The Blog of Roon

Last Friday’s WISH asks about GMs and players keeping or sharing game secrets. Again, I’ve avoided reading the other responses before writing my own.

I can go either way on keeping or sharing secrets. I am scrupulous about not letting my characters know what they shouldn’t, so it is “safe” for GMs to reveal things to me that my characters have no way to know. Sometimes that means I have to cringe while they walk unsuspecting into trouble. My fellow gamers are as good as I am, meaning they slip now and then (so do I), but a “And how does [the character] know that, exactly?” from the GM straightens us out.

It works out to a sort of doublethink, and is a good test of how well you separate yourself from your character when necessary. It can be tough, at least for me, especially with characters to whom I am especially attached—who are generally part of campaigns likeliest to possess shared secrets.

This kind of doublethink isn’t limited to secrets. Mind-control effects do something similar. Last Ars session another player played being victim of a love-charm admirably, despite the trouble it caused the group and the character. These things are wickedly hard to play. Unlike hypnosis, these effects can make a character embarrass or traduce himself, betray his friends, radically change his behavior. I, for one, resist playing these situations correctly. I invest so much in the psyches of my characters that it bugs the life out of me to have to change suddenly (and usually negatively). But I do try.

Nothing wrong with keeping secrets, either. The thrill of discovery is a wonderful thing. I think GMs generally need to keep more secrets than players, however. Players should remember that their characters spend a great deal more time together than the highly-compressed game-session time. They have plenty of time to ferret out each other’s quirks, history, and so forth. If something about a character is secret, it should be because the character is intentionally keeping it secret, and even then the other characters ought to have reason to be suspicious.

My gaming group seems to use email a lot to work these things out. The group is large enough (seven people plus GM!) that it can be difficult to make time for one-on-one or small-group interactions between characters. Email fills in the holes nicely. It can also create some marvelous character-on-character mysteries. I know there’s some stuff going on among Rat’s companions that Rat isn’t privy to, but would be immensely curious about if she could (she is currently separated from the main party).

The delightful thing about email is that it has turned one of our group from a die-hard mechanician (someone more interested in the workings of game-system mechanics than anything else) into a role-player as good as anyone in the group. Last Ars session he took a grog I had sketched out and turned him into a person. Cold—first time he’d seen the character. Beautiful job. I take no credit; I just enjoy the results of the transformation.

Is there a line between what to reveal and what to keep secret? If there is, I suspect it falls between plot secrets and character secrets. Plot secrets should be secret until the characters work them out. Character secrets are less secret, at least to me. I do, however, approve of a general secret-revealing session after a major plot arc or campaign ends. How else do you get to slap yourself on the head in disgust for not figuring out the obvious?

This week’s WISH is about (mis)communication between players and those running the game. Since I don’t run games, I only have the one perspective.

The reason my current gaming group works as well as it does has nothing to do with how well our gamemasters know the rules or how well they interpret them. Nor are we players necessarily rules experts ourselves. Last night’s Ars session was a lot of “okay, I rolled a 0; is this a simple or stress die?” and “run spontaneous casting by me again?”

The reason we work great (well, one major reason, anyway) is that when a disagreement comes up, whoever is running the game makes a decision and has it immediately accepted, without acrimony or even argument. On with the game!

That said, I can be considerably more obstreperous with my husband. (Why that man puts up with me, there are days I cannot fathom.) We got into trouble once over a trip into the desert. I had assumed that managing gear and supplies came under the heading of things to be elided, competency therein to be assumed of seasoned desert travelers (which all characters involved were at that point). After all, who wants to do the accounting? (“The ogre eats x times as much in a day as the elf, so you have to figure that into the purchasing…” who needs this?)

Then the party got caught in a sandstorm, and he refused to allow me to assume we had brought an appropriate tool to dig ourselves out. I shamefacedly admit that I threw a tantrum; I thought the whole thing was silly and boring (sandstorms are old hat at this point!), and wanted to get on with the purpose of the journey.

Eventually another trip came up, and I obediently drew up a list of gear and supplies that even he had to admit he couldn’t find any obvious holes in. Eagle-eyed hindsight suggests that a better way to handle the situation would have been to allow me the stupid shovel, but ask for a gear accounting next time. Even better would have been to ask for the accounting in the first place, rather than demanding it retroactively. I felt that the rules had been changed under my feet, which has sent better players than I am into fits.

As for me, there were plenty of ways out of the game situation, and I let my anger blind me to them, which was unacceptable (and, under the circumstances, no compliment to me as a player; some of the ways out were pretty bloody obvious).

I would like to offer a list of Rules for Avoiding Miscues at this point, but I don’t really have one. The best I can say is that when a miscue happens, as it inevitably will, do whatever it takes to keep the game going. Figure out a house rule if needed—but do it later.

This week’s writing exercise is casting bouquets and brickbats at game systems. I have very carefully avoided reading the other contributions thus far so as not to sully my opinions.

Since we have to do three, I’ll do what the question says: pick one system with very few redeeming features, one with very few faults, and one in the middle.

The single worst system I have ever seen was that of the first RPG I ever played, Living Steel. In my single experience with it, resolving much less than one minute of combat game time took over three hours. Enough said. To some extent, nearly all games based on futuristic combat machines (e.g. Robotech) suffer from this malady; I think it took the cyberpunk games (e.g. Shadowrun) to break it.

I am ridiculously fond of White Wolf’s general approach to game design, if not necessarily of their chosen milieux. I played Vampire before the concept got diluted with werewolves and mages and whathaveyou. Loved it. The best thing about it, speaking as a longtime D&D player, was the versatility built into character creation. Because there are so many choices to be made to create a Vampire character, there is really not much profit in min-maxing (unless your Storyteller is more predictable than any Storyteller I’ve ever seen), nor is there any single path to creating a successful character. This leaves worlds more freedom to come up with memorable, distinctive characters. The advancement system is similarly flexible.

My only complaint is fairly minor. One of the tests of a Vampire-like system, one in which the characters created explicitly mimic real people in real life (as opposed to being Chosen Heroes, set apart from the madding crowd), is that real people should be able to acceptably counterfeit themselves within the strictures of the character creation mechanism. I can’t do it in Vampire. I know too much. Any college-educated person knows too much. The basic stats are fine, but the point-pool for Knowledges/Talents/Skills is ludicrously small.

Increasing it raises the possibility of min-maxing, I admit. I have toyed with the idea of dividing such things into obviously-game-useful and merely-character-enriching, with the aim of increasing skill points for the sake of well-rounded characters while depriving min-maxers of anything to min-max. Tough thing to work out, though, and inevitably the line will be misdrawn.

And the system with which I have a love-hate relationship is… d20. I hate the rigidity of character construction, and the absolute requirement that any party wishing to survive two encounters have The Cleric, The Fighter, and The Magic-Slinger. D20 is an advance over second-edition D&D in this respect, since multi-classing is easier. However, prestige classes completely obliterate the usefulness of multi-classing (since so many of them are munchkin-bait), and they also force characters to be evaluated teleologically from their very creation—to earn a prestige class, you typically have to choose the right feats and skills right from the start. Seems a shame to force characters into a mold rather than letting them grow as their experience leads them.

On the other hand… the combat system is quick and useful once you become accustomed to it; the silly second-edition saving-throw and armor-class systems have been reduced to something downright sensible; monster levels are a brilliant cure for the “oh, just another kobold” blues; when properly designed, prestige classes can be clever and interesting. The rules have enough wiggle-room to fit plenty of situations, and are modular enough to be rewritable at need. (The ranger class is a frequent rewrite target; my group is working on that right now. I am considering giving Rat a level or three of ranger, as a situation just arose in-game in which she might learn appropriate skills.)

The most important benefit to d20 is, of course, the network effect. Most gamers know it, at least a little. Scads of sourcebooks and modules have been written for it, considering its relative youth. Creaky at the joints though the system is, it’s still playable and worth playing.

Update: I see a lot of anti-Ars-Magica sentiment. Find it odd. The character creation system is really not much different from Vampire, which is getting generally positive remarks. The milieu is playable with minimal history knowledge, though the more you know the richer your game environment, just as with most games. The magic system is by and large sensible, and vastly more flexible than a rigidly spell-based one such as that for d20. What’s the beef?

Would like to try: Nobilis, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia

Probably won’t try: Godlike (too tightly tied to its repulsive milieu)