The Blog of Roon

Well, some items of news this week ought to make Shirley happy. His patron Lady Hester won a sizable chunk of change off Vroomfondel, for one thing. (And now that that’s over with I will admit the lawsuit was my idea, communicated by Shirley to Lady Hester via telegram. I said Shirley was devious.) Vroomfondel has been collared in Irkutsk by Scotland Yard, what’s more—which just thrills me; I hope they aren’t gentle with him, the blackguard!

(I am envisioning uses for those hundred Mongols…)

Unfortunately, Shirley is not in a position to rejoice at the moment. That typhoon in the Tsushima Straits? Guess who’s in the middle of it. There have been casualties, there may be more, and that’s all I shall say for the nonce.

I see the Deoraj Singh/Ananda Das thing was successfully hushed up by Princess Vandana. That must have been an endeavor.

I don’t know what’s up with the Libby Wells impersonator. Li snowed me on that; Shirley thought they had the real Libby Wells at first, and Carter had only resorted to imposture when the real Libby failed to show for the deposition. Seems Carter was more of a weasel than Shirley thought—not that this is unusual; Shirley is rather slow to recognize weasels.

Still much we do not know about the Addison business, although it is looking more and more to have been set up by Vroomfondel, with or without partners-in-crime. It’s probably too late for Roland Carter to save himself, but if I were he I’d sell out Vroomfondel for whatever it would buy me. I don’t think he has much hope, otherwise.

Let’s hope Shirley has more…

Li offers an example of a character-based challenge in response to a Game WISH I haven’t yet answered: “a strictly non-violent character finds out that she or he may have been targeted for assassination.”

Er, I resemble that remark. Or Shirley does, anyway. I did the Batman schtick with him, up to a point; his parents died by violence, therefore he is himself firmly pacifist.

The smart money currently is on his not having been a specific target—if you read the Grand Ellipse timelines carefully, you discover that chief assassin suspect Herbert Addison never bothered to wait for Shirley to show up to be assassinated.

Even so, Li is quite correct that this was something of a preoccupation for Shirley as long as he didn’t know where the heck Addison was (you will note it’s pure GM fluke that Addison got caught). All right, all right—Shirley was terrified. Scared half out of his mind.

But if the supposed challenge was whether Shirley would stick to his principles in the face of considerable damage they might cause him—well, look, no challenge at all there. No question about it, Shirley is one principled little dude. Not perfect, just principled.

I suppose I might have handled things differently. I could have hauled in the game mechanics by the ears and bought off the Pacifist deficiency I gave Shirley at character-creation time. Easy enough to rationalize in-game; lots of people misplace their principles in the face of death. And I have character points coming out my ears at the moment, so the buyoff is no trouble. (I am in fact considering buying off his other deficiency. Depends on how a few things shake out.)

Or I might have had him crumble. He’s been close to it a time or two; he has a bad time with uncertainty and half-knowledge. In fact, I think the real challenge Li posed Shirley was not crumbling.

Goes to show that GM machinations don’t always have the effect the GM thinks they do. And it goes to show that some players are so bloody stupid they hand the GM the keys to their character’s weak points on a silver platter.

Let’s see how much Game WISH catching up I can do in one post. As usual, I’ve not read the responses so as not to lose my initial gut reactions.

While I’m at it—I know there are Game WISHers who are not using either trackback or comments to point to their entries from Perverse Access Memory. Please do so! I know I’m missing responses I want to read.

WISH 27 asks what a sci-fi RPG has to do to work, and why most current-gen sci-fi RPGs don’t work.

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with our expectations that “science” will be rigid, cut-and-dried, one-right-answer stuff. That is a bad paradigm to take into roleplaying; it leaves no room for rules fudging and lots of room for rules-lawyering, one of RPGing’s least-enjoyable components.

That said, I can see a sci-fi RPG working. Just not a hard sci-fi RPG. I could see a Hainish RPG (you, too, can be an Observing team on a new planet!), for instance. Could work well. I also think that when some of the ideas regarding emergent behavior and networking percolate through popular culture a bit more, sci-fi RPGs will have a better paradigm to build on.

Sci-fi RPGs, however, will simply have to get past the pages and pages and pages and pages and PAGES of rules regarding gadgetry. If I want to keep track of umpteen statistics about a cool gadget, I’ll play a computer game in which the computer keeps track of them for me. Gadgetry is not what I role-play for. Every single sci-fi RPG I’ve ever seen goes totally overkill on the gadgetry. Is that why they don’t work? Could well be.

WISH 28 asks for three movies that might inspire gamers. Drat it, I don’t watch enough movies to answer this question. I will, however, mention The Dark Crystal, because of its gorgeously-designed setting. I think it important for GMs to keep in mind that setting as well as plot and character can be used to boggle and delight players. The next time you dive into the Monster Manual, don’t just check hit points and attack bonuses. Ask what’s weird and wonderful about a given critter.

I want to do something like this with a character, actually—make the other characters wonder about her, find her opaque, curious, weird—but I haven’t the opportunity at the moment. If, however, Afletana doesn’t survive, I have a character concept in mind along these lines… which is not to say I’m planning to kill Afletana, as I’m quite fond of her and happy with where her story is going; just that our Temple invaders have been dropping like flies lately.

WISH 29 asks about preferred campaign style: long-term, goal-directed, episodic?

Er, all of the above? I think the different options require different gaming strengths, but they can all be enjoyable. The shorter-term the campaign, ironically, the more planning the GM has to do, in my opinion, because s/he won’t have much by way of character hooks to play with. The action had better be nonstop, or players are likely to get bored.

One-offs and short-runs are great ways to try out unlikely characters, exorcise the min-max demon, or test campaign ideas. I actually particularly like one-offs or short-runs in which I play a character somebody else generated, provided always that the character fits the scenario (something I once had difficulty with). Jolts me out of the usual, never a bad thing.

(In fact, now that I think about it, a longer-term campaign running a character designed for me by someone who knows me might be quite fascinating. I’d like to try it sometime.)

The single-storyline campaign is fine; it’s a nice balance between flat characters and overfamiliar ones (not that I have ever had much trouble with the latter). Room for development and plot twists; minimal risk of boredom.

Many campaigns turn out to be chains of single storylines; the most obvious example is the campaign based on a string of modules. I find (and you are welcome to disagree with me) that these campaigns run the highest risk of boring me. The GMs who run them all too often forget to involve characters; they ignore character hooks, forget what happened to characters previously, fail to create a consistent game setting, and generally treat the party as disposable cogs of zero individual interest. Hate that.

I don’t have anything in particular against modules, mind you; properly used, they’re great tools. Properly using a module, however, requires work, the work of integrating it into the campaign, altering it as needed to fit.

The best campaigns in my book are the long-running, multi-layered ones. But you knew that already, and this post is getting far too long.

So that’s the answer. One, two-hoo, three. *crunch* Three.

I hopped over to this worthwhile article on metagaming from Roll the Bones, and I’m glad I did. The article would be improved by additional thinking about when to metagame—which situations make for good metagaming and which don’t—but even without that it’s a thought-provoking read.

A curious thing not brought up in the metagaming article is that knowing something out of character can sometimes actually blind a player to obvious solutions. Devious GMs take note!

I know a couple-three things about the Grand Ellipse that Shirley doesn’t. One of them is what Vroomfondel’s yacht is doing while Vroomfondel is chugging across Russia. I’ve known this for quite some time, and it’s driven me barking mad because if Shirley knew he could incorporate it into his plans to foil Vroomfondel (who, we have recently learned, is rather eviller than basically goodhearted Shirley was willing to give him credit for).

It wasn’t until coming home on the bus Monday that I figured out that Shirley doesn’t actually need to know the piece of information that I know in order to foil Vroomfondel. The natural, logical assumption Shirley would make about the yacht will do just as nicely. I didn’t realize this, of course, because I was so focused on keeping my knowledge away from Shirley.

So if all goes well in Osaka, Vroomfondel should have yet another Shirley-inspired monkey wrench in his works. I am rubbing my hands together in anticipation. Whenever you’re ready, Li…

Shirley and Margaret are just impossibly cute. There’s no other way to describe them. I hope they do manage to marry each other (by no means a certainty).

If the Grand Ellipse were a Jane Austen novel, the Great Plot Complication when our hero and heroine realize they can never marry would just have happened. And in fact the Great Plot Complication is that classic Austen barrier—money. Bit of a twist on who has it and who doesn’t—actually now that I think about it, that’s rather un-Austenlike—but the same old problem.

I see a few ways Shirley and Margaret can resolve their dilemma (and I just suggested a particularly outrageous one) or have it resolved for them, but a genuine Happy Ending would require some GM ex machina, I suspect.

If I know our GM, though, she’ll have a few more plot twists in store. We shall see.

My New Year’s friend is letting me borrow his copy of Everway for a bit. Why did nobody tell me about this game before? It rocks. I am definitely going to hunt down a copy, and David and I are discussing moving our Al-Qadim campaign to it—we haven’t actually used any D&D mechanics in so long that keeping the game in D&D is pointless, even a nuisance.

It’s just easier to think about Juskinah and her friends in terms of Everway, which must be some indication that we would find the mechanics congenial. I found (well, actually, David found it) a right-down brilliant Vision card for her right off the bat, and within minutes of reading the section in the players’ guide about characters meeting their Fates it was clear to me when and how Juskinah had done so.

I’m not completely thrilled with the setting, as it (like D&D) is afflicted by unwillingness to let characters bond with their surroundings. I prefer games like Ars Magica, in which characters have a physical place in the world that they both change and are changed by. Still, Everway does allow characters to adventure within a single realm (or a group of closely-bound realms), and I must immediately concede that Everway is the closest to a genuinely workable multi-cultural game setting I’ve ever seen.

I’m also not happy with the “superhuman character” model, though I suppose I’ve lived with it long enough in D&D. I am a plebeian at heart; I prefer hobbits to elves, ordinary people in extraordinary situations to overendowed champions doing the impossible. If I were to run an Everway campaign, I think I might reduce the number of points available during character creation. (Which actually takes care of the problem rather neatly. Hmmm. Points to the game again.) Or I might juice up background characters to be more on a par with PCs.

The incorporation of fortune-telling into the game is utterly brilliant. I love it. No cheesy Augury spells, but the dark and perilous ambiguity that the Delphic oracle inspired.

I can’t say enough about how flexible this game is. I was having fits trying to turn the Pegana mythos into a D&D pantheon. No sweat in Everway. Quite simple, in fact—and I’m definitely tempted.

I wonder if anyone does Everway play-by-email?