From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage, and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry… Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area — dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists — where tasks could be done in a social setting.

Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery… The one thing they lacked was wood. They burned seaweed for warmth, and seaweed makes a most reluctant fuel, but that chronic challenge for them was good news for us. Had they been able to build their houses of wood, nothing would remain of them and Skara Brae would have gone forever unimagined.

It is impossible to overstate Skara Brae’s rarity and value. Prehistoric Europe was a largely empty place. As few as two thousand people may have lived in the whole of the British Isles fifteen thousand years ago. By the time of Skara Brae, the number had risen to perhaps twenty thousand, but that is still just one person per three thousand acres, so to come across any sign of Neolithic life is always an excitement. It would have been pretty exciting even then.

What really caught my imagination in all that is that final sentence: The idea that it would have been exciting to suddenly discover this incredibly rare pocket of civilization in a world untamed.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest that the historical Skara Brae be used as inspiration for fantasy gaming (it notably appears in both The Bard’s Tale and Ultima). But what I am strongly tempted to explore right now is not so much a “points of light” setting, but a point of light setting: The elder races have drawn back into iconoclastic isolationism (the elves in mysterious, fey-drenched forests; the dwarves into citadels deep beneath the earth — the former dangerous for mortal races; the latter forgotten) and humanity is nothing more than a thin smear across the surface of the world.

And it’s not that it’s a long, long journey from Skara Brae to the next point of light: It’s that there are no other points of light. Not in the British Isles anyway. The grandparents or perhaps the great-grandparents of the PCs had this idea about settling down and it seems to be working out, but what little humanity there is (and there’s not much of it) is still almost entirely nomadic.

Monsters, on the other hand? Oh. There are a lot of those. Good luck.

Awhile back I wrote “Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon“. This post is just a simple streamlining of an idea that was running throughout that essay:

If an RPG rewards you for a specific tactical method, that method will be preferred and sought out. For example, if the game rewards you only for combat, that provides a strong motivation to seek out combat. There will still be some strategic thought employed (as one differentiates between “challenges that can be overcome” and “shit that’s too tough for us”), but the tactical method being rewarded will be strong pre-selected.

If you shift the game’s reward to a strategic goal, on the other hand, then players are free to pursue any tactical method for achieving that goal. As a result, you game will be more flexible and, in my opinion, more interesting.

Actually, as I write this, I realize this principle probably applies beyond RPGs. For example, Chess provides only one reward (winning the game) and it only awards it when a strategic goal has been achieved (achieving checkmate). Imagine if Chess instead rewarded points based on capturing pieces. The entire focus of the game would be narrowed. And what if the game preferentially rewarded capturing pieces with your Rook instead of your Bishop? The focus of the game would become even more limited.

In a similar fashion,victory in Twilight Imperium is achieved when a player reaches 10 victory points. Virtually every reward in the game is a strategic one (which can be achieved using a variety of tactics depending on the circumstances of the game). The exception? One of the strategy cards gives the player picking it 2 victory points. This specific reward for a tactical method (“pick the Imperial Strategy card”) warps the game by “forcing” everyone to pursue that tactical method. The problem was so significant that Fantasy Flight Games completely revised the strategy cards in order to eliminate it in the first expansion pack for the game.

Dread is a storytelling game of horror based around a core mechanic in which the players pull blocks from a Jenga tower whenever their characters attempt a meaningful action: If the tower doesn’t collapse, the action is successful. If it does, the character is eliminated from the story, the tower is rebuilt, and play continues.

The intent is that the tower’s steady descent into precariousness models the traditional horror pacing of “tension rises, something bloody happens, and then tension starts rising again”. And, in my experience, this fundamentally works: In a focused gaming environment, the physical act of pulling the block viscerally and collectively immerses the players into the emotional state of the narrative.

So, at a basic level, the mechanic is very, very effective.

Which makes it all the more unfortunate that the game inherently suffers from a systematic pacing failure that arises from the same mechanic.

Let’s assume that you want a collapse or near-collapse state at the end of the game (for a tension-filled conclusion).

Per the designers of the game in this thread, it takes about 30 pulls to reach a collapse-state on the tower. I haven’t done any rigorous testing, but that sounds pretty plausible based on my experience. Unfortunately, this means that Dread only reduces the time between collapse-states by 10% (by pulling 3 additional blocks per character knocked out when you rebuild the tower). That means that in a two-collapse game one of the players will be sitting out of the action for nearly half the game. In a three-collapse game, one of the players will be sitting out for 60% of the game.

(To put that in perspective, it means that in a two hour game featuring three collapses, one of the players will play for 45 minutes and then watch the other players for an hour and a quarter. Even doubling the rate of pulls after the first collapse only mitigates this problem.)

Obviously this isn’t a problem if you’ve got a pool of players who don’t mind being completely passive spectators for long periods of time, but the “no chatter” rule in Dread (prohibiting players from talking out of character) only exacerbates a problem which is widely recognized as being a bad idea in game design for a reason.

THE END GAME PROBLEM

The logical conclusion would seem to be pacing for games featuring a single collapse-state: People aren’t “supposed” to be eliminated except for possibly a single elimination during the final climactic struggle. This makes the game considerably narrower in its utility, but appears to be the only way to easily resolve the “bored player” syndrome.

Unfortunately, this solution only calls attention to the other problem the game has: Tension deflation following a tower collapse.

Theoretically, of course, this models the tension/release cycle of horror movie pacing (as described above). But the player elimination problem forces us to abandon that pacing. And even if we didn’t do that, the same problem exists at the end of the game: There’s no way to quickly ratchet the tension back up.

Bill is killed by the werewolf… and then the werewolf isn’t scary any more and the group mops him up.

For mid-game collapses, of course, the GM should make the werewolf run off and then come back later (once the tension has built again). That, after all, is how horror movies work.

But the problem is repetitive: Whenever the tension ratchets up to the point that you can trigger an effective conclusion, there’s a high-risk for a collapse. And since a collapse always indicates a failure, it means that the actual conclusion will happen AFTER the collapse. This means that the game tends to either (a) end on a whimper or (b) a sacrifice (in which one of the players sacrifices their character by knocking over the tower to achieve a Pyrrhic victory). The latter is effective… but only up to the point where it becomes predictable.

SOLUTIONS?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any.

And it is unfortunate, because, as I mentioned above, the core mechanic is very effective in practice: The Jenga tower not only mechanically creates tension which normally requires a great deal of GM skill to evoke, but also invests the table collectively in that tension as a shared experience.

The game is intensely good at a micro-level. But its inherent pacing problems create a consistently frustrating experience at the macro-level.

Last week I proposed space scurvy, but deficiency diseases can also be interesting to consider in the context of a fantasy setting.

Imagine for a moment that fantastical creatures like dragons, basilisks, or medusa depend on some vitamin (or a complex of vitamins) which allow them to process magical energy or a “supernatural essence”. For the most part this is no big deal: This “magimin” exists as part of the natural food chain in fantasyland and these creatures get plenty of it from their natural diet. (Some of them might produce it naturally under certain conditions, just like we do with vitamin E from sunlight.)

But when these creatures start suffering from a magimin deficiency — for example, if a dragon starts eating livestock who have been raised in a natural antimagic field — things can turn bad. Our dragon, for example, might find his wings withering and falling off while his heart enlarges in an effort to cope with pumping blood through his great bulk. A medusa’s snakes wilt and become lifeless. A basilisk might slowly grow blind as its own eyes turn to stone.

A little too much science in your fantasy? Maybe. But I like to give thought to this sort of thing because it opens up interesting possibilities.

For example, what if we make the magimin deficiencies a little more magical? Without their magimins, dragons slowly begin to shrink… eventually becoming nothing more than large snakes. But what happens if a mad wizard were to superdose an ordinary snake with magimins… would they become a dragon (or some other insanely mutated creature)? Now we have a mechanism for those “mad scientist” wizards to use when they’re creating owlbears. And that means they need a supply of magimin. And gaining that magimin (by harvesting fairies, for example, or simply having it shipped in) will have consequences that can serve as adventure hooks (and also give the PCs non-standard ways of fighting back).

On the other end of the scale, what if magical creatures went away because their magimins went away? But if magimins were to be reintroduced to the food chain, suddenly we’d have a lot of dragons that have been trapped as snakes for a couple hundred years re-appearing.

Ripped from the pages of my Ptolus campaign, this beasty was created by chaos cultists using an artifact known as the Idol of Ravvan. He was an early test of the monster creation system from Legends & Labyrinths and was specifically designed to take advantage of the Gemini figure from McFarlane’s Warriors of the Zodiac toy line (pictured below).

GEMINI BEAST (CR 8+2*): 256 hp (HD 11d8+40), AC 20, claws +14/+14 (2d8+2d6+4), Save +11, Ability DC 18, Size Gargantuan, Speed 60 ft., Reach 20 ft.

Str 30, Dex 11, Con 18, Int 6, Wis 5, Cha 10
Skills: Climb +24, Intimidate +14, Listen +11, Spot +11
Blindsense 60 ft.

SPECIAL: The Gemini Beast is actually two creatures joined together (each possessing the stat block above). Like a mounted combatant, they take their actions simultaneously. If either moves (as a move action, full action, or 5-ft. step) they are both considered to have taken that action.

If one of the Gemini Beasts is slain, that half of the creature simply becomes inert and dead. The other half can continue taking actions normally, although it suffers a -30 ft. penalty to its speed (due to hauling the dead carcass of its twin behind it).

* Potentate.