Missing Memories (Part 1)

When I pitched six ideas to my players for the game we kicked off last fall, they ultimately chose Strangers on a Train. The premise is simple – the characters wake up on a train with no memory of who they are. The train stops periodically at different dangerous locations.

As I started to prepare for the game, I realized that the system for simulating memory loss was the big question mark. We had agreed on Knave for our system, so I knew the rule(s) should be relatively simple. But there were clearly many ways to incorporate memory loss in the session-by-session play. After some consideration, I drafted three ideas.

Flashing Before Your Eyes 

When you drop below zero HP – or otherwise face imminent doom – scenes from your forgotten life may flash before your eyes, giving you insight into your lost past. When you declare this is happening, you and the DM conduct a brief flashback.

After the flashback is complete, you will be rendered unconscious or incapacitated, but spared death or the full brunt of whatever situation triggered the flashback.

Each character can only use this ability once per session, and X times over the course of the campaign, after which they must risk death without mercy.

Pros: Happens at a moment of high drama; provides (limited) safety net for lethal play.

Cons: Limited supply may induce some PCs to play too conservatively.

Piecing It Together 

Among the lost ruins of civilization outside the train are objects redolent with mnemonic power. Finding these objects not only grant PCs power, but also restore some of their memories.

A sliver of memory grants 50 XP. A fragment of memory grants 100 XP. An aggregate of memories grants 200 XP. All rewards are shared among all PCs who participated in the session in which the memories were recovered.

When characters level up, in addition to the normal benefits they receive, they recover memories. This can either be a flashback conducted with the DM in real time, or a brief piece the player writes or otherwise creates between sessions, with DM consultation.

Pros: Encourages exploration and ties the main theme of the game to advancement.

Cons: MacGuffin-izes central conceit of the game.

Incepting Your Past

You have lost your memories, but some of the actions you take, the tools you use, and the dangers you risk, may feel familiar, providing hints to your past life. Were you a baker, doctor, gambler, spy? Quick with the knife, handy with machines, or learned in lore? Only you can say for sure.

When you attempt to do something that would require training, knowledge, or experience particular to a certain profession or background, you may decide to incept a memory. You have advantage on rolls associated with that memory.

You may only incept one memory per session, and X memories overall. If you have already incepted X memories and wish to incept a new one, you must decide which of the previous memories was a lie. The DM incorporates a consequence of your self-deception into an upcoming session. You have disadvantage on all Saves associated with the consequence.

Pros: Gives players a clear utility and flavor for their memories as they introduce them.

Cons: Fuzziness / openness of what the incepted memory would cover, and how broad or narrow it should be.

What did we go with? Well…

Next week: Missing Memories (Part 2)

Random Ideas from the Real World

The real world provides more inspiration than we could ever hope to use, and in complex and unpredictable forms that can break us out of the ruts of genre fiction and vanilla fantasy.

So let’s spin the virtual globe and pick a place at random. Presume we are populating a hex, or planning for an overland trek in our favorite TTRPG.

This is merely an inspirational exercise. It is not informed by any deep study of the randomly chosen real-world location. Indeed, we are intentionally keeping our view “fuzzy” to make it that much easier to create something fictional for game purposes. 

Latitude: 18.46154

Longitude: 104.94312

Real-world location: Bolikhamsai Province, Laos

Immediate visual keywords: Bridges, Boulders, Flowers. The GM should aspire to include one or more of these keywords in every major feature they describe. 

Criss-crossed with mountain ranges, our province is a land of bridges of all shapes and sizes, traversing either deep forested valleys or rocky rapid rivers. Many of those bridges are characterized by winding, flowering vines, growing along every available surface.

What else can we learn about this place? Again, this is an intentionally superficial skim. While a deeper study would likely be interesting and rewarding, it’s beyond the scope of ordinary session prep.

1. Waterfalls and hydroelectric power
2. Quasi-military refugee gangs
3. Religious tension
4. Karst limestone “stone forest”
5. Sun bears, elephants, clouded leopards, and hornbills
6. Tobacco production 
7. A temple with a “very large footprint” of a famous ascetic 

Already, with just a few pieces of information, we have an intriguing setting. We can adapt, abstract, remix, and refocus in various ways. For example:

1. Water power. In addition to the bridges, huge water wheels turn constantly on the fast-moving rivers. This is a natural place, but also one heavily leveraged for energy. 
2. Foreign gangs. Gangs from the north are constantly troubling the local populace. They may try to rob the PCs, but would be just as likely to recruit them, perhaps downplaying their predatory nature. The PCs are soon drawn into a story of foreign invasion and secret societies.
3. The religious overlay. More than one faith is observed here. Religion forms another “overlay” on the region, perhaps creating conflicts within communities and among otherwise sympathetic NPCs.
4. A petrified forest. The karst limestone “trees” of the real world can become actual trees transformed by magic. Perhaps by gorgons? 
5. Fantastic animals. Some of these animals may be fantastic enough in their ordinary form. But we can also derive fantastic equivalents just from literal interpretations of their names. Perhaps the sun bear can emit a blinding flash to stun its prey. The clouded leopard is invisible unless in direct sunlight. The hornbill makes a distinctive trumpeting call when disturbed, something that can work for or against the PCs.
6. Tobacco as treasure. What do PCs do when they capture the bandits' treasure… and realize it is 100 massive bales of stolen, unprocessed tobacco? Can they transport it somewhere and trade it in? 
7. The ascetic’s temple. This could be a flashpoint for religious tension, a bandit hideout, or the entrance to our obligatory dungeon.  

Why Roleplaying Games?

Double warning: This is a galaxy brain post; and I claim no special expertise. If this question has been formally interrogated through one or more disciplines (arts education, art therapy, anthropology, neurology?) I appreciate referrals.

Why weren’t tabletop roleplaying games invented much sooner? Various commentators have pointed out that all the tools were available from ancient times, and widely available from the time literacy was common. But they didn’t arrive in a recognizable form until the 1970s.

So here is my theory. Imagine an ancient hunter-gatherer society. They’ve mastered fire. Control of fire means, for the first time, a (relatively) safe area where they can focus their considerable brainpower on something beyond just survival. So they tell stories.

And while some societies had dedicated storytellers and lore-keepers, presumably many cultures told shared stories, where anyone around the fire could contribute. Changing or adding to old stories. Creating something new. Taking on different roles within the fictional narrative. Similar to roleplaying, right? Add some formalized prompts and a bit of randomness and you have a storytelling game like For the Queen or Fall of Magic.

For thousands of years, this local, collective expression of the performing arts doesn’t change that much. It may be farmers around a hearth instead of hunters around a campfire, but the basic logic is the same. Up until the end of the 19th century, if you were an ordinary person outside a major urban area who wanted to experience live storytelling, theater, music, dance, and the performing arts generally, your community’s most consistent option was to do it itself. You would be a performer and a creator, not just an audience member.

Community members learned to play instruments because that was the only way their families and neighbors were going to hear music regularly. Churches and schools held pageants and plays because that was the only regular source of dramatic performance available. If those prehistoric people gathered around the fire could see these performances, up through the 19th century, they would still recognize it, on some level, as the same tradition they engaged in thousands of years prior.

Then – within a generation in the early 20th century – that all changes. The phonograph, radio, and film are not only available, but available cheaply to a mass audience. Television follows soon after. Average people have easy, affordable access to entertainment and culture they and their community took no part in producing.

For the first time, that ancient desire to be an audience for art is easily satisfied without the work of participating in the creation of art.

But the ancient drive to create is still there, unfulfilled. Certainly many people still choose to become creators. But I think there is some rather large percentage of people on the margin who would have gotten involved in the pre-media era of art creation if they had lived before mass media, but do not get involved in the mass media age. They remain consumers only. 

And that’s why the invention of TTRPGs makes sense in a mid-20th century world saturated with passive media. They are a hack to bring the passive consumers on the margin back into the act of creation. I don’t think TTRPGs are unique in this role; many functions of the internet have allowed ordinary people to find that creative margin too. But TTRPGs do have an interesting, pathbreaking role in the return to community creation.

17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 2)

Previously: 17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 1)

You’re always hitting SOMETHING

Glasses and bottles shatter as a gunfight rages across the tavern.

Games featuring combat can devolve into a familiar pattern. “Lothgar attacks with his sword… 7… miss. The orc swings with his axe… 4… that’s another miss.” Described this way, combat can feel weightless, boring, static, and low-stakes.

But attacks that miss are rarely just sweeping through the air. Every miss can tell us something about the combat. The resiliency of armor. Quick reflexes. The difficulty created by the terrain or dungeon dressing.  

Every miss is a chance to loop back to previous action, or foreshadow what may happen next. Is a miss making noise? Knocking things over? Creating rough terrain? Separating the combatants? Destroying cover?

Of course, a miss is already a bad result for a PC, so we should avoid creating effects that feel like piling on. Changes triggered by misses should usually affect all participants equally, or be random in their ongoing effect.

Reward PCs for engaging with the environment

Jones, targeting an enemy behind cover, fires at the burning logs in the fireplace, igniting the pool of spilled liquor.

Jones’ player asks the GM, “can I hit the guy in the center of the room?” The GM says “he has cover behind a sturdy table, it will be hard.” So the player says, “how about hitting the fireplace?”

Some GMs will have a knee-jerk reaction to players trying to “hack” the scenario, but this is exactly the kind of thinking we want to encourage. A GM should absolutely offer more favorable odds or an improved opportunity for success when a player engages with the fiction in a logical way. 

Break up static situations

The gunfight is interrupted when one of Toht’s henchman flanks Jones and grapples him.

Fights that don’t end quickly can settle into a static equilibrium. Perhaps PCs and antagonists are just slugging it out, whittling away at each others’ hit points; or both sides have turtled up.

When this happens, introduce disruptive elements, like an enemy flanking a character making ranged attacks. For most TTRPGs, it’s probably more important that this is dramatically interesting than tactically optimal. 

Connect one event to the next, even if the rolls were unrelated

After Jones loses a contested grapple roll, Marion succeeds on a stealth check.

A clever GM can frame Marion’s success on her attack as stemming directly from the distraction of Jones’ player’s failure on the previous roll.

Of course, we know that these were independent rolls. But part of GMing is finding meaning and patterns in randomized action. Emphasizing that Marion is taking advantage of an opportunity makes her player feel more capable; and perhaps Jones’ player also feels better about their failure, as it “set up” Marion’s success.

 

Allow the antagonists to make suboptimal tactical decisions

Despite holding a gun, Toht decides to light the bar on fire, creating a less effective but more exciting threat.

Players will usually fight in tactically optimal or near-optimal ways. Unless the game in question has a specific focus on tactics, it’s fine to have most antagonists act sub-optimally, as long as it creates a more interesting situation, or “tells the story” of what that antagonist is all about. It shouldn’t be done because the GM is giving the player a break.

Of course, at least some of the time, an enemy should fight just as tactically as the PCs. It will be that much more of a challenge contrasted against the typical encounter.

Morale checks may play out in unexpected ways

Toht tells his henchman to “shoot them… shoot them both.”

There are many ways to imagine how we get to this particular juncture in a fight. Perhaps some previous action in the fight weakened the enemies’ cohesion, even though the fiction points to them holding the upper hand. Dissension and betrayal are powerful tools to spice up an encounter. 

As in the previous entry in this list, the important thing to remember is that this follows from what we know about NPC drives, factions, and relationships. As long as the action follows from the established facts of the scenario plus the results of the dice, it can enhance the situation.

Remember that antagonists fail too

Toht reaches for the medallion, not realizing it is dangerously hot to the touch.

It can be difficult to separate GM knowledge from NPC knowledge – but it is useful and rewarding. An NPC who acts with less than the GM’s full knowledge – but in a way that is reasonable given what they do know, and what they want – creates a believable, responsive world.

If the villain escapes, it’s before combat is over

As victory (quite literally) slips from Toht’s fingers, he flees the tavern. 

GMs often try to protect antagonist NPCs, with the idea of creating recurring villains, but the rules in many TTRPGs make this unlikely. It works much better if Toht was an unimportant NPC (possibly even unnamed – after all, no one ever speaks his name in the movie) who only becomes important after the fact, based on the events of the fight. That’s classic play-to-find-out action. 

Note how Toht gets away while the medallion is still at risk, the fire is still burning, and a henchman is still fighting. A villain who does flee should always try to do so a round or two before combat ends.

As combat ends, pause to consider the complications and developments

Marion joins forces with Jones in the wake of the tavern’s destruction.

The final part of this scene reminds me of the Urban Shadows game I play in. In Urban Shadows, Marion would have a new debt on Jones, and it would inform the subsequent action and give them a reason to “party up.”

In D&D, this would be a great way to add a new PC to an adventuring party. Marion would make an excellent NPC-turned-PC.

The GM in this scenario would also make a note that Toht survived, and that the symbol was burned into this hand, ensuring that the encounter would have far-flung effects later in the campaign…