We had an ice storm this week, icicles falling all around the house and non-essential personnel, like Damon, going in late, two hours and a half hours for the express bus from the Randolph AFB area to make it downtown, highways closed, that sort of thing. A Minnesotan or New Englander would've laughed at us, but you try getting around in that weather when you don't own a set of snow tires or chains, your heaviest jacket has a broken zipper you haven't bothered to replace, you've lost one of your gloves, don't own a furnace, and nobody within a mile radius of you has ever driven in icy conditions. I shut up half the house, had all the heaters turned up as high as they'd go, left the oven open and on warm all day (and the kitchen was still freezing; it's the coldest room in the house), wore my only set of long-handled underwear and my hiking socks, drank a lot of hot tea, and got buried in cats.
But now we're fine. I love Texas.
It's a classic literary dodge to isolate the cast in order to ramp up tension, focus attention, precipitate crisis, and put the characters on their mettle - in short, to enable story to happen, rather than letting all that narrative energy diffuse into the distractions of normal life intersecting outside the crucible of one specific social group. Because all social groups will generate drama if sufficiently isolated. In any given group, there's going to be dominance disputes, people who get more of their needs satisfied and people who get less, resentments passed over for the sake of keeping the peace, misunderstandings, tenuous accommodations, authority and rebellion, standards and variations from them, different rules for different classes of people and the dishonesty that maintains that as the norm, and mutually exclusive assumptions about any number of things. Any kind of conflict can come to the crisis point when the normal safety valves are shut off and no one can escape, even temporarily.
Weather is one popular way to isolate people, but in the society where I live it gets harder all the time. You'd have to take away both internet access (power outage; but how long do these ever last these days?) and cell service (well, if you can't recharge them...and cell towers do go out in storms, I think); but also access to neighbors (flooding rendering the house on the high ground incapable of evacuation?) and public services. Thanks to our much-maligned taxes, most rural areas have dedicated professionals working round the clock - the county's Essential Personnel, who don't get to come in late and often put in extra shifts - to keep them connected to their larger society, and the problems of urban people during major disasters are not taking place in direct social isolation, but instead involve an excess of contact with many more people than usual in a context of isolation from support services. Which is an entirely other kind of story.
It can be done, especially if the conflicts you wish to concentrate are powerful enough that bottling them up for a mere 24 hours (or less) will do the trick. The office whose boss insists they stay late despite weather warnings, trapped in the cold dark office building (possibly with the janitorial staff) till dawn; the extended family gathered for Christmas at the grandparents' hobby farm with the driveway too steep to leave safely; the gaming group riding out the zombie apocalypse in the fortified basement - that sort of thing.
You can start this from either end, with the characters or the situation; though I believe most people will start with the people around them and conjure up the situation that could isolate them long enough to force inherent conflicts into the open enough for resolution. How you isolate a group depends on how you define the group; but the reverse is also true.
The precise nature of the conflict will depend on the genre you wish to use. Anything from farce to murder can be generated out of the standard run of human small-group politics. The revelation of the disguised, unadmitted conflicts necessarily forms the bulk of the plot, with a shocking cathartic action occurring at some point during it; but the cathartic action might precede or follow the revelation depending on the genre. Murder mysteries, in particular, require someone to act to resolve conflicts at the beginning of the action, and the process of solving the mystery is the process of discovering whose conflict was strong enough, or character weak enough, to bring about this attempt at resolution.
Though part of the interest of such a story is that of survival in unusual, difficult situations, do not commit the fatal B-movie error of assuming that this is the main plot; that the mere fact of a horde of Dark Elves trapping a family of privileged white folks on their hobby farm will be interesting enough to carry the story. You don't want (well, okay, you probably don't want!) the audience to be rooting for the Dark Elves, and you certainly don't want them realizing that they don't care one way or the other whether anyone gets out alive. You want the audience to feel very much as they do about their own family, co-workers, friends, or Garden Club; exasperated and protective, loving and hair-tearingly frustrated, hateful and guilty, impatient and resigned, resentful and generous, entitled and put-upon, and the whole nine yards.
Everything else is window-dressing.
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale; campaign concepts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale; campaign concepts. Show all posts
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: When Worlds Co-Exist
So, having read about the two habitable planets closer to each other than Earth is to Mars you immediately start world-building.
But where do you start? When will your story be set?
It has to be post-crossworld-contact or what's the point? But is it at the beginning, when they start becoming aware of each other - which could be as early as the first Renaissance-quality telescopes? Is it at first physical contact? Is it when us humans stumbled across them? Is it during a period of peace, or a period of war?
Actually - if the two intelligent species I am assuming for each of these planets are enough like earthlings for us to write stories about them, periods of peace are probably non-existent. Everybody is always fighting somebody; and how each individual tribe/nation/state feels about interplanetary contact is probably vastly influenced by where in the war/truce/peace/annoyance cycle it is.
You could, of course, decide that only one planet has intelligent life, so there's no interspecies conflict, just a larger-scale colonization period, but that's underutilizing the setup and making it far too easy to fall into simplistic accidental allegories of the Discovery of the New World, without acknowledging the agency of the people who were already in the New World. I want different-but-equal. I want some real basic exploration of the idea of personhood, detached from biology; I want some really different stories!
What is each species like, for starters? What basic difference in the evolutionary histories of their planets shaped them?
What if one intelligence evolved in the oceans, complete with opposable thumbs or whatever other dodge full manipulation requires of their basic anatomy, and one evolved on land, not necessarily from primates? The vaccuum of space would be equally intimidating for both, but the technical problems presented by space travel, and probably the motives for space travel, would be different. A zero-G environment would not be half the adjustment for a cephalapodian intelligence that it would for an ursid one; but holey cheese wouldn't life support be complicated? The ocean-based species would probably regard long-distance sensing and communication as the easiest and most natural way to deal with extraplanetary activity; might lack the terrestrial urge to go there.
The ocean-based species could colonize the oceans of the terrestrial planet and the terrestrial species could colonize the continents of the oceanic planet - before either one became aware that the other was intelligent at all!
Oh, man, my head's exploding already and I don't even have a character yet.
Speaking of characters - this'd make a great RPG setting.
Help...drowning...sea of possibilities...
But where do you start? When will your story be set?
It has to be post-crossworld-contact or what's the point? But is it at the beginning, when they start becoming aware of each other - which could be as early as the first Renaissance-quality telescopes? Is it at first physical contact? Is it when us humans stumbled across them? Is it during a period of peace, or a period of war?
Actually - if the two intelligent species I am assuming for each of these planets are enough like earthlings for us to write stories about them, periods of peace are probably non-existent. Everybody is always fighting somebody; and how each individual tribe/nation/state feels about interplanetary contact is probably vastly influenced by where in the war/truce/peace/annoyance cycle it is.
You could, of course, decide that only one planet has intelligent life, so there's no interspecies conflict, just a larger-scale colonization period, but that's underutilizing the setup and making it far too easy to fall into simplistic accidental allegories of the Discovery of the New World, without acknowledging the agency of the people who were already in the New World. I want different-but-equal. I want some real basic exploration of the idea of personhood, detached from biology; I want some really different stories!
What is each species like, for starters? What basic difference in the evolutionary histories of their planets shaped them?
What if one intelligence evolved in the oceans, complete with opposable thumbs or whatever other dodge full manipulation requires of their basic anatomy, and one evolved on land, not necessarily from primates? The vaccuum of space would be equally intimidating for both, but the technical problems presented by space travel, and probably the motives for space travel, would be different. A zero-G environment would not be half the adjustment for a cephalapodian intelligence that it would for an ursid one; but holey cheese wouldn't life support be complicated? The ocean-based species would probably regard long-distance sensing and communication as the easiest and most natural way to deal with extraplanetary activity; might lack the terrestrial urge to go there.
The ocean-based species could colonize the oceans of the terrestrial planet and the terrestrial species could colonize the continents of the oceanic planet - before either one became aware that the other was intelligent at all!
Oh, man, my head's exploding already and I don't even have a character yet.
Speaking of characters - this'd make a great RPG setting.
Help...drowning...sea of possibilities...
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Who are the Clones?
Clones.
A secret cloning facility, using the DNA of lab volunteers, unwitting grad students and miscellaneous tissue donors, and famous scientists long dead. Aliens, too, if you want 'em. None of your full-blown out-of-the-vat TV/movie clones, which not only have full use of their muscles but demonstrate that hairstyles are genetic; but proper clones grown from eggs to become babies to be raised. In the lab, according to whatever theories the scientists around are testing or espouse, subject to the vagaries of changes in funding priorities, facility politics, and personnel changes.
Of course when they hit their teens, they escape. Who wouldn't?
The first question to ask is, Of whom are they clones? How do they understand their relationship to their originators?
The second is, What other experiments were done on them in conjunction with just cloning?
Some of them might be chimerae, instead of clones. Combinations of star athletes with famous scientists, a merging of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison in an attempt to get The Perfect Inventor, supersoldier prototypes who are part human, part wolf, part sheep. What happens if we genderswap Albert Einstein? Or Lana Turner, whose career as a scientist is not nearly as widely known as it should be? Some of them might be vehicles for experiments in gene therapy: Let's see if we can clone Stephen Hawking and get a version with no major health problems.
You could have sets of nearly-identical twins, triplets, quads, or more, representing different runs of the same experiment.
Having assembled this core cast of characters, they will dictate the emphasis of the story as a whole; or, if you want a certain kind of story, you would choose a cast compatible with it.
It's a flexible concept that can be modified for different formats and different SF subgenres. You could have a lot of fun writing it for parody or satire. You could do a very dark, gritty story addressing the reality of cloning new creatures from mature tissue - a whole passel of kids facing early aging and death. You could do a whole series, with the kids escaping from the lab in Book or Season 1 and in subsequent ones adjusting to "normal" life, uncovering other labs, dodging government black ops, or whatever.
It's a suitable core idea for an RPG, too. I'm thinking a point buy system, with "heroic" rather than "superheroic" point totals. Tell your players the premise, let them pick the clone they want, and let them build them. You could have pregens of a few likely picks which could be customized, so if two people wanted to be clones of Albert Einstein, but if one wanted to be a genderswapped Einstein and one wanted to be Einstein + Babe Ruth, they could both get what they wanted by starting with the same base character and tweaking the appropriate features.
I'm afraid the work involved in doing this seriously is more than I care to face, as the research would be more technical and less historical or anthropological than I like; but I am having fun with a household of eight sim teens squatting in an abandoned warehouse, each one cloned and in some cases genderswapped or alienized from a familiar sim that comes with the game, or from those shared by the player with whom I swapped characters awhile back. Their cloning lab mysteriously burned down and now they just keep saying they come from France...
A secret cloning facility, using the DNA of lab volunteers, unwitting grad students and miscellaneous tissue donors, and famous scientists long dead. Aliens, too, if you want 'em. None of your full-blown out-of-the-vat TV/movie clones, which not only have full use of their muscles but demonstrate that hairstyles are genetic; but proper clones grown from eggs to become babies to be raised. In the lab, according to whatever theories the scientists around are testing or espouse, subject to the vagaries of changes in funding priorities, facility politics, and personnel changes.
Of course when they hit their teens, they escape. Who wouldn't?
The first question to ask is, Of whom are they clones? How do they understand their relationship to their originators?
The second is, What other experiments were done on them in conjunction with just cloning?
Some of them might be chimerae, instead of clones. Combinations of star athletes with famous scientists, a merging of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison in an attempt to get The Perfect Inventor, supersoldier prototypes who are part human, part wolf, part sheep. What happens if we genderswap Albert Einstein? Or Lana Turner, whose career as a scientist is not nearly as widely known as it should be? Some of them might be vehicles for experiments in gene therapy: Let's see if we can clone Stephen Hawking and get a version with no major health problems.
You could have sets of nearly-identical twins, triplets, quads, or more, representing different runs of the same experiment.
Having assembled this core cast of characters, they will dictate the emphasis of the story as a whole; or, if you want a certain kind of story, you would choose a cast compatible with it.
It's a flexible concept that can be modified for different formats and different SF subgenres. You could have a lot of fun writing it for parody or satire. You could do a very dark, gritty story addressing the reality of cloning new creatures from mature tissue - a whole passel of kids facing early aging and death. You could do a whole series, with the kids escaping from the lab in Book or Season 1 and in subsequent ones adjusting to "normal" life, uncovering other labs, dodging government black ops, or whatever.
It's a suitable core idea for an RPG, too. I'm thinking a point buy system, with "heroic" rather than "superheroic" point totals. Tell your players the premise, let them pick the clone they want, and let them build them. You could have pregens of a few likely picks which could be customized, so if two people wanted to be clones of Albert Einstein, but if one wanted to be a genderswapped Einstein and one wanted to be Einstein + Babe Ruth, they could both get what they wanted by starting with the same base character and tweaking the appropriate features.
I'm afraid the work involved in doing this seriously is more than I care to face, as the research would be more technical and less historical or anthropological than I like; but I am having fun with a household of eight sim teens squatting in an abandoned warehouse, each one cloned and in some cases genderswapped or alienized from a familiar sim that comes with the game, or from those shared by the player with whom I swapped characters awhile back. Their cloning lab mysteriously burned down and now they just keep saying they come from France...
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: The Pleistocene Adventure, an Irwin Allen Production
It was pointed out to me in the comments that the catastrophic landscape changes that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene are perfectly good stories to be found in geology, and this is true. The geology of the Channeled Scablands of the Columbia River Basin is dramatic enough for any adventure novelist, and if you're willing to get your scientific data all tangled up in religious arguments you can follow some pretty dramatic byways concerning the question of whether or not there was ever a Black Sea flood and, if so, whether or not it was the source material for the Mediterranean flood tradition most Americans know best as the Genesis Flood. When I researched the end of the Ice Age for 11,000 Years Lost, reading about the repeated formation and breaking of ice dams on the edges of glacial lakes, causing periodic catastrophic landscape changes, intrigued me.
For a time I thought obsessively about such a catastrophe as the starting point for an RPG campaign. Mentally, I built a campaign setting, composed of riverine grassland, hills/mountains, and the oceanic edge. Each setting contains a distinct society of hunter/gatherers, with trade and genetic connections to each of the other societies, each specializing in the skills necessary to exploit each habitat, each dependent on trade connections with the others to get necessary resources and desirable luxuries.
The oceanic edge culture specializes in maritime skills: they live primarily off foods gained from the sea; are expert boat builders; understand wind, currents, and navigation; use bone and shell extensively; and are highly mobile. They know the coasts and islands of their region intimately, but the interior is a mystery to them.
The riverine culture is more sedentary, moving camp with the seasons and exploiting different resources at different times of year: they specialize in basketry and fabric crafts, trapping, exploitation of plants, and the use of nets, with big game hunting as a seasonal group occupation. They know the drainage areas of the rivers intimately and probably have invented ceramics, though they don't make pots, and horticulture, though they mostly seed an area in one season, go away, and come back to harvest it later.
The upland culture specializes in lithic and wood technologies, hunts big game year-round, exploits plants seasonally, and understands more about minerals than both other cultures put together.
Once a year, in spring, these cultures come together in the valley of the biggest local river for an enormous trade fair. The maritime culture takes small boats upriver carrying salt, seashells, and the skins of sea otters and seals; the upland culture follows the drainages into the valley bearing tool stones, ochre, and the skins of megafauna; the riverine peoples bring out their basketry, river otter and raccoon skins, and feather work. Probably they all have medicinal substances that the others can't get; probably they also trade around nuts, dried fish, dried fruit, and grains. In addition to trade, of course, there's games, courting, dancing, courting, storytelling, courting, feuding, courting, conflict resolution, courting, and probably mass hunts, bake-offs, weddings, and divorces.
As a DM, I'd give this brief cultural outline to the players and tell them to choose a culture and make a character from it. Each culture would have a set of skills unique to it, and a knowledge base and geographical/social map of the world differing from those of the others. Female characters would have different skill sets than male characters. Someone who came up with a plausible culture-overlapping character concept (say a Riverine woman who married a Maritime man and went to live with his people; or a shaman called by the spirits to wander the three parts of the world) would have to work with the DM to build someone balanced and in keeping with the concept. Each player may also create a secondary, less competent, character dependent on the first, like a younger sibling or a child, but this is not required.
The last requirement is that the player must produce a plausible reason why this character, with the dependent if appropriate, is not actually down in the river valley on the Day the World Ends. Because, having created this campaign setting, the first thing the DM must do is destroy it when the ice dam breaks and a glacial lake the size of the Dead Sea comes pouring down the main river valley in a wall of water that sweeps all before it.
The PCs, and their dependents, witness this catastrophe, but cannot prevent or ameliorate it. It's like 9/11, only there's no one to blame and far fewer survivors; plus, the geography of all three known regions changes drastically. Because this happens in spring, plant and animal resources are both affected for the rest of the year. The campaign consists of the survivors coming together and pooling their resources, figuring out where to go, what to do, and how to survive the coming year in this lonely new world. Do they go up and down the coast looking for the extent of the damage and unaffected populations? Do they scavenge their dead? Do they strike inland because 2/3 of them are Uplanders and they hope the normal world still exists on the high ground? Do the characters all pull in different directions because the logical next step looks different depending on which culture each came from? What happens when they meet intact tribes - do they have to prove themselves trustworthy? Are they shunned as unlucky?
As usual, this campaign idea is way too work-intensive for me to carry out. In addition to my usual problem of wanting the players set their own agenda, with which I would then have to scramble to keep up, I'd be limited by the existing game systems. Most RPGs, focused as they are on "interesting times" and wanting to provide adventure, excitement, and rewards, suffer from power creep. Ordinary daily challenges like finding food and keeping healthy tend to be hand-waved because they're boring. Also, even the most dangerous normal animals aren't real threats to most RPG characters. It doesn't help that the people who write the stats for most gaming bestiaries apparently never saw an animal in their lives, and don't understand why, for example, a hippo is the most dangerous animal on the planet; or how the saber-tooth adaptation works; or the difference between a Dire Wolf and a wolf. All this sort of thing would be crucial to a Pleistocene survival game.
I would probably have to invent a gaming system with mechanics simple enough for me to use them, which nevertheless rendered foraging for berries, fishing, exploring new terrain, and building boats as interesting as a head-on confrontation with a mammoth and interpersonal combat. And "I" in that sentence would probably have to mean "Damon and the other person in our group who is truly enamored of game mechanics for their own sake."
So, no, not happening.
The same set-up could lead off a kick-ass set of blockbuster novels that would appeal to the same public as Jean Auel's Earth's Children; but since I couldn't set it in Texas (no glacial lakes!) it's a lead pipe cinch I won't write it.
Too bad.
For a time I thought obsessively about such a catastrophe as the starting point for an RPG campaign. Mentally, I built a campaign setting, composed of riverine grassland, hills/mountains, and the oceanic edge. Each setting contains a distinct society of hunter/gatherers, with trade and genetic connections to each of the other societies, each specializing in the skills necessary to exploit each habitat, each dependent on trade connections with the others to get necessary resources and desirable luxuries.
The oceanic edge culture specializes in maritime skills: they live primarily off foods gained from the sea; are expert boat builders; understand wind, currents, and navigation; use bone and shell extensively; and are highly mobile. They know the coasts and islands of their region intimately, but the interior is a mystery to them.
The riverine culture is more sedentary, moving camp with the seasons and exploiting different resources at different times of year: they specialize in basketry and fabric crafts, trapping, exploitation of plants, and the use of nets, with big game hunting as a seasonal group occupation. They know the drainage areas of the rivers intimately and probably have invented ceramics, though they don't make pots, and horticulture, though they mostly seed an area in one season, go away, and come back to harvest it later.
The upland culture specializes in lithic and wood technologies, hunts big game year-round, exploits plants seasonally, and understands more about minerals than both other cultures put together.
Once a year, in spring, these cultures come together in the valley of the biggest local river for an enormous trade fair. The maritime culture takes small boats upriver carrying salt, seashells, and the skins of sea otters and seals; the upland culture follows the drainages into the valley bearing tool stones, ochre, and the skins of megafauna; the riverine peoples bring out their basketry, river otter and raccoon skins, and feather work. Probably they all have medicinal substances that the others can't get; probably they also trade around nuts, dried fish, dried fruit, and grains. In addition to trade, of course, there's games, courting, dancing, courting, storytelling, courting, feuding, courting, conflict resolution, courting, and probably mass hunts, bake-offs, weddings, and divorces.
As a DM, I'd give this brief cultural outline to the players and tell them to choose a culture and make a character from it. Each culture would have a set of skills unique to it, and a knowledge base and geographical/social map of the world differing from those of the others. Female characters would have different skill sets than male characters. Someone who came up with a plausible culture-overlapping character concept (say a Riverine woman who married a Maritime man and went to live with his people; or a shaman called by the spirits to wander the three parts of the world) would have to work with the DM to build someone balanced and in keeping with the concept. Each player may also create a secondary, less competent, character dependent on the first, like a younger sibling or a child, but this is not required.
The last requirement is that the player must produce a plausible reason why this character, with the dependent if appropriate, is not actually down in the river valley on the Day the World Ends. Because, having created this campaign setting, the first thing the DM must do is destroy it when the ice dam breaks and a glacial lake the size of the Dead Sea comes pouring down the main river valley in a wall of water that sweeps all before it.
The PCs, and their dependents, witness this catastrophe, but cannot prevent or ameliorate it. It's like 9/11, only there's no one to blame and far fewer survivors; plus, the geography of all three known regions changes drastically. Because this happens in spring, plant and animal resources are both affected for the rest of the year. The campaign consists of the survivors coming together and pooling their resources, figuring out where to go, what to do, and how to survive the coming year in this lonely new world. Do they go up and down the coast looking for the extent of the damage and unaffected populations? Do they scavenge their dead? Do they strike inland because 2/3 of them are Uplanders and they hope the normal world still exists on the high ground? Do the characters all pull in different directions because the logical next step looks different depending on which culture each came from? What happens when they meet intact tribes - do they have to prove themselves trustworthy? Are they shunned as unlucky?
As usual, this campaign idea is way too work-intensive for me to carry out. In addition to my usual problem of wanting the players set their own agenda, with which I would then have to scramble to keep up, I'd be limited by the existing game systems. Most RPGs, focused as they are on "interesting times" and wanting to provide adventure, excitement, and rewards, suffer from power creep. Ordinary daily challenges like finding food and keeping healthy tend to be hand-waved because they're boring. Also, even the most dangerous normal animals aren't real threats to most RPG characters. It doesn't help that the people who write the stats for most gaming bestiaries apparently never saw an animal in their lives, and don't understand why, for example, a hippo is the most dangerous animal on the planet; or how the saber-tooth adaptation works; or the difference between a Dire Wolf and a wolf. All this sort of thing would be crucial to a Pleistocene survival game.
I would probably have to invent a gaming system with mechanics simple enough for me to use them, which nevertheless rendered foraging for berries, fishing, exploring new terrain, and building boats as interesting as a head-on confrontation with a mammoth and interpersonal combat. And "I" in that sentence would probably have to mean "Damon and the other person in our group who is truly enamored of game mechanics for their own sake."
So, no, not happening.
The same set-up could lead off a kick-ass set of blockbuster novels that would appeal to the same public as Jean Auel's Earth's Children; but since I couldn't set it in Texas (no glacial lakes!) it's a lead pipe cinch I won't write it.
Too bad.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: A New Concept in Adventure Modules
So, anybody out there who plays RPGs and has read my garage sale ideas for campaigns has probably recognized that my method of campaign planning is labor-intensive and not at all commercial. The reason I don't run these campaigns is that all that collaboration with the players involves infinite flexibility; and I can't be that flexible spontaneously. I have to overprepare and have all the stats, maps, and if:then statements worked out ahead of time. Then, during the game, I can react to what happens without referring to any of that.
During the shakedown period for D&D 3.0, back in 2000, I ran a one-off prison break scenario as a means to give people some experience with the new system before committing to a campaign. The PCs were imprisoned unjustly as a result of a disturbance during the escalation to civil war, and if they didn't escape before a certain point All Hell was going to break loose. I made a timeline of incidents that would proceed in the background until the PCs intersected with them and changed them. Once All Hell broke loose, I found myself tracking the actions of about six groups of people all over the city, in 15-minute increments, so that no matter what decisions they made or when they made them I'd have a guideline to what they'd find happening. Then the PCs escaped 24 hours before the criticial point and in the process released another prisoner who prevented the critical event that would have made everything so chaotic, and that work never saw the light of day.
I don't have time to do that sort of thing regularly, so for the most part I don't run games, but when, five years ago, it became desirable for me to do so, I ran adventure modules. In theory, adventure modules do all that overpreparation for you. The maps, NPCs, timelines, and developments are all worked out by the module writers. The time-consuming business of world-building is also performed commercially by game companies, publishing sometimes elaborate setting sourcebooks for places like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Harn, various historical periods, licensed fictional universes so you can roleplay in the worlds of your favorite TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Firefly) or novel (Harry Dresden, Miles Vorkosigan) series.* Good idea, right? Less work for GM, more revenue stream for the gaming company.
Except all modules need fixing.
I'm serious. I've never run a module that didn't require some fixing and fudging, that didn't leave huge gaps for me to fill in or present logical lapses for me to bridge. I've had to rewrite character stats because I knew my players would laugh at a fire-breathing ninja opponent; I've had to redraw maps because of architectural and geographical absurdity, and I've had to overhaul strategy because in dozens of playtests the creators never ran a party with a basic knowledge of seige engines or use of air power.
No adventure plan survives initial contact with the players, even when the GM knows the players; so modules written by total strangers have a strike against them from the start. Also, the two obvious ways to write a module - following a set storyline, and presenting a setting in which the players wander at will - lend themselves to the two campaign flaws I discussed last week, railroading and flopping. There has to be a better way.
Here's what I'd like to get in an adventure module:
A detailed setting, including things like weather and activity patterns (the business district of a town may be a very different place at different times of the day; an agricultural settlement may be sleepy or bustling depending on time of year) and large-scale maps, all with room in the margins for note-making and sufficient undefined space for the players to fit themselves into. I've never known a player who didn't get a kick out of finding his character's house on a map.
Optional rules covering the defects of the game system that are called into high relief by the setting. The shortcomings of D&D rules for water travel, for instance, become glaringly obvious in any adventure setting with rivers. Shocking numbers of players I meet online don't care and are happy to use the rules as written; but every group I've ever played with that comes up against such a defect has stopped cold until the group's "game mechanic(s)" (like "shade tree mechanics only with rule sets; they're usually also computer programmers) devise a more realistic rule. I would really, really like the builders of an adventure module to recognize this problem and have the more realistic rule set available for use right out of the box.
An introductory scenario suitable for any set of PCs and designed to simplify a realistic party formation. (It's a cliche of adventuring parties that the members all answer ads, or meet in a tavern and become best buds; let's have something more organic than that here.)
Placed within the scenario, multiple adventure hooks, all mutually exclusive. The players can pick up any one of them (or, in the case of some contrary groups, none) and follow it through a typical adventure scenario, at the end of which will be another hook, and so on. I think three is a reasonable number; say, one lower, one middle, and one upper class hook; or one intellectual, one combat-heavy, and one social; each should be distinctive and designed to appeal to different styles of play.
The unchosen scenarios should have "default" developments - since the PCs don't intervene, the situations and characters in those scenarios will have their effect on the setting, which will in turn affect the lives of the PCs. The consequences of each unchosen adventure will be written into the adventure paths of the chosen one, so that if the party chooses a combat-heavy path, they'll be finishing their campaign against the evil warlord in the middle of a revolution fomented in the social path and a crime wave resulting from no one stopping the rise of the Mob in the mystery path. Once the original path is completed, the players may choose to tackle the other problems - which have grown in magnitude as the players have grown in power. The party that wouldn't commit to an adventure path will be wandering around creating their own adventures in the detailed setting against the backdrop of the developments of all three ignored scenarios.
Practically speaking, players will sometimes opt to change paths mid-stream, but there's no way to anticipate when or how. For this reason, and also because the players are bound to come up with unanticipated actions, the scenario and setting should be designed with plenty of space for customization - wide margins and page backs intended to be used for in-game notes, spare character sheets, editable maps, and so on. In this modern age, there'd be a good response to custom "campaign tracker" software designed to make it easy to add comments to maps, alter NPC character sheets, change stats(in case the players decide to fortify an inn, say, or somebody marries the ruler's son), and so on.
You could even design Tournament Modules - modules intended to be played at conventions within a set period of time - in which three GMs at three different tables would run all three scenarios simultaneously, periodically letting their different groups interact directly. It'd be hard to set up, but it'd be a big hit when it worked.
If anybody wants to pay me to set up a sample module along these lines, I'm available. But it would take more entrepreneurial spirit than I have, not to mention better persuasion skills, to convince any existing game companies to invest in this idea when the modules they have keep selling. Besides, I don't want to work for a game company. Game content freelance contracts are insane by the standards of the rest of publishing. I think I'd be in violation of most of them by having this blog in the first place. And as for founding my own game company and producing the idea on my own - Dammit Jim, I'm a novelist, not a capitalist!
But I will totally try out any modules anybody produces along these lines.
*Excuse me for blowing off getting links to these setting books; the internet is being stupid today and I don't have patience to fool with it.)
During the shakedown period for D&D 3.0, back in 2000, I ran a one-off prison break scenario as a means to give people some experience with the new system before committing to a campaign. The PCs were imprisoned unjustly as a result of a disturbance during the escalation to civil war, and if they didn't escape before a certain point All Hell was going to break loose. I made a timeline of incidents that would proceed in the background until the PCs intersected with them and changed them. Once All Hell broke loose, I found myself tracking the actions of about six groups of people all over the city, in 15-minute increments, so that no matter what decisions they made or when they made them I'd have a guideline to what they'd find happening. Then the PCs escaped 24 hours before the criticial point and in the process released another prisoner who prevented the critical event that would have made everything so chaotic, and that work never saw the light of day.
I don't have time to do that sort of thing regularly, so for the most part I don't run games, but when, five years ago, it became desirable for me to do so, I ran adventure modules. In theory, adventure modules do all that overpreparation for you. The maps, NPCs, timelines, and developments are all worked out by the module writers. The time-consuming business of world-building is also performed commercially by game companies, publishing sometimes elaborate setting sourcebooks for places like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Harn, various historical periods, licensed fictional universes so you can roleplay in the worlds of your favorite TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Firefly) or novel (Harry Dresden, Miles Vorkosigan) series.* Good idea, right? Less work for GM, more revenue stream for the gaming company.
Except all modules need fixing.
I'm serious. I've never run a module that didn't require some fixing and fudging, that didn't leave huge gaps for me to fill in or present logical lapses for me to bridge. I've had to rewrite character stats because I knew my players would laugh at a fire-breathing ninja opponent; I've had to redraw maps because of architectural and geographical absurdity, and I've had to overhaul strategy because in dozens of playtests the creators never ran a party with a basic knowledge of seige engines or use of air power.
No adventure plan survives initial contact with the players, even when the GM knows the players; so modules written by total strangers have a strike against them from the start. Also, the two obvious ways to write a module - following a set storyline, and presenting a setting in which the players wander at will - lend themselves to the two campaign flaws I discussed last week, railroading and flopping. There has to be a better way.
Here's what I'd like to get in an adventure module:
A detailed setting, including things like weather and activity patterns (the business district of a town may be a very different place at different times of the day; an agricultural settlement may be sleepy or bustling depending on time of year) and large-scale maps, all with room in the margins for note-making and sufficient undefined space for the players to fit themselves into. I've never known a player who didn't get a kick out of finding his character's house on a map.
Optional rules covering the defects of the game system that are called into high relief by the setting. The shortcomings of D&D rules for water travel, for instance, become glaringly obvious in any adventure setting with rivers. Shocking numbers of players I meet online don't care and are happy to use the rules as written; but every group I've ever played with that comes up against such a defect has stopped cold until the group's "game mechanic(s)" (like "shade tree mechanics only with rule sets; they're usually also computer programmers) devise a more realistic rule. I would really, really like the builders of an adventure module to recognize this problem and have the more realistic rule set available for use right out of the box.
An introductory scenario suitable for any set of PCs and designed to simplify a realistic party formation. (It's a cliche of adventuring parties that the members all answer ads, or meet in a tavern and become best buds; let's have something more organic than that here.)
Placed within the scenario, multiple adventure hooks, all mutually exclusive. The players can pick up any one of them (or, in the case of some contrary groups, none) and follow it through a typical adventure scenario, at the end of which will be another hook, and so on. I think three is a reasonable number; say, one lower, one middle, and one upper class hook; or one intellectual, one combat-heavy, and one social; each should be distinctive and designed to appeal to different styles of play.
The unchosen scenarios should have "default" developments - since the PCs don't intervene, the situations and characters in those scenarios will have their effect on the setting, which will in turn affect the lives of the PCs. The consequences of each unchosen adventure will be written into the adventure paths of the chosen one, so that if the party chooses a combat-heavy path, they'll be finishing their campaign against the evil warlord in the middle of a revolution fomented in the social path and a crime wave resulting from no one stopping the rise of the Mob in the mystery path. Once the original path is completed, the players may choose to tackle the other problems - which have grown in magnitude as the players have grown in power. The party that wouldn't commit to an adventure path will be wandering around creating their own adventures in the detailed setting against the backdrop of the developments of all three ignored scenarios.
Practically speaking, players will sometimes opt to change paths mid-stream, but there's no way to anticipate when or how. For this reason, and also because the players are bound to come up with unanticipated actions, the scenario and setting should be designed with plenty of space for customization - wide margins and page backs intended to be used for in-game notes, spare character sheets, editable maps, and so on. In this modern age, there'd be a good response to custom "campaign tracker" software designed to make it easy to add comments to maps, alter NPC character sheets, change stats(in case the players decide to fortify an inn, say, or somebody marries the ruler's son), and so on.
You could even design Tournament Modules - modules intended to be played at conventions within a set period of time - in which three GMs at three different tables would run all three scenarios simultaneously, periodically letting their different groups interact directly. It'd be hard to set up, but it'd be a big hit when it worked.
If anybody wants to pay me to set up a sample module along these lines, I'm available. But it would take more entrepreneurial spirit than I have, not to mention better persuasion skills, to convince any existing game companies to invest in this idea when the modules they have keep selling. Besides, I don't want to work for a game company. Game content freelance contracts are insane by the standards of the rest of publishing. I think I'd be in violation of most of them by having this blog in the first place. And as for founding my own game company and producing the idea on my own - Dammit Jim, I'm a novelist, not a capitalist!
But I will totally try out any modules anybody produces along these lines.
*Excuse me for blowing off getting links to these setting books; the internet is being stupid today and I don't have patience to fool with it.)
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Feudal Reconstruction
All this reading about the Civil War and Reconstruction had made me realize how rich an environment history would be for a campaign. All those internal conflicts, all those impossible decisions, all that rabidity, all that intimacy among people with opposing interests, all those ad-hoc alliances, all those Indians and bushwhackers and vigilance committees. Routine trading with the enemy because the enemy had what you needed and needed what you had; besides, the trading relationships you had before the war didn't go away when your state took a political position diametrically opposed to his state's. Slaves who ran the plantations while their masters (often their blood relatives) were away, and were - not exactly rewarded for their selflessness, which was probably also self-interest - afterward. No matter what your opinion might be or who you were, it could get you killed if you spoke the wrong word to the wrong person, and the wrong person could be anybody, the wrong word could be any word.
However interesting all this is, even 150 years on the issues are too raw and controversial to make for comfortable roleplaying. At least one thing I said in that last paragraph probably made you uncomfortable, if you're American; I wouldn't venture to guess which sentence bothered you, but I'm sure every sentence would bother somebody. We have all been taught a lot of nonsense about the Civil War and most of us have an emotional investment in some bit of that nonsense, even if we can be objective about the rest of it. The urge to simplify history into good guys vs. bad guys expresses in the typical RPG as a structure which makes good vs. evil struggles almost mandatory; and that doesn't model the real situation well. Even in a group like ours, which deals better with moral ambiguity than most groups and has evolved a strategy for negotiating alignment disagreements (the most potentially savage disagreements in role-playing, because they touch so closely on real-life morality), is not necessarily going to enjoy role-playing in a situation this close to home.
The simplest way to deal with this is to change the setting to a generic medieval fantasy one. Almost any system will do, though it wouldn't surprise me to find that the Harn setting had already done most of the work for you. You design an isolated small political unit - ideally a single manor or barony. The country has recently gone through a succession (as opposed to secession!) crisis, in which the side the lord of the manor or baron lost. The campaign locale is isolated from the main field of battle, but has suffered economically and lost a lot of able-bodied men. Also, its isolation has tended to attract deserters during the war and disaffected knights who refuse to accept the new status quo, both of whom set up as roving bandits in the greenwood.
In order for this to work to defuse emotional investment in the issues involved, both the claims should have been about equally good. Because of the way feudal obligations are set up, probably the lord didn't care about the rights or wrongs of the succession claim, but followed the lead of his liege. As far as he was concerned, the issues weren't political, but personal. Others in his area of responsibility might feel differently. This lord was killed in battle, and he leaves a widow and at least one daughter (no sons). The person who killed him in battle has also died, leaving two sons.
The new king (or queen, whatever; new monarch anyway) decides that the minimally disruptive way to deal with this territory and reward faithful service is to marry the lord's daughter to the second son of the man who killed him. This son, who would otherwise be landless, is to move in, pacify the region, and make everything hunky-dory again.
Having mapped the immediate area in some detail - bare minimum, the central estate, supporting peasant village, and enough greenwood and rugged hills to shelter the bandits - and the surrounding area more vaguely, defined the feudal relationships of the inhabitants to eachother and the outside world, and given names and some general stats, but no personality or alignment, to some prominent NPCs (possibly only the new monarch) the DM would then present the situation to the players and tell them to make a character, any character, to fit into this mileu. This should be done as a group project. If somebody wants to play the widow, the forcibly affianced daughter, the imposed lord, a bandit leader, any of the on-site characters who would normally be NPCs setting the tone for the campaign, let them. They can even define some NPCs in relation to themselves - for instance, "I want to play the widow, and the daughter isn't old enough to be married yet, so I'm acting as regent for her." The only limitation should be that all the players agree on how and why their characters will naturally work together as a party for similar goals.
In my experience, failure to reach such an agreement is the #1 cause of party conflict. That one guy who just has to play a Babylonian in a Celtic campaign, but would immediately design a Celtic character if you changed to a Babylonian campaign, has to be required to address this issue up front or you'll be dealing with that instead of playing most of the time. It's all right to play an outsider, and the source literature most of us draw on often has outsiders as protagonists; but a role-playing game is based on the party, not the individual. It's the player's responsibility, not the game master's, to provide a motivation for the outsider to participate.
The players will of course be full of questions about these key NPCs, insisting that they can't make their characters without this knowledge; but, until the characters are made, this knowledge will not exist. For maximum comfort of play, the players will be the ones setting the primary conflict and the degree of moral realism they want to deal with.
The barony might be a hotbed of rebellion, the widow and daughter and their steward evil schemers, in league with the bandits. This is the scenario to choose if the players have decided to be the new lord and his entourage, a shining band of paladins bringing relief and order to an overtaxed and oppressed peasantry who have suffered too long. In which case, that forced marriage poses a pretty problem to the player who volunteered to play the new lord. Your first adventure problem stands before you: How will the players deal with the plot to murder the new lord on his wedding day and frame an innocent, loyal man? And by the way, how does he maintain a marriage and his legitimacy as ruler without violating his principles and becoming a rapist? (Hey, they asked for it. Don't play a paladin if you can't face up to the tough moral problems!)
The new king might be an evil tyrant, punishing the good and gentle people who opposed him with ruinous taxation, human rights violations, and cruel overlords reducing them all to slavery. This would be the natural result of the players deciding to play a Robin-Hood-style band of merry men; or any assortment of types who are characterized as loyal to the old regime and dedicated to resisting the new. If one of your players is all afire to play the widow or the daughter, in this scenario, she'll probably have a vision of how to do so that will set the tone for the whole campaign and lay the first adventure in your lap. Running away to the greenwood and forcing the new lord to assume control without the gloss of legitimacy, for example, only requires you to build the factors restraining her from doing so, with a view to rendering the rest of the party necessary to assist her.
I can most readily imagine my own group creating a conglomerate party from both sides of the conflict: A noble squire personally sworn to the new lord, the son or daughter of the widow's personal bodyguard, an ambitious peasant with a useful set of skills, a minor religious personage attached to either the household or the entourage (most medieval RPGs have healing tied to religious professions), maybe even a bandit come in from the cold. They would leave the new lord, the widow, and the bride alone to be NPCs, and in this case, though you could make the widow a resentful schemer who can't forgive her new son-in-law, the most reasonable character to give the Lord and Lady is that of two people determined to set aside their differences (after all, the Lord didn't kill the father personally and it was an honorable death) and restore law and order. The party would then be a deliberately-chosen coalition intended to act as troubleshooters and sent off on missions.
Monsters, unruly neighboring lords, unreconstructed outlaws, scheming courtiers, rebellious peasants (with and without legitimate gripes), and opportunistic carpetbaggers undermining the new lord's policies would be the primary foes. Your bandit-come-in-from-the-cold might create a Big Bad as part of his backstory in the form of a bandit leader he ran away from, determined to set up his own fiefdom here on the fringes of civilization, to include the target locale. Your squire might know things about the new king that the new lord doesn't want to believe because his moral standards are higher than the king's.
The GM should, in fact, encourage the players to create backstories with story hooks in them; and should, once provided with them, use them. Even if the hook is not one that appeals to you at first. You don't, after all, have to use it in the way the player is trying to manipulate you into using it! This is true regardless of the campaign.
This concept, like the Small Boat Campaign, would require a lot of flexibility on the GM's part and maturity on the parts of the players. But any good game does. The two most common kinds of unsatisfactory campaigns are the Railroad Plot (the GM has overdetermined what should happen and the players have limited freedom) and Total Plotlessness (the players have unlimited freedom but no goals). In both, the players' choices are meaningless.
Novels and role-playing games are different in a lot of important ways: the team-as-protagonist is difficult-to-impossible in novels, but necessary in RPGs; knowing where your story is going is necessary in novels but almost impossible, without railroading, in RPGs (and decreases the fun; the best moment in any game is the moment when the players come out of left field with a solution the GM would never have thought of in a million years); RPGs reproduce the texture of real life while novels streamline it; and so on. But they are alike in this.
The characters' choices must have meaning, or the whole thing is pointless.
However interesting all this is, even 150 years on the issues are too raw and controversial to make for comfortable roleplaying. At least one thing I said in that last paragraph probably made you uncomfortable, if you're American; I wouldn't venture to guess which sentence bothered you, but I'm sure every sentence would bother somebody. We have all been taught a lot of nonsense about the Civil War and most of us have an emotional investment in some bit of that nonsense, even if we can be objective about the rest of it. The urge to simplify history into good guys vs. bad guys expresses in the typical RPG as a structure which makes good vs. evil struggles almost mandatory; and that doesn't model the real situation well. Even in a group like ours, which deals better with moral ambiguity than most groups and has evolved a strategy for negotiating alignment disagreements (the most potentially savage disagreements in role-playing, because they touch so closely on real-life morality), is not necessarily going to enjoy role-playing in a situation this close to home.
The simplest way to deal with this is to change the setting to a generic medieval fantasy one. Almost any system will do, though it wouldn't surprise me to find that the Harn setting had already done most of the work for you. You design an isolated small political unit - ideally a single manor or barony. The country has recently gone through a succession (as opposed to secession!) crisis, in which the side the lord of the manor or baron lost. The campaign locale is isolated from the main field of battle, but has suffered economically and lost a lot of able-bodied men. Also, its isolation has tended to attract deserters during the war and disaffected knights who refuse to accept the new status quo, both of whom set up as roving bandits in the greenwood.
In order for this to work to defuse emotional investment in the issues involved, both the claims should have been about equally good. Because of the way feudal obligations are set up, probably the lord didn't care about the rights or wrongs of the succession claim, but followed the lead of his liege. As far as he was concerned, the issues weren't political, but personal. Others in his area of responsibility might feel differently. This lord was killed in battle, and he leaves a widow and at least one daughter (no sons). The person who killed him in battle has also died, leaving two sons.
The new king (or queen, whatever; new monarch anyway) decides that the minimally disruptive way to deal with this territory and reward faithful service is to marry the lord's daughter to the second son of the man who killed him. This son, who would otherwise be landless, is to move in, pacify the region, and make everything hunky-dory again.
Having mapped the immediate area in some detail - bare minimum, the central estate, supporting peasant village, and enough greenwood and rugged hills to shelter the bandits - and the surrounding area more vaguely, defined the feudal relationships of the inhabitants to eachother and the outside world, and given names and some general stats, but no personality or alignment, to some prominent NPCs (possibly only the new monarch) the DM would then present the situation to the players and tell them to make a character, any character, to fit into this mileu. This should be done as a group project. If somebody wants to play the widow, the forcibly affianced daughter, the imposed lord, a bandit leader, any of the on-site characters who would normally be NPCs setting the tone for the campaign, let them. They can even define some NPCs in relation to themselves - for instance, "I want to play the widow, and the daughter isn't old enough to be married yet, so I'm acting as regent for her." The only limitation should be that all the players agree on how and why their characters will naturally work together as a party for similar goals.
In my experience, failure to reach such an agreement is the #1 cause of party conflict. That one guy who just has to play a Babylonian in a Celtic campaign, but would immediately design a Celtic character if you changed to a Babylonian campaign, has to be required to address this issue up front or you'll be dealing with that instead of playing most of the time. It's all right to play an outsider, and the source literature most of us draw on often has outsiders as protagonists; but a role-playing game is based on the party, not the individual. It's the player's responsibility, not the game master's, to provide a motivation for the outsider to participate.
The players will of course be full of questions about these key NPCs, insisting that they can't make their characters without this knowledge; but, until the characters are made, this knowledge will not exist. For maximum comfort of play, the players will be the ones setting the primary conflict and the degree of moral realism they want to deal with.
The barony might be a hotbed of rebellion, the widow and daughter and their steward evil schemers, in league with the bandits. This is the scenario to choose if the players have decided to be the new lord and his entourage, a shining band of paladins bringing relief and order to an overtaxed and oppressed peasantry who have suffered too long. In which case, that forced marriage poses a pretty problem to the player who volunteered to play the new lord. Your first adventure problem stands before you: How will the players deal with the plot to murder the new lord on his wedding day and frame an innocent, loyal man? And by the way, how does he maintain a marriage and his legitimacy as ruler without violating his principles and becoming a rapist? (Hey, they asked for it. Don't play a paladin if you can't face up to the tough moral problems!)
The new king might be an evil tyrant, punishing the good and gentle people who opposed him with ruinous taxation, human rights violations, and cruel overlords reducing them all to slavery. This would be the natural result of the players deciding to play a Robin-Hood-style band of merry men; or any assortment of types who are characterized as loyal to the old regime and dedicated to resisting the new. If one of your players is all afire to play the widow or the daughter, in this scenario, she'll probably have a vision of how to do so that will set the tone for the whole campaign and lay the first adventure in your lap. Running away to the greenwood and forcing the new lord to assume control without the gloss of legitimacy, for example, only requires you to build the factors restraining her from doing so, with a view to rendering the rest of the party necessary to assist her.
I can most readily imagine my own group creating a conglomerate party from both sides of the conflict: A noble squire personally sworn to the new lord, the son or daughter of the widow's personal bodyguard, an ambitious peasant with a useful set of skills, a minor religious personage attached to either the household or the entourage (most medieval RPGs have healing tied to religious professions), maybe even a bandit come in from the cold. They would leave the new lord, the widow, and the bride alone to be NPCs, and in this case, though you could make the widow a resentful schemer who can't forgive her new son-in-law, the most reasonable character to give the Lord and Lady is that of two people determined to set aside their differences (after all, the Lord didn't kill the father personally and it was an honorable death) and restore law and order. The party would then be a deliberately-chosen coalition intended to act as troubleshooters and sent off on missions.
Monsters, unruly neighboring lords, unreconstructed outlaws, scheming courtiers, rebellious peasants (with and without legitimate gripes), and opportunistic carpetbaggers undermining the new lord's policies would be the primary foes. Your bandit-come-in-from-the-cold might create a Big Bad as part of his backstory in the form of a bandit leader he ran away from, determined to set up his own fiefdom here on the fringes of civilization, to include the target locale. Your squire might know things about the new king that the new lord doesn't want to believe because his moral standards are higher than the king's.
The GM should, in fact, encourage the players to create backstories with story hooks in them; and should, once provided with them, use them. Even if the hook is not one that appeals to you at first. You don't, after all, have to use it in the way the player is trying to manipulate you into using it! This is true regardless of the campaign.
This concept, like the Small Boat Campaign, would require a lot of flexibility on the GM's part and maturity on the parts of the players. But any good game does. The two most common kinds of unsatisfactory campaigns are the Railroad Plot (the GM has overdetermined what should happen and the players have limited freedom) and Total Plotlessness (the players have unlimited freedom but no goals). In both, the players' choices are meaningless.
Novels and role-playing games are different in a lot of important ways: the team-as-protagonist is difficult-to-impossible in novels, but necessary in RPGs; knowing where your story is going is necessary in novels but almost impossible, without railroading, in RPGs (and decreases the fun; the best moment in any game is the moment when the players come out of left field with a solution the GM would never have thought of in a million years); RPGs reproduce the texture of real life while novels streamline it; and so on. But they are alike in this.
The characters' choices must have meaning, or the whole thing is pointless.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Destiny Sucks!
We went to see the movie adaptation of The Lightning Thief last Sunday, forewarned by a report that the director had based the movie on his reading of the back of the paperback. This is standard for movies made from books, so I tried to suppress my irritation at the aging of the characters and the omission of all clues to the metaplot for the series, all the politics and most of the cool details of life at Camp Half-Blood, and two-thirds of the characters. (That's a rough guesstimate; I have not in fact done the math.) My husband, despite my assurances that this is less of a problem in the books, made no attempt whatsoever to suppress his irritation at yet another fantasy about a Chosen One.
He keeps watching and reading fantasy, but that particular cliché gets on his nerves something awful. The Chosen One doesn't get any choices, but he also doesn't have to do The Work. Not the big prestigious work of whatever destiny he's Chosen for, but the drudge work, the daily grind of training, learning, getting experience, and earning respect. You're the Chosen One so you're stronger, faster, better and everybody acknowledges this. You win dominance fights with folks who have trained their whole lives, 24 hours after you first manifest your Special Snowflake Powers, and they become your loyal sidekicks. The Good Guys give you respect on a silver platter and the Bad Guys are jealous. Prophecies that reference you come true regardless of what you do. The Big Bad End Guy never makes any progress against you, either because he's too stupid to recognize you or because you're so darn special you defeat all his cat's paws. He always sends cat's paws instead of trying to squash you like a bug himself, even when there's no overwhelming plot reason for him not to do so.
And who Chose this guy, anyway? I'm an agnostic and believe that stuff happens because of the complex interactions of contingency, chemistry, biology, physics, and free will. My husband is a Christian and believes that God set up the world, gave us free will, and sent us forth to do the best we can - or not, as we choose. We both know from experience how badly bad choices can mess things up for everybody, how powerful good choices can be, and how often "good" and "bad" aren't moral decisions, but practical ones. There is no place in either worldview for some mysterious background power that gets to decide for us what we will and will not do.
When he complains about this stuff I always assure him that someday I will write a story in which the Chosen One gets annihilated in the first chapter, and the Mighty Essential Quest has to be carried out by somebody, or a team of somebodies, who steps up to the plate and defeats the BBEG because hey, it's better to go down fighting impossible odds than to give up. The prophecies go unfulfilled or are turned on their heads. People you root for die horribly, the Unchosen Hero makes meaningful sacrifices, bad choices have bad consequences, every inch of ground is sweated over, and in the end the survivors are faced with a mess to clean up rather than a sunrise; but the BBEG is gone, the apocalypse or whatever is averted, and everything that is, is so because people exercised their free will.
The trouble is, I seldom feel like writing high fantasy these days, and I haven't had any specific sparks for situations or characters that make me want to get past the abstract concept. And it strikes me that as many high fantasy stories as use the Chosen One trope, there should be lots of room for stories that subvert it. I can even think of one, though it doesn't structure itself in direct opposition to the cliché in the way I'm contemplating: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud. Dear God, that third book has a killer ending! And in Lois McMaster Bujold's theological thrillers set in the country of Chalion, she sets up the interaction of divine will and free will with a masterful hand. Even in the Percy Jackson books, it's made clear that more than one person can fulfill the prophecy. The more people look for the possibilities in the trope, rather than blindly following the path it lays down, the better.
It'd make a good campaign concept, too - the adventuring party is at best the second-string backup to the original Chosen One, alive now because they sneaked out to attend a kegger at the Rolling Pig Tavern on the night the BBEG launched a full-out attack on Chosen One HQ and wiped out the Chosen One, his sidekicks, and his mentors.
Inside every cliché lurks a good story. Part of our job is to turn it inside out, and look.
He keeps watching and reading fantasy, but that particular cliché gets on his nerves something awful. The Chosen One doesn't get any choices, but he also doesn't have to do The Work. Not the big prestigious work of whatever destiny he's Chosen for, but the drudge work, the daily grind of training, learning, getting experience, and earning respect. You're the Chosen One so you're stronger, faster, better and everybody acknowledges this. You win dominance fights with folks who have trained their whole lives, 24 hours after you first manifest your Special Snowflake Powers, and they become your loyal sidekicks. The Good Guys give you respect on a silver platter and the Bad Guys are jealous. Prophecies that reference you come true regardless of what you do. The Big Bad End Guy never makes any progress against you, either because he's too stupid to recognize you or because you're so darn special you defeat all his cat's paws. He always sends cat's paws instead of trying to squash you like a bug himself, even when there's no overwhelming plot reason for him not to do so.
And who Chose this guy, anyway? I'm an agnostic and believe that stuff happens because of the complex interactions of contingency, chemistry, biology, physics, and free will. My husband is a Christian and believes that God set up the world, gave us free will, and sent us forth to do the best we can - or not, as we choose. We both know from experience how badly bad choices can mess things up for everybody, how powerful good choices can be, and how often "good" and "bad" aren't moral decisions, but practical ones. There is no place in either worldview for some mysterious background power that gets to decide for us what we will and will not do.
When he complains about this stuff I always assure him that someday I will write a story in which the Chosen One gets annihilated in the first chapter, and the Mighty Essential Quest has to be carried out by somebody, or a team of somebodies, who steps up to the plate and defeats the BBEG because hey, it's better to go down fighting impossible odds than to give up. The prophecies go unfulfilled or are turned on their heads. People you root for die horribly, the Unchosen Hero makes meaningful sacrifices, bad choices have bad consequences, every inch of ground is sweated over, and in the end the survivors are faced with a mess to clean up rather than a sunrise; but the BBEG is gone, the apocalypse or whatever is averted, and everything that is, is so because people exercised their free will.
The trouble is, I seldom feel like writing high fantasy these days, and I haven't had any specific sparks for situations or characters that make me want to get past the abstract concept. And it strikes me that as many high fantasy stories as use the Chosen One trope, there should be lots of room for stories that subvert it. I can even think of one, though it doesn't structure itself in direct opposition to the cliché in the way I'm contemplating: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud. Dear God, that third book has a killer ending! And in Lois McMaster Bujold's theological thrillers set in the country of Chalion, she sets up the interaction of divine will and free will with a masterful hand. Even in the Percy Jackson books, it's made clear that more than one person can fulfill the prophecy. The more people look for the possibilities in the trope, rather than blindly following the path it lays down, the better.
It'd make a good campaign concept, too - the adventuring party is at best the second-string backup to the original Chosen One, alive now because they sneaked out to attend a kegger at the Rolling Pig Tavern on the night the BBEG launched a full-out attack on Chosen One HQ and wiped out the Chosen One, his sidekicks, and his mentors.
Inside every cliché lurks a good story. Part of our job is to turn it inside out, and look.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Idea Garage Sale: The Small Boat Campaign
The Invader has conquered the keep on the coast. The Lord is dead and a new Lord sits on his chair. Similar scenes have been enacted up and down this coast, and sometimes the entire staff is massacred, but this Invader thinks there are people it's not worth soiling his hands with. Most of the inhabitants have accepted the new status quo (after all, how do you think the old Lord's ancestors got their position, picking daisies?), but a small handful of people, not worth fearing, have refused to swear fealty, and the Invader has placed them in a small boat with two oars, a keg of water, a box of food, and whatever they stood up in. Who are you? Why are you in the boat? What will you do now?
There's more than one way to tell a story. Remember when you were little, playing pretend games with your friends, making stories, and how they tended to break down because everyone wanted to be the hero? Well, back in the 70s that problem was solved with the invention of the Role-Playing Game, in which rules govern who can do what and one person - the Game Master, Referee, or whatever your system calls that role - adjudicates how the rules work, presents the problem, and runs the villains and minor characters. Everybody else gets to be a hero.
I love RPGs. They give me the chance to be someone besides me for a change and to collaborate with other creative minds, something I'm not normally good at. My basic social circle is my gaming group. Acting as Game Master with the use of published adventure scenarios (all of which needed heavy modification to accommodate our play style) was a big help in getting my creative muscles back into shape so I could write again after the Year from Hell. Now that I'm writing books again, I don't have time for it. Running a game is a labor-intensive, time-intensive amusement, and unless you get a job with a gaming company, which is way out of my ambition range, you don't get paid for it - except in the satisfaction of creating and running a game that your friends enjoy. In which case your reward is going to be more work.
The difference between a Campaign and a Novel is, that you as Game Master don't control the Campaign the way you as Author control a Novel. Yeah, as an author you often feel that the characters are running away with the story, that you are writing to find out what happens next, or that you are constrained by some exterior circumstance - your plot has to fit, geographically and chronologically, in the overall landscape of the contemporary world, or the Civil War, or the laws of physics. But all that happens between your own set of ears. You create all the characters and the plot proceeds in a way that makes sense to you.
This is not true in a role-playing game at all. It is a cliche of the genre that no scenario survives contact with the players. You think you've put in a big blinking neon sign pointing to your story, and they run off in a different direction after some little butterfly you tossed in for verisimilitude. You could try to force them back on track, but that tends to ruin the fun. Nobody likes a Railroad GM (a gamemaster whose story runs on tracks, and whose course cannot be altered by anything the players do). So - you let them go off after the butterfly and you run to catch up. You improvise. You toss them an easy puzzle, and they can't solve it; you set up an encounter you think hopelessly outmatches them and will end with them in the dungeons of the Bad Guy, where you can finally get back to your original plot, and they pull off some stunt that you could never have anticipated and wind up running the Bad Guy's show.
I may yet run the Small Boat Campaign, but feel free to take it over if you want. Depending on who is playing and the characters they produce, it could play out dozens of different ways. If the players decide that they are the original Lord's illegitimate half-brother, the nurse who has rescued the Lord's heir by claiming it's her own baby, the herald's apprentice, and a page boy who's father is a knight whose castle down the coast a way was conquered last week, they're going to want to go to an unfallen keep and devote the campaign to turning back the invader. If the players are a wandering bard who was only passing through, an unlanded knight who objects to the Invaders' religion but has no pre-existing loyalty, and a shipwrecked sailor, you might find them heading out in pursuit of rumors of the Isles of the Blessed and yourself running a campaign of exploration and derring-do. As GM, my job would be to pick a rule system, of which there are dozens, and create enough of a background for the players to make intelligent choices about who they want to be and what they want to do; then to fill in that background and create characters, cities, countries, and a world in response to the choices they make.
I won't be doing it any time soon, because I have books to write, and I don't have time to draw the campaign I started in the wake of The Year From Hell to a satisfactory conclusion. My players have considerable emotional investment in those characters and they deserve a good ending before I start something else. Also, making a campaign from scratch like that is just as much work as writing a book and I don't have energy to write two books at once, so I have to focus on the one that might someday result in income. But sometimes the campaign ideas bob up, so for what it's worth - there it is.
There's more than one way to tell a story. Remember when you were little, playing pretend games with your friends, making stories, and how they tended to break down because everyone wanted to be the hero? Well, back in the 70s that problem was solved with the invention of the Role-Playing Game, in which rules govern who can do what and one person - the Game Master, Referee, or whatever your system calls that role - adjudicates how the rules work, presents the problem, and runs the villains and minor characters. Everybody else gets to be a hero.
I love RPGs. They give me the chance to be someone besides me for a change and to collaborate with other creative minds, something I'm not normally good at. My basic social circle is my gaming group. Acting as Game Master with the use of published adventure scenarios (all of which needed heavy modification to accommodate our play style) was a big help in getting my creative muscles back into shape so I could write again after the Year from Hell. Now that I'm writing books again, I don't have time for it. Running a game is a labor-intensive, time-intensive amusement, and unless you get a job with a gaming company, which is way out of my ambition range, you don't get paid for it - except in the satisfaction of creating and running a game that your friends enjoy. In which case your reward is going to be more work.
The difference between a Campaign and a Novel is, that you as Game Master don't control the Campaign the way you as Author control a Novel. Yeah, as an author you often feel that the characters are running away with the story, that you are writing to find out what happens next, or that you are constrained by some exterior circumstance - your plot has to fit, geographically and chronologically, in the overall landscape of the contemporary world, or the Civil War, or the laws of physics. But all that happens between your own set of ears. You create all the characters and the plot proceeds in a way that makes sense to you.
This is not true in a role-playing game at all. It is a cliche of the genre that no scenario survives contact with the players. You think you've put in a big blinking neon sign pointing to your story, and they run off in a different direction after some little butterfly you tossed in for verisimilitude. You could try to force them back on track, but that tends to ruin the fun. Nobody likes a Railroad GM (a gamemaster whose story runs on tracks, and whose course cannot be altered by anything the players do). So - you let them go off after the butterfly and you run to catch up. You improvise. You toss them an easy puzzle, and they can't solve it; you set up an encounter you think hopelessly outmatches them and will end with them in the dungeons of the Bad Guy, where you can finally get back to your original plot, and they pull off some stunt that you could never have anticipated and wind up running the Bad Guy's show.
I may yet run the Small Boat Campaign, but feel free to take it over if you want. Depending on who is playing and the characters they produce, it could play out dozens of different ways. If the players decide that they are the original Lord's illegitimate half-brother, the nurse who has rescued the Lord's heir by claiming it's her own baby, the herald's apprentice, and a page boy who's father is a knight whose castle down the coast a way was conquered last week, they're going to want to go to an unfallen keep and devote the campaign to turning back the invader. If the players are a wandering bard who was only passing through, an unlanded knight who objects to the Invaders' religion but has no pre-existing loyalty, and a shipwrecked sailor, you might find them heading out in pursuit of rumors of the Isles of the Blessed and yourself running a campaign of exploration and derring-do. As GM, my job would be to pick a rule system, of which there are dozens, and create enough of a background for the players to make intelligent choices about who they want to be and what they want to do; then to fill in that background and create characters, cities, countries, and a world in response to the choices they make.
I won't be doing it any time soon, because I have books to write, and I don't have time to draw the campaign I started in the wake of The Year From Hell to a satisfactory conclusion. My players have considerable emotional investment in those characters and they deserve a good ending before I start something else. Also, making a campaign from scratch like that is just as much work as writing a book and I don't have energy to write two books at once, so I have to focus on the one that might someday result in income. But sometimes the campaign ideas bob up, so for what it's worth - there it is.
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