For the love of the game, Pt. 2

Every system of pen & paper roleplaying that I've encountered has more than a few mechanics for resolving more than a few things.  Through an extended example, I'm going to leverage how we need to love the game more than the rules.  While this example uses events in a novel/film to leverage its points, the basic differences between PnP RPGing and other forms of storytelling are readily apparent, the most crucial being the cooperative and spontaneous elements therein. 

Take the example of Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas tracking the hobbits and Uruk-Hai.  Under D&D 3.5X You can, for example, make thirty-six successive constitution checks for 'hustling' to check their fatigue, and have Legolas make a stream of dreary DC10 checks to aid Aragorn's tracking, and possibly even suggest that Gimli's minor clerical magic delivered in the form of humor gives them some resistance to exhaustion.

Rolling the number of dice required to do this would take at least 15 minutes.  It's clear that if the characters decide to take this course of action, they want to see it come to some sort of progress in the plot--and as the DM, you aren't doing anyone favors by belaboring this exercise.  In any form of storytelling, Plot-Points don't come during Montages (Samurai Jack's agility with the technique notwithstanding).  The plot point to resolve here is singular, or so it would seem--Do the Three reach the Hobbits before Isengard?

In this case, the rules are getting in the way of the game.  The game, the tone of the story that has come before, dictates that within ten minutes, everyone at this table would like to know what happens next.  Five minutes would be better.  Two would be best.

If you were the DM, you could say that Whatever comes Next could be that a Nazgul in the skies spots the three on their epic jog and that they must take refuge in a canyon, losing the trail, or that they happen upon the Rohirrim before their battle, or whatever strikes your fancy, guided by the player's level of success.  The action of the trek, however, lays between your gaming group and Whatever Comes Next and the mechanic as written in the rules is standing in the way of the game.

GNS--Something I'll say segregates us too much in another post

 

Here I will be accused of being anti-simulationist, and that the progressive difficulty of manifold CON checks for fatigue gives believability and realism to this journey.  But I say hogwash.  If five people are at a table to play a roleplaying game, they certainly don't want to roll d20's for a half hour with varying descriptions of (you get tired and have to slow down) or (your progress is good this hour).  They want to get to the decisive moment--the one where dice rolling and roleplaying can turn the story in any direction.  And the burden lies now on the DM to get the story past that point.

I'm touching upon many operational terms here in this first essay that aren't well articulated in the other literature on Gamemastering--"Decisive Moment" and a "Mechanic/Game" oppositional axis--terms which I'll bring to light as we continue this journey--but I want first to hook you into this idea of Mindfulness.

Let's return to the Grey Company in the wilds of Eriador.  As the DM, you have reached a point in the story where you need to maintain suspension of disbelief by allowing dice rolls and mechanical resolution to guide the outcome of the epic jog.  Your players are excited by the twist of the captured hobbits.
You have a moment.  You can typically always have about 30 seconds to figure out a mechanic, and it's conventional that if one takes ten seconds to flip through a book it's acceptable.  You have time to think. Thinking for a moment is much more efficient than pressing go on an inefficient mechanic or an unfun encounter--much like a speaker will sound far more persuasive without intersplices of 'um' and 'hmm.'

Let us now go deep.  Let us now go into your mind, and walk through the choices you have before you on how you could resolve this problem.  (note that the choices are spread across a continuum of more>less>no dice.)

• A) Use the mechanic as-is
• B) Make Something up using the nuts & bolts of the system before you.
• C) Gloss it over; they reach the hobbits.

Choice A will waste time at the gaming table and likely disengage all but the most straight-edged of your players (the parallel essay, Time is Precious, will address why this is a cardinal sin).  Choice B will allow everyone to feel that there's a chance of their actions succeeding and that their strategies for helping can affect the outcome.  Choice C will diminish the cooperative element of the game, as it will be left entirely up to you how the trek pans out.  B seems to be the best choice here, because of the successful uncertainty over how the effort of the Grey Company's trek will pan out.

Phase 2: What are the important questions that it might be fun to answer with a resolution using dice ? (if you wanted the Nazgul to appear, or for the Rohirrim to meet the Grey Co. before the scene of the battle, the lead-in is entirely off-camera--and thus up to you by fiat.  (Random encounter tables can be an inspiration here--and provide for turns in the story that your players wouldn't normally expect from you--but that's a topic for another post)

• When does the party intercept the Uruk-Hai? Before or after the battle with the Rohirrim? (notice this subsumes all tracking checks...if they lose the trail, the answer is late or never)
• In what condition does the Grey Company reach What Comes Next? (Since the story before has established that self-reliance is a theme in The Two Towers, we can conclude it's unlikely that deus ex machina will occur so early)

Phase 3: How can we answer the question? We know that the existing rules are cumbersome.  Mechanically, we know that it's a test of endurance--and likely also one of will (to keep going through blisters and hunger.)

Brainstorm something that tests these things.  We know we are rolling too many dice as is; would fewer dice, or even one die per player work better?  Endurance and will are two things we need to test...(and it makes sense that charactersthat have invested more energy in being good at these two things should have a higher degree/chance of success) HEY! there's something called a Fortitude Save, and a Will Save in this game.   Now here's where we can get unconventional.

Here's an option:

Dumb, but production this good in player imagination mean you're ok.

Have the players roll a fortitude save.  Then subtract each player's result from 30 or 40; that's how many damage they've got on their sheet when they reach What comes next. You could say that players that took 10 or more damage are fatigued, and those that took 20 hp are exhausted.  This rewards players with high HP, drains healing resources, and rewards thoughtfulness if anyone remembered to memorize something like restoration.

The propensity to falter and slow down the party seems like a test of will.  You could have them all make a will save; if they mostly save high, they get there early, if they mostly save low, they're late.  If they end up late, perhaps allow a junction if they're doing poorly: "Gimli's ankle will be sprained by the end of the day, and his quips are becoming less humorous and more desperate as he excuses falling behind..."

Then, if Aragorn's player were to say, "I'll carry him" you could have him make a strength check (i'd recommend climb as it's STR-based and improves with level), and apply similar damage/fatigue from the first check, or maybe STR damage from soreness.

That's all.  I'll edit with more ideas, and perhaps chime it with your own ideas of how to expedite this 'fistful of dice' moment (which are to be avoided, explained in principle in part 1).  You can add pivot points (another essay) and a second batch of die rolling/saves to modulate this (climbing a cliff, avoiding a stampede of aurochs, etc.)

End Phase: Now that you've gotten all that time from eliminating the part where the Rules got in the way of the game, you might have time for a twist!  Perhaps the party comes to a ravine that would take more time to cross, but there's a chance they might be able to jump across or balance on an ill-secured log...

 PS: I'll point out that with this kind of resolution we can count this as an encounter, and give folks some xp.

A change in the weather

When I last wrote here on the prospects of convening a group together to the end of Pen and Paper Roleplaying, how it was nearly a lost art, I was forlorn. The armies of WoW stood at our gates, put fire to our fields, our kingdom at its knees. Mass Effect was a more readily known word than Traveller or Shadowrun in the halls of Gen Con. Yet the Success of the film Drive speaks to a love for earlier eras, and for a kind of storytelling that wasn't in such a frantic rush. Success can be had in refreshing and updating the classic, while honoring the patience and grace of a passed era. And the music is AWESOME. (See Left).

So I've changed and revised my tune since then. I say we should embrace the idea that technology has passed us by. Don't mistake me for one of those OSR fellows that would see us all jump into a deep, dark lake of nostalgia. Nay, I suggest that the whole practice of P&P gaming, in all forms, is as retro as the B-52's were in 1981. And the most retro among them is the pen and paper roleplaying game. And it's got a lot going for it--interaction, the opportunity to make friends, positive reinforcement of hygiene, and the opportunity to be part of a story--one that can take unexpected turns that television, or even novels, would flinch from...let alone the increasingly formulaic and boring mileu that passes for Videogame 'storytelling.'

After all, don't we love Shakespeare? Isn't it a given that If you can sit through five acts of slowroll storytelling, that there's something to be said for roleplaying? The answer is yes. But like Shakepeare, like Drive, we can't merely stand on the laurels of Brando and Brannagh or a Steven Seagal film from 1990--We've got to do better and put on some good-nay great pieces of work. This propensity for unearthing the Little Keep on the Borderlands every five years isn't honoring our forebears. We've got to get fresh with it.

You're going to ask yourself, 'I'm just a DM,' or 'I'm just a Diehard Wizard, Thief, or Fighter,' you're going to say, "What can I do for the love of the game?" My answer is, Do better. All the sound and fury in the Internet has distracted us from what can make us better at our craft. All it takes is a little mindfulness, the echoing of a few mantras when you can manage it: "For the love of the game," "Show, don't tell," and "Time is precious." Prepare for posts following that bode the beginning Of Game Journal J's Prophecy (and the dawn of a new blog to come:)

Post Rotational Syndrome

This is something of a wall of text, but seeing as you're getting into it, I thought I'd chime in with my experience of playing D&D over the last decade.

1) The pacing of something that's a shared experience of imagination is so different from everything else, where entertainments are fast, faster and fastest, very goal-oriented, and very videogamey (even prime time TV has gone this way with CSI et al, and it's very refreshing to do something cooperative, uncertain, and spontaneous. Even when there's a paper adventure the DM is going by, D&D and roleplaying in general is both unpredictable and fun. D*D was a real escape, it didn't want to profit from you (seemingly), no-it wanted to give you a world with a magical sword, a spellbook, an epic story, heroic deaths and even greater triumphs, all realized through cultivating your imagination with people of like mind. Sounds great, no?
2003:
2) Over the course of its run, 3.5th edition brought almost all of the manifold Pen and Paper enthusiasts into the fold of the same game. White Wolf, the makers of Vampire et al, destroyed their continuity while revamping their rules, alienating all but the most harcore LARPers. As LARP was always a very different set of folks from us, this meant that we got the best of the creative and mathematical talent from White Wolf's playerbase. D&D had never been more fun, and almost every house game you walked into was strong, with people showing up weekly and regularly leveling their characters 1-13. The death of the primary publisher of off-genre RPGs would prove pivotal later on.
2007:
4) Wizards, the Publishers of the primary D&D game, made a new edition of the game, which aimed to capture more of the Warcraft and Video game crowd by toning down the elements of the game that were oriented toward storytelling and simulation. While attrition and a sense of segregation between those with a causal approach,
--those who were already praising WoW and calling off their attendance at weekly sessions,
--and those more dedicated to the game,
was already becoming clear, the burden of sorting out which rules to play, and moving forward afterward,
2009(ish):
5) a group of game designers at Paizo splintered away, updating the 3rd edition rules, and generally capturing the more intelligent, tech-savvy and modern members of the playerbase. Those that neither used the internet for its intended purpose, nor attended Gen Con or Origins, regarded the hype around this 'new' game as somewhat quaint. For whatever reason, during the first 18 months of Pathfinder's debut, too few of the casual crowd was educated on how Pathfinder would bring new life to 3rd edtion.

This left the casuals and the oldtimers, who either adopted 4th edition abortively, kept on playing 3rd edition, or got into Pathfinder very reluctantly in an awkward position. Most of them already were at a point where they were at sessions about 1/2 of the time, and with the burden of figuring out how to play a new rules system, their internal calculus told them (correctly) that girlfriends and job applications were a better investment of time. D*D didn't hold its promise any longer. Players alienated themselves from each other as they either despised their playmates for being too stupid to play the 'best' game, or simply refused to have an opinion, and delved into playing WoW full-time.

Why did the dream die?
During this decade, the grounswell of visual ammunition for the imagination in the form of the Lord of the Rings movies helped immensely to make games exciting and boost a feeling that mental images were shared. But around 2006, the enthusiasm of more and more of the players I respected most wore away. They got their gaming fix during the week playing WoW (they admitted it was inferior, but so convenient!). They tuned out to the onrushing waves of content from Wizards that was constantly adjusting the power levels of the game. Second-rate jobs became increastingly unpredictable in schedules, and holding a group together required another individual beyond the DM just to 'coordinate' games.

By the time edition wars came along, it was the nail in the coffin. People didn't want to put the effort into pushing through their campaigns. Smartphones at the game table made things still more distracting. And at about this moment, new editions of Starcraft and Warhammer were released, sapping more energy from the nerdy tabletop community.

And most importantly, the sort of geeks that play D&D have never been good at conversations where consensus is pushed through. Mostly, they are happy to sit on their opinions, and are after all entitled to them, since they decided around 7th grade that they were different enough to spend 5 minutes or more a day thinking about elves and wizards instead of pokemon and baseball. That takes a certain nonconformist attitude, eh? The consensus needed to push past edition wars just wasn't something that a pack of introverts could arrive at.

After the sundering, Geeks' other great weakness reared its head: Inability to Network. Networking geeky groups is harder than ever, despite the internet. As the recent Finkelgate attests, the quest for a girlfriend, and probably a job, can get majorly snafu'd by having your real name branded with true nerdiness. (I'm talking the really geeky stuff here. Loving Ocarina of Time and Marvel Comics is about as mainstream as you can get). At the dawn of facebook, it was very clearly decided that D&D was an off-limits topic due to the possibility of Alyssa Banezak reading your feed.

And the alternatives to renetwork playgroups have not materialized. About a half dozen websites compete for true matching app functionality, and some people haven't moved beyond the use of forums and even NEWSGROUPS. So without the ability to discover adults that share your hobby discreetly through the internet, one would have to randomly proposition people in your life that just might be interested. They will probably turn out to be flakes--and as anyone that has leveled a character to 2 simply to see him go to the binder due to poor attendance can attest, flakes make great 5th and 6th players. When you're trying to get up to 4, they don't cut it.

And D&D can't take a hit like that. It takes effort and investment to get into, something that WoW et al. doesn't. You could, in that time, work on your golf game or your knowledge of the Jersey Shore, both sure paths to advancement in the workplace, rather than risk the time on this retro game where you use PEN and PAPER and DO MATH IN YR HEAD WTF? D&D requires effort, something that this casual-tilting age eschews, and therefore its potential players are few and far between.

Now, only diehards continue to play weekly and level up their characters. And without the continuity of a storyline, D&D really is WORSE than playing a video game.

Last year I learned that the author of the much lauded first book of Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path (the recipient of the industry's highest prize) no longer played weekly with a group, and had playtested the adventure online over VOIP. I'm sorry, but if the people making your product don't have the time/ability to play with it in its intended form, your product is officially now in the realm of the arcane. The numerous flaws in the adventure's scenarios were overlooked (it's braindead easy, 5-foot corridors are not a fun place to have a fight) by the journalists in the zeitgeist, and thus it was proved to me that only the true fans, those that aren't critical of their love enough to realize it's a mummified corpse, are still playing enthusiastically.

Inward-turned and in-bred. That's the direction D&D is headed.
Is D*D really dead?
I sure hope not.
I hope someone out there will prove me wrong.

Traveller 'verse: the empire

The empire sounds kind of sinister...

But really it's more 'distant.' It's the paradigm. Hereditary families called nobles look after the somewhat time-consuming and arcane world of interstellar relations...after all, who else has time to sit for 3 months on a starship just to go to a meeting?

The empire itself regulates and protects interstellar trade. Everything else resides in the jurisdiction of its member worlds, which can have any government they like: It has a very, very few rules:

• No non-imperial warships with jump drives (there are some ways to skirt around this, megacorporations have heavily armed route protector cruisers, there are interstellar mercenary corporations...but internal warfare can't interfere with commerce at large without the Empire intervening.
• All tarriffs to member worlds must be lower than those to non-member worlds by 50%; and tarriffs can't exceed 5%.
• No use of nuclear NCB weapons;
• No slavery.

The empire can of course claim jurisdiction in cases of interstellar commerce, and has its own court system. But there is no appeal to the imperial level: a judgement on a planetary level is final, it's final.

The empire supports itself through something like a 0.5% revenue tarriff on interstellar trade, which adds up to ALOT of money, and a fairly large military, though ground forces are not organized on a federal level except in times of war (think civil-war-era USA)

The imperial Credit is the usual medium of exchange in interstellar trade, though member worlds are allowed to issue their own currency, and even make it the only legal form of exchange onworld. Rate-fixing is not a problem, because it's illegal.

So there you have it.

The traveller universe: Technology.

Imagine everything we have now in the cozy early 21st century. Then add a few fantastic items, and a few steps backward.

• Medicine is performed with microsurgery and advanced pharmaceuticals. Infectious disease is not a danger...unless it's bioengineered.
• Strong taboos mean that getting cybernetic upgrades or biotech grafts are unknown technology. Somewhere, somebody knows about these things, or did, but they were a mad scientist and didn't last long outside their own Private Idaho (a small asteroid in the outer belt of the Glisten system).
• AIs and robotics have a similar taboo around them. Outside of table service and simple floor cleaning, people don't really like robotic workers, for two reasons: one, most planetary governments pursue policies of maximum employment, and two, the Imperiums' biggest threat, the Zhodani consulate, is a robot-friendly, telepathic-mind-control government. A branch of the Zhodani government is actually called the thought police.
• Imperial law forbids the enslavement of sentients. No one really devotes much time and money to creating AIs, as they're likely to have some legal problems if they were successful.

So, what is there, since we know what there isn't?

• Compact hot fusion. Buses and trains can and do run on fusion power plants.
• Contragravity devices, and artificial gravity aboard ship...these are very cheap, and so almost all personal transport (motorcycles, cars) are built on this principle, at least on high-tech worlds.
• Superconducting battery/capacitor cells. "Energy cells." Battery-operated devices use universal sizes, kept in place for at least a millenium.  Even cellular communicators have interchangeable batteries.
• Sensing technologies that we can logically expect. Chemsniffers, Biosniffers.  Densitometers are highly sensitive at mapping the interior of objects using gravity sensors. (probably uses the CG tech; though we have crude densitometers using radioisotopes.)
• Gauss (magnetic accelerator) weapons
• Laser weapons.  These were at one point standard issue to space crews (extrapolation), but have never been as damaging as similarly-sized gauss weaponry at the personal scale.
• Bullets are still pretty good for regular folks, and cheaper.
• Flying power armor suits: "Battledress."  Different interpretations of canon have these on almost every regular army trooper, sometimes only on imperial marines.
• 'Reactionless' Thrusters. These require power, and increase an object's inertia. Imagine a rocket that burns nothing. These are pretty much the cheapest way of moving something, and so are ubiquitous. Even on lower-tech worlds, these might be imported and installed in gasoline engine vehicles (unsupported in canon, but believable extrapolation).
• Nanomaterials have developed to the point that carbon fibers and thermal superconductivity are normal for military hardware; some efficiencies in manufacturing may be due to nanoassembly...but...things are still made in factories and sold by retail/mailorder, not asked for in from a household factory.
• Some biotechnology, however most of these advances (in agricultural production) have been made millenia ago, and the technologies are now open-sourced or sold as a service package (chemlawn). Folks are just as creeped out by the throught of putting a rebreather lamprey on their face as you are...so most people just wear masks when they have to.
• REALLY cheap computers, and a large market for specialized devices. IR 'shades,' about as light and expensive as a pair of Oakleys, are available. Brands exist that combine these with handheld cellular devices to lookup products...but a lot of people value their privacy.

The traveller universe: the way it is.

The driving logic behind Traveller is the Jump drive. A ship sublights out to 'shallow space' (at least 100diameters from any celestial body) charges up its jump grid, does some calculations, and falls out of existence.

It remains in Jumpspace (a poorly understood other quantum of reality) for about a week, undisturbed, and pops out somewhere between 1 and 4 parsecs (depending on the quality of the drive) away. A jump always takes about 160 hours.

The implication is a powerful one: Information from another star system is at least one week old. There is no other form of FTL travel in the traveller 'verse. No FTL radio. The capital of the Empire is about a YEAR away from the imperial fringes on 'swift boat' 4 parsec mail carriers.

This means many things: progress has a hard time equalizing itself--to support the technology level we have on earth we need a 6 billion person economy. To support more advanced technology, even larger economies of scale are needed. So there's sort of an upper ceiling on what technologies are out there in the market.

For two, there's lots of nooks and crannies in the universe for the little guy. Because of the information gap, small(er) businesses can thrive because of the agility compared to the interstellar megacorporations.

For three, the only way such a huge volume of worlds (there are hundreds of trillions of souls in the imperium) can be governed is through federalism. In fact, the Imperium is just the interstellar layer of government; anything beneath is the business of its member worlds. The empire simply subsists on tiny revenue tarriffs on interstellar trade, and even with so little, there's a fleet for each subsector of space.

The Traveller Universe: the really brief version.

Humanity has risen and fallen twice, passed through manifold ages of barbarism. It is several thousand years into our future, but that frame of reference has stopped mattering a long time ago.

In the beginning, humanity developed jump drive. The US, Japan, the ESA, China, and a few others invested in a new spacegoing technology that allowed a starship to travel a parsec (~4.3 ly) in a week. the first jump away from earth, we contacted an advanced interstellar empire with materials and nuclear technology far superior to our own...who were, apparently, human in every respect. Of course the nutjobs with their ancient pyramit conspiracies (TM) were very excited, but the reality proved far more pressing than the metaphyscial angst.

The Vilani Imperium was a baroque autarchy, with stagnant corporations so byzantine in their power structure that Earth's political scientists could not pin down where enterprise stopped and government began (and vice versa). Innovation was strictly regulated in the Imperium, leading to software built on ROMs, almost exclusively rerun entertainment, and two thousand years of no progress. The Earth humans already had superior medicine and computers; the vilani weapons and engines had a significant edge.

Several centuries of alternate war, peace, and trade resulted. The Earthlings replaced the Vilani at the top of the empire, but the influence was two-way, like the British in India. Eventually the Imperium of Man fell, too, leading to more than a thousand years of piracy and isolationism on the planets of the former empire.

NOW...
A new empire has risen. It's really more like a federalism, to anyone that cares to look closely...but that's for the next chapter.