Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has posted a translation of my review Ten Candles. (The original review in English can be read over here.)

They’ve also done a translation of Opening Your Game Table, which I promptly rendered obsolete by writing the Open Table Manifesto. (Sorry, guys!)

Node-Based Scenario Design has been translated into Hungarian by LFG. (The original for that is located here.)

Go to Part 1

A subject somewhat related to hidden vs. open difficulty numbers is the matter of open and hidden stakes. In other words, whether or not the players know why they’re rolling the dice.

In most cases, of course, the stakes are known: If you’re trying to jump over a crevasse, the dice roll is determining whether you do so or not. But there are action checks where that isn’t necessarily true: If the GM calls for a Perception test while the PCs are traveling through a jungle, the players don’t necessarily know if it’s to notice a tribesman lying in ambush, a hidden treasure, a treacherous piece of terrain, or something else entirely.

Perception tests are, in fact, probably the most common form of this. (Since they literally determine whether or not you’re aware of something.) But the principle can be applied to other tests and reactive mechanics, too. Calling for a saving throw against undetected dangers or unknown spells before explaining what the consequence of a failure will be is a great way to ratchet up the anxiety at the table (particularly if it’s the exception rather than the rule).

I’ll sometimes do the same thing with Sanity checks in Call of Cthulhu, Stability tests in Trail of Cthulhu, and similar mechanics: Call for the check (the magnitude of which in Trail of Cthulhu can foreshadow just how bad things are about to get) and then describe the eldritch horror, allowing the players to immediately respond according to whether or not (or how badly) their character failed the test.

(Enabling this immediate, immersive response to narration by preemptively resolving a mechanical component which might normally follow the narration is why I also roll initiative at the end of each encounter and keep it stored for future use.)

One potential pitfall of such checks, however, is that you’re unable to take advantage of a player’s familiarity with their own character: If you’re asking them to make a saving throw vs. fireball, it’s much more likely that you’ll forget that they have a +2 bonus to saving throws involving fire than it is that they will. And if you do forget, then the subsequent revelation can deflate as the mechanical resolution needs to be revisited.

ROLLING MEANINGLESS DICE

The existence of hidden stakes also opens the opportunity for another technique: Rolling meaningless dice.

This generally falls into two categories. First, rolling dice behind the screen for the sound effect. That can be valuable as a tool of misdirection, but it’s not primarily what we’re talking about here.

Second, having the players roll for checks that don’t mean anything.

Now, we’ve already established that dice should only be rolled if the potential failure state is interesting, meaningful or both. And if it is neither, you shouldn’t roll the dice. If that’s the case, it would seem to follow that you should never have people rolling meaningless dice.

But here’s the exception: You only roll if failure is meaningful or interesting… but sometimes you’ll roll the dice because the character believes failure could be meaningful or interesting and saying that dice will not be rolled will reveal information that the character does not have.

Searching for a trap that isn’t there is an obvious example of this.

Paradoxically, the reason you roll the meaningless dice generally isn’t to the benefit of the meaningful roll; it’s to enhance the meaningful rolls of the same type. For example, there’s seemingly no harm in cutting to the chase with exchanges like:

Player: I search the hallway for traps.

GM: There are no traps in the hallway.

It even seems to follow logically from the principles we’ve established. The GM is defaulting to yes (the “yes” in this case being “yes, your search of the hall is successful in determining there are no traps”; don’t be fooled by the presence of the word “no” in what the GM said). But if you do that a dozen times and then have this interaction:

Player: I search the hallway for traps.

GM: Okay, make a Search test.

The player automatically knows there’s a trap in that hall before they even pick up their dice. The GM’s pattern of behavior has revealed metagame knowledge that puts the player in the position of knowing something that their character does not.

And sometimes metagame knowledge is unavoidable (although in this case, it’s not). And sometimes that’s desirable (although in this case, there’s nothing being gained). And some players believe it won’t make any difference (but for someone who values immersion, it will). In my experience, nothing ever seems to be gained from this interaction and almost always there is something lost, so I recommend rolling the meaningless dice and preempting the loss.

USING MEANINGLESS DICE TO EFFECT

In some cases, you can deliberately use this effect reactively.

For example, as I’ve discussed previously in Metagame Special Effects, I not infrequently call for Perception checks even when there’s nothing to perceive. In addition to camouflaging which Perception check failures are important and which aren’t, this can also be an effective technique for heightening paranoia at the table.

The biggest reason I do it, though, is that I’ve found it’s the single most effective way to refocus the table’s attention on the game world when extraneous distractions and chitchat have derailed the players. (You’d think that just saying, “Okay, let’s focus.” would be equally effective, but I’ve found that it isn’t. If you ask people to focus in a kind of general way, they engage in a “focusing process.” Ask them to do something specific and concrete, on the other hand, and they become immediately focused.)

Eventually, of course, all of my players figure out that I’m frequently “crying wolf” with these checks. But it doesn’t matter: The more experienced heroes may no longer be quite so skittish or paranoid as they jump at imaginary shadows, but the tool still works.

And, of course, in a dangerous universe filled with wandering encounters, some of the Perception tests you use to refocus the table won’t be meaningless at all.

Go to Part 14

BETWEEN THE STARS

It was a kind of death when you volunteered, but it was also the promise of new life: A unique life. A life unlike any that had been lived before.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

You were supposed to be placed into cryosleep, loaded onto the ICS Ultima Thule, and sent hurtling across the void to the first nearby, habitable planet discovered by the Artemis satellite network. You were part of the maintenance team, scheduled to be periodically awakened over the course of the centuries-long voyage to make sure that the ship was still operating properly.

The first two maintenance wakes passed normally.

The third… didn’t.

The stars are missing. Everything outside of the ship is a blank, empty void.

Actually, you’re not even sure it’s a wake. The internal chronometer is screwed up and the beacon from Earth has gone dead. The onboard computer responds to queries with some garbled nonsense that looks like Aramaic had a baby with Ethiopic Ge’ez, and the voicebox produces nothing but modulated static.

The scans are running. Maybe you’re where you’re supposed to be. Maybe there’ll be a hunk of rock nearby, or an entire planetary system. Or maybe you’re lost. Off course. Slipped into the cracks between the stars.

But whatever the problem is, it’s on you to fix it. You’re all alone out here.

You hope.

Areas of Note: bridge, cryochambers, supply caverns, galley, engine room, AI core, the shuttles Copernicus and Kepler, Jefferies tubes, antenna array, hydrogen collector

Goal: Find your new home

Special: The first appearance of Them should happen shortly after the scenario begins. You might also choose to start this scenario from the maintenance team awaking from cryosleep, allowing them to discover their predicament. Alternatively, the scenario could be tweaked so that the PCs are just normal colonists who awaken onboard the ship, unscheduled, and discover most or all of the other cryo-chambers broken open and empty. The mystery of what They have done with the other colonists would be resolved through play.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 6A: Blood in the Depths

In which a hole in the wall leads to an unexpected labyrinth, and one pest problem quickly leads to another…

This section of the campaign is notable because the dungeon complex they begin to explore at the end of it was directly adapted into the The Complex of Zombies, a mini-module which you can purchase on Drivethru (among other places).

Adapting material from your personal campaign into a published form can be very rewarding, but there are a number of pitfalls you need to avoid.

The first thing you have to do is purge the material of any material inherited from other creators. Personal campaigns are, I fervently believe, strengthened beyond measure by becoming a beautiful mélange of influences and inputs. Copyright law, on the other hand, has other opinions.

In the case of The Complex of Zombies, fortunately, I’ve already “translated” Monte Cook’s Ptolus into my own campaign world (which I’ve been running and developing since 2000), which often has the effect of preemptively scrubbing off many of the serial numbers. But some work still needed to be done.

This process is less simple than it may first appear because you can’t just go through and delete everything. That would leave the material feeling hollow and incomplete. Nor, in my opinion, can you just replace other people’s creative content with generic versions of the same: “Generic” isn’t good. Generic lacks identity. Generic lacks interest.

So you have to go in, take this one really cool thing that has a bunch of specific context and content that you can’t use, and you have to replace it with something really cool and creative and detailed in its own right. And that usually has a cascade effect, as one change affects another. A well-designed scenario, after all, isn’t a bunch of unrelated stuff: So once you start changing some elements, the rest of the scenario can and should change, too.

(This process is often beneficial, though: Re-contextualizing material from one context into another often lends richer and unexpected depths to the new context which you might not otherwise have considered or created.)

For The Complex of Zombies, the most notable example of this was swapping out the deep background of Ghul’s Labyrinth (beneath Monte Cook’s Ptolus) for the research complex of the Sons of Jade. If I recall correctly, the Sons of Jade were an original creation for the adventure module, but I tied them into the mythology of the Jade Magi and the Lost City of Shandrala, which I had originally developed for the background of the gemstone golems I’d designed for the Penumbra Bestiary (although that background was stripped out of the final book) and which had also featured in a proposed mega-adventure in the pre-3.5 says of the D20 license. (A project which I occasionally play with the idea of returning to, but probably won’t all things considered.)

And although this didn’t really apply to The Complex of Zombies, the other thing you have to be wary of when going from table-to-page is trying to recapture the campaign instead of the scenario. For example, I’ve actually encountered multiple published scenarios where the author, seemingly out of the blue, suddenly starts talking about what the GM should do if one of the PCs falls in love with a seemingly random NPC.

This is almost certainly because that’s what happened in their campaign. In one case, this ended up being an extended subplot that chewed up almost half of the published scenario. Twenty or thirty pages of material. And I’m willing to bet hard currency that it was an absolutely, positively amazing experience at the table; probably one of those gaming memories that you’re still talking about fondly twenty years later.

But I’ll also guarantee you that literally no one else playing in that scenario will ever duplicate that precise experience. And you have to be cautious of those moments — at both the seemingly obvious macro-level, but also at the more insidious micro-level — when attempting to offer the material to other people. If you do your job well, then the odds are that the other GMs running your scenario will experience similarly amazing, spontaneous, and memorable acts at the gaming table. But they won’t be the same moments that you experienced. (No matter how much you try to craft a railroad to force that moment to come again. It’s like when things go sour in Groundhog Day as Bill Murray’s character tries to recreate the perfect day.)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 6A: BLOOD IN THE DEPTHS

April 29th, 2007
The 20th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The party arrived back at Greyson House and found two watchmen posted outside. They gave them the scrap of paper they had been given back at the watch house and were let inside without incident.

They found that a few things had been moved around – presumably by the watch –  but for the most part the house was undisturbed. Agnarr strode confidently into the kitchen, grabbed the rope that was still tied off to the stove… and promptly fell into the basement. Dusting himself off he looked up at the rest of the party staring down at him. “Well… We had so many problems with the rope before, I figured I would just jump down.”

Tee frowned, waved him out of the way, and then lightly slid down the rope, landing gently on the floor. She moved away quickly before Dominic could fall on her again, but the others followed carefully (and safely) as she moved south into the room where they had found poor Jasin’s body.

Tee saw that the crates stacked along the wall and hiding the small crawlspace she had seen hacked through the foundation of the house hadn’t been moved. The watchmen they had spoken to had told the truth: They hadn’t found the secret passage, or even suspected that it existed.

Tee had Agnarr move the crates out of the way. With the hole clearly exposed, she could see that crates had also been stacked on the other side of the hole. Getting down on her hands and knees she crawled through the hole and gave the crates on the other side a sharp shove to get them out of the way. Too late she heard the sharp twang as a crude tripwire snapped and two flasks of alchemist’s fire dropped and smashed across her back.

Goblins – probably warned of their approach by all the noise they had made – hooted and hollered and began running towards her from out of the shadows, but with elven speed Tee rolled back out of the crawl hole, ripped off her burning shirt, and tossed it aside. Read more »