IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 11A: Into the Caverns of the Ooze Lord

At the same moment, two of the greenish, ooze-like creatures dropped from the ceiling of the chamber and landed in front of the passage. They were not as large as the creature they had just defeated, but between the two of them the entire width and much of the height of the tunnel was filled.

In some design circles, there is a tremendous amount of focus and energy expended on making encounters mechanically interesting and/or mechanically novel. While I generally agree that a game (and thus encounters) should be both mechanically interesting and varied, I also think that there’s currently way too much emphasis being placed on this.

In my experience, you don’t need special snowflake mechanics in order to have memorable encounters. Of course, this doesn’t mean that mechanical interest isn’t important. Those who go to the other extreme and act as if mechanical design, mechanical effects, and mechanical interaction aren’t significant in the design and experience of combat encounters (and other gameplay elements) are blinding themselves and needlessly crippling their toolkit as a GM.

NOVELTY STAT BLOCKS

There are several ways to generate mechanical interest. For the moment, let’s limit our discussion to mechanical novelty in stat blocks – i.e., studding the stat blocks of your adversaries with unique abilities.

This is a particular area where it seems to have become fashionable to expend way too much effort on creating these unique, special snowflake stat blocks in the name of creating “memorable” encounters. There are 4^th Edition modules, for example, where seemingly every single encounter features an orc with a different suite of special abilities.

Not only do I think this is unnecessary, I think it can actually backfire: One of the things which creates mechanical interest is mastering a mechanical interface and then learning how to interact with it. Chess doesn’t become more interesting if you only play it once and then throw it away to play a different game; it becomes less interesting because you never learn its tactical and strategic depths. Similarly, when every single orc is a special snowflake with a package of 2-3 unique abilities that aren’t shared by any other orc, you never get the satisfaction of learning about what an orc can do and then applying that knowledge.

A constant, never-ending stream of novelty doesn’t make for a richer experience. It flattens the experience.

This is why video games generally feature a suite of adversaries who each possess a unique set of traits, and over the course of the game you learn how to defeat those adversaries and become better and better at doing so. That mastery is a source of interest and a source of pleasure.

(Of course, conversely, most video games will also feature bosses or other encounters that feature special mechanics or unique abilities. I’m not saying you should never have something a little special; I’m just saying that when everything is “special”, nothing is.)

My general approach to stat blocks is basically the exact opposite of this novelty-driven excess: Not only do I get a lot of mileage out of standard goblin stat blocks, I’ll also frequently grab a goblin stat block and use it to model stuff that isn’t even a goblin.

The other big benefit, of course, is that this is so much easier. So there’s also an aspect of smart prep here: Is all the effort you’re expending to make every single stat block unique really paying off commensurately in actual play? For a multitude of reasons, I don’t think so.

SYMBIOTIC TACTICS

The other two goblins passed into the slime creatures and… stopped there. Their swords lashed out from within the protective coating of the slime, further harrying Agnarr.

Perhaps the primary reason I don’t think so, is that there are so many ways of creating novelty (including mechanical novelty) in encounters without slaving over your stat blocks. One way of achieving this is through the use of symbiotic tactics.

Basically, symbiotic tactics are what happens when you build an encounter with two different creatures and, in their combination, get something unique that neither has in isolation. The current sessions includes an extreme example of that in the form of the ooze-possessed goblins who can fight from inside the green slimes (and are, thus, shielded from harm).

Symbiotic tactics, however, don’t need to always be so extreme in order to be effective in shaking things up. A particularly common form of symbiotic tactics, for example, are mounted opponents: Wolf-riding goblins are a distinctly different encounter than either goblins by themselves or wolves by themselves.

Symbiotic tactics also often appear in other media. For example—

—the fastball special from X-Men comics.

Unfortunately, to truly enjoy symbiotic tactics it’s not enough to simply design an encounter with multiple creature types. If you design an encounter with ogres and dragons and then the ogres simply fight separately from each other, it’s not necessarily a bad encounter, but it’s not employing symbiotic tactics. In order to have symbiotic tactics the goblins have to walk into the slime creatures.

(So to speak.)

Like many GMing skills, this is something that you can practice. Grab your favorite bestiaries, flip them open to two random pages, and then think about how those two creatures could cooperate to do something neither could do on their own.

Some actual examples I just generated:

• Dyrads + Ogres. A dryad is typically limited by their tree dependency, but this dryad is worshipped by a cult of ogres who carry their tree in a holy receptacle. The dryad is thus more mobile than usual, and will entrap opponents on the edge of their at will entangle ability so that the ogres can stand safely 10 feet away and use their reach to pound on them.
• Ankheg + Homunculus. An ankheg’s homunculus will fly above the surface, acting as a spotter for ankheg’s moving undetectably below the surface of the earth. (Yes, this does beg the question of how an ankheg ends up with a homunculus. Probably an interesting story there.)
• Harpy + Bebilith. The harpy uses their captivating song to keep victims passive while the bebilith snares them in their web.

What you end up may or may not be an encounter which even makes any sense. The point here isn’t necessarily to generate usable ideas. You’re flexing a muscle, and developing your sense of how creatures with disparate abilities can work together in interesting and creative ways.

In the process, you may start finding familiar themes: For example, after the three above I generated a Red Slaad + Ettercap. That can be another “stun ‘em, then web ‘em” combination like the Harpy + Bebilith.

Those types of discoveries are useful because you’ll begin building up a toolkit of such common tactical combinations that you can improvise with during play. But for the purposes of the exercise, try to pushing past the repeats and finding something unique. For example, the ettercaps might use their webs to stick the red salads to the ceiling. When the PCs enter the cavern, the ettercaps slice their webs and the red salads drop down all around them in an unexpected ambush.

Similarly, remember that you’re not necessarily trying to get their mechanical abilities to interact with each other in a purely mechanical way. It’s OK if that gives you an interesting idea, but it’s also limiting. Think outside the mechanical box and look at how these creatures might actually interact with each other. If that takes you back towards the mechanics, great! If it doesn’t, also great!

The final note I’ll make here is that this is not something I typically spend a lot of time (or any time) prepping before play. When you’re first exploring symbiotic tactics, it may be something that you do want or need to include your prep notes. But as you gain experience (as you exercise the muscle), you’ll likely find that you can dynamically figure out how different creatures can interact with and mutually benefit each other on the battlefield during actual play. You’ll be able to just focus on designing general situations (“there are ooze-possessed goblins and slime creatures in this area”) and then discover the rest of it during play. (Which will also have the benefit of allowing your encounters to dynamically respond to the actions of your PCs without losing depth or interest.)

In New Angeles the players each take on the role of a hypercorp in a cyberpunk megalopolis that’s fraying at the edges due to the social and economic crises created by the introduction of android labor. You play cooperatively to face the emerging crises of the city, trying to prevent the city from descending into enough chaos that the federal government moves in and shuts down the party. On the other hand, each player also has a secret rival and you need to ruthlessly exploit the city in order to earn more capital than your corporate rival.

Hypothetically, this tension between collective good and personal need will create dynamic, high-stakes gameplay.

Spoilers: It doesn’t.

CHOICE vs. CALCULATION

New Angeles should be exactly the type of game I love. The basic dynamic (collectively dealing with crises while seeking personal advantage for the victory condition) is shared with Republic of Rome, for example, which is one of my personal favorites.

The fundamental problem which cripples the game is that the crises faced all boil down to simplistic calculations instead of meaningful choices. At any given time, there are two problems faced by the hypercorps:

• A demand which must be met by producing X amount of five different resources. If the demand isn’t met, threat is generated.
• An upcoming event which will generate threat unless a specific type of problem is dealt with (Orgcrime, Human First activists, outages, unrest, illness).

Ideally there would be a meaningful choice between these two problems. This would create a space for legitimate negotiation (by arguing that Problem A is more important than Problem B, and therefore your action to deal with Problem A should be supported instead of the other guy’s proposal to deal with Problem B). Except this doesn’t happen, because the threat gained from failing to meet demand is virtually always higher than the potential threat gained from the upcoming event: Thus, rather than a choice, you have a calculation. If the group is forced to choose between meeting demand or dealing with the problem highlighted by the upcoming event, the calculation is always to meet demand.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if you still had legitimate choices to make in how you meet the demand. The combination of board state, the limited number of actions you can take, and the specific combination of resources you need to generate in order to meet the current demand means that nine times out of ten there is one clear path to meeting the demand.

What you’re left with is a game that basically plays itself: There is always a clear set of specific actions that need to be taken, with little or no spare room for doing anything other than those actions.

Although the game features a complex cluster of scoring mechanics, the fact that the game plays itself boils the result down to random number generators: You’re hoping that you randomly draw the scoring abilities that match the randomly generated demand and board state.

The game could be potentially bailed out here if you had the ability to meaningfully cut deals based on personal greed: “Screw the city, let’s get together and make some profit!” But two things conspire to limit this dynamic. First, in any given interaction the scoring is uni-dimensional; you generally aren’t presented with and can’t create situations where you’ve got a pool of points and can divvy them out. Second, the overwhelming randomness of the game prevents meaningful long-term deal-swapping. (You can’t say, “I do X now and then you do Y later.” because there’s generally no specific “later” that will reliably create a desirable outcome.)

The other thing that could potentially save the game would be some degree of uncertainty about what the city actually needs, allowing for legitimate arguments that X would be a better preparatory action than Y. But each time you resolve the current demand, all of your resources are reset to a clean slate before dealing with the next demand, so preparatory action is largely impossible.

RUNAWAY LEADER

The other thing which cripples New Angeles is the runaway leaders.

The designers clearly think they’ve eliminated the runaway leader problem because there can be no leader! Each individual player has a rival, and you only care what your specific rival’s score is!

… except they’ve deceived themselves. What often holds a runaway leader in check in games like this is that everyone gangs up on them and pulls them back to the pack. That doesn’t happen in New Angeles specifically because only one person cares about the runaway leader: If your rival pulls out a big lead on you, you’re basically screwed and nobody else cares.

A related problem revolves around the Deal. The Deal is the central gameplay mechanic of the game: The current player offers an action card and then, through a bidding process, one other player has the option of offering a different action card. The other players (those who aren’t offering one of the two action cards), then bid to determine which action card will be resolved (which will also give the winner a bonus in the form of an asset which offers some special ability).

On the surface, the Deal seems very clever and immersive, supposedly creating high-stakes negotiations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. In addition to the fact that the game plays itself (largely defanging the Deal in 90% of the turns you’ll take), even when you do have a turn with a meaningful Deal you’re faced with a more fundamental problem: The entire action economy runs through the Deal. If you can’t take actions, you can’t gain tradable resources. If you can’t gain resources, you have nothing to trade to convince other people to let you take actions.

AND ALSO A KINGMAKER PROBLEM

Lots of games featuring a point track suffer from a kingmaker problem late in the game (where someone who knows they’re losing is confronted with choices which basically determine which of the other players will win the game). New Angeles raises this to a whole new level because players are allowed to directly trade their personal points to another player at any time.

At the end of this 3-5 hour long game, people will have generally scored somewhere between 30 and 50 points. The margins of victory, however, will usually be in the single digits.

If you play rationally, therefore, everything you’ve done up to this point is rendered almost entirely meaningless in a final furious round of horse-trading to determine the actual winners.

It’s also equally likely that a runaway leader will have enough spare points to arbitrarily choose winners and losers. Or, conversely, a player who knows they can’t possibly win will have a pool of, say, 30 points that they can now arbitrarily dole out to all of the other players.

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE HELPED

In order for meaningful choice to exist, you need to have two (or more) objectives that are put into conflict with each other.

New Angeles lacks that conflict. It therefore lacks true choices. And it therefore lacks the ability to negotiate and debate between those choices. Even if the mechanical structures it provides for competitive negotiation were flawless (and they aren’t), they would be rendered meaningless because, by and large, there’s nothing to negotiate.

It may be easiest to understand this by looking at some ways in which New Angeles could have avoided this problem.

Persistent/Escalating Demand. As described above, the fundamental component of gameplay is generating X resources to meet Y demand. You’ll do this three times over the course of the game, wiping out all of the resources you’ve generated each time.

If you didn’t wipe out all the resources you generated, however, you could meaningfully argue for long-term gains (“we can produce an excess now, so that we’ve got a more comfortable buffer for next time”) against solutions to your immediate problems. This would also inherently create an incomplete information problem (whereby calculations are turned into choices because you have to make the decision before having enough information to make a reliable calculation) because of the uncertainty surrounding future demand.

The game could have done this in two different ways: First, allowing you to keep your surplus after meeting demand. Second, using a set of escalating demand cards (so that you’d keep all your resources, but Stage II demand cards would demand even more production from you).

More Secondary Production. You generally generate resources by exploiting different districts of the city. Although some of these districts generate a primary and secondary resources, most only generate a single resource type. If there was more secondary production, there could be legitimate debate not about the primary production, but about which non-essential secondary production would be chosen.

This would work even better if you had secondary production that generated something other than resources.

Multiple Paths to Victory. Victory in New Angeles boils down to a single metric: Having more points. This makes it incredibly difficult for the game to escape the crippling flaw of boiling down to calculation instead of choice, because ultimately all actions are only meaningful insofar as they either directly or indirectly generate points.

By contrast, consider the aforementioned Republic of Rome (which features a very similar gameplay dynamic to New Angeles): In Republic of Rome you win by becoming Consul for Life. But you can do so through money, influence, military revolt, and/or manipulating other players’ vote totals using a variety of mechanics (including assassinations, concessions, and military assignments). Each of those is a different resource, which creates the incomparable comparisons that result in meaningful negotiation and deal-making.

Varied Costs for Actions. Most of the action cards in the game do X while having a cost Y. (You have to destroy a beneficial Prisec unit in order to remove two enemy units. Or you break up a strike, but at the cost of provoking Human First protests.) The game would benefit enormously from having the same outcome X available with a significant variety of costs, which would allow two players to offer the same necessary action while arguing for different costs. (“I think we should violently break up this strike at the cost of dealing with Human First protests tomorrow.” vs. “I think we should break up the strike by sacrificing a Prisec unit.” vs. “I think we should just move the strike to a different location.” vs. “I think we should use my Orgcrime contacts to roust the strikers.” vs. “I think we could patiently negotiate with the strikers and resolve their problems, at the cost of 2 production credits or a group sacrifice of 10 personal capital.” and so forth.) Unfortunately, the game generally doesn’t offer these options (more generally favoring a “this card lets you get rid of a little bit of problem X with a no/minimal cost and this other card lets you get rid of a lot of it at a higher cost”). If it did, you would again have the opportunity to debate legitimate incomparables: We all know that we need to get rid of the Strike token in this district, but what price are we willing to pay to do it?

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, none of the things which would improve New Angeles are quick or easy fixes. It thus comes tantalizingly close to being a really compelling and interesting game, but is instead limited to mediocrity. A mediocrity which is compounded by its rather long playing time (3-5 hours in actual practice).

It probably plays better if your group is really bad at co-op games and incapable of performing the calculations. So it’s got that going for it, I guess.

But for me and mine, this game has been dumped onto eBay and won’t be returning to our table again.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10D: Clan of the Torn Ear

I suspect that there will be a number of posts in this series that end up being basically variations on, “Look how cool prepping situations instead of plots is!”

But that’s because it’s really frickin’ cool.

Let’s talk a little about how this scenario came into existence, because it’s a confluence of several different factors that went into building the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

First, of course, was a desire to run a campaign in Ptolus, which I’ve discussed before. Among the raw material Monte Cook designed for Ptolus were a half dozen scenarios in the Ptolus supplement designed to kick-off a Ptolus campaign.

One of these was “The Trouble With Goblins”, which you can more or less see play out in Session 5 of the campaign: Goblins emerge from the catacombs beneath the city and take up residence in an abandoned house in the Rivergate District. In the scenario as written, the players can trace the goblins back to Ghul’s Labyrinth, but there’s nothing to find down there: “The passages literally go as far as you want them to – and as far as the adventurers are willing to take them. They wind through ancient chambers empty except for more and more zombie encounters. There is no treasure to find.” The intention is that the zombies will eventually drive the PCs back to the surface (through boredom if nothing else).

I’ve never been comfortable with “there’s an endless array of empty corridors down there, so eventually you turn back” set-ups because, basically, I’ve never figured out how to run them successfully (by which I mean, in a way which is satisfying for both me and the players). So I decided to take a different approach: The goblins came from somewhere, and they could be tracked back there.

I decided that the “somewhere” in this case would be an impassable bluesteel door. (This would allow me to introduce one of the major features of Ghul’s Labyrinth.) Rather than just placing a bluesteel door, though, I created the mini-scenario The Complex of Zombies: The idea was that the PCs would be “rewarded” for tracking the goblins with a little horror scenario, find the bluesteel door, and be able to satisfactorily conclude this line of investigation.

As previously discussed, however, things didn’t quite work out like that: The PCs managed to do something incredibly clever and get the bluesteel door open.

Although I ended up adding a whole new scenario on the opposite side of the bluesteel door, I now had a situation where the PCs would logically be able to track the goblins back to their “home”… wherever and whatever that was.

The goblin shook his head. “He was not of our clan. He was traitor. Come. Look.” Holding the runty goblin’s corpse by the head like a rag doll, he bent it forward to present the neck.

Puzzled, Tee came closer. On the back of the goblin’s neck she saw four small tendrils of greenish ooze – they were still wriggling and writhing.

The other major factor was that, before the campaign began, I had done a survey of about 40-50 issues of Dungeon Magazine looking for interesting scenarios that would be appropriate for Ptolus. One of the scenarios I had really liked but ultimately ended up not finding a place for was “Caverns of the Ooze Lord” by Campbell Pentney in Dungeon #132. Now I pulled it back out.

The original module features a small village that’s been infested by mind-controlling ooze parasites, and the PCs are able to track the problem back to a local cave complex. I said to myself: What if the infested “village” is actually a clan of goblins? And the goblins had come to Greyson House because they were fleeing the ooze?

THE SITUATION

So I basically ripped out the entire front half of Pentney’s module, heavily modified the caverns in the back half to fit the new back story, and inserted a freshly designed set of goblin caverns. I summarized the situation and background like this:

• 40 years ago an earthquake struck this area. It opened the fissure leading to the Laboratory of the Beast (Adventure 003B); collapsed the tunnels which once led in that direction; and also opened the fissure leading to the Temple of Juiblex.
  • Juiblex the Shapeless is one of the Galchutt.
• The connection to the Temple of Juiblex contaminated the caverns and disrupted the local balance, leading to the emergence of sickstone. The goblins were eventually forced to abandon the sickstone caverns.
• An expedition was mounted to the Laboratory of the Beast, but it ran into the adamantium guulvorg skeleton, suffered heavy casualties, and retreated. The complex, along with the legendary “surface world”, was forbidden to the tribe by their leaders.
• 2 years ago the warcaster Morbion journeyed into the sickstone caverns. He found the Temple of Juiblex and was corrupted.
• 3 months ago, the goblins became aware that something was wrong: Goblins were disappearing. Eventually they figured out the “oozed ones” were controlling some of them and kidnapping or killing others. Their efforts to combat this threat have failed.
• 2 months ago, a small group of goblins fled through the Laboratory of the Beast and reached Greyson House.
• Currently Ursaal and the duskblades, along with 8 of the lesser warriors and one of the greater warriors, have been corrupted by Morbion.

(Tangentially, I knew that the Galchutt referenced here would play a major role in Act II of the campaign. I find that when designing unanticipated interstitial material in a campaign it’s useful – and also logical! – to find opportunity to reincorporate and foreshadow other elements from the campaign. You can see a similar methodology in the Obelisk of Axum and Severn Valley scenarios that I added to the Eternal Lies campaign as a result of actual play.)

EMERGENT EVENTS

In designing this scenario, my assumption was that the PCs would actually fight their way through the goblins – slowly gathering environmental clues about the presence of the “oozed ones” – and then fight their way through the ooze caverns. Kind of a standard “kill all the goblins” dungeoncrawl that would slowly morph into a horror scenario.

But as you can see in this week’s journal entry, that’s not what happened: The PCs ended up negotiating with the goblins and the entire scenario literally turned on a dime and became something completely different. And that’s what makes prepping situations so cool: Not only do you have the joy of being constantly surprised by what happens at the gaming table, but something like two hundred words of situational prep can suddenly blossom into entire sessions of compelling play.

The character of Itarek is one example of this: Found nowhere in my prep notes, he emerged logically out of the adversary roster I had created for the scenario, and (as you’ll see) quickly became one of the most unforgettable supporting cast members in the campaign.

“I will take you to our Queen. She will decide.”

Tee laughed. “You expect us to just walk into the middle of your caves?”

“You were going there anyway. And I give oath of safety.”

The “oath of safety” is a key emergent moment: If Tee hadn’t laughed off Itarek’s initial offer to take them to the queen, he never would have given them an oath of safety (and the subsequent scene would have played out completely differently).

Note, too, the roleplaying with Tor that emerges out of this completely unanticipated sequence of events. In the Shadow of the Spire benefits tremendously from players who are willing to make bold, strong choices.

I’ve said in the past that I think a lot of games suffer because of two unexamined paradigms or meta-rules:

1. The PCs are not allowed to fight each other.
2. PCs are not allowed to split up or leave the group.

The belief is that this prevents friction and disruptive play, but in my experience it actually creates those things. The moments between Tee and Tor that emerged during this session are an example of what can happen when you remove these artificial limitations: Tor being willing to leave the party because of his principles forced the group to resolve the situation in a way which created an even greater bond going forward.

And I firmly believe that interaction was only possible because it was, in fact, a real possibility that Tor would leave forever. (At which point we would have figured out a new character for Tor’s player.)

In much the same way that the enduring relationship between the party and Crashekka and Itarek only exists because it was equally possible that the party could have just stabbed them without ever learning their names.

Prepping situations is so frickin’ cool.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10D: CLAN OF THE TORN EAR

November 3rd, 2007
The 30th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE GOBLIN CAVERNS

Looking down into the fissure, Tee saw that it opened out into a natural – and very narrow – chain of caves. But there was definitely room enough for all of them to pass through and see where those caves might lead.

Tor volunteered to stay behind and stand guard in the chamber with the blood-stained pit. The rest of the group agreed to explore the caves for about ten minutes – if they didn’t find anything interesting, they’d turn back.

After climbing twenty feet down the steeply angled fissure, the caves beyond it proved remarkably easy to navigate. Although they were narrow enough that Agnarr’s shoulders occasionally scraped the walls, the floor was almost entirely free of obstruction. They made good time, and after five minutes they had already covered several hundred feet at a brisk walking pace. The cave floor had begun to descend at a shallow, but noticeable, angle.

About seven minutes after they had left Tor, the rest of the group came to an area where the narrow cave tunnel suddenly opened out onto a large side-cavern choked full of stalagtites and stalagmites.

Tee was in the lead, and as she emerged into this side-cavern a deep, guttural voice spoke loudly in Goblin: “Come no farther!” A large, broad-shouldered goblin stood up from behind some of the stalagmites. “These are the caverns of my people. What is your purpose here?”

Tee was surprised to discover that she understood what he was saying… the words just seemed to fall into place in her mind. But she had never spoken the Goblin tongue before.

The others couldn’t understand a word as Tee said, “We’re explorers.”

“Wanderers? From the surface world?”

“Yes.”

The goblin shook his head. “Go back. We do not want you here.”

Tee quickly translated the situation back to her compansion.

“There are more of you here?” the goblin demanded.

Tee confirmed it.

“Go now!” Tee wasn’t sure if the goblin was angry or if it was just the guttural tones of the language.

“All right,” Tee said. “We’ll go.”

But as she turned, another goblin – this one shorter and runtier – suddenly jumped up from behind another patch of stalagmites and fired a crude arrow at her. It went wide, but Tee’s reaction was immediate: She drew her dragon pistol and fired. Read more »