Go to Part 1

Looking at the two versions of Madame Ling from yesterday, it’s notable that both contain the same amount of detail. Does this mean we can’t (or shouldn’t) add any prep to Madame Ling?

Not necessarily. But we need to look for where we can execute value-added prep that isn’t wastefully redundant or needlessly limiting within the scenario structure of Technoir. Specifically, we want to avoid pre-linking any of the nodes together: The plot map mechanics will do that for us during play.

But beyond that, there are a lots of way in which we could theoretically enhance Technoir transmissions.

For example, consider Club Neo. Off the top of my head, we could potentially prep:

• A detailed floorplan of the club.
• Throw together a couple paragraphs describing the “overlapping reality” club scene, in which people deliberately share a common physical space with contrasting audio- and visual-inputs pumped through their AR rigs.
• Detail the “seven layers of reality” on Club Neo’s experiential menu.
• Provide a stat block for the club’s bouncer.
• Prep a drink menu for the club that could be given to the players as a handout.
• Set up a random table of ten colorful NPCs who could be used to provide the club with some instant flavor as needed.

How much of that should you actually prep? I dunno. How much of it actually looks useful to you? How much of it do you think would enhance the game for you and your players? How much time are you willing to spend in prep?

For myself, I’ve so far confined my Technoir runs to the minimalist approach of the default transmissions, with one exception: For each city that I’ve run, I’ve googled up a neighborhood map of the city as it currently exists and printed it off. Although the cities have changed dramatically in Technoir’s dark future, these maps have given me just enough of the local geography for a firm foundation.

SOME FINAL QUALIFIERS

In closing, I want to just clear up a couple minor semantic points which are likely to throw some people off the scent if they get too hung up on them.

To be perfectly clear: Every bit of detail you prep is, in some sense, going to lock down options. That’s why I made it a point to specifically identify the principles of smart prep as guidelines. If you try to pursue them as hard rules you’re going to be disappointed.

For example, what if I decide to prep Club Neo in more detail and, as part of that, say that it’s owned and operated by former twee-disco star Big Purple? I have now effectively locked out the option of making Madame Ling the owner of Club Neo. How is that any different than locking Madame Ling into actually being the owner of Club Neo? Haven’t I still restricted her relationship with the club?

Well, it’s largely a matter of degree. By making someone else the owner of Club Neo, I have locked out one option for Madame Ling among a nearly infinite multitude. But if I make Madame Ling the owner of the club, I have locked out a multitude of options in favor of a single choice.

Then am I saying that you should never make an NPC the owner of a restaurant? Well, as Big Purple demonstrates, obviously not. This is something particular to the fact that Madame Ling and Club Neo are both nodes in Technoir’s scenario structure: There’s nothing particularly heinous about making Madame Ling the owner of a sex salon or giving Club Neo a particular owner; it is rather the particular act of pre-linking two nodes which is substantially problematic within this specific scenario structure.

The point is that you want to maximize the utility and flexibility of your prep while avoiding prep which serves little or no function except to limit the flexibility of your material. Pre-linking nodes in Technoir is a particularly clear-cut example of how you can limit your flexibility without adding utility; prepping plots instead of situations is a slightly more complicated one.

But there are plenty of other examples (both large and small). For example, you might write, “The giants are automatically hostile and will not listen to negotiations of any kind.” It’s just one sentence, but unless I’ve got a really good reason for introducing that type of limitation, I’m not going to do it. I’m certainly not going to elaborate upon it. What’s the point of wasting time on something which provides a strictly negative value at the actual game table?

Smart prep. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.

GM rulings and GM fiat rest at two ends of a single spectrum.

On one end of the spectrum you have GM decisions that are completely disconnected from the existing rules. These are examples of clear GM fiat and the same decision would be made regardless of what rule system the GM was using or even if there were no rules at all.

On the other end of the spectrum you have a very simple and straightforward ruling: The players want to do X. There is a rule for X. We will use the rule to determine X.

In between you have a broad spectrum of gray.

For example, let’s consider the case of jumping across a crevasse. At one end of the scale you have pure fiat: The GM says “yes, you can” or “no, you can’t” based on his desire for them to do so, his whim, or somesuch. At the other end of the scale you have the simple application of 3E’s jumping rule: The GM simply picks up the rule, applies it, and determines whether or not the action is a success.

In between you might have OD&D, which lacks a clear rule for jumping. So the GM says, “He has a Dex of 15. He could probably make this jump easily, so yes.” That seems to still clearly be a ruling; the GM is simply figuring out how to apply the mechanics in a situation for which a clear rule does not exist.

Heading further into the gray we have thinking like: “His character background says that he was an Olympic track athlete, so it makes sense that he should be able to make this jump.” or “Last week he wasn’t able to jump over that pit and this crevasse is even wider, so it makes sense that he won’t be able to make this jump.” Are those rulings or fiat? It’s getting a little harder to judge. (Is the latter a ruling based on a previous fiat? Or just more fiat?)

Another way you can draw the distinction is that it is very easy for rulings to become rules; it is difficult or impossible for fiat to do so.

For example, in a case of pure fiat (where I say “yes, he can jump that crevasse because I say so”) it is very difficult to then make an informed ruling based on that fiat. At the purely local level it probably means I’ll decide that the character can make that same jump again, but whether or not that will have any wider applicability will probably still depend on some arbitrary decision-making.

On the other hand, the more concrete the ruling the easier it is to begin applying it as a rule. For example, if I say “he has a Dex of 15, so he can make the jump”, then it’s relatively easy to apply that as a rule and decide that, yes, the character with a Dex of 16 can also easily make the jump.

If I go even further and base the ruling on something like “I’ll say that you can jump 2 feet for every point of Dex”, then it’s very easy to simply treat that as a rule going forward.

A third way of looking at this is through the lens of consistency: The easier it is to reapply the same decision in a consistent fashion across multiple situations (because it’s based on some sort of meaningful criteria), the more likely it is that the decision is a ruling. The more difficult it is to do so, the more likely it is that the decision is fiat.

Which is one of the reasons why I say that a properly structured rule facilitates rulings.

Technoir continues to be a big hit at my game table. It’s proven to be a success not only with my hardcore players, but also with the casual brigade. The question now is whether it can be bootstrapped into either an open table of some sort or settle down into a dedicated group. (We’ve had a few thoughts on both.)

Technoir is also helping me clarify a lot of my thinking about the roles and functions of GMing.

I’ve talked in the past about the concept of “smart prep”, by which I’ve generally meant focusing your prep on stuff with high utility while avoiding prep which is either unnecessary or likely to be wasted during play. (For example, the entirety of “Don’t Prep Plots” is about focusing on smart prep.)

On that note, here are a few general principles of “smart prep”.

(1) Try to avoid prep which cuts off options during play.

Note, however, that prep inherently does this: If you decide that the walls of Castle Shard are purple during prep, then you’ve cut-off the option of making them black during play. So what you want to focus on is leaving open the meaningful options.

Another way to look at this is that you want to retain as much flexibility in what you prep as possible. This not only allows you to avoid redundant prep, it also means that you’re generally reducing your overall prep while actually increasing the utility of your prep at the same time.

For example, imagine that you’re prepping a goon squad for Baron Destraad. If you spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how to position them in Room 16B and the tactics they’ll use in Room 16B, then you’re limiting the utility of that goon squad to Room 16B. (You could, of course, simply ignore that prep. But, of course, that means you’ve wasted that prep work.)

(2) Don’t prep anything which could be just as easily generated during play.

Technically, of course, everything can be improvised during play. So what you want to focus on is the stuff that adds value by virtue of being prepped: For example, prepping stat blocks ahead of time instead of trying to generate them during play will generally speed things up at the table. Detailed floorplans or handouts can provide valuable and evocative visual aids for the players which generally can’t be created on-the-fly.

In general, look for the stuff that’s time-consuming; that requires special tools; that will benefit from considered thought; or which you know you just aren’t particularly good at winging.

(3) Try to avoid prepping any specific plots. And definitely avoid prepping any outcomes.

By which I mean stuff like “after A happens, then B will happen… unless the PCs do X, in which case C will happen instead.”

This applies at both the micro- and macro-levels. And, in many ways, it’s just a specific iteration of the first two guidelines: When you prep specific sequences of events, you’re self-evidently cutting off options (the other ways in which that sequence could play out) and prepping stuff that could be just as easily generated during play. (In fact, it would probably be easier to generate it during play since you won’t waste time with contingency planning: What happens will be what happens.)

Of course, all of these principles should be thought of as guidelines. In actual practice, there will be exceptions (often very useful exceptions). But I suggest thinking long and hard about your prep methods to see if there are ways in which you could be achieving the same results (or better results) with less prep. (Or using the same amount of prep to achieve more.) In my experience, most GMs spend a lot of time on wasted prep.

SMART PREP IN TECHNOIR

I want to take a second now to talk about how smart prep applies to Technoir, because the plot mapping scenario structure of the game ends up drawing a very clear and very specific line between smart prep and wasted prep that I think is useful in understanding the difference between the two.

As I’ve discussed before, scenario prep in Technoir takes the form of a transmission. Each transmission consists of six connections, six events, six factions, six locations, six objects, and six threats arranged onto a 6×6 master grid which allows you to randomly generate and connect these nodes to each other. The connections you generate between the nodes will spontaneously create the conspiracy-oriented scenario the PCs are engaging.

There are three transmissions included in the rulebook and you can also download the free Twin Cities Metroplex transmission. In these transmissions, each node receives a single sentence of description. For example:

Archangels of Saint Paul

A militant religious organization looking to cure the city of its sins.

Objects receive a set of tags (allowing them to act like other equipment). Connections get a full stat block (including the favors they can do for PCs). And threats get a set of 3-6 stat blocks (to be used as antagonists). But other than that, the single sentence is all you get.

Clearly there is no wasted prep here. And, speaking from experience, this minimalist approach works.

But, if we wanted to do more prep within this structure, is there value to be added? I think so. Notably, however, it would also be trivial to reduce the value of your prep even within the minimal profile presented by the sample transmissions.

Let’s start with the latter. Imagine a transmission in which we define one of the locations as:

Club Neo

A plain block of concrete glitzed in overlapping layers of multi-sensory AR.

In the same transmission we include a connection:

Madame Ling

A lady of refined manners and the drug mistress of the Lowtown party scene.

Looks good. On the other hand, imagine that we describe Madame Ling like this:

Madame Ling

The owner of Club Neo and the drug mistress of the Lowtown party scene.

Same minimalist approach, but – in the specific context of Technoir – this latter example is flawed. Why? Because it locks down the relationship between Madame Ling and Club Neo. This not only functionally “forces” Madame Ling onto the plot map if Club Neo is generated (which I’ve found can disrupt the flow and robustness of the map), it also drastically reduces the flexibility of these elements in play. (For example, without that constriction, Madame Ling could consider Club Neo a rival; she could be trying to take it over; she could be romantically entangled with the owner; and so forth. All of these options disappear if we’ve established that she’s the club’s owner.)

Continued Tomorrow: Value-Added Prep

The Cleric – Viktor Fetsch

The art for Legends & Labyrinths has begun to arrive, so starting today I’ll be regularly featuring pieces here at the Alexandrian. Those who contributed to the funding project will recognize some of these first images (which arrived in time to make the Black Book Beta rulebook), but we’ll be moving into territory fresh for everybody within a couple of days.

This beautiful image by Viktor Fetsch captivated everyone who saw it during pre-production. It immediately screamed “ADVENTURING CLERIC” to everyone who saw it. (Or, as they’re referred to in my current campaign, itinerant clerics.) It easily managed to shove out the piece I’d originally planned to provide the iconic illustration of the cleric.

My poor inbox (which was already wallowing under an inundation of holiday e-mails I have been unable to keep on top of) has been getting hit hard this morning with people asking me what I think of the freshly announced 5th Edition of D&D.

Short answer: I don’t really think anything about it. We know absolutely nothing about it, after all.

Slightly longer answer: According to ENWorld, the news was leaked to them in “early winter last year” and, at that time, the game had been “under development for some time” (to the point where they had a rough rules draft ready for playtesting by the press).

From this, it’s pretty easy to conclude what was already obvious when Slavicsek left the company and they started cancelling products: The Essentials product line was deemed an immediate failure by WotC . (Just as the early release of the Essentials rulebooks in 2010 told you that 4th Edition, as a whole, had failed.)

LOOKING AHEAD

I’ve said in the past that I currently don’t see a winning business strategy for WotC with a 5th Edition. Unsurprisingly, nothing I’ve heard in the last three hours has changed that opinion.

It should be relatively self-evident that the goal of a 5th Edition at this juncture is to re-unify the D&D customer base. (All the talk of “unity” in the announcement, of course, only confirms this.) But for all the talk about a “public playtest” and “asking D&D fans what they want in a new edition”, I’m not really seeing the mechanism by which 5th Edition solves WotC’s problems.

WotC, ultimately, faces an immutable truth: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base. And, as far as I can tell, there is no such dissatisfaction in the 4th Edition customer base. The biggest gripes they seem to have (if any) are the mini-revision of Essentials, the lackluster DDI support, and the lack of printed supplements. None of those complaints suggest a deep dissatisfaction with the system itself (quite the opposite, in fact).

Of course, there is widespread dissatisfaction with 4th Edition among players of previous editions. But that doesn’t actually help WotC.

Basically, the current D&D customer base consists of three broad groups:

(1) 3rd Edition players (either using the original rulebooks or having migrated to Pathfinder). These players, almost by definition, have said, “We’re happy with what we’ve got.” Which isn’t to say that many of them, including myself, aren’t open to new experiences. But the only way WotC can appeal to them en masse is to restore classic 1974-2008 D&D gameplay to 5th Edition.

(2) Unfortunately, restoring the classic gameplay of D&D is almost guaranteed to alienate the existing 4th Edition players.

(3) Finally, you’ve got a relatively small contingent of old school players. These guys are inherently even more conservative than the 3rd Edition players and, frankly, it’s impossible to publish anything new that will appeal to them en masse.

Honestly, I think the most likely outcome is that WotC will produce a game which attempts to return to classic D&D gameplay. But in an effort not to lose their existing 4th Edition players, they’ll try to strike a compromise between the two. The result may or may not be a great game, but commercially it will almost certainly fail: 3E players will reject the 4E elements and stick with the best-supported RPG in history. 4E players will reject a return to “wizard win buttons” and other spherical cows (which will presumably be even less true in 5E).

Things get worse when WotC cancels DDI support for 4th Edition (which seems likely) and creates another group of disenchanted customers who feel alienated and betrayed. Without an OGL to fall back on, a large percentage of this group will exit the game industry entirely.

Basically, my prediction here is that WotC will split their existing 4E fanbase (to one degree or another). They will pick up a relatively insignificant portion of the 3E and OSR fanbases. In short, WotC produces a 5E which performs even worse in the marketplace than 4E.

Things that could mitigate this doomsday prediction:

(1) WotC starts mending fences in really meaningful ways. Specifically, they need to look long and hard at some of the really unpopular decisions they’ve made and work to reverse them: Put previous edition PDFs back on sale. Make Dragon and Dungeon available in print again (even if it’s just POD).

(2) Reach out aggressively for new customers. I don’t know exactly what form this takes, but if WotC can find a way to replenish their customer base with new players then the continued schisming of the RPG marketplace won’t be as significant.

(3) Part of that, however, might be revamping the core products and methodology of your product line. Finding a way to truly abandon the proven failure of the supplement treadmill burnout cycle would also help.

(4) Restore the OGL.

There are also, unfortunately, a lot of things WotC could do that would make things worse.

WHAT WOULD I LIKE?

In an ideal world, I would like the version of D&D that became a missed opportunity in 2008. I talked about it a little bit here:

That’s the missed opportunity here: WotC had the chance to polish and improve Classic D&D; to take the next step with the game. Instead, they side-stepped and gave us New D&D instead.

Meanwhile, Paizo couldn’t make those changes with Pathfinder while simultaneously stepping into the void vacated by WotC.

In short, keep the core gameplay of D&D, fix the handful of problematic abilities at low levels, revamp high level play so that it doesn’t fall apart. Grab the utility of page 42 without the railroading advice and implement a cleaner/quicker system for creating monsters and NPCs.

I would also:

• Look to the OSR and reintroduce game structures that have been slowly stripped out of the game for the past 30 years.
• Embrace the D&D core sets strategy I’ve talked about previously featuring a stripped-down system very similar to what Legends & Labyrinths looks like.
• I would re-introduce the AD&D brand name to produce a Player’s Handbook, a Dungeon Master’s Guide, and a Monster Manual. These would be 100% compatible with the D&D product line. (If you’ve got a D&D module, you can run it in AD&D without conversion. If you create a monster with AD&D, you can run it in D&D. If you’ve got a D&D character, you can start using the AD&D character creation rules any time you level up. And so forth.)
• I’d go back to Dancey’s concept of “evergreen” products and try to make it work by focusing my actual supplement line on opening up new game structures. For example, I wouldn’t produce a book of “rules for ships”. Rules for ships are worthless unless you have a game structure that involves being on ships. What needs to be developed is a game structure for “being pirates” that’s as effective as the game structure for “being dungeoncrawlers”. Pull that off successfully and you’ll have created an entirely new market for adventure products.
• I’m hoping that I can buck the burnout pattern of the supplement treadmill by locking adventure content, rule content, and physical goodie content together into the boxed sets. If that doesn’t pan out, I’d just turn the boxed sets into limited editions and cycle them out of print.
• I would probably do everything in my power to avoid publishing splatbooks like Complete Warrior or Arcane Power. These books are not only the metastatic cancer of the supplement treadmill, but they make it actively more difficult for people to embrace non-“core” classes because the non-core classes never receive the same support. I’d rather have people reach for new experiences rather than glutting and then sating themselves on the supplement treadmill for fighters and wizards.
• Bring back the OGL if the legal department will let me get away with it.

If we got my “perfect edition”, would it make 5th Edition a success? Unfortunately, no. I believe it probably would have been a huge success in 2008 (particularly if released under the OGL) when the D&D trademark would have helped transition existing players to it.

But in 2011, at least half of WotC’s former market no longer has any loyalty to WotC or the D&D trademark. There is no easy mechanism for leveraging those players into a new edition, which means that you’re competing not only with their existing investment (of time, money, and experience) but with the most expansive library of support material ever produced for an RPG.