This may only be interesting to me, but somebody pointed me in the direction of a story on Reddit featuring one of my gilted fiends.

The title? Holy crap! Did I just let them resurrect an ancient dead elven king?

I think this may have particularly resonated with me because it coincidentally resembles an encounter I wrote for The Fifth Sepulcher. (Which I’ve realized I penned for Fantasy Flight Games more than a decade ago now. Ouch. Right in the age.) That encounter originally read:

Two sets of golden double doors face each other in this red-carpeted chamber. Six golden thrones — in two rows of three — face each other, and six figures sit upon the thrones.

These are six of the Seven Daughters of Lynmoor. The seventh, of course, is Queen Elisabet — who was interred in area 13. Each of the Daughters is under the effect of a permanent gentle repose and magic circle against evil enchantments (cast at 20th level). These spells have kept their bodies perfectly preserved, and protected them from the effects of the Necromancer’s Stone.

Note that the Daughters were prepared in this manner against the prophecy that they would rise again to save Lynmoor in her darkest hour. If the PCs take the proper actions (casting raise dead, for example) this could be that hour. (The Daughters are 8th to 12th level sorcerers.) However, if the enchantments are disrupted without returning the Daughters to life (through the use of a dispel magic spell, for example), the Stone will immediately transform the Daughters into liches.

If I recall correctly, when Alan D. Kohler reviewed the module he was not a fan of the fact that there was no particular compulsion forcing the PCs to raise the daughters. He also felt there was no way for the PCs to be aware of the prophecy or the magic preserving the daughters. The former is really just a Knowledge (history) check, of course, and the latter would seem to be a natural consequence of the PCs showing any interest at all in six perfectly preserved corpses in a dungeon and performing the logical investigations.

But I digress.

Unfortunately, if JCY2K ever posted a follow-up to let people know what happened at his next session, I haven’t found it. Still, it’s nice to know that I’ve been a major force for resurrecting long-dead royalty for more than a decade.

In this video, Errant Signal talks about win states in video games. He makes the specific case that win states contextualize play: Once you have a win state, the player will characterize the interactions in the system by whether they help or hinder them in attaining the win state. Which are useful? Which are useless?

In other words, win states are play-shapers. “So powerful when it comes to driving player motivation that any and all mechanics tend to be viewed through that lens.”

And due to this power, win states also reduce a player’s willingness to experiment or express themselves. Instead, players seek to find optimal strategies, minimize risks, and min-max their stats.

All of this also goes for lose states, but the effect tends to be less severe: A lose state tells players what they want to avoid, but not what they want to achieve. So lose states push players away from certain activities, but don’t force an agenda onto the player. “Do whatever you want, just not this!”

WIN STATES IN RPGs

I find most of Errant Signal’s output interesting: It’s thoughtfully provocative even when I don’t agree with it. But I found this particular video interesting because of how its thinking can be applied to tabletop roleplaying games.

Of course, we’ve been told time and time again that roleplaying games have no winners or losers. This is true insofar as the players are (generally) not competing against each other. But it’s almost universally bollocks if we’re talking about the group as a whole.

This is is particularly true as we begin to consider specific types of win states.

First, Errant State talks about the difference between boolean and non-boolean win states. Boolean win states are discrete and absolute; a single, concrete goal which is pursued. Non-boolean win states, on the other hand, are more about how much you won by (high scores, for example, or track records).

Second, we have explicit win states and implicit win states. Explicit win states are those recognized by the game. Implicit win states, on the other hand, are ones not explicitly recognized by the game, but which players nevertheless interpret that way. (For example, owning all the properties in Assassin’s Creed II or earning money in The Sims.)

Another way to look at this is that players are capable of creating win states for themselves even if the game does not. For example, here’s a guy playing Super Mario Bros. with the goal of getting the lowest score possible. (In doing so, he’s trying to break the record set by this guy five years ago.)

RPGs are filled with implicit win states, particularly non-boolean ones. And a large preponderance of RPG scenarios will feature explicit win states.

So this is worth thinking about: Are you pushing win states onto your players? Is your game system pushing them? And, if so, what effect is that having on how your players approach the game?

And if neither you nor your system are doing that, what win states are the players defining for themselves?

In either case, how can you shape those win states (and lose states) in order to positively affect game play (in either rewarding or interesting ways)?

Over at Gnome Stew, Patrick Benson has proposed the “Orbital Path Method of Plot Design“. I know I’ve said in the past that you should never prep a plot, but you might want to check this out because I think it has some conceptually useful stuff for node-based scenario design. Here’s the gist of it:

Using my terminology, each of those numbered dots is a node and you can follow any line from one node to another. So, for example, node 6 would have links to nodes 5, 7, and 13. Benson says that the “kicker” for the campaign should introduce several of the nodes in the outer ring and then play would proceed from there.

From a conceptual standpoint, what I find useful here is the visualization of escalation: As you move closer and closer to what Benson describes as the “root cause”, the stakes or difficulty or intensity or whatever increases.

I think this approach has a few practical problems: Like most diagrammatic approaches, it tends to artificially constrict navigational paths. The lack of backwards motion within the design scheme may tend to leave a lot of “abandoned” nodes in the players’ wake. That, combined with the seeming preference for a large number of “outer” nodes and a lower number of “inner” nodes will probably result in a lot of wasted prep.

Despite that, I thought it was a really interesting approach to visualizing the relationships between nodes. Check it out.

While I was at GenCon this year I played in one of the most memorable convention scenarios: Lord of the Hives by Threat Detected. It featured three gaming tables participating in a series of linked, timed tournament scenarios: The success or failure of a group during a particular round would directly impact the situations encountered by the other groups during the next round.

I was at the pilots’ table and played a young Admiral Ackbar in his pre-admiral days. There were, of course, copious outcries of, “It’s a trap!” We actually started the game playing a game of sabbac on the hangar deck, so my first line of dialogue in the game was:

Good times. Like most good gaming experiences, it featured a combination of clever scenario design and people who were fun to hang out with.

I bring this up, because Threat Detected has posted a Gallery from the event and a podcast featuring a Post-Play Round Table from the session. You can see me obliquely in the former and hear me briefly in the latter.

Rani Sharim has been translating articles from the Alexandrian into Hebrew.

Check ’em out: Three Clue Rule and Don’t Prep Plots.

(Or you can read the English originals at Three Clue Rule and Don’t Prep Plots.)