Vornheim includes a set of stripped down guidelines for giving PCs a set of contacts in an urban setting: The PCs can hit up their contacts for information about a particular topic and there’s a table for randomly determining what their reaction to the question is. (Here’s an example of the system in practice.)

Technoir is built around a plot-mapping mechanic in which PCs are created with a set of contacts: When the PCs hit up one of their contacts, there’s a system for randomly determining what they know. (And here’s an example of that system in play.)

The Technoir approach is built around the assumption that the GM — taking into account the subject indicated, that subject’s position on the plot map, the contact’s relationship to the plot map, and the specific question that was asked of the contact — will provide an act of creative closure and figure out what the contact says. And, in general, that works just fine.

But I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be useful and nifty if I had a Vornheim-style contacts table for Technoir? So that the rules of Technoir would produce the lead the contact was pointing them towards and then the Vornheim-like table would give some guidance on how they ended up pointing them at it?

The Vornheim contacts table includes some null value (“I don’t know anything about”) values, which don’t work well in Technoir. So I tweaked the table a bit and ended up with this:

Sometimes it takes years for your brain to puzzle things out.

For example, I wrote Revisiting Encounter Design way back in 2008. The basic thesis was that you should generally abandon the new wave fetish for My Perfect Encounters(TM) and embrace a more flexible method of encounter design that would emphasize faster-paced, strategic-based play.

The four major tenets I argued for looked like this:

(1) Design most 3E encounters around an EL 2 to 4 lower than the party’s level.

(2) Don’t be afraid of large mobs (10+ creatures) with a total EL equal to the PCs’ level. The common design wisdom is that these creatures are “too easy” for the PCs. This is true if you’re thinking in terms of the “common wisdom” that sprang up around misreading the DMG, but in practice these types of encounters work just fine if you’re looking for fast encounters and lots of them.

(3) Encounters with an EL equal to the PCs’ level should be used sparingly. They should be thought of as “major encounters” — the memorable set pieces of the adventure. It actually won’t take very long before the expectations of your players’ have been re-aligned and these encounters leave them thinking, “Wow! That was a tough encounter!”

(4) And that means you get even more bang for your buck when you roll out the very rare EL+2 or EL+4 encounter.

(The general philosophy of this advice, it should be noted, is widely applicable beyond D&D. In Feng Shui, for example, it means “keep a healthy supply of mooks flowing through your scenario.” In Shadowrun it means not letting a ‘run bog down into a single giant melee; keep the action on the hoof by making it possible for the PCs to cut their way rapidly through waves of security. And so forth.)

Most people seem to have grokked what I was selling. But there was a smaller group of people who insisted that I was wrong: That if they built an encounter with sixteen CR 2 creatures that the PCs would take a lot more damage than if they used a single CR 10 opponent. In fact, I still get fairly regular e-mails to this effect six years later. And I could never figure it out: Running the math on hypothetical scenarios regularly confirmed what years of play and hundreds of game sessions had taught me. It certainly wasn’t impossible for the mob of CR 2 creatures to out-perform the CR 10 creature, but in general the fighter was going to rapidly cleave through the mooks or the wizard’s fireball was going to rip them apart.

Were the people e-mailing me fudging dice rolls to toughen up the weaklings? Did their players just have no idea how to use mass damage or area control spells?

Nah.

It took six years, but then I was driving down a highway in Wisconsin the other day when epiphany finally hit me: These are reports of anecdote. And the problem with anecdote is that it selects for the exceptional and the unusual.

You don’t remember the 19 times that you used a CR 10 monster against a 10th level party and it took a few rounds to take it down while tearing out a few large chunks of hit points from the group. Instead, you remember the time that the party faced a single tough opponent and miraculously chopped his head off in the first round of combat.

Similarly, you don’t remember the umpteen times that your wizard casually fireballed a group of mook orcs and cleared ’em out without any hassle. What you’ll remember is that one time that a horde of kobolds left the PCs screaming and fleeing in terror.

It’s also likely that the actual numbers aren’t actually being looked at in these anecdotes: “Remember that time that the six orcs in area 4 were a lot tougher for the party to take out than the demon in area 10?” Sure. But were those actually EL equivalent encounters? Or were the orcs all CR 8 (for an EL 13 encounter) while the demon was CR 10?

None of this is a problem, of course, unless you start using the exceptionalism of your anecdotes as a guiding principle of scenario design. You want your scenario to be exceptional, of course, but you won’t achieve that if you’re expecting the statistically exceptional in every encounter.

(Of course this is another advantage of the encounter design method I advocate for: By increasing the number of encounters experienced, I increase the number of opportunities for the memorably exceptional moments to happen. Sometimes that will be the result of improbable math; sometimes it will be the result of clever and unexpected play. That’s the beauty of a non-deterministic medium.)

The first thing to say about Big Hero 6 is that it’s a ton of fun wrapped in a beautiful aesthetic surrounding well-earned emotional heartaches and catharsis. If you’re the type of geek who’s likely to be reading this website, then you’re probably going to adore this film.

With that being said, I was interested in the way that Big Hero 6 failed to be an ensemble movie: It comes very, very close (featuring a diversity of interesting characters in supporting roles), but ultimately misses the opportunity. (And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the film, which instead succeeds very well at being a film about its protagonist.)

I found myself making an easy comparison to The Incredibles, which is in many ways a completely different movie but which also features the formation of a team of superheroes. But whereas Big Hero 6 just misses being an ensemble piece, The Incredibles is a very successful ensemble piece.

The key distinction here is that all four main characters in The Incredibles are fully developed while each possessing a full narrative arc (which is also connected to the overall narrative arc of the ensemble). This is contrasted to Big Hero 6 where all five members of the team are given unique personalities and great dialogue… but notably lack fully developed arcs.

The reason I bring this up is that I noticed that a key difference between the films is that The Incredibles featured multiple sequences in which the main characters are separated from each other, whereas Big Hero 6 basically did not.

So what I’m saying here is:

SPLIT THE PARTY.

Because it’s a really effective way to allow individual characters to develop identities separate from the group identity. (Which will, ironically, enrich the group identity.)

(More on splitting the party over here.)

The problem with GURPS-style advantage/disadvantage character creation systems is that the actual impact of a given advantage or disadvantage is highly dependent on the circumstances of actual play: “Immune to psionic attacks” is totally amazing if your campaign is The War Against the Illithids; it’s completely wasted if your character never encounters a psion. Similarly, “Horrifically Claustrophobic” is a crippling disadvantage in a megadungeon campaign; it’s basically a non-factor if you’re playing Lawrence of Arabia.

So in order for these systems to work, the advantages and disadvantages need to be made equally relevant in actual play.

IME, however, there are two typical actual play dynamics in RPGs:

First, the players are given a free rein. Players will naturally seek to play to their advantages and play away from their disadvantages. This isn’t even really abusive play: It’s just a logical way of interacting with the world. (If I had no legs, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time buying ladders.)

Second, the GM is railroading the players. You might initially expect this to reverse the dynamic, but it typically doesn’t because (again, IME) most railroading GMs are more focused on achieving a predetermined goal: Their focus is an internal one. It might inadvertently force players into confronting their disadvantages, but often will not. (While the players will still be able to tactically exploit their advantages.)

In order for an advantage/disadvantage system to really work, IMO, you need a GM who’s willing to advocate as strongly for the inclusion of a PC’s disadvantage as the player is to advocate for the inclusion of the PC’s advantage.

The GMs most willing to do this are (in terms of the Threefold) dramatists and gamists. Simulationists are much less likely to put their thumb on the scale and “force” the inclusion of disadvantages.

This becomes a particular problem for GURPS because most the features in that system are heavily focused on supporting simulationists: So the people most likely to be running GURPS are the ones least likely to adopt the GMing techniques necessary to keep the advantage/disadvantage system balanced.

My general approach to handling “canon” when it comes to using fictional settings in an RPG generally follows the “World War II Doctrine”: Gaming in an established, fictional setting is no different than playing a game that’s set during World War II.

With that being said, there’s a broad spectrum of ways in which you can set a game in World War II at the gaming table:

A) The events of World War II as they happened historically can’t be changed, but primarily exist as a backdrop. You’ll hear about the events of the war, but you’ll never actually meet Hitler or change the outcome of the Battle of Midway.

B) You can meet Hitler, but you can’t shoot him. If you do shoot him, it will turn out you shot a double and history continues along unperturbed.

C) You can totally shoot Hitler.

There’s also the semi-tangential issue of the Alternative History Remix: This is the one where you decide that in your version of World War II, Germany is led by a guy name Hans Strauber and they’re fighting the White Alliance of Brittania and Charlegmania. (Or whatever.)

There’s also a second, rarer spectrum in which the PCs are actually canonical characters. Let’s call it the “Dragonlance Spectrum”:

A) You are playing the members of Hitler’s cabinet, but you’ll create an original character (replacing their historical analogs).

B) You are playing the actual, historical members of Hitler’s cabinet, but you’re free to take whatever actions you want (even if those contradict the historical reality of what the cabinet did).

C) You are playing the actual, historical members of Hitler’s cabinet and you’re going to be railroaded into experiencing World War II exactly the way that they did.

(Actually, this one is probably a little less of a clear spectrum. You could theoretically play non-canonical characters who are nonetheless being railroaded through the same events.)