Cartomancy & Camera Directions

Last week: Endings & Epilogues

The first time I tried running an epilogue session along these lines, it was fun, but ramshackle; the second time, I tightened the focus up and was pretty satisfied with the results, although there’s still room for improvement.

Here's how it worked. Shortly after the last conventional session, we gathered to resolve loose threads and collectively explore the characters' epilogues. I used a D&D-themed tarot deck that I had received as a gift for adjudication. Card-based resolution wasn’t inherently important – rolling dice would have achieved the same effect. But I liked that the cards signaled to the players that we were doing something categorically different from an ordinary RPG session. No ability checks nor saving throws were rolled, and no spell slots or X/day powers were referenced during our epilogue session.

Each player took turns describing what happened to their character in one of three time periods; one hour before the events of the final session; one minute after those events; and one year later. We jumped around between these time periods, with the only rule being that no scene could contradict an already-established scene. I would sometimes ask questions, or other players would add some details to the scene. After we had finished describing the scenario, we would flip over a tarot card and interpret the results.

I had narrowed the tarot deck down to the cards numbered 2-7 across the four suits. High results were positive for the PCs, while low results were negative (a 7 was very positive, a 4 mediocre, a 2 very negative). After negative results, I would also shuffle in major tarot cards representing antagonists or unresolved problems; these could then unexpectedly appear in future scenes.

Negative results didn't necessarily mean “something terrible happens.” One negative result, concerning the fate of a group of NPCs, was bittersweet, rather than dark or tragic. Another negative draw for a major antagonist simply meant that creature would remain a threat to the world in the future; something that dovetailed nicely with what one of the players had already established for their character through earlier draws.

It was important for the players to understand that an epilogue minigame changes the normal action resolution loop between players and the DM. I was inviting them to take more narrative control; not just control of their own characters, but of other people, places, and events the epilogue touched on. The players got into the spirit of it pretty quickly, and introduced a whole range of situations and implications that I never would have thought to have planned for if I had run the epilogue session as a conventionally DM-designed scenario. 

If I were to run it again, I would probably make the deck a bit smaller – with 28 cards to start with, the major arcana didn’t come up as often as I would have liked. Beyond that, I could imagine running this hack again with few (if any) other tweaks.

Endings & Epilogues

What’s the easiest way to tell the difference between instructions for a board game and rules for an RPG?

Typical board game instructions will include guidance for setting up and beginning play; resolving actions throughout the game; and for determining how the game ends and who wins.

RPGs, by comparison, will usually only include the first two items on that list.

This Ends Here

OK, “usually” is doing some work there. I know that many RPGs include rules for ending the game. Anything meant for a single session probably does. A lot of storytelling games obviously do, with their emphasis on narrative structure.

Many OSR games eschew planning for endings, I assume deliberately, either because they (a. want to distinguish themselves from overly plotted non-OSR games and (b. are agnostic about whether or not players will transition into some kind of domain play, or delve dungeons from the first session to the final TPK.

But a lot of games don’t take a clear position on endings. D&D 5E, the 800 pound gorilla of TTRPGs, devotes all of three paragraphs to “Ending a Campaign” in the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide. One of those three paragraphs is actually about how to start a new game in the same world. The other two paragraphs essentially say that the game doesn’t have to go all the way to level 20, and that players should have time to wrap up personal goals, in addition to resolving the party’s collective end goal.

Decent advice as that goes, but there’s no procedure for ending the story in a satisfying way. Or for hitting different individual characters’ beats in an organic way. Or for intertwining those individual resolutions with each other, and with the party’s overall goals.

Pragmatically, I understand why the writers spent their page count this way; a lot of games just peter out rather than properly ending, so why worry about a scenario many players will never reach? And DMs that reach a true campaign ending are (via survivorship bias) much more experienced than the newbies running their first sessions, who need all the help they can get.

But on the other hand, many great games can have humble beginnings. No one is sweating a mediocre kickoff after they’re 30 or 40 sessions in; they can barely remember what happened in that first session. The ending of a campaign, by contrast, will always be remembered. Or at least, it should aspire to be. Games should help GMs figure this stuff out.

The Game Within the Game

Some groups use collaborative storytelling games like The Quiet Year to launch an RPG campaign within a separate system. The same kind of idea can apply to concluding the adventure once it is over.

World Ending Game is “a tabletop game made to serve as the last session of a campaign in any system.” The book is a collection of mini-games and scenarios, but in particular prompts and active questions that can turn an impossibly big, amorphous challenge for a GM (“how do I bring this to a satisfactory end?”) into something rationally digestible. 

It explicitly uses cinematic language, calling for “camera directions” to execute its scenes. I consequently imagine it will be easier for the average PBTA game to make use of the book than the typical OSR game; but even the latter audience should be open to applying its tools, or articulating a contrasting vision for what “the end” means in an RPG. Even grognards who normally sneer at the idea of calling for a “hard cut” during a game should loosen up when ending a game – concerns about narrative railroading or the odor of scene-based gameplay are a lot less salient once the group has reached the end of their campaign.

For a game I ended recently, I took inspiration from World Ending Game, but because I can never resist tinkering, I created my own thing rather than using one of WEG’s scenarios straight out of the book. Fortunately, it worked out pretty well!

Next week: Cartomancy & Camera Directions

Inverse Feats for the Lowest of the Low

In its earliest editions, D&D didn’t care much about character ability scores. They primarily served as a gate for which classes a freshly rolled character could choose from. After character creation, they rarely came up in play.

As the game gradually shifted, edition to edition, toward using abilities for universal action resolution, stats became much more important. As campaigns got longer and character death became rarer, many players sought more certainty in the character creation process. Most D&D 5E games use point buy or the standard array, strategies that fix the “problem” of unbalanced stats, but eliminate the randomness of rolling – even though rolling is really fun.

What else could we do if we wanted to incentivize rolling and embracing randomness? What would make the low scores appealing, without changing their negative in-game effects? I thought it would be interesting to take those old prerequisites and turn them on their head. Traditional D&D might say “you need an intelligence of 12 or higher to be a wizard.” What is the inverse of that kind of rule?

Lunk. Strength 12 or higher, Intelligence 9 or lower. You have advantage on saves against fear and similar effects. You are simply too stubbornly dull to be manipulated like that.

Fool. Intelligence and Wisdom are both 9 or lower. You have advantage on saving throws against enchantment and illusion magic.

Weakling. Strength 7 or lower. Strong monsters will not attack you if you haven’t damaged them and a stronger ally of yours is within sight. If you give up, an intelligent monster must pass a morale check (or Wisdom saving throw) if they intend to refuse your surrender.

Normie. All abilities are 10 or 11. You are strikingly, shockingly average, an exemplar of the ordinary. As such, you are the most attuned to what’s strange in the world. You have advantage on initiative rolls when encountering something you and your companions have never seen before.

Coward. Charisma 8 or lower. If henchman, hirelings, or other allied NPCs flee combat, you can also run away, even if it's not your turn.

Wretch. All abilities are 9 or lower. You are the lowest of the low. Dungeon vermin will welcome you as an equal (the unspoken brotherhood of the miserable). You have advantage on rolls to forage for food (just don’t look too closely at what you’re eating). You can convincingly play dead during a TPK or similarly fatal circumstance (but only once per dungeon level – word gets around).

These are first draft concepts only. They would need some work to see action in a real game. But it would be interesting to layer them onto a system that has the space to accommodate them, or build them directly into a 3d6 stat system that needed something to add character to low-stat PCs.

Life on the Grid

I don’t like to bring a lot of gridded maps into my in-person* RPG sessions. I prefer theater of the mind for combat and other tense, moment-by-moment scenarios. I typically only want maps for the most spatially complex situations, where they’re absolutely necessary to ensure player comprehension.

But I like to interrogate my preferences, and it takes me to some interesting places…

So Transparent

Getting off the grid was a gradual process for me. I went from the big Chessex map (nice, but hard to take on the go), to the interlocking dry erase tiles (more mobile, but still restrictive), to these transparent gridded overlays. 

The obvious use for the transparent overlay is to conveniently turn a gridless map or landscape into a battlemap. The less-obvious use is to lay them over any image and use the resulting grid to facilitate play, whether we interpret the spatial relationships it creates literally or figuratively.

For our Strangers on a Train game, I can print any sort of image of outdoor terrain, lay the grid on top of it, and immediately create a pointcrawl with measurable distances. This technique isn’t limited to top-down views; for images conveyed from more conventional perspectives, the grid can also suggest height. Encounter checks trigger (and time advances) whenever the group moves across one of the gridded lines.

Spatial Relations for Every Situation 

But the image doesn’t even have to represent a place. Any handout can benefit from an overlaid grid. 

Progress clock. It’s one thing to say the bomb explodes after five setbacks. It’s another thing to watch a token move across a grid laid over an image of a bomb on the center of the table.

The kaiju. Print an image of a giant creature. Lay the grid on top of it. Player tokens or miniatures reinforce the relative size of the creature, and the grid forms a map for climbing around its body and attacking its weak points.

The puzzle. Lay the grid out on top of a puzzling image, and invite PCs to indicate which bits of it they will investigate, in turn.

The factions. Print an image displaying rival factions. Use the grid to map the ebb and flow of their power and influence; or alternately, plot the PCs’ relative prestige with either side.

The battle. Take a painting with a lot going on, like Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire; Destruction and lay the grid over it. The grid subdivides the space into grokkable chunks, and gives players a way to choose what to interact with in a scenario that’s bigger than they are.

Advanced techniques. Is a square grid too boring for you? Grab any image you like and run it through a Voroni Generator. Great for a pointcrawl through a twisted, physically abstracted space like the plane of Limbo, or corrupted cyberspace.

*I use the grid more liberally for online play. Without people in the same room, face-to-face with each other, there’s a greater need for imagery to visually center the players and keep them on the same page. 

High Level PCs Are an Affront to God

Why are there angels in the D&D monster manual? 

In modern D&D – 5E and its third-party cousins – Great Wheel Cosmology necessitates a mirror to fiends, so angels appear for taxonomic thoroughness. Mechanically, I presume the game's designers view the angels in the 5E.14 Monster Manual as summoning spell targets and NPC allies for the (presumably good) PCs.

Fashioning a combat encounter between these holy dudes and those putatively good PCs requires some contortions. D&D 5E makes its angels fluent in all languages, and telepathic as well, edging out the possibility of even a misunderstanding when these creatures descend from the heavens. A footnote in the manual indicates that fallen angels exist, but they don’t get any interesting mechanical implementation (for that, try the Chained Angel from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts).

D&D in its earliest forms didn’t have them, and many throwback systems still eschew them. The Old School Essentials bestiary, for example, lacks an entry for angels. 

When angels do appear in like-minded products, like Skerples’ beautiful new book The Monster Overhaul, they are decidedly old testament, plausibly dangerous, or decidedly unknowable. In keeping with the book’s focus on table-readiness and applicability to adventures, Skerples’ angels are loaded with danger, friction, and implicit conflict.

This Far You May Come and No Farther 

So imagine an angel confronting the PCs. Clearly it can happen because of something they have done in the game. Some action that made sense to them or solved a material plane-concern, but angered those on high. I’ve done that one myself.

But what else? What if the angels confront high-level PCs because they are high level?

It may not feel like an obvious conflict, but it’s firmly rooted in myth. From Prometheus to Babel, gods have punished mortals for attempting to rival them in power and glory. And PCs get harder and harder to distinguish from gods as they reach high levels.

Applying this mechanically can be quite simple. In a leveling system that goes from level 1 to 20, adventurers might begin to attract the attention of gods around 10th level (5E clerics gain the divine intervention ability around this time; a convenient demarcation point).

The gods might be merely watchful when PCs hit 10th level. I assume tier 3 adventurers are quite rare, unless a setting specifically says otherwise; and many adventurers who do reach that level retire or die before getting much further. But for every additional level the PCs attain, the gods become more wary, suspicious, jealous, and eventually angry.

By the time characters reach level 20, some sort of confrontation – violent or otherwise – is inevitable.

O Come At Me Bro, All Ye Faithful

All well and good for the wizards, thieves, and fighters out there. But what about clerics, paladins, and warlocks? Their adventuring life has been defined by the divine.

Warlock is easiest. Unlike most of 5E’s classes, Warlock has tension built in it at the ground level. A 20th level warlock is strong enough to directly confront the compromising nature of the pact with their patron. Even if they simply want their freedom, the patron may see them as too powerful and dangerous to just let loose. And the PC may even decide to take the patron’s place and begin issuing their own pacts.

For paladins and clerics, there’s always the option to say that at the end of the day, their arrangements with their gods were just warlock pacts with better optics. Maybe the conflict plays out in a similar fashion to warlocks. But it can go other ways.

A good-aligned god might stand aside for a worthy paladin or cleric to replace them – that actually happened in the 5E game I ran past level 20. But even if the god in question is fine with ceding the stage to their protégé, there’s no guarantee other gods will be OK with it. Most mythological gods in the real world do not tend to their portfolios in cool isolation, but instead are highly social creatures, fostering alliance and rivalries within a contentious pantheon. And there could be many reasons for those rivals to see the PC’s ascension as an affront to the gods.

Loose Canons

Canon. What was and was not canon in fiction was once the domain of a humble few, limited to the letters sections of comic books, the back pages of fanzines, and late-night arguments in the earliest fan conventions. The internet changed that, turning ordinary fans of movies, comics, television, and games into lore experts willing to argue as passionately (or vehemently) as the most hard-nosed academic. Nerd culture then fused with pop culture, and a thousand fandom wikis later, we live in a world obsessed with canon.

But before canon, there was... loose canon? Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft created stories in which shared gods lurked in the background, manifesting in different ways. An unfulfilled backdoor pilot in the original Star Trek show became a weird element of lore 60 years later. Elminster visited modern day earth! The loose mythologies of the worlds of Stephen King and Michael Moorcock are also fine examples.

A player in one game I ran created a character that was, in part, a callback to the nickname of an adventuring party from a previous game. The two games were completely unrelated; they were run in different systems. It would not be possible to “travel” from one world to the other. They are certainly not part of some kind of “multiverse” (a term I find progressively less and less interesting as more and more intellectual properties adopt it).

But I liked this idea that there was some tenuous, unspecified, non-actionable connection between these different fictional realities. Those characters will never see each other’s worlds or interact directly. But there are common themes, ideas, and aesthetics that the PCs (in their capacity as both participants and audience) can enjoy, and that’s what loose canon is all about.

Snagging Adventurers With Better Hooks

Bad hooks are a common complaint in Ten Foot Pole's reviews of published adventures. Adventure writers obviously struggle with transitioning users into the adventure, with efforts ranging from the flimsy (“um, the mayor will pay 50 gold for you to, uh, look into his orc problem?”) to the nakedly non-diegetic (“get in loser, we’re going adventuring”).

But I get it. Hooks are hard to write well in a published product, because PCs might enter a given scenario from any number of directions; and unless the product is written for a very specific setting, the writer may not even know the fundamental, baseline assumptions of the game world. 

But even when they are hard, hooks are still important, because the transition into a new scenario or location is an area where the DM could most use help from the writer. By comparison, it’s much easier for the DM to adjudicate uncertainty when the PCs are in the middle of a scenario already in motion. Getting started is the hardest part.

Hooks are usually presented as a best-guess at what the party is doing and what the PCs want, with the assumption that the DM will choose the closest one and tailor as needed. Can we make them any better? Get them any closer to what the DM needs? Perhaps by categorizing common ways adventuring PCs might enter an adventure scenario? 

What would these categories look like? 

• If the PCs are returning to civilization after visiting the dungeon…
• If the PCs are in transit as part of a longer journey…
• If the PCs are lost in the wilderness…
• If the PCs are looking for something that might be found in a town or city…
• If the PCs are searching for something that might be found in a dungeon…
• If the PCs are in search of a particular person or a type of NPC… 
• If the PCs are fleeing or retreating from someone or something…
• If the PCs are recruiting henchmen, hirelings, or replacement adventurers…

Some of these could be combined or better defined… but it might be worth a try to think of the hooks in terms of where the PCs are coming from, rather than where we hope those hooks will take them in the ensuing scenario. 

Adverb-Forward Skill Resolution in RPGs

Ability plus skill (henceforth, “A+S”) has been one of the most common TTRPG resolution methods for over 20 years. Roll the dice, add the ability modifier, add the skill modifier (if any). It allows some complexity and interplay between natural aptitude and trained proficiency, without ever getting too complicated. Nice little system.

But in some RPG systems, A+S gets a little too predictable. In my experience, in D&D 5E, most A+S pairing are almost hard-paired with each other. The Athletics skill is coupled with the Strength ability 99% of the time. Perhaps the DM occasionally calls for an unusual roll that breaks up the pairing, like Wisdom (Athletics), but in practice, the system has a lot less flexibility and depth than its structure implies. Digital tools and platforms for online play exacerbate this problem – the standard A+S rolls are usually tied to convenient buttons on character sheets, while non-standard rolls must be executed manually. 

Someone on the Alexandrian Discord recently pointed out a different X+Y system that caught my attention. Modiphius Entertainment’s Dishonored RPG combines six skills with six "styles." The skills are character actions you might see in a lot of RPGs: Fight, Move, Study, Survive, Talk, and Tinker. But the styles are something different, and what really caught my eye: Boldly, Carefully, Cleverly, Forcefully, Quietly, Swiftly.

I haven’t played the Dishonored video games, and prior to reading this, had no particular interest in the RPG either. But this skills and styles approach caught my interest, because those styles are, of course, adverbs.

Evaluating the A+S problem from a grammatical light provides an interesting perspective. If someone is described as a “strong, athletic fighter,” those two adjectives are perhaps reinforcing each other, but also in danger of blurring together. A parsimonious editor might say, “can’t we just write ‘athletic fighter’ and convey basically the same idea?” That helps explain why A+S sometimes feels one-dimensional instead of two-dimensional.

By contrast, an adverb can stake a stronger claim to its role in the sentence than an additional adjective can. Forcefully tinkering is quite different from quietly tinkering. Swiftly moving says something different than boldly moving. And so on. As I said, I haven’t tried this system; I would love to hear from those who have). I suspect it would feel more dynamic than some of the A+S systems I'm more familiar with.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to check out the Dishonored system. Or try hacking that resolution mechanic into a one-shot in another game. Frankly, you could say I am extremely interested, and that I eagerly look forward to a very exciting gaming experience.

The Prestige of Character Classes

I played in a few D&D 3.5 games back before I had developed any kind of distinct preferences about complexity and game feel within the TTRPG space. D&D 3.5 was simply the game other people I knew played; I was years away from learning about the then-nascent PBTA, OSR, and sundry indie movements.

Knowing games like I know them now – knowing my own preferences – I have little interest in playing, running, or designing for 3.5 or its descendants. But aspects of its design do stick with me, interest me, and provoke thoughts about our games.

Remember prestige classes? These were classes in 3.5 (and its offshoots, like Pathfinder) that PCs could access through multiclassing. They were different from ordinary classes in a number of ways, principally that they required various prerequisites (skill ranks, feats, and so forth) before the players could take them. Because of the prerequisites, prestige classes weren’t available from level one; but through careful planning, players could steer their characters toward a prestige class that would deliver a particularly specific character concept. 

Prestige classes were emblematic of 3.5’s emphasis on mechanically complex characters. Much of the online discussion of 3.5 was consumed with character builds and optimization guides, where prestige classes figured prominently. More power to players who enjoyed (and still enjoy) this style of play, but the mechanical implementation of these prestige classes was not for me. It required too much planning ahead, and it felt too removed from the in-game events that might organically shape a character.

But the fiction of many of those prestige classes was still evocative. Many characters in fiction are defined more by drastic changes in their abilities – transforming or changing into something different – rather than just becoming incrementally better at each level, as where a 13th level fighter becomes marginally more effective at, well, fighting when they hit level 14. Is there some way to capture that energy, without the heavy-duty mechanical implementation?

Back to the Backgrounds

Backgrounds are one of 5E’s best (and least-appreciated) features. They’re flexible but flavorful, and can make a character three-dimensional in a way that ancestry-plus-class can’t do by itself.

But they’re often forgotten in 5E games. A few proficiencies, languages, and a narrow-use-case special ability fade into the background (sorry) as characters gain flashier class powers. How could we put more focus on those backgrounds?

Let’s start our characters at level zero. A level zero character simply uses the commoner stat block from the Monster Manual, plus a single background of their choice. These people are ordinary; we’re talking about an adventuring party that starts out with 10s across the board for ability scores. (This doesn’t mean their ability scores suddenly and mysteriously jump up when they hit first level; they simply have not yet been able to leverage or express their natural abilities just yet.)

After an introductory adventure or two – a funnel, if possible, so the players aren’t too precious with these fragile characters – they can qualify for classes. D&D 5E assumes no particular link between backgrounds and classes, which certainly has its merits; less-obvious background/class combinations like “criminal paladin” or “entertainer monk” certainly can make for interesting character concepts. But for this exercise – drawing from prestige class ideas – we’ll constrain ourselves to binary choices.

Acolyte. You grew up in or around a religious institution; one day, you had to make a choice. When you reach first level, choose devotee (cleric) or heretic (warlock).

Charlatan. You could never fit in with the rules and structure of a “normal” life. When you reach first level, choose trickster (rogue) or wanderer (bard).

Criminal. You have always lived outside the law. When you reach first level, choose deceiver (rogue) or thug (fighter).

Entertainer. You’re most at home in the spotlight. When you reach first level, choose musician (bard) or magician (sorcerer).

Folk Hero. You stood up for the little guy. When you reach first level, choose pugilist (monk) or paragon (paladin).

Guild Artisan. You were a craftsperson before your training took you in an unusual direction. When you reach first level, choose journeyman (wizard) or fortune-seeker (rogue).

Hermit. You were always on your own, until you joined an adventuring party. When you reach first level, choose loner (ranger) or ascetic (druid).

Noble. You were part of the aristocracy. When you reach first level, choose knight (fighter) or priest (cleric).

Outlander. You were most at home in wild places that would test even the bravest. When you reach first level, choose warden (ranger) or nomad (barbarian).

Sage. Your search for knowledge was what led you to a life of adventure. When you reach first level, choose savant (wizard) or bedlamite (warlock).

Sailor. Even sailing the seas wasn’t excitement enough for you. When you reach first level, choose pirate (rogue) or explorer (ranger). 

Soldier. You fought in wars before you delved into dungeons. When you reach first level, choose veteran (fighter) or scout (ranger).

Urchin. You grew up in the streets with no one to look out for you but yourself. When you reach first level, choose mendicant (rogue) or scrapper (fighter).

And there we have it! Yes, this is quite unbalanced; some classes appear many times, while others appear only once. But that could be a feature, not a bug. In this example, fighters, rogues, and rangers would make up half of the class options, implying a considerably less-magical world. 

With a few changes to the choices above, it would be easy enough to create an entirely different menu of options. What prestigious choices would characters make in your game?

Defacing the Party Face

Skill-based games struggle with resolving action organically when PCs are hyper-aware of which character is best at what. A player will outline an entire elaborate plan for solving a problem; the DM will call for a roll; and the player will immediately switch gears and start proposing reasons why another PC (who was silent throughout the aforementioned process) should execute the action (because their character has a 5-10% better chance of succeeding).

Some games solve this through various mechanical details or table rules. But can we help the ones that don’t?

Everyone Has Something to Say

While watching the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, I was struck by how frequently the members of the titular adventuring party undermined their own plans because one or more of them couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Sure, social interaction is easy when the bard does the talking, and everyone else stands mutely behind them. It’s a little more challenging if the barbarian feels the need to interject with unhelpful or overly revealing commentary.

What if there was a game rule that the scene doesn’t end until every character speaks? Or, for larger adventuring parties, at least two characters (besides the charismatic “face”) speak?

The goal is to get some friction into the dialogue. Some PCs will be tempted to just say “yeah, what he said.” PBTA systems and other games that provide a mechanical payoff for the player failing, acting suboptimally to advance the narrative, or otherwise indulging a flaw can do this most easily. But it can work in any kind of game where the players buy into the idea and trust the DM to encourage them to cause interesting problems without responding punitively. 

Actions Speak Louder Than Words 

Let’s take another page from fiction. Movies, TV shows, and books are good at moving the spotlight from one character to another to make sure the story gives each of them something to do. Many of the same tricks work in a TTRPG.

How to move the spotlight after the face makes their case? It’s easy:

• The chieftain respects strength and strength alone; an arm-wrestling contest with the warrior would bring him around.
• The security system is unmoved by guile; it wants the cyborg to explain why you need to get in, using reason and logic.
• The fence agrees to find the missing artifact, but only if another member of the brotherhood of scoundrels (like, say, the party criminal) personally vouches for the deal.
• The elemental only speaks primordial, the language the dwarf PC got at level one and promptly forgot about. The elemental can’t make sense of the nattering, flighty language of man; say it  again, in words of stone and fire.

No More Talk

Implicit in some of the examples above is that a good rule for handling social situations is to know when and how to end the dialogue.

In listening to some actual play podcasts recently, I’ve been driven up the wall by GMs who will let players cajole, wheedle, beg, hector, and berate NPCs long after the interesting part of the conversation has ended. This is doubly bad in a podcast, where the session has to be entertainment for an audience, in addition to the players. But it should still be avoided in games where the players themselves are the only audience.

A terribly underrated tool is to simply say “they don’t buy your arguments and are no longer listening to you. It looks like you’ll have to explore some other way to get what you want, or come back to them after the situation has changed in some way and there’s a new argument to make.” Phrase it as narration  rather than in-voice dialogue, so it’s clear that you’re moving on to something else. This can be a little frustrating in the short term to players who want to “win” every interaction and scene they participate in, but it pays dividends in the medium to long term, with tighter, more interesting sessions.

Revenge of the Rejects

Players love to roll up new characters. The randomness and uncertainty is thrilling, and the process encourages players to discover their characters through creation rather than fulfilling a pre-decided ideal. But since the early days of the RPG hobby, people have debated the best way to do this. 

Today, I settle this debate. I have detailed below the best system for D&D-style 3-to-18 base statistics (OK, I have not tested this yet, so it may not in fact be the best system).

Players roll their character’s abilities straight down the line. No point buy, no standard array, no 4d6 drop-the-lowest. Maybe allow a single swap of any two stats (ala Knave 1.0), but that’s it. We want very quick, straightforward characters.

Here’s the trick: Players can reroll any number of times. What, you might reasonably ask, is preventing them from simply rerolling endlessly, until they get a character with exclusively good-to-great stats?

Option 1: They’re Going to Hold This Against You

The answer is simple. The DM keeps each character that the players reject. Each of those rejected characters becomes an NPC in the game. Each rejected character is an antagonist or rival to the group as a whole, or -- better yet -- to the player who passed on them. 

The intensity of their enmity goes up incrementally the more characters a player rejects. The first one they turn down might be a schoolyard rival or nosey neighbor. The tenth one is going to be a major world power or potential campaign antagonist.

Option 2: Group Draft

Each player rolls the first of six stats, writes it down, and then decides to either hold onto the sheet or pass it clockwise. Players opting to pass circulate their sheets amongst the other passing players. A player who passes their sheet and doesn't accept someone else's can start a new sheet. If all players reject a particular sheet, the DM gets that character sheet. This process continues until all players settle on a completed character sheet.

The DM keeps all the sheets that weren't claimed and uses them to collectively build an antagonist, villain, or organization integral to the scenario. This person or organization's strength in the world is proportional to the number of sheets the DM received (for example, the number of sheets could equal HD for a monster, or number of hexes controlled by an enemy army). If the DM chooses to make them an NPC or monster, the DM can pick and choose the best statistics from among the sheets they received. If they choose to make them an organization, faction, or something more abstract, the numbers can still inform how the resulting antagonistic force works.

Feels Within Wheels: NPC Reactions

In June, the Goblin's Henchman blog posted a cool idea for visualizing NPCs.

I’m often struck by how we try to help people by stuffing them full of words, when what they really need is a simple, elegant diagram (as someone who writes first and foremost, this was a tough thing to learn; but an important lesson all the same).

I really like this idea, but I knew that I would need something a little different for my own use. I need a tool that more specifically implies movement or development from one state to another. So my idea is something like this.

Spinning the Wheel of Values

I used an “emotion wheel” as a simple frame for what values might drive NPCs (a quick search will turn up many other examples of varying complexity). I don’t remember where I first saw these, but if you spend enough time thinking about RPGs, everything you encounter in the wild starts to look like a game mechanic or adjudication system. In addition to the Goblin’s Henchman post, this idea probably owes something to this old Sorcerer’s Skull post that I have cited before. 

Remember that NPCs should not (generally) attempt to simulate the complexity of real people. They are game mechanisms meant to create interesting interactions with the PCs. Just a few emotions are enough to create an actionable character; more details just bog down action at the table.

For example, rolling to choose values randomly, I populate an NPC with Love (the innermost level); Affectionate and Longing (at the intermediate level); and Sentimental and Romantic (outermost level). With just those five ideas, I can already visualize this character. Affection and longing suggest they’re separated from what they love. They’re also romantic, so we’ll say this is a non-platonic kind of love. But they’re also sentimental, which suggests to me nostalgia; I interpret this as someone longing for a love they have lost; perhaps they were widowed.

Social interaction with this character happens like this. Love is the surface level. On a cursory interaction, this person is warm and caring. But if the interaction goes beyond the superficial – because the PCs need something from this NPC, for example – the NPC comes across either as affectionate or longing. Viewing the NPC as a game tool reactive to PC action, we might say that empathy, persuasion, and gift-giving pushes the NPC toward their affectionate mode, while coercion, logic, or appeals to authority are more likely to push this NPC into melancholic longing.

If the PCs deepen the interaction and succeed again in going "deeper" (more on “success” below) the interaction can advance to the outermost level. If the PCs had followed the longing path, it develops to sentimental (the widow tells their story, perhaps gaining some closure in the process). If the PCs’ actions had pushed the NPC more toward affection, further development moves into romance (whether directly, because a PC flirted with the widow; or indirectly, by reminding them of the virtue of loving again, perhaps by relating a similar experience in their own life).

Adversity and Variety

If the PCs fail – they badly misread the NPC, or otherwise act in a way that really pushes against the NPC’s core values – the wheel also suggests a response with the entries on the opposite side of the wheel. So a failure might reset the players back to the innermost circle, and push them to the opposite wedge. Imagine an NPC interaction that begins with Surprise, then develops to Stunned. At this point, the PCs mess up. They’re pitched back into the innermost circle, and now the NPC is dominated by Fear! The PCs will have to ameliorate the situation before they can return the NPC to their “natural” track.

The descending relationships implied by the wheel are helpful for restricting choices to a manageable range. But we’re not bound by the wheel’s structure. Let’s create a character that draws from the entire wheel. This character will probably be a bit more dramatic and unpredictable than our affectionate and sentimental widow.

Rolling randomly, I get Surprise (innermost circle); Despair and Proud (intermediate circle); and Contempt and Dismayed (Outermost Circle). Surprise suggests they’re in a state of turmoil and disruption when the PCs encounter them. Despair and pride are their two reactions to this turmoil; the PCs can push them toward one or the other. We can pair the outermost terms with whatever intermediate terms we like; let’s match despair with dismay, and pride with contempt. Encouraging PCs could push their feelings of despair into mere dismay; that’s a relative improvement! This person may be inherently pessimistic, but the PCs can at least cheer them up and get them from hopelessness to… modest hopes. Pride pairs well with contempt; no matter how their fortunes have fallen, this person considers themselves better than others. By stroking their ego, perhaps pitting them against a group they look down on, clever PCs convince them to do what they want.

Success in Any Social System

This approach is system-neutral by design, so “success” and “failure” can vary depending on the system. In a storytelling or FKR game, it can simply be GM judgment (or group consensus in a GM-less game). In a crunchier system, the appropriate ability check or equivalent test does the work of moving from state to state.

Obviously not everything the PCs do will slot neatly into the binary forks this system suggests. That’s fine. The GM can choose the option that is marginally closer, or just whichever seems to make sense in context. Remember, the purpose of the tool is not to provide a “right” or “correct” answer; it is to create a choice that moves the GM quickly toward the next step in the process and avoids analysis paralysis. It’s a shortcut for the GM to get to what they think is right, not a way of telling the GM what the correct answer is.

Dungeon 23: The Art of Stopping

I stuck a fork in my Dungeon 23 project earlier this year. Through the spring, personal commitments, work, and my home games devoured all of the time I had set aside for Dungeon 23, and by the time the smoke cleared, it was obvious it would require a major increase in work just to catch up, much less get back into fighting form. So it goes.

But… I don’t feel bad about it.

Certainly we’re all familiar with lapsed resolutions and “year-long” projects that die miserable deaths by St. Patrick’s Day. Our instinct is to slink away from them in shame because they “failed.” 

I think it’s instead more helpful to think of ways we can extract value from a “failed” project. Many nominally wasted experiences are valuable if we just make the effort to learn things from them.

Doing Double Duty 

In my initial post, I decided to make my Dungeon 23 project from scratch, and not tie it to either a game I was running or something I would publish for others to run.

This was a mistake.

I think the theory in that post was fine, but in practice, it doomed the enterprise, because when time got tight, everything else took precedence over Dungeon 23. The hierarchy was something like this: 

• Family and friends
• Home games (an extension of the above)
• Work 
• Blogging and creating stuff for others
• Dungeon 23

Looking at it that way, of course Dungeon 23 fell by the wayside. If it had been, from the beginning, something I was going to share with others, it would have been much easier to prioritize that Dungeon 23 work. As a private project, it lost out to everything else.

Salvaging the Wreckage

In my original Dungeon 23 post, I wrote the following:

All misfit toys are welcome. No failed campaign notes, unused session prep, or aborted Itch.io publication is ever wasted so long as it could still rise again, animated by dark necromancy, to become part of a new project. One or more of my past projects will surely be absorbed into this process.

Well, the same is true for Dungeon 23 itself. All the work I did early this year is still ripe for reuse in other games and projects. I still use the generator that appeared in my original post, and it will probably be my go-to dungeon-population tool in the future. I don’t think I’ll ever finish my Dungeon 23 dungeon; but I’d be even more surprised if no element of it ever made it out into the world all the same.

More Knave-ified 5E Spells

I posted last year about going through the spells from the 2014 5E Player’s Handbook and reimagining them as one-sentence, level-less Knave spells. Readers enjoyed that post, so let’s pick up where we left off, halfway through the letter A, and go through the end of the letter B. 

Bolded text is my revised version of the spell; where not specifically stated otherwise, characteristics like duration and range are left to DM discretion, common sense, or an appropriate roll of the dice. These spells use advantage and disadvantage, assuming both PCs and NPCs/monsters roll for themselves; but could easily be adjusted for a game using player rolls only. L stands for level, but could be replaced by INT under Knave 2E's draft rules, which aren't yet finalized. Non-bolded text represents some thoughts on the design philosophy that underpins 5E spells, and how Knave and other rules-light systems differ from it.

Arcane Eye. You can see through an invisible floating eye that you control for L rounds; it can pass through small openings but not solid barriers.

Arcane Gate. You create linked misty portals connecting two points you can see for L turns.

D&D 5E has a suite of spells and abilities – Misty Step, Dimension Door, Arcane Gate, and others – doing similar things with varying power and duration. Beyond the scope of this exercise, it might make sense to either condense them into one spell with variable power (scaling with L), or sharpen the distinctions between them.

Arcane Lock. A closed door, aperture, or container is magically locked for anyone besides you and your allies, and can only be temporarily unlocked by the Knock spell.

Armor of Agathys. A freezing aura grants you armor as chain for L turns; creatures that touch you take L damage.

I complained about temporary hit points before, and here they show up again, in a spell that eponymously implies AC improvement. This is another recurring 5E problem, where the flavor of a spell or ability gestures at something different from the mechanical effect (Chill Touch neither dealing cold damage nor serving as a touch-range spell is the most famous example). I’ve attempted to push this spell closer to its flavor... but are two different “L effects” too finicky for Knave?

Arms of Hadar. Creatures within reach must make a Strength saving throw or be pushed far enough away from you that they can no longer reach you.

Astral Projection. You and your allies enter a state of suspended animation while traveling to another plane of existence; you arrive unerringly at your intended destination, but your bodies are vulnerable while you travel.

Astral Projection is a holdover from the early days of D&D, when a lot of ‘70s esotericism, science fiction, and pseudoscience was baked directly into the game. This spell has little practical applicability in 5E, where characters will use Plane Shift as a simpler option available at a lower level. I’ll solve this by making Astral Projection a reliable way to travel the planes, and (if I ever reach the letter “P”) make Plane Shift more like Teleport (which is to say, unreliable).

Augury. You ask an otherworldly entity about a course of action you may undertake, and it advises if the outcome will be weal, woe, mixed, or uncertain/unclear.

Except for some needlessly crunchy mechanical details, this one is fiction-forward and mostly fine as-is in 5E. The cumulative chance of false readings is nominally interesting, but I think most players would simply never cast the spell more than once in a day, so I’m just cutting that detail and leaving any penalty for overuse to DM adjudication.

Aura of Life. You and your allies gain advantage on saves related to the undead for L turns.

Aura of Purity. You and your allies gain advantage on saves related to poison, disease, or similar afflictions for L turns.

Various 5E spells interact with damage types and status conditions at a level of detail beyond what we’re really interested in here. We’ll just condense these down to their underlying ideas and leave the specifics to DM adjudication.

Aura of Vitality. L nearby creatures in danger heal L damage.

Healing spells are boring. While running Knave, I’ve enjoyed how seriously players view damage; they can’t just shrug it off the way 5E characters usually can. We’ll see how many 5E healing spells we can get through before we run out of creative ways to steer them away from the game's damage-sponge arms race.

Bane. Your enemies have disadvantage on attack rolls as long as you loudly chant and point at them.

Last time we did this exercise, I trashed Aid because it just changes numbers without changing the fiction in an interesting way. Bane is even worse, because it’s useful enough in the math of combat to be a correct tactical choice, but only gradually affects the battle in a way that feels very numbers-oriented. Our “fixed” version makes it stronger, but with a risk, putting a target on the caster’s head for as long as they persist.

Banishing Smite. The next time you hit a creature with half HP or less with an attack, banish it to its native plane, or a random location L miles away if it is already on its native plane.

Banishment. Banish a creature to its native plane, or a random location L miles away if it is already on its native plane.

A player once told me they felt bad about using Banishment as a get-out-of-jail-free card, ending a potential combat before it really began by sending an enemy off to another plane of existence. While I have issues with some of 5E’s save-or-suck spells, because they invite players to optimize the fun out of the game, I told the player I actually rather like how Banishment just kicks the can down the road. A banished enemy may show up later with a score to settle – and they’ll be better prepared for the PCs’ tricks the second time around.

Barkskin. You gain armor as brigandine for L turns, and can easily conceal yourself among trees while motionless.

I couldn’t resist adding a little flavor with the second clause; it feels like an idea one of my players would propose, and I would gladly allow.

Beacon of Hope. Name something dangerous you have seen recently; you and your allies gain advantage on saving throws while confronting it.

I recognize that I may be leaning too heavily on advantage and disadvantage to generalize out from 5E’s highly crunchy 5E spell descriptions. Advantage is a great tool, but it yields diminishing results when too many effects grant it. Any serious adaptation of the 5E spellbook to Knave would require condensing the total list of spells, or at least carefully controlling how many spells acquired by the party rely on it for their effect. An alternative approach for Beacon of Hope would be to apply it to henchman and hireling morale.

Beast Sense. After touching a beast, you can sense what it senses for L hours.

Bestow Curse. Choose one of the five senses; as long as you point at a creature while muttering curses, that creature has disadvantage on any saving throws related to that sense.

Bestow Curse in 5E is flavorful, but the actual effects are kinda crunchy and, like Bane, feel like more of an ongoing nuisance for enemies rather than something that immediately changes the situation in an interesting way. 

Bigby’s Hand. For L rounds, you control a giant glowing hand that can punch, shove, and grab with the strength of a dozen people.

Blade Barrier. You conjure a wall of spinning blades, either as a ring around you or a long wall; creatures attempting to pass through the barrier must make a Dexterity saving throw or take Ld6 damage.

Blade Ward. Weapon attacks against you have disadvantage for L rounds.

Bless. Your allies have advantage on attack rolls as long as you are in as much or more danger than them.

As with Bane, we need to attach some kind of condition, although I fear these are getting a little too vague. I do like the idea of the spellcaster leading from the front and hoisting a metaphorical battle standard to inspire the group, which is easier in a classless game like Knave.

Blight. Drain all moisture from non-magical plants roughly equal to L people in size, reducing them to dust; a plantlike creature takes Ld10 damage instead.

Blinding Smite. The next creature you strike is blinded until the next time it takes damage.

Blindness/Deafness. All nearby creatures are blinded or deafened (your choice).

Blink. You become shadowy and immaterial on the round you cast the spell – and every other round afterward – unable to be harmed by solid things, but also unable to harm them in return.

Blur. Attacks against you have disadvantage.

Branding Smite. The next creature you strike glows with tell-tale light that they cannot extinguish for L turns. 

Burning Hands. A cone of fire either deals Ld6 damage to one creature, or ignites all flammable objects in the vicinity.

Closing Thoughts

The "D&D Next" process that led to 2014's D&D 5E seems to suggest that there was some appetite for removing needless complexity from the game, and... I think that included a desire to condense the byzantine spell list. They removed many of the “greater” and “mass” variations on spells. The option to upcast spells provided a model for varying the streamlining effects like simple damage and healing spells.

But the design feels compromised. A lot of cruft obviously stayed in. The designers didn't use those tools nearly as much as they could have, or should have. I don’t know that 5E would really work with the truly level-less/balance-agnostic magic of Knave; but I do believe 5E could have gone much further than it did, and would have played that much better if it had.

The Steelman Argument for Fudge

Last week: The Argument for Fudge-Free D&D

Obviously, I am anti-fudge. I am against fudging rolls of the dice, and equally against fudging other aspects of the game via Mike’s “dials.” But for any strongly held belief, it’s worthwhile to take some time and try to find the strongest arguments against one’s own position. A “steelman argument” is the opposite of a strawman argument – attempting to look at an opponent’s argument in the strongest possible light. Below are my attempts to steelman the fudge.

It's worth acknowledging that many home games are built around untested alpha content. Many DMs don’t have the luxury of running scenarios multiple times. If they are running published content, it has (hopefully…) been tested, but who knows how extensively. If the DM is homebrewing their game content, that content is reaching the table in a purely untested form. Most of the content I have run in long-running games was like this. And as such, it was untested, and I (as the adjudicating DM) had to address instances where I (as the planning DM) had made mistakes or failed to anticipate how the content would actually work in practice.

My solution to this was usually to use diegetic solutions and flexible adjudication tools rather than fudging the dice or the dials. But I understand why many DMs find that so challenging, and it can sometimes be really difficult to find a diegetic solution to a particular game situation (whereas fudging avoids the need for a diegetic explanation).   

It’s possible I’m underestimating the DM's capacity to make the game “more fun” in the moment. Perhaps some DMs can make these adjustments in a way that reliably does push the game in more interesting or fun directions. Perhaps I have a below-average sense of these adjustments when adjudicating the game, and it's easier to do without risking player engagement than I think. I’m skeptical, but I could be wrong.

It could be that a game has more tolerance for fudge than I believe it does, as long as the players trust the DM. Mike includes some caveats in the article suggesting that frequent or arbitrary fudging is bad. I would obviously go much further than he does. But a steelman argument for fudge would suggest that fudging has to be very frequent or severe to really harm a game. In this view, the degree of fudging Mike suggests won’t be nearly as apparent as I suspect it will be.

A Player Transparency Compromise

Acknowledging that one, two, or all three of the above steelman positions could be true, I would offer one final position of compromise between my position and the pro-fudge DMs out there. I believe the DM who wants to fudge in this manner should clearly state their intent to do so during session zero, or an equivalent communication before the game begins. (It’s possible Mike does in fact do this in his games; the article in question doesn’t specify either way.)

Fudge as a session zero topic can sit right alongside the discussion of the desired level of lethality and challenge in the game. The DM who intends to do this should simply say “I’ll sometimes fudge monster HP in the interest of making the game more fun.” If I were a prospective player, this would at least alert me that this wasn’t the game for me. And other players could build their expectations for the game around this expectation.

I believe this compromise position doesn’t contradict either Mike’s points in his article, or the steelman positions I outlined above. I would challenge fudge DMs – are you transparent with your players about what you’re doing? If you are not, I’d be interested to know why.

The Argument for Fudge-Free D&D

“Fudging dice rolls is bad” is now a truism in most online RPG discussion spaces. Along with familiar phrases “don’t railroad” and “talk to your players,” “don’t fudge” has been repeated exhaustively wherever RPG advice is shared. I wrote about this subject previously because I wanted to get my thoughts down on paper, but I don’t harbor any illusion that those posts were particularly novel. This is well-trodden ground.

But pro-fudge people don't give up easily. They look for other ways to bring the fudge back into the game. For example, moving the fudging action from the results on the dice to other parts of the game. I don’t believe this is any better than conventional dice fudging.

Before I proceed, I want to contextualize my criticism. I don’t write a lot of posts criticizing other writers’ views. The reason I’m doing so here is because Mike Shea’s (AKA Sly Flourish) GMing advice is generally sound, particularly for his putative audience of new and mid-level GMs who are still figuring out how to run games. I also think his signature “lazy DM” style has much to recommend it in a hobby larded with excessive, useless session prepping. I have his Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master book and would recommend it for a new 5E DM looking for prep tools. If Mike routinely gave out bad advice, I wouldn’t bother to comment on a post I disagreed with.

I further recommend you read Mike’s article in full before proceeding, so you can make your own evaluation of his argument before you read mine. While I have endeavored to convey his statements accurately, I welcome counterpoints in the comments about anything I missed, misread, or interpreted unfairly.

“Fudge monster hit points whenever it leads to a more fun game”

When and to what degree fudging would be “more fun” than the alternative is not as obvious as it sounds.

Gauging what is more or less “fun” while an RPG session is in motion sounds like it would be easy. But it’s not. It’s like trying to figure out what is wrong with your car while you are speeding down the highway.

Why? I contend that one of the most appealing characteristics of TTRPGs as a form of entertainment – contrasted with what board games and video games and sports and many other pastimes have to offer – is just how hard it is to predict what is going to happen. The incredibly wide range of unexpected (but organic and logical) outcomes from the fiction, which the players never would have seen coming, is a big part of the appeal to the hobby. 

When the DM starts tinkering with the fiction to make it “more fun,” they are constricting that range of outcomes. I remember very clearly the first time I realized, as a player, that the DM was doing this. The DM in question (who did a great job overall) confronted our mid-level party with a beholder. The other characters fled, but my character fell behind. I prepared to make a last stand and hold back the beholder for as long as possible, to buy more time for the rest to escape. I obviously hadn’t planned for this outcome, and the idea that this character would suddenly die in this manner was interesting, and interesting in a way that I’ve really only encountered in TTRPGs.

But the DM fudged. To their credit, most or all of the fudging was diegetic – deus ex machina by NPC. I’m sure the DM was trying to make the game “more fun.” But for me personally, the cost of the intervention outweighed its supposed benefits. 

“Fudge When it Ends a Battle That's Overstayed It's Welcome”

Most fights should end well before either side hits 0 HP.

It’s wild to watch people twist themselves into knots trying to “solve” a “problem” that was sufficiently addressed 40 years ago in Moldvay Basic. If the DM uses basic D&D morale, or an equivalent system, monsters will flee once the battle has overstayed its welcome.

Mike writes that “It doesn't make sense for [enemies] to just quit and walk away” after the enemy boss is dead or the main goal of the battle has been achieved… when this is exactly what would make the most sense. Excepting constructs or other “unthinking” monsters, most minions would certainly surrender or flee in that circumstance, and the battle would end in a logical and interesting way.

This is not arbitrary or immersion-breaking; quite the contrary. The idea that enemies break and run is a much more realistic depiction of fantastic (medieval or, more generally, pre-modern) combat than the video game slog to zero Mike appears to be envisioning. Most of the casualties in historical battles occurred after one side was routed and fled the battlefield. I’ve often run D&D 5E combat this way, and it works perfectly fine.

Based on other things he’s written, I don’t think Mike is opposed to non-lethal conclusions to combat in general. He may just consider that outside the scope of this particular article. But a diegetic solution like morale solves this problem so much more elegantly than rigging the fight behind the screen, and I'm left wondering why fudging “dials” is even a viable option by comparison. Combats that end when enemy morale breaks should be one of the most common resolutions to combat. 

“When You're Beefing Up Bosses” and “When It Makes Sense for the Story”

Fixing monster HP totals should happen during prep, not while running the game.

These two are addressing the same idea – changing HP mid-combat to hotfix D&D 5E’s creaky design.

Hacking the game is hard enough during prep. Trying to do it while running a session is even more difficult. To return to my original analogy, this is like saying to a passenger in your car, “Sorry, I didn’t have time to go to the mechanic this week. I’m just going to lean out the window with this lug wrench and do some tightening!”

For emphasis: It is perfectly fine for the planning DM, during prep, to adjust the HP of monsters they’re considering using. The planning DM can alter the fiction in many ways during prep, and that’s fine until the PCs encounter the fiction in-game. The adjudicating DM has a different responsibility, and should be skeptical of their own instinct to patch the game while it is underway (on top of their many other responsibilities as master of ceremonies and referee).

This use of fudging also raises a further question: “why have hit points at all?” It may sound like I’m being glib, but it’s a serious question. In a Free Kriegsspiel Revolution game, the fight with the lich would simply continue until the game participants agreed it made sense for it to end. Everyone understands that there is no number for the PCs to push to zero, so there’s nothing to fudge. 

There are other RPG systems that are otherwise designed to better facilitate the cinematic thrill of fighting the boss – with the dramatic moments arriving at just the right time, and the boss dying right at the climax of the fight. D&D 5E is not that game, and trying to force it into that box just chips away at the game’s verisimilitude and shared investment.

And yes, there is a cost. Players are not dumb. They will figure out what’s happening, and learn that the resolution of combat isn’t based on their skill, or an impartial and genuine engagement with the fiction, but rather the DM uncommunicated and ambiguous sense of fun, and their desire to perform emergency maintenance while going 70 miles per hour.

Next week: The Steelman Argument for Fudge

They Don’t Even Notice You

It’s easy to think of the PCs as the main characters of the game. Even if we run a game where we avoid writing a plot, or railroading the players, or beginning with an assumption that the characters are predestined heroes; the camera is almost always focused on them. They’re indubitably protagonists.

This is all well and good – but over time, it can feel like every room, hex, encounter, scene, and scenario revolves around the PCs. If it happens too much, it’s a drag on the verisimilitude of the world. 

So throw in a few encounters that are definitely not all about the PCs.

• An enormous monster – a t-rex or a kaiju – walks past (or over) the PCs, in search of bigger game
• Two armies clash, and the PCs are treated as bystanders, if they’re noticed at all
• Bickering town merchants are only interested in interacting with the PCs insofar as it advances their respective side in their endless argument 
• Powerful wizards, liches, or demigods are locked in battle; the PCs barely register amid the minions, summoned creatures, and particle effects crowding the battlefield  
• A (non-magical) storm, earthquake, or volcanic eruption hits the area where the PCs are; they can not "defeat" it, only endure it

Sometimes a living game world is just happening around the PCs. Sometimes the creature almost steps on them, not because it's attacking them, but because it just doesn't know or care that they are there. Sometimes they don’t even notice you. 

Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons

Last Week: Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

Last week I wrote about turning a premise into tangible themes. This week, let’s get into a crunchy, digestible example.

The premise of our Knave game involves a mystery train that stops at various locations for the players to explore. But neither the premise itself nor the ensuing session zero discussion really defined what kind of locations the PCs would explore. It was an open question. 

So I made a list of words that either came directly out of conversations with the players, or were a step or two removed from those conversations. 

1. Brutalist
2. Cyclopean 
3. Alien
4. Oracular 
5. Innervative
6. Biomechanical
7. Hypnagogic 
8. Demoniacal 
9. Entropic
10. Stellar 
11. Temporal 
12. Apocalyptic
13. Resurrectionist 

I decided to go with all adjectives for a feeling of internal consistency. It’s OK to flex the dictionary and thesaurus a bit here, as long as the words are evocative and interesting.

Because Strangers on a Train is a mystery game, information is revealed gradually. The words at the top of the list are close to the surface, things that might come through within the first few sessions. The second location the PCs visited had very literal brutalist and cyclopean design characteristics.

The terms further down the list may only be perceptible after many sessions. Many megadungeons essentially contain a mystery in the same manner. The first level might be full of sundry bandits and cultists, but the lowest level is the hollow earth / portal to hell / crashed spaceship part of the dungeon, secret from all but the most accomplished adventurers.

Remember that in the last post, we talked about the value of compounded our terms. Words on their own might not get us very far in developing something unusual. They are instead more valuable when we combine them to create something really novel. So oracular-stellar becomes “a structure for studying the stars to predict the future.” Brutalist-hypnogogic becomes “a vast dreaming amphitheater for sleeping explorers.” And so on.

Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a famously cliched question for novelists and other creatives at Q&A sessions. I’m mostly against comparing novelists and other narrative-creators to DMs and game designers, but in this instance there are parallels.

So where do they come from? You can get some ideas from your players, as long as you’re careful to do it in a way that separates the planning DM from the adjudicating DM. But for all but the most purely improvisational games – and the resolutely GM-less ones – the DM needs to generate quite a lot of ideas before the players ever come to the table.

Ideas are everywhere. Other games, other media, news stories, dreams, random combinations of unrelated words. Ideas are easy. Premises are easy. The difficult part is turning those inherently amorphous starting points into actionable tools.

Inspired by a few sources, particularly the spark tables in Electric Bastionland, I’ve settled on a process for turning a premise into actionable themes. I’m thinking primarily about developing a new campaign in a TTRPG, but a lot of the same principles apply more generally to other open-ended, game-adjacent planning and creation efforts. 

That said, I do not advocate this as a one-size-fits-all system. Idea generation and cultivation is highly personal. I expect that if anyone else finds this useful, they will modify it beyond recognition, devising their own tools for developing campaigns, settings, worlds, modules, or entirely new games.

Identify the Major Themes of the Game

This sounds obvious, but many people jump directly from a mere premise to creating content. It’s easy to skip an important intermediary step – unraveling the premise to find the themes that support it. This is much more a matter of deciding what the game is not than deciding what it is.

Science fiction games are a good example; this putative genre includes everything from gritty blue collar space truckers to sword-and-planet romance, and from space opera to physics textbook in action. Throwing a lot of sci-fi at the wall without clear themes will produce an incoherent setting and an indistinct game. It’s absolutely imperative to make choices, to decide what is (and especially what is not) central to the game.

So what are these themes? They’re just universal terms that define the world. At least a dozen words, and ideally closer to 20, like the Bastionland spark table, is good to start. I find half adjectives and half nouns a good mix. For the latter, abstract nouns or gnomic noun categories (“vehicle” rather than “motorcycle”) are best.

A random word generator or AI text generator can be helpful here, but usually only as a starting point or to provide “wrong” answers that can be corrected (because changing a “wrong” answer to a “right” answer is much easier than coming up with a correct answer out of thin air).

Compound the Themes 

The setting comes alive not when a single theme appears on stage, but rather when two themes intertwine, dovetail, or clash violently.

If your list is pretty short, combine each of your words into two-word paired terms, with each pair appearing once. If the list is longer, don’t feel obligated to pair every possible combination; roll dice to pair up words and see where the list takes you. Any time you can introduce a little randomness into the process is beneficial, because it unlocks your oracular subconscious. 

Take some deep breaths in a quiet environment and then go through each combination of words and just think about what images those combinations bring to mind. If you meditate, you can employ that tool here. If you don’t meditate, think of the state your brain is in when you have shower thoughts. Why do shower thoughts arise in the shower? Because for most people, it’s one of the few (waking) periods of the day when the brain is released to wander freely. Embrace that feeling. You want to unscrew the lid on your head halfway, just enough to let some air flow in both directions.

Evaluating the Results

Working through this process will commonly produce two results. The first result is interesting, and the second is really fascinating. The first is a meandering walk toward the expected or genre-vanilla result. Your space opera will include laser swords. Your fantasy world will have elves. Your gritty urban world will have a corrupt underbelly. 

No surprise, right? But it’s still worthwhile to have “gotten there” on your own power. Validating a genre convection proves that you need it and that it deserves to be there. Every idea needs to be checked to confirm you’re not just gliding on assumptions.

The second result, the fascinating one, is when the process spits out something really unexpected. You may feel an immediate instinct to toss out the weird or incongruous result. Don’t do this. Instead, add it to the list and let it hang out. Keep it around for a while. Savor it. Remember, if you’re creating a genre-salient game-thing for players or consumers who are savvy in that genre, the fastest way to lose them is not to create something that doesn’t engage with their expectations of the genre, but rather to create something that relies on those expectations too much. We want – we need – our game to be surprising, even – especially – to people who know the game’s premise well.

If, after some time, you realize that a theme-pair really is too strange or confusing to use as-is, don’t throw it out entirely. Instead, consider the permutations. Is there something synonymous that is worth using? Antonymous? Is the combination’s meaning just obscure? Slang? Jargon? An acronym? Magic words? A brand name?

Remember, the players will probably never actually hear many of these word pairs in a session. These are working in the background. You don’t have to be self-conscious about it or worry about explaining it to someone. This is inside-voice stuff, for your use only. 

Next week: Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons