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.