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If there’s one fundamental lesson I think you should take away from Don’t Prep Plots or Smart Prep, it’s to think of your prep as a collection of tools that you can use during the game rather than a story you’ve written. Or as a box full of toys that you can play with at the table (the same way the players are playing their characters) rather than a script to be read from. Or whatever other metaphor works for you.

Those previous articles already discuss this principle in both general and specific terms, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time today retreading that ground. I’m going to assume that you’ve already discovered the joy of actively playing scenarios, and what I want to talk about today are the toys you could be playing with, but may not realize that you already have in your toybox.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I’m talking about is by way of example.

NEWSSHEETS

For my Ptolus campaign, part of my campaign status document is a list of upcoming headlines/articles in the local newssheets. For example:

  • Another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District. Attributed to Shilukar. Said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughter and heiress, Tillian.
  • Ratmen openly prowling streets of the Warrens after dark. City Watch refuses to patrol the area, although they’ve increased patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained to the Warrens.

And so forth. The current version of the sheet has the next fifteen or so days of newssheets mapped out and I do the same thing in my Dragon Heist campaign for broadsheets in Waterdeep. Some of the news items tie into future scenarios, others reflect the ongoing activities of the PCs, and some are just random events unrelated to the PCs.

The primary reason I started prepping these is the obvious one: My players were routinely checking the local newssheets to see what was going on in the city and it was useful to give some thought to what they’d find when they did.

Although designed as a single-use tool (PC wants to look at headlines → give them the current headlines), once I had the tool in my campaign status document I began discovering that there were actually lots of different ways that I could use it. For example:

  • When canvassing local taverns for gossip.
  • Conversational topics for NPCs, both generally and when using the party planning game structure. (Particularly true when improvising a party in the middle of a game session, like the one described here.)
  • Feeding content into conversations they’re eavesdropping on.
  • Local color. (A scrap of newspaper blowing down the deserted street; a news boy shouting headlines on the corner. Graffiti about the current scandal sprayed on a wall.)

To find these hidden tools, I just had to stop thinking of the list as being specifically “this is what appears in the newssheet” and started thinking of it in the more general sense of “this is what’s going on in the city / what people are talking about / what’s in the public consciousness.” What looked as if it was very specific content actually had a much broader general utility.

One of the interesting consequences of identifying and using these “hidden” tools is that it will often highlight places where, as described in Smart Prep, you can completely eliminate unnecessary prep. For example, when I first started prepping news stories for a campaign I would often get very specific: What newspaper were they published in? What was the headline? Et cetera. When I started using these tools in different ways, I realized that these details were often superfluous waste. The thing that was actually useful was the core piece of information. Everything else could be improvised during actual play depending on how the information intersected with the PCs.

This is not to say that the contextualization isn’t important. (Exactly the opposite!) It’s not even to say that this sort of contextualization shouldn’t be prepped. For example, you can see here how I researched specific newspapers from the 1930s for my Eternal Lies campaign. Note how easily you can grab one of these newspapers and combine them with a news item like the examples above and instantly contextualize the information: You don’t need to prep a specific newspaper for every single article in order to get the same effect in actual play. Similarly, it’s quite probable that if the PCs are getting this information from a PC or a tavern, then it’s also something you’ve prepped.

You can also think of this as prepping a collection of more generic tools that can be combined together in order to flexibly respond to any number of possibilities, rather than prepping hyper-specialized tools that can only be used in one specific way. Looking for your “hidden tools” is one way of taking a specialized tool and making it more widely useful. (Note, though, how this greater utility often takes the form of less prep, not more!)

But it’s important not to mistake this for a reductio ad absurdum where the goal is to eliminate all specificity. If you look at that same Eternal Lies campaign, for example, you’ll find any number of instances where I prepped very specific newspaper articles, books, or the like.

PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING

The principle of permissive clue-finding, described as a corollary to the Three Clue Rule, is actually another example of using hidden tools.

Basically, when you design a mystery scenario, you prep a specific list of revelations that are necessary to solve the mystery and then you prep specific clues that point to each revelation so that the players/PCs can figure it out. The principle of permissive clue-finding is simply to provide meaningful clues in response to PC-initiated investigations even if they are not the clues that you prepped ahead of time.

The revelations on your revelation list are, effectively, your hidden tools: You know that solving the mystery lies in grokking those revelations, so when the PCs start pursuing an investigatory path you hadn’t anticipated, all you need to do is figure out how (or if) it can be related back to one of those revelations.

HEXES & RUMORS

Here’s a technique I used when running my OD&D hexcrawl.

I wanted to seed the campaign with rumors, so I decided that new characters would begin play with 1d4 rumors and existing characters could make a Charisma check in the downtime between sessions to pick up a rumor. I experimented with a traditional 1d20 and, later, a 1d30 rumor table, but because it was an open table with several dozen players and even more characters the rumor table would basically get burned up as soon as I stocked it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time restocking the rumor table (particularly because many rumors were never pursued, which felt like semi-wasted prep), so rather than rolling on a rumor table I started just randomly selecting one of the hexes on my map, looking at what the hex contained, and then just improvising an appropriate rumor.

So, for example, I might randomly select Hex C2 and read:

C1 – WHITE DRAGON LAIR

Queen of the Claw – Elder White Dragon (AC 2, 12 HD)

  • Suspicious of Dyre (hex A1)
  • Daughter (Paicyro) ran away and knows a secret entrance (hex C8)
  • Remembers a time of Ashardalon and opposed him when she was a wyrmling

Sired a pack of half-dragon dire wolves (AC 2, 4+2 HD).

Served by the Twelve White Claws, elite anubian warriors chosen for the honor in a gladiatorial combat once every 10 years.

TREASURE: 8000 silver, 30,000 gold, 98 gems, 10 jewelry

And come up with any number of rumors like:

  • Traders coming through the Gap have seen a White Dragon circling a mountain peak northwest of the Cloud Spiral.
  • In an ancient Thracian text kept by the Temple of Minerva, you discover references to a “Queen of the Claw” who opposed the dragon god Ashardalon. She is said to have been entombed with untold wealth in a crypt “in the peaks directly north of the Tower of Wind”.
  • A caravan passing through the Gap was found slaughtered. Those who found their ruined bodies heard a reptilian howling in the hills to the north. They quickly buried the bodies and fled.

You can probably come up with another half dozen such rumors yourself, even without knowing the wider context and lore of this particular campaign world.

Note that the hexes are still fulfilling the primary function I had designed them for (being discovered during a hexcrawl). It’s just that they were now also being leveraged and put to new use. (With, you’ll note, no additional prep on my part whatsoever.)

CONCLUSION

The point here is to reprogram your brain so that when you prep X in order to do Y you don’t lock down on the idea that Y is the only thing you can do with X.

Along the way you may discover that, instead of trying to prep something in order to do Y, it makes more sense to cut out the middleman and go straight to prepping something that’s directly designed to be flexibly used in multiple ways. That’s great! Y will still be taken care of, but now you can also take care of a bunch of other stuff.

At a macro-level I say don’t prep plots, prep situations. At the micro-level, we might describe this as prepping content instead of writing outcomes.

From one point of view, the playing of a roleplaying game can be described as the organized exchange of information between players. Particularly numerical information.

GM: Give me an attack roll.
Player: 17.
GM: You hit.
Player: I do 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

The player generates a number (rolling their attack skill plus a d20 roll) and gives it to the GM. The GM performs a mathematical operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s armor class) and the result of that operation causes him to request an additional number from the player. The player generates that number (by rolling the damage for their weapon) and reports it to the GM, who once again does an operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s remaining hit points) and determines an outcome (the orc dies).

This seems simple and intuitive. And, in this case, it largely is.

But it turns out that how we process and pass numerical information around the table can have a big impact on play. For example:

GM: The orc’s AC is 17. Give me an attack roll.
Player: I hit. 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

By passing a piece of information (and the associated mathematical operation) over to the player, this GM has significantly improved the efficiency of their communication. If the orc hadn’t died (or if there are other identical orcs), this efficiency compounds over time because the GM doesn’t have to keep passing that piece of information to the player.

Of course, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of a roleplaying game. There are any number of reasons why a GM might want to keep the orc’s armor class secret from the players (either as a general principle or due to specific circumstances). My point is not that these other considerations are somehow “wrong,” but rather simply that in choosing those other things the GM is sacrificing efficiency.

In many cases, however, the GM isn’t aware that this is a choice that they’re making. And often there are no reasons that might justify the inefficiency; the flow of information (and the impact it’s having on play) just isn’t something the GM is thinking about.

For a long time, this wasn’t something that I understood, either. I’d have discussions with people complaining that such-and-such a system was super complicated and a huge headache to play, and I would be confused because that didn’t match my experience with the game. It would have been easy to pat myself on the back and think, “Well, I guess I’m just smarter than they are,” but I would also have players say to me, “I’d played such-and-such a system before and I hated it, but you really made everything make sense. Can’t wait to play again.” And I’d scratch my head, because I really hadn’t done anything special in terms of teaching how the game worked.

The difference was in the flow of information. Not only can the flow of information around the gaming table be inefficient, it can also be confusing and burdensome.

ECLIPSE PHASE

We think of game mechanics primarily in terms of numerical values and how those values are created or manipulated. But in actual practice, many mechanical Eclipse Phase - Posthuman Studiosresolutions are performed by multiple people at the table. If you think of the resolution as a ball, it often has to be passed back and forth. Or you might think of it as a dance, and if we — as a table of players — don’t coordinate our actions in performing the resolution we’ll end up stepping on each other’s toes.

This efficient passing of information is an example of system mastery. Often, as a table gains experience with a particular RPG together, they’ll intuitively find the patterns of behavior that work. But this doesn’t always happen, and when it doesn’t we can benefit from consciously thinking about:

  • What numbers we say
  • Who is responsible for saying them
  • How we say them

Let me give a simple example of this, using Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase is a percentile system. You modify your skill rating by difficulty and then, if you roll under that number on percentile dice, you succeed. In addition, your margin of success is equal to the number you roll on the dice. If you roll 30+ (and succeed) you get an excellent success; if you roll 60+ you get an exceptional success.

Here’s how things often go when I’m introducing new players to Eclipse Phase (particularly those new to roll-under percentile systems entirely):

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got a 47.
GM: What’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Great. That’s a success. An excellent success, actually, because you rolled over 30. Here’s what happens…

The players don’t know what numbers to give me, and so I need to pull those numbers out of them in order to perform the necessary operation (determining if this is a success or failure and the degree of success.) As players start to master the system, this will morph into:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: Great. Here’s what happens…

They can do this because they’ve learned the mechanics and now know that their roll of 47 when they have a skill of 50 is an excellent success. (In this, the exchange mirrors that of a player attacking an orc in D&D when they know it has AC 17, right? They don’t need to pass me the information to perform the mechanical operation because they can do the operation themselves. In fact, many people like roll-under percentile systems like this specifically because they make this kind of efficiency intuitive and almost automatic.)

But there’s actually a problem with this because, if you recall, Eclipse Phase also features difficulties which modify the target number. This disrupts the simple efficiency and we would often end up with discussions like this:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: There’s actually a difficulty here. What did you roll?
Player: 47.
GM: And what’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Okay, so you actually failed. Here’s what happens…

This creates all kinds of friction at the table: It’s inefficient. It’s frequently confusing. And either the outcome doesn’t change at all (in which case we’ve deflated the drama of the resolution for no reason) or the player is frustrated that an outcome they thought was going one way is actually going the other.

The reason this is happening is because there is an operation that I, as the GM, need to perform (applying a hidden difficulty) but I’m not being given the number I need to perform that operation. The player has learned to throw the ball to a certain spot (“I got an excellent success”), but I’m frequently not standing at that spot and the ball painfully drops to the ground.

What I eventually figured out is that the information I need from the player is actually “XX out of YY” — where XX is the die roll and YY is their skill rating. I could catch that ball and easily carry it wherever it needed to go.

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got 47 out of 55.
GM: An excellent success! Here’s what happens…

And I realized that I could literally just tell players that this is what they needed to say to me. I didn’t need to wait for them to figure it out. Even brand new players could almost instantly groove into the system.

ADVANCED D&D

As you spend more time with a system, you’ll frequently find odd corners which require a different flow of information. In some cases you may be able to tweak Dungeons & Dragon 3.5 - Players Handbookyour table norms to account for the special cases, but usually it’ll be more about learning when and how to cue your players that you all need to handle this information differently (and the players gaining the mastery to be able to quickly grok the new, sometimes overlapping, circumstances).

Let’s go back to D&D, for example.

When I’m a DM and I’ve got a horde of orcs attacking a single PC, it’s not unusual for me to roll all of their attacks at once, roll all of the damage from the successful attacks, add all that damage up, and then report it as a single total to the player. It just makes sense to do a running total of the numbers in front of me as I generate them rather than saying a string of numbers to a player and asking them to process the verbal information while doing the running total themselves.

And, of course, it works just fine… right up until a PC gets damage reduction. Now it’s the player who needs to perform a mechanical operation (subtracting their damage reduction from each hit) and doesn’t have the information they need to do that.

Even PCs with multiple attacks usually resolve them one by one for various reasons, so the reverse (players lumping damage together when the GM needs to apply damage reduction) rarely happens. But two of the PCs in my 3rd Edition campaign have weapons that deal bonus elemental damage, and they’ve learned that sometimes I need that damage specifically broken out because creatures are frequently resistant against or immune to fire or electricity damage.

When we first started running into this difficulty, the players defaulted to always giving me the elemental damage separately. But this was an unneeded inefficiency, and we quickly figured out that it was easier for me to simply tell them when they needed to give me the elemental damage separately.

These are simple examples, but they hopefully demonstrate that this sort of mastery is not an all-or-nothing affair. There’s almost always room to learn new tricks.

FENG SHUI

Let’s also take a look at one of these systems that’s fairly straightforward in its mechanical operations, but which can become devilishly difficult if you don’t pass information back and forth cleanly.

In Feng Shui 2, the dice mechanic produces a “swerve”: You subtract a negative d6 from a positive d6 in order to generate a bell curve result from -5 to +5. (Sixes actually explode and are rolled again, so the curve is smeared out at the ends, but that’s basically how it works.)

When you want to make an attack, you do two things. First, you check to see if you hit:

Roll Swerve + Attack Skill – Target’s Defense

If you hit, you then calculate damage:

Margin of Success + Weapon Damage – Target’s Toughness

Looking at those two equations on the page, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly exotic about them. In practice, though, I’ve seen players and entire groups get completely tangled up in them. There tend to be two major problems:

  1. The attacker feels as if they should be able to complete one full step of this process and then report the result… except they can’t, because neither step can actually be completed without information that the defender posseses.
  2. Upon completing the first step, players want to report a flat success/failure outcome (“I hit”), but if they don’t pass the margin of success to the damage equation they can’t actually calculate damage.

What frequently happens in the latter case is:

GM: The target’s Defense is 17.
Player: (does math) Okay, I hit!
GM: So your damage will be equal to the margin of success plus your weapon damage. What was your margin of success?
Player: Uh… crap. I forgot? Three? Maybe four? Hang on… (does the math again)

Another interesting thing that will happen in this kind of situation is that the players — who don’t like being confused or frustrated! — will try to find ad hoc ways of routing around the problem. In Feng Shui 2, for example, I’ll frequently see players basically say, “Well… I know what this guy’s Defense value is because I attacked him last round. So I’m just going to attack him again to keep it simple.”

The important thing to take away from this is that the players want to solve the problem just as much as you do. But often this kind of ad hoc pseudo-solution just shifts the frustration: They’ve figured out how to make the mechanical resolution flow more smoothly, but they feel trapped by the system into making choices that they don’t necessarily want to make. The insane, over-the-top Hong Kong action of Feng Shui 2, for example, has been compromised as they attack the same guy over and over again.

So let’s say that you find yourself in this situation. How can you fix it?

  • Identify the sequence in which mechanical operations must be performed.
  • Identify who has the necessary information for each operation.
  • Figure out how to pass the information to the necessary person at each stage of the opration.

For example, in Feng Shui 2 who has each piece of information used when resolving an attack?

  • Outcome of the swerve roll. (Attacker)
  • Attack Skill (Attacker)
  • Target’s Defense (Defender)
  • Margin of Success (whoever calculated the outcome of the attack roll)
  • Weapon Damage (Attacker)
  • Target’s Toughness (Defender)
  • Wound Points taken (Defender)

If you look back up at the mechanical equations, it should be fairly easy to identify the resolution sequence and the numbers that need to be said:

  1. Attacker rolls swerve and adds their attack skill. (The game actually calls this the Action Result.) Attacker tells the Defender this number.
  2. Defender subtracts their Defense from the Action Result. (This is the margin of success. The game calls this the Outcome.) Defender tells the Attacker the Outcome.
  3. The Attacker adds the Outcome to the Weapon Damage. (The game calls this the Smackdown.) The Attacker tells the Defender the Smackdown.
  4. The Defender subtracts their Toughness from the Smackdown. (This is the number of Wound Points they take.)

You can see that Robin D. Laws, being a clever chap, identified the significant chunks of information in the system and gave them specific labels (Action Result, Outcome, Smackdown). Other games won’t necessarily do that for you (and even the Feng Shui 2 rulebook, unfortunately, doesn’t specifically call out how the information should be passed back and forth), but you should be able to break down the mechanical processes in any system in a similar manner.

PIGGYBACKING IN GUMSHOE (AND BEYOND!)

Let me close by talking about a mechanical interaction that has multiple players participating simultaneously (which, of course, makes the “dance” of information Trail of Cthulhu - Pelgrane Pressmore complicated to coordinate).

In the GUMSHOE System (used by games like Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu), some group checks are resolved using a piggybacking mechanic:

  • One character is designated the Lead.
  • The difficulty of the test is equal to the base difficulty + 2 per additional character “piggybacking” on the Lead’s check.
  • Those piggybacking can spend 1 skill point to negate the +2 difficulty they’re adding to the check.

The mechanic is very useful when, for example, you want Aragorn to lead the hobbits through the wilderness without being detected by Ringwraiths: The more unskilled hobbits there are, the more difficult it should be for Aragorn to do that, but you still want success to be governed by Aragorn’s skill at leading the group.

Many moons ago I adapted this piggybacking structure to D20 systems like this:

  • One character takes the Lead.
  • Other characters can “piggyback” on the Lead’s skill check by making their own skill check at a DC equal to half of the DC of the Lead’s check. (So if the Lead is making a DC 30 check, the piggybackers must make a DC 15 check.)
  • The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check.
  • The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the Lead’s check is made.

On paper, this system made sense. When I put it into practice at the table, however, it wasn’t working out. It seemed complicated, finicky, and the players weren’t enjoying using the mechanic.

I gave up on it for a couple of years, and then came back to it and realized that the problem was that I had been sequencing the mechanic incorrectly. One element of this was actually a slight error in mechanical design, but even this was ultimately about the resolution sequence.

The way the mechanic was being resolved originally was:

  • The GM declares that, for example, a Stealth check needs to be made.
  • The players decide whether they want to use the Piggyback mechanic for this.
  • The GM approves it.
  • The players choose a Lead.
  • The other players decide whether they want to piggyback or not.
  • The Lead chooses whether or not they want to lower the Piggybacking DC.
  • The Lead would roll their check.
  • If the Lead succeeded, the other players would roll their piggybacking checks. (The logic being that if the Lead failed, there was no need for the piggybacking checks. But, in practice, players would see the Lead’s result and then try to opt out of piggybacking if it was bad.)

Here’s what the actual resolution sequence needed to be:

  • The GM declares that there is a piggyback check required.
  • The players choose their Lead.
  • The other players make their piggybacking checks. If any check fails, the largest margin of failure among all piggybacking characters increases the DC of the Lead’s check by +1 per two points of margin of failure.
  • The Lead makes their check.

You can immediately see, just from the number of steps involved, how much more streamlined this resolution process is. The only actual mechanical adjustment, however, is to shift the adjustment of the piggybacking DC from a decision made before the piggybacking checks to an effect of those checks.

The take-away here is that while our passing of mechanical information at the table is often numerical, it can also include other elements (like who’s taking Lead in a piggybacking check) which can also be streamlined and formalized for efficiency.

Amelia Tucco - Sperm Oil Can (Edited)

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 22B: At the Top of Pythoness House

The door was locked, so Tee kneeled next to it and got to work. Agnarr, standing nearby, decided to start oiling the hinges. Tee, remembering the last time Agnarr had decided some hinges needed oiling, began grinding her teeth, but managed to ignore him… mostly.

This session contains a callback to Session 10A: The Labyrinths of Ghul. In that session, I described the ancient hinges of a door in the dungeon as squealing loudly. While Tee explored the room beyond:

Agnarr, meanwhile, started playing with the iron door – moving it back and forth and causing the ancient hinges to squeal horribly. Tee was visibly annoyed. “Stop it. We don’t know what’s down here.”

First, I’d like to take a moment and acknowledge what a great roleplaying moment this is. We often think of great roleplaying as being exemplified in big dramatic or emotional scenes, but this simple little interaction actually demonstrates the heart of all great roleplaying. It’s a player being fully immersed in a moment and simply asking themselves (almost unconsciously), “What would my character do?”

And in this particular moment of boredom the answer was, “Play with this squeaky door.”

Now, at the table, this action is not actually annoying. There is no actual door squeaking. But Tee’s player becomes visibly annoyed because she, too, is immersed in the moment and is fully imagining the sound of this bloody door echoing through the room while she is trying to concentrate. So she tells him to cut it out. And then:

Tee went back to searching. Agnarr shrugged and pulled some oil out of his bag, spreading it liberally over the hinges of the door. That did the trick and the door stopped squeaking. Agnarr grinned, swinging the door back and forth, and called out: “Tee! Look!”

Tee whirled around: “What?!”

As she turned, the mound of rubble behind her exploded. A foul and terrible creature rose up amorphously behind her – its forms constantly shifting through virulent shades of purplish-blackish horror. Agnarr’s eyes widened and the smile fell from his face as two muscular extrusions slashed vicious claws across Tee’s back, ripping open vicious wounds.

Tee screamed in pain. “I hate you Agnarr! I hate you!”

Agnarr sees that Tee is upset and wants to help, so he figures the best way he can do that is by fixing the squeaky hinge that’s upsetting her. Having fixed the “problem,” he just wants to share his happiness with Tee and let her know that he’s solved it!

From Tee’s perspective, of course, the problem is not the squeaky hinge, it’s that Agnarr keeps distracting her. And now he’s distracting her again! There’s a complete mismatch of expectation and emotion as she whirls around.

And then shit goes bad.

In terms of actually “running the campaign,” per se, I contributed virtually nothing to this moment:

  • I randomly described a door hinge as being squeaky.
  • When Agnarr wanted to fix the hinge with some oil, I called for a check to see if he did that. (He made it.)
  • I called for a Spot test to see if Tee noticed the chaos beast lurking in the rubble. (She failed it.)

I mostly just got out of the way, which is often the best thing you can do as a GM.

What makes this moment special?

Hard to say, honestly. There’s an emotional truth here which seems to capture an essential element of the relationship between Tee and Agnarr. The simplicity of the actual interaction coupled with a near-catastrophic outcome creates strong dramatic contrast.

Because I’m talking about this in the context of the long-term legacy of the moment – as demonstrated in this journal entry, it becomes a running joke for Agnarr to oil hinges while Tee grits her teeth – it’s tempting to sight the replicability of the moment (there are lots of opportunities for dungeon adventurers to oil hinges). But the truth is that this had become an in-joke for the group long before Agnarr did it again. The players would bring it up during sessions. They’d also joke about it in other social contexts. Ten years later, in fact, they’re still doing so (much to the bewilderment of many an out-group listening to these conversations).

In sharing these campaign journals I’ve occasionally wondered about the degree to which these in-jokes translate to people who weren’t “there” when it happened. But it’s not unusual for long-term campaigns to develop these in-jokes. Like any in-joke, they build a sense of community and common purpose. They become both shibboleths and fond memorials of shared joy.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 22CRunning the Campaign: Using Lore Books
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 22B: AT THE TOP OF PYTHONESS HOUSE

May 18th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Meanwhile, the skeletal leader – in a frenzied flurry of blades – had been cut down by Tor and Tee. Tee, inspecting the body, discovered the chain armor was of superb quality. The woman had also worn a ruby ring and matching gold bracelet worth a small fortune. On the interior of the bracelet was inscribed a name:

RADANNA

Laying near the gruesome remains of whatever deadly ritual had been held here there was a slim, red book. On the cover, traced in blood, was the symbol of a spiral. Ranthir began examining it as Tee continued searching the room.

THE SCARLET OATH

Scarlet Oath

On the cover of this book, written in blood, is the symbol of a coil. On the first page is an oath:

“I pledge my body, soul, and purpose to the furtherance of chaos. We shall act as one. We shall breathe as one. We shall think as one. And in our crimson coils we shall choke out the life of those who would bring us death. We shall choke out the order which stifles life. We shall choke out the civilization which crushes liberty.”

The rest of the book teaches the ways of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Coil. The cult acts like a virus – their faces hidden; their identities submerged into the Coil itself. The members of the cult do not mix in normal society, preferring to remain cloistered in remote temples or hidden demesnes. The only time the cultists make an appearance is to carry out a Purging. During a Purging the cultists appear en masse to carry out some act of terrible destruction.

The cult chooses a target, seemingly at random, and then show up to burn down a building; set fire to a field; slaughter a family; or deface a monument. They are neither subtle nor gentle. They show neither mercy nor fear. Usually, their raids come so suddenly and unexpectedly that they meet little resistance. They usually appear in numbers so great, they simply cannot be stopped—a hundred cultists to burn down a single house, a dozen to murder a merchant walking down the street. They disappear quickly, often using spells to cover their escape.

(more…)

B3 Palace of the Silver Princess - Partial Map

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 22A: Return to Pythoness House

Arrows suddenly fell among them. One of them clipped Elestra’s shoulder. All of them were suddenly in motion – diving for cover in different directions. Somehow six skeletal women – most clad in the tattered remnants of their brothel fineries – had crept onto the upper terrace and were now firing arrows down into the ruined garden at them.

A novice GM looks at the map of the dungeon. The PCs are about to open the door to Area 5, so he checks the key (in this case from B3 Palace of the Silver Princess) and sees that (a) it’s a library and (b) there are five kobolds in the room.

A fight breaks out. If the novice GM is talented, then the events of that fight will be influenced by the details of Area 5: Maybe the bookshelves topple over on top of people and the kobolds are throwing books. But the kobolds are keyed to Area 5, and so that’s where the kobolds are met and where the fight happens.

Time passes and our novice GM has gotten more experience under his belt. This time, when the PCs get ready to open the door to Area 5, he doesn’t just look at the description of Area 5. He looks around the map and checks nearby areas, too, to see if there are other monsters who might come to join the fight. He looks at Area 7, for example, and sees that it’s a barracks for five goblins.

A fight breaks out. The GM makes a check for the goblins in Area 7. He determines that they DO hear the fight, and a couple rounds later they come rushing over and join the melee in the library.

What the experienced GM is doing can be made a lot easier by using adversary rosters in addition to a basic map key. But there are other methods that can be used to achieve similar results. For example, the sounds of combat might increase the frequency of random encounter checks.

Random encounter mechanics might also lead this GM to another revelation: Combat encounters can happen in areas where they weren’t keyed. For example, maybe the PCs are poking around at the sulfur pool in Area 20 when a random encounter check indicates the arrival of a warband of kobolds.

At this point, our more experienced GM has accomplished a lot: Their dungeons are no longer static complexes filled with monsters who patiently wait for the PCs to show up and slaughter them. They feel like living, dynamic spaces that respond to what the PCs are doing.

THE THEATER OF OPERATIONS

There’s still one preconception that our GM is clinging to. He’s likely unaware of it; a subconscious habit that’s been built up over hundreds of combats and possibly reinforced through dozens of modules relying on preprogrammed encounters (even as he’s moved beyond such encounters).

When the goblins came rushing over to join the fight in the library? It was still the fight in the library. When the kobolds ambushed the PCs by the sulfur pools? The GM still thought of that fight as somehow “belonging” to Area 20.

One of the reasons this happens is because our method of mapping and keying a dungeon is designed to do it: We conceptually break the map into discrete chunks and then number each chunk specifically to “firewall” each section of the dungeon. It makes it easier to describe the dungeon and it makes it easier to run the dungeon, allowing the GM to focus on the current “chunk” without being overwhelmed by the totality.

But the next step is to go through that abstraction and come out the other side. We don’t want to abandon the advantages of conceptually “chunking” the dungeon, but we also don’t want to be constrained by that useful convention, either.

When combat breaks out, for example, we don’t want to be artificially limited to a single, arbitrarily defined “room.” Instead, I try to think of the dungeon as a theater of operations — I look not just at the current room, but at the entire area in which the PCs currently find themselves.

You can see a very basic version of this in the current campaign journal:

Pythoness House - Cartography by Ed Bourelle

While the PCs are in Area 21: Rooftop Garden, I’m aware that the skeletal warriors in Area 25: Radanna’s Chamber have become aware of them. They sneak out onto Area 27: Battlements and fire down at the PCs, initiating combat across multiple rooms (and, in fact, multiple levels).

Here’s another simple example, the hallway fight from Daredevil:

This is basically just two rooms with a hallway between them. But note how even this simple theater of operations creates a more interesting fight than if it had been conceptually locked to just one of the small 10’ x 10’ rooms individually.

Also note how the encounter actually starts before he even enters the first room. This way of thinking about dungeons goes beyond combat: What’s on the other side of the door they’re approaching? What do they hear? What do they see through the open archways?

LEARNING THROUGH ZONES

Awhile back, I wrote about how abstract distance systems in RPGs mimic the way that GMs think about and make rulings about distance and relative position. Zones — like those used in Fate or the Infinity RPG — are a common example of such a system, and using a zone-based system can also be a great set of training wheels for breaking away from the idea that combat takes place in a single keyed location, because zones naturally invite the GM to think of neighboring rooms as being a cluster of zones.

For example, I have Monte Cook’s Beyond the Veil sitting on my desk here. Here’s a chunk of the map from that scenario:

Beyond the Veil - Monte Cook (Partial Map)

And Area 8 on that map is described like this

8. DRAGONPODS

This large chamber was once a gathering hall with tables and benches, and trophies on the wall. There are only vague remnants of those now. Instead, the room has a large number of strange brown and yellow pods on the floor, and clinging to the walls and ceiling, each about three to four feet across. Six of them remain unopened, while at least a dozen have burst from the inside. A few smaller dragonpods lie cracked and brittle on the ground, unopened but obviously long-dead. All of the pods are of some hard organic matter covered in a thick, sticky mucus. They smell of sour fruit.

Storemere’s mating with a carrion crawler produced some strange results. Carrion crawlers normally lay hundreds of eggs at a time. But Storamere’s crawler mate produced dozens of strange, egg-like pods. Some of them hatched, and produced half-dragon carrion crawlers. Others never produced anything viable. Still others have yet to hatch, even though their parents are long dead.

Strangely enough, the union of dragon and carrion crawler seems to have spawned a creature with entirely new abilities. These half-breeds thrive for a time and then curl up and die, producing yet another dragonpod. Even if slain conventionally, the body of the dead dragon crawler will create a new pod and thus a new creature. Only destruction by fire prevents a dead specimen from forming into a pod.

As soon as anyone without dragon blood enters the chamber, four dragon crawlers scuttle out from behind the pods and attack. The round after combat starts, another one drops down from the ceiling to attack a random character. These creatures are covered in black scales and have green, dragon-like eyes on their stalks. Each has dragon wings but they are too small and ill-fitting to allow them to fly. Instead, they flutter and flap their wings to distract opponents.

The room is large enough to comfortably run the entire melee against the four dragon crawlers in there. A neophyte GM might even treat the whole room as kind of being a big square, featureless space.

What an experienced GM will do (and what zones basically formalize) is break that whole region of dungeon map up into zones:

  • Hallway
  • Kitchen (Area 9)
  • Gaulmeth’s Chamber (Area 10)

And then do the same in Area 8, too:

  • North entrance
  • Eastern doors
  • Bottom of the stairs
  • Dragonpod muck
  • Ceiling pods

The result will be their theater of operations. (Which could expand even further into the dungeon depending on how the encounter proceeds.) Thinking in terms of zones will naturally invite you not only to conceptually break up large spaces, but to group spaces together. And once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll realize that you don’t need the specific mechanical structure of zones in order to do this.

OTHER THEATERS OF OPERATION

Thinking in terms of a theater of operations shouldn’t be limited to the dungeon. In fact, it often comes easier in other contexts (in which we haven’t taught ourselves to think in terms of keyed areas), and meditating on how we think about these other examples can often be reflected back into how we think about the dungeon.

For example, one place where GMs often easily think in terms of a theater of operations, even if they don’t in other contexts, is a house. I suspect it’s due to our intimate familiarity with how these spaces work. Think about your own house: Imagine standing in the kitchen and talking to someone in the living room. Or shouting something down the stairs. Or looking up from the couch and seeing what’s happening in the adjacent room.

When we’re talking about the totality of the environment, that’s all we’re talking about. It’s that simple.

At the other end of the scale, there are wilderness environments.

What happens here is that the sheer scale of the wilderness can, paradoxically, cause the theater of operations to similarly collapse into a one-dimensional scope: The forest is vast and, therefore, the entire fight just happens generically “in the forest.” There’s no place for the reinforcements to come from and no capacity of strategic decisions because everything is, conceptually, in a single place — the forest.

The modern over-reliance on battlemaps (particularly battlemaps all locked to a 5-foot scale) tends to exacerbate this problem, limiting the field of battle to a scale that tends to blot out the true theater of operations in the wilderness.

The solution, of course, is to instead embrace the scale of the wilderness. You’re traveling across the plains, but there’s a tree line a few hundred yards away to the north. There’s a family of deer grazing fifty feet over there. There’s a ravine off to your right perhaps a quarter of a mile away that you’ve been paralleling for awhile now. And the goblin warg riders just cleared the horizon behind you. What do you do?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Something I’ll immediately caution against here is getting fooled into making this more formal than it is. If you find yourself trying to prep the “theaters of operation” in your dungeons, then you’ve probably just created another inflexible preconception of the environment. (You’re probably also wasting a lot of prep.) Theaters of operation generally arise out of and are defined by the circumstances of play: What do the PCs know? Where do they go? How have they tipped off the NPCs? What decisions do the NPCs make (often based on imperfect information)?

The point isn’t to try to anticipate all of those things. The point is to learn how to actively play the campaign world; to let the campaign world live in the moment.

The cool thing is that, as you think of the dungeon as a theater of operations and play it as such, you will be implicitly encouraging the players to also think of the dungeon as a totality rather than as a string of disconnected encounters. They’ll start engaging in strategic decision-making not only in combat (“let’s fall back into the hallway!”), but for the exploration of the dungeon as a whole (“can we draw them back into the room with the poison traps and use those to our advantage? can we circle around them? can we split them up?”). And getting the players into this mindset is instrumental in unlocking more complicated scenario structures like heists.

And remember that, as you’ve seen with our examples above, you don’t have to leap straight into juggling massively complicated strategic arenas: Two rooms and a hallway. That’s all it takes to break out of the box.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 22BRunning the Campaign: In-Jokes
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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