Session 13B: The Tragedy at the Door

Sun Tzu said:

To cross mountains follow the valleys, search out tenable ground, and occupy the heights. If the enemy holds the heights, do not climb up to engage them in battle. This is the way to deploy an army in the mountains.

The army likes heights and abhors low areas, esteems the sunny [yang] and disdains the shady [yin]. (…) You must quickly get away from deadly configurations of terrain such as precipitous gorges with mountain torrents, Heaven’s Well, Heaven’s Jail, Heaven’s Net, Heaven’s Pit, and Heaven’s Fissure. Do not approach them. When we keep them at a distance, the enemy is forced to approach them. When we face them, the enemy is compelled to have them at their rear.

When on the flanks the army encounters ravines and defiles, wetlands with reeds and tall grass, mountain forests, or areas with heavy, entangled undergrowth, you must thoroughly search them because they are places where an ambush or spies would be concealed.

I was originally going to write that a lot of emphasis has been given recently to creating “dynamic terrain” or “tactically rich environments” or “interesting areas” or whatever other term somebody has decided to hang on the concept (all of which are just euphemisms for “two guys standing next to each other in an open field beating on each other is really boring”). But then I realized that this emphasis has actually been going on for like 10-15 years, which I suppose means it doesn’t really qualify as “recent” any more.

(Get off my lawn.)

What I will say to all you whippersnappers is that I think this has become significantly over-emphasized. This includes My Precious Encounter™ design where GMs become obsessed with creating the “perfect” encounter terrain, filled with all kinds of pre-programmed tactical features. It also includes the strange, Rube Goldbergian edifices that I’ve seen spring up where you need to mechanically “tag” the battlefield like some kind of amateur graffiti artist so that the characters can use a whole ‘nother set of mechanics in order to “invoke” the tags in order to (usually) gain some prepackaged, generic effect. Or, worse yet, you custom-build mechanical interfaces into every tag so that the players can dock into them with keywords or some such.

Gah.

Basically, what I’m saying is that if this is how you’re achieving dynamic terrain in your games, then you’re really over-thinking the whole thing.

Just create realistic, detailed locations and then have your bad guys use them logically. (Or insanely awesomely depending on circumstance and genre.)

You don’t need to drape mechanics over it. The staircase can just be a staircase. You don’t need to pre-tag it with the “Banisters” property so that people can slide down them. And I’d argue that you shouldn’t spend a lot of time pre-planning the stunts your Triad martial artist mooks are going to be performing, because the fight might just as easily happen in the next room or the PCs might just blow them all up with a grenade before the fight even starts.

In fact, rather than trying to nail everything down and covering it with an encrustacean of extruded mechanics, I tend to embrace the largely opposite approach as championed by Robin D. Laws:

In Feng Shui, you want to be able to decide on the spur of the moment that there just happen to be awnings hanging over that walkway between buildings, or there is indeed a ledge big enough for that hoodlum to jump off of. (…)

An alternative to maps are color pictures from magazines. Travel or architectural magazines often have excellent photos which you can use as the basis of your set design. You can show these to your players to help visualize where their characters are, and they will stimulate the imaginative process instead of hampering it.

If a player says they want to slide down the banister, then unless the staircase was explicitly established as not having a banister, then it almost certainly does now. (And if that’s case, why would I need to not only spell that out in my notes, but also dump a bunch of mechanics into it? See what I’m saying?)

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

It is, of course, really easy to just say, “Describe terrain and then be awesome with it!” And with thirty years of experience, maybe I am overestimating how easy it is to do this in practice for people who haven’t done it before.

But I will say this: It’s a skill and it will improve with practice. And all that mechanical over-engineering? It’s not practice for this skill. It’s a completely different thing.

And here’s my super secret technique for creating dynamic terrain:

1. Try not to describe empty spaces.
2. Think about how the space is actually used.
3. Make sure to include the third dimension. (Both up and down.)
4. Create chokepoints.
5. During the actual fight, think about the unintended ways in which characters can affect the environment and vice versa.

That’s basically it. If you find that you’ve jotted down an empty, featureless room in your notes (or conjure up that visual while improvising on-the-fly during play), second guess that impulse.

If you’re looking for inspiration, think about why the room exists: What purpose is it currently being used for? (Or was being used for if the area has been abandoned.) What furniture would be there? What physical shape would the space possess? What decorations or accoutrements would people put here?

Finally, remind yourself that your map may be two-dimensional, but the game world isn’t.

This last point, almost entirely by itself, can carry a lot of the heavy weight when it comes to dynamic terrain. You can see an example of that in this session, when the PCs get trapped trying to descend and ascend the sinkhole. That one tactical reality pretty much defines the entire encounter (which is one of the most memorable of the entire campaign for the group). There was a similar example back in Session 11, actually, where there was a short ten or fifteen foot drop down into the fungal garden corrupted by sickstone.

“Okay,” you say, “but what if the group is outside and there are no walls and they’re in the desert or the prairie or some other vast, wide open space?”

Well, in that case the point of interest is the vast, wide-open space. What does that distance do to the combat (particularly the initial encounter range) compared to the claustrophobic knife fights that most RPG combat tends towards?

Just don’t do it all the time, because anything repeated often enough will become boring. Find a box canyon or something. Or just throw a couple of hills up. (Ask Paullus and Varro what can be done to you with a couple of hills.)

Session 13A: At the Sinkhole’s Edge

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 13A: AT THE SINKHOLE’S EDGE

December 16th, 2007
The 1st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

There was trepidation among those standing at the edge of the sinkhole and surrounded by rotting fungus, sickly slime, and malformed corpses. Tee, in particular, harbored deep misgivings. To her the sinkhole was filled with a horrible foreboding and a sense of nameless doom.

But when the group decided, collectively, that there was no other path to follow, she had no hesitation in leading the way. Agnarr hammered a piton into the rock of the cavern floor and she quickly tied off one of their ropes.

Tee worked her way down the rope, reversing herself in mid-air as she came level with where the bottom of the sinkhole opened up into a larger cavern. Peering over the ceiling’s edge she found herself looking down into a long hall.

The near end of the hall, just beyond where the sinkhole was located, had completely collapsed. In the opposite direction, two enormous troughs — each running at least eighty feet along the length of the hall – were filled to the brim with the insidious olive slime. Beyond these troughs, the hall ended in a short flight of stairs and a set of double doors wrought from iron.

Tee stared into this hall for a long while, but perceived no motion or threat of danger. When she was satisfied, she reversed herself again and completed her climb. Looking up, she motioned for the others to follow.

Tor was next, and he quickly joined Tee below. But Dominic, who was to follow, had no confidence in his ability to manage the long climb. So a crude harness was furnished from another rope, and Agnarr lowered the priest to the hall below.

THE WARCASTER

As Tee was working to release Dominic from his harness, however, Tor suddenly gave a cry and drew his sword: The troughs of ooze were beginning to undulate.
(more…)

Session 12C: To the Aid of Goblins

“The rest will be needed here. To hold the bridge,” Itarek said. “And they would not last long against the horrors that we have seen.”

Here’s something that I wish I was better at as a GM: Running NPC allies accompanying the PCs.

The internet is filled with horror stories of the dreaded “GMPC” – where the GM essentially tries to be a player in their own campaign by running a character indistinguishable from being another PC in the party. Although technically possible (and you can find a few success stories here and there), what usually happens is that the GMPC becomes the unabashed star / spotlight hog of the entire campaign and/or is used to forcibly railroad the players.

Because, frankly, the GM already controls the entire world, which should be power and participation enough for anyone. So 99 times out of 100, for a GMPC to exist there has to be some other shitty agenda motivating it in the first place.

The idea of running a GMPC isn’t just an obvious anathema to my whole ethos as an RPG gamer, I’m pretty sure it’s something I’m actually incapable of doing.

When circumstances, like those in the current campaign journal, dictate that NPCs will be allying with the PCs and traveling with them for some length of time, what generally happens is a simple, three-step process:

1. I make an effort to make sure those NPCs are contributing and present in the group.
2. I get distracted.
3. “Oh, crap. Right. Robert is here. Uh… I guess he was standing in the back this whole time?”

Itarek and the other goblins in the current sessions actually work out pretty well because so much of their time onscreen is spent in raid-type or combat situations, which means that I’ve got an initiative list which constantly pushes them back into the center of my attention.

It’s odd, really, because I can successfully run incredibly complex social interactions featuring dozens of characters without a hitch. But as soon as an NPC gets firmly aligned with the PCs, it feels almost inevitable that they’re going to turn invisible.

I think there’s probably a couple of factors at play here.

First, to pat myself on the back a little bit, I am usually pushing myself to the limits of my mental gymnastics when it comes to running a game. I’m a pretty big believer in the idea that there’s always another element you could be adding to improve your game, it’s just a question of whether or not you can. So if something seems non-essential, it’s easy for it to get replaced by a different ball and fade away unnoticed.

Second, I think I have a strong, instinctual predilection towards viewing NPC allies as non-essential. One of my primary pleasures as a GM is seeing how player-driven decisions interact with the situations I’ve created in the game world. NPC allies, who should logically and naturally become part of the group’s decision-making process, aren’t just superfluous to that creative agenda, they’re actually kind of innately hostile to it.

GMPCs being anathema to my values as a gamer? I meant that pretty literally.

So whenever things heat up in the campaign, NPC allies are just naturally the first thing to get dropped in favor of almost literally anything else.

When you have a weakness like this, there’s generally three things you can do about it. First, you can steer away from it. And you will, in fact, notice that it’s a rather rare day when you’ll see me deliberately pushing scenarios in which NPCs will naturally ally with the PCs. (When allies do crop up, it’s far more likely to be because the PCs are seeking them out.)

Second, you can focus on improving it. In the case of losing focus on NPC allies, part of that is just literally focusing, of course. But you can also try other methods of keeping the NPC in the forefront of your brain. Giving them a unique miniature, for example, can help. (Although in some of the chaotic battlefields I run, they can still get lost.) An idea that just occurred to me as I was writing this: Clip a picture of the NPC ally to the inside of my GM screen so that the NPC is literally looking me in the eye. (Not sure why something so obvious has never occurred to me before.)

Third, find alternative techniques to achieve the same ends. For example, I’ll often kick an NPC ally to one of the players and ask them to run them as a secondary character if at all possible. (Often it isn’t, unfortunately, because the NPC has an independent agenda that can’t be assumed by the players, for reasons rather similar, actually, to why GMs shouldn’t be running GMPCs.) For NPC allies that are sticking around for awhile, I’ve even been known to invite in temporary players to assume the role. Having a co-GM who can focus on the areas where you’re weak can also be effective.

When you can have successes in the areas where you’re weak, of course, you’ll enjoy a real sense of accomplishment. That turned out to be the case with Itarek and his goblins, who came – as you’ll begin to see in Session 13 – to assume a very special place in the campaign.