Recently got involved in a discussion about the sidebar in CthulhuTech that proudly proclaims their intention to use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun:

THE PRONOUN GAME
Okay, here it is — we use he, him, and his when we’re talking about people playing the game. It just seems weird to alternate pronoun genders within the same book — it make it feel like the book is written for two different audiences. The masculine pronoun is the standard and right or wrong we’re used to seeing it. It may not be politically correct, but you can’t please everybody.

This sidebar has enraged some people. Other people have cheered it on. Still others (who, I pray, are the majority) are just left scratching their heads.

My personal mileage is that I’m mildly annoyed by it. But my annoyance is pretty much identical to the RPG rulebooks that include sidebars expressing how amazing they are for alternating pronouns or whatever their hobby horse of a “solution” is for the gender neutral pronoun in English. The fact that RPG rulebooks somehow became a major battleground in the gender-neutral pronoun wars is one of the truly What The Fuck?! moments of the ’90s for me.

With that being said, I can certainly recognize that for people who actually care deeply about this issue that the CthulhuTech sidebar is basically a game designer going out of his way (and unnecessarily so) to say, “Fuck you.” I would find that fairly off-putting, too, if I was in their shoes.

 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH

Historically, “he” was the gender-neutral pronoun. Several hundred years ago, people came up with “she” to specifically differentiate women. Once women had been differentiated, the previously all-inclusive “he” picked up the specific connotations of being male.

As “he” lost its gender neutrality, however, the language reflexively adapted and “they” was used as a gender neutral pronoun. This worked fine until the the original grammar nazis of the 19th century arrived on the scene: A lot of the work they did to systematize the language was a huge net benefit to the English language, but they also had a lot of weird ideas. (Like trying to force English to obey the laws of Latin: For example, in Latin a split infinitive is simply nonsense. In English, however, phrases like “to boldly go” make perfect sense and people use them all the time. The attempt to ban split infinitives in English because they don’t work in Latin is nonsense. It’s like trying to ban people from playing Halo games on the X-Box because they don’t work on a Linux computer.)

One of the things these guys strongly objected to was the use of “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. So, like split infinitives, many of them declared them to be bad grammar and insisted that “he” should be used exclusively as the singular gender-neutral pronoun. (Note that this was a choice: Either “they” could serve as both a singular and plural gender-neutral; or “he” could serve as both masculine and gender-neutral.)

Despite the grammarians, lots and lots and lots and lots of people kept using “they” as a gender-neutral singular. That made sense, of course. There was a reason that the language had evolved that way. And the situations in which “they” being singular instead of plural could cause confusion were much rarer than the situations in which “he” being treated as gender-neutral instead of masculine could cause confusion.

Fast forward to the 20th century: People begin noticing that “male = human, female = other” is really fucking problematic. And, yes, the grammarian attempt to enforce “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun hundreds of years after the language had attempted to naturally evolve away from that was part of that sexist memetic structure.

As a result, several varying efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun separate from “he” or “they” have been attempted. But language tends not to work like that. Instead, “they” has simply continued merrily on its way as a gender-neutral pronoun with ever-increasing levels of acceptance.

MY TWO BITS

I’m a pretty big fan of people communicating clearly and correctly. But I’m also a huge fan of telling prescriptivist grammarians to shut up.

So I strongly endorse making it your personal mission to boldly go forth and use “they” as your gender neutral pronoun in English.

For RPG rulebooks specifically: If you want to swap the gender of your pronouns when writing specific examples, I fully support and endorse your gender-inclusive agenda. Toss some zes and zirs in there, too. And if you aren’t talking about vis character, then you’re unnecessarily excluding future generations of AI players. Seriously: Specific examples of characters and/or players should be multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-everything. Not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s awesome.

But trying to make “she” a gender neutral pronoun is like “fetch”: It’s not going to happen. Please stop trying.

Many moons ago I presented a series of essays on Game Structures in roleplaying games: Learning them, prepping for them, using them, creating them, and so forth. What’s about to follow may make a bit more sense if you click through that link first.

One of the things that was originally supposed to be part of that essay series was a discussion of urbancrawls: A structure that would have completed the triumvirate of dungeoncrawl-hexcrawl-urbancrawl and given an essentially “complete” structure for running exploration-based fantasy campaign worlds.

When I started the Game Structures series I thought I was really close to cracking the urbancrawl nut. But as I wrote the series, it became clear that I was not as close as I thought I was. I eventually excised the discussion of urbancrawls from the series, but was fairly confident I would be able to solve the problems and present it independently in the very near future.

Six months have passed since then. (And another year and a half since I wrote the previous sentence.) And I still don’t think I’ve solved it.

WHAT I’M NOT LOOKING FOR

First, let me clarify something: I am not trying to figure out how to run urban adventures. With the recent uptick in people being interested in dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls, I’ve seen a fair amount of people using the term “urbancrawl” to just mean “a D&D adventure that happens to be set in a city”. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

If that was what I was talking about, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. My current 3.5 campaign – set entirely within the city of Ptolus – has been running for 100+ sessions. I know how to run effective adventures and entire campaigns that are set in a city. Node-based scenario design is a flexible tool and I’m not afraid to use it.

WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR

What I’m looking for right now, though, is an urbancrawl. A scenario structure that would use the same fundamental principles that dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls use.

Let’s take a moment to review the characteristics of a ‘crawl (based on our analysis of the dungeoncrawl and hexcrawl):

1. It uses a map with keyed locations. (This provides a straight-forward prep structure.)
2. Characters transition between keyed locations through simple, geographic movement. (This provides a default action and makes it easy to prep robust scenarios.)
3. There’s an exploration-based default goal. (This motivates player engagement with the material and also synchronizes with the geographic-based navigation through the scenario.)
4. Characters can engage, disengage, and re-engage with the scenario. (You can go into a dungeon, fight stuff for awhile, leave, and when you come back the dungeon will still be there.)

This fourth property appears to exist because:

(A) Material within the ‘crawl structure is firewalled. (In general, area 20 of a dungeon isn’t dependent on area 5.)

(B) The default goal is holographic. (You can explore some of the wilderness or get some of the treasure and still feel like you’ve accomplished something.)

(C) The default goal is non-specific. (You can get a bunch of treasure from Dungeon A then get more treasure from Dungeon B and still be accomplishing your goal of Getting Lots of Treasure.)

(D) The default goal isn’t interdependent. (You can clear the first half of a dungeon and somebody else can clear the second half. By contrast, you can’t solve the second half of a mystery unless you’ve got the clues from the first half.)

The dungeoncrawl structure provides these features for location-based adventures. The hexcrawl structure provides these features for wilderness-based adventures. A fully functional urbancrawl structure would theoretically provide these features for city-based adventures.

WHY I’M LOOKING FOR IT

If I can already use node-based structures to run urban-based scenarios, why am I interested in figuring out this “urbancrawl” thing?

Open game tables.

My current open table campaign started with dungeoncrawling. It later expanded to include a surrounding hexcrawl. In both cases, however, I had vestigial cities hanging out as “home bases” for the PCs: They were safe havens and places where they could resupply, but active adventuring wasn’t taking place there.

And it wasn’t taking place despite the fact that I had specifically prepped them the way I normally prep cities: With interesting NPCs and scenario hooks hanging all over the place. In non-open campaigns all of those hooks would get developed using node-based structures as the players explored them. But node-based structures are generally interdependent, specific, and non-holographic: When every week sees a different group of PCs sitting at my table, the node-based structures don’t work. They fall apart.

But if I could develop an urbancrawl scenario structure that works the same way the other ‘crawl structures work, then I would be able to prep effective material and the players would know how to engage it.

Beyond the open table, I’m also just generally fascinated to see how an exploration-based urban environment would develop in play. I also suspect it would give rise to a lot of interesting, faction-based play and also open up alternative realm management possibilities. (But those are just gut instincts, obviously, since the structure doesn’t actually exist yet.)

SO WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

I think I’m narrowing in on an urbancrawl structure, but it’s not quite gelling for me. So I’m hoping to present my own thoughts on the topic, open up a dialogue, get some feedback, and maybe crack this thing once and for all.

Go to Part 2

THINKING ABOUT URBANCRAWLS
Part 2: Applying the ‘Crawl
Part 3: Vertical Integration
Part 4: Experimental City Hexes
Part 5: Using the Ptolus Hexmap
Part 6: Old School Inspiration
Part 7: City States of the Judges Guild
Part 8: Other Old School Cities
Part 9: New School Urbancrawls
Part 10: One City, Many Urbancrawls
Part 11: The Investigation Action
Part 12: Exploring the Advanced Urbancrawl

Yesterday I posted Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy. It was the first article here at the Alexandrian that was made possible entirely through the support of my patrons. I want to take a moment to call attention to the Patrons of the Alexandrian page I’ve created to thank them and recognize the contribution they’re making to the site.

This is the last post I’ll be making about my Patreon for awhile, but there’s a lot of nifty content coming down the pipe that will only exist because of the Patreon. Everyone reading this is going to have the opportunity to enjoy all that niftiness because of my patrons and I really can’t express my appreciation for that enough. It’s amazing to me that we’re basically only $7 away from the So You Want To Be a Dungeon Master? milestone goal. If just 30 people interested in seeing a step-by-step practical guide to GMing from me were willing to pledge $0.25 per post, I’d be able to start tackling that truly monumental project.

It’s so cool.

$0.10? $0.25? $1.00?

… even the smallest of pledges can add up to wondrous things.

I get a lot of reactions to “Don’t Prep Plots” that basically go like this: “Oh, yeah. I don’t want to railroad my players, but…”

The justification or rationalization which follows the “but” varies. There’s a consistent recognition that roleplaying games aren’t really designed for linear, predetermined plots, but since the vast majority of the media we consume is purely linear (even most of the “interactive” stuff) those creative instincts get buried pretty deep in us.

One of the most common versions of the “but” I hear is, “But I don’t want them to kill my bad guy!” The justifications for this vary from a strictly predetermined “finale” that’s being ruined to the more seductive version of convincing yourself that your players won’t be “satisfied” if the bad guy is “prematurely” knocked off.

These instincts aren’t necessarily wrong: Pulp fiction is filled with scenes where the heroes impotently watch the bad guys escape, building the sense of rivalry between them and baiting our appetite for the finale of the story. It’s an effective trope.

But I don’t think railroading is the only way to achieve that trope at the gaming table. Nor do I think it’s the most effective: When you push your thumb onto the scales of fate in order to predetermine the outcome of your game, you deflate the value of that outcome. If you do it poorly (or simply do it often enough), the anger and frustration of the players will stop being focused on the NPC villain and start focusing on you. The value of the trope becomes depreciated when it’s achieved through artificial ends.

CREATING MEMORABLE VILLAINS

What I recommend instead is a three-pronged approach:

First, build tension between the PCs and the villain without using direct confrontations between them. Give the bad guy minions. Have the bad guy do horrible things to people, places, and organizations that the PCs care about off-screen. Social interactions in situations where the PCs won’t be able to simply shoot them in the head without serious consequences also work well to build a personal relationship. (As do taunting communiques and phone calls.)

Second, when you’re prepping your scenarios include lots of bad guys. You’re probably doing this any way, so the real key here is to simply refrain from pre-investing one of these guys as the “big villain”. Basically, don’t get attached to any of your antagonists: Assume that the first time they’re in a position where the PCs might kill them that the PCs will definitely kill them. (This attitude will help to break any railroading habits you may still be secretly harboring.)

Third, remember that people in the real world usually don’t fight to the death. Have your bad guys run away. And not just your “big villain” (since you won’t have one of those any way): Unless their back is truly to the wall, most of the people your PCs fight should try to escape once a fight turns against them. (If you’re finding it hard to break the “fight to your last hit point” habit, try experimenting with some morale rules.) Most of them will probably still end up with a bullet in the back of their heads, but some of them will manage to escape.

The ones that escape? Those are your memorable villains. Those are your major antagonists.

This is the crucial inversion: Instead of figuring out who your major bad guy is and then predetermining that they will escape to wreak their vengeance, what’s happening here is that the guy who escapes to wreak their vengeance becomes the major bad guy.

MEDIA FAUX-EXAMPLES

Consider Die Hard for a moment. As written, this film is a great example of our first principle: The antagonism between John McClane and Hans Gruber is established almost entirely without any direct interaction between the two of them: Gruber takes McClane’s wife hostage. They talk to each other through telecommunication devices. Gruber sends his thugs to fight McClane elsewhere in the building.

The exception to this is the scene where Gruber pretends to be one of the hostages. This is actually a really clever device that heightens the conflict between McClane and Gruber by allowing them to directly interact with each other. But if this was a game table, what would happen if the PCs saw through Gruber’s bluff and put a bullet through his forehead right then and there?

It doesn’t matter.

Remember our second principle? Lots of bad guys. So now Die Hard becomes the story of the hot-headed Karl Vreski taking control of Gruber’s delicate operation and blowing it up in a mad pursuit for vengeance. Maybe he starts killing hostages and becomes the most memorable villain of the campaign when he throws McClane’s wife off the top of Nakatomi Plaza.

Okay, so cycling through the org-chart of Villains, Inc. works when you’re facing a team of bad guys. But what if the PCs really are just facing off against a single nemesis?

First off, remember that not every challenge needs to be of epic proportions: Sometimes you run into some goblins in the woods and you kill them and you move on. You don’t need every goblin to murder the priestess’ cousin or become the sworn blood-enemy of the paladin.

Second, even the most memorable villains from fiction were often part of Villains, Inc. even when that isn’t immediately obvious. For example, consider Dracula: Wouldn’t it be really unsatisfying if Jonathan Harker sneaked into Dracula’s tomb at the beginning of the book and staked him through the heart before he ever went to England? I mean… this is the Dracula, right?

Remember, though, that Dracula is only the Dracula because that didn’t happen at the hypothetical gaming table. We didn’t know that he would become obsessed with Harker’s wife and kill Mina’s best friend in pursuit of her. We discovered that during play. So let’s pretend that play had gone a different way: Harker stakes Dracula and heads back to England, satisfied that he’s destroyed an ancient evil. It’s a beautiful, happy ending…

… until the Brides of Dracula pursue him to England seeking bloody vengeance.

As a final example, remember that you need to embrace the whole package: You have to allow your bad guys to die indiscriminately and you need to include lots of bad guys in your scenario. If you only prep the “big villains” and then allow them to die indiscriminately, what you end up with are the Star Wars prequels: Darth Maul is replaced by Count Dooku is replaced by General Grievous… and none of them ever achieve enough narrative weight to make you really care whether they live or die.

EXAMPLES FROM THE TABLE

As I’ve mentioned in the past, faux-examples from other forms of media can be useful due to the common understanding of the source material, but can be somewhat misleading because the official version of events from the original media lends a patina of canonicity that shouldn’t be true of actual tabletop scenarios. So let me also take this opportunity to offer a handful of examples from my Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

SILION: Silion was a cult leader. Using our first principle, I built her up in a variety of ways: Her name was referenced in early foreshadowing. The PCs tangled with her thugs and were targeted for retaliation by her organization. She was also incorporated into the background of a new PC joining the campaign, becoming responsible for murdering the PCs’ family and destroying their village.

Eventually, the PCs managed to track down her lair. They snuck in, found her digging through a box of archaeological artifacts, rolled a critical hit, and put an arrow through the back of her skull. She literally never even got a chance to look them in the face.

My players gleefully tell this story at almost every opportunity. They love it. It’s one of their favorite moments from the entire campaign.

Why did it work? Because when you heavily invest a villain through foreshadowing, the payoff of defeating them is massively satisfying. It can be argued that this sort of thing might not work as well in other media (although consider that Luke’s actual confrontation with the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, after building up to it over the course of three films, lasts almost no time at all), but in a roleplaying game the audience is synonymous with the protagonist. Your players don’t want to be handed their quarry on a plate, but a quick kill shot isn’t a gimme: It’s a reward for all the work that got them to the point where they could take the shot.

ARVETH: Arveth was a mook. She was captured by the PCs, questioned by Tithenmamiwen, and then cut loose. When Elestra tried to sneak back and slit Arveth’s throat to stop her from warning the other cultists, Tithenmamiwen stopped her.

But then the cultists caught up with Arveth: Believing that she had betrayed them to the PCs, they tortured her and even cut out her eye. Eventually concluding that Arveth was still loyal to their cause, the cult gave her a team of assassins and sent her to kill Tithenmamiwen. This was our second principle: Use lots of bad guys and develop the ones who survive. (In some other campaign, Arveth could have easily been cut down randomly during combat and completely forgotten by the next session.)

Arveth nearly succeeded in her assassination attempt before the rest of the party showed up. While the rest of her team held the party at bay, Arveth managed to escape (barely evading Tithenmamiwen’s angry pursuit). This was our third principle: When they’re losing a fight, have your bad guys run away.

At this point, things transitioned to the first principle: Arveth used a magical artifact to send horrible nightmares to Tithenmamiwen (often featuring Arveth cutting out Tithenmamiwen’s eye). She issued threats to Tithenmamiwen’s friends. She placed a bounty on her head.

The PCs would fight her again. This time Arveth was teamed up with a medusa who turned two of the party members to stone. Arveth carved an eye out of each of the statues before making her escape once again.

By this point, of course, the PCs were absolutely furious. Tithenmamiwen, in particular, had a rage which burned so white hot that her alignment shifted: She had shown this bitch mercy and she was repaid with endless torment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such intense hatred focused towards an NPC before. It reshaped the entire course of the campaign.

Arveth was a mook no more.

When she finally died, the cheers of the players rocked the house. They literally took her miniature as a trophy so that it could never be used in a game again.

WUNTAD: Finally, here’s an example of me breaking (or at least bending) my own rules. Following the scenario laid out in the excellent Night of Dissolution campaign by Monte Cook, Wuntad and a gang of other chaos cultists show up just as the PCs finish clearing out a dungeon. The intention of the scenario is really clear: The PCs have been beat up. Wuntad and his cultists should have a really easy time of beating them into unconsciousness and then stealing several key items that the PCs had taken from the dungeon.

Stealing the PCs’ stuff? That’s pretty much guaranteed to piss them off for the rest of eternity.

Deliberately designing an interaction to create a major villain is against my “rules”. But it worked.

What I consider the key thing here, however, is that I still wasn’t invested in a particular outcome: Common sense showed that the outcome was likely, but I still wasn’t predetermining it.

What if Wuntad had died? Well, I had reinforced the scenario by following my other design principles: He was supported by lots of bad guys (including Silion from the example above). If he had died, somebody else would have stepped in and taken control of the cults. (Which is not to say that these characters are interchangeable: Killing Wuntad would have made the PCs a major target in the campaign a lot sooner. Factions within the cults probably would have broken away from the new leadership. And so forth.)

Similarly, returning to one of our faux-examples for a moment, common sense tells you that the leader of the terrorists who have taken over the Nakatomi Plaza is more likely to become John McClane’s nemesis than one of his mooks. You don’t have to abandon that common sense in order to follow the principles of RPG villainy.

FURTHER READING
The Railroading Manifesto
Node-Based Scenario Design
Gamemastery 101

Go to Part 1

Every piece of evidence surrounding the authorship of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock points to one of two truths:

(1) If the play was written in the early 1590’s, then Shakespeare must have written it. (If not, then its deep similarities to later Shakespearean plays would indicate that Shakespeare spent the bulk of his career cribbing from the work of an anonymous and apparently forgotten playwright.)

(2) If the play was written after 1600, then Shakespeare probably did not write it. (The relative crudity of the play coupled to such a late date makes it unlikely as the sequel to the polished Richard II, and makes it far more plausible that the play’s similarities are the result of someone cribbing from Shakespeare’s mature works.)

But in the absence of any certainty regarding the play’s authorship, why should it be included in the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare?

Partly because we believe that staging the apocrypha gives a unique and exciting opportunity to see plays which are rarely or never performed. If an apocryphal play like Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock was, in fact, written by Shakespeare, then it’s an important part of the project’s goal to include it. But even if it is not, such plays are an important part of the American Shakespeare Repertory’s mission to provide the rich, Elizabethan context in which Shakespeare’s plays were originally staged.

Which is the other reason we believe it’s important to stage Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock. Amidst all the uncertainty, there is one thing we can be sure of: There was a play on the London stage dramatizing the events surrounding Thomas of Woodstock’s death. If it wasn’t Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, then it was some other play covering the same ground.

Whether or not that play was by Shakespeare, it would have been fresh in the minds of those who saw the premiere of Richard II — a part of the cultural gestalt created by Elizabethan theater. It’s a context which has been largely, if not entirely, inaccessible for the past 400 years. But it’s a context which the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare is uniquely suited to restore.

Originally posted September 18th, 2010.