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WISH 54 asksDo you like to have bits and pieces from your characters’ backgrounds appear in the game? Do you write hooks into your character background for the GM to use in the campaign for your character? Do you like it when the GM gives you a background hook into an adventure or scenario with a previously unknown hook, such as creating an old friend of your character’s who is somehow involved? What are some examples of cases where hooks have worked or not worked for you? As a player and as GM, I love hooks. I don't even have to know when we set one up what a hook is about. It doesn't even have to be important, although it sometimes becomes so later on. Hooks big and small are what makes a campaign seem more real. Hooks give players things to worry about.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:40 PM
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This week's WISH is about Movies, and the question my GM brain asks every time: How can I use this as a GM to make things difficult and fun for the players?
Ginger's Wish question 28 is:What are three movies that have inspired you as a gamer? Would you recommend them to other gamers, and if so, what would you tell them to look for and/or hope for them to get?
The Seven Samauri is such a basic plot that it's almost hard to use anymore. Defend the defenseless villagers from the outlaws. A great plot for dragging players into (perhaps they're stuck in the village, perhaps they have moral obligations, perhaps they're looking for pay) a group.
Lesson: Throw 'em together and mix it up.
Alternate: The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond the Stars / High Noon
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai This one is for balance and comedy. Watch Jeff Goldblum. Yes, he looks like he'll be a Shaggy, but he's a brain surgeon, Buckaroo wants him on the team, and he shoots a lectroid that was coming at BB's back.
Lesson: Let everyone have their niche. Let them have their incompetencies. Let them need the team. Serious stories can be really funny if you mix it up right.
Alternate: Tremors
The Dirty Dozen Fully 65% of the movie is planning and practicing the perfect plan, and still the team Scooby is a problem. It's a great plan, of the kind that cannot fail.
Lesson: Even the best plan has risks. For the best plans, it's probably the PCs. Give them the opportunity to run the plot, and give them the tension that comes from it.
Alternate: The Great Escape / The Bridge on the River Kwai
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:07 AM
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Ginger's Game WISH #13 asks:How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?
This is a good one for me, since I'm at the character building stage for Rick's campaign. I'll describe my mental process in building my character submission and then outline what I think I'm going to do from here. I tend to write reasonably detailed backgrounds, but I like to leave some hooks for the GMs to fill in. Tom is a snapshot of how I work on the character creation process.
The indented material is my inital submission to Rick. When I wrote it, I knew no more than 2 sentences about any other characterThomas Burdon The name came first. Looking back, it comes from Everway (Burden), Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and Jack Burton.
Tom was born Jan 1, 1901, and so is 27 at the time of the game start. He is currently attending Arkham and paying for it by working as a custodian. His parents are dead and it's probable that the job is a sympathy thing involving someone in the faculty or administration who knew his parents, who come from an old Arkham family. Possibly, father was a professor? This gives the age and family and job. The 1/1/1901 thing is borrowed from a comic book character named Jenny Sparks, who is supposed to be the spirit of the age, and who was born with the century. Tom is going to get in a lot of fights and deal with serious wierdness, so that fit. I wanted him to be poor since we had several rich kids in the group. I thought about making him a labor agitator, but the student/custodian seemed more likely to actually play with the rich kids. Plus, munchkin-like, I recalled that custodians might get keys! Since I don't know who the PCs/NPCs are, how exactly he got the job and what other connections he has to the university are left as hooks to be worked out with Rick at a later date.
Tom lied about his age and fought in Europe in the Great War, and was involved, somehow, in the Irish civil war shortly thereafter. He doesn't talk about it, but it's sorta clear that something happened over there that affected him strongly and he ended up back in Arkham. Gotta answer this one for anyone who was of-age or near-age when the war started. Tom's a fighter, so he's gonna get into this one. The Irish civil war gives him something to do until about 1923, and lets me tie him to some history I'm particularly fond of. I'm likely to later tie it to Michael Collins and his death at a place called "The Mouth of Flowers", which is probably much more Buffy/Cthulhu-esque than the history books show. This also gives Tom some reason to believe in wierd shit happening.
I am imagining Tom as a trouble-magnet. He'll probably end up fighting with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain in a few years and may end up with the Flying Tigers in China. If he gets out of Arkhamdale...
Played by Paul Darrow (although the Roger Moore in this photo looks interesting as well...) We use Paul Darrow for Julian in House of Cards and he has a great presence. This young picture fits my mental image of Tom pretty well.
If we go with trouble-magnet, that sounds like a hero, which I know you were looking to not overload. I have more development to do (what's he studying? why? who does he know?). I certainly see a potential for class conflict with Astorbilt. This is where I start looking at the next set of questions. From here, Tom is playable. I know who he is and what he would be like if the game didn't change him any.
I need more. In some games I've created character background fiction. In some I create a dossier. Tom needs more family. He needs to know what he's studying. He needs to know how and why he's here. He needs to know what happened to his parents. All that. But at least some of it needs to be part of what gets revealed in play. If I resolve all the mysteries, then there aren't any left for Rick to hit me with...
I like Tom. He'll be fun. That's what writing a background does for me. When I know I can play a believeable character and that I expect to have fun, then I've got enough background for now. I dunno the answers to the Everway and ADRPG questions. I've never developed a character that way.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:28 PM
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| This week's WISH: | List three or more maxims/proverbs/bits of conventional wisdom/etc. that you've learned in your gaming career, and explain what they mean and how you've seen them apply in your gaming experience. |
There are two big temptations here: One is to roll out the favorite movie/book/comics quotes that we constantly hear from our Gen X, hyper-referential ADD gaming crowd. "Yeah, yeah, enough with the flavor text..." "Don't see the PGMP-15, Danny, be the PGMP-15..." "Get 'em? That was your plan? Get 'em?" (hey, it often worked...) The other is to trot out my favorite quotes from games that do and do not have quotes pages. I'm looking for the lines we've repeated for years that are part of our collective decision-making process.
Whatever you do, don't say 'Whatever you do, don't roll a one'.This is a meta-rule at the table, which has to do with respecting other gamers superstitions, not touching their dice if they're a 'don't touch my dice' person, letting people be wierd about probability and chance, and generally not looking for trouble at the table. If someone has to say 'chicken bone, chicken bone, lucky, lucky chicken bone' before he rolls in order to have fun, let 'em... You're not heros, you're assholes!Usually quoted when the Champions team was about to make some utterly logical but not particularly four-color heroic choice. Bled over into a lot of games, because it was useful. It's a maxim about examining your motives and the role your character wants to project in his life. Don't feel bad, lots of paladins have warhorses that are smarter than they are...aka "next time, spend a few extra GPs and buy the helmet. Head injuries may not slow you down, but that's because it's not a vital organ in your case..." Plan B is where we don't do something stupid...Plan B was frequently spontaneous... Gaming is like sex. It's only fun if you trust your partners.This includes the GM. This is about willingness to leap out into the blackness, secure that, even if you fall on your face, your partners are there for you. It's why it's no fun to play in a game when two people who really don't want to be talking to each other are both playing. It's about being picky and the rightness of being picky. And it includes the implication that, while bad gaming may be better than a swift kick in the privates, really bad gaming is enough to make people consider swearing off the art...
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:29 AM
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WISH asks us to discuss secrets. I'm going to be wishy-washy on this one. Sometimes it's good to have a player surprised. A revelation of an unexpected relative caused one House of Cards player to say "Gah...". We have lots of secrets in the mix, big and small, for the HoC players to discover.
I've had what I thought were some spectacular failures with "public secrets". The secret identity of a champions character I once ran is my major example. David was a spy and a member of a really bad family of not-so-good-guys. I don't think the players tried to use OOC knowledge, but it seemed like OOC attitude leaked into some of the characters' interactions with him. Turns out he was on the outs with his bad-guy family, but that didn't have anything to do with it.
I'm not sure how much of this had to do with the secret or the public knowledge of the secret, but it didn't leave a very good taste in my mouth. It's no fun feeling like you've contributed something to the game and had it used against you in an unfair way (used against you in a fair way is different). I'm sure the others who were involved feel differently, of course. The revelation of the secret wasn't a very big deal and it should have been. Of course, this doesn't mean that it is wrong to have revealed secrets, just that it didn't work in that case. It added a layer of unworking complication to an already poorly-working campaign.
However, I've seen some really good play with the great superhero secret ID issue. In a different Champions campaign, there was a scene where another player went to his Mafia Princess girlfriend's house to explain why he'd stood her up for a date. Of course, he was out heroing, but she hated his hero ID. So he hems and haws and generally fails to do much of anything, and she accepts his apology and watches in mild surprise when he runs out of the room to deal with this week's superfight. Off she goes to her bedroom where she opens her scrapbook of superhero clippings of our team leader (not the character in question, mind you!) and say "My Boyfriend is...a Super Hero!" and smiles. It's a brilliant scene that only worked because of the public nature of the private secret ID.
So, I've seen both work and both fail and I think it has a lot to do with how it's done and how collaborative the game is. I've seen games where the players don't share character sheets and others where they plot out in advance how the revelation of this or that secret will affect their characters' relationship.
And I don't intend to make the plot of House of Cards a public secret, or even any of the interesting and unrelated flavorful side-secrets...
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:51 PM
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This week's WISH asks about communication and miscommunication.
I had a player in my Traveller campaign who didn't really know what he wanted. We discussed it and I let him run an amnesiac. This is the campaign I discussed in WISH #4, where I had very different assumptions amongst the players about the world and the threat levels and how I expected them to get along.
So 'John Carter' is on the run from the cops in this little backwater planet and decides it's time to get off. He steals a letter that will allow him to pass himself as one of several heirs who have inherited a spaceship (that's the PCs and their hook...).
I start asking the player questions about what he does, how he operates, etc. "What do you do with the guy from whom you're stealing this letter?" "I kill him, can't have him around as a messy loose end. He figures he's some kind of secret agent and he's in a lot of trouble." Fair enough, but it doesn't really fit either my expectation of the world or the background I wrote for the character.
In my background, the character was a secret agent, but not of the James Bond/Jason Bourne type. He was a recruiter for a secret school of telepathic healers, outlawed by the Imperium but continuing in hiding. Another PC had latent talents that his school wanted so he'd been sent to bring her in. What happened next? Hadn't determined.
So, I throught about it and I decided that we could tell a great story that was sort of a reverse "Bourne Identity" and when he realized all the bad things he'd done because he thought he was one kind of agent would be some great role-playing. What do you do when you find out that underneath your veneer of civilization, you're capable of being a casual killer? I was really sorry I didn't get to develop this plot.
Sometimes player-GM communication doesn't work. I burned some long fuse between myself and a friend in a D&D game he was running. We, the good guys, had been ambushed trying to help 'little Timmy' rescue his family from the Brigands. Now, Timmy was described as '13'. I am playing a Monk from a different culture. After we escape, I go hunt down Timmy. To my mind, he's a young adult who needs a lesson in 'not tricking the large party of adventurers'. Now, I'm a good guy. I'm not going to kill him, I'm probably not going to draw blood. Timmy will learn his lesson and that'll be that.
The GM can't deal with it. I'm planning to hunt down and beat a small child. Small child? I didn't get a single 'small child' signal before this. Medieval agrarian society age 13 read very differently to me. The GM insisted that I was out of line and that it should have been clear what he meant.
I agree, it should have. He should have described 'Timmy' as a small child, not as 'thirteen'. I never really got back what enthusiasm I had for that campaign and left it within a few weeks. I did learn a lesson that I've tried to apply in my own games: make sure that if there is a misunderstanding, you talk it through with the player. It doesn't always work and it doesn't always solve the problem, but it never hurts.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:31 PM
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| Be Careful What you WISH 4... | WISH |
This week Ginger invites us to discuss systems: the good, the bad, the indifferent.
System isn't very important to me unless I'm playtesting. The best games I've run or played in have submerged the system and let us get on with the adventure. I love Paranoia, Kobolds Ate My Baby, Everway, Hunter Planet, and Classic Traveller for letting me ignore them. We had some amazing successes writing for and running Call of Cthulhu at NanCon 88 (named after the founder's Olds Delta 88, not the year...) and we never ran the system outside of the Con.
On the other hand, a system that is intrusive is bad. I've had fun in Shadowrun despite the system, not because of it. The Imperium Games Traveller (T4) edition was a big drag on my Traveller game because it took so much effort to make it work. If I want to play a tactical resource management game, I'll play Angband.
I try to answer two questions when I choose a system "can I use the setting to build the world in which the game works?" and "does the setting/system provide for the player experience I'm trying to project?"
An example of the former: I once tried to play a somewhat ambiguous but in-the-end heroic superspy in Champions. Where this character failed was that the game didn't really have much advice about this kind of character and the other players and I had different ideas about how and when the conventions of four-color comic book games should affect how they dealt with him.
The latter is exemplified by my experiences running Traveller:Inheritances in T4. I didn't do a very good job setting the tone for the campaign before it started and the players didn't agree. I had some playing for laughs and others who were attempting to determine when they could inconspicuously kill the clowns. It blew itself up after a few weeks and nobody really got to the high-speed action space chase story I wanted to tell. Luckily I have all those plot elements in my back pocket and I know how not to do that story in the future, including being more careful with picking a system.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:49 AM
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Ginger's game WISH for this week asks about settings. How do we find settings or pieces of settings in popular culture?
Choas in House of Cards: I had a pretty firm idea of what I wanted to project with Chaos, the domain beyond the place where the Shadows went mad, in House of Cards. I had Roger Zelazny's descriptions, but I needed something to tie the parts of the world that I was designing to, so that they would hang properly with RZ's. To express the primacy of will on the physical world in Chaos, I was inspired by the Dr. Who episode Castrovalva, which was inspired by the M.C. Escher painting. If I succeed in my mission, the players should think of Chaos as a very frightening place. The nice part of doing so in print is that I don't have the limitations of the TV production crew.
For my short-lived Traveller:Inheritances campaign, I needed a high-tech seaport that was overcrowded and had seen better days. I merged a bit of Blade Runner with Roger Zelazny's The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and modern Hong Kong to get my mental view of the port.
For Kobolds Ate My Baby!: The Grate Eskape! (OwlCon 2K2), setting needed to be both very clear and also very easy to shove into the background. The kobolds went from Luftstalag 3 to the Star Wars trash compactor, to a combination of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, to a Smaug's side door, to that funky ice-cave in Logan's Run, to The Tomb of the Cybermen (but with frozen zombies) to a D&D vampire's crypt.
The settings in KAMB are submergable. Most of the fun is seeing how the characters kill interact with each other. So they need to be clear, interesting, present a challenge, and not over-run the kobold-on-kobold mayhem. These were a lot of fun to string together and run.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:14 AM
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WISH 1: Successful NPCs
The first WISH was about successful NPCs. The direction for the exercise was:
Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game.
| Ginger : Turn of a Friendly Die | | Stoat | LiveWire | Baby | | Ginger believes that character interaction is the key to NPC success. Stoat from House of Cards is a barfly and a warehouse guard and not ambitious. He gives a peek into a part of the City of Amber that the courtly PCs don't see much of. Ginger picks him because she can hear the dialog as she's writing it in the character's voice. Live Wire was an NPC who was secretly working for the villains but who eventually turned on the villains due to the kindness of the heroes. Sounds to me like his Evil Overlord hadn't read the Rules. I think Live Wire was interesting because he had his own story arc. Baby was a pseudodragon, usually something I find sorta boring. That Baby was a companion and not a familar makes her more interesting. |
| ArrefMak : In The Shadow of Greatness | | Orcus | Droppa Ma Pantz | Tatasha | | Arref presents three NPCs who caused him to change an opinion, in or out of character, and change how he thought of his own characters in those games. Orcus was an NPC from the original D&D game and the source of the Mighty "Wand of Orcus". Arref had a GM who made him come to life, have plans, body language, charm. That his character fell in love with him is enough to assure that he must have been very different from the Orcus so many of us killed in our munchkin days. We don't have Droppa Ma Pantz in House of Cards. He's a second series reference, but he's not bad. For Arref, he's one of the last living retainers who knew Oberon well and personally. What does it take to be the court jester who can make Oberon, who must have seen everything, laugh? Tatasha sounds like a great troublemaking NPC. It's not as if she is the foil to the plot, but she must be accounted for in major operations. I like Arref's line about her: "everyone has an opinion about because she forces you to think about her even if she isn't around." It's a good thing to be able to say about an NPC. |
| RikiBeth : Tales of the City | | Kelton den Garlon den Tirian den Tamlon Shadowslayer | Two Talking Swords | Arminta | | RB presents three NPCs with family problems (in their own ways. Kelton den Garlon den Tirian den Tamlon Shadowslayer isn't an Amber character but in many ways could be. "Gar" is an all-powerful four year old. While this has been done before (Squire of Gothos, anyone?), the GM made him memorable by making him act like a four year old. That the PCs may find themselves from time to time babysitting is nice. It shows that the world has more to it than "adventures" and "plot". Two Talking Swords (which probably have names) are inhabited by shadow gods--a Father God and a Trickster God. They don't have to advance the plot to be interesting to be around. Arminta is an NPC of RB's, and she has her own story arc, a background including her agenda and her family's divergent agenda. She's alive, not a plot device. |
OK, too much data and i've only got 3 of 20something. We'll split this out, but not tonight...
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:53 AM
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Introducing a new meta-watching feature, which I hope will be a regular part of my blogging life...
WISH is a writing exercise for gamers, created by Ginger Stampley. I think it's a great exercise and I've participated in both WISH exercises so far. I plan on writing (and blogging) my (brief) thoughts on each entry, so that if I want more detail on a particular inspiration, I know where to turn. Comments will be on for these, and I may try some fancy HTML tricks to connect my thoughts to these links.
Email me (or comment here, which will email me) if I missed your entry or missed the point of it. I may not make any changes, but it might make you feel better...
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:51 PM
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Ginger's WISH for this week is about Romance in Games:
Describe two romantic relationships involving a PC you've seen in a game. One should be a romance that worked for the participants and the other should be one that failed, died, or came to an end. What was good and bad about these relationships from the point of view of plot and character development? How did the GM make the romance appealing to the players?
Alternatively, talk about a time when a PC in a game you were in turned down a romance and why. Was this a good or bad decision for plot purposes? Why was the romance unappealing to the player or character?
For Greg Morrow's Champions campaign Voyagers, I wanted a spy. David FitzAlan was, even before he was granted super powers, hiding in a secret identity. David lived in California, working for one of the other PCs as a computer security expert. In truth, he was the titular head of and sometime attempted kidnap victim of the Shambalan Security Services. Shambala was a rouge country on the Nepal/China/India border. David had an uneasy peace with his relatives. He didn't come to their attention and they didn't have him kidnapped to come home and work for the bad guys.
This was a problem, because Shambala was bound to find out about the super powered crime fighting and want to bring him back. While that would have been fine if the comic book was his solo book CyberMancer!, it didn't work well for The Voyagers!, what with it being a team effort. The solution to the problem was to have David fall head-over-heels for the team leader, The White Lioness (played by Ginger, actually). It tied David to the team and forced him to be heroic, because Lady Hawkwood wanted him to be.
It was a star-crossed romance, to be sure. David couldn't tell her how he felt, for starters. She was happily involved with an NPC lover. She had an adopted child whom David's presence might endanger. The team's patron and 'official leader' didn't like David. For the first half of the campaign, David didn't even tell the team about his real secret identity. This was because the rumor in Shambala was that some years ago, David's older brother had attempted to have his way with Lady Hawkwood and she had fled Shambala. David's brother was socially ruined, of course, but David certainly felt a certain amount of guilt.
One of my absolute favorite moments in the campaign came when David had to fly back to Shambala, get into his Air Group Commander uniform, and attempt to stop them from killing Lady Hawkwood's NPC lover, who had been investigating David's background. How we got to that point, nevermind, that's not a favorite moment... But the unveiling was, as we all expected, a shock to all.
That he kept his unrequited love a secret through that, when he faced a very angry Vivian, Lady Hawkwood, was a great success. That the two never became lovers is immaterial; TV shows that thrive on romantic tension always die within a season or two of them resolving the relationship.
On the negative side, I played a character in Kellie Patrick-Getty's Vampire, the Masquerade campaign who started with an NPC girlfriend. This was actually a character with a similar archetype. The child of a very wealthy "old crime" "old money" family, he was supposed to go to law school and become respectable and be either a legal or a business face for some of his family's more shady dealings. After he passed the bar, he said "forget it" and concentrated on being a painter. Well, family money helped. He'd also dealt a little, but mostly to help friends, not for a profit.
The girlfriend was supposed to be his tie, his regret, his connection to his humanity and who he'd been (or more to the point, who he'd never been but wanted to be). It didn't happen. It didn't click for Kellie and we never really spent that much time dealing with mortals. Possibly we were too interested in the world of the vampires. The campaign ended before I had a chance to implement my backup plan: my Toreador should have failed to pay attention to her through the passing of time and then gone to look for her and found either an old lady or a grave.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:16 PM
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This is my response to Ginger's Wish Writing Exercise
WISH 1 asks us:
Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game. The NPCs can be from any game you've been in as a player or GM, and any system or genre.
I'll start out with the embarrassing admission that I am horrible with names. I have to have lists and I have to review my notes before games.
Paladin AD&DThe thing I liked about him was that he kept growing out of the GM's control. He was the minor son and future heir of a castle where we needed to get the magic sword to let us enter the ruined keep of his grandfather. Young and idealistic, the lad said 'yes' when we asked him to join us. He had some knightly training and it was, after all, his magic sword. We trained him, and faced dangers with him, and taught him the difference between an adventurer and someone who's had some knightly training.
It was a major turning point when we were close to being beaten by the undead and, at our urging, he stepped forward with the magic sword of his grandfather, called upon ancestral gods, and attacked the baddies. He saved our bacon, which was nice. But most interetingly, he bacame a paladin, as his grandfather was before him.
What I liked was watching this bit of life, totally unrelated to the goals and quests of our campaign, play itself out. We watched a life-changing experience. It was amongst the best stories of the campaign, even if neither we nor the GM had intended for it to be anything but a minor detail. We send him off with treasure we found to get Paladin training. (Why, yes, the GM was influenced by Elizabeth Moon, why do you ask?)
"Romeo" and "Juliet" TravellerThis was a pair of NPCs that I never got a chance to introduce because my Traveller campaign fell apart first. [I made some mistakes, mostly in who I let in and how I set player expectations.] Romeo was a former squaddie who had worked for one of the PCs in his previous military career. The PC was hard-boiled and, by design, something of an asshole. His men worshipped him. Juliet was the little sister of a very aristocratic PC. The two of them fall in love and run off to fight in a Spanish Civil War equivalent and eventually join the anti-Imperial republican terrorists, the Ine Givar.
Oh, the hooks I lost when that campaign imploded. The rescues, calls for help, rumors, trouble, breakups, reunions, parental ultimata and strife. I didn't have a timeline, since it had to mesh with PC actions, but there was an entire relationship I'd planned out to happen across the campaign.
I really loved my little plans I had and what I was going to use them for in showing the universe and letting the players find the space they wanted to be exploring in it.
Lady Vesper from our own House of Cards is the mother-in-law of our only married PC. This is another 'what is the world like' NPCs? She came about because we needed an outraged parent to beard the royals on a wayward daughterm and the player surprised us by marrying her. We had to develop the mother-in-law, give her background (which we've hinted but not revealed), and made her be the kind of person we thought would be the mother of her daughter. She's much more than we originally considered.
She also gives me a very positive feel for our very visual method of casting NPCs and putting them on the web page. That she is played by Agnes Moorehead gives her a certain personality that she didn't have when she was 'Solace's Outraged Parent'. How did she get to be who she is? We know and it helps us make her real.
I'm really waiting for the two grandmothers to meet. Yes, I am...
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:56 AM
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