Elementary Collaborative Story-Telling

Okay, I have an idea for character I'd like to play for a change.  Those of you who have read any quantity of my previous posts on pen & paper roleplaying will know they tend to revolve around ideas for games, worlds, settings or mechanics, enchanted artifacts and such, as I mostly GM.

Every now and again however, I conceive of a character I'd like to play.  And I live in hope that one of my friends or acquaintances will create a game for me to enjoy from the other side of the table from time to time.

The idea of this character has really been born out of two notions:

1) The idea of collaborative story-telling in an RPG.  The sort of thing John Wick bangs on about.  And the sort of thing I embarrassingly have never tried myself.  Too old skool, too much of a control freak.  But the concept does intrigue me.  Taking part in a game where the players don't just participate in, but to some extent actively modify the plot to a certain degree.  And...

2) I've been watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes recently. Most notably Benedict Cumberbatch's modern reworking of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic, to CBS's most recent adaptation set in New York.

And it struck me that playing a character like Holmes, displaced into a fantasy genre (so approaching, I suppose, to some degree the forensic eccentricities of Depp's Ichabod Crane) such a character could create a number of ad lib'd hooks for the GM to utilise in a collaborative style pen & paper RPG.  I've always wanted to play a character whose priniple 'weapon' was hypnotism too.  So I'll throw that in there as well.

This is the way I see it working:

The GM sets up the scene as per normal.  But whenever the Sherlock character begins to investigate the area, the player (that'll be me for a change) adds in detail that the GM didn't explicitly mention at the time - and may not have even considered, but the GM then uses these hooks to further develop the story.

So I get to say things like: Yes the barkeep at the Drowned Goblin seems like a pleasant enough fellow, indeed.  But appearances can be deceptive.  His clothes had a familiar odour, that of winter roses, an expensive perfume favoured by Lord Heldrum's mistress.  Moreover, the barkeep had abrasions on the back of his left hand, resembling marks left by teeth but with a noticeable indentation not present, commensurate with an upper left canine, missing from Heldrum's mistress's handmaiden, Flossie.  Moreover the Drowned Goblin itself is built on the old part of the town, atop the ancient catacombs that run the length and breadth of the merchant quarter heading towards the cliffs overlooking the bay.  The barkeep's boots were black with mud and yet it hasn't rained in days.  I'd wager that if we explore the cellar, we'll find a concealed entrance to those dank catacombs and a trail that leads directly to Heldrum's mistress's cottage on the outskirts of town towards the east.

I think you get the general idea.  From a GM's point of view players' actions inevitably require some ad lib'ing to weave them effectively into the story.  With a character like the one sketched out above, the GM will have if anything a surfeit of ideas to aid them in this endeavour.  And it would be a great opportunity to try out some of this collaborative story-telling all the kids are talking about.  :-)  I remember when all this was fields.

Now if I can just find someone interested enough to run such a game....  ;-)

Dungeon Bash turned on its head

Ah, its feels good to be back in the P&P driving seat after a couple of random posts about MMOs.

So without further ado...

Dungeons.

You gotta love 'em.  

Though, that said, the tired old dungeon bash (or Dungeon Crawl as they are oft called) has really had its day for anything but the most rudimentary of games run for the most novice of players.  And even then I'd say you could do something more interesting with it.

Award-winning P&P game designer John Wick, whom I have referenced numerous times in prior posts, has a pretty interesting concept with his Dirty Dungeon.  Which he describes here on You Tube.

As with most of Wicky's ideas, they certainly give you food for thought, but I tend not to take them up wholesale, rather pick bits out of them, mush them up a little and turn them into something else.  Which is precisely what I intend to do with his Dirty Dungeon concept - and make it more of a collaboration rather than something almost purely player prescribed, which whilst an interesting idea - goes a little too against the grain of roleplaying for my delicate palate.  What I'd like to see players do, is actually roleplay the gathering of the information.  And so you as the GM come to the table with a rough background for why the dungeon is there.  And a modular design for the architecture, and as the players do their research in libraries, talking to old adventurers, and generally listening to rumour and gossip about the place, you think on your feet and use their discussion and the ideas that emerge to build your dungeon on the fly.

Anyway, that's not what I came here to talk about.  That's all intro.

The following idea is something I developed a few years ago, inspired by the Bulldog Productions game Dungeon Keeper. I started it once with a group of players but never got to finish it due to the encroachment of RL into the fantasy world I prefer to inhabit.  It might be interesting now to redevelop it in conjunction with the Dirty Dungeon idea above.

The idea is fairly straightforward but ultimately turns the classic notion of the Dungeon Bash on its head.

In a distant region of the world, a little off the beaten track, a town has been periodically besieged by the denizens of a nearby dungeon.  And periodically the town strikes back by sending off the odd group of heroes and adventurers to seal the dungeon, and its fate, once and for all.  Obviously this hasn't worked, and none of them have ever been seen or heard of again.

The PCs are hired by notables in the town, or the local Venturers' Guild, or just because they want to make a name for themselves.  Whatever reason, some townsfolk tell them about the dungeon, and they stride off (after researching the legends and making suitable preparations one hopes) to go bash it.

But this is an 'evilpilch' game, and they don't call me that for nothing.

The dungeon is in fact the lair of an ancient and potent Lich, far more powerful than the combined forces of the party.  And this is important.  Because at some stage (not prescribed, we allow the players to penetrate the dungeon to a degree) but one by one, they come a cropper and fall foul of the dungeon's traps and undead denizens.  

But this is not the end of the game.  Far from it.  The players, after their demise are reawakened en masse, on a series of cold dark slabs of stone, much like sarcophagi.  And on a shelf before them they see what they suspect are their own hearts in dangling from a chain within glass jars.  A corresponding crudely stitched wound down their breastbones.  They have been reanimated as Wights.  Undead that retain the memories of their former lives, and their skills, but are at the behest of their reanimator.

On so begins the game proper.  With the Lich tasking the players to defend its lair against intruders.

The Lich also has a series of special tasks for them, kidnapping virgins from the town.  Bringing in children to sacrifice at the Lich's altar.  All manner of gruesome and unsavoury assignments.  There may even be a way for the players to turn against their master, or otherwise indirectly orchestrate the Lich's demise so they are freed from bondage.

But in short, this is how a regular dungeon bash can be turned on its head.

Dire Peril

I'm not sure if I like this idea or not.  Too early to tell, but the fact that I'm on the fence suggests I ought to play-test it.  I just came across this notion whilst watching a YouTube video of John Wick being interviewed.  I was pleased to hear John talk about combat in a similar way to how I view it (watch from 5:10 onwards to avoid the guff).  But he also brings up this concept of Dire Peril.

And it seems to tie-in with what I was discussing in my last post about occassionally overtly rolling dice in front of players to determine the outcome of the combat.  Wicky talks about having a rule where his players cannot die, unless he begins a scene by saying: Dire Peril.  The players then know that the safety is off and they can die in this scene.  I kind of like the idea, as I can see how it would make players cautious and nervous - and thus create tension.  But I'm unhappy about the 'at all other times the players are safe' vibe.

As said, I'll have to play-test this and see how it works.  I'd prefer to use Dire Peril on the fly, perhaps saying it as I reach for my dice and roll them overtly before the players.  And of course virtually any action can involve Dire Peril, not just combat.  Climbing a cliff can be hazardous, after all.

Dire Peril!

It has a nice ring to it.  Although it somehow conjures images of schlock-horror 50s B-movie sci-fi flicks.  There is definitely something to it, though.

I shall report back.

Narrative over mechanics - Revenge of the Number

Players that have had some involvement in my games will probably tell you that I am forever striving for a decent combat system.  A combat system which does not slow-up the game, but which is yet authentic, realistic and dangerous - whilst also being flexible.

Can this be achieved?

My current take on it - a take that has been developing over the last ten years or so, is that combat should be intrepetive, like all game rules, IMHO.  Looking up tables, adding and subtracting a variety of bonuses etc. etc. all slows down the game into a number-crunching nightmare that steals the passion and excitement from the scene.  Yet I still believe it is important to have a final, random, dangerous element - so anyone entering into combat cannot be sure they won't die, or lose a limb or whatever.  Part of the enjoyment of roleplaying is not quite knowing where the story is going, and this is almost as true for the GM as it is for the players.  For the players, they are exploring a world, a narrative, and they really don't (or shouldn't) know what's in store for them.  But for the GM, the players, by their actions which of course the GM does not dictate, also modify the story.  But the dice do this also.  Through the success or failure of the players' actions, and to a certain extent, the actions of NPCs too - the story can shift and change dramatically.

As a GM I tend to use dice rolls in a variety of ways.  Firstly, in order to propel the story forward, the majority of incidental rolls (players finding stuff, overhearing stuff etc.) if its required to happen to drive the story forward and keep the pace going I employ the 'Gygax Rule' and roll the dice just for the sound of it.  Effectively ignoring the result.  Sometimes I need a little inspiration myself though, and if its not critical to drive the narrative forward, and I determine that a little randomness can provide for an interesting divergence or outcome, I will roll the dice and allow that randomness to tweak the direction things are going in.  How an NPC reacts to the players' behaviour for example (if its not critical to the story).  Barmaids fancying the dashing paladin, or the quirky mage, that kind of thing.  And then, at some critical tense scenes, I deliberately go against the grain, and roll the dice right in front of the players so there is no hiding it.  Because contrary to what John Wick says, drama can be derived from randomness, and I have witnessed many a heroic death brought about by the dice.

So as I strive to make combat effective, thrilling and yet dangerous -this is how I achieve it:

For the sake of expediency, combat rolls are heavily interpreted, I don't use table or charts and I pad out the dice results with description.  As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, I use a 'tweak die' to generically influence how successful something was.  So the basic rolls determine success or failure, and the tweak dice determine the extent of the success or failure.  As combat is a fluid thing, one decent success, or epic failure can lead you into an advantageous position, or a leave you prone to further mishaps.  I use the dice rolls to embellish and describe the combat events that occur.  And this necessarily leads on to dramatic fights.  A series of fails can eventually lead a player to the point where the next blow from the enemy could be devastating.  And this is where the drama and story-telling come in.  After a series of four failed rolls, or poor tweaks the player is on his back, having been disarmed and his attacker looms over him, sword raised to finish him off - and it is that point that I will roll directly in front of the other players - but it is also at that point that another player can intervene, turn, and hurl their own axe at the looming attacker.

Such descriptions cannot be achieved when counting hit points.  I don't think.  Hit points take into account all that drama but distil it down into a mere integer.  What I'm suggesting is removing the numbers and interpreting the results of the dice, descriptively.

Play-testing awaits.

Death in P&Ps...

Okay, so I just watched a video of this GM talking about how he intends to kill one of his player characters tonight.  And I can't say how much I disagree with this notion.  And it stimulated to write this post.

First off, let me categorically state that I am utterly opposed to planning to kill one of the player characters.  That seems like killing for the sake of it.  Like its some power-trip for the GM.  It has no place, IMHO, in mature gaming.  And if a player found out that you set out to kill their character - that you had that objective in mind before you even started the game - I don't think they'd be particularly happy with you.  For a start, a GM has ultimate power, above all the gods, and so killing a player is easy, if thats what they want to happen.  But as a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

The only time I would condone planning to kill a PC, is under these particular circumstances.  And I've found it works really well to build tension.  Sometimes when I'm running a game, one of my experienced players can't make the full session (I tend to game on occassional long weekends these days as mentioned in a previous post), but want to come along for a few hours one evening.  If this is the case, and if it fits the game, I ask them if they mind if I kill their character.  And I dont tell the other players this is going to happen. In these cases, having a player turn up for a cameo - especially at the beginning of the game.  With the other players thinking the cameo player is there for the full session, it comes as a terrible shock when the cameo PC dies after a few short hours, or in the opening scene.

Or perhaps the cameo player rocks up mid-game.  Whatever the case, I let the other players believe that the cameo player (I never openly refer to them as that) is going to be there for the rest of the game.  They're just a regular player.  And wham, I kill them off within a few short hours and it brings shock and tension to the remaining players and their characters.  -Man, this guy is serious, he's not pulling any punches!-  It works great in any game, but especially horror games which hang off their atmosphere more than any kind of roleplaying.  Some genres are more forgiving than others for allowing comic asides.  My advice is to avoid them in games where you want players to feel fear and dread.

So apart from that specific example, where you pre-plan with the player's approval that you're going to use their character as shock-tactics to instil fear into the surviving party members, by having them think you're that brutal.  I do not condone planning to kill of a PC.  It's just to easy anyway.  You're the GM, you decide what happens.

So when do I kill off PCs?  Death can be a tricky concept to manage in P&P games.  On the one hand, players invest a considerable amount of time and effort in developing and playing their characters, so you don't really want to go round slaughtering them willy-nilly.  That said, you also don't want them to think their characters are 'immune to the plot' as John Wick puts it.  As a GM you often tread a fine line between wanting to kill the PCs to maintain realism and tension, and not wanting to kill them so at least the majority of them experience the full story.  After all, much of GMing is about crafting an immersive world in which the players contribute to the story.

I'll happily kill off a PC if the player is repeatedly doing something stupid.  Not heeding the warnings, trying to take on too much.  Generally playing unrealistically.  This has happened a few times in my games.  On one particular occassion, in a fantasy game, the players were tricked into opening a daemonic gate.  As the rift between worlds began to form, one particularly reckless player said he dived in.  I looked at him sternly, hopefully coveying with my expression: "are you freaking nuts?" and gave them once chance to reverse their decision.  They repeated they wanted to jump into the gate.  So I took them to oneside, described in detail the experience of doing so and what unimaginable horrors awaited them on the other side.  I then gave them an extremely hard sanity check to flee.  They MADE their sanity check but refused to budge!  I shook my head in amazement and led them back to the table.  I then announced to all the players the results of this one reckless player's actions.  And descibed how bits of him - by all means not all of him - just some random bits, were emitted from the gate a few moments later, bubbling, hissing and still writhing, as if some warped fragment of life still possessed some of the parts, a quivering cheek, a blinking eye torn from its socket.  And some greasy loops of intestine which defyed gravity in the vicinity of the gate, and hung there, ejected the last of its faecal matter.

In my next post, I'll talk about some interesting ways you can handle death.

Educating players... + heroism and courage

So this isn't going to be a post about Player Impact as I had previously intended.  That'll have to come later.
Here John Wick talks about a suggestion he made to a friend who was running a High Fantasy game for his 16 year old daughter.  I heartily recommend checking it out.  Nice idea of how to educate careless characters.

Mr Wick is actually talking about heroism and courage, but I like it as an idea to educate players.

On courage and heroism, I recall a game I played in - not GMed, for once! - many years ago.  The party journeyed into these subterranean caverns which transpired to be the lair of some hideous spider god cult.  On the way in we were confronted with a pit-trap.  In the floor before us was a huge pit, hundreds if not thousands of feet deep.  Hanging from the ceiling above it, dead centre, was a rope.

One agile member of our party (to whom we attached a safety rope) ran and made a jump for the rope dangling above the pit.  As soon as he grasped it, the entire section of the ceiling to which it was attached dropped down, slottingd perfectly into the mouth of the pit and stopped, thereby creating a floor over the hole.  The trouble was, our thief was now trapped under this 'floor' dangling from the rope within the now sealed pit.  Thank goodness we had him tied to that safety line.

He decided to let go of the dangling rope and trust in the safety line.  As soon as he did so, the section of ceiling that slotted into and blocked the mouth of the pit, rose rapidly to form the ceiling again.  Effectively reopening the pit.  We pulled our thief to safety.

So we had a problem.  How to get across?  The pit is too wide to jump.  The inside of the pit walls too smooth to climb, even for our agile thief.  What we did was this:  We tied a rope to our thief and got our brawny dwarf fighter to hurl the rest of it, in a big coil, across the pit to the other side.  This he managed on his second attempt.  The thief then made a jump for the rope dangling from the ceiling.  Sure enough the ceiling dropped and slotted into the mouth of the pit again and our thief clung on for a count of 30.  Meanwhile the rest of the party ran across the 'ceiling now floor' and grabbed the rope which had been hurled across, and which was now being trapped by the dropped ceiling section, but still attached to our thief dangling beneath.

With the party comfortably across, when the thief got to 30 he let go.  The ceiling rose once again, but the party had hold of the other rope and we pulled our thief to safety.  We had safely negotiated the pit trap.

Or so we thought.

The trouble came about five hours later in the game, when we had disturbed some foul spider god ritual and were now being pursued by a bunch of psychopathic cultists (aren't they all?) and a handful of giant spiders,  and were fleeing back out of the dungeon.  With the thief in front the party rounds the corner, runs up the passageway and realises they now have to negotiate the pit trap again, in order to escape. Trouble is they don't have enough time to tie a rope around the thief, hurl it across the pit, have the thief jump for the dangling rope, blah blah blah.  The cultists are hot on their heals, and outnumber the party about five to one.  If they stand and fight, the party will unlikely survive.

There is a moments hesitation.  And then the dwarf fighter in a moment of extreme courage, heroism and self-sacrifice jumps for the rope himself.  He only just makes it.  And once again the ceiling slides down into place, forming a floor over the pit.  The party run across the pit and turn around to face the cultists.  As soon as the dwarf hears the second set of pounding footsteps across the ceiling above him (which he guesses are the pursuing cultists, he lets go of the rope.  The dwarf plummets... and we never hear him hit.  Of course as soon as he lets go the 'floor come ceiling' rapidly rises into place again, crushing the few cultists that were on it at the time.  The remaining cultists are on the other side of the pit and hurl rocks at the party as they retreat in stunned silence.  Their warrior, the brusque dwarf fighter had sacrificed himself so that they might live.

That scene remains one of the most memorable in my history of roleplaying.

Can't remember the name of the dwarf now.  But it was played by the inimitable Chris Hart.  (A valuable addition to any game.  No one gets more scared, and infects the rest of the party with fear like Chris).
Thanks mate.  =)

The images below illustrate how the pit-trap works, in case my explanation confounded you....

1. Shows the trap unactivated.

 2. Shows the trap activated, with the thief dangling from the rope, safety line in place.

 3. Shows the trap activated for a second time, with the safety line tossed to the other side (prior to activation).

 4. Shows the remaining party members (in truth there were five but I couldn't be arsed to draw them all) scamper to the other side.

 5. Shows the thief let go from the dangling, trap-activating rope, and being hauled to safety by his party.  I didn't bother drawing the trap to illustrate the sacrifice of the dwarf... it was just too sad.