I scream, you scream, we all scream for GM screens

I listen to Fear the Boot every now and then; I'm not a regular by any means, but it's one of the few RPG-related podcasts I can listen to all the way through without wanting to gnaw my own face off. Last night I was on the look out for something to listen to in the gym, and came across their recent interview with Ken Hite (handily transcripted here); it made for interesting hearing, especially when it came to the future of the RPG industry.

But the issue of GM screens came up on a tangent during the course of proceedings. I was glad to hear that Ken Hite doesn't use them, and felt vindicated about that, because as a long-term naysayer about GM screens I sometimes wonder if I'm from a different planet to most people engaged in the hobby.

The case against GM screens is as follows:

• It creates an artificial psychological barrier between the GM and players. I like to think that I'm gaming with friends, not teaching a group of schoolkids.
• It makes the players wonder whether or not the GM is fudging. I roll all my dice in the open, and frequently tell the players what an NPC needs to score a hit or succeed on their roll. It's way more tense that way, and it keeps me honest. Rolling dice in secret would make the players suspicious I was cheating, either in their favour or otherwise.
• Related to the point made above, a GM screen provides a constant temptation to fudge. If they players can't see the dice, there'll always be a small part of you that wants to change the result despite your better judgment.
• On the rare occasions in which you want to roll secretly - for instance, if you don't want a player to know whether something has succeeded or not - you can just do it behind your hand, for Goodness' sake.
• It sends out the unfortunate message that in order to GM you have to be some sort of all-powerful, pontificating svengali figure, pronouncing judgments from on high and subtly manipulating everything behind the scenes like a puppet master. Instead of just, you know, facilitating a game.
• I was involved in a Call of Cthulu game with the least frightening GM screen ever invented. Me and one of the other players had a running joke that one of the sinister Cthuloid entities on the front looked kind of like the Blue Peter tortoise. It totally ruined the mood.
• The table I use is a bit too small to set one up.
• If you game in a public area, like we do, you look like a total nerd. Being an RPG nerd is bad enough without drawing attention to it.

The only case that can be made in their defence is:

• They have pretty tables and charts on the back for handy reference.

Which certainly does not outweigh the points against their use.

Your honour, the case for the prosecution rests.

What I want in a Star Trek Game

Amongst my many sins, I am a fan of Star Trek. Well, let's be more specific: I love The Next Generation; you can keep the rest.

The thing about NextGen is that it's episodic. There might be recurring characters who sort of develop over the course of the 7 series, but ultimately it's rather like The Twilight Zone in space - every week the Enterprise rocks up at a new planet/space encounter and there's a new, self-contained story, almost always presenting itself as a problem followed by a solution. There may or may nor be a sub-plot.

I want a game that emulates this. It would need, primarily, three things:

• A way to randomly generate unique planets/space encounters quickly and easily. (Examples: A large gas giant orbited by a Ferengi space station. A jungle planet populated by ostrich people. A huge space fungus.)
• A way to generate unique problems. (Examples: A disease which makes the sufferer invisible. A Klingon spy. A star that's about to explode.)
• A sub-plot generator. (Examples: An ensign is in love with character Y. The holodeck is malfunctioning. Lieutenant Barclay thinks he's gay.)

The important thing here is, you don't know what the solution to the problem is - not the players and not the GM. You just have a hurdle, and how it gets solved is open-ended, with the GM acting as a sort of ideas arbitrator, deciding what would or would not make sense.

Ideally, there would be some sort of teching the tech pool, whereby the players could spend a finite number of tokens to pull technological bullshit out of their arses, so long as they made it sound sufficiently plausible/amusing/Star Trekish:

Picard: Mr. Data, can't you figure out a way to re-route the manganese sub-particle detector shield to emit caesium rays?

Wesley: Yes, sir, and that might positivise the helium ions and create a mass-resistant vortex to pull us out of the radon nexus! 

Face it: it would be awesome.

When All Else Fails, Forge Monsters

It's been a while since I've done any of these.

Petal Zombie

Malevolent spirits inhabit groves of cherry and plum trees, waiting for spring. When it arrives they inhabit the fallen blossoms, which they animate and use to kill passers-by. They attack by suffocation, forcing themselves into nostrils, mouths, and throats; a successful hit does no damage, but the victim must contine to succesfully save vs. paralysis each round from that point onwards or choke to death. Petal Zombies can only be harmed by magical weapons. They always surprise their victims unless forewarned, and they never stray more than 60' from their grove.

Frequency: Rare
AC: 6
Hit Dice: 2+1**
Move: 90' (30')
Attacks: 1 (envelop)
Damage: Special
No. App.: 1d6
Save As: D2
Morale: 8
Treasure Type: U
Intelligence: 9
Alignment: Chaotic
XP: 45

Root Voice Demon

These malicious but harmless beings live amongst tree roots, under the surface of the earth, and call out to passers-by. Being able to sense the contents of a man or woman's soul, they will often divulge personal secrets - careless of who might overhear. They have a 50% chance of doing so per round a person is in ear shot.

They are ethereal and invisible, and very rarely approach the surface.

Frequency: Very Rare
AC: 8
Hit Dice: 1-1
Move: 90' (30')
Attacks: 0
Damage: None
No. App.: 1d6
Save As: C1
Morale: 6
Treasure Type: Nil
Intelligence: 6
Alignment: Chaotic
XP: 10

Urn Wraith

An urn wraith is an evil undead entity which imbues itself into the ashes of a funeral urn and animates them into a human form - which emerges at will. It does this for its own amusement and satisfaction, to enjoy the misery and terror it instills into its victims before they die. Its touch causes the soul to wither.

Frequency: Very Rare
AC: 3
Hit Dice: 4**
Move: 120' (40')
Attacks: 1 touch
Damage: 1d6 + energy drain
No. App.: 1
Save As: F4
Morale: 8
Treasure Type: Nil
Intelligence: 7
Alignment: Chaotic
XP: 175

D&D and the Open Marriage

I think most gamers have a relationship with D&D that's similar to an open marriage. You're allowed to see all the other games you like, and you can even bring them home sometimes, but in the final analysis there's only one truly lasting love - and that's Dungeons and Dragons. The other games are fun, and they add a lot of spice to your life, but D&D is the only one that feels like home.

It's only by virtue of the fact that D&D is usually the gateway to the hobby, of course. And for people who came to role playing through other systems, I guess it doesn't apply. But I'd estimate it's true for 75% of gamers.

So I miss D&D when it's not around. I'm running a weekly Cyberpunk 2020 game at the moment and really enjoying it. But that hankering for hit points, THAC0, orcs and random encounter tables won't go away. In fact it's growing stronger. I'm not sure how much longer I can take it.

Inspirational Classics

I'm not the world's biggest expert on classical music, but I know what I like, and I know what's good inspiration for a D&D DM. I don't generally like to have music on during game sessions, unless it's just in the background, but during planning or setting creation some pieces can really get the synapses firing. Here are a few favourites:

• Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and his symphonic poem The Song of the Nightingale (the latter not to be confused with his opera, The Nightingale, from which it was born). The first is famous because of its use in Fantasia, but the performance is terrible and the piece cut up and bastardised. In its original form it is a stunning, brutally rhythmical musical depiction of a human sacrifice, which makes it pretty D&D in my book. The Firebird is a gorgeous and exotically alien piece, starring an evil and immortal sorcerer-king called Kaschei the Deathless. The Song of the Nightingale is perhaps not for everyone - it's discordant and extremely strange, like an opium-fuelled vision of the orient. But it's one of the most genuinely 'fantastical' pieces of music ever written.
• Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which is a very popular piece - for a reason: it's beautiful, exciting, uplifting and mysterious, and it draws on the 1,001 nights, one of humankind's great artistic achievements. Here's Rimsky-Korsakov's own description of the story it depicts: "The Sultan Schahriar, persuaded of the falseness and faithlessness of women, has sworn to put to death each one of his wives after the first night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by interesting him in tales she told him during 1,001 nights. Pricked by curiosity, the Sultan put off his wife's execution from day to day, and at last gave up entirely his bloody plan." 'Nuff said.
• Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D minor. It is the very essence of Scandinavian cold: icy, exotic, dark, brooding - like what a fjord would sound like if you put it to music. The Lord of the Rings would be set to this.
• The Paris Quartets, by Telemann, for a slightly different feel: if you want the sound of 17th/18th century Europe, this is it. The kind of chamber music that, used in a film, is a lazy shorthand for "the court of a monarch in an indeterminate post-renaissance age". 
• If you ever need something lithurgical, mournful, awe-inspiring and like it sounds as if it comes from the heart of some huge temple, you can't go wrong with J.S. Bach's Mass in B minor. Conjurs images of heaven, but also of weird magickal cults who worship the chaos gods.
• Bartok's String Quartets, especially numbers 1 and 2. Forget death metal. If you want a disturbing, unsettling listen that will give you nightmares, put these on your Spotify.
• Rachmaninov's The Isle of the Dead, based on this picture. Again, 'Nuff said:

Random Boss Generator

Need the name for a BBEG, or just a sinister-sounding weird NPC who lives at the bottom of a dungeon/in an ancient tower/in a ruined manse/in a volcano/in the sewers? Use this table. Can be used for [name/no name] +[qualifier+noun] or [noun+qualifier] -e.g.:

Elizabeth, the Queen of Bats
Ugpapa, the Dog Chief
Snurri, the Dreamer of Knives
The Worm Lover
Osman, The Famine Pope
The High Priest of Frogs

Should have d100-worth of entries. Make your own.

Why Having No Character Background Makes Sense

My preference, when creating D&D characters, is to have no, or minimal, background details. I think this is common to most people who play older versions of the game, because bitter experience shows there isn't much point wasting time creating a special snowflake PC given they have a 75% chance of dying before level 3.

This is one reason why outsiders are sort of snooty about old versions of D&D, I think.

But there's a good, sensible in game reason why not having detailed character backgrounds makes sense, at least in D&D. And it's this:

People go off and do crazy adventurous things when they have no responsibility and no ties. When I was 18 I went off to Kyrgyzstan for a few months to volunteer. When I was 21 I graduated from university and hopped on a plane to Japan with the intention of working my way around the world. I did these things because I was young, single, and fancy free, and didn't feel any real connection with where I grew up. In D&D terms, I had no 'character background' - you could have summed me up in one sentence (probably even less than that). I was a "Level 1 University Graduate". It was only after I'd lived for a while that I started to get anything like an interesting background worth speaking about - in other words, it was only after my 'adventuring career' had started that events in my life became worth cataloguing.

This would be even more true for D&D characters. In a typical D&D setting, life is nasty, brutish and short, and not only that - there are actual fucking orcs out there that will skin you alive if they catch you. The people in such a world who would be starting off an adventuring life would be, not to put too fine a point on it, young, dumb and full of cum. They wouldn't have interesting and elaborate back-stories tying them down to home and hearth. They'd be wet behind the ears. They'd probably be the youngest child in the family with nothing to hang around for. They might be orphans or urchins for whom the adventuring life is all upside (the alternative is dying in a gutter with leprosy). These are not the sort of people with interesting back-stories. It's when they set off into the dungeon that their lives really begin.

Player Responsibilities

I phoned it in tonight at my weekly game session. It was still fun for me, and the players still had fun too, I think - but I was low on energy. I was like the other bunny in the Duracell adverts. The one whose energy slowly drains away as he collapses, with a pathetic blank expression on his furry rabbit face.

It got me thinking about responsibilities. I've written about my DMing philosophy before, such as it is, and one of the things I emphasised was that one of the most important responsibilities of the DM is setting the tone. The energy flows from you, to a large extent. And if you feel flat, it's likely the game will feel a bit flat too. I think that's what happened tonight.

But that got me thinking: what are the responsibilities of players when they come to the table?

There's the obvious stuff:

• Don't hog the limelight.
• Don't try to browbeat or fast-talk the GM into changing every single piddling little decision.
• Don't cheat.
• Don't drink a lot if nobody else at the table is.

But this really mostly boils down to "don't be a dickhead", and it sounds more like a set of rules or guidelines than responsibilities. So I guess I'd start off with:

• Take agency. Be an actor and not a reactor. You're the engine of the game, not the GM, and he's not your own personal dancing monkey.
• Try to buy into what the game is about. It's fine not to take everything 100% seriously, but try to judge the mood and help build it.
• Take everything that happens in the game with good grace, unless it's conspicuously a case of the GM being unfair or stupid.

Not particularly pithy or interesting, but it'll do for starters. 

To Whoever Is Doing the Google Searches...

...on whether or not I'm Ron Edwards' love-child or secretly "a swine":

a) No.
b) I think the whole "swine" thing is probably the pettiest and most childish phenomenon I've ever witnessed, and there's nothing secret about the fact that I like some story games.

K thx bye.

I Got Some Lovely Fantasies

Because I've spent a lot of time on story-games recently, let's throw some love to the Big Purple. An interesting thread came up entitled The older I get, the less I want fantasy (in which the poster feels that his liking for the fantasy genre has declined with age, and he now prefers historical or modern-era gaming).

This struck a bit of a chord with me, though my feelings aren't quite the same as him. For me, what I can definitely say is that fantasy fiction has lost its lustre as I've got older. From the age of 11 or so, when I first read The Lord of the Rings, to the age of about 25, I read absolute shit-tons of fantasy novels. (And most of it was shit.) You name the series, I'd probably read at least one volume and probably the lot.

Nowadays, I barely read any, and to be frank, while the Fantasy & SF section is the first one I go to when I go to a bookshop, whenever I pick up a new fantasy book and flick through to see what it's like, it usually makes me cringe. Boring, samey writing; banal dialogue; by-the-numbers plots; awful unimaginative world-building dressed up as "unique" settings; inside-front-cover maps covered with place names like 'Franconia' and 'L'k'xhklhaj'... It's a veritable hell-on-earth of literary bollocks, only a step removed from Mills & Boon, and without the compensating factor of sex (unless it's GRRM, who only writes The Most Stupid Sex Scenes Ever^TM anyway).

There are nowadays only a handful of fantasy authors who I can really stand to read: Tolkien, Dunsany, Howard, M. John Harrison, China Mieville, Wolfe, Vance, and, okay, GRRM, because I have to finish off that bloody series if it kills me. The rest of the genre can go hang, quite frankly.

But this is why, I think, I'm still very much into fantasy gaming: a function of finding modern fantasy literature so soul-destroyingly awful that I can't bear to read it is that I have to get my imaginative kicks elsewhere.

Moreover, I'd say that if what you're interested in is expanding your mind, imagining weird shit, dreaming up half-crazed nonsense, escaping somewhat humdrum reality, and many of the other things that fantasy lit is supposed to do, I'd argue that fantasy gaming does it much better. Your imagination is constrained far less if you and your friends are the ones coming up with the entire thing - if you are not letting some third-rate author do your imagining for you - so why have cotton when you can have silk?

In fact, maybe that's what my rule of thumb for fantasy literature is: from now on I'll look at the blurb on the back of the book, and if the whole thing sounds like I could imagine something better in a session of D&D, the author isn't trying hard enough and the book gets binned. If I can't imagine something better in a session of D&D, it's worth a try.