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Let’s See What Happens, Part Four: Watch Their Eyes

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It’s been a while, but I’m back to talk about the next component in my recipe for emergent campaign storylines. If you’ve missed the previous installments, I give an overview of my method here, and then talk about the Secrets Deck here, and discuss Sandboxes here.

This step of the… I hesitate to call it a process, because that implies a more rigid structure than I actually have. Let’s call it a tool. This tool in the toolbox is where the rubber really meets the road. At this point ((If not before.)), the players are well and truly involved in what you’re doing, and you go into reactive observer mode. You’ve got your secrets in place, and some hints ready, and your sandbox set up and filled with toys, and the players get to come in.

Now you have to watch their eyes.

Pay Attention

The biggest thing you need to do is pay attention. Watch what they react to. Listen to what they say. They will show you what catches their interest and what doesn’t. You just need to be aware of the signals.

There are a couple of catches, here, though: first, the onus is on you to catch the signals. Later on, I’m going to talk about asking questions to find out what the players are interested in, but really, what you want at this point is their unsolicited, unfiltered reactions. That means just paying attention to the things they do and say without prompting of any sort.

Which leads us to the other catch: you need to be objective and open to what you here. Be ready for them to ignore your strokes of brilliance, or to find them trite and boring. If you want this to be useful, you can’t react to what they say, or else the players will start to filter. And really, you need to know if they find pieces of what you’ve done to be crap. That is valuable information, and you must absorb it and use it.

So, watch what they get excited about, and make note ((You don’t need to actually make a note, and you probably shouldn’t make a physical note if it’s going to make it look like you’re eavesdropping on the players’ conversations and taking notes. That’ll make them start to filter, again. But remember what they do and say.)) of any strong reactions. The things that make them say, “Cool!” or start hatching plots – those are the things that you want to expand and flesh out, so you can make them centrepieces of the campaign. The things that they ridicule or ignore – those are the things that you either want to let fade into the background, or rework later on ((Which I’ll talk more about in the Making Connections post.)) to make them cool.

But for now, just take note.

Bide Your Time

This is surprisingly important. You need to wait a bit before acting on the perceived interests of the players. There are a few reasons for this:

  • Acquiring More Information. The more you wait, the better picture you’ll have about what the players are interested in. You hear more of what they say, see more of what they do, and build a more complete idea of their interests.
  • Giving a More Complete Picture. At the beginning of the campaign, your players are going to be finding their feet, and everything will be new and shiny. Give them some time to get a more complete picture of the world, so that they will have a more complete range of choices, and their reactions will be more meaningful and useful.
  • Misdirection. You don’t want to just toss in another story about pirates just because the players had fun with the last adventure about pirates. You need to mask what you’re doing a little bit. A little bit of time, with something in between, will keep things a little fresh.
  • Give You Time to Think. Don’t just jump in with both feet at the first thing that the players seem interested in. Take some time to think about the best way to do things. Plan your approach, and look at how things fit into the overall campaign. Only move when you’re ready, and you’re happy with what you’ve come up with. There’s no rush.

So, take your time in reacting to what the players are reacting to. Let them enjoy the opening stages of the campaign, and the wonder and confusion that a new campaign engenders. Use that time to process their reactions and decide what to do about them. Polish your ideas, and don’t spring them on the players until you’re happy with them, and the time looks opportune.

Respond

When you think you’ve got a handle on what the players are looking for in the game, and you’ve worked out an polished an idea until it’s ready, introduce it. It doesn’t need to be a big thing – it can just be a single encounter, an interesting item, a new NPC, or even just a bit of background information. Drop it in as appropriate, and pay attention to how they respond.

This is the feedback cycle. Pay Attention – Bide Your Time – Respond – Pay Attention – Bide Your Time – Respond… You get the idea. Lather, rinse, repeat. What you need to be looking for is if you were right about what the players were interested in, because it’s easy to be wrong. Here’s a scenario:

  1. You have an adventure where the characters take to the seas to hunt down some pirates. Everyone has a great time.
  2. You decide that the players like sea adventures, so you develop an adventure where the characters join an expedition to map the Lost Seas.
  3. The players are bored, and do whatever it takes to cut the adventure short and get back to land, because it wasn’t the sea adventure part of the original adventure that they liked, it was the swashbuckling battles against the pirates.

See? You guess wrong about what it is that the players find interesting ((And it’s easy to do, don’t fool yourself. This is because the adventures you design look different to you than they do to the players, who don’t have your insight into the structure and development of the adventure. So be aware.)), and the adventure falls flat. And then you’re stuck in an adventure no one is enjoying ((Which is why you should be ready to Discard Liberally, as I’ll discuss in a later post. For now, I’ll just say that you shouldn’t get married to any adventure, and build in escape hatches if possible.)) until you can switch tracks to something else.

Learn from that. Build it in to the next cycle. This is an iterative process, and each time round the circle should bring you more mastery, more certainty, and more fun for everyone.

Ask Questions and Listen to the Answers

Asking questions is an important way to gather information about what the players like, but you need to delay doing that until they’ve had a chance to get used to the campaign and develop some real opinions. This means running through the cycle a few times without asking questions. This gives them time to really figure out what they enjoy about the game, and also gives you time to accumulate your own ideas about what they like.

Now, the kinds of questions you ask is important. I recommend not asking, “What kind of adventures do you like?” simply because players think about adventures differently than GMs do ((In short, they see the adventure as the finished product of them playing it, while GMs have to look at the adventure as a list of potentialities that are not resolved until play. It causes the two parties to think about the structure and nature of adventures in very different terms.)), and their answers won’t be all that useful ((Well, they will be somewhat useful, but they will be needed to be translated into GM-think.)). In general, these types of abstract questions, while they might yield some interesting information, aren’t as useful as your own observation.

Now, that’s a pretty big claim, but hear me out. You need concrete information to create an adventure. When you talk to players about what they liked in an adventure, they will say things like, “It was really cool when we did X!” Now, that’s concrete information, but it’s not the kind of information that you can just reuse – if you did, you’d just have the same scenes repeating in each adventure.

Because you don’t need to know that they liked doing X. You need to know why they liked doing X. And that sort of information is often not conscious – it’s a gut reaction based on a number of factors. You need to do the analysis yourself to figure out why X was fun.

And besides, you probably already knew that they liked X, because you’ve been watching their eyes during play, right?

So, what question should you ask? In my opinion ((Like the rest of this essay isn’t just my opinion.)), the best question is, “What do you want to do next? ((Sometimes, you might want to phrase this as, “What does your character want to accomplish in this campaign?” That’ll give you about the same information, but over a longer time-frame.))”

This gives you a concrete answer about what bit of the campaign is most holding their attention at the moment, for whatever reason. Again, you have to do the heavy lifting of analysis to figure out why on your own, but you should have a wealth of ideas from paying attention to the players. The important thing here is to actually give the players what they want – don’t twist things so that it looks like they might be getting what they want, but then yank the rug out from under their feet. Sure, throw in some twists, but give them what they want. Otherwise, they’ll stop trusting you, and won’t give you useful answers any longer.

There’s another question that you probably want to ask every now and then: “Why didn’t that work for you?” You know when things fall flat for a player, and when they do, this is a good way to gather information about why. It’s a dangerous question, though; you have to be ready to hear the criticism of the adventure you made. The player is probably going to be a little reluctant to complain too much ((You’re probably playing with people who like you, and who don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you’re not, why the hell not?)), but if you genuinely welcome the feedback and use it to improve the game, you will get more candid responses as they come to trust you.

If you take the information they give you and use it to improve the campaign, you may soon have your players volunteering answers to the questions before you ask them ((In the case of the “Why didn’t that work for you?” question, this can come off an awful lot like bitching about the game, but it’s not. It’s your players trusting you enough to be honest and give you the feedback you need to build something that’s fun for all of you. Welcome it.)).

What Aren’t They Saying

Silence and lack of attention are things you need to pay attention to in the game.

Some players don’t talk much in game. Whether it’s a product of their character, or their play style, they sit quiet unless they need to speak. This is not necessarily an indication that they are bored ((Though it might be. Pay attention to them, and, if necessary, ask them outright. But do it privately, so as not to put them on the spot with the group.)), some players just play more in their head than in conversation. For these folks, you need to watch body language and general demeanor during play to see what they’re interested in.

Then there are times that normally garrulous players turn quiet. That’s usually a sign that they’ve run up against something in game that they either have no interest in or actively dislike. That’s good information to have; keep it. It doesn’t mean you have to eliminate whatever the player isn’t liking, but you do need to be aware of this cost of using it – you’re losing the interest of at least one player. If it’s something that someone else is avidly interested in, then go ahead and use it sparingly to provide a bit of a spotlight moment, but be aware that the bored player is going to need to be rewarded for being a good sport with a spotlight moment of something he or she likes.

And if everyone at the table goes quiet and starts fidgeting, well, that’s a big red flag for whatever you’re trying. Get through what you’re doing, and then drop that campaign element in the Do Not Use bucket.

 

The upshot of all this advice is simple: pay attention to what the players like, and give them more of that. These techniques are the ways I try and do it in my games. Hopefully, they’re useful to you.

If you’ve got any tips that I’ve missed, fell free to drop me a comment below.

Next time, we get to the actual construction of storyline elements in emergent campaign storylines. This is where the work starts paying off.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

This past Storm Point game was pretty short. One of the players – the one who owns the space we pay at – developed a migraine, and we called it a night early.

We did get through the rest of the encounter, however. It was a tough slog, indeed, with the closely-matched antagonists. Of course, as with all battles, once one of the monsters dropped, the rest sort of cascaded as the characters were better able to concentrate their attacks. Some crappy rolls to distinguish friend from foe caused a few problems, but in the end, they made it through, and proceeded to take an extended rest.

So, that’s really all there is to say about that.

Mucking Around in Middle Earth: The One Ring RPG

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Saturday night, I gathered together a group of friends to try out the new The One Ring RPG from Cubicle 7. Over the past couple of weeks, we had created characters, and I had produced a couple of cheat sheets, so when the time came, we were ready to sit down and play through the introductory adventure included in the game.

For those unfamiliar with The One Ring RPG, it’s the latest roleplaying game based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. It comes in a wonderful set of two books ((One for players and one for Loremasters, the game’s special name for GM.)), two maps ((Again, one for players and one for Loremasters.)), and a set of the special dice ((A d12 and 6d6, each with special markings to be used for system quirks.)) needed for the game in an attractive slipcase. It uses a new system developed by Italian game designer Francesco Nepitello that is very straightforward, but has a number of interesting little twists to it that give it surprising depth while not slowing down play. The books and maps are beautiful, as might be expected.

We had a pretty good time, and really enjoyed the game. The rules do a good job of evoking the feel of the world, and reinforcing the kinds of things one sees in the source material. The adventure was paced nicely to wrap up in a single session and offered a sampling of pretty much everything the game has to offer.

For characters, we had a Barding slayer, a Barding treasure-seeker ((Brother and sister.)), a Woodman wanderer, and a Wood-Elf warder. Character creation is a simple templated system: you choose your culture, choose your background, choose your motivation, and then spread around a few discretionary points. It runs quite quickly once you figure out where everything is in the books and how it fits together, but this is a stumbling block that I’ll get to a little later.

There is an actual subsystem for handling the party as a party – what the rules call a Company. It gives the characters each a job to do in the journey system, provides a pool of points to help the characters out, and defines who your most important relationship is with in the group. That was how we started the game, as the characters had been developed independently: defining the Company and fleshing out who the characters were, how they had met, and why they were together.

I’m not going to talk too much about the adventure itself, to avoid spoilers, but here are some general observations:

  • Combat is wonderful. It is fast, cinematic, and deadly. There is a sense of real tactical choice and danger, despite the fact that it doesn’t use minis or battlemaps or anything like that. It abstracts positioning by using stances, where each character decides if they’re fighting on the front line or hanging back and using a missile weapon or something in between. Initiative, chance to hit, and chance to be hit are all determined by choice of stance, and the Loremaster just throws the monsters at the appropriate combatant. It works very nicely, and we all loved it.
  • There is an Encounter system, which is somewhat similar to skill challenges in D&D. It’s used specifically to handle social situations where the characters might or might not impress or offend a person or group. It works fine, but I found the scenes ran just as smoothly through straight roleplaying, taking into account the prejudices of the other party, without making a lot of rolls. I can see mixing it up a bit during ongoing play, but recommend not getting too slaved to the dice rolling.
  • The journey system works well, but it met some resistance in play. Part of this is the fact that I’m not experienced in running it cleanly, so it felt awkward, and part of it is that the roles for the journey were called out in other parts of the game for special tasks. The roles and journey system are there specifically to provide spotlight moments for different characters and to have everyone in the Company contribute to success ((Also to avoid everyone in the group rolling for every single challenge faced by the Company.)), but the rigidity of the roles felt artificial. Running this adventure a second time, I would handle the non-journey system invocation of the journey roles differently, asking who was doing what at a given moment, then asking for the roll.
  • I was very pleased with how easy it was to mix combat with other types of action – such as holding off an attack while escaping. I can’t say too much more about that without spoilers, so…
    Spoiler
    …when escaping the cellar while pursued by the Marsh Dwellers, it was easy to switch back and forth between characters involved in different aspects of the escape – fighting off the Marsh Dwellers, hauling the rescued Dwarves, acting as scout or guard, etc. It flowed very nicely, and created a great sense of desperation and urgency.
  • We only had the one set of special dice for the game, and it got a little annoying to share them. According to the Cubicle 7 forums, there will be dice available without buying the rulebooks in the next couple of months, and I plan on picking up a couple of extra sets ((What can I say? I love dice!)), but it was easy enough to use regular d12s and d6s.

There is one big problem with the game, though: the rulebooks are not well-organized. First off, they are split between an Adventurer’s book and a Loremaster’s book, and the split is not clean. As Loremaster, I need to look in both books to run combat, because combat is asymmetrical between PC and monster. The indices in the books are not true indices, but instead just an alphabetical listing of headings. The character creation leads you right through the process very nicely, except for one piece – Virtues and Rewards – which requires you to jump two chapters ahead to find the details. Without a page reference.

Now, the rules are not all that complicated, but it’s still a big stumbling block for the first few sessions, when the players and GM are having to look up a lot of stuff. The lack of proper index and the split between two books makes finding a specific rule mainly a matter of random chance, and that just slows the game down. A lot.

That said, the game ran fairly smoothly, and worked pretty well. We had enough fun that the players want to try another adventure in the system, following on one of the obvious next steps from the intro adventure. I’ve said okay, and given them the go-ahead to revamp their characters based on what we saw during play this time. We may even add a couple of players. And it means I get to figure out how to build an adventure in the system.

But that won’t happen until after I get back from Ireland.

Feints & Gambits: Too Long a Sacrifice

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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We had a full house for the first time since adding the new player, which meant we had eight people crowded into my living room. It was a little tight, but turned out to be workable. And it was nice to see how the dynamic with the full group worked.

When we had left the last session, the characters had just followed rumours of Padraig Pearse’s ghost right up to the gates of Kilmainham Gaol. I backtracked a day or so to bring the two characters who hadn’t been at the last game up to speed and involved. This was pretty easy to do, as I had originally planned to have one of the characters hooked into the plot from the start, but had to change that last session when he couldn’t make it.

Now, the O’Malley boys are good Irish lads with a reputation for being involved in some strange things. This led an acquaintance of theirs to approach them with a job offer – well, the offer of an offer, really. He told them that he was helping out another man – a patriot ((Full disclosure. I’m a little uneasy about writing about how I use the Troubles in the game. I mean, they are a big part of the history of Ireland and Dublin, but I’m just a Canadian prairie boy who has no real insight into them, no matter how much research I’ve done. And using them for entertainment might offend some people, which I don’t want to do. Suffice to say that I intend no offense, and am using the Troubles as a fodder for collaborative fiction. All people, situations, and events are used in a fictitious manner.)) – who wanted people with a certain kind of knowledge to help him help the Republic. Nothing violent. Honest.

When it came out that the meet was supposed to be at Kilmainham Gaol after dark, the boys got a little nervous. They had heard some unsettling things about the Gaol, and the suffering and death that had occurred there over the years left Mark with little doubt that the place was steeped in some rich negative juju. Still, they figured they better go see what was going on so that they could put a stop to it if needed. And, as they showed up at the Gaol, they noticed the rest of the characters skulking in Rogan’s car in an alleyway ((Yay! All the characters together, and less than half an hour into play!)).

The two groups spent a few minutes bringing each other up to speed, then came up with a simple plan. The O’Malley boys would go in first, as they had an invitation, and they would create a distraction ((Nate is especially good at providing distractions. Fiery, catastrophic distractions.)), allowing the rest of the gang to follow them in.

Inside the Gaol, Mark and Nate met with Sean Miller, a few of his companions, and around a hundred or so ghosts, including Padraig Pearse. Miller wanted some protection from the fey ((The Winter Warlord, Elga, was looking to get the ghost stone he was using back from him.)) so he could use his ghostly army to free Ireland from the English ((Step three: Profit!)). Mark startled Miller by putting him in a magic circle briefly, at which point Nate was tired of playing things carefully, so he started insulting the Pearse ((Who was already predisposed to not like Nate, after Nate had used cleansing fire to clean the ghosts out of the GPO.)).

At that point, I decided the distraction was occurring, so I cut to the outside group, and reported the gunshots, explosions, and flashes of fire coming from inside ((These are the standard signals that Nate has started a distraction.)). They all came running in.

Now, this was a big group – seven players – for running a large combat. I had been wondering how I would do it, and decided to go to a very loose, cinematic structure. Everyone got a turn, and we went round in an arbitrary order, letting people do stuff and deal with the consequences on their turn. This was easier than tracking initiative for the characters and the bad guys and going strictly by that and by the standard measure of a round. Instead, I let each character do about as much as would be shown in a single cut from an action movie fight scene of similar magnitude. Basically, they could each do one meaningful (cool) thing on their turn, and whatever other stuff got them to the place where they could do that cool thing.

I also let the initial part of the combat – the bit where Nate and Mark were alone amidst a horde of ghosts and several mortals with submachine guns – happen off-screen ((With the players’ consent. That’s important to note.)). I had them back-to-back in the middle of the mess when the rest came through the doors, Mark holding off the ghosts with a shield while Nate blasted them with fire. To reflect that they had been holding off massive odds for several seconds, I had them each take a 2-shift and a 3-shift Mental Stress hit.

The fight was a lot of fun. I think pretty much everyone got a good chance to have some spotlight time doing neat stuff. Some notable moments:

  • Aleister running into the press of ghosts and immediately shooting Sean Miller between the eyes ((So he thought. Miller actually took an Extreme Consequence (Eye Shot Out) and then conceded.)).
  • Kate’s Ghost-Freeze potion that took all the (non-Pearse) ghosts out of the fight right at the start.
  • Safire using her aspect Relatives Everywhere to know one of the prison guard ghosts that Pearse called in as reinforcements, and talking him into keeping the guards out of the fight.
  • Mark using the Ghost Dust he had prepared as a fist-load to punch right through Padraig Pearse’s head.
  • Nate’s mad, desperate wrestling match with one of the living opponents in the midst of slippery fire-extinguisher foam.
  • Firinne taking a video of said desperate wrestling match and uploading it because it was funny.
  • Rogan, broken leg and all ((Which I completely forgot to compel during the fight. Stupid!)), leaping into the fray and tearing the head off her opponent.

In the midst of this row ((Miss Kerrigan fainted, her cheeks at the same time as red as a rose.)), Miller dragged himself off. Aleister ((Who was the recipient of our first player-on-player compel bidding war. Two other players each offered him a compel on a different aspect – one to stay and help Nate, Kate, and Firinne, and one to go after Miller. This was an excellent way to dramatize the kind of internal struggle that we see so often in fiction but so seldom in roleplaying. It was pretty much the high point of the game for me, and I think for Aleister’s player, too.)), Safire, Rogan, and Mark tracked him to the courtyard where the 1916 executions had taken place. He made a feeble attempt to fight them off, but really had no hope. Safire grabbed the ghost stone, and Mark took a look at Miller with the Sight to see if he was being controlled in any way.

He saw that Miller was covered in blood, with blood running off his hands, but under his torn flesh, he shone like burnished gold that was hard as steel. And he felt a huge, intimidating presence behind him. One player-on-player compel later, Mark turned around to see a huge humanoid figure that seemed to be made of fire wrapped in chains. And it spoke Mark’s true name perfectly ((Cue Epic (+7) mental assault as Mark tried to close his third eye. It took him a Fate Point, but he pulled it off.)).

That’s when the sirens sounded, forcing the characters to run off before fully dealing with Miller. After all, he had conceded, so he got to get away.

In the aftermath, Mark told the rest of the group about his vision, saying that he thought he had seen the Martyr Ghost, the living embodiment of Kilmainham Gaol’s crucible-like property of burning away everything but the idea that drives a person. Rogan thought that this might be something useful for her to try, until it was pointed out to her that what Mark had seen of Miller suggested that he had undergone this purification.

And as for the ghost stone, the group destroyed it and delivered the fragments to Elga, who told Firinne that Winter was in her debt.

Because nothing bad can come of that, right?

The last thing we did that evening was I asked all the players to take some time over the next several weeks and to send me an e-mail outlining what her character would like to accomplish in the game. This will allow me to work a few more personalized hooks into the campaign, and start pulling a storyline ((As in an emergent campaign storyline, for those following along at home.)) for the overall campaign together.

And that’s where we left it.

Let’s See What Happens, Part Three: Sandboxes

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So far in this series, I’ve given an overview of how I develop storylines out of a campaign, and I’ve talked about the Secrets Deck. Now, it’s time to discuss Sandboxes.

Sandbox is a term we use in games to indicate that the players can pretty much go anywhere and do anything they like – they set the agenda, they choose the direction, and they go. This is a little bit ingenuous, though; they may get to go anywhere, but it’s anywhere on a list of places that exist in the game world. They can do anything they like, but in-game situations and out-of-game rules constrain those actions to a degree. Sandboxes aren’t completely player-driven, much as we may like to think they are. They’re a menu of options that the players can choose from.

That said, it’s important to have a wide range of options available if you don’t already have an idea for where the campaign is going. This will allow a broad spectrum of experiences for the players to choose from, and let you experiment with different tones, moods, themes, and techniques to find what works for the players ((I’ll talk about this in much more depth when we get to the Watch Their Eyes post.)), and what works for you. There’s an added advantage (to my mind) of having a wide array of things in your Sandbox – it makes the world feel bigger than the characters, and more alive.

So, how do you build a Sandbox game?

The Nature of the Sandbox

Two games that I’ve run that have had great success with Sandbox-style play are The Armitage Files and my Fearful Symmetries DFRPG campaign. The type of Sandbox in each campaign is structured differently, and you need to decide up front which kind of structure you’re going to use. In The Armitage Files, the Sandbox consists of a set of documents liberally sprinkled with references to people, items, events, and places that are not explained, but sound mysterious and intriguing. In Fearful Symmetries ((And any DFRPG game that goes through the setting-building section of the game.)), the Sandbox consists of a list of locations, threats, people, and themes.

Really, the type you choose is going to depend on – and determine – what type of campaign you’re playing. The default assumption in Cthulhu-based games is that the PCs are investigators seeking out mysteries, so it makes sense for the Sandbox to be constructed of rumours, clues, and hints. In DFRPG games, the default assumption is that the game takes place in a given city ((Though this is not necessary, and is addressed in the setting construction chapter.)) that the characters know fairly well, so it makes sense for the Sandbox to be constructed from people, places, and groups in that city.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course. In fact, they can’t really be exclusive. You need some concrete things in a informational Sandbox to give the characters something to grab hold of in order to kick off an adventure. And you need informational things in a geographical Sandbox to let the characters know where the cool stuff is happening. But the balance between the two is important to consider.

Let’s take a look at a video game example to illustrate one end of the spectrum. Oblivion is very much a Sandbox game, with a strong geographic ((Most CRPGS work on a geographic slate. It’s certainly easiest to conceptualize in that medium, and allows the programmers to scale the difficulty of the opposition by geographic area.)) focus. Yeah, you get information to follow the main story along, but you also spend a fair bit of time just wandering around the countryside, stumbling across random dungeons ((Seriously, what’s with all the dungeons littering the countryside? Why does every little cleft in the rock open into a vast underground network of caves filled with monsters? Shouldn’t someone be doing something about that?)), and cleaning them out.

The Armitage Files highlights the opposite end. Aside from the assumption that the game is set in Arkham, Massachusetts, there is very little concrete or geographical structure to the Sandbox. The occasional reference to a specific place – Kingsport, Zurich – is still just an informational cue for the game. Most of the clues could lead the characters anywhere.

Most campaigns deal with going somewhere and doing something. If  your Sandbox is primarily geographic, then characters will be going somewhere to see what’s there. They will look at the map ((Or whatever equivalent you have in the game.)), and say, “We go to Bitter Creek. What do we find there?”

If it’s primarily informational, then characters will be going somewhere to do something specific. They will look at their information and say, “We head to Bitter Creek to find the missing prospectors.”

In either case, it could wind up with the same adventure – searching for missing prospectors – but the hook in is different.

Determining how much of the Sandbox is informational versus geographic will shape the ways the players interface with the game fiction, and say certain things about the campaign. So devote some thought to where you want to set that slider.

Putting in the Toys

When you have decided on the nature of Sandbox, you need to fill it. There are a couple of ways to do this:

  • Solo. This is the traditional way to design a campaign. You sit down with your blank Sandbox, and think up all the stuff that goes in it. Pros: You get to put in exactly what you want, the players don’t know any of the secrets. Cons: You are limited by your own creativity, you have to do all the work.
  • Collaboratively. This is the default in DFRPG. You and the players sit down and populate the Sandbox together. Pros: Less work for you, you get the advantage of everyone else’s creativity, players get invested in the game. Cons: You don’t have complete control of what goes in, the players know secrets, requires the players to agree to participate.

I have to say, I’ve become a huge fan of collaborative setting building, mainly because it gets the players excited about the world and it puts in things that I never would have considered ((Baba Yaga in the sewers of Dublin, for example.)). That said, it does require that the players be good about separating player and character knowledge.

Whichever way you do it, it is vitally important not to do too much detail work ((That way lies madness. No, really. Madness.)). You never know what is going to be important at this point, so you may wind up wasting hours – days, weeks – fleshing out things that never get touched in play ((I’ll talk about this more when I get to the Discard Liberally post.)). Not only will this frustrate you, spending the time will delay the start of the game. And if you’ve taken the collaborative approach, every day you spend tweaking the things the players helped you come up with, their attention and enthusiasm will wane just a little bit more.

So, go high-level. Add a city to the Sandbox? Write two or three sentences about what the city is and what it means to the game. If you’re using a Secrets Deck, make sure you come up with at least one secret for the thing. For example:

Belys is a prosperous city-state ruled by a collection of genasi noble houses. It evokes the Thousand and One Nights Baghdad feel crossed with Renaissance Venice, with wondrous magical devices for sale and convoluted politics and scheming behind the scenes. This is the foreign city that becomes the characters’ home base in the Paragon Tier.

Secret: The mystic power of Belys is based on an arcane machine that imprisons a legion of djinn and efreet, harnessing their energy for the use of the noble houses.

That’s more than enough to go on with. Now I know enough about Belys to seed some hints in the rest of the game, and to improvise if the players suddenly decide that they really need to go there now! 

If you’re putting lots of elements in your Sandbox – and that’s really kinda the point, after all – coming up with just this much for everything is going to be more than enough work. I recommend tossing in a few evocative references with nothing attached to them for developing later – the ruined tower of Asterys, Kraken Bay, the Rookery, whatever sounds cool and fits in the campaign. That way, if you have a good idea after the game starts, you have something to attach it to.

The nature of your Sandbox – it’s place on the geographic-informational continuum I made up in the topic above – will determine what sorts of elements you put in it. If the structure is primarily geographic, the elements are mainly going to be places, with some people and rumours thrown in. If it’s primarily informational, then you’re going to have a lot of clues, rumours, hints, and people with information, with a few places and items thrown in. Mix and match as required for your vision of the campaign.

Showing the Sandbox to the Players

Once the Sandbox has toys in it, you have to show it to the players. How you do that is going to depend on what sort of Sandbox it is, and the forms the toys take. If the game is primarily geographic, you may want to hand them a map with the various locations labeled on it. If it’s informational, you might, for example, hand them a mysterious document with a number of unexplained but intriguing references.

If you’ve done setting creation collaboratively, the players will already know a fair bit about the Sandbox. In these cases, I often just type up and flesh out the notes we came up with at the setting creation session and distribute that to the players ((Less any secrets I’ve thought up in the meantime. I mean, the players need some surprises, right?)) as the setting bible. It’s important at that point to have a discussion with the players about segregating player knowledge from character knowledge, but so far I’ve found with my players that their involvement has made the setting cool enough to them that they will happily ignore anything their characters shouldn’t know so as to have the fun of finding it out in play.

The point is, of course, to let the players see what options they have. You don’t have to give them a look at all the elements in the Sandbox, but they do need to see where a few things are, and get an idea of the scope and nature of the setting so that they can start making decisions. I mean, yeah, you can plop them down in the middle of nowhere with no map and say, “Where do you go from here?” But that initial decision, being pretty much totally random, is meaningless to the players, and to the characters ((Not to mention that it undermines the notion that they have free choice in the campaign, because they can’t see that their choice makes any difference.)). You need to give them some context and structure to complete the buy-in and make the game matter. You need to give them some sort of map, even if it’s just a blank sheet with a dot that says You Are Here, two dots marked Sweetwater Gulch and New Zion, and a line connecting the three points marked Road. Now they’ve got real, meaningful options.

Setting the Agenda in Play

Okay, so you’ve got your Sandbox all set up, and you’ve shown it to the players. What next?

Now, you have to start structuring the actual adventures. In a broad range of choices, it’s easy for the characters to become paralyzed with indecision about what to do next, so you have to point them subtly ((And sometimes not-so-subtly.)) towards the adventure. The best way to do this at the beginning is to constrain their choices.

Yeah, that sounds like a bit of hypocrisy after the whole bit about building in choices and making sure the choices are meaningful, but hear me out. Traditionally, RPG adventures initially place the characters in a reactive role: something happens, so the players have to respond. A stranger in a bar needs help, so he asks the PCs to go into the dungeon. A socialite is murdered, so the PCs have to find the killer. The supervillain is robbing a bank, so the PCs have to stop her.

It can take some training before players will actively set their own agendas and seek out adventures. They need to see that they have the power -  the agency – to set the agenda, and you may need to lead them to that realization gradually. So, start small, dropping pointed opportunities rather than outright adventure hooks: instead of the bartender telling them that some punks have stolen the bar sign and the PCs have to get it back, just have the whole bar be surly and upset, and let the characters figure out why that is and decide for themselves what to do about it. It’s a small step, but it will eventually lead to PCs telling you what they want to do in the next adventure ((While this may feel odd to you as a GM at first, embrace it. It lets you focus your creativity on what happens in the adventure, rather than on what the adventure is. Relax and let them boss you around.)).

Even if your characters are used to setting their own agenda in games, you still want the choices to be a little limited at the beginning, just to help them get into playing their characters and interfacing properly with the campaign and setting. Leave the big choices for later in the game.

Now, once the players start really taking the lead in setting the agenda, you will sometimes find they have a tendency to deliberately try to surprise you, or put one over on you, or fake you out. This is an artifact of the adversarial-GM fiction that I’ve talked about before – the players “know” the GM is out to get them, so they have to trick the GM in order to win, whatever winning means. How do you deal with that?

Easy. Ask them not to. Tell them that, while you’re totally cool with them setting the agenda, you need a little prep time to make sure you have interesting things for them to do. If you talk to them about it reasonably, and play fair with them ((This is, of course, an important point. Don’t screw them when they do what you ask them to.)), they will be more than willing to be honest and upfront with their plans, so you can make plans of your own.

Which brings me to…

Being Prepared

The beauty of the way Sandbox games are structured is that you don’t have to build in a lot of depth before you need it. You don’t have to have thirty fully prepared scenarios ready to go at a moment’s notice, just one. As long as it’s the right one. That’s no more than you need to prepare if you’re running a more traditional campaign, where you as GM set the agenda and dictate the adventures, but it has the added bonus of being something you know the players and characters are interested in because they chose it. They have choice, you get to flesh out that choice to make it cool, then they get to play through it and make the whole thing cooler.

Now, making sure you have the right adventure ready is very much a matter of communication with the players. For the first adventure, I talked about constraining the choices available to the characters, and I gave a couple of reasons. There are other reasons, having to do with preparation: if you limit their choices, you need to prepare less for that first adventure. I recommend building just one adventure, but have a couple of different ways into it. Yeah, this is a bit of a cheat ((I don’t like inflexible rules in anything, including running games. I will use any tool I need to in order to build a play experience the players enjoy, even if it means I have to lie, trick them, and cheat behind the scenes. I will do what I need to do to bring the cool.)), but it gets you playing and pulls the characters into the game. Then, at the end of that adventure, ask them what they want to do next.

Couple of important points about that:

  • Ask them at the END of the adventure. This gives you time to prep the next adventure based on what they want to do.
  • Force them to a decision. Don’t bully, but make them choose something specific so you have a starting point for your prep work.
  • Get them to commit. If you’ve put in a month’s work on an adventure that they’ve said they want, and they show up at the session, and say they’ve changed their minds, I think it’s allowable to strike them in the head with something heavy ((Disclaimer: Maybe I don’t really think this. But when it happens, I want to.)). Make it clear that their choice is binding, and if they come up with a better idea at the start of the session, defer it for a later adventure.
  • Make sure you accept their decision. Point out options, offer opinions, but don’t try and make them choose something they don’t want. Once they’ve chosen, don’t try and weasel the adventure around to something else. Don’t use the adventure to punish them for not going with your idea. Basically, don’t be a dick.

When they’ve told you what their plans are for the next step, prepare the adventure based on that. I don’t pretend to know what kind of prep work you need to do for your game – that varies from system to system, and from campaign to campaign, and from GM to GM – but spend that time trying to make the characters glad they chose the option they did. Pour coolness on the idea, throw in some neat twists and surprises ((But, as said before, don’t weasel it around to a different adventure.)), make the opposition interesting and engaging, and do what you need to do to make the adventure rock.

A crucial part of preparing for a Sandbox game is keeping track of what happens so it can inform the rest of the game. In a linear game, this is pretty straightforward, but it’s a little more complicated for Sandbox games. Take notes, and leaf through them when you’re prepping adventures to see if there’s anything interesting that you can call back up to add some continuity. Make sure you don’t lose the name of the NPC that you made up off the top of your head but has now become important. Keep track of any surviving villains and not-quite-extinct plots and conspiracies, and any extinct NPCs or cities or helpful organizations. This becomes invaluable when it comes time to start pulling the threads together for the emergent storyline that the campaign generates.

No matter how much you prepare, though, you’re going to wind up having to wing it from time to time, so make sure that you’re ready for that, too. Keep an encounter or two salted away for when you need to send in the ninjas ((Whatever the ninjas happen to be in your campaign.)), and try and tie these encounters into other aspects of the game. Using a system that is easy to improvise in – GUMSHOE and FATE, for example – means that you can get a lot of mileage out of a single encounter, while systems that aren’t quite as easy to improvise in – D&D, for example – may mean you need to have a couple encounters ready just in case. If nothing else, sending in the ninjas gives you a little bit of breathing room to cope with the unexpected player choice that prompted your little panic attack.

When you do improvise, it’s even more important to take notes to keep things straight. If you haven’t tied the improvised section into the main plot before, take a good postmortem look at the notes, and figure out how it’s related after the fact. It helps build verisimilitude. Not that it has to be tied to the current main plot; sometimes, it can be fun to throw in an alternate storyline to see if the characters ((And players – this can be very confusing for players, so be cautious.)) can figure out that there’s actually two different things going on at once. Or, it can be a hook into a new adventure, showing up a little early.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

That’s about all I have to say about Sandboxes. The next emergent storylines post will show up within the next couple of weeks, and I’ll talk about Watching Their Eyes.

Feints & Gambits: The Boys of the Old Brigade

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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This last session was interesting. We added a new player to the group ((Welcome, Jen!)), and we spent the first part of the evening creating her character.

I wasn’t sure, going in, what the best way to do this was. I had considered holding a separate session just to create her character, inviting some volunteers to fill in the guest-star roles in her novel phase. But when Jen got me her character concepts, I didn’t get to reviewing them for a few days. By the time I did, the next scheduled game session was coming up in less than a week, and I didn’t want her to have to miss a session just because I was slow getting back to her.

So, I told her to come along to the session, we’d get the character done first, and she could join lay that night. It worked very well, though I made a couple of little adjustments to things.

Four of the other players were able to make it. That gave us a nice group for brainstorming Aspects and the other co-operative bits of character creation. I wanted to link her character in with the broadest group possible, so I was less random with the guest-star phases of the novels than I usually am, making sure that each of the other players had a connection with the new one.

The rest of character creation went pretty quickly, because Jen had already roughed out her powers and skills. We needed to have a discussion about the potential hazards of Cassandra’s Tears ((Generally, I hate powers like this. Predictive powers tend to offload a bunch of character responsibility on to the GM, and that’s not fair. Cassandra’s Tears has the additional problem of no one believing prediction, including the other characters. This makes for a great plot device in a book, but is a pain in the ass for an RPG. The rules for Cassandra’s Tears help bypass that, using declarations, but it’s still a more… challenging power than a lot of the others.)), but Jen had established in the various phases of character creation that Safire, her visionary artist, had learned not to try and tell people about her visions, but instead just try to be on hand in the right place at the right time to prevent the disasters she foresaw ((Think Spider Robinson’s short story Fivesight, from Time Travellers Strictly Cash.))

I ran into another little problem, here. The hook in for this adventure relied on one of the characters who was not able to attend ((One player canceled at the last minute. Sick wife. It happens.)), so I needed to rework how the characters found their way in to the plot. Fortunately, Cassandra’s Tears provided me with an easy way to feed a few clues to Jen’s character – she saw a vision of rebel ghosts marching through the streets of Dublin. This sent her off to find Kate at the Long Room library, and give her a book about Irish soldiers. Kate was already somewhat concerned about the ghosts in Dublin, so this little bit of oddness got her worried. She called Aleister to meet her at the Silver Arm.

Meanwhile, Firinne was buttonholed by Elga, the Winter Warlord. She told Firinne that she was looking for an old fairy stone, wrapped in gold wire, hung on a silver chain. Elga told Firinne that she expected Firinne to tell her if she found it, and that time was running short, though she didn’t explain why. There was the suggestion of reward, and the the implication of a threat, but nothing overtly stated. That sent Firinne off to the Silver Arm to get some help.

Kate had heard legends of the fairy stone ((With an Epic Lore roll, she had heard pretty much everything about the stone.)). According to what she remembered, it was a stone that allowed one to see and interact with ghosts, and vice versa. There was even some rumour about it giving the power to control ghosts, but given the state of ghosts in Dublin after the necromancer’s death curse, she didn’t know if that would have any effect.

Further investigation uncovered rumours that Sean Miller had made some inquiries about such a stone. Miller had split from the IRA after the Good Friday Agreement, and was currently trying to gather the muscle to fulfill his own personal vision of Irish rebellion. They managed to track him to Kilmainham Gaol, which has a reputation for being haunted, but were chased off by ghost snipers on the roof.

Retreating and regrouping, the gang decided to see if they could enlist the help of a different ghost that they had encountered previously: Padraig Pearse. Safire managed to use her ghostly contacts to trace Pearse – right to the gates of Kilmainham Gaol.

And that’s where we left things.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

The last Storm Point session was pretty much a wash. We hadn’t played in almost two months, summer scheduling being what it is, and spent most of the evening socializing rather than playing. We even had to stop the combat partway through when we wrapped for the evening.

The group made it through the secret door and into another oddly-shaped room. They entered carefully, mindful of traps, and everything went dark for a second. When the lights came back up, there was a duplicate of each of the characters standing near them. And, of course, the duplicates attacked.

The fight is tough. The monsters that are being used as the duplicates ((I’m not going to say what they are, yet, because the fight is ongoing, and at least three of my players read my blog.)) are well-chosen, and quite effective, even when I forget one of the powers. The mechanics for seeing if players attack their intended target or an ally have caused a couple of bad moments for the group ((And if they didn’t know that this adventure was The Tomb of Horrors, they would have been calling me out for such a dick move. Because they know what the adventure is, they take the boning almost in good humour.)), but I’ve been a little less stringent with that than I might, because it is a nasty thing to do to the players.

But at the end of the evening, we’d only got through three rounds of combat, and none of the enemy had been dropped, yet. I took a picture of the battlemap, and we called it a night.

I’m hoping for one more session before my Ireland trip, which should finish this encounter. After that, I expect one or two more sessions to wrap up the adventure. Then it’s on to the city-state of Belys.

From the Armitage Files: Emigrant, Montana

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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Note: I’m really falling behind on my posts. Expect the next few to be somewhat shorter than usual until I catch up, then a big, long one for the Sandboxes post.

**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

After dealing with Carsdale and the SOSI last session, the investigators decided to follow up the connection to the Montana bank robbers in the document. Solis had already done some investigation via telegram, locating three fortune tellers that may be connected with the Fuschack-Donlands gang – one in Billings, one in Bozeman, and one in Emigrant. Seeing as Emigrant was mentioned directly in the last document, they decided to go there, first.

We played a bit with the journey to Emigrant – talking about the money it took to rent a plane to fly into Montana, then the long truck ride to Emigrant, through the sterile, denuded landscape of the state in 1936. I talked about the the barren fields, the heaps of cow carcasses every so often, and the run-down, abandoned-looking farms ((It’s nice when the actual state of the world can be used to enhance the feeling of horror in a game. Well, maybe not nice, but interesting and useful.)), giving the characters the feel that they had very much left behind their familiar stomping grounds.

The town of Emigrant was, I decided very much a remnant of the previous century, looking more like an old west town than what the characters were used to back east. There was a bar and a boarding house and a couple of churches, some houses, and a few businesses, along with a rail spur.

The investigators got rooms at the boarding house, ran into a close-lipped bartender ((He knows which side of the bread the butter’s on. If he talks to outsiders about locals, the locals will stop coming in.)), and went for a walk around town after dark ((Which allowed them to meet the sheriff, who escorted them back to their lodgings. Strangers wandering the street after dark are not wanted in this little town.)). Finally, they plied the gossipy landlady at the boarding house, and found out about the fortune teller, who had a small shop across town.

That night, Moon used the book they took from Carsdale to try and block the dreams of water and monsters from Roxy’s mind. He also suffered another time-slip, with the night seeming to last forever. Eventually, he went to Solis’s room to see if he could wake him. He did, and when Solis opened the door, he saw not Moon, but the yeti-thing that Moon had described to him previously ((When Moon was in Rot Tal, Jahraus showed him that that’s the way people look from outside the normal three dimensions.)) Cue the gunshots, wounding, and Stability checks.

I believe that’s also when the fifth set of documents turned up.

So, next morning, the trio went out to talk to the fortune teller. She denied any connection with Fuschack, but suggested that the nearby ghost town of Aldridge might be a good place for such a gang to hide out. She also told Moon’s fortune, which left him strangely comforted, it seems, despite her rather unsettling pronouncements.

That’s where we left things for the evening. I believe the plan is to go check out Aldridge next, but I may be misremembering. Oh, well. I’ll find out soon enough.

 

 

New Centurions, Issue #12: King and Castle

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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We picked up our game where we left off last time, searching the underground installation in Provence for some clue as to the whereabouts of Dr. Methuselah, and the source of the ancient robots. We quickly found another room with robots in it: some more pawns, another knight, and a huge rook.

The robots activated and attacked when we tried to open the door on the far side of the room, and proceeded to try and take us apart. Widowmaker used her forcefield to keep the rook off us as we took apart the other robots, but then the door opened and the King came floating out.

Now, I’d been doing a little bit of gloating, I must confess, about how S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was immune to the mind control ((Being a robot, and all.)) of the illithids during the invasion storyline, so I really should have seen what was coming. This King robot, which commanded the other robots, attacked me in my weak spot – my Mind – and took poor S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. over. I threw off the robot mind control for a panel, using my hero die, but completely flubbed my intended attack on the King, and resigned myself to going back under his command next panel.

Fortunately, the others noticed that the King had a glowing crystal attached to the back of his head, and… forcefully removed it. All of a sudden, he stopped fighting us, told the remaining robots ((Including the rook. The rook was nasty.)) to stand down, and released me from his control. Then he took off his mask, revealing a cadaverous human face behind it.

Turns out that this was the creator of the robots, himself essentially a cyborg with dead flesh. He had built his army of chessmen to aid the war effort against Germany, but something had gone wrong during his construction of the bishops, and he didn’t remember anything after that. What he did remember was how his wife had died, and he had tried to convert her to a cyborg like himself, but wound up with a Queen that had no more will and mind than his other creations.

With his help, we figured out that Dr. Methuselah had been retrieved from this installation by a group of agents that included at least one super-powered individual who could teleport and wasn’t Nightshade. They seemed to be able to control the King through that glowing crystal and, through him, the rest of the robots. As they left, the teleporter said something about the Mountain being grateful for his help ((This, of course, got my conspiracy theory lobes spinning into speculation about the Assassins, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and Templars, and so on. Don’t know if any of that will turn out to be applicable, but that’s where my brain went.)), and took off with the still-immobile Dr. Methuselah.

Checking the dates of things, we found that the shut down of the King’s facility occurred at about the same time as the Centurions had vanished, and super-heroes had generally disappeared all those decades ago. And that the reactivation of him and his army coincided with our discovery of the Century Club HQ in Manhattan. This was our first confirmation that whatever had happened in 1936 ((Is that year right, Clint?)) was world-wide, and not isolated to the United States ((This was corroborated by the fact that the King had sold a few hundred hover-sleds to Russia, and they didn’t see service during WWII, any more than the King’s robots or any of the German advanced inventions that the robots were built to counter.)).

We decided then to go check out the Century Clubhouse in Paris ((Which Clint hadn’t prepared for. But the man’s good; he was able to give us something to investigate, interesting things to find, and some challenges to overcome, all right off the cuff. If I hadn’t known what the subtle signs of GM surprise look like – from having experienced them so often from the inside – I wouldn’t have known he hadn’t set this up in advance. So kudos to Clint!)), to see if there were any clues there as to what had happened. When we located it and found the secret entrance, we discovered that, like we had done in Manhattan, some new heroes had discovered the headquarters and moved in.

Unlike in Manhattan, these heroes all seemed to have been slaughtered in an attack on the clubhouse. The place was torn up, and bodies were strewn about, dressed in super-hero costumes. Any records had been either removed or destroyed. We found a hidden lab that seemed to be untouched, with an isolated computer, showing that someone had been investigating genetic origins of super powers, which we decided would be best removed and examined at our leisure.

That’s about where we left the game. We’ve got the ID from one of the bodies, and we’re looking at following up on that next game, then we’re looking at investigating some of the other Century Clubs in various cities, to see if we can uncover more of the mystery of what happened to all the heroes just before WWII.

GenCon 2011 – Home

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I’m home. Laundry is laundering, I’ve had a shower in my own shower, and I’m about to head to sleep in my own bed.

The trip back was uneventful, and we made pretty good time. Border crossing was painless, and the torrential downpour that hit us on the way into Winnipeg stopped long enough for us to get into our respective homes with our precious purchases intact.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello at the Con, and to all the folks who had nice things to say about the blog. And thanks again to Scott Glancy and Jarred Wallace for treating me so well at their booth. Same time next year, gents.

Now, I’m going to bed. Work tomorrow. And the (ir)regular posting schedule will resume in the next couple of days, starting with a New Centurions post, and followed closely by the next emergent storylines post.

Good night, all.