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.