The Seven-Sided Die

Doctor Checkmate makes an astute point: "Buying product after product has always been the methadone to treat the addiction to play." I need to take this to heart, considering the state of my wishlist.

However, playing more often isn't an available solution, so what's left? I suppose just self-control (and a tight end-of-year budget) will have to suffice. In theory I'll have more time free to play and prep for play in the new year. Until then, my best bet looks to be finding a free or public-domain no-prep collaborative game that I can play/run with my current group. On the other hand, the AD&D 1e game I'm currently running is a lot of fun and I certainly don't want to back out on it already.

Does anyone have any tips for running D&D (of any edition; I can probably adapt anything) with no or next to no session prep? The one lone dungeon that I've had on the drafting table for the past two months is still giving me conniptions for lack of time to flesh it out.

I like that roleplaying has one of the best cost to value ratios of any media hobby. It's such a good return on investment that my hobby's value is more often bottlenecked by the lack of time I have to read all the material I do get. At the top of my to-buy list is a one-book game (InSpectres, entirely due to the InSpectres in Spaaaace! play reports at lame mage) and a five-copy set of a generic rules system (Solar System);  each are a mere US$20. That's an incredible price for how much play I hope to get out of them.

Alas, even such a low-cost hobby can give me pains in the wallet these days. That little "US" notation before the dollar sign is the latest part of the problem. It wasn't long ago that I could buy online from RPG retailers in the US nearly on-par, but the Canadian dollar is falling against the US dollar at a dismaying rate. (Aside, I don't really get that either. If the US economy is tanking, why do money traders still consider the US dollar "safe" and flock to it during economic crises?)

I've heard that the margins in RPG publishing can be pretty thin. Are we going to see games slip out of print because of gamers reining in their hobby spending in the face of the looming recession?

It has been so rare in the past that I've been a player and not the GM that I sometimes have a hard time coming up with characters concepts that I'd enjoy playing for an extended time, rather than the one-off or occasionally-recurring characters that a GM usually needs to make. So, that's the only reason this idea is notable at all, and I wanted to write it down somewhere so that it wouldn't pass into my mental ether before I ever get a chance to use it.

A while ago I read with interest Jim Henley's Actual Play of a game with his kids set in the DC Animated Universe, which planted the seed. Greywulf has been on a huge Supers kick for the past while, throwing up fully-statted and CG-illustrated characters at an impressive rate. He got me interested enough in Mutants and Masterminds to read this great review of M&M 2nd Edition at RPGnet by Jacob X that sold me on the entire genre. (I've never been a Supers fan, but I like what I read there.)

So today Grief jumped into my brain and made the final connection between thinking about Supers roleplaying and actually wanting to play.

Grief is a tragic hero, maybe an anti-hero. His power is to make anyone relive their moment of greatest grief and pain magnified a hundredfold. It disables his opponents, stopping guards and thugs in their tracks, and (so he thinks) justly punishes criminals with the vulnerability that they exploit in others. The catch is that he experiences whatever memory he induces, too. He's become somewhat inured to it and isn't disabled by it anymore, but at what cost to his humanity?

Obviously that concept would work best in a noir or Punisher-style game where tortured anti-heroes are interesting. I haven't thought up much of his background, but there's scads of tormenting possibilities with an empath/telepath, let alone one who can also project and magnify what he perceives.

A variation on Grief I considered after the initial idea was the Rag Man, whose power also burns the memory from their mind as he induces and intensifies it to paralytic proportions. Lifting these horrible memories from their minds like an old rag and smoothing it over like a fresh linen, though, he permanently etches them into his own memory, accumulating a debt of grief and sorrow that might yet bury him. And what of those who realise what he's done and, despite the sadness of the memory, treasured it? His arch-nemesis might be only a relentless cop who knows his only memory of his dead daughter has been taken from him and who now has nothing the Rag Man can use against him. (A cookie for anyone who gets the reference in the name.)

I don't have a system in mind. Oddly, I think either might work in a game of Sorcerer, given that sort of humanity-testing internal conflict.

There has been a bit of chatter about the Tyranny of Fun[1. I picked that post because it excerpts the core bits of Melan's larger post at the RPGsite, which you can read here: The Tyranny of Fun: status report.] that has come to dominate the design of D&D. I have some sympathy for those on both sides of the argument. Chatty points out that it injects more incendiary material into the edition wars. I agree that demonising fun is stupid.

On the other hand, I do see a problem with thinking of fun as most important (it creates an false dichotomy between fun and whatever is supposedly sacrificed in its name), and I do think that because 4e tries to make everyone awesome[1. RPGpundit has more in The Tyranny of Fun pt. 2.] it ends up making awesomeness meaningless.

However, I think that the people arguing that a Tyranny of Fun exists are missing the real crux of this issue.

A commenter on a Paizo forums thread about Gygaxian Naturalism said this:

3e rejected a lot of Gygaxian crap, and boy am I glad it did. Some people might like the idea that a 2nd level party might wander into an ancient red dragon's lair, but I wouldn't want to waste my valuable gaming time with such stupidity.[1. pres man, Sun, Oct 5, 2008, 11:41 AM, in 4e's Rejection of Gygaxian Naturalism]

What makes me cringe when I read that is the idea that our time is so scarce and precious that we cannot afford to make any mistakes on the way to Maximum Fun. This idea is of a particular structure that, in leisure pursuits or love, promotes a race to the bottom.

The unfortunate reality is that safe, guaranteed fun does not exist. Seeking it leads to the rejection of anything that might be only perceived as a threat to that guarantee, regardless of the actual value of a new idea. The irony is that we, as humans, are not maximally entertained by the predictable and the routine, so standardising and formalising the elements that make play fun encourages finding a lowest common denominator. Seeking Maximum Fun forces us to aim squarely at mediocrity.

How does this relate to Gygaxian Naturalism in that quote above? Much of the success of D&D is that you can do anything. You can do anything in one sense, in that the DM can theoretically allow anything to happen; but the real impact of that feature of roleplaying games is that you can try to do anything, and see what happens. If you can't choose to walk blindly into that ancient red wyrm's lair at second level, there are hundreds of other things that you can't choose either that might end up being fun in ways that nobody at the table could have predicted. Constraining action to only what will predictably result in fun tears the entire foundation of D&D's fun out of the game.

It's not a Tyranny of Fun, really. It's a Fear of Unfun.

In a recent comment, Jonathan linked to his collection of articles on Gygaxian Naturalism. Reading ravyn's Ecology for World-Builders from that list, I suddenly understood why the first edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide has so many rolls for random encounters in wilderness forest: prey animals.

I always thought that the number of encounter checks listed for forest travel on page 47 of the DMG was excessive—six times per day-night cycle—especially during long overland treks. However, these present an opportunity for the conscientious world-builder. The typically low-interaction encounters that result when normal animals are the "wandering monster" allows the DM to inject colour and setting information without unduly slowing the pace of the game.

A well-designed, naturalistic random encounter table isn't just full of monsters. Non-aggressive creatures—prey animals—filling many of the Common table slots adds verisimilitude to a game world. Having the party stumble upon a Shambling Mound makes a forbiddingly-described forest more concretely dangerous in the players' minds. In the same way, spotting deer bounding in flight away from the party establishes the game world as a living place with minimal effort.

Encounter a prey animal such a deer can immediately establish a number of assumptions for the players: there is foraging here; something eats the deer; we can hunt if our supplies run low; monsters we fight are the dangerous exception; we can seek deer paths to move more quickly; we are not alone out here. Giving some though to the local predator-prey relationships and reflecting this in an area's random encounter tables can make this effect nearly effortless during the game. Including prey animal encounters, whether random or scripted, also helps set the tone of a game in which players are expected to resolve events in ways other than combat.

Obviously these effects are not limited to systems like D&D that include random encounters. These same principles can be applied to narrative and scene-based systems to good effect, but I suspect that using mundane details to invoke associations and convey colour is somewhat more obvious to GMs and players familiar with the modes of play that those systems thrive on.

I installed WP Captcha Free here the other day, but it appears to be a broken plugin at least with this version of WordPress. The trackback from Tommi's post about using random encounters in his fascinating dungeoncrawl game was never recognised, and Jonathan from The Core Mechanic emailed me to say that comments were being eaten by an "invalid data" error. Damn.

So, goodbye WP Captcha Free! You sucked, and I really should have done... um, any testing after installing you. Lesson learned.

I've got another post brewing about random encounters, inspired in part by some links that Jonathan's been collecting on Gygaxian naturalism.

After my last post about kids and roleplaying games, a dear friend send me a link to an article by GeekDad: Teaching Kids to Roleplay is Only Natural. He points out that kids don't really need to be taught to roleplay since their play naturally involves playing pretend and experimenting with different identities and behaviours. (He goes on to talk about games that are good for different age groups, including some I hadn't heard of.)

Of course, the structured nature of roleplaying games is a different story. Teaching kids to play roleplaying games is going to be a challenge. The point of a ruleset (when compared to freeform play) is to inspire play ideas that you might not otherwise think of without them. You might assume that teaching the rules is going to be the hard part, but I think the real challenge is how to offer these tools (the ruleset) to the kids without constraining them and squashing their natural creativity. To invoke a colour-book metaphor: Being able to colour inside the lines is a useful skill, but being able to colour outside them creatively is equally (or possibly more) important.

Chatty recounts a freeform roleplaying game he ran for his 6-year-old as a bedtime story in Bedtime Campaign: Nico outsmarts Smaug the Dragon! I like the idea of creating quick fantastic adventures like that, and there are some good lessons to be learned by reading between the lines. The pacing, with its flurry of simple events and quick cuts, is particularly good.

There are some things I would have done differently to bring more of the kid's ideas into the story. For example, this exchange I thought missed a great opportunity to cede some authorial control:

Nico: Can I have a few things to help me?

Prince Guk: Sure, just go ask my Wizard on top of the highest Tower.

Nico: (Excitedly) I go there!  What can I get?

Chatty: The Wizards gives you a potion that can turn you invisible.  How’s that?

Nico: Cool!

After that first question I would have asked instead, "Sure, what do you ask for?", and kept the idea for an invisibility potion in reserve in case he had no ideas. That's not to imply that Chatty didn't do a good job since he clearly had a happy kid afterward, but it's a useful exercise to look at ways to improve on a good technique.