Way back on July 4th, 2005, I launched the Alexandrian with the cleverly titled post “Welcome to the Alexandrian“. In that post, I talked about how I had become a freelance writer. The 100+ reviews I wrote for RPGNet played a major role in that story, but I wrapped up my post by saying: “But if you go to RPGNet today, you won’t find any of my reviews there. What happened? Well, that’s another story for another day.”

Then I didn’t really follow-up on that, largely because there were more interesting things to talk about.

But I’ve had people pinging me for awhile now wanting access to some of the content from my older reviews. And the original (and continuing) purpose of the Alexandrian is to archive my creative work. To that end, I’m going to start posting those old reviews in order to properly archive them away. Which means that “another day” has finally arrived.

THE REVIEWS

I posted my first review to RPGNet in the spring of 1998.

It was a review of The Paxton Gambit, a campaign supplement for the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, and it had originally been written for and posted to the Heavy Gear Mailing List. RPGNet had been around for a couple of years at that point, but the site was just beginning to get noticed by the larger RPG community. One of the people who noticed was Phillippe Boulle, who — at the time — was an editor at Dream Pod 9. He, in turn, posted a message to the Heavy Gear Mailing List asking that fans of the game go to RPGNet and post reviews of their favorite Dream Pod 9 products. When I saw Phillippe’s message, I took the review I had already written, popped over to RPGNet, and posted it.

That was a lot of fun and, to make a long story short, I kept doing it. In fact, over the next four years I would do it 165 times.

In those early days, the RPGNet community was heavily focused on the reviews: There was no general forum, but there was a discussion thread associated with each review. That meant that all of the discussion on the site was focused through whatever reviews had been posted in the last couple of weeks. It meant that the community was radically neophilic and intensely focused on RPGs.

It also meant that, if you were a successful reviewer, you were the genesis point for sprawling discussions that could go on for dozens or even hundreds of posts.

In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to recognize that RPGNet was actually serving as one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging blogosphere: Each review was effectively a blog post and the emergent community was blog-focused. At the time, it was just exciting. I’d been participating in online discussion groups since 1988 or ’89; but here I was actually finding an audience.

From ’98 through ’02, I was one of the top three or four reviewers on RPGNet. During this time period, the site went through several changes of ownership, one of which nearly destroyed the site before it was returned to Sandy Antunes (the founder). In 2001, it was then sold to Skotos Tech.

Throughout this time period I continued writing reviews. In May 2001, in fact, the site ran a “Justin Bacon Review Week” in which all of the reviews posted that week (20+ total) were written by me. That was pretty awesome and I felt very honored. Around this same time, I was asked by Sandy Antunes to help develop content for a D20 Nation website that he wanted to launch as a partner-site with RPGNet. (Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition.)

The site was also changing, however.

Forum software had been installed at some point. This was almost certainly a good thing (the site would have probably died completely during the period when its owners weren’t updating the content if it hadn’t been for the forum), but it also meant that the character of the site was changing: The community was becoming forum-oriented instead of review-oriented.

(One memory from this time period in particular: The early forum software didn’t have any accounts. You just typed in your name and left your message. There was a period of a couple weeks where somebody was deliberately trolling the forums by posting incendiary posts under my name. It took me awhile to figure out what the heck was going on, and eventually the guy responsible confessed. I suspect this incident contributed significantly to the site updating to new forum software with registered accounts shortly thereafter.)

In mid-2002, I posted what was essentially my last review at RPGNet. (In mid-2004, I posted a review of A Game of Thrones. But it was a fluke.) Partly this was because professional work was chewing up more and more of my time. Partly it was because the RPG review community had completely fetishized the reviewing of typography and binding quality instead of actual content and gameplay. But largely it was because the audience for reviews at RPGNet had severely atrophied.

PARTING OF THE WAYS

I remained an active member of the RPGNet community, however, until 2004.

In October 2003, I was participating in a thread where somebody was voicing incredulity at the idea of someone owning more than a hundred RPGs, claiming that a hundred RPGs didn’t even exist. I pointed out that hundreds of free RPGs were available on the web; so you could own hundreds of RPGs without even spending a dollar. After a couple rounds of this, I compiled and typed up a very lengthy list of the free RPGs I owned and posted it. This took about 2-3 hours worth of effort.

This list prompted several pages worth of interesting discussion. Several days later, however, one of the forum moderators did a drive-by on the thread and deleted the entire post as “threadcrapping”. I was irate at having 2-3 hours of work eradicated and responded with, “Fuck You.”

In retrospect, I probably should have saved a local copy of the post. And I probably could have been more politic in my response to the atrociously poor moderation. But I wasn’t and I got hit with a 90-day ban for mouthing off to the incompetent moderator.

Several months later, after the ban had expired, I came back and found that I couldn’t log into my account. Reconstructing events after the fact, it appears that one of the moderators (probably a fellow named Brian Hollenbeck, operating under the name “Kuma”) had decided to change the password and e-mail address on my account in an effort to secretly turn a temporary ban into a permanent one. E-mails to RPGNet went unanswered, so I created a new account under the name “Justin A. Bacon” and continued posting.

In August or September of 2004, Kuma started trying to IP ban me from the forum. Since I was posting from a dynamic IP, this completely failed. (I wasn’t even aware he was doing it, since he’d posted his intentions in a thread I was no longer reading.) After several weeks of this, another moderator apparently got around to banning the “Justin A. Bacon” account for “avoiding a ban”. (This was, of course, completely untrue. For several years after this it was quite hilarious because the “Justin Bacon” account had still never been banned, although it looks like they finally got around to “fixing” that recently.)

I sent an e-mail to the site and was told to wait a couple of days for the issue to be resolved. After a week or so, it hadn’t been.

At this point I posted to Trouble Tickets asking for an explanation. None was forthcoming. It took several days and many other people posting to both the forum thread and e-mailing RPGNet before they finally got around to posting their explanation: They believed that I had posted at some point during my 90-day ban and were, therefore, permabanning me.

Did they have a link to that post? No.

Could they find a link to that post? No.

Was there any way to fix this issue? Yes. Within 1-2 days, they would confirm the existence or nonexistence of the post Kuma claimed existed.

… only they didn’t do that. Instead they closed the thread so that no one could post to it.

A month and a half later, somebody else posted a thread asking: “Hey. What’s going on here?” The moderators still had no explanation.

During this time period, I was being contacted by others. Something was deeply, deeply rotten in the moderation team at RPGNet and I wasn’t the only one having problems.

I decided to raise the stakes: I publicly announced that if RPGNet didn’t want me as a member of the community, then I would pull my reviews.

The point was to raise the profile not only of my issues with the moderation team, but the general issues the community was having with the moderation team. I was hoping that it would force the new owners of the site to put their cards of the table and make it clear what sort of site RPGNet was going to be. In this I was successful, although not in the way that I had hoped: Still unable to produce the posts demonstrating that there was any justification whatsoever for my permabanning, the owners of the site instead permabanned me for daring to exercise my IP rights.

I shrugged and walked away. The RPGNet I had once fervently supported was obviously dead and gone.

POSTSCRIPT

I do remember quite vividly, though, my final e-mail exchange with the ownership. They wanted to give me “one last chance” to let them keep my reviews on the site. They wrote: “By removing them from RPGNet, you’re destroying the value of your reviews.”

This taught me an important lesson: When an organization believes that your work has value because they allow it to appear in their venue (rather than the reality, which is that the content is what gives a venue value) then you’re probably better off getting away from that organization as quickly as possible.

In the years since then, the situation at RPGNet has only worsened. The Tangency forums have become the tail wagging the dog. There are members of the moderation team who take great pride in the fact that they’ve never played an RPG. (This fact boggles my mind every time somebody mentions it.)

The site, which once made its name on the participation of major RPG professionals (priding itself as the “Inside Scoop on Gaming”), has become increasingly hostile to them. It’s becomes a popular past time for posters to bait professionals posting to the boards so that the professionals will get banned. At one point, this was coupled with a ludicrous policy of banning discussions of games written by people who had been banned.

A couple years ago a friend of mine told me he was being accused by RPGNet’s mods of being my sock-puppet because he included links to products I had written (and he had helped edit) in his .sig. Last year I had a complete stranger send me an e-mail saying that RPGNet’s mods were making the same accusations towards him.

I’m not sure what to tell either of them. I enjoy discussing and debating RPGs. It improves my games. It improves my writing.

But RPGNet? It’s a cesspool. And, sadly, it’s a cesspool that’s been created by the very mechanism which is supposed to be keeping the water clean.

In any case, that’s the nutshell version of my rollercoaster ride with RPGNet. Hopefully you found it at least mildly entertaining. But mostly it’s my way of introducing the reposting and archiving of the reviews I wrote for RPGNet “back in the day”. I’ll be starting later today and posting them semi-regularly until I’m done.

Go to Part 1

Let’s turn our attention now to specifics: What are the exact navigation methods that can be used to guide characters into a node?

CLUES: Clues turn each node into a conclusion. When the PCs put the clues together, they’ll tell them where to go, who to look at, and/or what to do.

Clue-based scenarios are often considered fragile, but by using the Three Clue Rule and the Inverted Three Clue Rule you can make them robust.

One pitfall to watch for: In order to reach the next node, the PCs must know both what they’re looking for and how to find it. If you only give the PCs one clue telling them how to reach the Lost City of Shandrala, your scenario will remain fragile even if you include 20 clues telling them the Lost City of Shandrala is interesting and they should totally check it out.

On the other hand, clue-based node navigation conveniently organizes itself into mystery scenarios which provide over-arching push/pull motivations: Once the PCs are interested in unraveling the mystery, all you need to do is put a node on the bread crumb trails and they’ll follow it.

GEOGRAPHY: In other words, the choice of which way to go. The archetypal example is the dungeon, which generally provides a far more robust structure than a clue-based scenario. For example, consider this simple dungeon:

Moving from A to B to C requires no redundancy because the hallway provides a clear and unmistakable geographic connection.

However, geographical structure can occasionally create a sense of false security. For example, consider this very similar dungeon:

Now you have a potential problem: If the PCs fail to detect the secret door your adventure can easily go off the rails. (Assuming they need to reach C.)

Hexcrawls can be similarly problematic in that there’s no guarantee that any given piece of content will actually be encountered. (When I was 12 years old I remember pouring over a copy of X1 Isle of Dread and never quite figuring out how the PCs were supposed to “know where to go” in order to find all the keyed encounters.) Properly designed hexcrawls, however, employ a mode of redundancy similar to the Three Clue Rule: They don’t require you to encounter any particular piece of interesting content, but rather spread interesting content liberally so that you are almost certain to encounter at least one piece of interesting content even if you’re just exploring randomly. (This, of course, creates a high degree of extraneous prep. But hexcrawls are meant to be used over and over again, utilizing that extra content over the course of several passes.)

In geographical arrangements, obstacles serve as pushes. For example, if the PCs are in Room A and they want to get to Room C, then Room B is encountered only because it’s an obstacle. The PCs are pushed into encountering Room B because the geography of the dungeon requires it.

TEMPORALLY: The phone call that comes at 2 PM. The goblin attacks on the 18th. The festival that lasts for a fortnight.

Although lots of nodes can include time-sensitive components (“if the PCs arrive after the 14th, the Forzi crime family has cleared out the warehouse”), nodes that are triggered temporally are almost always a push: Something or someone comes looking for the PCs, pushing them into engaging with the node.

(Of course, temporal triggers can also be coincidental – like a red dragon attacking the Ghostly Minstrel when the PCs just happen to be dining there or the sun becoming eclipsed – but those are still pushes.)

Temporal triggers can also have some variability built into them. For example, you might decide that the Forzis hire a hitman to kill one of the PCs on the 16th. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the hitman will immediately find them.

RANDOMLY: Wandering monsters are the classic example of a randomly generated node, but they’re far from the only example. The early Dragonlance modules, for example, coded story events into their random encounter tables. Jeff Rients’ table for carousing mishaps offers a different set of possibilities.

Because of their long association with wandering monster checks, the random triggering of a node is often associated with the random generation of a node. Although both can be useful techniques, when we’re talking about navigating between nodes we’re primarily focusing on the random triggering of a node.

For example, in my current hexcrawl campaign the content of each hex has been fully keyed. But I use a set of mechanics to randomly determine whether or not that content is encountered by a group moving through the hex (i.e., triggering the node).

PROACTIVE NODES: A proactive node comes looking for the PCs. These are often triggered temporally or randomly, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

For example, instead of using random encounters I will often run small complexes in “real time” by splitting the enemy NPCs into small squads. I can then track the actual movement of each squad in response to the actions of the PCs.

One could also easily imagine an “Alert Track”: Every time the PCs do something risky or expose their activities in some way, the alertness level of their opponents rises. The rising alertness level could change the content of some nodes in addition to triggering a variety of proactive nodes.

In reading many published adventures, it’s not unusual for the first node to be entirely proactive. (The classic example being “an NPC wants to hire you for a job”.) But then many adventures will suddenly stop being proactive. Neither of these things need to be true.

It can also be tempting to think of proactive nodes as being a railroading technique. While they certainly can be used in that way, there’s no need for that to be true. Examples entirely free of predetermined GM machinations might include NPCs making counter-intelligence checks to discover the PCs’ identities or the PCs being tracked through the wilderness by enemy forces after they escape from the Dread Lord’s Castle.

In general, proactive nodes are useful for creating a living world in which there are both short-term and long-term reactions to the PCs’ choices.

FOLLOWING A TRAIL: I’m not sure if following a trail from node A to node B constitutes navigating by clue, geography, both, or neither, so I’m including it here as a common sort of special-case hybrid.

A trail, of course, doesn’t have to be limited to following tracks in the mud: Tracing data trails through the ‘net; hacking jumpgate logs; a high-speed car chase. There are lots of options.

PLAYER-INITIATED: In their quest to get from A to C, it’s not unusual for players to invent their own B’s without any particular prompting. Sometimes these can be anticipated (like most Gather Information checks, for example), but in many cases the players will find ways of tackling a problem that you never imagined (like the time my players inadvertently started a shipping company in order to find a missing person).

In the same spirit as permissive clue-finding, it’s almost always a good idea to follow the player’s lead: Your prep should be a safety net, not a straitjacket. (That doesn’t mean all their schemes should prove successful, but when in doubt play it as it lies.)

Go to Part 3: Organization

One of the major reasons for the Black Book Beta and 8-Bit Funding project was to raise the funds to improve the art for the book.

Some of the new art will be going into the sections of the book currently missing from the Black Book Beta (the Grimoire and Bestiary). But a good chunk of it will actually be replacing art already found in the Black Book Beta (which is almost entirely lifted from public domain sources).

I used those public domain sources because I wanted to lock-in layout. The Black Book Beta is actually a fairly art-rich book. It features 79 illustrations in 150 pages, for an art-to-page ratio of 0.53. (You can compare that to other RPG art throughout history here.) That ratio will probably be dropping as I anticipate some of the sections missing from the Black Book Beta will end up featuring less art per page.

But the use of public domain art carries with it some problems:

• Some of it is ugly.
• Some of it is inappropriate.
• Some of it is too familiar.

In short, it was always my intention to replace at least some of the art in the Black Book Beta with different pieces. At the funding level we achieved, I can’t afford to replace all of it.  So here’s your chance: Flip through your copy of the Black Book Beta and tell me what you think sucks; the stuff you hate with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns; the stuff you think is completely inappropriate; the stuff you think is too generic or well-known; and anything else you just don’t like.

I’ve included a poll with what I suspect will be the likeliest subjects. Vote for as many as you’d like, but don’t feel like you need to stop there: If there’s another piece that’s really bugging you, drop it into the comments.

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In Node-Based Scenario Design we explored an alternative to the typical plotted approach to scenario design: By designing a situation instead of a plot we create a flexible environment in which the meaningful choices of the players are allowed to flourish. And by organizing the elements of that situation into nodes we retain the clarity of the plotted approach without accepting the limitations of its straitjacket.

Now that we’ve established the basic elements of node-based design, however, I want to explore some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned in working with node-based prep.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the fundamental structure of node-based design: How do the players move from one node to the next?

In discussing basic node-based design I defaulted to clue-based movement because (a) it’s simple; (b) it’s versatile; and (c) it clearly demonstrates just how powerful and flexible the node-based approach can be. It’s also fairly universal in my experience: Whatever other methods I may be using, the clue-based approach is virtually always part of the mix.

But it’s not the only way.

PUSH vs. PULL

Let’s start with a general principle.

In discussing narrative velocity in computer games, Andrew Doull coined the terms “push” and “pull”. I find Doull’s usage of the terminology a little vague, but nonetheless useful as a basic concept: A “pull” happens when the players want to explore, experience, or discover a node. A “push” happens when the players are forced to do these things.

A pull, by its nature, requires that the players have some sort of knowledge about the node which makes it desirable for them. The appeal of the pull can take the form of a reward, an opportunity, or any other form of benefit. In a typical D&D dungeon, the pull is the promise of treasure. In a mystery scenario, the simple promise that “you might find some clues over there” is often more than enough of a pull.

A push can similarly rely on player knowledge (“rob the bank or your girlfriend dies”), but it doesn’t necessarily require it. For example, the PCs can be pushed into an encounter with the assassin hunting them (by way of ambush) without ever being aware that the assassin was coming. In other cases, the PCs’ ignorance may be the entire difference between a push and a pull. For example, they might have loved to seek out the Hidden Citadel of the Golden Empire if they had ever heard about it. But since they didn’t, it was a complete push when they randomly stumbled across it during a hexcrawl.

In practice, the distinction between a push and a pull can be somewhat muddy. This is particularly true once you start layering motivations. (For example, the PCs might be forced to investigate the recent raids by giant war parties when the duke threatens to execute them if they don’t. But once they’re engaged in the investigation, the pursuit of individual clues might still be pulls. And maybe they’d already been pulled by the giant raids because Patric’s father was killed by frost giants.)

It should also be noted that pushes don’t need to be fait accompli. The duke threatening to kill them if they don’t investigate the giant raids is certainly a push, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have the option to leave the duchy and seek their fortunes elsewhere. (Or assassinate the duke. Or bribe him to leave them alone. Or kidnap his daughter and hold her hostage until he grants them a pardon. Or any number of other things.) In other words, the game world can push at the PCs without the GM railroading them.

Pulls and pushes also don’t have to be limited to character motivations; they can also act on player motivations. If you’ve ever heard your players say “let’s find some orcs to kill so that we can level up”, then you’ve heard the siren call of the metagame pull. But this can also take the simple form of “let’s explore the Eyrie of the Raven Queen ‘cause it sounds like the most fun”.

Whether pushing or pulling or both, a node still needs to overcome a certain “gravity” in order to be explored. For some groups, this gravity is simple apathy. (You need to make the place sound a lot more interesting or threaten them with a lot more consequences before they’ll drag their sorry asses out of the local tavern.) Sometimes it’s the competition with other active pulls and pushes. (“We’d love to deal with the Temple of Deep Chaos, but first we need to make sure the Pactlords can’t breach the Banewarrens.”) Or it might be the known and suspected costs of going to the node. (“The Tomb of Horrors may contain a ton of treasure and that’s a fantastic pull… but it’s still a bloody death trap and I don’t want to go there.”)

Go to Part 2: Node Navigation

Over on Hack & Slash, -C has written an interesting trio of posts on the matter of the Quantum Ogre:

On Quantum Ogres

On Slaying Quantum Ogres

On Resurrecting Quantum Ogre

If you enjoy some of the theoretical stuff I post around this neck of the woods, you’ll probably enjoy this stuff, too.

With that being said, however, I pretty strongly disagree with some of his advice. An addendum I’d like to point out: Players making a choice without having relevant information is only a problem if they don’t have the ability to gain that information. The choice to not get that information is a meaningful choice. (Or the failure to do so is a meaningful consequence.)

So any time he recommends giving players access to information that their characters don’t actually have access to, you can just imagine me shaking my head sadly. That technique is killing player agency just as dead as the quantum ogre is.