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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):
Hello. This is Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice,
with me, Michael Cule
and me, Roger Bell_West,
And this is the beginnings of summer outside
after the hottest April on record, again
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!
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
I try to spend all my profits on gaming products
If you want to contribute, paypal.me/rogerbw
Thank you very much, gentlemen, we appreciate it
muchly
Onward!
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.
And if it turns out to get resurrected in a new form,
well, shrug.
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.
Sometimes visibly.
I have not yet seen bloodshed at my gaming table.
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.
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.
I suspect these days, at the very least you would want
pregenerated characters for that.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
and things keep turning up on the shelves. Shudder.
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.
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.
And I think this is especially true with horror games.
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."
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."
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."
I'm not the only person who needs to do this to save the
world, sure.
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."
Yeah, but that's worth it.
Arguably yes, but it's not something you can do with a
song on your lips, or at least I couldn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you do it with style, we may give bonus points to
your next character.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The entire universe, you say?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and you can build the characters into each
others' backstory.
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".
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.
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?
Well, I think the answer to the last question is "how
could it not?", but let's get there the long way.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In HeroQuest, presumably you could, because you can do
anything with anything.
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.
Raufoss high-explosive incendiary round made from
fragments of the True Cross, from three miles. Hell of a shot.
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!"
"We are not so different, you and I…"
Yeah, that's the one.
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.
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.
We didn't call those clocks in my day, we called them
progress bars or checkboxes, but eh.
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".
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?
I do not have any qualifications in project
management…
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.
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.
That's fair.
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.
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.
A lot of my villains have teleport devices and the
ability to survive jumping off towers, because you should really do
that.
As long as an onlooker completes the incantation by saying
"nobody could possibly have survived that!"
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.
Heroism can be tiny, and that's fine. It's still
satisfying to play.
In Call of Cthulhu, the difficulty is finding any
creature which isn't going to kill one or more of the players.
Cultists.
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.
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".
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".
Presumably; I haven't played it, but there's no secrecy
here. The players are well aware up-front that that's the situation.
So how do they frustrate the evil, if they do?
Don't confront them directly.
Send somebody else in with a bazooka?
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.
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.
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".
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."
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.
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…"
Is that not part of the TV action show experience?
Being disappointed? Oh, hell yes.
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.
That's his perception?
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.
I think you need a number for their armour, their
dodge…
Armour is about two or three points, yeah. Dodge is half
number plus three, same as any other defence.
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.
What does go along with this is, there is a personality
first.
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".
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.
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.
That's why, you know, "job skills are this number". This
guy is very good at what he does, he's a 14.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. I'd certainly say that's fair.
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.
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
Leave a message on the website, or email podcast@tekeli.li
And we will be back again later in the summer, which
looks like it's going to be blazing.
[disgruntled noises]
He hides in holes in the ground when the sun is
shining.
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