Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice

Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice! is a podcast by Roger Bell_West and Michael Cule, in which we pontificate on role-playing games.

Try the RSS feed!

You can also listen on iTunes, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

Please email us your comments and suggestions, to "podcast" at the domain "tekeli.li", or comment on individual episodes. Most discussion is now happening on the forum.


Learn It Fast Enough Before Something Eats You 01 June 2025

Download

This month, Mike and Roger talk about introducing players to new systems, and how much you stat up your villains.

We mentioned:

Alarums & Excursions, Unknown Armies, The Dee Sanction, Trail of Cthulhu, Different Kinds of Crunch, the Esoteric Order of Roleplayers playing The One Ring, Exalted: The Fair Folk, Invisible Sun, GURPS for Dummies, How to be a GURPS GM, The Dracula Dossier Fury of Dracula (boardgame), QuestWorlds (formerly HeroQuest), Blades in the Dark, and Cthulhu Dark.

We have a tip jar (please tell us how you'd like to be acknowledged on the show).

Please use the discussion forum at discussion.tekeli.li rather than commenting below.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

Transcript (thanks to Shimmin Beg):

  • Michael Cule

Hello. This is Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, with me, Michael Cule

  • Roger BW

and me, Roger Bell_West,

  • Michael Cule

And this is the beginnings of summer outside

  • Roger BW

after the hottest April on record, again

  • Michael Cule

and looking forward to the hottest May on record, and probably the hottest June — never mind, let me not talk about this, let me smear on some sun cream and let's talk about a couple of final questions out of a venerable gaming institution, which is now folding. Questions about introducing people to new systems, and about villainy. But first, Roger has the opposite of some villains to introduce — he wants to thank some heroes of our podcast!

  • Roger BW

Yes, thank you particularly to Robert Wolf, Dave Morris, and Glenn Lewis, all of whom have put some money in our tip jar. This is very helpfyul, it encourages us to keep doing it, it pays for the occasional half-cup of coffee — well, tea in my case

  • Michael Cule

I try to spend all my profits on gaming products

  • Roger BW

If you want to contribute, paypal.me/rogerbw

  • Michael Cule

Thank you very much, gentlemen, we appreciate it muchly

  • Roger BW

Onward!

  • MUSIC SEGUE

  • Michael Cule

I was bemoaning, last time, the ending of the venerable gaming apa Alarums and Excursions, which has been accompanying the developments of the hobby since the 1970s, and has been a proximate cause of several of them. And every month, Lee Gold, the editor, would put forward a proposed topic of debate, called the Ignorable Theme, which dashed about all over the place. I viewed some of them for inspiration for parts of this podcast in the past, and I thought, in honour of the passing of an institution, I would ask Roger to join me in looking at the last two topics which were proposed before the magazine came to an abrupt end.

  • Roger BW

And if it turns out to get resurrected in a new form, well, shrug.

  • Michael Cule

We will mention this if it does. There are murmurings in the background about how to do it without Lee to lean on, as we have for so many years. Right, ignorable theme number 594, for May deadline April 21st. Introducing players to a new rules system, especially to new combat rules. And I find this a piercing and apposite question just at the moment, because having become discontented with the GURPS *Monster Hunters *game I was running, and one of the players having become discontented with the Dungeon Fantasy game which was introduced as a substitute while we had people going away on holidays, I am now thinking again that maybe if I'm going to run something other than Runequest and GURPS ever in the future with this group, I'm going to have to start bringing the more obscure things in. And they have been tried in the past a bit by my tendency to experiment with new systems. But I'm feeling that way and just at this moment in time, if they want inspiration from me, they may have to accept something they're not used to. So I got out all the piles of stuff I have thought about running, and I have of course, being me, run into difficulties which are causing me confusion and confunction. Mostly this is inspired by Unknown Armies, something I'd really like to run. There are difficulties — it strikes me, and this applies to all games, there are difficulties at three levels. There is the difficulty of introducing the system and what it does, what it does well, and what it demands of the players. Tied in with that there is the difficulty of finding a background with which to use this particular ruleset which will show it off to its advantage. And then there is the difficulty, which the question alludes to, of getting them practised with the things that they can do on a small scale. And combat is the most intimate and detailed of systems in most games for a reason — it grabs the heart and makes the blood to pump.

  • Roger BW

Sometimes visibly.

  • Michael Cule

I have not yet seen bloodshed at my gaming table.

  • Roger BW

Just remembering the early days of GURPS, there was a recommendation, very common for that, and occasionally for earlier games, that you should essentially get your players to stat up some disposable characters and put them into a combat so they would find out how combat worked.

  • Michael Cule

I think in principle that's not a bad idea, but I would be inclined to spread it out a bit and make up — I would start the campaign with a series of in media res scenes, in which each player gets to do the thing they are most noted for, most built for, and a duel, a non-lethal duel, which tests the combat systems and all the fancy stuff like parries and repostes and deceptive attacks (to use GURPS terms) — all the neat things it can do in a single scene, would be extremely useful, I would say.

  • Roger BW

I suspect these days, at the very least you would want pregenerated characters for that.

  • Michael Cule

Pregenerated characters are a thing that I like as a GM, but my players are sometimes less than respectful of my ability to construct them.

  • Roger BW

But for the specific purpose of learning a new system. I mean if one of your players already knows the system, then you can hive off the character generation work on them, but I'm thinking here, you're going into Unknown Armies, you want people to see the highlights of that system. One way to do that would be, "these people are not your characters, these people are going to fail horribly, probably — because it's Unknown Armies — but here is how you can get used to the mechanics of them doing so".

  • Michael Cule

The sacrificial demo characters, the people who die just before the opening credits roll. That's a neat thing. I feel a strong temptation whenever I think about it of not telling them that these people are sacrificial characters, and then sacrificing them anyway.

  • Roger BW

I still have a notion of a horror scenario in which, you know, you are the expendable meat, and in the first half hour you all get horribly murdered by the monster, and then the investigators turn up. But that's a separate thing. Something that does link into this — a term that used to be bandied about a lot and is less now, but I think is worth considering, is "system mastery". In other words, the idea that the players should be not just familiar with, but actively competent at the system. This is a thing that is very much what you expect in something like a D&D or Pathfinder game — players are expected to choose their character upgrades, and choose the right ones so that their characters are maximising their combat effectiveness and so on — but that's very much not the way I run games. To cliché it in the other direction, I would say "I want you to play your character, not the system" and that is one of the reasons I stick with GURPS a lot more than perhaps I should, because most — not all — of the decisions you're making when playing a GURPS character are either directly or immediate proxies for a decision that the character would make. "Am I going to charge in and make sure I get that hit on the guy no matter what, or am I going to fight more defensively", that kind of thing, which has an obvious real-world analogue. So on the one hand, I don't want to have to teach the system. I want people to say "don't worry about your pluses, just tell me what you're doing". On the other hand, it's really nice when players remember after the third or fourth session that what you do is, roll against the skill I just asked you to roll and tell me how much lower you get on 3d6 than that skill number. Thank you.

  • Michael Cule

I do have one player who we have to remind "This time it's d100s. Last time it was 3d6", and the other way round. I found, looking at Unknown Armies, a difficulty which I'm not sure, but I think is a growing feature of modern game settings in which two things: the setting itself and the group in which the players are formed also have to be made up. And this means that — it gives me a slight difficulty with Unknown Armies, because there's a lot of lore, and a lot of background, and there are a lot of ideas which aren't familiar ot the average gamer, even the average horror gamer may find some of them difficult, and I don't see how you can make meaningful choices about who your characters are and what your group is like - what your group's aims and desires are, and what holds them together — without a huge chunk of world lore, of setting lore, and that is going to be a bit of a difficulty. Ideally, what I want is something like "you're washed ashore at this foreign country and you have to discover them, and you're a group of people from a totally different culture" which was the opening of Empire of the Petal Throne, which is still a classic.

  • Roger BW

Well, I have seen the starter kits. The one I have seen is Raiders of the Lost Mart. I don't know if these were Kickstarter extras or something else, but I've certainly seen them floating about and I think they are available. And what you get there is not just a setting but also a set of characters, which, I mean on the one hand, as you said, some people very much want to generate their own characters. On the other hand, you have at least approximate relationships with the other people - in this case you are the night shift at the supermarket

  • Michael Cule

and things keep turning up on the shelves. Shudder.

  • Roger BW

But that certainly makes it much easier to get the hang of things, because you don't need to learn all the deep lore of the setting; you can learn it in the course of play, and hope you learn it fast enough before something eats you.

  • Michael Cule

I would say that Unknown Armies and a number of other games I've read offer a promise of being able to do just about anything within the assumptions of the game for anybody, but it doesn't provide an easy way into the setting, an easy way of discovering the setting, that isn't a pregenned subset of the setting and a pregenned campaign, and I find that a little annoying. I was thinking — and by the time next week comes, I may have decided on something else entirely — that I didn't like The Dee Sanction, but that a historical version of Unknown Armies might fit the basic idea. That you are working for Elizabeth's court as counter-supernatural officers and you're there because you have been guilty of some piece of monstrosity or witchcraftery and are already condemned to death. I was thinking that might be a very Unknown Armies kind of game, and I might be able to do something with it. But it feels like if I impose that on the players… they need to give meaningful consent to what I'm proposing to saddle them with for some months, if not forever.

  • Roger BW

And I think this is especially true with horror games.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, quite. There's a subset of horror games which is Call of Cthulhu, which has a certain group of cheerful assumptions built into most of the gamers I know, which says "you're going to die, try to have fun whilst doing it."

  • Roger BW

The heroic attitude to this I think is, "I will give my life, my health, my sanity, in order to save the world, and I will be happy to do that."

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, but Call of Cthulhu says "You're going to try, and you might have a temporary success, but doom waits for you — Scene 4."

  • Roger BW

I'm not the only person who needs to do this to save the world, sure.

  • Michael Cule

No, that's not it, that's not the message in the true Cthulhoid thing, It is "the world is doomed; your human efforts to save the world are doomed and will at best give a few more decades of life to the universe."

  • Roger BW

Yeah, but that's worth it.

  • Michael Cule

Arguably yes, but it's not something you can do with a song on your lips, or at least I couldn't.

  • Roger BW

Now being fair, there are some adventures, particularly the ones tagged as traditionalist adventures for Trail of Cthulhu, in which — I'm not going to name titles here, but explicitly, you cannot win. The world is going to end in the course of the scenario. You are going to watch it do so. And that is not a sort of game that I'm interested in playing, but that's fair enough — the people I know who run games aren't terribly interested in running it either.

  • Michael Cule

The problem is the gap between what you tell the players at the start and the surprises you have to have if you're going to run the game. This is drifting away from the given topic, but we always do, and we always did in Alarums and Excursions. But it is writing the introduction without being dishonest, but without revealing everything as well. I think I'm just going to have to ask them to trust me to not be a monster, even though I am sometimes.

  • Roger BW

I mean, these people have been playing with you for a while. Presumably they have some idea of the sort of thing that you consider acceptable to put in a game by now.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, and I have a long collection of the times they have kvetched at me about the things I have put in a game. Right, so let's assume we've got beyond that step. We've convinced them that this is a setting, and they can come to an agreement about what sort of group they are in.

  • Roger BW

Yeah, and as a GURPS player, I do tend to think of setting and system as quite separate things. I know that many of them are tied in. That's a thing I wanted to come on to. I wrote a blog post about this recently. The term "crunch" in the description of a game is traditionally used to mean "lots of real-world numbers", so GURPS will say "if you get shot with that particular handgun while wearing that particular sort of armour, it's going to hurt approximately this much", that kind of thing. Sometimes this has little room for error. If you get shot with a bazooka while wearing a string vest, I don't care how tough you are as a normal person, you are not going to survive that.

  • Michael Cule

If you do it with style, we may give bonus points to your next character.

  • Roger BW

But there is a separate thing which is — well, the GURPS one you can reality check. Some of it may be impractical, but you know, "how far can a healthy person march in a day and how useful are they at the end of it", that kind of thing. But there is also what I think of as "abstracted crunch". I've been listening to the Esoteric Order of Roleplayers' play of *The One Ring *recently, and they have things like "I spend a point of Hope to get a bonus on this die roll", and "when my Hope goes below this value I am Disheartened and I get penalties on all my rolls", that kind of thing. I find it very hard to attach that to a decision the character is making. But also, you can't reality check it. You can't say "how hopeful is Bob when he tries to jump this chasm?" and to me that is just as much crunch, but it's harder to relate to because I can't visualise it. There is no direct process that is being modelled here; it lives entirely within the rules.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, Unknown Armies is heavy on psychological crunch. It wouldn't be the game it is if it didn't. The number of unpleasant things that have happened to you changes your personality slowly as you stress out, and there's a limit to the amount you can come back from that. And it affects not only your psychological state, but also some of the skills. Your ability to relate to people may go down, and your ability to lie to them may conversely go up. It's a subtle sort of a system, because the "light side" abilities are also what you use to resist the psychological impact, and your ability to resist is going to go down as those light side abilities go down. It's interesting.

  • Roger BW

Well, I think it's a big improvement over the traditional Call of Cthulhu "when you lose enough Sanity you're useless", because apart from anything else, it's not explicitly bad. It is bad for the character in some ways, but it is good for them in other ways.

  • Michael Cule

It degrades them as a human being, but it might make them tougher in facing the things that they have to face; but if you get too degraded as a human being, you stop being able to access the really neat abilities that come with them being human. Being human is part of doing magic and manipulating the universe, and you have to preserve that. Which is a very nice touch on the game. Tell me, do you find the Power characteristic in Runequest to be one of the things that you can't imagine? It's a simple measure of how much of a certain type of-

  • Roger BW

In Runequest it's fine. In Call of Cthulhu it's a bit rougher for me, because it gets used as a proxy for your starting Sanity, it gets used as not only "do you resist the magic?" but also to some extent "do you resist the very persuasive guy?".

  • Michael Cule

I think that there are points of games that become so abstracted that you can't get any sort of hold upon them. I think psychological changes are good from an internal identifying with the character point of view, and a chance to chew scenery and do some emoting from the roleplaying and immersion point of view. But when you get things like… well, in my memory, Exalted: the Fair Folk is the worst offender, but I'm willing to put forward Invisible Sun as something I couldn't grok in the bloody slightest. It's an absurdist setting with an absurdist system, in which you are playing people who used to be magicians trapped in an earthly incarnation and are now just coming back to being magicians again, and you can't understand a single sodomising thing that the setting is handing you. You can't understand the effects you make, you can't understand the sacrifices you make to get better effects. It's all absurd levels of setting mastery and system mastery and I can't grok it at all, and I think you need something that people can relate to, even if they're superheroes, even if they're selling their souls to the devil, you need something that they can grasp hold of and make that character and that experience real, but that is a rant for another day.

  • Roger BW

Well, yeah, I mean, I think you're of a mind with Stan Lee who, you know, Spider-Man, X-Men, the idea that the superheroes should have relatable problems as well as superhero problems.

  • Michael Cule

It isn't just about them being teenagers, any more than Buffy is just about being a teenager and the stresses of going to school, but it's about that as well.

  • Roger BW

So a couple of system points that came to mind for me were, the more specific the game gets, the more I expect the players to do. Not because I necessarily want them to be thinking in rules terms, but if you're playing say a GURPS superhero, your powers are going to have different ranges, and it's probably a good idea if you're aware of that and bear in vaguely in mind when you decide "oh, I'm going to energy blast that guy on the building over there". Well, how far away is he? He's on the building across the street — you don't have that range, but you do have that range on your mind control. You know, this is the kind of thing that a character can reasonably think about, but a player doesn't necessarily expect because it's not exactly in the superhero mindset

  • Michael Cule

You do want your players to be an expert in their own character, in what makes their character workable; and I have had criticisms from players when I let them have things and I didn't really understand what I was allowing them to have, and I can't handwave those things as player. I have to say, if it's there on the character sheet, it's there in the rules, I have to say "yes, you can do that" and then frantically scramble around for a means to control that character and stop them from dominating.

  • Roger BW

The entire universe, you say?

  • Michael Cule

Cosmic? No, no, I should say no, you can't have that level of cosmic power, or no, that level of cosmic does not give you that level of power, more often.

  • Roger BW

The other example that came to me, and we did in the original brief have the mention of combat — Traveller, and specifically here we're talking about the relatively new Mongoose Traveller, which you have run and I am currently running. And that definitely needs people to know what their options are, and I think it is harder than GURPS in that respect. As I say, in GURPS you can say "I'm being very committed about this attack and I don't really care who else might hit me as I'm doing it", that's fine; but [Traveller] has got this major/minor action system, and if you are used to a system in which you basically say "it's your turn; what do you do?" then that can be quite tricky, because you can, for example, if you're in a sustained firefight, you are probably doing minor action Aim, major action Fire every turn, and you're getting that plus one every turn. If it's the first round of it, then you might do minor action Ready Weapon, major action Fire, so you don't have to take a turn to do it, this isn't the one-second GURPS turn, but you aren't going to get your Aim bonus. Or you could say "I'm going to trade my major action for two minor ones", which is one of the standard options, "and this round I'm going to Aim, Aim, Aim, and next round I'm going to Aim, Fire, and I get a plus four." None of these is a hard thing, but they are things that you have to have in your head. Rather than say "I'm going to take my time and take a really good shot" the way people do in GURPS, you have to be able to say the way this works in terms of the specific action mechanics.

  • Michael Cule

I think with something like that — something that isn't immediately obvious in the way it works — on the other hand GURPS isn't immediately obvious — I'd say that running a small-scale combat with multiple player characters would be the way to go with that, rather than a one-on-one person duel, which is what I'd tend to recommend with something like GURPS.

  • Roger BW

And if you've got players who are prepared to read stuff, then just running this perhaps on one's own and then writing it up, die roll by die roll, mechanic by mechanic, might be helpful too.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, the descriptions you get in rulesets are not always including the things that you need to learn, or not all of them. It would increase the length of books immensely. There's probably, I mean there have been markets for system mastery books, and there is a How to be a GURPS GM line but there isn't How to be a GURPS Player as such.

  • Roger BW

Well, there sort of was — I do not know what the licensing deal was, but there was actually a GURPS for Dummies, it was not written by any of the regular GURPS authors, and it is basically, from what I have seen of it, it's basically how to power-game GURPS. I do not know why this book exists; I do not know why it was authorised; shrug, business, etcetera. You probably haven't heard of it and there is a reason for that.

  • Michael Cule

No, I have heard of it and there is a copy on my shelves, long-unconsulted. I got the impression it was somebody who had done a fantasy campaign with GURPS and wanted to tell the world about it. GURPS can be bent in many different directions, and I think that's probably true in any detailed and complex system.

  • Roger BW

I would recommend in fact the "How to be a GURPS GM" books even to players. They are mostly aimed at the GM, yes, but three are things like Sean Punch's notes on "these are the skills that at least one person in the party reason really needs to have in almost any setting; here are the skills that everybody should be at least not completely incompetent in", that kind of thing.

  • Michael Cule

I think on the whole I'm going to say that if you're introducing a system to people for the first time, or after a long disuse or with a new version, then you should probably plop in front of them "here's where I want to use this", a campaign frame at the very least, and then let them, if they can, design the player character group, if it's important.

  • Roger BW

Well, we're diverging a little more, but I think this comes into "how does the group decide what is the next game that is going to be played?", and I think my experience is generally, one or more GMs each produce one or more campaigns that they would be happy to run, which will typically say both a system and a setting even when those aren't tightly bound. So I might say, you know, "GURPS fantasy in the islands of Araterre", Banestorm, and you know, a paragraph or so of "you are going to be pirates eliding the nasty bits of piracy, because you are heroic pirates with teeth that go ting.", that kind of thing. So to my mind, the choice element of that has been done before the game gets actually started, though I am increasingly actively preferring — not just putting up with — havin a session zero which is not… I mean, session zero has now come to mean the bit where you negotiate "I'm not going to talk about eye injury because Player X is squicked by eye injury", which is fine, that needs to be done, but session zero to me — I like, even now that I'm playing online, perhaps especially — I like to get the character generation done as a group. Partly so that the players can say "okay, we've only got one person with first aid, perhaps I should take some as well", but also partly so that they can talk about "okay, this is the sort of thing that X has done before the campaign started — is that a thing in the setting?" and I can say "yes, you might have been over here at a time when that was happening". It is the interactive building of a background, especially with something like Traveller where you've got this careers system.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, and you can build the characters into each others' backstory.

  • Roger BW

Mongoose Traveller makes this explicit, but it was always a thing that was "okay, why are you particular people hanging around together?" and the answer might well be "I know him from that time when… and he knows her from that other time, and when we heard about this particular thing, we thought, 'I need some like-minded nutters to join me on this project".

  • Michael Cule

Okay, I think we've thrashed this thoroughly with some useful tips to the newcomer. I don't think I've got anything left to say on this particular topic, but let's move on to the second.

  • MUSIC SEGUE

  • Michael Cule

Ignorable theme number 595 and last, June deadline, May 21st. Do you stat and equip your intelligent and powerful villains who are going to defeat the inferior "heroes"? Why, or why not? Does doing or not doing this influence how you run the session-stroke-campaign?

  • Roger BW

Well, I think the answer to the last question is "how could it not?", but let's get there the long way.

  • Michael Cule

Okay, I'm going to say this as clearly as I can. I tend not to stat out villains until I know I'm going to need them, and I tend to have layers of villains ready as we move towards the final villain. And the early villains may defeat the heroes, but I try to make sure they've got a good reason not to kill them. The final villain should fight the hero to a standstill and then lose — that's what I'm aiming for, but the dice may tell me something different.

  • Roger BW

When I was preparing for this, I realised that I very rarely do this, but I think it is because my games are not generally about, narratively about, the direct confrontation. The climactic moment is much more "the scheme has been foiled" than "I punch the villain on the jaw".

  • Michael Cule

I ran The Dracula Dossier, the climax of which had to be them facing down Dracula — twice, because he respawned and they had to go to the spawning location — and I did not bother to stat out Dracula until they had fought their way through a number of his minions and a couple of other vampires conspiracies with other, lesser bosses.

  • Roger BW

Some of that is harking back again to the GM learning the system. Presumably some of it is, you want to know what's going to be an interesting combat challenge and at the start of the campaign you can't really say that.

  • Michael Cule

It's a very fine line to draw designing an enemy who you want to be too much for the players to handle but who won't just wipe the floor with them.

  • Roger BW

This is really outside my experience. I'm not doing sufficiently procedural games that this is a thing, because if there is a confrontation, it is very likely to be at a time and in a place I did not expect, with a person with whom I did not expect to get a confrontation.

  • Michael Cule

That's true too. The players… such things arise when the players have either misunderstood what you say, or have taken a tactical turn which strikes you as being barking bloody mad. The players have misunderstood how dangerous this is supposed to be, and you've decided "well, I did warn them", and decide to let them have a good hour. And yeah, in the early stages of what turned into the Dracula Dossier campaign, they were encountering vampires for the first time, and discovering sometimes that they were much harder than they could defeat expect by a well-organised joint effort. And sometimes discovering that they were surprisingly weak and puny, but then there are weak and puny minions at the bottom of the vampiric food pyramid.

  • Roger BW

Just remembering playing Fury of Dracula with you, and finally we are on Dracula's trail! Oh look, here is a very minor minion, and we've just used all our expendable resources to stay alive fighting him — how are we supposed to fight Dracula?

  • Michael Cule

Gather resources and having Lord Godalming go shopping, I think is the canonical reply apply to that. That board game system is very good at that. I've played Dracula a couple of times, and I never felt not threatened, not in difficulties. Even if I won, I'm always trying to create traps for the players and trying not to gloat when they're going in entirely the wrong direction, which is the harder point, I think. But it's not like that in a roleplaying game. You want to very gradually and interestingly and dangerously bring the players and their opposition together. I'm not sure there is a meaningful way to defeat Dracula by boardroom manipulation, even though he's deeply embedded in much of the business and the politics of that setting.

  • Roger BW

In HeroQuest, presumably you could, because you can do anything with anything.

  • Michael Cule

Well… no, no, you can only use an appropriate skill to gain an appropriate effect — and we must call it QuestWorlds these days, we really must. But in [Fury of] Dracula there are separate systems for finding out where Dracula is, finding out who Dracula controls, and finally killing the bastard require different sets of skills and different mechanics. In the end, whilst he is still unalive, or still undead, then he is a menace and will come back no matter how much you struggle and how much you sacrifice. So yeah, that game is set up so that there will be a final climactic conflict, for good or for ill.

  • Roger BW

Raufoss high-explosive incendiary round made from fragments of the True Cross, from three miles. Hell of a shot.

  • Michael Cule

No, I'm pretty damned sure that you need to get up close to Dracula to be able to blow him up with fragments of the True Cross. Otherwise he'll dodge. And there should be a realistic concern that he's going to turn members of the team, or offer the entire team a high rank in his organisation and immortality at some point. "You have impressed me, mortals!"

  • Roger BW

"We are not so different, you and I…"

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, that's the one.

  • Roger BW

Thinking about it, a lot of the games I run, there is a nefarious plan ongoing, and in theory one could make the villain's skill rolls to make progress on that, whether that is Leadership to get his minions to do the right thing, or Mad Science to advance the design of the device, or whatever. In practice, I don't think it makes a difference in play if I do what I actually do, which is one of two things. One is "this is the timetable which is going to happen if the PCs don't interfere", which is perhaps informed by their skill levels but I'm not going to be making die rolls as I go along. And the other is, of course, the plan will be complete three minutes after you burst into the lair.

  • Michael Cule

I think there is a mechanic in Blades in the Dark, which is the clock. The GM starts clocks and the players start clocks on long-term projects of theirs, and when the players succeed at things their clocks advance, which may include finding out where the lair is. And over time, and when the players screw up, the villains' clocks advance. They're going to advance to a degree anyway.

  • Roger BW

We didn't call those clocks in my day, we called them progress bars or checkboxes, but eh.

  • Michael Cule

Conceptually they are, but they use a clock design. Similar things happen in Grez Stolze's Unknown Armies and Reign, where there are vast opposing conspiracies and you're only in control of what you're trying to do. I think, if memory serves, he does favour the other side making dice rolls, but I can see an argument for just abstracting it out and saying "they're doing this unless you find a way to stop them. Unless you delay the delivery in Bucharest, that's going to go forward; and if you delay the delivery in Bucharest, somebody will come looking for you".

  • Roger BW

I'm sure half our audience — both of them — is going to be screaming at this, but what about a Gantt chart or some sort of task-dependency graph?

  • Michael Cule

I do not have any qualifications in project management…

  • Roger BW

Well no, but that's already what you are doing, and here is a tool that will potentially make it easier. I'm not saying a full-on project management software package or anything like that, but as an extension of the clock idea: this thing is happening, when this thing gets to here, that other thing can start; when it is complete, this other thing can start. And then there is a tree that leads down to the ultimate victory of evil.

  • Michael Cule

Okay, let me explain a thing that I was going to bring up anyway, which is that I am not going to want to commit myself to what the evil people are actually up to until as late as possible. I will have to improvise things about the universe which I didn't know at the start. The players will tell me things about the universe which I didn't know at the start. And I have to incorporate them later. I normally have a vague idea about where everything is going, but I don't make what is really going on final until some way into a long-term project.

  • Roger BW

That's fair.

  • Michael Cule

If I do do this Dee Sanction/Unknown Armies crossover thing, I have a certain idea about what may really be going on and what they would have to do to frustrate it, but I could change that, turn on a farthing and change that to something else at any moment. The default "what I think is going on at the beginning" is there at the beginning, but it may not be there at the end. I can't now recall whether Dracula's final project that they discovered was what I went in with — I think it was — but there was certainly a lot of elaboration, and therefore as long as I'm consistent, I can be held to be fair.

  • Roger BW

I think that's a very important thing, not only to do, but to be perceived as doing. If you're going to let them shoot at the villain, don't just fudge the roll and say "oh, he evaded". There is an actual in-world reason why you are not able to shoot him.

  • Michael Cule

A lot of my villains have teleport devices and the ability to survive jumping off towers, because you should really do that.

  • Roger BW

As long as an onlooker completes the incantation by saying "nobody could possibly have survived that!"

  • Michael Cule

Alright, that's true too. I think this question assumes things about villainy that I'm not entirely sure are true. Powerful villains who are going to defeat the inferior heroes — first of all, the "heroes" shouldn't be in quotation marks, which it is in the question. They may be heroes even if they're too puny to actually do any heroism, and in Call of Cthulhu that's always the case.

  • Roger BW

Heroism can be tiny, and that's fine. It's still satisfying to play.

  • Michael Cule

In Call of Cthulhu, the difficulty is finding any creature which isn't going to kill one or more of the players.

  • Roger BW

Cultists.

  • Michael Cule

Alright, even cultists. Cultists come in numbers, which is their defence. They keep coming in a wave of fanatical fearlessness and wielding inappropriate and crude weapons, but they can still kill you with the inappropriate and crude weapons.

  • Roger BW

I am just reminded of the game Cthulhu Dark, which is a very lightweight game, for which the combat rule is "if you fight a mythos creature, you die".

  • Michael Cule

Saves time. And presumably the flavour text on the mythos creature says "and these are the numerous ways in which they can make you die".

  • Roger BW

Presumably; I haven't played it, but there's no secrecy here. The players are well aware up-front that that's the situation.

  • Michael Cule

So how do they frustrate the evil, if they do?

  • Roger BW

Don't confront them directly.

  • Michael Cule

Send somebody else in with a bazooka?

  • Roger BW

As I say I haven't played it, but I think the general idea is try to be subtle; try to undermine them in indirect ways, rather than just going down and taking them on hand to tentacle.

  • Michael Cule

I think if you can't throw dynamite in a shoggoth's face, life is not worth living. I mean it's not a good idea to throw dynamite in a shoggoth's face; it just spreads them about. I would recommend a delivery of liquid nitrogen to be the preferred method of dealing with shoggoths.

  • Roger BW

One side note. One sort of NPC that I do absolutely stat up very firmly and fully indeed is the NPC who is potentially going to be along with the party for something. For example, she hasn't come into play yet, but in the 2300 campaign that we're playing, the captain of the ship on which you're all crew or scientists, I have a full set of stats for her because I may suddenly need to say "well, here is a situation in which the captain needs to roll Space Tactics, and I know what her bonuses are".

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, there's also a case for saying "well actually, I travelled with the circus when I was young, and I know how to juggle."

  • Roger BW

Oh, I have a system design that's largely based on that, for TV action games, where basically your backstory starts as a blank, either long-term, or for an individual episode and then it can be forgotten about thereafter.

  • Michael Cule

I think that last provision is going to cause people to write in to Points of View or, that doesn't exist any longer, is going to write in to your webpage "excuse me sir, but I remember back in episode 49…"

  • Roger BW

Is that not part of the TV action show experience?

  • Michael Cule

Being disappointed? Oh, hell yes.

  • Roger BW

I'll just mention in passing, there's one thing I do in GURPS, which it occurs to me I really ought to write up for The Path of Cunning — the micro-character. I may have mentioned this before. You know, this guy is a guard. He's reasonably competent at being a guard; his number in the things he needs to be good at is 12. That's his dexterity, that's his weapon skill, that's his hit points.

  • Michael Cule

That's his perception?

  • Roger BW

Quite possibly. His number in the things he's not so good at, like resisting blandishment, is maybe a 10. But even if the PCs are going to get into a fight with him, that's more or less all I need; and then if a fight does start, I can spin up secondary numbers like damage easily enough from there. But it's a lot less work than a full GURPS — even an animal write-up, and the animal write-up is normally pre-done for you anyway by the bestiary, but it's certainly much less work than designing a character who isn't going to be all that relevant anyway in detail. And if he ever is, well, I can spin him up into a full-sized character.

  • Michael Cule

I think you need a number for their armour, their dodge…

  • Roger BW

Armour is about two or three points, yeah. Dodge is half number plus three, same as any other defence.

  • Michael Cule

When you're giving him a ten to resist psychological manipulation, then you're not really going to want to give him any weaknesses, he's generally weak to that approach.

  • Roger BW

What does go along with this is, there is a personality first.

  • Michael Cule

I'm terribly sorry, but my guards are usually… I remember being a security guard myself, and I was either a) talkative because I hadn't seen anybody for twelve hours, or b) inclined to say "I'm terribly sorry sir, I cannot do that for you".

  • Roger BW

Yeah, and that's the thing — it doesn't need to be a big, complex, fully-developed personality. But there is a personality. This is the guy who's a bit bored, he's a bit of a shirker, as you say, he's had nothing to do since he came on shift except hassle some small children who are trying to get through the city gate. If you look weak he will try to bully you; if you look strong he will knuckle under to you, whatever. It doesn't need to be a complex thing, but that to me is much more important to the players' experience of interacting with the guy than what his numbers are.

  • Michael Cule

Numbers only really come up when you attempt something aggressive, especially combat. But he should be a plausible person to do the job, whatever the job is.

  • Roger BW

That's why, you know, "job skills are this number". This guy is very good at what he does, he's a 14.

  • Michael Cule

The guy that runs the forensic lab should be 15 in his professional skills and have a little more personality, because you're probably going to come back to him, but the guard on the gate, no. In a comic book or in a short story, you can give him a tragic family life and a child who he isn't going to see because the players are going to cut his throat, but in this, no, he's just a mook, a figure in the background — it's really very sad, all things considered.

  • Roger BW

Well, that's the thing — I don't need to write it out in full, but I at least want to have those hooks, so that if that interaction gets more complex and interesting, I'm ready to spread that out and say "here is that actual guy". And if the players just want to say "okay, here is our three silvers to buy your girlfriend something nice" and he accepts the bribe and he lets them through, well, that's fine. We don't need anything more than that.

  • Michael Cule

Yeah, I think you roll their Bribery skill in secret, and if they fail he gets all umph-y, and if they fumble, he takes the money and sics somebody on them to follow them and see what they're doing. Yeah, alright.

  • Roger BW

But I think it's a combination of a) not wanting to do the work unless I have to, because I am lazy, and b) being more interested in the people than in the numbers.

  • Michael Cule

It's an admirable attitude, and I think it ties in with my decision to not stat out the villains until they absolutely have to be statted out. This may find you suddenly having to create a vampire character in a hurry, which you really don't want to do under any system I've ever seen, but it will save you time. And the players' fears, and the reputation that they gather and the small horrors that they encounter along the way, will build that character up in the players' minds, and will make the final confrontation all the more worthwhile.

  • Roger BW

Yep. I'd certainly say that's fair.

  • Michael Cule

Okay, I think we have come to an end of that. Let me hope that there will be a resurrection, a flowering of a phoenix flame in some other place for Alarums and Excursions, but from now on you're probably going to hear me talk about it a whole lot less.

  • MUSIC SEGUE

  • Michael Cule

If you want to tell us about the things you used to have in your roleplaying system which are now gone forever and it makes you feel sad, well, we will listen, so you can send it to

  • Roger BW

Leave a message on the website, or email podcast@tekeli.li

  • Michael Cule

And we will be back again later in the summer, which looks like it's going to be blazing.

  • Roger BW

[disgruntled noises]

  • Michael Cule

He hides in holes in the ground when the sun is shining.

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Archive
Tags 7th sea a taste for murder aces and eights achtung cthulhu agon alchemical baroque amazing engine amber apocalypse world arkham horror ars magica artesia ashen stars banestorm battlelords of the 23rd century battlelords of the twenty-third century battletech behind enemy lines blades in the dark blue planet blue rose bluebeard's bride brindlewood bay brp buffy the vampire slayer cabal call of cthulhu castle falkenstein chill conan continuum cthulhu eternal cyberpunk dark conspiracy diaspora different worlds discworld doctor who dracula dossier dragon age dragonmeet dramasystem dread dreamhounds of paris dune dungeon world dungeons durance dying earth eclipse phase empire of the petal throne en garde everway exalted fading suns fallen london fantasy fate fear itself fellowship feng shui fiasco fief for players forgotten futures forsooth! freemarket fringeworthy fudge gamma world gangbusters gear krieg genesys godlike good society grey ranks greyhawk gumshoe gurps gurps time travel harn harnmaster harp hero system heroquest hillfolk horror houses of the blooded in a wicked age in nomine in spaaace infinite worlds jags wonderland james bond 007 lace and steel lady blackbird larps laundry files legend of the five rings liminal lords of creation luftwaffe 1946 madness dossier mage the ascension masks masterbook merp microscope millennium's end mindjammer modern age modern day monster hunters monster of the week montsegur 1244 necessary evil nexus nexus the infinite city night's black agents nobilis nova praxis numenera ogre over the edge paranoia pendragon pre-written adventures primetime adventures reign reign of steel rifts ringworld rocket age rolemaster runequest runequst savage worlds science fiction shadowrun sorcerer space 1889 space master space opera story games sufficiently advanced superhero 2044 tales from the floating vagabond talislanta technomancer termination shock the arduin grimoire the cthulhu hack the esoterrorists the great dalmuti the laundry files the mountain witch the price of freedom the quiet year time travel timelords timemaster timeship timewatch torg trail of cthulhu transhuman space transhumanism traveller traveller 2300 troika twilight 2000 universe unknown armies vampire vampire the masquerade victoriana viewscream warhammer frp warp weird war ii werewolf the apocalypse world war ii wraith the oblivion yellow king rpg
Produced by aikakirja v0.1