Category Archives: General

Table News, 9 May 16

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Yeah, really late. Sue me 😛

I’ve been working on the new Traveller campaign for the Core Group (Friday). We had a get-on-the-same-page session in April, where we worked out the overall campaign issues and figured out the main characters. Essentially, it’s to be a more-or-less direct continuation of my S³M stuff, mixing Firefly and The Expanse, set in the Spinward Marches, with a “home base” on Denotam/Vilis; a bit of an underworld-focused techno-thriller. As part of my prep, I’ve been researching the upper-level politics of the area, and plan to feature more of the back-and-forth between the Imperial dukes than (most) other Traveller games I’ve played in. Also, I decided to use a lot of background material from our Olympus (Saturday) Traveller campaign, and will be coordinating with the regular GM for that one.

I was actually supposed to start running the week after the same-page session, but I just wasn’t ready. We decided to go ahead with the Pathfinder continuation, and I’ll step in after that (maybe a one-shot in the middle if we need a break).

Meanwhile, I haven’t had much to do with GMing for the Olympus group. We’ve got a lot of material to work with over there, and more potential GMs, especially now that we’ve established the concept of guest-GMs in regular campaigns. I suppose I’m still planning to do Inception there, but I haven’t even looked at it in ages, and I’m well past the point where I usually start waffling over what to run. That said, I expect the Core Group Traveller campaign will occur first, so I’m throwing all my energy into that one.

GURPS Traveller, “The New Deal” 1Shot.4

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GM Perspectives and Introspectives

For the better part of February, I stepped in as guest-GM of my Saturday Traveller campaign. The nature of the overall campaign’s construction allowed for easy swapping of GMs, which would give the regular GM a chance to play in the campaign for a change. Plus, I had some stuff in mind that I wanted to see that, when presented with the guest-GM idea, made sense for me to run as guest-GM instead of waiting for the regular GM to get to it. I just needed the right opportunity, certain conditions met, to set it up. This would be my first GMing foray for this year, and the first since the Inception one-shot over a year prior.

Overview

In our regular Traveller campaign, we tend to hand-wave, for the sake of time/mundanity, the day-to-day operational details discussed at length in GURPS Traveller: Far Trader. I wanted to deliberately focus on those details, if for no other reason than to have that experience to reference, at least once. A countdown—like a race, or a tight schedule—would be an excellent justification for that level of focus; by taking each step of the process and introducing delays or other obstacles to on-time completion there would be plenty of content for a session or two.

As I started working on the one-shot when the time came, I also decided to take the opportunity to bring up a number of Disadvantages amongst the PCs—Enemies, Secrets, Duties and the like—which had gone neglected for whatever reason, and use those as the adventure’s obstacles. One such Trait came from the regular GM’s new character, Eddy, his Secret (Some Crime)—which turned out to have been removed when I wasn’t looking—to be represented by the appearance of a bounty-hunter which would threaten to expose said Secret by causing the others to ask “why?” This would be the centerpiece of the adventure. (I kept the bounty-hunter storyline anyway after I realized the Disad was removed.) I did not do any actual work on the content, that is researching and writing things down, until the week prior to the run—intentional standard procedure for me, of late, but I really wanted to keep this simple. I did not have a specific target for how many sessions the run would take up, but once I had the content sorted, I figured it would be at least two, maybe three—which turned out to be correct.

Dramatis Personæ

The PCs, for reference.

There were only two NPCs that I “officially” cast: Maaq Mountain (Dwayne Johnson, a mix of his characters from The Rundown and Fast and Furious 6) and Ulysses Pitt (Nick Chinlund, a “Tooms” ripoff from Chronicles of Riddick)—and crew. I didn’t stat them out, but I did have a general idea of their capabilities and background. I had a “face” in mind for the brokers, but I did not present that to the players—these were throwaway characters, really, and I didn’t want to lock in those actors. Truman Park (Matt Damon, from The Martian, specifically) was an on-the-fly addition—details on that later.

Execution

Pre-Game

I wrote my own PC, Haank, out of the story, taking the opportunity to focus on an aspect of the character that hadn’t gotten much attention—he’s a “serious” golfer. Porozlo has a perfect environment for golfing, and the “celebrity tournament” made it something Haank would definitely not miss (and nobody would make a fuss). I had him take Valerie along to remove her from the crew’s concern, with the good excuse of getting her off the ship and in the open air for a while, something the character desperately needed. Haank also normally saw to the ship’s business interests ashore, his absence meaning that some PCs would have to perform jobs they weren’t accustomed to—intentional, to get them involved in those day-to-day details.

There are a number of mechanical adjustments/experiments I intended to use (as usual), as follows:

  • The “rush job” was specifically intended to create the “countdown,” to generate the dramatic tension for the story. I had already planned for Haank to get his HAZMAT certification at Rhylanor, so a hazardous cargo was a natural choice. I pre-generated the other outgoing freight and passengers, which turned out to be quite a lot—commerce between Rhylanor and Porozlo is very heavy, as it turns out—and this locked in the PCs’ intermediate stop at Porozlo, which was important to the PCs, due to their previous visit. I had to scour the books to find the standard deadline for freight, on TFT28; I worked out the tightest possible schedule for the rush job’s deadline.
  • My original plan was to have the bounty-hunter 24 hours behind the PCs as another countdown, giving them that window to get in and out of port before he arrived, but as I started to work out the details, specifically, how fast his ship would be compared to the overall transit time, I decided not to force it—it wasn’t really needed, and having the bounty-hunter at port at the same time would force them to get creative. I went over the Traveller: Bounty Hunters book a couple of times to get the background squared away—the bounty did not originate from the judicial system, but it was technically legal (all the paperwork was filed), though by private parties for private reasons.
  • I originally planned to give out points at the end based on Victory Conditions. One of those conditions, specific to Eddy’s player, was that, at the end, the other PCs were not made aware (in character) of the true nature of his “Some Crime” committed—of course, that was before I found out the Secret had been removed. I was a bit disappointed that it was no longer applicable; I really wanted to see how that might turn out in the end. The other Victory Conditions I had in mind were like “On-Time Delivery” and “Eddy Leaves with the Ship.” But I don’t like setting conditions like that without a tangible threat of failure, and I don’t like surprising the players with unexpected changes to the reward system, nor did I want to end up arbitrarily inflating point gains. In the end, I didn’t have a solid plan by game-time, so I dropped it; the conditions were all met anyway.
  • The potential for delays was going to be central to this adventure, but I didn’t want to arbitrate that sort of thing, so I came up with the “Universe Reaction Check.” It’s an otherwise-normal Reaction roll (B560), in the “General” category, with the results applied to the universe/environment. In this case, I didn’t have a fixed set of effects, I just gave them a delay in minutes for a Poor result, or hours for a Bad result, etc., and a Good result let them sail right through, unhindered. It actually worked pretty well—even got used by other GMs in other games afterward—but it’s not something you’d want to use all the time, just when it counts.
  • We had not dealt with “jump masking” before in the campaign (TFT60). I planned to introduce it here, and as it turned out, both Porozlo and Rhylanor were always masked. Fulacin was another matter; it was listed as being masked, but those “abstract” statistics assume a much closer position than the mainworld actually occupied—not to mention the lack of an allowance for binary systems. In the end, I eyeballed it, and decided the Fulacin mainworld was too far to be masked at all. I’ll have to figure out a better way sometime.
  • I used a system in my S³M campaign that allowed a Piloting or Navigation check to reduce trip time by fine-tuning the plotted course. As the timetable for this mission might come down to “hours,” it was a good fit here, and something I wanted to see in the regular campaign anyway. However, I didn’t realize until I began to use it in the game that, because of the way GURPS Traveller presents insystem trip calculation (via tables; TFT59-61), my old method needed some tweaking—Traveller gives the shortest route at the start, whereas my old mechanic assumes a less-efficient result that can be shortened. On top of that, the Traveller tables cover the conditions rather broadly, non-specific, resulting in a level of inaccuracy I don’t think is warranted. So, I ended up winging it a bit when it came up. After the run, we sorted out the details, and may use the adjusted version in the future in the regular campaign.
  • I planned to use what I refer to as “Reverse Influence”; the idea is to have the player make a secret Reaction or intended Influence Skill roll (being Fantasy Grounds, this would be “in the box”) immediately when the character meets the NPC, and after-the-fact, through dialogue and/or identification of effective modifiers that might apply, adjust the results of the Quick Contest throughout the encounter. (It’s usually done the other way around—figure up everything first, then roll.) The idea is that the encounter would play out in a more “natural” flow, the NPC responses and attitudes changing as a result of the changing Quick Contest results. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this got the attention it warranted; I did do the rolling up-front, but there were no pre-prepared social encounters, and I didn’t brush up on Social Engineering beforehand like I should have. For what it’s worth, I didn’t encounter any problems with what was implemented, but Inception is expected to center around the social stuff, so I expect the mechanic to get a proper field-test there instead.
  • I’ve always wanted to see a bit more “color” when it comes to daily maintenance on a typical far-trader or similar vessel, and have used various mechanics to generate this sort of thing in the past. This time, I used tarot: I drew one card for each leg (in this case: pre-flight/takeoff, transit, entering jumpspace, during jump, exiting jumpspace, transit, and landing/post-flight) of the trip. On a draw of a Major Arcana, I rolled against the ship’s HT score (10); on a success, I worked out a “cosmetic” incident based on the card, and on a failure, an actual problem. For example: the artificial gravity cutoff was a failure (the card was Moon, Reversed), and the bad sensor a minor (9 of Wands). I figured the severity of whatever mishap occurred would be affected by the overall level of preventative maintenance done regularly aboard the ship, which in this case was properly and skillfully managed, so the repairs would be a small matter—I knew that would be the case, so I didn’t bother coming up with a system for that. I liked how it worked out, overall, and we discussed keeping it (or something like it) going after my run ended, though it was agreed that there should be fewer rolls per trip for that sort of thing—we’ll see how that goes in the future.
  • I continued to use tarot to generate a little extra color for encounters and such. It’s still working for me, plus I’m getting better at reading them. For Traveller, though, it feels a little funny to use a Medieval-themed Rider-Waite deck—something more “technological” would be more appropriate.
  • I broke up the events into 1-hour blocks and sorted them into a rough timeline, though some events would have to be plugged in as they happened. I had pre-figured the flight details, and knew the bounty-hunter would be landing at 3 hours after the PCs; I gave him a d6 hours to locate Eddy, then he would wait for an opportunity to take him. I used combat sequence to organize PCs’ actions throughout—this worked pretty well to maintain focus.
Mid-Game

I had no real plan for breaking up the adventure once it started, but I guessed pretty well where the breakpoints would likely fall;. The second and third sessions benefited from extra time for polish and research. Here are some miscellaneous points-of-interest from after the game started:

  • Eddy has the Bad Luck Disadvantage. I fully intended to use it, probably to get him captured at the end. Instead, the player decided to use it on himself throughout the adventure, to generally-hilarious result. He insisted on rolling the Universe Reactions himself, and applied anywhere from a -6 to -10 penalty; one such failure was Eddy’s date interruption by the bounty-hunter.
  • At the time of the first session, I had not yet discovered a base time-period required to find freight. I did find a reference by the second session, Spaceships 2 p.41, that lists it at two days. This meant the PCs would be “rushing” their search, doing it in half the required time. I left the lots I had rolled up previously as-is, but adjusted the pricing down to compensate for the rush.
  • For the “bank” scene, I drew Queen of Cups—a romantic encounter. Before the scene, I had not considered that the subject might be Ella (the only female PC)—not that it changed anything, really, but with Abe’s encounter with Katelyn at the same time, I didn’t want to pile on. I told Ella’s player that she had seen a guy that was definitely her type, and had her tell me what that type was (rather than try to guess). I gave myself the week between sessions 1 and 2 to figure out what to do with him. Ella has had a rough time since the start of the campaign, and I felt like she needed a break, but at the same time, I couldn’t pass up a chance to mess with her a little, so I made him “too good to be true,” natural PC-paranoia inevitably suggesting him to be some kind of monster-in-disguise. Then I engineered the “date,” fully expecting she would be out of commission for a while as a result.
  • One time-slot in session 2 had multiple characters passing through the security checkpoint separately, in or out. I had them (and the bounty-hunter) each roll a single d6, and on a match, they would see each other as they passed through. They all missed each other in session 2, but another instance in session 3 had Ella and Abe encountering the bounty-hunter and Eddy.
  • The “chase” in session 2 was unplanned, but we’ve used the Action 2 mechanic often enough in this group that it wasn’t difficult to improvise. I did find myself a bit confused at the results of failed Stunt rolls; I still think following up the failed Stunt round with a round of “recovery” feels weird—but that’s another story. The appearance of the monorail was player-agency. I drew a tarot card; I don’t remember the card drawn, but the result was “no luck”—I felt at the time that it should mean the train was out, but I wanted to give it a chance, so I decided it would be leaving. The handling of the failed Stunt that followed is probably my one real GM-fail; I wasn’t prepared for potentially-lethal consequences, and would have benefited from more time to think that through. In retrospect: I should have grabbed an image to work from, so we were all seeing the same thing; I should have used random hit location to determine what part of Eddy got caught; and I should have referred to Escape Artist for Eddy getting loose.
  • I ended session 2 at the point where the PCs would be starting their rescue plan intentionally, to give them the week to think it over. In session 3, I planned to use the Action 2 “Planning” (p.17) mechanic to manage this—I wanted to test the concept for Inception. I skipped the “Big Picture” as unnecessary in this instance. When it came time, Sae ended up taking over the planning, and made the Tactics roll; I intended to give them some Plot Points at 1 per 2 points of success, but the roll ended up being made by 0-1, so they didn’t get any. If the roll was better, they would have been allowed to use those points to apply player-agency to the situation, even retroactively, saying “they planned for that.”
  • I took a short break once the bounty-hunter reached out for the booby-trapped handle to think over the situation, and the first thing that jumped out at me was a “cardiac-arrest,” so I went over the Basic rules for electric shock. As it turned out, the trap ended up doing just enough damage that, with the associated penalty, had the bounty-hunter failing the HT check by 1—if it hadn’t, I might have fudged it anyway; it was both convenient for the GM (wrapping things up nicely) and hilarious to the players. Sae’s critical failure to diagnose was icing on the comedy cake.

Synopsis

Session 1 Recap • Session 2 Recap • Session 3 Recap

Aftermath

GM Confidence: 5 of 5. Unusually, I did not experience the pre-GMing “dread” I normally do—I was really looking forward to running this one, maybe because it had been so long. Right from the start, I felt like it really went well; it had a really good energy to it, the pacing was fairly snappy, and I felt like the players were having fun with it. There was no combat, when it was all over—not planned as such, or intentionally avoided, it just wasn’t needed.

For the down-side: I really don’t have much to complain about, though there are a couple of minor things I would have liked to have done better. Specifically, the third session, after the bounty-hunter had been dealt with, felt a bit flat to me—too much like the wrap-up it was. And overall, I felt like there wasn’t enough for Sam to do; I felt like he had been left out, a bit.

Overall, I felt good enough about it that I pitched a straight-up Traveller game (borrowing the characters and other stuff from S³M—essentially, a continuation of that campaign, but in a new setting) to the Friday face-to-face group, and will be running it next, in place of Terra Nova (which I still intend to get to one day). As it happens, my turn is coming up in a few more weeks, so this one won’t be lingering in pre-production for very long. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Table News, 7 Jan 16

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Another year has passed. Within that year, I did not GM at all—that’s not so unusual, though I’d rather it were otherwise. I need more practice, more repetition, if I am ever to become comfortable behind the screen.

That said, I did do a lot of prep-work that I expect to pay off in 2016. Terra Nova is nearing a playable, possibly sustainable state, and I expect it to see production this year, though I couldn’t say how soon. The Inception kickoff is still in the works, but I haven’t looked at it in a while; this one will likely come up sooner than Terra Nova, but again, I am unsure of when that would be. On the side, I have that potential guest-GM one-shot for Traveller in mind, which I still expect to occur—sooner than the rest—and I have been picking at the Forgotten Greylance setting a little here and there (which could end up in GURPS instead, or remain as D&D). There aren’t any other GMing projects I am actively pursuing right now, but it’s early yet.

I’m eager to get back to it, and maybe more confident than not. Just waiting for the wheel to turn my way once again.

Stories We Tell

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storybook_by_fictionchick-d58kf7e

I was playing GURPS Traveller with the Saturday online group as a favorite character of mine, Haank, a half-Vilani polymath, and the PCs’ ship’s loadmaster. He was in a spaceport bar with a couple other shipmates when an altercation started between his PC Vargr crewmate and another alpha Vargr in the bar, attempting to establish dominance for…reasons. When Haank got involved, I actually had a story in mind to tell within the scope of this encounter, a “narrative” that I mentally played out as I decided to contribute, and how—not something I did consciously, just a normal part of the decision-making process. In this case, the picture in my head had Haank stepping up and casually putting the alpha into an arm-lock submission hold, and intimidating his followers to back down. That’s not how it went down, of course. Before it was over, Haank ended up getting punched hard in the face, having been entirely unsuccessful; we “won,” in the end, but a bit messy.

Though I failed to achieve it, I had a mini-story I wanted to tell at the time, through the character’s actions; I’m calling it “the Narrative.”

I think the above is a process everyone goes through when they figure out how their character will respond to an encounter. I suppose one could try to focus on this encounter-level Narrative consciously, to better organize their actions throughout the encounter, but I really don’t see much “extra” benefit from doing so. No further consideration is necessary.

That said, what could be beneficial is to “scale” this process up, to consider the character’s Narrative with respect to the entire (or partial) campaign—this is something I do not believe regularly occurs on a conscious level. Using Haank as an example: when I created the character, I didn’t fully consider how I wanted that character to grow and progress after the campaign started, or what kind of story his would/should be. As a result, I’ve been waffling over how to improve the character over the course of the campaign, and if I were asked, I would have a hard time providing the GM any Haank-specific story guidance. It should be easy enough to figure out a proper Narrative during the creation process—essentially, the reverse of a back-story. It would probably be best as something brief, like a one-liner, but could be as detailed as the back-story. Like the above encounter, this Narrative would never be expected to survive the campaign’s events, and should change along with it, but a vague direction to press toward would be helpful for suggesting later character improvement, and other story-related elements along the way. This benefits the GM as well, and possibly also the other PCs’ interactions, if made available to them, though it need not be.

In Haank’s case, I’ve decided to make his Narrative this: that by the end of his life-story, he should become the Most Interesting Man in the Galaxy—it’s suitably vague, enough to survive for a while, but still gives me something to work with. I might change it, or refine it as we go, but there it is.

Additionally, as I considered these things, I realized that my Terra Nova campaign lacked a Narrative as well. It’s probably common for an open-world/sandbox campaign to lack any kind of story focus—in some ways, it’s the point—but it can help, I think, to have an idea what kind I want to tell. For example, a Narrative like “Survival against all odds” can flavor the campaign differently than “Wilderness of Mirrors.” That Narrative can suggest mechanics, antagonists, encounters, which can reinforce it—“Survival” might suggest a lot of disasters, while “Mirrors” might suggest a focus on subterfuge and spies. I’m still trying to decide where I want to go with that one, and with the other campaigns in my active queue.

So, there you go. Try to tell a story, and even if it fails, the overall experience will likely be better for it.

As a side note, I want to give a shout-out to Extra Credits. I’ve lately been watching a lot of their YouTube videos about game-design philosophy—they’re talking about computer games (or in some cases, CCGs), but the philosophy is the same regardless of the medium. The videos are really entertaining and informative, and have been a big inspiration.

Table News, 5 Nov 15

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I kinda got a bit burned-out on writing recaps and blogging-type stuff—this isn’t my usual thing, really. Plus I’d really prefer to post some more useful stuff than progress-reporting, but I haven’t come up with anything yet. So I’m lagging behind a little. Here’s my progress-report 😛

I’m still pushing hard on Terra Nova, and making good progress. I’ve got a fairly-strong basis for the intro, some of the characters are starting to take proper shape (and I successfully convinced that wayward player to join in), and I’ve sorted out some of the important tech-related issues. I’ve started working on the wiki entries. I need to do more work on the map—there are a lot of places I need to identify, at least, that the show doesn’t cover. I need to finalize some dino stats; I need to pick up Big Lizzie so I have those 4e stats available. And I’m still dithering a bit on some of the NPC casting.

I’m not sure where TN will end up in the Friday rotation, but the current campaign is about to wrap, so it’s moving closer. The situation for the Saturday group is the same, and my scheduled mini-startup for the Inception campaign is within sight, but since I’ve been progressing so well on the TN campaign, I’m hesitant to switch gears, so I may delay it—depends on how long the new campaign-rotation, Traveller, ends up running.

In the meantime, I’m forcing myself to get past my writer’s burnout. And I’m planning a guest-GM one-shot for the Traveller campaign—something new we’re trying over there, to get the GM a chance to play a bit of Traveller himself. I’ll be sure to post some after-thoughts on that when it happens.

Table News, 8 Sep 15

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Last month was weird. After the dust settled, the face-to-face Core Group has changed composition once again, a little, and the GMing rotation has been considerably altered. Sadly, the Savage Tide campaign was cut off (permanently, as it would later turn out), and my Generica was to be next in line, only I wasn’t quite as ready as I felt I needed to be. Now, it’s Kingmaker starting this week (after pretty much an entire month of no game, due to absences and such). I was going to be switching back to my yet-to-see-production Terra Nova campaign to avoid the glut of Medieval Fantasy-themed campaigns, but due to a player declining to participate in that one, I decided to table it until things change (including changing that player’s mind—could happen—or my changing mine). I’m continuing to work on Terra Nova in case of a mind-change, and I’ve had breakthroughs in that area; once I’m satisfied I have enough to start with, I plan to return my attention to Generica and/or others.

For the Saturday/Olympus group, we’re beginning the next campaign in the queue this week, which means there’s one other between it and my Inception campaign starter. I’m trying to start thinking about that one a bit, now; I don’t feel like I have a lot of work to do on that one, except cleanup/fine-tuning of the mechanics and house-rules.

So, forward progress. That’s good. Maybe I’ll have something of more useful substance to post in the near-future.

Table News, 11 Jul 15

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A bit late this month…July sneaked up on me.

As of this writing, thanks to some personnel changes at the table, it looks like I will answer the call of GM duty for the (Friday) Core Group in a month or so, with the Legends of Generica campaign. I think I’d prefer to have a bit longer to work the kinks out, but then I do always say that. It may be a little shaky at first, but I expect it’ll smooth out as it gets moving. I have no idea or plan how long to run, but we’ve been discussing limiting GMing runs to 8-12 sessions, as a rule-of-thumb; ideally, it will be “sandbox” enough that I can keep it going indefinitely as needed.

Pretty much all of my work in the last month—to the point of near-obsession—has been devoted to Generica world-building; specifically, cleaning up the map, and filling out information on the wiki. Much progress has been made, and I’m feeling pretty good about it overall, though it has meant that work on the Inception campaign has all but halted—depending on the timing, I may end up delaying my scheduled start of that campaign, as I may be running Generica at that time.

Table News, 6 Jun 15

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I’m still working on the GURPS Inception campaign. I’ve worked up a theme for Fantasy Grounds. I’ve set a soft-deadline for when to run the one-shot starter “adventure,” that is, after the next campaign run by the regular Saturday GM, which will follow someone else’s run—so I’ve got a while, but it’s not as long as I might tend to think, and any deadline is better than none. I’m feeling pretty good about the campaign this far out.


That said, I’ve been more recently distracted by my next production for the Core Group’s Friday game. After a year since the start of work on the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign with nary a peep, I put forth the question of what I should be working on, and we ended up instead with a reboot of our Forgotten GreyLancErron “Generica” setting. It’s a very old concept of mine, a tongue-in-cheek generic Fantasy setting that makes undisguised and unabashed use of all the cinematic and literary tropes of the genre. In this case, though, I will be running it not in GURPS (as I would prefer), but in D&D 3.5—part of the reasoning for the change in focus was to allow the GM who normally runs the D&D games to get a chance to play in one. This does present a bit of a dilemma for me: this setting is certainly not part of the Daniverse, and my sites are almost-entirely dedicated to GURPS—so what to do with it? I haven’t yet decided. In the meantime, I’ve been possessed with world-building stuff, and populating a new Core Group wiki site. It’s all moving along quite nicely, and I intend to avoid putting off production for too long, lest it fizzle-out like so many have before it.

GMing: The Bright Side of Failure

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In my Olympus gaming group, my Saturday online game, in a recent fill-in session, we were playing a Mad Max-style post-apocalypse one-shot. Our fearless protagonists found themselves in the upper levels of a toppled skyscraper, both the walls and floors slanted such that a misstep would send unfortunate soul sliding toward the outer windows, and a long fall to their inevitable doom. Lacking the necessary skills and equipment to safely navigate this hazard, most of the PCs succumbed to the inevitable failure on the Climb checks to advance in a controlled manner, and slid down the canted floor toward the outer wall, breaking through the weakened window glass; one PC ended up hanging onto another’s leg, dangling out of the window, many stories above the river below. It was very dramatic, as you might expect, worthy of typical action movies.

That failure was frustrating, as it generally is. But I realized some time after the fact that the scene we were playing out would have been horribly boring without it—we would have walked in, got what we came for, and left. Failure made the scene entertaining.

Later I recalled another such incident: another one-shot with the Olympus group, this time an Infinite Worlds game. The PCs were in an American “Old West” timeline, and were to be “taken in” by the local constabulary, and we resisted. My character, a (decent) practitioner of Kali, was attempting to take down a rifle-wielding cavalryman, and over the course of 5-6 rounds of back and forth—attack, defend, attack, defend…actually, I don’t remember how it ended, except that it was really frustrating that I was having so much trouble connecting with this yokel. Afterward, I complained a little, but everyone else at the virtual table exclaimed at how cool it was, all the back and forth, like a martial arts movie. Again, that failure turned out to be entertaining—for everyone else, at least. I’ve endeavored to remember that incident since then any time I find my character unable to get past his opponents’ defenses.

To reference the image above: imagine the beginning segment of Raiders of the Lost Ark if Indy had succeeded in his attempt to spoof the trapped idol with the sandbag, and walked out—his failure made the scene memorable.

So what does it all mean, then?

I suppose the moral to this story is to treat failures as an opportunity to entertain. As GM, give a little leeway to the entertainment potential of failures. For example: there’s an option spoken of in GURPS Horror for Fright Check failures (“Not Just Stunned,” Horror p. 141), that allows sufferers of all those “Stunned for X Rounds” results to run around in circles, crawl randomly, scream or cry—things other than stand there and get hit, so long as it’s “useless.” Make it funny. Make it dramatic. Make it cinematic. Embrace failure as a necessary part of the storytelling.

But…

This does present a bit of a problem when you consider Impulse Buys, Plot Points, or other mechanisms for subverting failure. If you can cancel out failures, it (obviously) eliminates any sort of entertainment value one might derive from them. For this reason, I’m considering whether or not to allow regular Impulse Buys for my upcoming Inception campaign, or if I should disallow the buying-off of failures. I don’t have an answer for this yet, but I’ll be thinking about it—we’ll see what I decide.

GMing: Paragon/Renegade, or the Ethics of Mass Effect

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What is it?

The first encounter I can recall with this bit of digital game-design was a BioWare title, Knights of the Old Republic, a CRPG belonging the Star Wars game franchise. In that case, it took the form of the “Light Side/Dark Side” mechanic: actions taken resulted in accumulation of positive (light) or negative (dark) points to an overall total score for each character. The balance between the two had an effect on how the character was reacted to by other NPCs, and even had a physical “cosmetic” effect, in that the more the character favored the Dark Side, the more pale and haggard he would appear. Mass Effect, also by BioWare, included a similar mechanic using what was referred to as “Paragon/Renegade,” which differed from the former in that the virtues represented less of a “Good vs Evil” flavor, favoring something more like “Nice vs Mean.” Though less black-and-white and harder to judge the quality of a given action, it did mean that the Hero™ could favor one or the other and still be considered a “good person” in the end. I preferred the new mechanic. Naturally, I wanted to find a way to bring it into GURPS. Accumulation of Paragon/Renegade points can be a meta-system mostly independent of the rules; the GM can evaluate a PC’s actions and award points as he sees fit. However, there’s not much point to it unless there’s some tangible, in-game benefit, which is where the game-system gets involved.

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How I’m doing it

I’m already using the official-alternative Impulse Buys in (most of) my campaigns, and have been, in some form or another, since 3rd Edition; details on my website. My first thought—which I’m currently planning to implement for the first time in the Inception campaign—was to allow the accumulation of Paragon/Renegade-specific points for this purpose, spendable only on actions that can be properly justified according to the associated virtue. In addition, currently, my plan is to allow the current balance between the two types—that is, the number of points by which one exceeds the other (FREX: Paragon 5 and Renegade 3 = balance of Paragon 2)—to be used as a sort of limited Reputation, positive or negative based on the situation (FREX: a Paragon Rep would be positive toward “do-gooders” folks and negative toward “mavericks”), the limitation being that the subject must witness or have witnessed the character’s behaviors, or at least, “read his file.” Gaining of such points in either direction will be evaluated on an action-by-action basis, and will be limited to one point of each per session. It is my opinion (not specifically backed up by my digital inspiration) that gaining of a new point in either direction should require an escalation—if a character gains a Renegade Point for stealing candy from a baby (in the name of justice, of course 😉 ), then to gain another the next time, he’d need to steal the baby’s blanket too—or maybe the whole baby. Spending of such points will be upon request, and also limited to one of each per session.

Other Means

I also briefly considered using Talents (B89 and Power Ups 3) to represent a Paragon/Renegade score; it could provide a bonus to a number of specific, appropriate social skills, and would have a built-in limited “reputation” similar to what I wanted. It would probably work well enough, but it would be a bit more complicated to employ—I opted for the KISS method. One could also treat Paragon/Renegade Points as a limited-use Higher Purpose (B59), applying its bonus only to ethically-appropriate actions; a score of more than one Paragon/Renegade point could be available as a combined, single bonus, or limited to +1 for an equal number of uses. Either of these would be suitable replacements if you aren’t using Impulse Buys or some similar meta-system.

My work on the Inception campaign has renewed, to my great relief. I’ll be sure to write about how this mechanic works out in play once it finally occurs.