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.

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A Favour You Can Pick Up And Load 01 March 2021

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This month, Mike and Roger regret a failed campaign, do each other favours, and contemplate the role of the trap in a modern game.

We mentioned: Hero 6E and Champions 6E at the Bundle of Holding (until 15 March), Ars Magica, Lace & Steel, Roger's Discourse dice roller, Mortal Coil, Leave Not a Rack Behind, Torg, EABA, Reign, GURPS Conspiracy X, Monsterhearts, En Garde, Niška, GURPS Social Engineering, the Grimtooth's Traps series, What's New?, Have His Carcase, the first Ars Magica dungeon and The Story of Aye and Bee.

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

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

Transcript (thanks to Shimmin Beg):

  • Michael Cule 00:16 Hello, this is Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice me, Michael Cule

  • Roger BW 00:22 and me, Roger Bell West

  • Michael Cule 00:24 and it's leaning towards spring here in High Wycombe. Still a little cold, too cold to go out and walk around the park in. And walking around the park is about all I'm going to be doing soon, because the government has assured me that I'm particularly vulnerable. I'm a delicate old flower and I should stay indoors a lot. And my thanks to Roger for doing my shopping for me this week, by the way

  • Roger BW 00:49 staying indoors with your exceedingly large collection of books and games and things, to be fair,

  • Michael Cule 00:54 and in a very comfortable hothouse temperature as well. But I miss people, obviously, it's terrible. I miss actual people being in the room with me.

  • Roger BW 01:07 Meanwhile, as one person doing the shopping, I say people are - nah, nah, they've gotta go. Have them all out and turn it over to the word lice. But on a happy note. This is Episode 99. Gosh, yeah, that's what you call a happy note, isn't it? We're gonna have to do something special for next time, Roger. I haven't thought of anything. Well, I can bring you some gin.

  • Michael Cule 01:29 Drunk podcasting is not good podcasting. Roger. Besides which, I would prefer Calvados.

  • Roger BW 01:35 I've got some of that too.

  • Michael Cule 01:37 Yeah. Okay. Let us go and talk then you and I, and what are we going to talk about this time?

  • Roger BW 01:45 We have a confession and self-examination.

  • Michael Cule 01:50 Oh, yes. Mea culpa, mea Maxima culpa - in Latin, you'll notice that.

  • Roger BW 01:55 We have thoughts about favours - owing people favours, being owed people's favours - how does that work in a game? How should it work?

  • Michael Cule 02:04 And also, what you should do when you just heard the click underneath your boot. And you know, you're in deep, deep trouble.

  • Roger BW 02:12 Before any of that, I'd like to say thank you to Robert Wolf, who passed us the money to encourage us to keep the show going. If you would like to do the same, paypal.me/RogerBW Will reach us.

  • Michael Cule 02:44 The nice people at Bundle of Holding send us free samples of their weekly, slightly more frequently sometimes, deals on gaming PDFs. Ah, this this way isn't one we're going to talk about very much. Because we've already gone on at considerable length about the reasons that Hero isn't the game system for either of us.

  • Roger BW 03:13 Which is not to say I wouldn't be happy to play it, but I don't think I'm ever going to run it.

  • Michael Cule 03:17 I think the bit of my brain that might have been taken up by Hero got taken up by GURPS instead, and it feels a better fit. But they are featuring the sixth edition of Hero and the sixth edition of Champions from which Hero sprung.

  • Roger BW 03:40 Yeah, and most of this has not been on a bundle before. Some of the books have but your basic heroes sixth edition rulebooks, Volume One, Volume Two, which incidentally, are more pages than GURPS by a substantial margin...

  • Michael Cule 03:57 Yeah. We are not gloating here; we're just pointing it out.

  • Roger BW 04:03 But I mean, I think it would be fair to say that they're aiming for a similar sort of market, if you downplay the superhero side, and as I said, Champions is a separate bundle from the other Hero system stuff here. I mean, you've got your core rulebook, which gives you the basics of everything. And then you can add on to that the fantasy book, the science fiction book, whatever else you want to do for the specific campaign you want to run.

  • Michael Cule 04:29 Yeah, yeah,

  • Roger BW 04:30 I'm not opposed to this. I like the way it works. I just have I will admit, I have irrational reasons for disliking Hero. When I first met it, it was mostly Champions and the people who were playing it were the sort of people who really liked niggly point optimizations.

  • Michael Cule 04:50 Yeah, there's something, it must be confessed, there's something of that on the GURPS forums as well. Some days.

  • Roger BW 04:58 Yes, and I sneer at them.

  • Michael Cule 05:03 Fortunately, on the internet, you just have to assume somebody's sneering at you all the time.

  • Roger BW 05:10 Yeah, pretty much. I mean, if you contribute to us, we will come around and sneer at you in person. But yeah, that's,

  • Michael Cule 05:17 that's hand-crafted. That's hand-crafted sneering.

  • Roger BW 05:19 when the legal situation allows, obviously. Yeah, but yeah, I have friends who like the system, I have one friend who has practically everything Hero and Champions. And some of this is new to him, at least in PDF. Yeah. He has shelves full of this stuff. I'm try to persuade him to run it sometime. Hello, you know who you are, I'm not going to say your name.

  • Michael Cule 05:45 I don't think we're not sneering at this point. Because I could look up from my desk and see a stack of GURPS books, which if you stood 'em end on end would be as tall as I am.

  • Roger BW 05:56 Yeah, the great shelf of GURPS, which would not fit legibly in the camera I'm using to do this is not in this room, but... only some of it is. Anyway. So yeah, I think this comes down to, it's not a system that I'm likely to run, but I don't think it's a bad system.

  • Michael Cule 06:14 No, if it's your cup of tea, it'll be on

  • Roger BW 06:18 this is a good chance to get in on it for relatively little money.

  • Michael Cule 06:21 And we're not doing it, for once we're not doing it at the last minute. And this will be until middle of the month.

  • Roger BW 06:28 15th of March. Yep.

  • Michael Cule 06:29 Yeah. All right.

  • Roger BW 06:30 Plus or minus time zones, whatever.

  • Michael Cule 06:33 So those of you who already know that this is the sort of thing that you like, may care to pop over there and see what you can drool over.

  • Roger BW 06:39 A few months ago, we had, we talked briefly about an Ars Magica play by forum game, and it's not happening anymore. So yeah, post-mortem, self-criticism.

  • Michael Cule 07:07 Oh, there's a lot of self-criticism here. This is a tale of failure. With I think a small moral, and a certain bit of self-discovery in it. I found that doing the thing online, intermittently, posting, was a problem. Now it's not just being online. When I run things in a more traditional fashion with five or six people gathered via chat, then I do find some slight exaggeration, in my stage fright, which I think was overridden when we could meet face-to-face by the rituals of getting there, meeting people, settling down. And that got lost in the traffic of other mental activities. But when I'm not face-to-face, when I have to click on at a specific time, then I do find a certain amount of nervousness. It goes when I'm GMing or playing in a group, because I'm used to that, but I was having to go through the same level of nervousness before each time I logged on, took a look for new posts, and had to think. It was making it harder and harder.

  • Roger BW 08:38 It's, something I found with projects that haven't worked is, I look at the thing, and I think "I don't want to do this right now. It's gonna be a lot of work." And then I go back to it a few hours or a day or two later, and it's still there. And I look at the thing and now not only is it going to be a lot of work, but I've been slow about it.

  • Michael Cule 08:57 Yeah. And this exaggerated that the stress of the whole thing. Also, I wasn't prepared for how slowly it would drag along; how often I had to turn to my players and say "what do you do now"? That you can't really say "here is the list of dice rolls I anticipate you needing to make; we'll come back with" more than about two in advance. And so it loses something when you don't have the thrill of the dice rolling, the thrill of that moment of chance, face-to-face with people, people's live reactions, even if conveyed by camera.

  • Roger BW 09:56 One thing that does occur to me is that, at least for myself, I don't know how much how true this is the other players - I think they may have made the world better than I did - but I was often getting stuck because in order to work out what a plausible thing was to do next, what my character would think of doing, I needed to know the world's natural philosophy. Normally I would say the world's physics, but I think in this case natural philosophy is the right term

  • Michael Cule 10:21 you're quite right

  • Roger BW 10:22 and indeed, its unnatural philosophy but because I have not already absorbed that, I was probably relying on you more than I would in a in a normal situation.

  • Michael Cule 10:34 yeah

  • Roger BW 10:34 Combine that with the other things you've just talked about and that also goes to slow things down, and make my posts shorter, because I say "I've thought of this and this" and you can then say to me "well okay, thing one is not a thing, it's not a relevant thing in the game because it doesn't work that way, and then thing two, we can try that" and then I have to come back and think of another thing.

  • Michael Cule 10:54 Yeah, and I think the fact - and this is another part of Ars Magica which made the game difficult - the fact that we never got away from you all playing mages. I think one of the other players was doing his best to move into playing a companion and that was gratefully received, but the problem is the way Ars Magica is set up, the magi are the drivers but they are also lab rats stuck away doing things scientifical, natural - I beg your pardon, natural philosophical things, unnatural philosophical things - in their own sanctuaries and not being out in the world, or rather only one of them at a time being out in the world - by the way, the fact that Ars Magica calls it a laboratory for some reason has always grated with me. Sanctum or workshop works better, but laboratory feels centuries later, it's just wrong. But on the other hand, it's based on the word labour and working place, and so, well, perhaps I shouldn't think that way. You were gonna say, anyway.

  • Roger BW 12:31 Well, "laboratory" is from 1600

  • Michael Cule 12:34 yeah yeah, far far too late.

  • Roger BW 12:37 Well, you've got "laboratorium" before that, but in English it does not come in before then.

  • Michael Cule 12:42 Well, what does laboratorium mean?

  • Roger BW 12:44 A place for work.

  • Michael Cule 12:46 yeah

  • Roger BW 12:48 What it was used for in medieval England, I mean, I have no idea, you're closer to being a scholar of medieval Latin than I am.

  • Michael Cule 12:57 And I'm nowhere near. But yeah, I would perhaps I wouldn't have kicked so hard if they'd called it the laboratorium. There's enough Latin in the game as it is.

  • Roger BW 13:06 But one thing that struck me - I was reminded of this in a recent episode of the Grognard Files. Dave Morris was saying one of his early roleplaying experiences, basically people working out from scratch how roleplaying might work, was that they had a limited time. Their GM would give them, you know, 15 minutes for this player as a one-on-one, and then he would go away and then another player would come along and 15 minutes of that player; and the players worked out, "hang on a minute, if we join forces, we can get more role playing each".

  • Michael Cule 13:39 yeah

  • Roger BW 13:41 and it felt as though that we were having that. So, it's obviously more work for you, because you're running four complicated characters in parallel.

  • Michael Cule 13:51 In parallel situations that often don't touch. I kept wanting your investigator to come out of the crime scene and have a word with other people but you never did.

  • Roger BW 14:02 Yeah, I have a feeling this was probably a thing I was meant to do. I wonder whether - this is with no suggestion that I know the system better than you do, because I absolutely don't - but I do wonder whether one might start with the approach of taking the player who knows the world best, saying "right you're playing a magus, everybody else is playing companions or grogs or whatever, everybody else gets to learn a bit about how the world works while playing a relatively simple character and getting involved and doing stuff".

  • Michael Cule 14:35 That's certainly the way I do it around a tabletop. I'm not sure it would work in the - in fact, given that I was doing it as an established covenant which had lost a lot of its members and was trying to recruit and recover, I think that might have been a valid diegetic, as we sometimes say, approach as well. But - that's good counsel, but for the next time.

  • Roger BW 15:12 The other thing that occurred to me on a technical level: I remember some time ago, you were speaking favourably of Google Wave as a as a midpoint between traditional forum gaming and the actual live stuff.

  • Michael Cule 15:27 Yeah

  • Roger BW 15:28 It does occur to me that if you can set a time and get people together, discourse threads will work quite like that. You know, somebody posts something, it will appear at the bottom of everybody's screen.

  • Michael Cule 15:39 Yes. On the other hand, if we can get everybody together, I think I have not yet come across somebody who says no, I can't do that, I don't have a webcam.

  • Roger BW 15:51 This may be why Google isn't running Wave anymore.

  • Michael Cule 15:53 Well, true. I mean, it was intended, I think it was primarily intended as a work collaboration tool. And maybe its children are being included in later developed...

  • Roger BW 16:08 I suppose these days, people would use Discord, which is just... lots of people are using it, it's just horrible. Yeah,

  • Michael Cule 16:15 I don't think it's suitable for running either face-to-face chat or text chat. It's there as a supplement to other things, specifically to video games. And I think, on the whole, it's not at the top of the list of the ones I've tried. At the top of the list is unfortunately Zoom, but the two campaigns I'm in that are using it are using it on the back of somebody else's subscription for other purposes, because great gamers are a noticeably stingy bunch. Quite right too. We spend enough on books and other stuff. And I'm spending still more on - I spent seven quid on a PDF of Lace & Steel and its one adventure, because I couldn't be buggered to get the physical copies I have out of storage. And I feel ever so over-luxurious and self-indulgent,

  • Roger BW 17:34 I think I have a physical copy of that somewhere with the cards and everything.

  • Michael Cule 17:38 Yeah, me too. But it's not a game I've ever played with its own system. And I don't think many people have.

  • Roger BW 17:46 I played it, but I never run it and I don't remember the system at all well.

  • Michael Cule 17:50 yeah, you remember it used cards for magic and for fencing. And it used tarot cards for character generation - one of the first to do so I think, Anyway, tale of my sorrow. I don't know. I am a little more practiced with Ars Magica now than I was before, which is all to the good for the time that my memory is lost in the depths of my optimism again.

  • Roger BW 18:24 and there's now software support in my Discourse dice roller.

  • Michael Cule 18:28 I appreciated that. Somebody else may be grateful before I am. Ask him if you want the technical details, folks,

  • Roger BW 18:38 it's got more use than the Genesys dice roller that I also built into the code.

  • Michael Cule 18:43 Yeah, there was one problem that I found in the running of the game, which I knew was going to be there, which was the fact that people who have experienced the system have experienced a specialized particularized version of the system, the one that has one storyteller and their troupe, perhaps more. They've inherited the traditions of how the system works. And this is a problem with anybody who's experienced with any game but Ars Magica deliberately leaves areas of doubt and uncertainty for you to figure out as part of the game,

  • Roger BW 19:32 so I could come along thinking I know Ars Magica, and what I actually know is Bob's Ars Magica that I played five years ago.

  • Michael Cule 19:38 Yeah, yeah. And this was the reason I ran the Dawn of Magic game that I did, which I really regret having died in flames that - I don't want to give listeners the idea that this happens to all my campaigns. It doesn't, we run successfully 90% of the time, but it used to be 100%. But never mind.

  • Roger BW 19:59 Well, there's also the consideration of, if a campaign is still going and everybody's happy with it, then you can't count it as completed successfully, but everybody's still happy with it.

  • Michael Cule 20:08 True true. And I do revisit campaigns. I would love it if there were a really good game of setting up magic and discovering what magic can do. I'm looking at, because somebody pointed out to me that that was what it did, I'm looking at that, what's it called - Mortal Coil, that was it - I turned back to have a look at Mortal Coil and some of the pre-generated system settings for it, just because that is one of the things you're supposed to be able to do with it. I'm interested but I’m not interested enough to run it, you know.

  • Roger BW 20:55 Yeah, I've run - I like the theme, I'm interested in the idea. I've done it in GURPS in my 1930s campaign.

  • Michael Cule 21:05 yeah, but yeah, I think I probably want to do it when technology isn't fighting with magic quite so much.

  • Roger BW 21:20 yeah, and one of the things I like as an idea to explore is, you know, there used to be magic, and people treated it like magic, it was the same way they treated God. You know, here is the thing to be learned about and you learned this thing and you learned that thing and you learned the other thing. Whereas if it's, call it 19th century or later, very broadly, you've got the mindset that says "we can systematize this, we look for parallels, we try to build on this and that and the other and then we think oh maybe we can do that other thing" and to me that's a much more interesting mindset

  • Michael Cule 22:00 we experiment which is why I set the Dawn of Magic in the early years of the Royal Society, and there was one member of the Royal Society - admittedly he was there because he was a rich man - who was also one of the 36 first mages. So it's an interesting problem and one you could use Ars Magica for, except you'd have to go back to the time of Bonisagus if you use the native setting and say "here is what Bonisagus and the others discover; here's what they can make work".

  • Roger BW 22:44 It also seems to me that you've got you're throwing away an awful lot of what gives Ars Magica its flavour if you say "these things are up for grabs" and you don't have a set of standard - I can't remember the term - spells

  • Michael Cule 23:00 yeah, ritual magic - not ritual magic, the other thing - but

  • Roger BW 23:09 yeah, but yeah

  • Michael Cule 23:09 you don't have had the craft... but for me, one of the things that is wrong with Ars Magica is the oath of the magi - is the oath of the order of, of the code of Hermes which - it looks like a suicide note long played out to me. And the assumption that mages are dicks, which is baked into the setting. Not mages can be dicks, but mages are always dicks, so...

  • Roger BW 23:14 well, to a first approximation humans are, so it doesn't seem an unreasonable...

  • Michael Cule 23:50 see, this is why you were more suited to playing a magus than me. Okay, but on that sad note - and not meant to discourage anybody who wants to try play-by-forum play-by-post themselves - but just to warn you about one of the pitfalls that I put my foot into and went ow. So it was a worthwhile experiment, I’d like to thank and give a round of applause to the people who joined us on that brief and frustrating journey, and I’m sorry I wasn't a better GM for you. I did try. Onwards. More and more, nowadays, people are trying to include in their game systems the ability to do things other than hit people over the head. Shocking, I know, but

  • Roger BW 25:04 stabbing them in the kidneys from behind?

  • Michael Cule 25:06 Let us assume that violence to person or persons not yet attributed to is something that the craft of the game has got a lot of means of dealing with and a lot of levels of dealing with, from Toon all the way up to GURPS, which can do, you know, stabbing in a particular location. And yes, the vitals is a lovely place - the kidneys, or the lungs - are lovely places because it triples the stabbing damage, be this as it may, off my GURPS high horse. And the major thing that we do apart from that is social interaction. And leaving aside the fact that people often feel that just role playing is a better way to resolve this. There's also the problem of favours, because favours are a very useful currency, in real world and in game social terms. At the end of the adventure, when the very rich very powerful patron is saying - employer, let's say employer, rather than patron, because patron has a specific game term meaning and GURPS and other systems; patrons stick around, employers are just the once - when the very rich, very powerful employer turns to you and says, "what would you like as a reward?" A very good idea is to say "I'll take a favour, sir". Or madam as the case may be. And that is a very open ended thing, a very profound commitment, in a system where honour and reliability is an important consideration, which is to say all systems, including the real world. Sometimes they will say back, "I think I owe you a small favour, or middle favour or a large favour". Some people just say "a small favour, yes. Two small favours; or would you like one large one?" But some places are more finely graded than that. And I want to know-

  • Roger BW 27:47 Sorry, I'm just thinking of sippers and gulpers and the other subdivisions of a Royal Navy tot.

  • Michael Cule 27:55 Is there anything above a gulper?

  • Roger BW 27:57 I believe so. But I don't remember them.

  • Michael Cule 28:00 Okay. I think that's quaffing, quaffing is above gulping. Okay. But the question is, how do we do this? How do we quantify favours usefully?

  • Roger BW 28:19 I think the first thing one wants to ask is, "What does one want to achieve by doing this?" Because the obvious approach from traditional role playing is to say, "this is a resource. Just like your magic points or your cash. And it's a resource you can spend-"

  • Michael Cule 28:36 "and expend."

  • Roger BW 28:37 Yeah. And if you're using a favourite in the in that strict setting, you know, I'm going to do something nice for you once", then that's valid. On the other hand, it's not it's not very generic, considering the scope of some role playing games. I mean, if I do something nice for that for the Grand Prince such and then 20 years later, when he's King, I come back and say, "Hey, about that time?" Is that still going to work? It depends on him. It depends on the society, it depends on… it depends

  • Michael Cule 29:10 it depends on his sense of honour. How the society would view him breaking his word. And it also means, not all favours are the same. A favour from the merchant on the corner is not the same as a favour from the Crown Prince.

  • Roger BW 29:31 So I don't know. I'm just remembering all the systems that have had abstracted money over the years, because, you know, keeping track of the actual number of coins you have is boring.

  • Michael Cule 29:44 Yeah. But you have a problem with that.

  • Roger BW 29:49 Well, I've never seen an abstracted money system that really worked. I mean, they all have the same basic idea of "stuff in this cost bracket, you can just buy without thinking about it; stuff in this cost bracket you may need to make a bit more effort for" and so on, but none of them, I mean none of them has ever seemed to me - and I'm not saying I’ve looked at every system, so if somebody knows one that works better then tell me by all means! - but they never seem to me to be worth the bookkeeping of not just saying "okay, you're a mercenary on a secret mission, what do you think you would have with you?"

  • Michael Cule 30:29 except that, well, it eliminates the bookkeeping of individual coins, it eliminates the bookkeeping of encumbrance levels - well, not quite, because encumbrance levels actually have a function-

  • Roger BW 30:46 no, I’m sorry, I’m saying that the decision for me is not "abstract money versus specific money", it's "abstract money versus narrative money".

  • Michael Cule 30:56 what's the difference?

  • Roger BW 30:58 in narrative money you just say "okay what's a - is this a reasonable thing for you to have?" you know, you're working as a janitor you're living in a horrible little flat you probably don't have a particularly sexy sniper rifle, or if you do there's a damn good reason for it.

  • Michael Cule 31:13 well I think the point of non-narrative money is that you use it as a tool for the referee to resolve what happens when they want something that they can't afford. I could go out and buy myself a house. I've got enough money. I'd then have not enough money to live on in that house but I have enough money at this moment in time to go out and buy a house. It would wreck all my savings and not be a wise thing, but I could do it. And so when the player says "I need this sniper rifle, I need it now, but I have not enough money; what do I do?" then then abstracted money with numbers on it - the four dice in wealth or what have you - gives you an answer to "can I do this this way or not?" when he comes up with a proposal. It's there as a tool to make the GM's life easier and look fairer.

  • Roger BW 32:27 I suppose. It's always seemed like a lot of work to me. And there is also the other problem, which - I think you really need to use a universal log scaling mechanic to make this work right. The basic problem of "here is a thing that is so trivially cheap that I don't have to care about buying it or not. now I want 20 million of them" And if you use a system with a scale like TORG or EABA I think or DC Heroes and a system where you can say this is not $10 this is economic value level two. Then you multiply it by 50 million and right that's now economic value level 17, and we just feed that into the wealth system and that's fine. Anything short of that gets awfully edgy.

  • Michael Cule 33:17 Roger, we've argued about this before. We're getting off the topic; but I will say I think a real model or a real-ish model of how the economy works means that if you want a pint of milk, fine; but if you want a two-gallon tankers' worth delivered to your door then the milk merchants are going to come around and have a few words with you.

  • Roger BW 33:45 Yeah. I mean as long as the players are willing to cooperate and say, you know, "I’m not going to spend this and then this three seconds later and then these three seconds later" and so on - as long as they're prepared to basically not be munchkins then I think it could work.

  • Michael Cule 34:04 In Reign there's wealth, which is an attribute of people, and there's treasure, which is an attribute of organizations. And the two can be converted - you can feloniously bunk up your character's wealth by stealing from the treasury, and you can put it back - but the two price lists are separate and in separate units of purchase as well.

  • Roger BW 34:38 Things people buy and things kingdoms buy, basically.

  • Michael Cule 34:41 Yeah. You need to get yourself a polearm, you can get yourself a polearm. You need to equip a troop of infantry with polearms, then you go to the treasury and use similar mechanics to reconcile whether it's affordable. But going back to what we were talking about, favours...

  • Roger BW 35:07 Basically, I think favours can easily be an abstracted money. That's one way of looking at them mechanically.

  • Michael Cule 35:15 It saves the GM a lot of work! One of the commonest things I do with them is, when they haven't got an idea at the end of a mission, then I can say "Very well! The crown owes you a favour." And if they use that wisely, then it's a step into the crown's society and being trusted to do more jobs for the crown. And if they don't, they will never be seen again.

  • Roger BW 35:45 But, well, yeah. That's one consideration. Being owed a favour by some people will make those people very uncomfortable.

  • Michael Cule 35:52 Yes

  • Roger BW 35:53 Especially if - you know, I'm thinking of your classic stereotyped mafia don, who is honourable enough to say "Yes, I do owe you a favour and I will pay you back" but he's going to get increasingly edgy the longer that lasts.

  • Michael Cule 36:07 "You sure you don't want anybody killed today?" I think I wrote that into my version of Glorantha, that the troll traders of Argan Argar are aware, and have been since the god time, that they took one of Issaries' trade rooms under not entirely trade-based circumstances and they really do owe him for that. And all initiates and higher of Issaries are trained to say "No, no, nothing at this time" when asked.

  • Roger BW 36:49 Is it a transferable resource? That's another thing to consider, and this is something that I've not had much to deal with, but when we were playing Vampire with Dr Bob, I gather this is one of the things that turns up in classic Vampire.

  • Michael Cule 37:02 Yeah, I think under certain systems definitely it is.

  • Roger BW 37:09 You know, I thought I owed my boss, but it turns out I’m doing something for a complete stranger because my boss chose to pay him off that way.

  • Michael Cule 37:19 if he's still your boss and can still make his displeasure known, then you do it don't you. The fact that you're willing to owe one person a favour is slightly different than being willing to owe the person they owe a favour a favour, but it happens in a favour-based economy. Can I just say parenthetically that I am not looking forward to the cashless economy at all; you know, the reputation-based economy that some transhumanists seem to be aiming for. Strikes me as hell on earth. Nothing but networking and committee meetings.

  • Roger BW 38:03 This is what happens when you let the extroverts define what 'normal' is.

  • Michael Cule 38:07 I'm an extrovert - well, compared to you I'm an extrovert.

  • Roger BW 38:10 that's not hard. People who think social media is a good idea think reputation-based societies are a good idea.

  • Michael Cule 38:19 They are wrong! They are wrong, they are hideously wrong because you know it's based .upon prejudice and slander

  • Roger BW 38:29 Thinking about another gaming example, I've never played the original Conspiracy X game, but GURPS Conspiracy X had a thing that it called "pulling-strings".

  • Michael Cule 38:41 yeah

  • Roger BW 38:43 As opposed to "pulling strings", the conventional way of saying it. The idea was, it's basically a reusable thing. You know somebody at the NRO who can get you satellite pictures in a hurry, that kind of thing.

  • Michael Cule 38:59 Yeah. Permanently in your debt.

  • Roger BW 39:03 Yeah, and it's somewhere between a favour and a specialized contact because it doesn't wear out typically. Though I mean, there are ways for them to go away in the long term, but they basically don't wear out from use.

  • Michael Cule 39:15 yeah, I'm sure I've seen strings used in one of the Powered by the Apocalypse games.

  • Roger BW 39:22 yeah the monsters at high school one has "everybody owes everybody else something"

  • Michael Cule 39:30 yeah, I’ve seen I’ve seen it in later iterations as well. Oh, and it just occurred to me what the first example of favours being used was. That was in that highly rules-driven game En Garde way way back in the day, that you got the chance to be an aide to the crown prince, and when you got fired for covering up the crown prince's demeanours, he owed you a favour, which you can use directly as a dice roll modifier to increase your chances of promotion. And the players could trade favours between each other. I think it's the first time I've seen it used, and in a highly social game, like En Garde. Why hasn't somebody done a second, third, fifth edition of En Garde suitable for the modern age, I wonder? Is it something...?

  • Roger BW 40:30 It's something we might look at on another occasion. So yeah, I think the short answer to "why hasn't anybody done this in much detail?" is, there's actually quite a lot of parameters you need to tweak to make it generic. And obviously in a specific society and a specific setting, you can say, "okay, they work like this" and do it relatively easily. If you wanted - let us call it GURPS Favours - a fully generic and universal system, that will be really quite complicated because of the number of things that would come under that umbrella.

  • Michael Cule 41:03 It's true. Mostly - there's a difference between providing a favour you can pick up and reload, and providing a favour that is a whisper in the ear of a particular merchant: "Don Luigi tells me, you are to be relied upon. This is good".

  • Roger BW 41:27 Sorry, I'm just having [Nishka] flashbacks. Yeah. I find myself inclined to generalize this into a relationships model, which is something I've been bashing at in game mechanic terms for a while and not really got very far with. Though there are many people to whom you can say "please do this for me, please do that for me" and you can have a constant stream of low level they do stuff for you, and maybe eventually they get fed up with it, and maybe eventually they don't. On the other hand, if you ask for something huge, they might suddenly say, "Whoa, that's a bit excessive".

  • Michael Cule 42:07 Yeah, in GURPS, there are patrons, who like you, and are more powerful than you; there are allies who are about as powerful as you and like you; there are contacts who will provide you with information repeatedly...

  • Roger BW 42:26 or specific skill uses, in a non-adventuring context.

  • Michael Cule 42:30 Are there one-use favours in the character build system? I got a vague feeling I've seen it somewhere.

  • Roger BW 42:35 I don't recall it.

  • Michael Cule 42:39 But it could be there. Debt is there; debts can be paid off.

  • Roger BW 42:45 Well, debt is there in the sense of it's the opposite of Independent Income. Independent Income says you get this much money per month, Debt says you have to pay this much money per month.

  • Michael Cule 42:56 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 42:58 Yeah, I mean, contacts in general, they are implemented as, "here is the skill that that contact has". But it's a bit abstracted, because what they might have is, you know, "knowing how the police work", 18.

  • Michael Cule 43:13 Yeah. And they aren't always available, are they? Because they have a contact availability.

  • Roger BW 43:21 Yeah, they have availability, they have reliability, and they have their actual level of competence. And I think that may be one parameter too many, but yeah,

  • Michael Cule 43:31 yeah, I see the point. And I can see why both of that those are in there; though mostly I'd go for whatever the full cost is. There are various discounts, if you want to take them. Sometimes your friend in the phone company is always there, anxious to talk to people because nobody likes them, and totally reliable, but limited in what they will do. You probably know GURPS Social Engineering better than I do. How useful is that towards more detailed modelling of somebody earning you a favour?

  • Roger BW 44:20 Not very, I think. I mean, it's a book I would in general highly recommend, but its basic approach is "here's how you get a person to do a thing".

  • Michael Cule 44:35 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 44:36 starting from a more or less neutral standpoint, and I think one could - one way of modelling a favour would be, assuming you start with that model of you know, "I am using my diplomacy skill to persuade you to do a thing".

  • Michael Cule 44:55 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 44:56 And if the thing is small, it may have a huge bonus on it.

  • Michael Cule 44:59 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 45:00 And if I say "and you owe me that favour" then that's effectively a one-shot plus whatever to my skill

  • Michael Cule 45:07 it occurs to me at this moment that if you can owe a favour for a favour, and that if it's well defined enough, the player characters are going to be burdened or choose to be burdened with favours as well. And for their sake we want this to be fairly well-defined except that screws up the role playing. You want them to imagine that their honour is involved in saying yes or no when the king says "you remember that favour you owe me".

  • Roger BW 45:44 Well this would be specific to a society, but I think it would be reasonably fair to say up front that, you know, in this particular environment, among nobles or whatever, it will be known that you can get a negative reputation "didn't keep his word".

  • Michael Cule 46:03 yeah

  • Roger BW 46:05 which is going to be a lot more painful to you than doing somebody a little favour, I mean, nothing serious

  • Michael Cule 46:11 if you owe the king a big favour you shouldn't have been such a damn fool, should you. Actually, he was the crown prince at the time when you said "yeah sure, I'll owe you one Luigi. Let's not call him Luigi - Don Carlos. I guess I will owe you one, Don Carlos. A small favour for the king, I think we said earlier, is not a small favour for the crown prince or the earl or whatever or the knight or whatever it may be. Yeah yeah, but having been somebody's friend way back when is a very useful thing, but it can also be a burden.

  • Roger BW 46:49 Yeah. I think I want to represent it more in a more complex way than "you owe, you know, 1/16 of a standard favour". I want to say "this guy remembers you as a good guy". It's not a reputation, it's not a huge widespread "everybody knows that you are a good guy back in the war", or whatever - it's "he specifically remembers you and regards you favourably".

  • Michael Cule 47:13 "More important, if you don't do this for him, he's in a position to slag you off". Not more important - your own personal honour is more important - but from the point of view of driving the players with whips, the bad consequences are more important. I think we should probably bring this up on the GURPS forums and say "come and listen to our podcast", always a good sign. But we've been talking about favours; how would you realize this in your games? I bet Bill has an idea or three.

  • Roger BW 47:46 Yeah, for that matter everyone discussion tekeli.li where we have a whole bunch of mostly non-GURPS players

  • Michael Cule 47:53 Yes, we should definitely take this further and maybe get somebody to commission us to write GURPS Favours. So you and your bosom companions, the dwarf, the elf and the necromancer - don't ask why you're a friend with a necromancer, it's a long story - are going down that dungeon with a dwarf at the front, because that's what he's good at when suddenly he fumbles and there's a click, and everybody knows he's standing on something dangerous and it's about to kill him, or maim him, or do its best to - and he says "don't panic, there's always a way to turn it off, or nobody who lives down here will be able to use the corridor".

  • Roger BW 49:02 "Hold on lads, I've got a great idea..."

  • Michael Cule 49:07 Yes, something like that. So you're down the dungeon and the DM has decided to trap you. Is this fun? Roger.

  • Roger BW 49:19 Well, I think that the fading out of the trap, or the puzzle perhaps, as a type of encounter - and I’m not saying it's gone, but it seems to be less a thing I hear about when people are telling me about their dungeon games these days - is partly because a lot of the time they're soluble by the players rather than by the characters.

  • Michael Cule 49:44 And sometimes they're soluble by the characters, but not by the players. That's also annoying.

  • Roger BW 49:48 But that's boring, because for a combat we - this is the eternal problem for combat - we have a complicated system of strike and parry and dodge and whatnot - and for trap we have "roll your trap skill", "roll your disarm device check". And either you do it or you don't.

  • Michael Cule 50:05 On the Gumshoe principle that you should always find the information you need to solve something, but not necessarily the solution, I think the thing there is, yes, the dwarf's companions do find the disarming mechanism. And that's when the big problem actually starts. There are such things as INT rolls and, engineering skills, but they don't always help.

  • Roger BW 50:45 I think, I mean, obviously, you could have a game which gave as much attention to traps as games traditionally give to combat, you know, a multi stage thing. I mean, there are certainly been games which had multistage success systems. So, you've got to achieve task A, task B, task C. And if you succeed, particularly well or fail particularly badly at any given step, that will have specific consequences. So it's not just you get through or the track goes off. Yeah, so I think there's potential there.

  • Michael Cule 51:17 Okay, yeah, I've got something that I'm doing at the moment. But all right, I think it leads right directly to my main response to this. I'm currently doing a game on my PC, which is basically a puzzle-solving mystery in a pseudo-Lovecraftian setting, with one character, wandering through the remains of somebody else's investigation and piecing together what has happened.

  • Roger BW 51:49 Excellent.

  • Michael Cule 51:50 Yeah, it's, it's very good. I won't mention it here because I have negative things to say about it. And for the people who are into this sort of thing, I think, it is a beautiful, well crafted - and you can probably figure out if you're really into this sort of stuff, what I'm talking about - recent production, beautiful, well crafted, very atmospheric. It annoys me because it doesn't quite fit my PC setup, and I have to pixel bitch a lot just to just to click on the thing I need to click on. And also, there's an annoyance, which is I think is intrinsic in this sort of thing. You can only puzzle - fairly puzzle - a mind like your own. I think the biggest thrill in puzzle-solving is going to be when somebody either says "Aha, yes, of course, that's what it means!", or on the alternative says, "aha, yes, I should have known. That was what it means!". That's the fun sensation of reading whodunnits, or howdunnits or whatever. That you can see, "oh, yes, how stupid of me" is the fun sensation. But in this thing, even when I am shown the solution - I decided I'm fed up, I'm going to cheat - I say I can't see how they got from there to there. That's not at all obvious. Why would I do that? And that happens time and again.

  • Roger BW 53:24 And the same time can happen in a mystery where, you know, you read that this particular thing set off that train of thought and that was what led to the solution, and you think "Well, yes, but it shouldn't; there is a missing connection there". Or "Yes, but that's completely incompatible with the person the killer is presented as being. They would make a different mistake, not that one."

  • Michael Cule 53:48 In what I'm doing at the moment, the question that keeps coming up is "how did that end up there? What was the backstory?" I cannot reconstruct what must have happened in the ... "Why are all the bits reset?" That's another good question.

  • Roger BW 54:11 Yeah, I'm assuming you're familiar with Grimtooth's traps.

  • Michael Cule 54:16 Yeah, that was the inspiration for my introduction.

  • Roger BW 54:19 And it's fun. It's probably a lot more fun to read them to play.

  • Michael Cule 54:25 True. A lot more fun to read than to see your character chewed up by.

  • Roger BW 54:32 Though, just think thinking about the sorts of system that that was being run for. I mean, you barely had thief skills. I don't think you do have thief skills in Tunnels and Trolls - you might have some sort of stat check. And in D&D you had some sort of disarm trap thing wasn't there.

  • Michael Cule 54:52 Once the thief was introduced. And there was the capacity for the fighters to break bars and gates, that sort of thing. But that was about as far as it went.

  • Roger BW 55:03 The thing that - to me a classic Grimtooth is the sort of thing where you say, "The room is presented as this." And the party say, "Okay, I will do obvious thing", you know, "I will go over and pick up the statue". At which point doom happens.

  • Michael Cule 55:18 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 55:22 Can you make that fun? Because, you know. Is your character the sort of person who is twitchy and paranoid and suspicious of things that things that look straightforward? What happens when you get the trap that is designed for people that are twitchy and paranoid, where the correct route through is to do the straightforward thing?

  • Michael Cule 55:46 I think my response to that is always, this can't only be a trap. There must be a way - It must be a security system. And there must be a way for the regular users to use it regularly.

  • Roger BW 56:01 Yeah, I certainly take the approach that the traps should be fitting for, if not the original purpose, at least the current purpose of the place. You know, the traps to keep out tomb robbers are distinct from the traps that let the orcs in and out to go raiding, but stop adventurers.

  • Michael Cule 56:23 Yeah, I think the games have concentrated more on the tomb robber end of things. Except that these tombs tend to be inhabited by things that move around and want to eat you, which was not a major thing in the Valley of the Pharaohs. You know.

  • Roger BW 56:43 As far as you know...

  • Michael Cule 56:49 Be this as it may - I'm remembering a Call of Cthulhu scenario in which you really didn't want to break into that Egyptian tomb, you really didn't. But yeah, alright. I think my problem again, is... I think it's fun when you always almost trigger the trap. It's the NPC throwaway characters. It may be that the sensible thing to do would be to do the false intro characters as the first - this is a trick we've talked about before, whereby you hand out three pregen characters to the players and say, "You're going down this tomb," and then you kill them. You make them face whatever doom is down there, and have only one escape to tell them - and if there isn't one, the real player characters wake up in a cold sweat from the dream of having died. This doesn't make any sense.

  • Roger BW 57:57 Your cousin said he was gonna come back and pay you that money he owes you next week, because he was on to real good thing. And you haven't heard from him for a while from him for a while...

  • Michael Cule 58:06 Yeah. But how they know not to - "I don't know how I knew not to touch that; I just did!" is one way of doing it. The other is to institute the rule they never trigger it all the way, or there is always - as there is with terrorist bombs - once you disarm it, there's always a second one to go off and kill the bomb finders.

  • Roger BW 58:35 As a point in the other direction, a thing that I haven't seen done but I think it would be interesting to do. If you've got particularly the pyramid equivalent, you know, the ancient tomb of whatever.

  • Michael Cule 58:47 Yeah

  • Roger BW 58:47 Maybe some of those traps just don't work anymore. You know? I just got poked by a stick! Once upon a time it had poison on it.

  • Michael Cule 58:55 Yeah. Oh, well, the spring's gone.

  • Roger BW 58:58 Yeah. There's a clunk and a sort of groinching noise from the wall and nothing happens.

  • Michael Cule 59:04 Yeah.

  • Roger BW 59:05 I think what I'm after is variation. If you say that the character's doing the disarming and your system says "that's a traps roll", then you don't want to do that more than once or twice because it's boring. It's the same thing again and again.

  • Michael Cule 59:20 Yeah, but the issue should be, lots of times - well, especially if you're delving into ancient secrets - the issue should be one of learning, lots of times, what does this look like? And that's a question for the scholar or the mage, or anybody but the light fingered hobbit who knows how to spring traps.

  • Roger BW 59:49 Yeah. And you might say, you know, the soldiers of the original garrison were all trained carefully that you don't tread on the pale yellow flagstones.

  • Michael Cule 59:59 Aha, it says here...

  • Roger BW 1:00:01 So once you've solved that for the first couple, it's not unreasonable to say "okay, the party could learn to do that. And now we can do this."

  • Michael Cule 1:00:09 And hey, maybe we can sucker somebody into chasing us down the corridor. Maybe once you're deeper inside the safe flooring tends to triangles. And you go, oh.

  • Roger BW 1:00:24 "The higher caste were the only ones allowed in here."

  • Michael Cule 1:00:28 You think that the higher your caste, the fewer your sides?

  • Roger BW 1:00:33 Well, the highest of all of course are the circles, but...

  • Michael Cule 1:00:37 Except that has - does a circle have infinite or one sides?

  • Roger BW 1:00:43 Yes.

  • Michael Cule 1:00:45 Right. Good answer.

  • Roger BW 1:00:49 For those of you who remember Flatland, this is completely inconsistent with that.

  • Michael Cule 1:00:58 There are always problems with traps, but the central problem is always making it interesting, as well as potentially deadly. As I've said before, if something's potentially deadly, sometimes it has to turn out to be really deadly. And there's a clunk and your light fingered thief has some, some sticky, pointed needle sticking into his arm and says, "I've started to feel woozy", which makes things... which puts you on a different timer. But again, eventually, they should they should fail the 15th "stay alive" roll if not the, if not the first two.

  • Roger BW 1:01:47 I just picked a random Grimtooth page.

  • Michael Cule 1:01:53 Okay. What've you got?

  • Roger BW 1:01:55 Pillars? You know, the room is very deep, and there's probably something nasty at the bottom, and you have a bunch of pillars you have to leap between. Fine, but... okay, and some of them are greased, and some of them will crumble. And some of them have an invisible pillar sitting on top of the real pillar. Yeah.

  • Michael Cule 1:02:16 Yeah. But given this in the spirit of Grimtooth. This isn't the real way in anyway.

  • Roger BW 1:02:26 Yeah, what you have to do is climb on the wall.

  • Michael Cule 1:02:30 Yeah, Spider Man will be fine.

  • Roger BW 1:02:33 But if you're running a high mortality game, where this sort of thing can happen, then that's fine. But I think you need something more than "maybe you saw them with different skills", you know, a perception check to spot the grease, and a different sort of check to say "Hang on a minute. They these are all marble, and that one's just plaster painted to look like marble". Yeah.

  • Michael Cule 1:02:59 Some sorts of I want something interesting. As opposed to "I jump. I make the jump!" "You die, in a new and inventive way". Yeah, the one that's got the invisible pillar on top is suspiciously free of dust. Yeah, yeah. The most valuable thing for dealing with trap dungeons is to say, "Yeah, let's just wait a moment and take a careful look at this, shall we?"

  • Roger BW 1:03:32 Consider the potential of the map of the traps.

  • Michael Cule 1:03:36 Oh, yes.

  • Roger BW 1:03:38 Which I mean, everybody'll sell you a map of the dungeon, but a listing of what the traps are and where they are...

  • Michael Cule 1:03:45 It runs out here. Wonder why.

  • Roger BW 1:03:47 Yeah, it's a bit ragged at the bottom, but...

  • Michael Cule 1:03:50 yeah, if the guy who sells you the map pops out of the wall and says "I have the other half of this", then clearly, it's a scam. And that answers "who is resetting the traps"?

  • Roger BW 1:04:08 I don't remember where it was a cartoon in some gaming magazine somewhere. But if I just say that the caption was ever since I started handing out fake maps, I've saved a fortune in dragon feed.

  • Michael Cule 1:04:25 You don't feed a dragon; dragons tax you. But

  • Roger BW 1:04:29 Probably What's New? Yeah, I think there's potential but I think they're more complicated than they seem - which for a trap seems quite appropriate, really.

  • Michael Cule 1:04:39 Yeah. And traps slide into riddles. As you say, I think we've mentioned before the difficulty of coming up with new riddles given the sort of people that we game with.

  • Roger BW 1:04:52 But also, a riddle is a thing for the player to solve. Almost always. Again, if it's going to be more than make an obscure lore check.

  • Michael Cule 1:05:02 Yes, the classical - I used, as I keep saying the riddle - the solution, rather, to Dorothy L Sayers' "Have His Carcass" once in a game, and it was then that I discovered most people don't have the [spoiler] knowledge to actually solve that one. And that they didn't even know the word when spelled out for them. So

  • Roger BW 1:05:44 Although that just serves them right for not reading the classics.

  • Michael Cule 1:05:50 I could take that point of view, but their characters were in Glorantha. So let's not go there, shall we?

  • Roger BW 1:05:55 In Glorantha, you can probably name the specific spirit that causes it.

  • Michael Cule 1:06:00 But riddles are a lot harder and require a bard's mind to make them originally, and I don't have that, I find.

  • Roger BW 1:06:09 Yeah, it would be lovely to have something that built off the world-specific lore, but then you need not only very deep lore, but the right sort of mind to put it together and players who're interested enough in the lore to put it together themselves. So

  • Michael Cule 1:06:22 I have seen there is in the first published dungeon delve for Ars Magica, a piece of lore written into the very first puzzle. And there's no way you can solve that at that stage of your acquaintance other than to say, "make a roll against this particular lore skill and tell me what you get". And it's part of the history of the order. And, and it's not necessarily all something all members of the order would know. But it's very good flavour. But it isn't solvable as a riddle without in-game knowledge. If you're going to do things that require specialized knowledge of your specialized world, then it's got to be there just for flavour and not for riddle-solving. And on the other hand, you can with a mythical setting, rip bits of real-world mythology out of the real world and retool them for use there. I wrote an account of the Creation of the First Men from the point of view of the Trickster God, which took its cue from classical Greek mythology. I'm still rather vaguely proud of it, so, there. There are opportunities - I think the takeaway from this segment is, as it is so often from our segments:

  • Roger BW 1:08:07 it's not simple.

  • Michael Cule 1:08:09 It's not simple. it's harder than it looks. Unless you can generate a character in 15 minutes, and the players won't feel cheated when you drop the anvil on them from a great height.

  • Roger BW 1:08:23 Yeah, when I started gaming - certainly when I started reading gaming magazines and finding out what other people did - there seemed to be an awful lot of people whose first exposure to games was some sort of general, you know, after-school activity-type room or something, somebody waved at them and said, "We need a cleric".

  • Michael Cule 1:08:41 Haha! They said to me, "you can be a fighter, they're simpler". And it's one of the great compliments of my gaming life that one of my regular players says I killed him in there in the first game of Runequest I ever ran. I killed his character. He's still alive, though advanced in years. I killed this character in the first game I ever ran for him but he still came back for more.

  • Roger BW 1:09:12 Onward.

  • Michael Cule 1:09:27 If you'd like to tell us about your great failures - keep it short, please - especially those relevant to play by post we'd be very interested

  • Roger BW 1:09:36 or the exciting people you owe favours to.

  • Michael Cule 1:09:38 At our age we wish people felt they owed us favours at our age. And at our age, and all ages, you should keep your debts current. Or you have a particular fiendish trap you wish to try on our ingenious minds you can contact us by

  • Roger BW 1:10:00 leave a message on the website or email podcast at tekeli.li

  • Michael Cule 1:10:04 We'll be back in another month's time

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