True roleplaying — in which you pervasively portray and deeply immerse yourself into a character who is not yourself — is a difficult art. There are people who literally spend years studying and mastering improvisational acting. And quite a few of those people would look at the challenge of performing at a dining room table while simultaneously rolling dice to be a very high hurdle to clear.

On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of drenching this sort of thing in mystique. Plus, even untrained high school students can climb up on stage and perform. Just because you can’t consistently produce material like Matt Damon does in Saving Private Ryan (the entire story of his brothers was improvised) doesn’t mean you should just throw in the towel.

With that being said, I usually don’t worry too much about this on Day One with new players: If they want to play an avatar of themselves, no problem. If they want more than that, then a properly constructed set of rules, the example of other players, and their own creativity will lead them into it.

But when you come to second day of roleplaying, you might want to reach for something a little more daring. And that’s when you might discover that capturing the totality of a personality which isn’t yours can be a daunting task. It may seem too immense or you may not know where to begin. Even if you do manage to get a grip on the character, it can be easy for it to slip away once you actually start playing the game (and that can be really frustrating).

When that happens, this is my advice: Instead of jumping into the deep end and getting overwhelmed, start with a small, concrete checklist of “touchstones” that you can use to connect with your character.

Pick three touchstones. Focus on those.

For example:

1. Pick a single personality trait. (Think of it in concise terms, but you may benefit from not making it completely generic. For example, instead of just saying “greedy”, you might say “greedy, but will always give a coin to a child in need”. Focus on finding opportunities when you can make active choices based on that personality trait. Also focus on never acting contrary to that personality trait.)
2. Pick a physical mannerism. (This shouldn’t be flamboyant and it doesn’t have to be particularly fancy or complicated. In fact, the simpler the better. Something like “he drums his fingers” or “he scowls when he has to think hard about something” or “he likes to wink while giving a thumb’s up”.)
3. Create a catch-phrase. (It doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific phrase (which could easily get worn out and boring), but perhaps make it some core concept. For example, Conan often swears to Crom. He doesn’t do it all the time and it often takes different forms, but it’s a persistent element of his character. As a bard, you could pick some famous songwriter or storyteller who inspires you.)

While keeping those touchstones in mind, just keep doing what you’re doing now. But whenever it’s appropriate, hit one of those touchstones: Drum your fingers on the table. Or demand the choicest share of treasure. Or mention that “a beast like this was described in the song s of the legendary bard Moranth”.

Of course, don’t feel as if your character has to be limited to those things. But these are your touchstones: Focus on achieving them and let the rest take care of itself for awhile.

It won’t be long before you start to feel the character “settle in” around those touchstones. Over time, the character will become deeper and richer. But whenever you feel the character “slipping away” again, simply reach for one of your touchstones to find your way back.

This was originally posted as a response to a comment by Pasquale, but I thought it might interest a larger audience.

Transhuman Space has earned a reputation as a rich and magnificent setting… which is also almost completely impenetrable to players and incredibly difficult for GMs to run. Pasquale asks whether or nor the Between the Stars campaign structure could be used to crack open Transhuman Space.

The primary problem with Transhuman Space is that the complexity, depth, and density of the setting requires a heavy upfront investment from the players.

To give a basis of comparison:

My open table OD&D campaign relies almost entirely on common knowledge. If a player knows what an elf, dwarf, halfling, and wizard are, I can provide a functional basis for understanding the game world in about 60 seconds.

My dedicated 3.5 campaigns set in the Western Lands are a bit more involved: I have an 8 page handout (half of which consists of practical lists like “gods you can choose”, “languages you can choose”, etc.). It probably requires about 5-10 minutes from the players, with another 30 minutes or so dedicated to character creation.

Transhuman Space, on the other hand, doesn’t have a lingua franca of common genre tropes to fall back on. It is a very specific, very complex, and very deep setting. In order for most characters to function coherently in such a setting, the players need to have a specific, complex, and deep understanding of the setting.

Basically, a setting like that often requires that the players read most of the setting book for themselves. That requires hours of investment, and I’ve found that most players won’t commit it.

To make things worse, Transhuman Space was primarily designed to be an interesting setting for the sake of having an interesting setting, without any real consideration or focus given to the types of stories/games that can be told in that setting.

So, to answer Pasquale’s question at long last: Yes. I think you could use a structure similar to “Between the Stars” as a solution to both problems.

It’s been about 10 years since I read Transhuman Space, so take any specifics with a grain of salt, but the general approach I would take would look something like this:

(1) Set the PCs up as the crew of a tramp freighter. These vessels, due to their relative isolation and the difficulty of maintaining network connections and advanced tech on a mobile platform, end up being a lot more culturally conservative than the rest of the solar system. (In other words, their crews cleave a lot closer to early-21st century norms, so the players don’t have to “reach” as far to understand their characters.)

(2) The scenario structure needs to be tweaked somewhat to accommodate interplanetary travel instead of interstellar travel, but the basic principle of “key to the voyage” should still work.

(3) I would key each voyage to reveal some specific facet of the Transhuman Space setting. (Over time, therefore, the campaign would slowly introduce your players to its intricacies one chunk at a time.)

In terms of keying, this can actually be quite liberating. Flipping through the setting book randomly and just grabbing stuff off the page, for example, gives me:

A large group of executives from Nanodynamics is travelling to a base in the outer system to inspect the installation of zero-gee nanofabrication tools. But they’re being targeted by pro-union terrorists from the recently acquired Exogenesis Systems Technologies. (see page 95)

A poorly secured microbot swarm breaks loose in the ship’s cargo hold.

The crew is hired to make the long haul out to Miranda with 3HE mining supplies. There’s a spy onboard trying to figure out what China’s real intentions are for the Miranda colony. (see page 48)

A Felician combat bioroid sneaks onboard in an effort to escape her contract. A corporate hunting team, however, is trying to track her down. And since the Felician killed their captain, they may be more interested in vigilante justice than fulfilling their contract. (see page 116)

And so forth.

It might also be useful to check out “Getting the Players to Care“, which is primarily about how to parcel and structure exposition so that it’s not boring or overwhelming.

Something I’ve spent literally years struggling with as a GM is transitioning from one scenario structure to another within a dungeoncrawl.

Let me see if I can clarify that:

I find it really easy to switch scenario structures at the same time that the venue of action is being switched: If the PCs enter the dungeon, we swap to dungeoncrawling. If they seek out a specific character in a tavern we roleplay that conversation; if they exit the tavern and then start hitting the streets looking for information we handle that a different way.

After a few false starts as a neophyte GM, I also eventually found it relatively easy to switch scenario structures within most venues: Renting rooms at a local tavern is handled at one level of abstraction, but when they wake up in the middle of the night to find the tavern haunted by ghosts we switch to a different structure.

These days, this sort of thing is pretty much automatic for me. But swapping structures in the dungeon still routinely thwarts me.

The type of structure I’m talking about is mainly the one found in adventures like Night Below or Thunderspire Labyrinth: A large, underground complex in which there are isolated pockets of “interest” which are designed to be run as a room-by-room crawl.

For awhile, I thought it was the difficulty of presenting meaningful navigation choices to the players in these environments. But once I came to think of them as “underground wildernesses”, this wasn’t a problem any more.

No, the primary problem was the transition from the room-by-room crawl to the underground wilderness (or vice versa): When the PCs enter a room with three exits and two of them lead to another room but the third leads to the more abstract labyrinths of the wider complex.

I mean, it’s relatively easy to just do it. But it’s more difficult to do it effectively.

Partly it’s the difficulty of finding a smooth narrative description of the shift. Mostly, however, it’s the damage to roleplaying and immersion caused by the imposition of the metagaming structure on the decision-making of the characters.

See, in most other circumstances it’s either the passage of time, the changing of circumstance, or the decision of the characters to do something different which smoothly transitions us from one game structure to another: But not so in this case. Circumstances remain unchanged and the PCs are making the exact same type of decision they’ve been making for the past twenty rooms… but suddenly the scenario structure is changing.

And, like I say, this can be handled pretty simply by saying to the players “we’re switching structures now” (or some equivalent thereof). But that has consequences on the decisions they’re making. (As a simple example, if I didn’t tell them “all the rooms beyond this point are empty, so we’re going to be switching to underworld exploration” then they might waste time searching those empty areas… which might have an impact when they return to the occupied rooms.)

In a lot of ways, this is all a mountain out of a molehill because it just doesn’t come up that often. But it’s something that my recent discussion of using multiple scenario structures has brought to mind.

Recently, though, I had an interesting discovery in my Ptolus campaign. Part of the vast megadungeons beneath that city are immense labyrinths built by the warlord Ghul. Ghul’s Labyrinth is filled with a number of bluesteel doors which are extremely difficult to bypass (being resistant to knock and lacking any normal lock to pick).

And these doors have proven to be ideal transition points between dungeon scenario structures because they’re natural transition points within the game world: Not only do they require a significant decision on the part of the PCs in order to pass through them, but they were actually built by Ghul to logically divide his demesne.

All of this, of course, ties back into the larger issues of making sure that your players’ decision within a scenario structure are associated with the decisions of their characters: Something I not only aesthetically prefer, but which is absolutely necessary if the scenario structure is actually unknown to the players.

As a brief tangent to our discussion of game structures, how could we go about plugging the “hole” in Traveller’s scenario structure?

Since Traveller’s starmaps are hex-based, we could start by rifling through the pockets of the hexcrawl and snagging the concept of “when the PCs enter the hex, trigger the hex’s keyed content”. But what we’ll quickly realize is that there’s a reason Traveller doesn’t do this already: Planets are really, really big.

If we think of a dungeon room or a wilderness hex as a “container” which holds keyed content, it’s pretty easy to recognize that a planet-sized container completely dwarfs the scale of any single encounter or location. Take an encounter and stick it in a dungeon room; it fills the room. Take the same encounter and put it in a wilderness hex; it gets a little bit lonely but there’s still enough to quench our thirst. Stick it on a planet, on the other hand, and the glass still looks completely empty.

And this isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. It impacts the GM’s ability to logically transition the scene: If the PCs are traveling through a wilderness, it’s relatively easy to find a transition from the macro-level of wilderness travel to the micro-level of the keyed encounter. You just say something like, “As you pass through the forest, you see a bunch of orcs.” But this method doesn’t work quite as well if the PCs are approaching a planet.

Perhaps more importantly, this also affects the ability for players to make meaningful decisions within the context of the scenario structure. If the GM of a hexcrawl says, “You see a castle perched upon a rocky crag of blackened stone.” The players can say, “Okay, that looks scary. I think we’ll just skirt it as far to the west as possible.” And they can do that. But if they were to say, in this hypothetical game structure for spacecrawling, “Okay, I don’t want to deal with this settlement of murderous cannibals. Let’s lift-off and land somewhere else on the planet.” Suddenly they’ve exited the purview of the scenario structure.

One logical leap from this conclusion is that we simply need to key more content to the planet. Maybe, for example, we could just map the entire planet and key it as a hexcrawl: Thus, just like a hexcrawl contains dungeoncrawls, our spacecrawl would contain hexcrawls.

But hexmapping and keying an entire planet in any sort of meaningful or interesting detail? That’s an absurd amount of work. It’s obviously completely impractical.

HAILING FREQUENCIES OPEN

So maybe, instead of that, we let our logic take us the other way. Maybe we accept our limitations and implement a structure where each planet is keyed with a “hail”: When an intrepid band of interstellar scouts enters orbit, they’ll receive the hail.

This basically handles the problem of scale by embracing the old pulp SF trope of “every planet is a village”. The result is less Traveller: Firefly and more Traveller: Star Trek. But as long as the players are onboard with the fact that they have to either engage with Oxymyx and Krako or bypass the planet (i.e., they can’t just decide to head over to the other side of the planet and talk to a different set of gangsters), you’ll probably be in pretty good shape.

Unfortunately, the structure starts to breakdown once you’re dealing with civilized planets (instead of exploration). But, of course, this is also true for traditional hexcrawls (which provide no guidance for PCs once they pass through the gates of Greyhawk).

ABOARD THE KING ARTHUR

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to start thinking this way about Traveller. Back in 1981, FASA produced Action Aboard: Adventures on the King Richard. In addition to detailing the ISCV King Richard and providing two sample adventures, this module included a dozen or so “Outline Adventures”, all of which constitute primitive scenario structures into which any number of specific scenarios could be poured. For example, the Hijack:

I. HIJACK

The forcible capture of the vessel and its contents may come from either inside or outside the ship.

A) Internal

A hijack from inside assumes that the hijackers and their equipment are all aboard at the beginning of the scenario.

1) Players as crew – the players may or may not be issued weapons from the ship’s locker, depending upon the level of surprise.

2) Players as passengers – The players will not be given weapons and, unless they have social standing A-F, they will be abandoned at any habitable planet (roll 1-4 on  one die) or shot, and/or dumped into a vacuum (roll 5 or 6 on one die). If they have high social ranking, they will be ransomed.

And so forth.

Primitive? Yes. Still incomplete? Sure. But you can see how this begins to provide a basic structure into which a few stats can be poured to give you something that can be used in play. In combination with the other “Outline Adventures”, Action Aboard begins to give you enough structure to run an entire campaign based around the voyages of the ISCV King Arthur.

As I mentioned awhile back, the Russian spammers figured out my math captcha. The intensity has died down again in the past couple months, but I’m still scanning through a couple dozen spam messages per day that slip past the captcha and hit the Akismet spam filter.

Usually it’s pretty easy to spot the false-positives and restore comments that should be seen by the world at large, largely because the spam comments are always complete non sequiturs that have nothing to do with anything I’ve ever talked about here on the Alexandrian. But a couple days ago I ran into this:

On the topic of AC being movement based, etbolusaly NOT!! While Dex does affect AC, AC is not dependent on Dex. AC is based on the ability of the armor to prevent damage to the wearer; which is why plate is better than chain is better than leather is better than clothing In the real world in medieval europe, clothing was a layer of wool on a layer of linen, leather was boiled (hardened) leather on a padded jacket (basically a moving blanket), chain was riveted iron rings on a padded jacket and plate was 1/32 to 1/16 inch think steel plate with small ring chain at the joints all on a padded jacket.Sheilds ranged from all but disposable Viking duelling sheilds (see the duel in 13th Warrior) to seriously stout wooden rounds and tear drops (kites much better for fighting from horseback, but very useful on foot too) to proper steel traditional shapes in late periods.Your dexterity might make you move a bit more fluid in your armor, but it did little for the actual defensive ability of the armor. If you get hit with a mace, the blunt force impact can still break bones in lessor armors (chain, leather, cloth). If you are stabbed, you are almost definately getting hurt in lessor armors (chain, leather, cloth). If you get knocked down in plate, you aren’t just jumping back onto your feet and returning the attack, you might even need help to stand again.Watch some YouTube videos of SCA combat to get a decent idea of what D&D combat would be like.

A little on the ranty side, but my first impression was that this was a legitimate comment. But then I noticed that it had been posted on the page for “Opening Your Game Table“… which has absolutely nothing to do with armor class. A little digging around then confirmed that the user name was linking back to a known spam domain.

So, apparently, the spam bots are playing RPGs now. Which, frankly, I’d be fine with: They just need to stop posting random comments on my website and start running some games on Google+. Ya know, contribute something to the community.