Category Archives: Roleplaying Games

Demon Week: The Subtler Side of Demons / Shadows in Wraith: the Oblivion

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Earlier this week, I wrote about demons in Magic: the Gathering. The problem with them: They lack subtlety. They are monsters that tear the world they inhabit apart. They will usually end the game in someone’s favor, but they aren’t necessarily interested in whose. They will follow your orders, but only if they are paid.

The real scary demons are not like that. I was reading Hellblazer: Bloodlines just yesterday. It includes a storyline called Royal Blood, (trying to avoid spoilers here) which is about a demon called Calibraxis possessing a man of note. The depictions of the nature of the possession are quite violent, but they happen in the head of the possessed man. The demon tears and sinks its claws deeper, but only “spiritually”. There’s an image of the demon laying on top of the man’s brain. That’s scary. That goes deep. We don’t want anything in our heads, where it can control us.

Another, not as scary, but interesting take, is the character of Mr. Nick in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus played by Tom Waits. He is more like bored than actually malevolent, making him mischevious instead of strictly evil. However, he has a long-term plan and will probably toy with his poor victim for the rest of eternity, giving him just enough line and reeling him back in.

Now, how to do this in an RPG? I believe Wraith: the Oblivion had the answer, of sorts.

In Wraith, each character had a Shadow. A Shadow is basically the dark side of his personality, but the Shadow is played by another player. Its always there, lurking about looking for weaknesses. Someone is always thinking about how the Shadow can gain influence over the good side of the character. It has its own personality, so there are different approaches to this. Leading the character into enough danger to rely on the help from the Shadow always helps.

Sadly, back when I had the opportunity to play Wraith, my gaming group wasn’t quite mature enough to do it. There were also religious problems with the idea (no, really, separating fact and fiction seems so hard for religious people), as the Shadows seemed quite demonic (for a reason), and one of the players was not a good player, as he was more interested in GMing instead (and wasn’t very good at that either).

Still, I’d love to try it out now that I have a better gaming group. Just a matter of finding the right time, which will never happen, as our schedules are already too full to keep our current games going. Life, sigh.

Anyway, the major idea of the Shadow is obviously putting much of the burden of running them on the players. The GM has enough to do as it is (although I tend to keep my own workload quite light), so running three to five major characters all the time would be a major distraction.

Maybe I’ll just insert the idea into one of our random RPGs.

Demon Week: Demonic Possession, Part 1

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R-20-58-39

Demons in RPGs are nothing new. They tend to be something like Aki discussed yesterday – big and scary. Rarely something else. It might have to do with same kind of prejudice as in the case of MtG. Or not. It actually does not make that big of a difference.

I do not pride myself as an expert of RPG lore. But I have played several games and read even more. So as a part of Demon Week I decide my angle to be demonic possession as it will feature heavily in the Wayward Sons hack.

My first encounter with demonic possessions was with the original Deadlands. My character died and returned as a Harrowed with a demon inside of him. It so was fascinating the play a character who had two different goals (and actual identities) that I was intrigued ever since.

Deadlands handled the thing quite nicely. Once you had a demon in you there was no escape. Except death. It was raiding you until it took total control of your character or your character faced the final death. This was the kind of doom and gloom I liked. Later supplements introduced Voodoo possession too (at least if my memory serves me right) but they did not feel that interesting to me.

Later on when Dark Heresy was published I was once again fascinated by its approach. The demonic possession in WH40K universe was introduced (to me at least) by the Inquisitor war game and Dark Heresy did a good job adapting the power of possession. I absolutely loved the random table for side-effects of possession and ended up using them in a game of WFRP I ran.

For all the rpgs I’ve read and played I’m yet to find an interesting representation of exorcism. I suppose it is somewhere to be found. But actually having missed something like that is an interesting point by itself. Sure, there are numerous magic spells and rituals to exorcism. But no such imaginative rules as those of possession spring to mind.

This is likely because of the specific nature of such an act. In most games the roles of the characters are definite and diverse. Having one character with a special kind of “mini-game” to exorcism just is not that important. Anybody could be possessed by an evil spirit but it seems to be more that a group of characters could/would be involved banishing it from its host.

For me this seems fair. Exorcism is not as important when considering the flow of the story as the actual possession. But it could be. I think that Dread could make an excellent game for exorcism. The characters would all be taking part in the ritual while the demon would be fighting against them. “A little Exorcist and Poltergeist for the evening” so to speak.

Image from: http://www.acliparthistory.com/church/cbr/The-Devil/R-20-58-39

GM Prep for Wayward Sons

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As stated I started to work on a Apocalypse World hack this week. The GM prep was actually quite easy to write as I have been planing this kind of campaign for quite a long time.

Now I do not make the mistake of calling what I have written ready. Actually I believe it will go through some changes still. But I do see this as an interesting opportunity to share the writing process to gain futher ideas and to hone it.

Again – I used the Simple World structure when making this.

Wayward Sons
An Apocalypse World hack

The characters are ripped from their conventional lives by some unnatural event that forces them on the move. They dedicate their lives to investigate the strange and unexplained in secrecy. For they know that hidden forces are always working against them and that the general public would judge them insane. What they do not know that they are all on the road to turn into the very monsters they hunt.

Stats:
Fitness: physicality, endurance, agility
Presence: influence, charm, looks
Violence: aggression, fighting, shooting
Intellect: knowledge, education, rational thinking, reason
Discipline: willpower, mental strength

Assign to stats: +2, +1, +1, 0, -1

Trust
Set Trust to other characters at the beginning of the game by distributing points equal to the number of characters. Trust can be set from 0 to 3.

When you Help or Hinder a character roll THEIR Trust to you +roll.

Additional Stats:

Experience

Gain experience for:
+1 for invoking own Trait to escalate the situation
+1 for each Condition gained
+1 for each esoteric secret learned (from old tomes etc.)
+1 after each session
+1 after each session when the group votes for “who made the game most interesting”

Using experience for:
-1 to re-roll
-1 to activate a Sigil
-1 to gain narrative leeway
-n to power up a ritual (depends on the level of the ritual)
-2 gain a new Trait (up to maximum of 12 Traits)
-2 to reduce Taint level by one
-4 to mark an advance

Taint
Each character starts with 0 points of Taint and a Taint Move:

Spark of Taint
Whenever you commit an inhuman act (kill someone in cold blood, work magic, eat human flesh etc.) make roll+Discipline.
10+ You remain unaffected by the Taint
On a 7-9, You are fighting the Taint. You may choose to advance it.
On a miss, your Taint advance a step.

Character Concepts:
Journalist (pushing for extra info, gaining influence with public writing, heavy drinking)
Medium (contact to ghosts, sensing weird stuff, being mysterious)
Collector (weird collections, trivial knowledge, extensive connections)
Cult Member (access to occult lore, backup from cult brothers, being in danger)
Biker (looking menacing, having biker contacts, breaking stuff)
Dealer (getting illegal things, being paranoid, all talk)
Private Eye (noticing hidden clues, getting it on with dames, shadowing people)
Boxer (hitting stuff, getting hit, abandoned boxing studio)
Ex-Cop (hangover, strained relationships, no-nonsense mood)

The Agendas:

  • Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
  • Play to find out what happens.
  • Drive the characters to turn into monsters

The Principles:

  • The devil is in the details.
  • Introduce a believable world of (supernatural) secrets.
  • Give the world more depth through play.
  • Come up with interesting mysteries, not interesting adventures.
  • Make your move, but misdirect.
  • Make your move, but never speak its name.
  • Use NPCs to introduce constancy, then destroy them.
  • Name everyone, make everyone human.
  • Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.
  • Respond with challenging circumstances and occasional rewards.
  • Be a fan of the players’ characters.
  • Think offscreen, too.
  • Occasionally, let the players answer the questions.
  • The fight is in vain, for humanity means little on the grand scale of things

GM Moves

  • Separate them.
  • Capture someone.
  • Put someone in a high-stakes situation.
  • Harm someone (as established).
  • Trade harm for harm (as established).
  • Announce off-screen badness.
  • Announce future badness.
  • Take away one of their Things.
  • Demonstrate one of their Things’ bad sides.
  • Give them a difficult decision to make.
  • Tell them the possible consequences and ask.
  • Turn their move back on them.
  • Make a move from one of your Dangers or Bigger Pictures.

Starting a New Hack for AW

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I am awful when it comes to RPG rules. I dislike reading them, cannot remember them and have (and quite likely will) changed them always to suit my preferences. I was almost certain that coming up with my own system would solve the case.

Of course it didn’t.

The past months have been a bit dry for me as a GM. I certainly have had ideas and the will but when it comes to choosing or creating the system I get overly complicated. I actually explained this in the first edit quite a lot. But it too got too complicated.

When Aki brought out the tremulus I was quite eager to try it out. Call of Cthulhu kind of games are close to my heart. My gaming group have been playing and enjoying the Apocalypse World and I had wanted to try it but I just do not get anything from post-apocalypse games.

As stated previously I enjoyed tremulus enough to give it a try as a GM. It was almost what I had been searching. But naturally (for me) not exactly it. After brooding over it for a few weeks I decided to try something new.

Joe McDaldno had an interesting thing called “Simple World” on his blog. It basically gives you a blueprint of writing your own Apocalypse World hack. So what the hell, I decided that this was what we should do.

As I write this I have gone through the first steps of the guide (MC Prep). It needs a little re-wording and proofreading but I will present it as I’m satisfied with it. I think I need to map out a little extra for the rules along the ideas represented by tremulus and Urban Shadows RPG (both Apocalypse World hacks). But hopefully we can get this game up and running during this month.

We’ll keep you posted!

Changing the GM

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Recently, Lauri ran the second Bell End story. What’s notable in this case, is that I ran the first one.

Now, we all use ideas by others all the time. That’s nothing new. But the difference is that he was using something very familiar to me, especially since I was the originator of the idea. Not that I specified that many things. Still, he had to skirt around certain things, because I had expectations on the subject. And he did. There wasn’t much about the first scenario, at least not in an easily recognizable form.

I injected some stuff from the earlier scenario, just for the heck of it. This could go horribly wrong, because obviously in a situation like this, I need to let go of the thing and just let the new GM do his thing. I just couldn’t resist. I didn’t do too much of it, but some.

And that’s the key. The old GM might feel he’s creation might be stepped on (although I didn’t), but he or she just has to let it be. If things change, they change. In this case, Lauri moved the whole thing to a new environment, but there was a definite link (not that the new players knew what it was). This is basically a horror series. With each new chapter, one has to find a good balance of familiar and new. In this case, only one of the players (me) was familiar with the original story, so the problem didn’t really exist.

All in all, this was an easy transition. Not much to change.

But what about a campaign. Lets say you do this over a longer period. Hey, who knows, maybe this Bell End thing can continue. I already have an idea for the third installment. You never know. Again, this time its easy, because the characters keep dying and environs will probably change too.

On the other hand, what about a more conventional campaign? After all, some games may not recommend it exactly, but will at least talk about multiple GMs. Its something that is not outside the realm of possibility, despite being quite rare.

Again, some ground rules are needed. Maybe some NPCs and places are out of bounds for other GMs, but since that might cause problems in the verisimilitude of the environment, this should be kept to a minimum, so constant awkward excuses are not required.

Who does the design? In our case, I did the original design of the oneshot, but Lauri didn’t let that constrain him. In a more conventional campaign, players are going to expect a more complete world, which works in consistent way. Two (or more) GMs are going to have slight differences in their interpretation of the setting, no matter how well you define it. People just have different expectations based on their reading of the genre and earlier experiences with similar settings.

I actually had somewhere I was going with this when I began, but writing this, I’ve lost my way, so to speak. I’m probably making all this more complex than it really needs to be and its not really a problem most players even face, but some will.

However, since most people run what they would most like to play, this might actually be a very beneficial arrangement all-around. You shouldn’t go into it blindly, though.

Lanchester’s Laws

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Note: This obviously does not apply to very narrative games, where combat is highly abstract and these kind of considerations are taken care of on a totally different level.

This is about how you can twiddle with the deadliness of combat as the GM. Of course, this isn’t all-encompassing, but understanding these principles will help with both setting up the situation and adjusting the number of opponents.

Frederick Lanchester was a polymath, who founded a car company, did much work with aerodynamics and was one of the founders of operations research. Since operations research might be new to many of you, its the study of using math to help decision-making. Normally, we are using higher mathematics, but today we won’t be needing anything more complicated than powers.

One of the things Lanchester was interested in was how the rudimentary WWI planes faired in battle. He noticed that the battles were fought very differently than other combats. His major discovery was about the amount of killed.

Back in the day, when wars were fought in lines of people, who tried to kill the guy just in front of them, the number of killed would simply be the difference in the sizes of the groups. Assuming similar training and equipment, and no surrendering a group of ten soldiers would win against a group of seven soldiers and three of the group of ten would survive. Obviously, battles would never drag so long that everyone died from one group, but if they would, this is how they’d end up.

Since then, how combat is conducted has changed very much. Its not man against man in straight lines, but people with access to automatic fire or, in the case of planes, no clear battlelines. Therefore both sides can better utilize their firepower instead of limiting it to one person.

Now, in a combat, the actual difference between the forces isn’t linear anymore. So, if we give planes to the soldiers mentioned before (and trained them), the situation wouldn’t be 10 against 7, but those numbers would be squared instead, so its 100 agains 49. The larger group would still have sqrt(100 – 49) = 7,14 or seven people plus someones arm or something.

Proof (not real mathematical proof, but hopefully enough to convince you):

Assume both sides are firing with everything they’ve got. Each unit within the group has a 10% chance of killing an opponent during each “round” of combat.

round group 1 group 2
1 10 7
2 9,3 6
3 8,7 5,07
4 8,193 4,2
5 7,773 3,3807
6 7,43493 2,6034
7 7,17459 1,859907
8 6,988599 1,142448
9 6,874355 0,443588

There is of course some variance. As you can see this differs from the figure above, but its close enough. Its because of the nature world with rounds in it when compared to the world where time flows seemlessly (well, close enough).

In short: If you double the opposition, its power will actually quadruple.

The actual power used in today’s military science isn’t actually 2, but 1.5 because most battles don’t fall cleanly into either category here. Also, this is about symmetric warfare, which is becoming increasingly rare as well.

Games and Language

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A guildmember posted this survey on vocabulary our IRC channel recently: TestYourVocab. My results: http://testyourvocab.com/result?user=2985045.

If you read the whole thing, including the linked information, you’ll see that’s pretty damn good. Better than most native speakers and much, much better than non-natives. But I’m not alone. The results I’ve seen from other guildmembers seem to indicate that they too have pretty extensive vocabularies. Not necessarily as extensive as mine, but definitely noticeably better than most non-natives and on par with native speakers.

Where does this stem from?

I have the added advantage of having worked in the academia, but I believe a major contributor to my vocabulary is my gaming hobby. Many of the words in the survey are terms used in games. Not all, but many.

Now, although vocabulary doesn’t equal intelligence, there is some correlation. If you build something, you are going to be able to do it better, if you have the proper tools. In thinking, concepts are the tools we use. These concepts are then abtracted into words, which work as shortcuts in our thinking (see this post from Saturday).

The more of these shortcuts (or tools) we have, the more efficient our thinking becomes.

Taking the Foil / Straight-Man Role as the Player

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About a year ago, we played Lady Blackbird. Ville ran it, I and Lauri participated, with couple of other players. I was Kale Arkam, the ex-burglar, current mechanic of the Owl. Lauri was Snargle, the goblin pacifist pilot, with problems with risk assessment, to put it politely.

I didn’t choose this approach consciously, but I sort of fell into a role of the straight man. There were some comedic aspects to my character (namely his greed) and I did play up his rogue/low-level wizard/mechanic abilities at times, but mostly I just played against Snargle and Cyrus Vance, the captain. Not in the sense that I tried to kill them or beat them, but when they were doing something outrageous, I’d put a spotlight on it by having my character argue against the idea, roll his eyes, just step back from the situation and stuff like that.

I think it worked. Some of the time I didn’t even know what was happening, but played it out like my character knew exactly what was going to happen. Partly this worked because we had excellent chemistry within the group (although I met the player of the captain for the first – and thusfar only – time). There was a lot of in-character banter and after a couple of hours, I felt the crew of the Owl had a very in-depth history, which was formed through discussion injected into the game.

I enjoyed playing like this. In the past (and often still), I like to have the spotlight at least some of the time, but in this case I enjoyed sharing it with others in a way which probably makes my character look like a supporting character, but we often need the contrast to let certain aspects really shine. I think Ville was at times worried that I wasn’t getting my spotlight, but in this case, I didn’t feel I need it.

I’m not sure this kind of playstyle comes easily. I think pieces just fell into place in this specific case and it worked because of circumstances. On the other hand, this is an age old technique from comedy (although standups don’t do it anymore) and theater. It works in movies. It wouldn’t stick if it didn’t work. Since RPGs have been moving towards more traditional storytelling anyway, its not out of the question to bring this kind of character into RPGs on a more regular basis. I just don’t think you want to proclaim you are doing this.

The Imaginarium of Mr. Moreau (tremulus)

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It is funny that Aki should mention the gaming immersion in his recent post. I encountered some of the problems discussed while I ran tremelus last week.

I had done my homework and read through the rulebook. I had played the game a few times and I had build a framework for the session. But still something was missing. And that was the confidence that is required to run this kind of a game.

Having just recently found the Apocalypse World engine I did not have the same amount of experience from it as Aki did when he ran tremulus. He made it seem quite easy. I found it anything but that. I had to constantly browse through the book to find what moves I could use and how exactly I could do that. I had to consult Aki during the session to get a confirmation that I was doing the thing right. It was a big hassle. At the beginning.

Then I did what I should have done the last time a ran a one shot. Threw to rules out the window so to speak. I wasn’t going to let the rule system ruin yet another session and just lead the game as I usually do. By guiding the flow of events just the way I damn please.

The players where familiar with their end of the system. They new what they were doing but I lost total track of all the tracks and moves I had in my disposal. I just let the things happen the way I thought they might improve the narrative. Was this done according to the principles of tremulus? Maybe not but at least to my knowledge the players had fun and enjoyed the game.

If you want to check out the framework (and maybe give pointers of how to improve it?) you can download it HERE as a pdf.

GMing: Keeping the Lore vs. Playing

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I ran my first Call of Cthulhu campaign during 2009 and 2010, during which time my GMing preferences underwent a drastic change. It was the acclaimed Tatters of the King, “Cthulhu done right”, praised for its believable NPCs and milieu. While everyone seemed to like the story, from the GM’s point of view the campaign was arduous. There is little freedom for the players, and the GM is instructed to fudge die rolls so that certain events come to pass in just the right way. What’s worse, the book is a horrible manual for an actual gaming session. To start with, there are no master lists for clues, or any other handy points of reference other than a timeline. In effect, I had to keep the book open at all times and make sure that I handed the players just the right information to ensure that the campaign goes along.

GMing it was hard work during the sessions. The book is 232 pages long, and the campaign takes up about 180 or 190 pages. Some of the early scenarios contain information or objects that are vital late in the campaign, but the information in the book doesn’t follow any clear format – it’s hidden in the NPC’s pre-written dialogue. Without a Master List of Everything Necessary, or at least a small explanatory text of what’s essential in the scene, it was really hard to improvise anything.

In effect, I kept the book open in my lap at all times, glanced at it regularly so that I could act the parts of the NPCs and deliver all the necessary information the players. It was hard to concentrate on what was happening at the gaming table because I had to focus on the book and on making sure that the campaign could go on.

(I’m not blaming it all on the book, though; it might not be the best campaign for a first-time Cthulhu GM. Maybe an experienced GM could have read the book in its entirety and gleaned all the necessary information and made his own play aids. I maintain that it’s the book’s job to make the pre-made campaign easily playable, but that’s beside the point here.)

That’s my point of view, my experience. In contrast, around the same time I had two different kinds of roleplaying experiences. FIrst, I read new gaming masterpieces such as 3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars, and even got to play them a bit. 3:16 is a rules-light, improvisation-heavy roleplaying game about space marines intent on killing everything in the universe. It is filled with good stuff, but what’s relevant here is that 3:16 was the first game where I encountered the band metaphor for RPGs. It’s like jamming together and creating stories. (To my present knowledge, Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer is the first game to utilise that metaphor.)

The second experience was playing two Call of Cthulhu scenarios several times in Ropecon, namely John Wick’s Curse of the Yellow Sign, Act One (three times), and John Tynes’ In Media [sic] Res (five times). Those scenarios are player-driven, and the GM is reacting. Everyone is kind of riffing off of each others’ ideas. The players play against each other, and the GM is trying to make the situation even more intense (and sure, describes the environment, gives clues and so on). Rather than reading from the book what’s supposed to happen next, the GM feels out the situation at the gaming table and adds something to it. Effectively, he’s one of the players.

In Tatters of the King, my job really felt like that of The Keeper of Arcane Lore, Call of Cthulhu‘s title for the GM. I was the repository of stuff that the players had to uncover. Their rolls of dice were either rolls to see whether they were damaged, or whether they could get access to the information I was withholding. (In effect, I fudged a lot of rolls because that was what I was used to.) I didn’t feel like I was one of the players in the game, or “one of the guys”. I was sitting at the head of the table, which sort of emphasised my role as being apart from the others.

Now, I’m not saying I never want to sit at the head of the table again (actually I still do), or that I don’t want to withhold information (I still do if the game has something of the sort), or that I want everyone at the table to hold equal power (I sure as hell don’t, but neither do I advocate that the traditional GM-player divide is the only way, or the only interesting way, to divide power). What I am saying is that I learned to love playing. I want to come to the table and feel that I don’t have all the answers, that I don’t know what’s going to happen at the table. I enjoy the moments when players surprise me and I have to step back and admit that I didn’t see that one coming.

What I’m saying is that I learned to Play Unsafe, which is actually a title of a brilliant little book by Graham Walmsley that I also read during the Cthulhu campaign, and I urge you to read it as well. When I don’t know what’s going to happen at the table, I need to stay on my toes and pay attention to what’s happening at the table. I feel more uncertain and tense, and I can transform that uncertainty and tension into something positive.