It’s becoming something of a cliche:

Player: I jump down to the ground.
GM: Are you sure you want to do that?

Here’s the thing: If your players are suggesting something which is self-evidently suicidal to the GM, then there has probably been some sort of miscommunication. Simple example–

Player: I jump down to the ground.
GM: Okay. You fall 200 feet, take 20d6 points of damage, and die.
Player: What? I thought the building was only 20 feet high!

That being said, I’m not a big fan of the coy, “Are you sure you want to do that?” method. While it may warn the player away from some course of action, it is unlikely to actually clear up the underlying confusion.

It’s generally preferable to actually explain your understanding of the stakes to the player to make sure everyone is on the same page. For example–

Player: I jump down to the ground.
GM: The building is 200 feet tall. You’ll take 20d6 points of damage if you do that.
Player: Ah. Right. Well, let’s try something else, then.

Although the misunderstanding can just as easily be on the GM’s side–

Player: I jump down to the ground.
GM: Are you sure you want to do that?
Player: What? Is it covered in lava or something?
GM: No, but the building is 200 feet tall. You’ll take 20d6 points of damage if you do that.
Player: I’m planning to cast feather fall. I just want the princess to think I’ve committed suicide.
GM: Carry on.

This carries beyond deadly situations. For example, if you’re running a mystery scenario and one of the players says, “I inspect the carpet.” And you don’t know why they want to inspect the carpet, just ask them.

Player: I inspect the carpet.
GM: What are you looking for?
Player: You said it rained last night at 2 AM. If the killer entered through the window after 2 AM, there would be mud on the carpet.
GM (knowing the murder took place at 4 AM): Yup. It looks like somebody tried to clean it up, but you find some mud scraped onto the molding near the window.

If you don’t ask the question and you don’t understand what they’re looking for, you might end up feeding them false (or, at least, misleading) information.

Which suggests a general principle:

If you don’t understand what the players are trying to achieve with a given action, find out before adjudicating the action.

The beautiful abstraction of inflationary hit points is an efficient, streamlined, and (most importantly) fun way of handling combat damage.

Once you get outside of combat, however, they do take a toll.

Falling damage is oft-cited, but doesn’t really bug me any more: If your character is capable of punching out a dragon (and they are), the fact that they can jump off a skyscraper doesn’t really seem that implausible. My philosophy is let the demigods be demigods.

But the one tack-on effect that does bug me is the loss of stealth-based play. You can’t just sneak past the guards, because in practice that usually just means that you end up with enemies in front and behind you. And since the system is designed to make it difficult to take out your typical opponent in one hit (because that doesn’t make for a fun combat), it’s impossible to execute a “quiet sweep” (by taking out opponents without raising the alarm). So, in general, your only viable option within the mechanics is to go for a full breach every time. And this is a problem that is typically exacerbated as the PCs gain levels.

(You’d think that having a wider range of weaker opponents would counteract this trend, but in practice it doesn’t because the players don’t have a reliable way of knowing which opponents are weak enough for the “guaranteed take-out”. Since a failed stealth attempt will generally put you in a bad position and the group can usually just overwhelm targets they could successfully take-out during a stealth op, my gameplay experience suggests that they’re rarely willing to take the gamble with the odds stacked so heavily against them. This could be addressed by adding a mechanic that would allow PCs to figure out “how tough is this guy?”.)

Another solution, of course, would be to increase the lethality of the system. The D20 version of Call of Cthulhu, for example, lowered the Massive Damage Threshold to 10. This encourages stealth-focused play from both sides — it makes the PCs vulnerable in open melees and makes it possible for them to take out opponents in a single, stealthy blow.

Of course, in D&D, setting the MDT to 10 would simply turn the game into a big crap shoot of save-or-die. Not much fun. I’ve long been tempted to play around with setting the MDT to a character’s Constitution score + HD in a D20 game just to see what would happen. That might work for an E6 game; although beyond that point the lethality would start creeping back up into save-or-die territory.

But I digress. My point is, using MDT to solve the problem will also impact how combat itself plays out. Which may not actually be desirable. So let me tweak it a little bit and propose something different.

SURPRISE DAMAGE THRESHOLD

Create a “surprise damage threshold”. If a flat-footed character suffers more damage than their surprise damage threshold during the surprise round, they are knocked unconscious.

This rule allows the PCs to dogpile a single sentry or small group to help guarantee that their stealthy behavior pays off. And by requiring the damage to be dealt during the surprise round, you’re eliminating random knock-outs at the start of every fight. (The flat-footed requirement is there to make this strictly about achieving surprise.)

What value should the SDT be set at? That’ll probably require some tweaking and playtesting, but Constitution score + HD might not be a bad place to start. You could also add a Fortitude save like the regular MDT rules require.

So it turns out there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me crazy again?

Partly you’re just dealing with cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right”, which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of physical reality. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a tiny little pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy”; it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right”. (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 1D: THE COMMON ROOM AT NIGHT

March 10th, 2007
The 15th Day of Amseyl  in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 1D: The Common Room at Night

In which further friends are met as strangers, recompenses are paid for a broken door, and the matter of several strange documents become of quizzical importance…

As I’ve mentioned before, the players for my Ptolus campaign were originally scattered to all corners of the country: Indiana, Iowa, Arizona, and Minnesota. The group included my oldest friend, one of the players from my original 3rd Edition campaign, my brother, and my girlfriend. This was, in short, the only way I could play with these people.

Today we’re fortunate enough to have a plethora of online game tables to choose from. Back in 2007, there weren’t as many options to choose from. And most of them were expensive. IIRC, one involved purchasing a $50 piece of software for the GM and then $25 licenses for all of the players. With 5 players it would have set me back $175, which I considered to be a fairly ridiculous price.

The solution I eventually settled on was ScreenMonkey: It had the dual advantages of being affordable and not requiring any special software for my players. ScreenMonkey allows the GM to host a session that can be accessed through any browser. That being said, it’s not a great piece of software and — at least when I was using it — prone to severe lag. But it handled dice rolling, let me display maps, and allowed the players to move their miniatures around.

To supplement ScreenMonkey we also used Ventrilo and, later, Skype for voice-chat. And we used the SSA-X2 PDF character sheets to conveniently swap standardized character sheets.

Which basically sums up what you need for a virtual tabletop:

• Ability to share graphics (preferably with battlemap and miniature support).
• Dice roller.
• Ability to talk to each other.

With that being said, I’d also like:

• Ability to tab and/or splitscreen multiple graphics.
• Integrated private messaging.
• Fog of war. (Customized to individual PCs would be great.)

I know lots of people also like to see integrated mechanical support for their systems of choice (character sheets, initiative trackers, etc.). But I’ve found they’re usually more trouble than they’re worth: I’d rather keep the digital interface clean and simple and let people manage initiative and character sheets and all that the same way they do at the physical table.

PREPPING THE ELECTRONIC TABLE

With that being said, I haven’t done a lot of gaming at electronic tables. Partly this is because I don’t do a lot of gaming with strangers. Partly this is because my gaming schedule is already filled beyond capacity with face-to-face games.

But largely, speaking as a Game Master, it’s because prepping for an electronic table requires a lot more work than prepping for a table game.

Largely, this is because I’ve found that people tend to have very different standards for what they consider “graphically acceptable” on a computer screen. When I scratch out some lines using colored markers on a Chessex battlemat, players at the table tend to simply provide closure and imagine vast halls of cyclopean majesty. When I’ve taken the same players and shown them the same chicken-scratchings on a virtual tabletop, however, it doesn’t seem to work.

(I eventually started using Dundjinni with the Old School map pack. This is the only mapping software I’ve found that lets me crank out polished maps in about the same time it takes me to sketch them out by hand. It’s not glitzy and it still needs to pre-prepped for a digital table, but it’s of a high enough quality that my players stopped getting perceptibly yanked out of the game.)

But this also goes beyond battlemaps: Stuff that can be quickly shown at the gaming table without any effort at all requires special prep for the virtual environment. Something as simple as holding up a bestiary and showing the picture of a monster requires scanning the image and getting it into a format (and location) where it can be displayed to the players. (This is becoming less of a hassle as more and more of my RPG library becomes digital, although I still need to get the picture out of the PDF.)

The net result of all this is not only that prepping is more labor-intensive for a virtual tabletop, but that I also find the virtual tabletop inhibits improvising. If my tabletop players unexpectedly go into a random building, it’s not hard for me to whip up floorplans on the fly. On the digital table, however, there’s just no way for me to pull that off in any sort of smooth or effective way.

In many ways I find this similar to using detailed miniature terrain like DwarvenForge. It’s fabulous. And if I was independently wealthy I would hire somebody to make and customize miniature terrain for my campaigns full-time. But it’s too time-consuming for me to use it on a regular basis.