The topic of how to narrate and describe things as a DM came up in the comments to a recent post. It put me in mind of a topic that I have written about before - namely, the difference between skills which are primarily learned through explanation (reading and writing, speaking a new language as an adult learner, driving, most sport) and those which are primarily learned through introduction (law, philosophy, teaching, acting, creative writing).
In a nutshell, learning how to drive is a skill which you can for the large part learn from being directly taught a series of techniques such as how to change gears, how to do a three-point turn, how to parallel park, etc., combined with practice. This is what makes it mostly an explained skill.
Learning how to write fiction is a skill which you can only really learn by reading good fiction, combined with practice. You can't become a good writer by learning technical tricks. This is what makes it mostly an introduced skill.
For both types of skill you need a lot of practice to get good, and you need intuition and experience to do whatever it is well. But the former category is the type of thing that is amenable to being taught through a course and/or textbook, while the latter is the type of thing that can only really be taught by consistent informal exposure for a period of years. This is why there are useful textbooks on how to learn Romanian, but there are no useful textbooks on how to write fiction well. Romanian, like any other language, is mostly learned from putting into practice rules and techniques. Writing fiction well cannot be learned through a similar process (which is why 'how to write fiction that sells' type books are full of useless crap like, 'Write what you know' or 'Don't use adverbs', which no great novelist, or even bog-standard novelist, has ever actually followed).
Learning how to DM is in my view quite clearly much more like learning to write novels than it is like learning to drive. Yes, there are rules of thumb, and you will need to learn the rules of whatever game you're running, but what makes a good DM is mostly learned from watching others and from practice rather than from following technical guidelines or lists of 'best practices' or anything of that nature.
I am willing to be proved wrong, but I think in particular that the elements of DMing which concern describing and narrative events can't really be learned other than through watching good DMs and through practice. How to describe a fight scene in an exciting way? How to make wilderness travel interesting? How to make a scene, or a particular NPC, really 'come alive' in the players' minds? You have to do it a lot, reflect on what works and what doesn't, and watch other people who you think are good at DMing and reflect on that, too.
Wednesday, 18 March 2020
Tuesday, 17 March 2020
"Because God Loves Wondrous Variety"
Spot the difference:
Fantasy and SF settings need more of a 'Mos Eisley Cantina' vibe than less, I think.
Foreign observers never failed to be impressed by the exotic regiments of the Tsar - Don, Turkistan and Ural Cossacks, the latter 'big, red-bearded, wild-looking men'. Officers carried their maps in their high hats; many enemies were killed with the lance...As for the men, correspondent Alexei Kayunin wrote: 'The yellow and purple robes of the Turkmens appeared blindingly brilliant against the background of village houses. They wore enormous sheepskin hats, above dark features and wild hair which made them seem picturesque and majestic. Galloping on their horses they caused no less panic than armoured vehicles. I offered cigarettes and tried to talk to them. It was useless, for they didn't speak any Russian...
An American correspondent described a squadron of Kubanski Cossacks: 'a hundred half-savage giants, dressed in the ancient panoply of that curious Slavic people whose main business is war, and who serve the Tsar in battle from their fifteenth to their sixtieth years; high fur hats, long caftans laced at the waist and coloured dull pink or blue or green with slanting cartridge pockets on each breast, curved yataghans inlaid with gold and silver, daggers hilted with uncut gems, and boots with sharp toes turned up...They were like overgrown children.' First Army's cavalry were commanded by the old Khan of Nakhichevan, who was found weeping in his tent one morning because he was too crippled by haemorrhoids to mount his horse.
-From M. Hastings, Catastrophe, pp. 260-261*
[W]e began to saunter along the embankment, while the Professor gossiped about the holiday-makers around us. He showed us some peasants from the villages down on the Greek border, who could neither read nor write, but got the silly fellows who had gone to the bother of learning such stuff to tell them the commodity prices on the foreign exchanges, and on that information they very cunningly calculated what crops to sow. He showed us also a superb being, like a Cossack in a Russian ballet, who went strutting by in a wide-skirted coat made from the wool of a brown sheep. This, he told us, was a wealth Tsintsar, a true nomad, who moved with his herds between summer and winter and hoarded all his wealth, according to the classic nomadic fashion, in the form of necklaces and bracelets worn by his womenfolk. And he hurried us across the road to see a family of gipsies who were clearly natives of fairyland. Only there could a father and mother still shapely as gazelles and bloomed with youth have eight children; only there could they have arrayed their coffee-brown beauty, which fastidious nostrils, secretive lips, and eyes like prune-whip made refined and romantic, in garments of chrome yellow, cinnabar, emerald, royal blue, and vermilion, which were so clean that they made the very sunlight seem a little tarnished. 'They are Gunpowder gipsies,' said the Professor; 'we call them that because they used to find saltpetre for the Turkish Army, and they are renowned for their cleanliness and their beauty.' 'But they are like Hindus!' I exclaimed. 'They might be from the Mogul court.' 'They are something of that sort,' said the Professor; 'when Gandhi's private secretary came here he could make himself understood to our gipsies in Tamil. We think that they are descendants of some conquered Indian people who fled out of Asia after some unrecorded catastrophe in the Middle Ages, and certainly these Gunpowder gipsies represent the ruling castes.' [...] 'All, all is in Yugoslavia,' said Constantine, glowing happily...
-From R. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 657*
All sorts of people hung about the stations, men turbaned and fezzed and capped with conical hats of brown fur, men in Turkish trousers, or in long shirts and tights of creamy homespun linen, their leather vests richly worked in coloured wheels and flowers, or in suits of heavy brown wool ornamented with patterns of black braid, high red sashes wound round and round their waists, leather sandals sewed to a circular spout on the toe and bound to the calf with leather ribbons wound to the knees; women with the Turkish yashmak and bloomers, or in leather and woollen jackets embroidered in bright colours, waists of the rare silk they weave in the village, embroidered linen underskirts, black aprons worked in flowers, heavy overskirts woven in vivid bars of colour and caught up behind, and yellow or white silk kerchiefs on their heads.
-From J. Reed, The War in Eastern Europe, p. 3*
Coad was a busy town. Along the crooked streets, in and out of the ale-coloured sunlight, moved men and women of many castes and colours: Yellow Islanders and Black Islanders, Horasin bark-merchants muffled in grey robes; Caucasoids such as Traz from the Aman Steppe; Dirdirmen and Dirdir-men hybrids; dwarfish Sieps from the eastern slopes of the Ojzanalai who played music in the streets; a few flat-faced white men from the far south of Kislovan. The natives, the Tans, were an affable fox-faced people, with wide polished cheek bones, pointed chins, russet or dark brown hair cut in a ledge across the ears and foreheads. Their usual garments were knee-length breeches, embroidered vest, a round black pie-plate hat. Palanquins were numerous, carried by short gnarled men with oddly long noses and stringy black hair: apparently a race to themselves; Reith saw them in no other occupation. Later he learned them to be natives of Grenie at the head of the Dwan Zher.... Once Traz grabbed his elbow and pointed to a pair of thin men in loose black trousers, black capes with tall collars all but enveloping their faces, soft cylindrical black hats with wide brims: caricatures of mystery and intrigue. 'Pnumekin!' hissed Traz in something between shock and outrage. 'Look at them! They walk among other men without a look aside, and their minds full of strange thinking!'
-From J. Vance, Servants of the Wankh
Fantasy and SF settings need more of a 'Mos Eisley Cantina' vibe than less, I think.
Monday, 16 March 2020
PCs From the Deep
A long time ago, I speculated that Werewolf: the Apocalypse was secretly a game in which the PCs were terrorists.
Today during my lunch break I went down a weird rabbit hole of watching XCOM 2: Terror from the Deep play throughs on youtube. Perhaps it is just the use of the word 'terror' that forced a connection between these two things in my mind. But I got to thinking about the following high concept for a campaign:
The problem with turning a game like XCOM or Terror from the Deep into an RPG is that it falls prey to the old samurai sandbox problem. Having the players act like policemen or alien hunters forces them into a reactive mode which is repetitive and deprives them of agency. A campaign in which the PCs are elite soldiers or superheroes staving off alien attack is one in which they are basically at the beck and call of the DM, either directly because they are generally carrying out missions on behalf of some higher authority, or indirectly because their job is to wait for something bad to happen and then ride to the rescue like cavalry. You can possibly have a fun game that way, of course, but it won't be a sandbox and the players won't have much choice about what to do. It'll be more like a wargame with acting. It'll also be hard on the DM, who has to constantly come up with interesting scenarios rather than following the players' lead, which is one of the main virtues of a traditional sandbox campaign.
(This is the same problem in a nutshell as a "the PCs are cops" campaign: following orders and waiting for bad stuff to happen before acting is not as interesting as its opposite.)
But spin Terror from the Deep on its head and you have something very different. The basic idea behind TftD, for those who haven't played it, is that aliens who have been slumbering on the ocean floor for millennia have suddenly been awakened and are rising up from the oceans to attack human cities, spreading fear, panic, destruction, blah blah, and a special international agency has been set up to stop them. The parallel universe version is that the aliens have taken over the world, and the humans, rather than stopping alien terror, are engaged in a terrorist campaign against the alien overlords.
Rather than casting the PCs as guardians of humanity, in a reactive/defensive role, it makes them purposive actors - planning activities (bombs, raids, assassinations, whatever) - with the whole world as their oyster. Each session they're not looking to the DM to discover what their mission is; they're deciding for themselves how they are going to further their terrorist campaign.
A concluding observation is that players love this sort of thing. I find that the best moments in RPGs, the times when things really seem to sing the most, come when the PCs are coming up with some dastardly plot or scheme; that's when the players come to inhabit their PCs the most, and the point at which distinction between player and character begins to break down. When players are cooking up a plan, they start to truly think 'in character', and they do it collectively into the bargain. A terrorist campaign is one which maximises the opportunities for precisely that kind of mood to develop.
Today during my lunch break I went down a weird rabbit hole of watching XCOM 2: Terror from the Deep play throughs on youtube. Perhaps it is just the use of the word 'terror' that forced a connection between these two things in my mind. But I got to thinking about the following high concept for a campaign:
Aliens have taken over the world, and the PCs are freedom fighters in underwater submarine bases engaged in a futile campaign of disruption and defiant violence against them.
The problem with turning a game like XCOM or Terror from the Deep into an RPG is that it falls prey to the old samurai sandbox problem. Having the players act like policemen or alien hunters forces them into a reactive mode which is repetitive and deprives them of agency. A campaign in which the PCs are elite soldiers or superheroes staving off alien attack is one in which they are basically at the beck and call of the DM, either directly because they are generally carrying out missions on behalf of some higher authority, or indirectly because their job is to wait for something bad to happen and then ride to the rescue like cavalry. You can possibly have a fun game that way, of course, but it won't be a sandbox and the players won't have much choice about what to do. It'll be more like a wargame with acting. It'll also be hard on the DM, who has to constantly come up with interesting scenarios rather than following the players' lead, which is one of the main virtues of a traditional sandbox campaign.
(This is the same problem in a nutshell as a "the PCs are cops" campaign: following orders and waiting for bad stuff to happen before acting is not as interesting as its opposite.)
But spin Terror from the Deep on its head and you have something very different. The basic idea behind TftD, for those who haven't played it, is that aliens who have been slumbering on the ocean floor for millennia have suddenly been awakened and are rising up from the oceans to attack human cities, spreading fear, panic, destruction, blah blah, and a special international agency has been set up to stop them. The parallel universe version is that the aliens have taken over the world, and the humans, rather than stopping alien terror, are engaged in a terrorist campaign against the alien overlords.
Rather than casting the PCs as guardians of humanity, in a reactive/defensive role, it makes them purposive actors - planning activities (bombs, raids, assassinations, whatever) - with the whole world as their oyster. Each session they're not looking to the DM to discover what their mission is; they're deciding for themselves how they are going to further their terrorist campaign.
A concluding observation is that players love this sort of thing. I find that the best moments in RPGs, the times when things really seem to sing the most, come when the PCs are coming up with some dastardly plot or scheme; that's when the players come to inhabit their PCs the most, and the point at which distinction between player and character begins to break down. When players are cooking up a plan, they start to truly think 'in character', and they do it collectively into the bargain. A terrorist campaign is one which maximises the opportunities for precisely that kind of mood to develop.
Friday, 13 March 2020
To Be Alone Amongst Friends
George Mallory, explaining the attraction of mountaineering, said: "Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man."
Most fantasy RPGs are about what Mallory puts under the umbrella of "proving [one's] adventurous spirit or telling stories about incredible things". That is what I think you would describe as the main motivation for D&D PCs (along with gaining wealth and power), for example, and the game models that well enough.
Fantasy RPGs model the pleasure of "being alone among friends in a land without man" much less successfully. The struggle of man in the wilderness and the pleasures and hardships of travel and exploration have largely escaped our focus.
This may replicate an imbalance at the heart of fantasy literature, which I think has tended to draw from the more bombastic, saving-the-world and derring-do elements of The Lord of the Rings while neglecting the (huge) parts of the story which concern travel and exploration as interesting activities in their own right. You don't get many fantasy epics which are mainly about the experience of a journey, although Vance's books can have this quality.
Eventually I will get around to buying Ryuutama, which promises to be able to produce that type of play experience. Some elements of the game (the "players and GM create the world together" and the idea of nudging PCs to help each other through the mechanics) are a turn off. But it seems worth putting up with that - by which I mean cutting out those bits - for "Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail". As long as I can transpose the contents into Lower Druk Yul or Lamarakh or whatever, we're golden.
Most fantasy RPGs are about what Mallory puts under the umbrella of "proving [one's] adventurous spirit or telling stories about incredible things". That is what I think you would describe as the main motivation for D&D PCs (along with gaining wealth and power), for example, and the game models that well enough.
Fantasy RPGs model the pleasure of "being alone among friends in a land without man" much less successfully. The struggle of man in the wilderness and the pleasures and hardships of travel and exploration have largely escaped our focus.
This may replicate an imbalance at the heart of fantasy literature, which I think has tended to draw from the more bombastic, saving-the-world and derring-do elements of The Lord of the Rings while neglecting the (huge) parts of the story which concern travel and exploration as interesting activities in their own right. You don't get many fantasy epics which are mainly about the experience of a journey, although Vance's books can have this quality.
Eventually I will get around to buying Ryuutama, which promises to be able to produce that type of play experience. Some elements of the game (the "players and GM create the world together" and the idea of nudging PCs to help each other through the mechanics) are a turn off. But it seems worth putting up with that - by which I mean cutting out those bits - for "Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail". As long as I can transpose the contents into Lower Druk Yul or Lamarakh or whatever, we're golden.
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Drummond's Quarter
Shaped like the remains of a circle from which three quarters have been removed, Drummond’s Quarter sits on top of a triangular mound with steep slopes on all sides, at the top of which are high wooden stockades. Behind these bristle towers and watchposts - many spines which give the fourth-of-a-town the look of a hedgehog. And its people bristle too, with weapons and aggressive martial fervour, and with the unspoken anger of those who find themselves shackled by law, custom and circumstance.
According to legend Drummond’s Quarter was once part of a full town, roughly circular in shape, with each quarter owned by a brother. The brothers became proud and rode against an ancient and mighty golden wyrm, Yehud-Shining-in-the-Twilight, who once lived in the hills nearby. Their punishment was to have their town taken from them and cast into a netherworld of the dragon’s choosing, where it would remain for all time. At the last moment, however, the youngest of the brothers, Drummond, managed to declare an oath to the dragon which saved his own quarter of the town - though nobody knows what was the promise he gave.
This may or may not be true. But the main festival day in Drummond’s Quarter celebrates the return of the souls of those lost in the dragon’s punishment. And the people of the town insist that there are secret tunnels in Blackhaggs Rigg, the wooded hill which by legend is where Yehud-Shining-in-the-Twilight made his home, and that these tunnels lead down into a netherworld where - somewhere - the remaining quarters of the town and their inhabitants can be found. In some tales, those people wait for a saviour to come and rescue them, but in others they have created for themselves a paradise far below the surface of the earth, where they want for nothing and are safe from all dangers.
Drummond’s Quarter is ruled by its martial orders, of which there are dozens, each with its own tower or keep, and each with its own peculiar focus, be it the capture of enemies without killing them; the use of the greatsword; the net-and-trident; or the skill of trench-digging. Each order is small, having usually less than fifty or so members (who are collectively referred to as ‘electors’), every one of whom spends all of his time in practising so as to be ready to defend the town when necessary. To be a member of such an order is prestigious: most have two or three wives, and a number of chattel slaves to perform the work of their household, and they are the only inhabitants of the town who may vote to elect the Leader. Their daughters they marry off; their sons they treat with brutal harshness so as to burn off all hint of weakness, like the fire sears the skin of a roasted hog and makes it into crackling. The rest of the population live in meek subservience, mostly bonded to measly plots of farming land outside of the town itself in serfdom, although there are a few merchants and other traders and artisans performing necessary tasks. The mood among the non-electors is that which would prevail among any population denied the capacity to develop wealth or status through their own merits - by turns despairing, stoical and violent.
Travellers come to Drummond’s Quarter rarely. The journey is too dangerous, and the town itself is full of unkindness and has little laughter in it. But by the same token, for those who seek adventure its position at the edge of the wilds is of unparalleled potential.
According to legend Drummond’s Quarter was once part of a full town, roughly circular in shape, with each quarter owned by a brother. The brothers became proud and rode against an ancient and mighty golden wyrm, Yehud-Shining-in-the-Twilight, who once lived in the hills nearby. Their punishment was to have their town taken from them and cast into a netherworld of the dragon’s choosing, where it would remain for all time. At the last moment, however, the youngest of the brothers, Drummond, managed to declare an oath to the dragon which saved his own quarter of the town - though nobody knows what was the promise he gave.
This may or may not be true. But the main festival day in Drummond’s Quarter celebrates the return of the souls of those lost in the dragon’s punishment. And the people of the town insist that there are secret tunnels in Blackhaggs Rigg, the wooded hill which by legend is where Yehud-Shining-in-the-Twilight made his home, and that these tunnels lead down into a netherworld where - somewhere - the remaining quarters of the town and their inhabitants can be found. In some tales, those people wait for a saviour to come and rescue them, but in others they have created for themselves a paradise far below the surface of the earth, where they want for nothing and are safe from all dangers.
Drummond’s Quarter is ruled by its martial orders, of which there are dozens, each with its own tower or keep, and each with its own peculiar focus, be it the capture of enemies without killing them; the use of the greatsword; the net-and-trident; or the skill of trench-digging. Each order is small, having usually less than fifty or so members (who are collectively referred to as ‘electors’), every one of whom spends all of his time in practising so as to be ready to defend the town when necessary. To be a member of such an order is prestigious: most have two or three wives, and a number of chattel slaves to perform the work of their household, and they are the only inhabitants of the town who may vote to elect the Leader. Their daughters they marry off; their sons they treat with brutal harshness so as to burn off all hint of weakness, like the fire sears the skin of a roasted hog and makes it into crackling. The rest of the population live in meek subservience, mostly bonded to measly plots of farming land outside of the town itself in serfdom, although there are a few merchants and other traders and artisans performing necessary tasks. The mood among the non-electors is that which would prevail among any population denied the capacity to develop wealth or status through their own merits - by turns despairing, stoical and violent.
Travellers come to Drummond’s Quarter rarely. The journey is too dangerous, and the town itself is full of unkindness and has little laughter in it. But by the same token, for those who seek adventure its position at the edge of the wilds is of unparalleled potential.
Wednesday, 11 March 2020
On RPG Hobbyists and the Didactic Mode
The latest Bundle of Holding campaign is for Blue Rose. I am not one of those people who has anything against Blue Rose in particular. I am actually totally on board with the idea of a fantasy RPG which is about being the good guys - and I will quite happily admit that I have a real soft spot for romantic fantasy and for the artistic style of Blue Rose range:
I mean, I like sinister cats and weird uncanny-valley-inhabiting androgynous fae beings and creepy butterflies and flowers. I am all about those things.
I also completely understand the appeal of:
But where I part ways with projects like Blue Rose is the didacticism. It's the idea that it isn't sufficient to just create a product that takes inspiration from romantic fantasy literature or that is inclusive; one also has to teach people something:
Why is it that RPG designers feel that they have to do this - to prove that what they are doing is about more than just playing a game? That there has to be a didactic element to what they're creating? What is wrong with it just being for fun?
I wonder if it is the vestiges of that protestant work ethic, with its strong roots in the Puritanism that found its roots in the New World, which feels as though there is something base in enjoyment for its own sake, and insists that fun can only be fun if there is an element of work or self-betterment involved? Or is it just a manfestation of the insecurity of somebody of an artistic bent who frets that they are not doing something more important? Either way, it lends Blue Rose the unfortunate air of the closing sequence in a 1980s children's cartoon series, a Thundercats or a Dungeons and Dragons or a Defenders of the Earth - yes, didn't we all have fun fighting the baddies and setting off lots of explosions, but more importantly, didn't we also learn something about friendship? Cue millions of children throughout the land rolling their eyes and switching channel to ITV; the creators of Blue Rose might want to ask themselves if that is the mood they really want to capture with the product they've invested so much time and creative effort in.
I mean, I like sinister cats and weird uncanny-valley-inhabiting androgynous fae beings and creepy butterflies and flowers. I am all about those things.
I also completely understand the appeal of:
“[A] style and a point of view that’s generally positive, hopeful, and cooperative: good people can make a difference, true love can and does win in the end, we can make the world better, people of good conscience can work together (and even disagree) but still coexist peacefully, and, ultimately, there is good in the world and it’s something worth fighting for. That romance often includes interpersonal relationships, from boon comrades to passionate love, and such things are both the reasons why characters take action and the rewards they receive for their efforts." [from an interview with the Lead Designer, here.]
But where I part ways with projects like Blue Rose is the didacticism. It's the idea that it isn't sufficient to just create a product that takes inspiration from romantic fantasy literature or that is inclusive; one also has to teach people something:
"I think it’s remarkable that, in this day and age, even mature adult gamers won’t blink at games and stories that model the most terrible forms of violence, but become sheepish and embarrassed by stories modeling love and friendship and family, especially when tabletop roleplaying is such a social activity. While Blue Rose will most likely (we’re still in the design phase) have some game mechanics to support those relationships, my best advice to gamers is to balance a regard for everyone’s comfort level at the game table with a willingness to perhaps reach beyond that comfort zone for something that can be a powerful story element that has been missing from games aimed at telling legendary or mythological stories: the notion that love and connection are powers as great, if not greater, than any magic, any battle-prowess, or any cunning scheme." [from the same interview]In other words, it's not enough to just have fun playing a game - the players have to "reach beyond their comfort zone" and, the implication goes, learn something about the importance of love, connection, and so on and so forth through play.
Why is it that RPG designers feel that they have to do this - to prove that what they are doing is about more than just playing a game? That there has to be a didactic element to what they're creating? What is wrong with it just being for fun?
I wonder if it is the vestiges of that protestant work ethic, with its strong roots in the Puritanism that found its roots in the New World, which feels as though there is something base in enjoyment for its own sake, and insists that fun can only be fun if there is an element of work or self-betterment involved? Or is it just a manfestation of the insecurity of somebody of an artistic bent who frets that they are not doing something more important? Either way, it lends Blue Rose the unfortunate air of the closing sequence in a 1980s children's cartoon series, a Thundercats or a Dungeons and Dragons or a Defenders of the Earth - yes, didn't we all have fun fighting the baddies and setting off lots of explosions, but more importantly, didn't we also learn something about friendship? Cue millions of children throughout the land rolling their eyes and switching channel to ITV; the creators of Blue Rose might want to ask themselves if that is the mood they really want to capture with the product they've invested so much time and creative effort in.
Monday, 9 March 2020
This Post Mentions Swanmays
Swanmays are one of that gang of monsters I tend to think of as symbolic of D&D during its Silver and, more prominently, Bronze ages, when the role of the DM was increasingly conceptualised as being to include the PCs in what was basically an interactive story of his or her own making. (This group of monsters also includes things like the lammasu, couatl, and sphinx.) That is, their presentation in the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual results in an ever-present temptation to the DM to give them a prominent role in the story, to use them as a walking 'quest dispenser' for the PCs, or - worse - deploy them as a GMPC to wander around with the party and keep them on track so that they don't stray too far from whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.
(The clear inspirations for this kind of character are Beorn and Aragorn - powerful helpers who step in to aid our heroes at crucial moments.)
But that's not to say they're irredeemable; rather, they are a concept crying out for reskinning, reformulating and rethinking. Perhaps the easiest and best way to do this is to give them prefixes.
War swanmay and Chaos swanmay have their appeal, but in the comments on my post about dungeon scavengers from the other day, somebody commented that you can turn anything into a dungeon scavenger by putting 'blind cave-' in front of its name. So I'm going to make the case for blind cave swanmay, because it so nicely illustrates the power that comes from randomly putting words together. What is a blind cave swanmay? First, you have to explain why there is a swanmay in a cave, and then you have a vision of blind, flightless (or flighted and echolocating?) swans eating fungus from the bottoms of vast but shallow underground lakes, cut off from the outside world by dark eons of isolation. You then have to imagine what a blind cave swanmay looks like, and then your imagination conjures up an albino woman with blank eyes (perhaps covered in skin), able to hear and smell her way through the blackness, and determined at all costs to preserve the peace and isolation of her flock. And then you have to think about what might threaten it, and then you have local noblemen on the surface who prize the feathers of a blind swan for their regalia, or orcs down below who present such feathers to their females as a prelude to mating. And all of a sudden you have the concept for an extended area of a dungeon map and its connections to the outside world and/or the rest of the dungeon which practically writes itself.
You can play the prefix game with more or less any prefix you like (as well as war-, chaos-, and blind cave-, there's also stuff like winter-, fire-, lightning-, magma-, etc.; magma zaratan, anyone? Lightning zombie? Fire yeti?). The thing to remember is that you're not coming up with the name of the monster necessarily, because the results in that respect are frequently very cheesy and 4e-ish indeed. The blind cave swanmay doesn't have to be what you call the thing for the players, in other words - it can have a more sensible in-setting name than that. It's the concept that matters. Try it and see.
(The clear inspirations for this kind of character are Beorn and Aragorn - powerful helpers who step in to aid our heroes at crucial moments.)
But that's not to say they're irredeemable; rather, they are a concept crying out for reskinning, reformulating and rethinking. Perhaps the easiest and best way to do this is to give them prefixes.
War swanmay and Chaos swanmay have their appeal, but in the comments on my post about dungeon scavengers from the other day, somebody commented that you can turn anything into a dungeon scavenger by putting 'blind cave-' in front of its name. So I'm going to make the case for blind cave swanmay, because it so nicely illustrates the power that comes from randomly putting words together. What is a blind cave swanmay? First, you have to explain why there is a swanmay in a cave, and then you have a vision of blind, flightless (or flighted and echolocating?) swans eating fungus from the bottoms of vast but shallow underground lakes, cut off from the outside world by dark eons of isolation. You then have to imagine what a blind cave swanmay looks like, and then your imagination conjures up an albino woman with blank eyes (perhaps covered in skin), able to hear and smell her way through the blackness, and determined at all costs to preserve the peace and isolation of her flock. And then you have to think about what might threaten it, and then you have local noblemen on the surface who prize the feathers of a blind swan for their regalia, or orcs down below who present such feathers to their females as a prelude to mating. And all of a sudden you have the concept for an extended area of a dungeon map and its connections to the outside world and/or the rest of the dungeon which practically writes itself.
You can play the prefix game with more or less any prefix you like (as well as war-, chaos-, and blind cave-, there's also stuff like winter-, fire-, lightning-, magma-, etc.; magma zaratan, anyone? Lightning zombie? Fire yeti?). The thing to remember is that you're not coming up with the name of the monster necessarily, because the results in that respect are frequently very cheesy and 4e-ish indeed. The blind cave swanmay doesn't have to be what you call the thing for the players, in other words - it can have a more sensible in-setting name than that. It's the concept that matters. Try it and see.
Thursday, 5 March 2020
Video Games - Role Playing versus Just Playing
I have never been a huge video gamer, and I gave up, semi-deliberately, about three years ago to avoid time wasting. But I have played a lot of strategy games over the years - mostly the Civilization, Total War and Paradox Interactive ones - as well as quite a lot of roguelikes.
In my playing days, I used to watch the occasional YouTube video longplay or keep abreast of 'After Action Reports' at places like the Paradox Interactive forums. What I noticed after a time was:
- Some people get insanely good at strategy games, mostly by identifying certain loopholes and exploiting them mercilessly;
- Other people like to play the game in a more immersive way by imagining game play as being something like an unfolding, un-planned story
- There is nothing wrong with either, because it is entirely a matter of taste, but...
- I was in the latter of these camps
For example, I am not a great master at any of the Civilization games. I can conquer the world on the lower difficulty settings, but usually get squashed at higher difficulty settings. This I attribute to being more interested in imagining that I am the demigod ruler of a race of minions than I am in getting 'good' at the game. It's more important to me to imagine that I am creating a pleasant city for people to live in than I am in figuring out the precise combination of buildings and resources I need to generate the optimal amount of research or military units (or whatever). I'm more interested in emotional connections to AI civilizations (loyalty, revenge, etc.) than I am in getting what I need from them. I value the experience of narrative more than winning, in other words.
Put another way, I am probably a romanticist rather than a classicist. I prefer Role Playing to Just Playing.
(And this extends to other types of game too. In a roguelike, for instance, I'm more interested in playing a halfling demonologist or whatever because it sounds weird and I like to imagine what the character is like, than I am in picking something optimal or working out how to make a certain configuration of race/class work.)
Is this due to me playing RPGs during my formative years and hence valuing that kind of play experience more than the one of getting good at the game? Or am I naturally attracted to RPGs because I am of a romantic sort of disposition? I'll leave that question to the philosophers.
Tuesday, 3 March 2020
What Happened to the Bodies?
PCs often end up killing big monsters, or large numbers of humanoid ones. (For example, it wouldn't be unusual to have the PCs kill a dozen orcs in a confrontation.)
This would leave a big mess. As a DM I have tended to deal with this on an ad hoc basis but I wonder if there is a more systematic way of doing so. For example, here is a table to determine what happens to the bodies (or body) after a battle with humanoids or a big monster such as a giant, dragon, manticore, etc. You would roll on this table whenever the PCs return to the scene of a battle in a dungeon.
Humanoids
1-4 - The bodies remain as they lay, but have attracted small scavengers who are now feeding on them* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects)
5-8 - The bodies remain as they lay, but have attracted large scavengers who are now feeding on them* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects, 4 - Monstrous**)
9-12 - The bodies have been disturbed and looted (the looters are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6)
13-16 - The bodies have been removed by allies (the allies are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6; they are of the same type (1-4) or a different species (5-6))
17-19 - The bodies have been mutilated and defaced by rivals (the rivals are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6; they are of the same type (1-2) or a different species (3-6))
20 - The bodies have mysteriously disappeared (they have been e.g. taken away by a necromancer to turn into undead, taken away by body snatchers for parts, taken away for food by intelligent cannibals, and so on)
Large monster
1-6 - The body remains as it lay, but has attracted small scavengers who are now feeding on it* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects)
7-12 - The body remains as it lay, but has attracted large scavengers who are now feeding on it* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects, 4-6 - Monstrous*)
13-16 - The body has attracted humanoids who are cutting it apart to obtain the skin, organs and so on for magical or religious purposes*
17-19 - The body lies pristine and untouched (because dungeon denizens are afraid of it; because it is haunted by the spirit of the original owner, etc.)
20 - The body has mysteriously disappeared (they have been e.g. taken away by a necromancer to turn into undead, taken away by a magic-user for ingredients, taken away for food by intelligent dungeon dwellers, and so on)
*If a period of time longer than 3 days has passed, the bodies/body have been eaten or picked clean and now lay as carcasses
**'Monstrous' indicates a carrion crawler, otyugh, pudding, ooze, etc.
Humanoids
1-4 - The bodies remain as they lay, but have attracted small scavengers who are now feeding on them* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects)
5-8 - The bodies remain as they lay, but have attracted large scavengers who are now feeding on them* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects, 4 - Monstrous**)
9-12 - The bodies have been disturbed and looted (the looters are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6)
13-16 - The bodies have been removed by allies (the allies are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6; they are of the same type (1-4) or a different species (5-6))
17-19 - The bodies have been mutilated and defaced by rivals (the rivals are still nearby on a roll of 1-2 on a d6; they are of the same type (1-2) or a different species (3-6))
20 - The bodies have mysteriously disappeared (they have been e.g. taken away by a necromancer to turn into undead, taken away by body snatchers for parts, taken away for food by intelligent cannibals, and so on)
Large monster
1-6 - The body remains as it lay, but has attracted small scavengers who are now feeding on it* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects)
7-12 - The body remains as it lay, but has attracted large scavengers who are now feeding on it* (roll to determine whether these are 1 - Reptiles, 2 - Mammals, 3 - Insects, 4-6 - Monstrous*)
13-16 - The body has attracted humanoids who are cutting it apart to obtain the skin, organs and so on for magical or religious purposes*
17-19 - The body lies pristine and untouched (because dungeon denizens are afraid of it; because it is haunted by the spirit of the original owner, etc.)
20 - The body has mysteriously disappeared (they have been e.g. taken away by a necromancer to turn into undead, taken away by a magic-user for ingredients, taken away for food by intelligent dungeon dwellers, and so on)
*If a period of time longer than 3 days has passed, the bodies/body have been eaten or picked clean and now lay as carcasses
**'Monstrous' indicates a carrion crawler, otyugh, pudding, ooze, etc.
Monday, 2 March 2020
Refractions of Hobbiton, Categorised
It occurred to me yesterday while watching an 11-hour long play-through of Secret of Mana (don't judge me) that Tolkien's greatest influence on the fantasy genre may be the basic structure of his plot. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can be roughly summarised as: naive young hobbit leaves Hobbiton, has adventures and comes back changed by the big bad world beyond it. The evidence of this plot is all around us within the genre (it is even, I would argue, present in the version of A Song of Ice and Fire which GRRM was writing before he let himself get carried away), but it reaches an apogee of cliche in the Squaresoft games. Just watch the following 5 minutes of this video:
There is a lot to this basic plot structure, of course, because it raises all sort of interesting questions (in The Lord of the Rings, is it perhaps more the case that the naive young hobbit leaves Hobbiton and changes the big bad world, rather than the other way round, while the big bad world comes and changes Hobbiton?) but not many of Tolkien's imitators were anything like as subtle. They have, however, shown a certain capacity to innovate in the type of Hobbiton which they have created. Here is a non-exhaustive list of Hobbiton variants, with Hobbiton here defined as "a nice, innocent homely place which the main character lives in before going off on his or her adventures":
1. The Unfinished Hobbiton - a Hobbiton to which the hobbit never actually returns; see e.g. Emond's Field in The Wheel of Time (I never got very far in the series, but I think I'm right anyway)
2. The Reverse Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is the locus of the hobbit's adventures, rather than his original home; see e.g. Hogwarts, the USS Enterprise, and possibly Armada in The Scar
3. The Cold-Hearted Hobbiton - a Hobbiton from which the hero is, fairly or unfairly, exiled; see e.g. Potos in Secret of Mana
4. The Violated Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is destroyed, generally early on in the plot; see e.g. Uncle Owen's farm in A New Hope, or that place with the treehouses in Dragons of Autumn Twilight
5. The Hobbiton by Numbers - a Hobbiton which effectively fulfils the role of the Hobbiton in The Hobbit, often complete with a bucolic quasi-English rural setting; see e.g. Aunt Pol's farm in The Belgariad
6. The Internal Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which the main character never leaves, because adventure comes there instead; see e.g. Redwall Abbey from Redwall
7. The False Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is actually evil and from which the main character is happy to flee; see e.g. the Citadel in The Shadow of the Torturer, or the Dursleys' house in the Potter books
8. The Refused Hobbiton - a home that also generates its own adventures; see e.g. Gormenghast
9. The Mos Eisley Cantina Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is a hub serving as a base for adventure; see e.g. Sigil, the Magic Faraway Tree
There is a lot to this basic plot structure, of course, because it raises all sort of interesting questions (in The Lord of the Rings, is it perhaps more the case that the naive young hobbit leaves Hobbiton and changes the big bad world, rather than the other way round, while the big bad world comes and changes Hobbiton?) but not many of Tolkien's imitators were anything like as subtle. They have, however, shown a certain capacity to innovate in the type of Hobbiton which they have created. Here is a non-exhaustive list of Hobbiton variants, with Hobbiton here defined as "a nice, innocent homely place which the main character lives in before going off on his or her adventures":
1. The Unfinished Hobbiton - a Hobbiton to which the hobbit never actually returns; see e.g. Emond's Field in The Wheel of Time (I never got very far in the series, but I think I'm right anyway)
2. The Reverse Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is the locus of the hobbit's adventures, rather than his original home; see e.g. Hogwarts, the USS Enterprise, and possibly Armada in The Scar
3. The Cold-Hearted Hobbiton - a Hobbiton from which the hero is, fairly or unfairly, exiled; see e.g. Potos in Secret of Mana
4. The Violated Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is destroyed, generally early on in the plot; see e.g. Uncle Owen's farm in A New Hope, or that place with the treehouses in Dragons of Autumn Twilight
5. The Hobbiton by Numbers - a Hobbiton which effectively fulfils the role of the Hobbiton in The Hobbit, often complete with a bucolic quasi-English rural setting; see e.g. Aunt Pol's farm in The Belgariad
6. The Internal Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which the main character never leaves, because adventure comes there instead; see e.g. Redwall Abbey from Redwall
7. The False Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is actually evil and from which the main character is happy to flee; see e.g. the Citadel in The Shadow of the Torturer, or the Dursleys' house in the Potter books
8. The Refused Hobbiton - a home that also generates its own adventures; see e.g. Gormenghast
9. The Mos Eisley Cantina Hobbiton - a Hobbiton which is a hub serving as a base for adventure; see e.g. Sigil, the Magic Faraway Tree
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