Quick and dirty and eminently useful

As a harassed dungeon master/game master, I am always on the lookout for very useful shortcuts to make my job easier and more effective. Real life takes a horrific toll on my refereeing efforts - and I feel that I am not remiss in claiming that many of my brethren of similar persuasion are in the same situation as I am.

Jeff Rients has a most effective article on coming up with an instant dungeon in Fight On! magazine issue number 6 most appropriately entitled HOLY CRAP! I NEED A DUNGEON RIGHT NOW. I find myself so much in such a situation the day before I committed to run a dungeon and just emerged from a very toxic work week. I do heartily recommend this article if you find yourself searching for some solid tips on how to deal with these last minute crunches.

One such piece of advice deals with quickly but effectively stocking your shake and bake dungeon with monsters which are hopefully going to offer something for your players' characters to sink their fangs into. I am a fan of customizing my big baddies before I throw them at the players as I always believe in tossing them something they've never encountered before as opposed to just recycling something straight from the monster manual.

Jeff suggests rolling once on the appropriate encounter table for your dungeon's level for the basic monster and then rolling again on the encounter table. After this, simply amalgamate the two monsters who have rolled up.

I decided to take this for a spin during my last Traveller-themed dungeon crawl. The results were pleasantly intriguing (and surprisingly fun too for my players). First roll on the wandering monster table under Labyrinth Lord rules produced the Owlbear- my usual favorite. Second roll was the Gorgon: mean and deadly considering its petrification attack. Amalgamating the two together produced a monstrous and deadly hybrid- the Owl Gorgon. It looked, smelled, attacked and died like an Owlbear but packed the hideous surprise of breathing out a cloud of greenish gas when it had you in a bear hug which, if you failed your saving throw, turned you to stone.

As it is, my players wisely ganged up on it and applied massive dollops of shock action (ie. cut it to pieces before it really got to turn someone to stone). The fighter narrowly missed his save but never really found out what was going to happen to him if he failed. Too bad he later got careless and failed his save against a corrosive poison gas trap later on as he fixated on looting a magical sword. But that's an altogether different story.

As to generating the Owl Gorgon, I got it down pat in 2 minutes flat. Not bad for a harassed dungeon master.

Jeff's advise shows you that thinking slightly out of a box and using the tools provided in existing old school clone rulesets will really yield great dividends. A great savings in both time and effort.

I know exactly what you mean...

This post at The Fine Art of the TPK really got my attention. More importantly, it made me laugh - which is a good thing as it seems I can use more laughs in my life. I guess this post goes out to all Game Masters out there, whether you go by the name of Dungeon Master, Mutant Lord, Umpire, Referee, Mission Controller or some other esoteric monicker. Chances are, while you are in the midst of trying to put some sense into a brewing storm of chaos after your gameplan has (again) been torched by a rampaging band of never satisfied players, these thoughts (or something like them) may have crossed your mind at least once.

When losers are winners

Another sticky point that has arisen time and time again in my gaming experience is the subject of how "weak" characters can be when they are generated by a random-based game system. Many of my players who have gotten so used to generating characters in point-build games systems (such as Gurps) or "balanced" game systems which produce epic characters from the get-go (such as D&D 4e) seem to bothered by the randomness of the Mutant Future generation system. The very possibility of being stuck with a character having less than average attribute scores and debilitating random mutations seems to bother some people. They see this as being "burdened" by an inferior character.

This is evident in a request I received from one of my current regular Mutant Future players. While he plays a most suitable Pure Strain Human, he once asked me if I could initiate a houserule allowing for point allocations to generate character stats instead of the usual die roll method (and its attendant risks). The risk of getting a Strength attribute of 5, it appears, grates on his sensibilities.

Me, I see this as a challenge to one's role-playing and gaming skills, rather than a burden. Then again, they say I have rather strange role playing game habits. I have this fascination for the struggle of the underdog; of the everyman-turned-reluctant-hero who bucks the odds without a sure guarantee of survival (much less of success). I always had a soft spot for characters who, at first glance, appear "inferior" due to lower-than-expected die rolls during character generation. It isn't for a reason that I am a fan of the old DC comics series of an intrepid team of four heroes in World War II called the Losers, particularly the ones drawn by Jack Kirby.

Musing all of this was triggered by a post in Planet Algol which essentially captures how I feel about the whole thing:

"Loser characters are hilarious, usually the awesome players in my campaign play their ability-score deficient character to the freaking hilt! Jeryk's jackass antics had a couple of us helpless with laughter. With the lowered emphasis on ability score in AD&D, it really doesn't make it a huge handicap in most instances, and it seems like the characters with ability scores that are a genuine liability play smarter as a result and those characters tend to be survivors as well as having a lot of heart."

Reading this post also led me to another similar point from Jeff's Gameblog which I find just as appropos:

"For the EPT game I wanted the kind of freaks you'd see in an actual campaign, so I generated a bunch of stats randomly by using the random number generator in the spreadsheet. This resulted in a couple kickass PCs, some decent ones, several mediocre characters and quite a few complete losers. This is completely acceptable to me, as every campaign that uses random chargen will show a similar distribution."

Even non-random game systems such as Gurps can lend itself readily to this type of gaming. Curiously, the relative "weakening" effect brought about by a random throw of a dice during character generation may also be "self-inflicted" (a term I use for want of a better one). This is suggested by Nikolas here, wherein he says:

"Voluntary Disadvantages adds another dimension to RPGs and attempts to create an incentive for layers to voluntarily bring up their disadvantages in appropriate situations to enhance the game's experience."

To me, whether or not it comes as a result of random chance, or a voluntary decision, the willingness to accept the challenges of playing what others would dismiss as a Loser connotes the presence of guts and chutzpah in a player. Something I'd do myself and respect in others.

Maybe I'm just a bit tired a not a bit sick of running games starring a group of epic-story, star-crossed, lavishly equipped, superstars romping through the world in search of fame and fortune. Instead, I crave dozens of eclectic groups of misfits just bucking the odds and going out there to raise some hell. Bring 'em on- bring on the Losers!

On character motivation (and sound advise from Messrs. Zak and Raggi)

Reading this post from Zak's Playing D&D With Porn Stars gave me another "aha!" moment. It also brought up (not so very) pleasant memories of games I ran in my younger age back in the day. In not a few of these games, I'd often hear a player quip "Why are we in this dungeon again?" to the others, followed by laughter and derision. Things eventually changed. I grew up a bit more, picked up more of the GM-ing craft. Certain players I gamed with grew up too and eventually gave up the fine art of role playing games altogether and became self-professed normal people pursuing normal lives. Eventually, it dawned on me that their absence from my gaming life entailed no big loss at all. In losing them, I later gained better players who turned out to be better friends as well.

My point is that, for the longest time, I struggled with trying to help my players find their characters' motivation for doing what they do in the games I ran.

Zak argues a very good case for adopting what he terms as the 'Roguish Work Ethic' in enhancing the very reasons why your character adventures in the game world. Hence, he makes the following observation:

"Now I don't actually want to talk about playing villains, I want to talk about playing Roguish Heroes. Grey Mouser, Conan, Cugel, Han Solo, and the stereotypically larcenous Old School D&D PC.

Now a Roguish Hero is not the same as a villain, and I am not saying everybody should play Lex Luthor but, functionally, pulpy roguish protagonists and villains have an important thing in common: they want something from the world. Gold, power, the admiration of attractive members of the opposite sex--something. The Upright Hero doesn't really want anything--or at least not anything that would bring him/her into violent conflict with the world as-is. The Upright Hero is not usually proactive, s/he waits until s/he sees injustice (even if it was an injustice that was there all along)."

And continues with this:

"There's a reason why the stereotype of Old School D&D is a bunch of amoral bastards running around killing things and taking their stuff--and it's not just because of the x.p. system. It's because people who just want treasure don't need to be given a reason to go into a cave or a lair or an abandoned city or the HQ of the local Wizard's Guild and they can pick freely which one they want to do first, since the fact that the lair contains a despotic vampire that plagues the countryside and the cave just has a dumb animal with big teeth in it doesn't automatically impose a moral imperative on Roguish PCs to deal with the vampire first"

And this archetypal "bunch of amoral bastards running around killing things and taking their stuff" is by no means to be confined to D&D. I've had the pleasure of GM-ing such amoral bastards who had, at one time or another, taken a multitude of guises and forms including, but not limited to, German Fallschirmjager, Soviet Frontoviki, survivors of the US 5th Mechanized division near Kalisz, proto-Dunedain in Beleriand, Travellers in the Spinward Marches, mercenaries for the PanGalactic Corporation, and questing pilgrims in the Known Worlds. Different worlds, different characters, different systems -yes, but still the same concept applies to all.

He hit the point spot-on as regards character motivation. Ultimately, the player who plays proactively, who works to make things happen, makes the game move forward, perhaps just as much as the referee does as he runs the game. To me, this is as much an attitude, as it is an effort to bring the game to life. Everyone wins this way because everyone works together to make things happen.

He also makes a further distinction from the standard "Sandbox" gaming style which, I confess, have never given much thought to in the past, but presently have all but embraced in my current games. He calls this the Quicksandbox, and taking a look at my Mutant Future world, I can see what he's talking about:

"Then there's the Quicksandbox. The world isn't dominated by a single evil, it just completely sucks. This is the basic post-apocalyptic set-up. (It also could just be any old world if you're desperately poor.) Basically--anything any PC tries to do (find water, ammunition, eat pie) is so hard and beset with so many mutants or gangsters or cave bears that heroic effort is required just to do anything. In this case, it doesn't matter if the PCs are Upright Heroes or Roguish because either way they have to act Roguish (i.e. plot, scheme, choose their battles) because otherwise they'll just die immediately. Survival is the plot hook. The only trick in making this kind of thing a true sandbox would be making sure the GM gives the PCs enough information about what's around them that they have different options about where to look for various commodities. Supermarket? Army barracks? Spooky old house?"

He goes on to postulate a Quicksandbox world which sucks AND is dominated by a single evil. Reading this elicited yet another "aha!". My players seem unanimous in describing my games (and resultant gameworlds) as "gritty" ones. This one really seems to be up my alley.

Character motivation.

Without it, even the most intricately designed gameworld played in the most potent game system becomes inert much as a supercharged engine is without gasoline fuel.

Ultimately, I still believe that the process at arriving at, and maintaining the necessary proper character motivation in a given game is one shared by both players and referee, working together to produce something that can be truly great. As a gamemaster, I had agonized quite a bit about this (and I've seen fellow game masters still struggle with this). But the reality is that the gamemaster can really only go so far. The players have to pull their share - after all, arriving at this desired goal is truly a joint effort.

I can't help but remember what Edward James Raggi said here sometime back, which I feel applies to this point:

"If a player complains that he’s bored and that nothing is happening, look at him and say, “I agree. So are you going to do something or not?”

It is not the referee’s job during a session to provide excitement for his playing group. His job is to administer the setting and resolve character actions. If the characters are taking no action and are not interacting with the setting, then the referee has literally nothing to do. The players are wasting his time.

Other common standards of pacing become obsolete when dealing with a player-driven adventure xxx"

I guess all this kinda reinforces the concept that a face-to-face rpg is really a cooperative effort between everyone who comes to play at the game table.

Musings on character death, et al.

The subject of character death seems to have reared its unlovely head once more in our group's collective gaming lives. For me, this was precipitated by two recent events.

The first was my reading of the collective responses sent in by my players to my GM game survey form I circulated earlier in the week through my gaming egroups. I'll be devoting the responses of my players and their expected effects on my gaming henceforth in a later post. Suffice it to say for now that character death appears to be a geniune issue with not a few of my current players.

The second was the unexpected and brutal deaths of mutants Clem and Clyde during our last Friday night Mutant Future game. A good thing I can say about my current players is their dedication to really building up a well-thought of and played character. Couple this with the emotional investment of making Clem and Clyde survive through six gaming sessions (quite a record for a harassed referee like me to maintain a game this long), I guess the loss of the mutants understandably felt like a real loss for Henry.

For a wee part of the game last Friday, my friend sat there staring at the green plastic mini representing his recently-deceased mutant muttering in tagalog, the equivalent of "Ce'st la vie" over and and over again. Eventually, he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and got back into the thick of it, as every good player does.

These things may strike some gamers as strange or even absurd, but as my gaming group's GM, I can't be blind to them.

For the longest time, character death (if it ever came at all) was few and far between in my gaming group. Our default game system of choice was Gurps and stories were rather story- and plot-driven. Although I seem to have acquired a reputation for running hard-edged, gritty and combat-bloody games, looking back, there were really few character deaths in my games.

Late in 2008, I invested in the boxed set of the Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition rules and started running a campaign for my gaming group. I felt like a fish out of water in the start as everyone else had been playing 4e already and I was astounded to see just how many new rules and concepts there were. And the powers - man, it was like law school all over again: daily powers, utility powers, encounter powers, at-will powers - all on top of skills and feats. Still, it was fun in the beginning.

Then, the tedium kicked in. It seemed a new book arrived every x number of weeks with even more new rules and new races and new crunchy magic items, and so on, ad nauseam. And my gaming group really got off on trying out the newest, crunchiest stuff that came out.

In a way, I got too caught up in trying to run a 'fun game' the way I thought my players (and the unseen game writers) thought I ought to be running the game, not how I thought the game ought to be.

In 2009, I started reading up on various old-school gaming blogs starting out with Grognardia. I started lurking in the old-school gaming forums that came up beginning with the one of Goblinoid Games. All this opened up a whole new world for me, so to speak. I guess you can say I got caught up in the Old-School Gaming Rennaisance movement that is still happening to this day. The old-school explosion really resonated inside my gaming consciousness like nothing else did for a very long time.

Something clicked inside my brain. At this time I was approaching 4e burn-out and I could feel it already. It is ironic that looking back now, my first 4e adventuring party suffered a TPK from me at about this time. Following this, I did hear some grumbles and dark mutterings on the side about the dungeon master applying too many of those "weird old-school gaming ideas" to the 4e game. Maybe they were right. It dawned on me that I had forgotten a very basic core rule that I always held true to my gaming.

I am the game master. I master the game. The rules don't master me. I adjudicate the situation conistently and fairly. If push comes to shove, in a conflict between the rules as written and the game master's decision, the latter should prevail. I know lots of players won't see things this way, but that's how I see things to be. Of course, this presupposes that the game master should be fair and consistent in his rulings, else tyrrany and absurdity arises thereafter.

On the other hand, character death is more sticky. Player emotions can be involved- particularly in view of the emotional investment made by a player for a well-played character. Significantly, the advise given by James Edward Raggi on Adventure Writing appearing in his Lamentations of the Flame Princess provides a very do-able answer in addressing such a concern:

"The most important thing to remember when constructing an adventure is to not assume that the PCs will succeed at any point during the adventure.

As a referee, your job is to be completely impartial during game play. You have absolute power at the game table and can bequeath success or mandate failure at any time. Doing either of those things ruins the game, as both give no incentive to play well.

Do not fudge the dice. Ever. Luck is a part of the game, and the dice are there for a reason. Resist the temptation of sparing characters that fail or even die due to “bad luck” or a “stupid die roll.”

Would it be acceptable to tell a player that just rolled a stunning success that you’ve decided, just because it’s more fun, that the die roll doesn’t count and he instead failed? I don’t think so. So why would ignoring the dice in the players’ favor be acceptable?

Good game play will tip the scales of fortune and those that rely on pure luck deserve what they get – either way. At the same time, if an incredibly lucky roll derails the entire adventure and gives the players a quick victory, it should stand. It needs to work both ways. When the dice go badly for the players, they should be thinking of how to not let a roll of the die be the sole determiner of their fates. And when the dice go a little too well for the players, the referee should note what he needs to do to prevent a single die roll from determining the course of an entire adventure.

Traditional games are all about the players (and referee) learning to play better over time. The characters’ experience gains are secondary. Demand and reward player excellence and the game will be more challenging in the long run."

In turn, I arrived at the realization that if you really consider your character very valuable and worthy of the emotional investment you placed upon him, then it is your duty to play excellently, whereby ensuring that a single die roll does not result in the death of the character; that the fate of your character does not purely rely upon the scales of fortune or the outcome of a single die roll.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and I would not go so far as to venture with certainty that Clem and Clyde could have easily survived the encounter against the mutant scorpions if everyone started blasting away with their newly-acquired firepower instead of saving their ammo until the last minute. What I can safely say is that the death of Clem and Clyde was an example of a character's fate being determined by a single (saving) throw of the dice. Maybe people could have hedged their survival chances by blasting away for a mad minute at the first opportunity. Or maybe they could have ran away instead. Perhaps this is when playing excellently really comes to the fore.

Finally, there comes a time when even despite one's best efforts, something really happens and throws the whole thing out of whack. Characters will die as RPGs in general (at least as far as I'm concerned) largely involve killing and death. If that happens, then reflect on how the character lived. There is a story out there and death is not the end of anything, by no means! Great times are remembered and the memory of an excellently played character is the best way to ensure gaming immortality.

As I write this I recall a few players I had in my previous Fading Suns gaming group. One of them was a real thespian - the sort that cries in-game while role playing the angst of her Vampire character (yes, they were really into that style of gaming). One valentine's day in 1999, I was pleasantly surprised to receive flowers (of all things)from this player before running a game. A really nasty part of me asked myself if these were burnt offerings made to appease the GM (we were running through a dungeon-type game against some Zerg-like baddies called the Symbiots). Halfway through the game, it seemed like her character would die after getting badly mauled by a Symbiot critter. Some recalculations confirmed this was not the case so she lived.

In the meantime, she was beside herself anguish and was on the edge of what seemed like mild hysteria at the thought of a beloved character dying. She even threatened to take back the flowers.

I really didn't give a fig about the flowers but I was mildly put off, to say the least, by her reaction. If that happened to me today, knowing what I know now, I'd most likely just laugh in everyone's collective face and get back to the game.

The Mutant Lord's Impressions: Episode One

Episode One was the first experience I had in running Mutant Future and the first time any of my players ever played in a Mutant Future game, so this essentially was a learning experience for all of us.

The rules were pretty straightforward and being from a Basic D&D background a long, long time ago in my distant childhood, every thing came back to me smoothly. I liken this to not riding a bicycle for the longest time and just hopping on one and taking off down the street. Analogy-wise, running Mutant Future as a game system was a smooth ride.

The addition of variable damage rules and variable hit points from Carcosa (what my players now term as the ‘Carcosa Variable Damage Rules’ or CVDR) provided an additional level of uncertainty and tension during combat. Overall, that translated into a whole lot of fun, particularly when a player would satisfyingly roll high on the variable damage table and throw a whopping d12 when stabbing a critter with a “puny” dagger.

Checking under the hood - Sanly Bowitts and its environs

As soon as I made up my mind to run a Mutant Future game, I knew I’d have to make a few departures from my default settings for my other games. Science would have to be ‘softened up’ from the normal Traveller-Twilight 2000-Gurps Ultratech background in my usual game to a more rubber-science feel. Hence, the giant insects, lizards, vermin and glowing green mutants (not that the ladz have ever come up against a glowing green humanoid yet…). The point is, I relaxed quite a bit on my usual hard-science SF aspects of my game and threw the players into a real science fantasy universe that almost makes the Known Worlds of Fading Suns seem like hard science SF.

Also, with the drastic reduction in my overall game prep time brought about by an ever-increasing work at the office as well as the usual demands of bringing up two little kids, I was forced to take a more “laid back” approach in campaign development and world building. When I say “laid back” I refer to adopting a “kitchen sink” approach. I took what I wanted and what I could from existing post-apocalyptic sources and inspirational material, tossed them into my collective pot, stirred the mess around a bit, and fed them at will to my players.

Yes, the result was stew but so far, my players have yet to complain of the taste.

I know some of my players could be reading this, but what the heck, they’ll find out anyway. Some of a few odds and ends related to the setting at the start of my Mutant Future include the following:

Sanly Bowitts is a respelled name of a village at the edge of the desert in the post-nuclear war America of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’, if memory serves me right. I always felt that the first part of his work captured the feel of a world emerging from the destruction of the War to End All Wars, into the Shadow Years that follow.

Being my default start location for the ongoing game, Sanly Bowitts had to be fleshed out to a more organized degree as I expect my players to be spending some time meandering around town, hatching plots and raising their usual brand of mayhem. Hence I took the town of Horn from the excellent 1981 Gamma World adventure module Legion of Gold and plunked it right into the Cygnet Delta of my Gamma World. Gary Gygax, et al really did great on that module and I’m unabashedly ripping off bits here and there for use in our game.

The Hub is a larger, ostensibly more powerful city-state north west of Sanly Bowitts. I named it after a town in another post-nuclear America wherein the Normals war with the Mutants. This is in Michael Resnick’s 1969 novel ‘Redbeard’. I regret losing my copy of this book but I always considered Redbeard to be one of those stories that go so far in capturing that Gamma World-Mutant Future feel.

The musicians from the Strontium Ninety who were seen to have rendered a performance of a ditty with a chorus which goes somewhat like “Whip it Good!”, I’ll leave to my readers to figure out themselves. If you don’t get it, don’t feel too bad- I’ll attribute this, amongst others, to generation gap. I’m pretty old and my music tends to show this.

In relation to the musicians in the Strontium Ninety, I’d say the bar fight involving a stunningly beautiful, scantily clad, platinum blonde swordswoman and the three hulking verdure brutes should be another giveaway for those who’ve seen the animated Heavy Metal Movie. This, and the great white bird should bring the name “Taarna” in mind, if it hasn’t done so yet.

So far, this is it for Episode One. As I write this, I remember a recent post in James Maliszewski’s Grognardia wherein he did a review of the old SFRGP Space Opera. Having never played Space Op myself, I was intrigued (as most old style-SF rpgs tend to do so to me). One thing that struck me was the impression that FGU’s Space Op was essentially a happy mish-mash of different SF themes, tropes and icons all unabashedly placed in one game. Hence the cover of the gamebook as appearing in James’ blog had something that looked like a Wookie mixed in along with some other character types.

I couldn’t help say “Yeah, I can relate to that.” It dawned upon me that my Mutant Future is shaping up to be a mish-mash of post-apocalypse themes. A mixed stew. I hope it retains its flavor without going stale on me.