Con (where I was a guest of honor, which was amazing) and Con on the Cob. I have my preferences; Origins remains my favorite of the big guys, gitchy registration and all, while I'm finding myself more jazzed about Con on the Cob as the summer progresses on. I've had some great experiences as cons, I've learned a lot about running and playing games, and I've met some of the most important people in my life at these weird gatherings.

It would hard to nail down exactly what aspects of GMing I've taken away from con experiences vs. the ones I've developed from the games I've hosted or run regularly, but I do know that I'm becoming more aware of careless GMing as I attend cons. You'll note that as I was discussing games earlier, I avoided saying that a "bad" GM could screw up a "good" system. Instead, I refer to a careless GM screwing up a game that I like.

As I talk about my Origins 2009 experience, I'm going to spend some time talking about the games I played in, and I'm giving those games a letter grade. I'm not grading the game itself; that's down to taste, and my taste isn't yours. I don't expect you to groove on Promethean: The Created if tales of body horror and humanism aren't your thing, and likewise, don't expect me to whoop for joy if you want me to sit down and play Dungeons and Dragons (any edition, though I might give a Monty Python-esque "yaay!" if it's 4th). But no matter what we're playing, there are some criteria that I think we should be able to agree on, especially for a con game.

For one thing, remember it's a one-shot. You don't get to follow this up. Yes, I know people run multi-part games; I don't get that, maybe it works. But if folks just show up to try a game out, or to experience an old favorite with a new GM, then make sure the plot is something that you can do in three hours of actual play (con games are often scheduled for four hours, but till you get done explaining rules and breaking for food mid-game, you're lucky to get three hours in). A lot of my con games wind up having deeper implications than what's immediately presented, but the plot itself - rescue the princess, kill the bad guy, solve the mystery, whatever - should be resolvable within the time you have.

Likewise, have a plot. Make characters for the game you're running. Don't just pull the pre-gens from the book, throw them at the players, and expect your game to work with any combination thereof (if you can do that, congrats). I typically make characters for my games, and then include six questions, Dread-style, as well as a blurb on that character to help players customize.

Anyway, with all of that in mind, let's get to the specifics! Origins, ho! And yes, there are a few pictures, but not many, because Heather had the camera and she was only there two days.

Wednesday:

We (by which I mean Andrea, Michelle, Teagan and Cael) left Wednesday morning and arrived in Columbus that afternoon. Andrea headed to registration; she was volunteering (she pretty much spent the weekend doing that, and apparently had a grand old time with it), and Michelle and I got our badges. Well, Michelle got her badge. I stood in the Special Services line waiting for someone to give me a badge. Finally some nice lady asked if anyone waiting in line had an educator's hall pass badge, which I did (in case you don't know, I'm a speech-language pathologist for an elementary school, so I get into Origins free). I got my badge, and Michelle and the kids and I went up to our hotel room. Cael needed a nap, and the rest of us just wanted to veg after the trip.

I know, nothing too exciting so far. Hang on, I'll get to gaming momentarily here.

Heather, y'see, was on GOBA, and had to wait for her father to get her car back...it's complicated. Anyway, Michelle and I had a 10PM Dread game, which we just barely made. It turned out to be not the game we'd signed up for, but whatever, it's Dread.

Here's the deal on this game, in case you don't feel like clicking the link: It's a horror game in which Jenga is the task resolution mechanic. You make a pull when your character wants to do something, but if you knock over the tower, you're out. Dead, catatonic, arrested, on vacation, whatever. Out of the game. But you never have to make the pull, you can always refuse. Characters are created via a questionnaire, which is a method I've taken to using to help flesh out one-shot and con characters.

An aside, here: If you make pre-gens for a one-shot, you know what you're getting. You know that the characters will have the requisite traits for whatever game you're running, and you don't wind up with a bunch of characters that don't have anything to contribute. Likewise, that enables you to make the game about those characters, and can we all agree that that's really the best situation?

Anyway, the way Dread works pretty much ensures that. The GM has to consider what's on that questionnaire, to work those details into the scenario. Sure, there's a plot to consider, but the real fun of Dread comes from using those characters in that situation. And since the players don't have nifty tricks or numbers to fall back, you pretty much have to roleplay like crazy.

My character, it turns out, was an assassin. Rather than go with the stereotypical cool-as-ice hitman, I decided he was a junkie who had killed one of his dealer's rivals in exchange for free junk, and just kept going from there. He'd kicked his habits, for the most part, but was still hooked on painkillers (and mixed them in with Altoids, which he'd crunch during the game). In the game, our plane crashed and we wound up landing on an island populated by zombies. We only had one fatality - me. I knocked over the tower attempting to move our huge raft toward the water, away from the zombies. But man, by the time I did, that tower must've had 30 pulls, so I don't feel any shame at knocking it down. Anyway, my charater got eaten. Nom.

Thoughts on the game: We started late, which was no one's fault, and so we kind of ran out of time and left off with the zombies chasing the survivors - not exactly great resolution. I think the GM could have made more of an effort to either push us toward the island's interior (where there were apparently some answers) or work toward some other form of resolution. That said, the game was fun, and the GM definitely worked with the details that we gave him about the characters. My grade: B- (but that's only because I've played in some spectacular Dread games, so my bar is pretty high)

That game didn't wind up until after 2AM, so after that, we went the heck to bed.