The game we selected is Aces and Eights. We have played around with it a couple of times in the past– a couple of one shots and character creation sessions.

Character Creation: The Process

Character creation in Aces and Eights is detailed and proves to be an interesting mix of random with lots of options. The easiest analogy for character creation complexity, for me, is to older editions of Shadowrun. (It feels particularly like Shadowrun when you’re going through long equipment lists.) But the randomness makes Aces and Eights a unique beast. Let’s dive in and look a little closer.

Characters are built off a platform of seven randomly rolled stats: the six you expect from D&D, plus looks. Each stat is the normal 3-18 range, but is also given a decimal percentage that is often truncated, but occasionally has a significant impact. So a character might roll a strength of 11.77, an intelligence of 6.12, and so on. Character creation is predicated on rolling 3d6– no funny business– but if you’re looking for a more talented bunch of characters you can reroll ones, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest, or whatever methods you’re familiar with from years of AD&D and similar systems.

Our game is intentionally less heroic [we just finished with high level D&D and wanted a change], so we rolled characters straight. Well, mostly we did. Kev’s dice were cold, and he wound up generating four sets of raw statistics before finally coming up with one that looked fun to play. The other characters… would have been challenged by life on the Savage Frontier. Probably too challenged to enjoy playing much.

Once you generate the raw stats, you can improve them a couple of ways. You can trade stats down to raise others– usually at a 2:1 or worse ratio, unless you’re improving sub-seven stat rolls. We avoided the trade system, and instead purchased incremental improvement. At the start of character generation, you’re given a pool of 75 build points. You can improve your stats by 0.05 per build point*, which is primarily used to cross the threshold to the next whole number when you’re close. So, for 5 BP, I could raise my 11.77 Strength to 12.02.
_{* Subject to diminishing returns; after 20 BP [1 full stat point], each BP buys you less.}

Once your stats are all adjusted, you’re ready to move on. (Don’t spend all of your BP on stats– you’ll need them for skills and talents later!) Copy over your stat bonuses for your skills. Now roll up an age, roll to see if you’re right handed, and decide where you want to come from. (If you’d like inspiration, there’s a random table of birthplaces.)

If you like, you can take a detour and generate your family history and circumstances. We did so; it’s a chunk of additional rolling, but can really help settle a character in your mind. If you do so, be sure to use the amended Chapter 6.5– there are a few troublesome errors in the printed books. (Among other things, the first print run omitted the table laying out the chance for characters to be legitimate…)

From here, you calculate your Reputation, which is an average of your seven stats, modified by your looks and Charisma. The more naturally talented your character is, the better their reputation, and the more build points you gain. This is common throughout the system; good rolls early improve things for your character all along the line. It can lead to a rich-get-richer problem, but that’s reality, right? Speaking of rich, it’s time to roll up starting cash. [It doesn't matter what you roll-- it won't be enough. There's a lot of expensive gear that's awfully nice to have... like horses and guns.]

Now you can roll or pick quirks and flaws. Much like older White Wolf games, quirks and flaws are flatly negative, but reward you with additional build points. If there’s a flaw you’d like to play you can pick it off the list– but for only half value. If you roll, you get full value, but results range from amputee to a love of food. If you want multiple flaws, you can take a second or third… but the build point reward descends by five for each additional flaw. This is useful for strongly discouraging a big pile of flaws. A quick d4 roll for HP and you’re essentially done with the easy part of character generation. Hopefully you have a big stack of BP at this point… you’re going to need them.

The next step is purchasing skills. Interestingly, none of the purchasable skills are combat skills; for combat, you’re rely on your stats and a talent or two, if you have the BP to purchase them. Skills are everything else: spotting things, chemistry, sewing, and so on. These are a little tricky; different skills have different costs, ranging from 1 to 10 for one tally of skill. What’s that? Well, each time you buy one tally, you reduce the skill percentage by your stat plus a die roll. The die sizes vary; highly regimented skills like medicine are often a d4, while physical and social skills are often a d8– all the way up to a d20 for drover. The law of diminishing returns is here in full force: the second tally of a skill costs twice as much as the first (so 2 BP for a 1 BP skill; 20 BP for a 10 BP skill), the third triple, and so forth. So becoming an expert in a skill can quickly drain your BP… unless it’s a low BP skill and your high stat gives you a discount. The process is a little tricky, and with die rolls for each skill level, it’s not something you can do independently. The skill list is alphabetical, which makes it easy to skim right over useful skills. Fortunately, a detailed writeup is available in the back of the book for each skill– skimming that chapter often reveals an oversight, or you find that a skill doesn’t quite do what you imagined on reading the title. It’s pretty easy to fix at this point, as long as you haven’t run yourself out of BP.

Now that you have your skills, you can buy talents, which are 10-50 BP. You probably can’t afford many, if any, but it’s good to look. (You should probably look before you pick skills, really, to ensure that you save enough BP for any talent you find necessary.)

You’re almost at the end! Now you can take that starting cash you rolled, augment it with your leftover BP converted into cash, and can buy equipment. There is a lot of equipment; 8 pages of small type with few descriptions. Not including the guns, which are 20 glossy pages earlier in the book. You can buy all kinds of things, from pencils and notebooks, to wagons and mules, to fishing line and a canteen. It’s a very extensive set of lists– and provides good insight into the relative value and rarity of items. When a horse is 3-4 months of wages for an average cowboy, you can see why they take such good care of their mounts.

Character Creation: Who Resulted?

While it took a while, we came up with three interesting characters that we’d never have come up with on our own. The combination of random stats (that you can ameliorate a bit), random quirks and flaws (encouraging you to play beyond your comfort zone), and a limited number of BP made some interesting characters. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of our three hombres.

Kev created Dr. Emerson Brown, a wealthy son of a doctor and landlord in New York City. He had a great upbringing, but wants to escape dad’s shadow. He just turned 21, and is headed out west with a few guns and a medical kit. He’s known for his doctoring and has a few other white collar skills. He’s impulsive, short tempered, and has high standards. He also has a terrible bedside manner. He should be interesting to be watch.

Mike created a orphaned kid of 15, who is an excellent scout and outdoorsman. He hopes to be hired on as the trailblazer for the wagon train. He is headed out west hoping to start up a ranch, capture some wild mustangs, and turn a tidy profit. He’s terrible at lying, prejudiced against the Irish, and carries a number of big guns.

I created Bob Cassidy, from rural Tennessee in the CSA, now 19. He’s got a lot of natural talent [high wisdom], leading to good cooking, fishing, and observation type skills, a lot of experience handling a wagon, and some good gossip and talking skills. He won’t say no to food, and can’t lie to save his life. If you hear rustling at midnight, it’s probably just Bob looking for a snack.

Character Creation: Was it worth it?

It took a lot of steam to grind through character creation, particularly through the thick list of skills. A lot of the rolls added personality, the family backgrounds suggested a lot of context, and quirks and flaws are great for a shorthand description of a character.

Skills take some effort to add, and I don’t see how much adding the die rolls [versus a fixed number] improves the process, but they aren’t too bad, really. The hard part is making sure you haven’t missed an “of course” skill– the first time we played, we all missed “observation” on the list and groaned when it was time to spot enemies. I think there are over 100 skills in the game… it’s very easy to miss one.

Worse than skills, however, is purchasing equipment. Making the first pass of purchases is pretty easy– but then, when you want to erase a few vials of ink and add a hunting cap and three shirts, it can get messy. I’m going to use a spreadsheet, mostly because our setting concept means purchasing is important. In other circumstances, I’d beg for handwaving equipment.

Character and Setting

This is not a game with a set “what characters do” like Dogs in the Vineyard. It’s the west, and you can be any reasonable person with a reason to wander. “Let’s play Aces and Eights” isn’t really a pitch. It has to be narrowed down so the characters have something to aim at and some interaction.

Our specific pitch, worked out last week, is that we will be members of a wagon train headed west. We’re going to start in St. Louis and head out to the Oregon territory. We laughed about it being an analog version of the Oregon Trail computer game from 5th grade, but it’s a great pitch. We know there are a variety of struggles in the future of our characters: the challenge of getting there, then the challenge of joining a settlement or forming a new town. Mr. Brown is already contemplating the position of mayor, and Mike has mentioned that his character might make a good sheriff… but it’ll take play to see how the rest of the wagon train reacts. Annoy the wrong person and you might get dumped in the wilds.

Questions? Pointers?

I was surprised when I began searching the web for resources; I remembered the excitement when Aces and Eights was first announced, but I didn’t find many resources for the game outside of Kenzer’s dedicated site. Arc Dream’s The Gang With No Name was one of the few play threads I found. Fortunately, the thread has neat resources like PDFs he built for his group, that will work great for ours.

What great resources have I missed? Have you played Aces and have warnings or encouragement to pass on? I know that I’m eager to play and find out how Bob is going to deal with the rigors of the trail. If you have questions, please ask!

Related posts:

1. D&D Burgoo: NPC creation finds a new path
2. Stat generation
3. Character Histories and Background

The best kinds of ideas are one that have been vetted by someone else and have received constructive feedback. What we might think is the greatest plot twist may, in truth, offend the players, or crush their free will in within the game. Quite simply, a GM’s need someone to run ideas past. We need a GM Sounding Board; that person who will listen to our ideas, and make suggestions, but most importantly be honest with us; not afraid to tell us if our idea is cool or totally sucks.

Job Requirements

Not just anyone can fill this role. There are a few requirements for being a GM Sounding Board (which, because I am feeling lazy we will now abbreviate as GMsb).

Relationship

First thing, and this may be obvious, but the GMsb needs to be a person that is not a player in your gaming group. If they were, they would be privy to upcoming in-game events, and that would not be any fun at all for them, and likely to anger the rest of the group. So, the GMsb needs to be someone that is separate from your group. Here are a few types of relationships that would work:

• Spouse or Significant Other
• Friend who does not play in your group
• Members of a Discussion Board, where your players do not frequent
• A Gnome (but never Halflings…ever)

Understanding

While having your GMsb be a full-fledged gamer, is an advantage, it is not a requirement. Someone who has a good grasp of literature or cinema can also be a good fit. Any person with a good grasp of what makes a book good or a movie a hit is going to have the necessary skills to evaluate your ideas.

My GMsb is my Wife who is not a gamer, but is familiar with my games, my players, and is both an avid reader and movie watcher. She has no problem following most of my plots, and she often pulls in great ideas from books and movies, I am likely never to have read or seen on my own (chick flicks, movies without helicopters, guns, explosions, kung fu).

Honesty

Your GMsb has to be honest. When you have an idea that stinks, you need to be sure that the person you are telling is going to give you an honest answer about how bad it is. They can be nice about it, but honesty is everything. Sometimes this is not fun to hear, especially if you think you have the best idea ever, but a bruised ego is much better than a session that sucks.  So, if you do not believe that your current GMsb can perform this most candid service for you, you might want to consider shopping around for a new one.

Thought Provoking

The best GMsb’s are not just Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down people, they should challenge your ideas, ask you to defend your ideas, and very often add something that you had not thought of.  So your GMsb has to expressive, needs to make you work for that idea.

A good idea can be made into a great one, when your GMsb asks the right question, or offers up the “and…” to your idea. I am very fortunate that my GMsb, has a great understanding of story structure, and a knack of asking a question that explodes in my head and causes ideas to rain down.

Compensation

The GMsb gets the short end of the deal on this. They listen to your ideas, they offer up their opinion, and even collaborate with you. But in the end, you write the session notes, and you run it.  Your players think you are some kind of GM savant, but you were not alone. So from time to time, do something nice for your GMsb, and give some props to them.

Two Minds Are Better Than One

The GMsb is a valuable resource for a GM. Having someone who will make sure your bad ideas never see the light, and your good ideas are improved, is a valuable asset.  If you don’t have a GMsb, seriously consider finding one, and you should see an improvement in your sessions.

If you have a GMsb, then feel free to give them that praise they richly deserve in the comments below.  Tell us, who they are, and some of the best ideas they have helped you with, or some of the worst they talked you out of.

And to my Wife, thank you for listening to me, for 9 years go on about characters, scenes, plots, etc. and for offering up that question or idea that makes my ideas better than had I done it on my own. Thanks.

Your turn….

Related posts:

1. Fair or Foul? Planting the Evidence
2. You Should Quit GMing, Right Now
3. Troy’s Crock Pot: The Devil Made Me Do It

This past weekend I just finished running a medium length campaign for my group. The game had been a play test and world-building project. The group travelled far and wide across the world and grew to great heights of notoriousness . . . uh, I meant fame.  A couple of sessions before the projected finish of the campaign, a few members of the group told me how much they would have liked to have done a big dungeon with these characters. Since I’m not the type of Game Master to run huge amounts of Dungeon Crawls I figured I would pick up an interesting dungeon from my FLGS or Drive Thru RPG. Then I saw on Facebook that it was Monte Cook’s birthday. Every time I saw or heard something about Dungeon-a-Day I had thought that I should sign up for it, if only I ran more dungeons . . . Bang. Problem solved. I immediately signed up for a subscription and set about running it once the group finished up their current adventure.

The Experience
One of the very first things that has to be noted about Dungeonaday.com is that it is incredibly easy to use. Signing on for the first time I came across the handy  “Getting Started” section, replete with links to resources that are useful for the GM. Things like “History of Dragon’s Delve” or “Dungeon Design Assumptions“. There is even a separate section for “Dragon’s Delve Resources“, which includes a whole plethora of things that are useful to the Game master. Sections like Secrets and Rumors of Dragon’s Delve provide great adventure hooks, GM only information, and even false rumors to throw your players off with.

Dungeonaday really leverages the power of the internet to change the way dungeons are written. Links from within articles and room descriptions let  you easily access relevant information directly in a new window. You can click, read what you need, close out the window or drag it away, and jump right back into playing.

Aside from links in the articles, the level maps are a piece of html wizardry. Clicking on a room opens its summary in a new window. This makes the level map an excellent central location to work from. While reading ahead is a decent idea, information about links to a room are always contained within a room. For instance, if a 4 bugbears (20 hp) were going to going to burst through the secret door from 2a and ambush the PCs in this room, that information is placed within the summary for room 4. Links to the bugbears stats (if available on the site or from D20srd.org) will be included so that all the Game Master has to do is click the links and game from the screen.

I really can’t say enough about how Dungeonaday uses some really simple but elegant web technology to create an easy to use adventure.

Full Featured
Aside from the unique and easy to use layout the room summaries are full of information. While the site has a section for the general history of the dungeon, each section has information (or a link to where to find information) about the history or necessary motivations for a room’s inhabitants. Pictures from various fantasy artists adorn many of the summaries. Layouts of various rooms using Dwarven Forge rooms are done for most of the rooms. Links to printouts and game aids are provided where necessary and they come in incredibly handy. A few times I came across one that I had forgotten to print out beforehand. All I had to do was hit print, ask a player to grab it from the printer downstairs, and weave the handout into the story.  Many of the illustrations for elements unique to the dungeon were provided in this way, so all I had to do was turn the screen or print out the “sketching in an old journal” that they found to include a visual element for the players. While I might have to take pains to cover the section title “AMBUSH THAT WILL KILL YOU INSTANTLY” in a printed book, all I have to do with Dungeonaday is click view in a new window and the players only get to see the image that I want them to see.

Size And Continual Content
The Dragon’s Delve dungeon is huge. The site states that when finished it will have 20 levels. Currently (after one year) the dungeon is written into the 7th level with two outside areas. This isn’t the type of dungeon you “clear out”, as it says in the Dungeon Design Assumptions section.  While you might worry about getting to the end of it too quickly, I’ll say this: You won’t. Every room has an encounter or special factor to it. There aren’t any “empty” dungeon rooms. The dungeon is also more than an instance for adventurers to kill monsters. Most rooms contain a “Revisit” section that details what happens if the party returns to the area.There are also random encounter tables for each level and a unique history that can provide for a fairly complex social experience. In one room my group decided to try to “party with the gnolls” instead of attacking. A few good rolls and some interesting roleplaying and a fairly large section was played out as a negotiation and aiding in a clan war. No matter what, you are going to find something to use within this dungeon. Even using the dungeon (or a section of it) as an element in another adventure is going to provide you lots of well thought out material to modify.

Do I Need My Laptop At The Table?
I’ll say this. Having a laptop at the table increases the awesomeness of Dungeonaday.com exponentially. However, you don’t need it. PDFs of completed levels are available to subscribers. Yearly subscribers get these free, quarterly and monthly subscribers pay a small fee. This is only to prevent people from signing up for one month, downloading all the PDFs and then cancelling.

What If I Don’t Play D&D
So, I have to confess that I didn’t run my games in anything resembling D&D. While Dungeonaday is definitely geared towards running in D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder (D&D 3.75) it doesn’t need to be. I converted things on the fly and had no issues whatsoever. I could easily see running Savage Worlds, Gurps, Besm Dungeon, or any other fantasy game or setting out of Dungeonaday. A small amount of prep would be needed, but not much.

Final Conclusions

• I am highly enamored of the layout and internal linking done by Dungeonaday.
• I loved the ease of use factor. I didn’t need to go digging for anything, it was all provided off of the summary for the room that my group was currently in.
• Many of the rooms are made to challenge traditional parties and work well to counterbalance too powerful parties.
• The dungeon itself is incredibly well thought-out. Nothing in the back-story, history, monsters, NPCs, or any other factor felt half done.
• Every possible step to make things easy on the Game Master seems to have been taken. Even when it is just a photo of a papercraft model to show how a 4 dimensional level (that’s right, you heard me, there is a freaky and fun 4D level) is arranged it is done.

I loved running from Dungeonaday.com. When we finished out the adventure (and two sessions later the campaign) my group kept talking about wanting to see what else was in the dungeon. Our next game is going to be a troupe-style game with each player running a different level or two. If it seems like I am gushing about Dungeonaday, that is solely because it is so awesome. I received no compensation, free access, nor back alley threats from Halflings (stupid Halflings) to do the review. If you are looking for a great site to mine for individual rooms, looking for a huge mega dungeon to run your group through as they level up, or just looking for a great example of adventure design then Dungeonaday is something you should definitely check out.

So, does anyone currently run from Dungeonaday? Got any fun stories about it? Have you seen any examples of adventures online that work like this? I’m interested in the use of interactive media to run adventures and might be building my next adventures like this. Share your thoughts and go check out Dungeonaday. Its worth a look.

Related posts:

1. Johnny’s Five – Five Tips For Tweaking Your Gaming Space (Plus one frigging awesome link)
2. Awesome moments: Action Points and FYIA Tokens
3. Johnny’s Five – Five Awesome Pieces Of Terrain

My last campaign was traditional D&D v3.5, which I ran almost entirely from a laptop, learning enough to write not one but two articles on laptops at the gaming table. This time around, the presence of wife and child means that priorities have changed; hours of prep and research are no longer an option.

So I chose a system that is fun, but has low prep requirements: Savage Worlds. While this is written from my experience as a Savage, many of these techniques can easily be carried over into other systems. 

Prep

The campaign is still managed by computer; nothing else can handle the volume of data that a campaign world will generate. For what it’s worth, a Google Group handles the public side of the campaign world, and Microsoft’s OneNote handles the GM’s side. I should be using a ‘one stop shop’ like Obsidian Portal, but Google was where it started, and my players probably wouldn’t like to switch horses mid-stream.

Reminders and pre-session notes are made on an index card or two, and a half-sized legal pad stands at the ready for notes during the session.

Savage Worlds has a fairly simple character sheet; most NPCs and critters can fit onto an index card. I made simple character sheets for blank 3×5 cards, and fill them in. Once the cards are used, they get filed in a card holder, ready for their next engagement. 

Next, miniatures are segregated by encounter and stashed in spare dice bags, so the players won’t know what’s next. I try to prep more encounters than are expected, just in case the players take that wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Play

Savage Worlds can be a very prop-heavy game, with markers for Bennies, Power Points, Wounds, and the all-frustrating Shaken condition. Bennies are full-size green ‘clay’ poker chips. Wounds and Shaken are stackable 1” plastic poker chips (red and white, respectively). Power Points are glass beads.

Savage Worlds has two types of area effects: cone and circle. The cone is a simple paper template until something cooler shows up. The various sizes of circle are macrame rings. They work great and are available in almost any size.

In gameplay, the 3×5 character sheets are brought out for their encounter. Bennies and initiative cards are placed on the proper character sheet. Shaken and Wound chips are stacked underneath the mini’s base, so everyone can see the situation.

Since the end of my last campaign, I’ve taken to using larger dice and rolling in the open. Because Savage Worlds is a game of wildly variable die rolls, this works out beautifully, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Here’s a picture of my setup, taken at the beginning of an encounter. You can see just about everything noted above:

Aftermath

XP in Savage Worlds is usually 2-3 points per session. I borrowed this system from a friend and GM. (Thanks Flynn!)

• 1 XP for showing up at the game.
• 1 XP for ending a chapter or campaign arc (about every 3-4 sessions).
• 1 XP for answering the “Questions Three” – Name three things learned in tonight’s session, whether about the rules, the setting, or other characters.

Everyone’s always answered the “Questions Three”. It’s more of an encouragement to take notes and to be engaged in the campaign than it is a challenge.

After the session (sometimes almost a week after), I write a “Wrap-Up” email, covering XP totals, answering any questions brought up, and providing a brief synopsis of the session’s adventure. This not only acts as a reminder of what happened, but it also allows me to emphasize or clarify certain aspects or events. If your players completely overlooked your Big Hint, here’s a good chance to drop it again.

As a final note, I love my Tact-Tiles too much to take the plunge, but we’ve considered using a gridless battlemap for the campaign. If we did, a bunch of mini tape measures would magically appear at the table.

Comments? Questions? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

Related posts:

1. Come to the Savage Side
2. Breaking the Rules
3. Loose Prep, Detailed Play

While looking over this, and seeing some of the forum buzz it created, it struck me that a lot of things done in this room are solely for the game immersion factor. A  lot of things he does here are the same kinds of things that I do with my gaming space to keep my players focused and involved. The gaming space you play in is incredibly important to your game. Anyplace with a table (if you need one) will work, but if the space you are gaming in is working against you, then you have a lot more work on your hands. So here are five things to think about in regards to your gaming space.

1. The walls are your biggest problem and your biggest asset
   When a player isn’t in the spotlight or is feeling slightly bored, the thing that is going to take up most of their visual wandering is the walls of your gaming room. That pineapple wallpaper from the 70s is going to turn them right out of gaming mode if that is what fills most of their vision. If you are playing a fantasy game and the walls look somewhat dungeon-like, then the gamer’s mind is never going to leave that mental space they have while involved in the game.The same goes for sci-fi, horror, western, or any other genre. Sure we can’t redo the walls of our living rooms or basements for every game, but throwing a few props or art that fist the genre of your game up on the walls will help keep a continuous stream of mental immersion into the game world.

    
   These props layered around my game room help the steampunk/anime-fantasy feel of the game I am currently running.

2. Table props trump room props
   The players are going to be looking at the walls sure, but their main focus is going to be on the table. Any visual element there helps the players keep focused in the game. Use bits of scenery, make sure you’ve got minis (even if they aren’t being used in the current action), keep maps interesting even if they aren’t to scale. I can’t overemphasize the importance of the visual space of the gaming table. Even if you are doing maps on the fly, there are little touches for making them nifty. I use Jenga blocks and dominos to build most of my dungeons, but I paint them up to look like dungeon walls and doors. When I make use of ships or airships in a game, I make use of the cardboard ships from various ship trading card games, like Pirates. These little elements keep people visually engaged with the action going on. Even if I can’t make use of appropriate props, I make use of permanent markers and poker chips to represent spacing or the fact that something is on the board.

   

3. Try to remove anything from the room that visually breaks game immersion
   Anything in your room that breaks the immersion of the genre you are playing in is bad for the immersion. Burntwire’s awesome setup has speakers hidden in the ceiling, no visible light switches (all controlled by the DM and hidden under the table), an old looking table that doesn’t look modern in any way, and walls that look like dungeon brick. The only modern looking things in the room are the plethora of games he has collected and the closets (a plain grey color). I’m not saying you shouldn’t strip everything electrical out of the room, but you should take minimal steps to cover it up. If you play mostly sci-fi games primarily then make use of dimmer switches or more futuristic lighting options. If you are playing horror games, spread some cobwebs and remove any happy and "warm" items or things from the room. You don’t need to be as extensive as this guy (although seeing his apartment makes me want to rent it and play a star trek game there), but if you are setting up a permanent gaming space, tweak it out to help the types of games you play.

   
   The fireplace isn’t something I can cover up, but I remove all the modern cleaning tools that sit around it before game and try to sit with it to my back for the brick effect. 

4. Background music is great, but it should stay in the background
   I love me some background music. I think it is great for game immersion, and Martin covers it in-depth in the article I just linked to, so I’m not going to rehash already great advice. I do want to add to it, though. Music should not play in a space that puts it between you and your players. The biggest lesson I ever had to learn when playing music was to not play it directly off of my laptop. It put the music pointing at me and the sound was something I had to talk over or turn down low (because of the way that humans localize sound). Instead, get some cheap speakers and run them around behind the players, and keep them a decent distance away so that they aren’t right in the players’ ears. This makes the music a factor but not the central one. When you are doing this think about step 3 and try to hid the speakers in a non-visible area or cover them (unless they help build immersion).
5. Burntwire’s setup is definitely extensive, but lots of things can just be layered on top of where you already play. Don’t break the bank.
   Ok, this is more money saving advice, but it is important. Immersion is important to a game, gaming space is important to immersion, but it isn’t absolutely necessary. No game is going to suffer because the Game Master didn’t spend wads of cash and time on building something awesome. Doing so might help a game, but it isn’t necessary. If you want to do things to liven up the gaming space and help with immersion, there are lots of easy things you can do on the cheap:
   • Print out things to use as props for the walls. There are many sites that have generic images for genres like sci-fi, fantasy, etc.
   • Use things you may already have (like replica swords – BE SAFE!) to hang on the walls.
   • Party stores have wall coverings and really nifty props that are fairly cheap. Need a dungeon wall or a western saloon look – they’ve got it.
   • Kid’s craft books have lots of recipes for making things suitable for nifty table props. Paper mache, contractors foam from stores, even cardboard boxes with a little bit of marker drawing can make great terrain. It sure isn’t going to be as professional as purchased or hobby-store created stuff, but it will work.
   • Focus in one in-game element for ease of setting up your space. In one shadowrun game I ran I had the group stationed out of a mechanic’s shop. I grabbed some spare tools and a rolling toolbox from the garage. A few adhesive hooks and the toolbox in the corner made the place feel like the shop.

     
     Elements of the “Hunters Lodge” which my group played out of (plus a quickly made spiderweb/rock structure piece of scenery).

Gaming space can be tweaked out for immersion to great effect. It can be done with small things added onto your gaming room or can be done full bore, like Burntwire’s setup. What steps do you take to tweak out your gaming space? Have you ever had a horrible gaming space that was detrimental to the game? What was the best gaming space you have ever used?

Related posts:

1. F.A.P.: The Problem Without Extradimensional Storage Space
2. Dungeonaday.com – Awesome In Any System
3. Gnome Rodeo: Link Me Amadeus

Happy GM’s Day from all of us gnomes, from the bottom of our grubby gnomish hearts* — GMs of the world, you rock!

This year, we’re officially lame: We’re so insanely busy getting all of our ducks in the row for the upcoming release of our first book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters (announced last weekend), that we’re pulling long nights after long days and have had exactly zero time to prep for GM’s Day.

Were it not for our deeply ingrained gnomish laziness, beaten into us at a young age by our red-hatted gnomish mommas**, we be better stewards of this sacred day. We’re sorry!

As it is, the best we can do is cough up a link to RPGNow’s annual GM’s Day sale and ask you to open your wallets and treat yourselves to something awesome.***

Also exciting: Monte Cook’s Dungeonaday.com turns one year old this month, and is celebrating with a special price: $84 for an annual subscription if you sign up this month. Dungeons + Monte + $7 a month = a very good thing.

For our part, we’ll be enjoying GM’s day by whipping the Eureka manuscript into its final form. Happy GM’s Day!

* Rumors that we stole our hearts from dwarves and/or halflings are filthy, filthy lies.

*** Though not, we feel compelled to mention, so awesome that you won’t be able to afford to pick up Eureka!

Related posts:

1. Four Ways to Make Your Players Happy
2. Gnome Stew’s Secret Project: The Cat’s Out of the Bag
3. Surgery on Gnomes is Expensive!

Rico Is So Dead

Shortly after I finished reading the Fiasco rulebook, my group and I were supposed to have a Witchcraft game, but it was canceled when one of the players was sick (read: hangover). We decided to give Fiasco a try. We gathered a total of four players and decided to use the Tales From Suburbia playset. 

While the Fiasco rules suggest that you use index cards and post-it notes for documenting relationships, needs, objects, and locations, we put the whole thing down on a dry erase board in my gaming lounge, and I thought I would share it with you.

After our Setup we had the following:

• Carlton Dalton—Owner of a bookstore specializing in crime books in a run down mall, and the owner of a prize show dog (a St. Benard), which was rescued from a dog fighting ring years ago.
• Lance—Owner of a rival bookstore in the same run down mall and distant cousin of Rico. He is angry at Tina the Madam who has tried to ruin his business (to win Carlton’s favor).
• Rico—The boy toy of Tina the Madam. He wants to break up with Tina and is looking to hook up with someone to prove that “he still has it.”
• Tina the Madam—A suburban madam running her prostitution ring from the basement of her house with her boytoy Rico and would like to buy Carlton’s prize dog.

Act One was all about Lance and Rico conspiring together to kill Carlton’s show dog, and Tina and Carlton getting wind of the plot and preparing to get them first. The first few scenes were a bit rocky, but by the fourth scene everyone had gotten comfortable, and the plot had begun to pull itself together.

Then came the Tilt.  Lance and Rico came up with a plan to run over the dog outside the dog show, but they miss and run over Carlton, only clipping the dog in the head, which then sets the dog on a murderous rampage as it reverts to its dog fighting days. Then things take a turn for the worst.

In the end, the mall burned down, a store clerk was shot, a mall security guard was shot, several prize dogs were mauled, the dog vanished in the fire, Lance was arrested, Rico fled the country, a badly burned Carlton was forced to work in a chain book store, and Tina…well she broke up with Rico, but found love and a new puppy in the end.  It was a total Fiasco.

Overall, the game play was very easy. The Fiasco rules do an excellent job of helping to create the setting, and then allowing the players to create the story. The dice pool becomes a very versatile tool, that gets re-tasked for several activities: The Setup, The Tilt, and The Aftermath. This keeps the rules very tight.  In our first game we started to discover some very interesting strategies for the dice pool, such as using up more positive outcomes in Act One, so that Act Two would be much more chaotic.

Another mechanic which really shows how well the game is constructed is the scene mechanic of framing vs. resolution. It gives the player plenty of narrative control, while at the same time maximizing the input of the rest of the group. That coupled with the differences in dice accumulation between Acts One and Two, make for very interesting decisions in both parts of the story.

My favorite aspect of the game is The Tilt. This genre of story is known for that moment where everything comes off the rails, and you know that everything is about to take a sharp turn into disaster. The mechanics of The Tilt do an excellent job of creating that event, and our group was laughing and yelling as the elements of the Tilt were selected, and the remainder of the story opened up before the group in a collective “ah-ha” moment.

The total game was 2.5 hours long. After the game was done, we spent another 30 minutes laughing about the events of the game and just how naturally the game came together.

Why This Will Make You A Better GM

Fiasco is a game based on spontaneous narration with the player having to either react to a scene being framed for him or having to steer the narration to the conclusion the group desires. There are no rules, no random encounter charts, no dice to hide behind. What you have is a map of relationships, needs, objects, locations, and your imagination.

This game will sharpen your ability to improvise story on the fly, as well as improvise off of ideas from others. These are two skills that are critical to a GM. Improvising story on the fly is key for being able to keep a session going, when the players have drifted from the established story, and ultimately the evolution of this skill leads to the ability to create games with little or no prep.

Just as important, the ability to improvise off of the ideas of others raises your GM skills from being able to run an adventure to creating a fully immersive story. This skill is one that allows you to read the wants and needs of your players based on their actions, and then modify or improvise the story to create those totally collaborative story moments which become those unforgettable moments in your campaign.

If you are one of those GMs who has not become comfortable enough to hand over partial control of your campaign to the actions of your players, or worse are a Conductor GM (one who drives the train), this is a game that will teach you the power of collaborative storytelling, and show you how the input of the group is one of the most powerful GM tools.

How This Will Make Your Players Better

Players will also benefit from Fiasco as well. Fiasco will teach players the importance of creating openings for the GM to draw upon. Every scene in Fiasco builds upon the previous scene, so each player in the game needs to craft a scene that not only furthers the story, but creates it in a way that there is something for the next player to take and continue.

Players who apply this skill in traditional RPGs will find that the their game experience will be vastly enriched when both the GM and fellow players are able to take the hooks that they create, and run with them building that shared story, rather than just being an island within the plot.

Why This Book Should Be On Your Shelf

Fiasco is a great addition to your gaming collection.  First and foremost, Fiasco is fun to play. It is a game that is set for one type of genre, and its smart, subtle mechanics fully support it.  Every rule and every item on the playset lists support the setting and the type of play. They form their own guide, gently leading play without putting anything on rails.

Fiasco is a great game to have if your scheduled session is canceled because of a player not able to make the session. The game plays with as few as 3 players and with no prep, so this becomes the kind of go-to game that can jump in and save a blown session.

Fiasco is a game that works for both experienced and novice RPG players. In our playtest, we invited a friend, who does not play RPGs, and had not really seen any of the movies that the book recommends. That player had no problem picking up the rules, and no problem advancing the story when his turn came up.

If you have ever desired making a deal with a meth head to steal a rare comic book from a strip mall comic shop with nothing more than some duct tape, a can of drain cleaner, and a black powder pistol, this is your game. If you enjoy collaborating with a group of friends to build a story from a list of elements, being lead from scene to scene based on the input of your fellow players and your own wits, this is your game.

Fiasco is available on the Bully Pulpit Games website, DrivthruRPG.com, and at the Indie Press Revolution.  It is available in both book format and PDF.

Related posts:

1. Fiasco: Rules, Dice, Friends, And Trouble
2. Loose Prep, Detailed Play
3. Time Preservers: Primetime Adventures in Play

Disclosure time—Bully Pulpit Games was generous enough to provide this humble Gnome a PDF copy of Fiasco for this review. The rental car, the trunk full of weed, and the Armenian gangsters I had to provide myself.

A Quick Confession

Laura: You left a dead prostitute alone in the desert?
Kyle: She’s not alone…

– Very Bad Things

I have a sick sense of humor.  I laughed hard at “Very Bad Things” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,” as well as most of the movies in that genre. There is just something about those crazy plans going down in flames that has me laughing when the bodies start piling up. So, when I read about Fiasco, over at The Dice of Life , I was hooked.

The Elevator Pitch

The best summary of the premise for Fiasco comes right out of the Fiasco  book itself, and so I will quote it rather than trying to paraphrase it:

Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong – particularly films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably collapse into a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

–Fiasco Rulebook

The Book

The Fiasco rulebook is 130 pages in length, with single column text.  The cover and interior artwork, were done by John Harper , and has this very mod, 60s movie motif done in black, red, and gray.  The artwork looks like it belongs in the opening credits of a movie.  It’s very well done and unique, giving the book a very tangible feel.

The text is well written and in a tone that complements the artwork.  It has good examples, as well as tips for things to look out for during play. Each chapter has a great bulleted summary at the beginning also facilitating learning the game.

The book reads very quickly. I was able to read it in 3 separate sittings over a weekend. The rules take up about 55 pages of the book, with the next 50 or so pages containing information and tables for running the game in four different settings. The remainder of the book contains an actual transcript that is a great help in understanding how the game is played.

The Game

Fiasco is a shared narrative game. It requires 3-5 players, no prep, and no GM.  The game is created on the fly, with the players taking turns narrating the story.  Each player brings four d6 dice: two white, two black, to the table. These are then pooled into the center of the table and are used during the game.

Once all the characters are defined, the game begins. Fiasco uses a story structure based on the its genre, with five distinct sections:  The Setup, Act One, The Tilt, Act Two, and The Aftermath.

The Setup

The Setup starts by picking a playset for the game. The game comes with 4 playsets:

• Main St (…In a nice southern town)
• Boomtown (…In a wild west boomtown)
• Tales From Suburbia (…In a suburban community)
• The Ice (…In McMurdo Station, Antarctica)

Additional playsets are available on The Bully Pulpit’s webstie.

Each playset contains a series of lists of Relationships, Needs, Objects, and Locations. The players then take turns selecting items off of these lists to define their specific session. The items are selected by taking a die from the pool matching the number of an item from the list. The lists are arranged in six categories, with each category having six elements.

Each player is required to have a relationship with the person to his left and right, ensuring that everyone at the table has a relationship with each other. Objects, Needs, and Locations are then associated to a relationship.

For example:  Two players may decide their relationship is based in crime; a gambler and his bookie, and that between them they share The Chicken Hut.  Perhaps that is where the gambler places his bets, or where the bookie has set up shop…

After the Relationships, Objects, Needs, and Locations are defined, the group then takes a few minutes and comes up with their characters working with their relationships among the other characters, and the needs, objects, and locations they share. Characters do not have any stats, skills, or feats, just a relationship and perhaps a need, object, or location. That’s it. The rest is up to the player.

The setup is the key to the game. Done correctly and as a group, the game will take off when play starts. It is worth taking time at this point to make sure that all the characters are set and that everyone is on the same page.

Act One

Act One comprises the first half of the scenes for the game, and it typically establishes what crazy plan is about to take place.

The actual play of the game takes place in scenes; one scene for each die in the pool.  A scene is focused on a specific character and is narrated by a player. On a player’s turn, the player may decide to set up the scene (framing it), and let the group determine the outcome (good or bad), or the player can allow the group to frame the scene, and the player can determine the outcome. This is a great mechanic as it grants a certain level of control to the player, whose turn it is, but at the same time, forces the player to improv part of the scene, based on the input of the other players.

Unlike a traditional RPG, the player who is narrating is in complete control of the scene. There are no skill checks or challenges to be made. The player just describes the action, and any dialog. The player can involve other players’ characters in the scene, allowing them to participate, or can even ask other players to act out other minor characters. The group is welcome to offer up suggestions as well, but in the end, the player whose turn it is, is the narrator.

The outcome of the scene is represented by either a white die (for good) or a black die (for bad), which is taken from the pool of dice established at the start of play. If the player is resolving the scene, then he can take the die representing the desired outcome.  If the player has framed the scene, then the group determines the outcome by passing a die from the pool of dice to the player. In Act One the narrating player awards the die from the scene to another player  in the group.

For players who have not played in a diceless game before, you may experience a bit of anxiety in the sheer openness that the narrating player has. It is a big responsibility to have to move the game along in an entertaining way, based on the last player’s scene, and leaving something for the next player. The good part is that anxiety goes away quickly and in a few scenes, it feels totally natural.

The Tilt

After the last scene in Act One, comes The Tilt. The Tilt describes those events that send the plan established in Act One into disarray. Players roll the dice they have accumulated in Act One, and the player with the highest total of white dice and the one with the highest total of black dice, choose the elements of the Tilt from the Tilt list, which is set up in a manner similar to the Relationships, Needs, Objects, and Locations.

Once the elements of the Tilt are selected, the group takes a few minutes to figure out how they apply.  Once very one is comfortable with how the Tilt is going to occur, then Act Two begins.

Act Two

Act Two is where The Tilt comes to fruition and where the wheels come off the wagon.  It comprises the last half of the scenes, where the action is heading to the tragic and at times sickly funny set of events that will lead to the finale of the story.

Act Two is also played in scenes, just as Act One, with the only notable difference being that in Act Two the player keeps the die that he selected for his scene.  How many dice and what colors of dice will ultimately determine the fate of the character.  When the final scene is played, then comes the…

The Aftermath

The Aftermath determines how your character survives the story. Each player rolls and totals the dice they have accumulated during the game, and consults the aftermath tables in the rulebook. The tables give you guidelines for how things turn out for your character. Roll well, and you might just get out of this in once piece.  Roll poorly and you likely will not survive.

Once each player’s fate has been determined, The Aftermath is then played out in a montage of scenes, with one cut of the montage for each character and for each die that the player acquired during the game.  Each player describes his own cut for his character, keeping in mind his ultimate fate.

Fiasco is not a game that supports campaign play. While it would be possible to continue the story after The Aftermath, in most cases the characters are in no shape to participate in a subsequent plot.  This game as a one-evening type of game.

How Does It Play?

The Fiasco rules are a great and very efficient rules set that do exactly what they were designed to do; which is to play out a fiasco.  The rules do an excellent job of setting up the all the pieces, and then gets out of the way, allowing the players to take the reigns and create the story.

Today was all about the Fiasco game, and tomorrow, we will take a look at how my first game of Fiasco went. As a bit of a teaser, we will talk about a Fiasco called:

Rico Is So Dead

–A tale of large women, a large dog, and two bookstore owners in a rundown mall.

Fiasco is available on The Bully Pulpit website, DrivthruRPG.com, and at the Indie Press Revolution.  It is available in both book format and PDF.

Related posts:

1. Fiasco: In Action And Why You Should Play This Game
2. House Rules: Supplemental Rules
3. A Beginner’s Guide to Dice Stacking

Thanks to the way GenCon event registration is timed, as of today our first official teaser about the project has gone live:

SEM1009173
Eureka! Cooking Up Adventure Plots with Gnome Stew

Join the infamous Gnomes of Gnome Stew, and learn about their first book: Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters. Get a first-hand introduction to this game-saving book, catch a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the most popular GMing blog in the Prime Material Plane, learn our secret ingredient, and help celebrate kilts. Be sure to stick around and consult the Gnomes about your own GMing questions. No flash photography or shoe mirrors.

OK, technically that’s three tidbits:

• 1. It’s a book!
• 2. It’s called Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters.
• 3. And it’s going to be out before GenCon.

Since we’re in revealin’ mode, I’ll add two more:

• 4. Eureka is being developed by a team of 19 talented, creative people, including all nine gnomes. (I still have trouble wrapping my head around that!).
• 5. There’s a world of difference between adventure plots and adventure hooks. We cannot WAIT to tell you more about this.
• 6. To the best of our knowledge, no one has produced a gaming book quite like this one before.

Stay tuned for much more info about Eureka over the next few weeks!

Related posts:

1. Happy GM’s Day from the Gnomes!
2. Out in the Garden: Project Kobold Love
3. High Tech and Secret Identities

While driving along the 95 corridor and not being too distracted by “South of the Border” signs, I began to muse on accents and fantasy RPGs. I’ve been playing since 1982, and even now, in 2010, most fantasy campaigns that I have played in regularly are primarily set in a pseudo-medieval Western Europe. Generally, when attempted, the accents bear this out. I’ve heard my share of Scottish Dwarves, Viking barbarians, and French paladins. The only non-European accents I usually come across are either specifically foreign (e.g. a samurai steps off a boat) or the player simply uses her own accent.

This got me thinking. What if I populated my fantasy world with North American accents and dialects? Would it be jarring for dwarves to sound like English Canadians? How about Elves that sounded like they came from the Deep South? What if the people of a cosmopolitan city sounded like New Yorkers? Would it work if all of the members of a particular ranger order had Texan accents? What if the swamp-dwelling Halflings spoke in a Cajun dialect?

So what do you think? Would it be too jarring if your pseudo-medieval fantasy setting borrowed dialects and accents from North America (or heck, any other region of the world)? Have you run or played in fantasy settings that used diverse American accents? How well does it work?

Related posts:

1. Hey, You Wanted to Play the Cleric; Now You’re Stuck with It!
2. Review of the “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming”
3. D&D Burgoo (4.0): Remake the Realms II: Putting Fallcrest in its place

1. Puzzles should be meaningful and fun
   When a group encounters a puzzle in a game, it should have relevance to the game and be fun. Incorporating a puzzle into a doorlock is fine, so long as it isn’t the 13th one in a row, or if it is then there is a reason for the puzzle to be there. While working on a puzzle or riddle can be incredibly fun and let the players flex different brain muscles, they should fit and be fun for the group to tackle.
2. Puzzles should be tactile and 3D
   No matter what kind of puzzle you are dealing with, solving it becomes easier when you can visualize it, and visualizing it becomes easier when you can touch it and work with it. Any kind of prop that can be incorporated into the real world will be a blessing to the players. Even if it is just writing down the words of a riddle, seeing it can help players solve it more quickly. Think of this as a good guideline: If at all possible, the players should be able to interact within in a similar way that the characters can. This may be writing numbers on Jenga blocks, making sure you’ve got minis to represent the room accurately, drawing out the symbols, marking symbols onto a completed rubiks cube  in order and then messing it up, or doing a stick figure sketch of the painting that holds the clue and giving it to the players. Whatever it is, if you can give them something to interact with, do so.
3. Puzzles should be easy
   Gamers are generally fairly smart and enjoy being challenged mentally, but unless your players are in the top-ranks of Mensa and really enjoy mind-bending puzzles, the puzzles you use in game should be easy to figure out. Even if the players solve it in microseconds, bypassing an easy puzzle will probably be more enjoyable than struggling for hours on a very hard one. Clues that are evident to characters (or to the GM) may not be remembered by players, which makes even easy puzzles more complex when used inside of a game.
4. If puzzles aren’t easy, they should be skippable
   If a puzzle isn’t easy to figure out, it shouldn’t bar the players from moving forward in the game. A complex puzzle on an optional benefit is great. The players should be challenged in order to get that awesome artifact. If the complex puzzle is on a door and the players can’t figure it out, have them make the appropriate skill rolls and checks until it is solved. There is nothing wrong with making players sweat a bit while trying to get through the adventure, but have an escape plan.
5. Puzzles should be geared towards character, player, or common game world knowledge
   Puzzles in games should be relevant to something the characters know, the players know, or is common(ish) game world knowledge. What do I mean by this? A puzzle that relies on arcane knowledge or cyberhacking shouldn’t be included if there is not mage or hacker type character in the group. A puzzle that relies on knowledge of ancient Byzantine architecture shouldn’t be used if the players don’t know about it. If a puzzle in a world where Ogres have a very unique background relies on information about Ogres, then the players should be fairly familiar with that knowledge. If you are designing a puzzle for your game make sure it has some kind of hook for the group to get the logic behind the puzzle.

Puzzles can be a great addition to any role-playing game, and they have deep roots within the genre. What are some of the best puzzles you have used? What other advice have you got on using puzzles in your games? How pissed would you be if you never found the puzzle I secreted away in this post? There is no puzzle, stop looking!

(Image: Here. / CC BY-NC 2.5)

Related posts:

1. Johnny’s Five – Five Reasons To Give Your Group an In-Game Sponsor or Patron
2. Johnny’s Five – Five Tips For Tweaking Your Gaming Space (Plus one frigging awesome link)
3. Johnny’s Five – Five Ways To Get Your Players Into Shared Narrative When It Isn’t The Focus Of The Game

When I’m playing but not GMing (as is the case right now), part of my brain is always watching — and trying to learn from — my GMs.

During my group’s Eberron campaign session last night, I got to watch a great GM handle a tricky balancing act brilliantly, and I wanted to share some of what I took away from that experience.

The Quick Setup

The PCs in this campaign are special forces/spies/irregulars — folks hired to operate off the books and under the radar, and specifically tasked with preventing another Great War.

In this session, we were sent to protect a noble from assassination; his death would strengthen local factions trying to spark another Great War, so we had to keep him safe for a couple of days.

We were told very little about the circumstances of the possible assassination attempt, and our research before departure didn’t tell us much more. This looked like a session where my group would engage in one of our all-time favorite activities: over-planning.

How it Went Down

We did some planning on our lightning rail journey, and hashed out several possible approaches (kidnapping the noble and keeping him tucked away until the threat passed, having our changeling impersonate him, replacing his entire staff, etc.) — and then did some more planning once we arrived.

Around this time, I wrote “Everyone aboard the overplanning express! choo choo choo” and drew a little picture of a locomotive in my gaming journal. That seemed to be where we were headed.

But once we met the noble and narrowed our plans down a bit, everything went beautifully from there on out — and we wound up having an incredibly satisfying session. Here’s why.

Just Enough Rope

Our GM, Sam, did lots of things right — but specific to this topic, here’s what stood out for me:

1. He didn’t pressure us early on. It was pretty clear that there was a chance we’d spend the whole night agonizing over tiny details, but our GM didn’t push us to act out of character or otherwise get a move on. As long as we seemed to be having fun (which we were), he let us go in whatever direction we wanted to.
2. He played out one encounter in detail. Protecting the noble involved getting him through five business meetings — three at his home, one offsite, and one back at home that we would not be allowed to actually attend. We spotted #4 and #5 as the week links in our security agenda, but we couldn’t be sure when the assassins might strike. Sam ran the first meeting in detail so that we could enjoy it, see how our plan played out, and establish a template for the other meetings.
3. Then he handwaved the next three encounters. Once we had a working plan for the meetings, he described a few details from the next two and then left it at “They pass without incident.” For the offsite meeting, since our focus was on the journey (as the destination was insanely secure), we played that out and then skipped the meeting. This was perfect: we got to see that our planning was paying off, but we didn’t waste time on boring stuff.
4. We shifted back into gear for the final encounter. Since everything seemed likely to come to a head in the final meeting (the one where the noble wouldn’t allow us to be in the room), all of us — the players and our GM — slowed things down and really savored the planning, roleplaying discussion, and other aspects of this encounter. We figured out most of the truth behind the upcoming assassination attempt, then got into a huge fight after the meeting when the attempt actually took place.
5. He applied mechanics to our areas of interest. After the session, we talked about how much fun we’d had. Sam mentioned that he’d reduced the number of mooks who made it to the final encounter based on our planning, and also delayed the arrival of the second big bad — again, based on what we’d done. I don’t know if this had been in the works all along, but I suspect that if we’d just asked to skip ahead to the final encounter — done no planning, in other words — things would have gone very differently. Seeing that Sam had made what mattered to us (the planning) matter to the outcome of the session was really satisfying.
6. Lastly, he gauged our energy levels perfectly. Since we threw Sam some curveballs, it would have been easy to just assume that the final battle (which lasted several hours) needed to be shifted to the next session. But Sam correctly guessed that we all had it in us, and because he’d paced the session so well — balancing our interests with the need for progression — it went perfectly.

Having a plan, or even just an idea of how the evening’s session might shake out, and being a) willing to change it on the fly and b) observant, quick-thinking, and confident enough to balance those changes with the needs of the storyline — while ensuring that everyone at the table (GM included) has fun, and without bogging down the session — is a challenging task for any GM.

I would have had trouble pulling this off nearly as well as Sam did, and I learned a lot just by seeing how he handled it. As a player, it made for a fun session; as a GM, it was a pleasure to watch an expert perform his craft.

I hope this was useful to you — and I’d love to hear your stories of putting this kind of improvisation into action, whether it went well or poorly. (Ditto for stories about experiencing this sort of thing from a player’s perspective.)

Related posts:

1. Troy’s Crock Pot: At the end of my Use Rope
2. Johnny’s Five – Five Reasons To Give Your Group an In-Game Sponsor or Patron
3. Four Ways to Make Your Players Happy

The personality types can be used in many ways. If you have an NPC and want a quick hook to build a character around, randomly assigning a personality type can give you a quirky way to quickly develop motivations and goals. Below is a quick table you can roll on, with a thumbnail description of each intersection. Pick up a 20 sider and go!

1. ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers
2. ESTJ – The Guardians
3. ISFJ – The Nurturers
4. ESFJ – The Caregivers
5. ISTP – The Mechanics
6. ESTP – The Doers
7. ESFP – The Performers
8. ISFP – The Artists
9. ENTJ – The Executives
10. INTJ – The Scientists
11. ENTP – The Visionaries
12. INTP – The Thinkers
13. ENFJ – The Givers
14. INFJ – The Protectors
15. ENFP – The Inspirers
16. INFP – The Idealists
17. Reroll, emphasizing the first preference (I/E).
18. Reroll, emphasizing the second preference (S/N).
19. Reroll, emphasizing the third preference (T/F).
20. Reroll, emphasizing the last preference (J/P).

You can also work backwards, looking at the professions most commonly associated with a type and assigning a character to it. This might encourage you to present the world in a way that feels more real: if forensic pathologists and mechanics are often ISTP, then playing your CSI technician with the traits listed on the page might make the character seem more believable. Conversely, if you play the CSI technician as an extrovert, you’ll be intentionally playing against type– instead of accidentally doing so.

Trying it Out

In an upcoming game, the dwarf king’s two primary advisors have been statted out. I know how they are going to fight, what resources they have– but haven’t figured out much about them. (It can be hard to get attached to characters who will be going down in a round or three.)

So, a quick personality for my Eldrich Disciple… let’s roll. The d20 came up 11, ENTP. Clicking through the professions link above, I see that she is flexible and diverse, lively and energetic, and enjoys solving difficult problems. Given her viewpoint, I have an idea how she came to power.

Swanilda Gautvidsdatter was a driven priestess, identified as a dynamic, inspiring presence in the order soon after her ordination. Unfortunately, her drive was difficult to mesh with the routines and deference to authority expected in her order. She found another path, bargaining with demons for personal power (the Warlock class), and blending her depraved worship with her religious training.

She hated the rigidity the superiors in her order demanded and sought a new patron. Her combination of personal and divine power proved attractive to the king, who promoted her to his professional “counselor”. Since her assignment outside of the order, she has proven her loyalty to the king– who maintains her freedom from the religious order as his personal problem solver. A role she relishes.

The other adviser is an Eldrich Theurge. His type was 9, ENTJ. He is a natural leader, who seeks structure and order. I see him as a wizard now (probably a colleague of the king), rather than the sorcerer I’d originally envisioned. His impatience with inefficency, self confidence, and verbal communication skills scream nobleman to me.

Eyvald Gladsen was among the first to commit his clan to the king’s alliance with the demonic powers. His personal powers grew as a result, and the pure wizardry of his powers soon became tainted with the unique powers of his demonic alliance. He has studiously researched methods to infuse his spells with demonic power and has figured out a way to hang spells on his eldrich blasts.

Despite the madness he and his clan have suffered, he remains an inspiring leader of men. His desire for structure keeps things orderly, his madness manifests as obsessive detail and focus. In battle he will make strong clear demands, and act decisively to take control of the battlefield. He is less about pure damage than controlling the PCs options and disrupting their plans.

In Your Games

I have to admit that using business tools for quick personality seems a strange, but there are a lot of sites out there that support the Myers Briggs types. For me, a valuable use is to ensure that other ways of seeing the world make it into the game at times. Not everyone is rational in the same way that I am… and the world feels flat if all NPCs think like the GM.

Have you ever used these personality types in your games? What strange tools have you borrowed from your work or school life to enhance your NPCs?

Related posts:

1. Deep as a Puddle: Character Development with Tarot
2. Deep as a Puddle: Characters and Culture
3. Deep as a Puddle: Question Everything

Thinking about similar movies -  like Indiana Jones, Serenity, Conan, or Flash Gordan, one of Star War’s inspirations – there are few instances where the heroes have special powers. Though they may be portrayed as the peak of humanity, they rely on skills and natural abilities as opposed to magically or specially granted powers.

Powers Everywhere!
Looking through the gaming books on my shelf, it occurs to me that most games and characters rely on some kind of special powers. Of the 10 base 3.5 D&D classes, only 3 jump out as not having "special" powers built in (Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue).  Moving into 4e, where everything is set up as a power, the number of classes without something that could be considered special drops. (Mind you, many of the 4e powers, for some classes, are merely mechanical representations of extreme combat skill.) But D&D is also fairly reliant on magical items, which grant abilities outside the scope of human ability. Games like Gurps, Besm, Savage Worlds, and Fudge are so open-ended in their character creation that characters might have any variety of special powers or not. It all depends on the limitations the Game Master puts on the game and the game setting.

On the other hand, games like Call of Cthulu, Indie games that focus on specific themes, many horror themed games, and many licensed property games pit regular humans against great threats without the aid of powers or magic. I’m sure there are many other games that take this approach as well.

Do we need them?
I don’t think special powers are bad in a game, not by a long-shot. I enjoy playing games where my character is INFINITELY more awesome than I could ever hope to be. I just notice that a lot of games grant powers like candy, or at the least treat PCs as better than regular people.

"Look, we got four or five of the main characters on this ship. I think we’ll be fine." – Peter (as Han Solo) from Something, Something, Something, Dark Side

I wonder if special powers (or that better than regular people feeling) are necessary to the enjoyment of a game. One of my favorite heroes of all time, Dr. Henry Walton Jones, isn’t anything more than a guy with an awesome mind, a well trained array of skills, a whip, a gun, and a hat. I love the feel of the Indiana Jones movies, and games that emulate that "pulp" style. The best game experiences I’ve had (as a player) are in games like this, where my character wasn’t "above" the rest of the world, One of my favorite characters was in a Star Wars games where I played a Brash Pilot, without any mystic abilities.

I’m not fully decided on the necessity of special powers in a game. I think there are a lot of factors involved in the question, and I’m curious how people feel about them – so I put this question to you, the awesome Gnome Stew Commenters: Do you prefer games where special powers (even just implied superiority) are given to the PCs? Do you think that PCs are automatically in the top percentile of most gaming worlds? Does the necessity of special powers get completely trumped by gaming styles?

Related posts:

1. Johnny’s Five – Five Issues With Mental Powers
2. You Set the Baseline
3. The Star Wars Arsonist Strikes Back!

In what must be the most brazen or naive scheme ever devised by those foul-smelling doglike lizards, some Kobolds have asked us Gnomes to review the latest issue of their magazine, tempting us with a free PDF issue.

Do these Kobolds really think that a new edition means that all the old rivalries are forgotten? Do they think that a simple bribe will make up for past atrocities? Can Kurtulmak take a joke? (Heck no.)

Greed and curiosity trumped Gnomish pride, so I accepted their offer. I fully expect this review to be like a Kobold’s life – ugly, short, and ending violently at the hands of an angry Gnome.

Kobold Quarterly is a gaming magazine that focuses on all aspects of gaming, from design to play. Apparently it’s published four times a year, and is available in both print and PDF formats. Honestly, I’ll be impressed if Kobolds can string a sentence together, much less publish a quarterly magazine.

Contributors

Let’s check the table of contents, and see what kind of desperate fanboy would agree to be published under the banner of the Kobold. We’ve got Wolfgang Bauer, Monte Cook, James Jacobs… This can’t be right; these are some of the bigger names in gaming… Phillipe Menard! Et tu, Chatty?

This is some kind of practical joke, right? Gnomes like practical jokes, so let’s get to the bottom of this. Surely these Kobolds wouldn’t be able to craft an essay like Monte Cook, especially one titled “The Myths and Realities of Game Balance”. After all, Kobolds can’t even craft pants.

(Time passes.)

Wow, that’s really a nice piece of writing; it’s all practical and no joke. This article alone is worth the price of admission. But even Kobolds can roll a natural 20; let’s see what else is in here.

Layout

A nice mix of color and line drawings, all of which add to the articles. Beautiful cover, with a nice winter motif. The fonts are very readable, sidebars are obviously sidebars, and stat blocks are in a familiar format. Even the ads are well done, and remind me of gaming magazines of yore. (Sniff.)

Either Kobolds have really evolved, or there’s something more going on here. Maybe their three ENnies are well-deserved. (Future link here.)

Content

In its 69 pages (including some full-page ads), this issue of Kobold Quarterly has a nice balance between the many facets of gaming, from crunch-heavy variant monks for Pathfinder, to Phillipe Menard’s excellent 4E article on weaving skill challenges into combat, to a review of an RPG adventure turned into a school play. And much more.

Just like another print magazine named for a scaly fantasy beast (now somewhat reincarnated), Kobold Quarterly focuses on the sword and sorcery genre, and primarily on D&D 4E and Pathfinder as gaming systems. However, mechanics are not the point of the magazine, and even a Savage like myself can find plenty in the fluff and system-independent articles.

Final Words

Reviewing this issue of Kobold Quarterly made me realize that a gaming magazine prods the imagination by delivering a wide variety of articles in one place. There’s something about a magazine that leads me to read articles that I’d normally skip over on a website. “The Ecology of the Froghemoth” is a perfect example. They’re still goofy monsters, but now they’re a cool kind of goofy, and I’m much more likely to use them someday.

Do I like Kobold Quarterly? As a Gnome, I’ll go on record as saying that the name needs some work; nothing this good should be named after those filthy critters.

That said, actions speak louder than words: I’m subscribing today. It’s that good.

Do you have an opinion of Kobold Quarterly? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

Related posts:

1. Out in the Garden: Project Kobold Love
2. Spotlight Review Follow-Up: EpicWords
3. Shadis Magazine