Category Archives: talk

Pathfinder Fighter vs. Ice Devil?

Posted on May 26, 2009 | 48 comments

There’s been some smack talk about the Pathfinder preview of Valeros the 14th level fighter.   It spins off into the usual “fighters are worthless in D&D 3.x” hate speech.  In particular, there’s comparisons with an ice devil. “The fighter is totally outclassed by the CR 13 ice devil!” they cry.  “Casters are the only worthwhile classes!”

Well, I can’t speak for Valeros’ build, but our Pathfinder Beta based Curse of the Crimson Throne game is coincidentally at level 14.  We have a fighter, a ranger, a cleric (me), a new bard, and an occasional sorcerer.  And I’m afraid we don’t find the fighter “weak.”  Let’s look at our level 14 fighter and how he’d fare.

Malcolm, our fighter, carries a modest +1 heavy flail of transmuting (which, after hitting a creature, gains the properties needed to bypass its DR).  Sure, he needs buffing – but with his usual loadout (he always drinks a potion of Enlarge Person, which he has scads of, when in a dungeon, and then either Righteous Wrath of the Faithful from me or Inspire Courage and Haste from the bard, either gives +3/+3 and an extra attack) – he can kill the devil in three rounds on average.

First round, he closes and gets one shot at +28 for 2d8+17 damage (not even counting it as a charge).  With Improved Critical (17-20) and Devastating Blow that’s 36 damage (minus 10 for the devil’s DR).  He does have to contend with the devil’s fear aura, and it’s true that even with Bravery he has a good chance of failing that save (45% for Malcolm) but that’s what friendly casters are for – resurgence or anti-fear stuff, of which we have a variety.  And for the flying problem – he has potions and other items that give short flying, or again one of us can help out there.

Then in round 2 with a full attack (and extra one for haste), the transmuted weapon bypassing DR, and Backswing –  107 points of damage on average in that round.  Devil’s down to 14 hp.  Even if it gets a slow hit in and Malcolm somehow fails a Fort save (unlikely!), it’s nap time on round 3 from a single attack.  Malcolm has AC 28 and 197 hit points; there’s nothing the devil can do to pour enough damage into him to kill him inside 8 rounds.  Its cone of cold only does 25 hp damage to him on average, and its full attack is only a little better.  Even without caster buffs, Malcolm can do it in four rounds (though the fear and fly problems are more of a problem without caster support, although there’s a variety of cheap Magic Item Compendium items that counteract those problems).

A three round kill on the devil is as good as a caster would do on average.  Between the SR 25 and +15 saves (+19 with unholy aura up), even the spiffiest save-or-dies from a level 14 caster only have about a 20-25% chance per round of working.  That’s three to four round survivability once you do the math.  And the fighter can keep it up for a long time.  The Pathfinder rules tweaks have helped him out a lot – the weapon training, armor training, bravery, and additional feats like Backswing and Devastating Blow boost Malcolm’s worth in this fight was above a level 14 3.5e core fighter.

Besides, adventuring isn’t about one on one.  It’s about a party, over 5 or so encounters in a day.  The fighter needs healing, buffing, and anti-mind-affecting support from someone.  But that’s worth it – it’s like someone with a heavy machine gun needs someone to feed ammo.  The two people together are doing more than they could with a rifle apiece.  Getting and keeping Malcolm on a target when it means 100+ damage easily in a round is so worth it.  As a cleric, I can at best toss 25% success chance save or dies (of which I have a very limited number), or cast a variety of 14d6ey anti-evil-outsider stuff, which is only 49 damage even before SR and save which makes them average a net 15-20 damage.    I’m definitely better off optimizing our fighter.

These caster queens also complain that fighters are “boring” and support roles are “boring” (apparently only save-or-dies are “exciting”).   To them I say – you’re doing it wrong!

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Modern Warfare

Posted on May 14, 2009 | 5 comments

A while ago, I was going to write some essays covering the “underserved” areas of RPGing – cop fiction, crime fiction, and war fiction.  I got through the cop and crime ones but got bogged down before I got to war.  There’s a lot of WWII type gaming out there but not much newer.

I’ve been working over it for a while, and as a preface here’s some books I’ve read on the recent war(s).  They are educational in general but also I will later demonstrate how the most successful military approach – small special operations groups embedded in the local populace – also solves a lot of the problems with creating a modern “War RPG”.

So without further ado, the list!  Together they have given me an extremely interesting and fairly complete perspective on the recent war. Presented in the order I read them.

Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda

A very interesting book about a major operation in Afghanistan when the military’s focus had already been diverted to Iraq. Also shows how some of the military intra-unit political BS, seemingly undiminished since Civil War days, fucks things up bad. A good read especially because maybe we’ll actually be trying to go back there and take care of business soon. And man, the terrain is awful. “Sorry,our Apaches can’t fly though air that thin.”  Did you know that Holistic Design came out with a “d20 Afghanistan” game when the war was new?  I have it, it’s pretty good.

In The Company Of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat

This one’s OK… Written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, but basically just him following the 101st Airborne in the initial assault on Baghdad. Interesting and action-packed, but necessarily limited in scope. Bonus in that he’s hanging around with Petraeus in the early days, when he was just a major general commanding the 101st. He spends too much time with the officers and not enough with the line units so it’s a bit white-collar. I’d only give it three out of five stars but we’ll be seeing Petraeus more later.

The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq

Not awesomely written because it’s just the memoir of a Florida National Guard grunt, but it’s the most pure “soldier experience” of the lot. His unit got kept over there for like three years because his CO wanted to get some of that wartime glory. He ended up all fucked up, hooked on Valium and post-traumatic-stress-disordered. Great look into the everyday soldier’s life over there and how bad it was/is. Definitely movie ready, like that FX “Over There” series or something. Did you know there’s an interesting ashcan RPG called “Black Cadillacs” that tries to insert this kind of experience into a war story?

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

Dang, I got ripped off at Half Price Books, this hardbacks’ on sale for $6.99 through Amazon. This is a really scholarly military history book, more than a Black Hawk Down memoir type – the author (who also wrote Balkan Ghosts) goes to every major theater and hangs out with the grunts in everywhere from Colombia to the Philippines to Iraq. He gets a really good view into the weaknesses of the American approach – our specops work fine, but as an organization overall the focus on technology, force protection, etc. is harmful. He basically comes to the exact same conclusions that Petraeus will later as he rewrites the book on COIN before heading back to Iraq. Holistic also did a Colombia d20 RPG, which seemed an odd choice of country to me (they also did Afghanistan and Somalia) but having read this book I understand, and see that the Holistic guys were pretty well plugged in.

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

Now this one’s awesome. This guy went to Dartmouth and decided to go Marine ROTC. I remember his father told him “The Marines will teach you everything about life that I love you too much to.” He later joined First Recon, the even-more-elite arm of the Marines. The book covers everything, from boot camp on through to the end. He brings together the painful on-the-ground experience of “Last True Story” with the analysis of a highly educated mind of “Imperial Grunts.” He leaves the military because he sees that their anti-civilian approach was so damn retarded (going on to a dual Harvard Law/ Kennedy Business double major program). Oh, and you know that Rolling Stone guy’s “Generation Kill” book that HBO made into a series or something? It was THIS GUY’S UNIT.

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008

All the previous books were older. This one is kinda the payoff for all of them though. Turns out after the initial run on Baghdad they squirrelled Petraeus away at the Army war college and he rewrote the book on counterinsurgency (literally). A retired general named Keane saw how jacked up things were and pulled strings from retirement to basically bypass the Chiefs of Staff and get Petraeus and others in place commanding in Iraq and give them the latitude they needed to get stuff done. Basically he recognized the entire approach was wrong and that the military had deliberately tossed out everything they learned from Vietnam. The surge, which I admit I thought was a retarded idea, wasn’t just a “throw more heads at it” play, it was part of a transformation from the approach, so well illustrated in these previous books, of “hide in a fortress, then drive around in armored Humvees to see if anyone will shoot at us” to the more “community policing” model of COIN that Kaplan identified as so successful in other theaters back in Imperial Grunts. In the end, though, it portrays the surge as being successful at achieving more modest goals – but the question of “no really, is it worth doing?” is still unanswered.

More on the RPG angle later, but I wanted to share the bibliography first.

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Next Campaign: Alternity!

Posted on May 10, 2009 | 4 comments

Next campaign, we’re taking a break from D&D.  We always play a variety of games in our gaming group – in fact, we have a loosely afiliated group of quite a few people so there are a number of simultaneous campaigns on differing schedules with different attendees.  I attend the Sunday game slot, which is really two campaigns that alternate weeks.  One game has just concluded, a homebrew called Savage Worlds: Empire of Ashes, and is launching Savage Worlds: Legends of Steel this weekend.  The other, Curse of the Crimson Throne using the Pathfinder RPG rules, will be finishing up soon.

We play other stuff (most recently Mutants & Masterminds, GURPS, Silhouette, Champions…) but usually have one D&D and one non-D&D game running at a time.  We’re taking a D&D break though.  The new Pathfinder final rules won’t be out till August, and our DM’s judgment and word on the street is that the next AP, Second Darkness, kinds sucks.  One group is running the new  Legacy of Fire AP, but we decided to do some Alternity!

Alternity, if you don’t know, is a science fiction game TSR put out at the end of its life.  It was only around a couple years but they put a lot of material out for it, it had its own “Living Verge” RPGA campaign, etc.  Its Wikipedia entry sums up the ruleset.  It was mainly notable for a very in depth skill system.

Paul, our GM, has an idea for a troupe-style game set on the space station called the Lighthouse in the Star*Drive universe.  He envisions it as a Babylon 5/Deep Space Nine kind of deal.  I always liked Alternity and Star*Drive.  We will each play two characters, one member of the space station command staff, and one “other”  from a crowd of diplomats and other power players.

I’m working up my characters now.  One is the Star Force captain who is the military commander of the station (he reports to the Concord Administrator who’s the civilian head of the station,though).  The other is the bartender of The Corner, the liveliest bar/restaurant/casino on the station.  More to come on them and the game!

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Genre Thought: Friendly Combat

Posted on May 9, 2009 | 7 comments

I was preparing a character for an upcoming sci-fi campaign, and was considering a little brawling skill.  The min-maxer in me said, “Forget that crap!  Unless you go super-monk, there’s no such thing as unarmed combat, and certainly no such thing as nonlethal combat.”  And sadly, that’s usually the case.  You don’t get too many nice fists-only bar fights, people always whip out the high impact weapons.

Which is a shame.  Star Trek, for example, was always all about the unarmed combat; easily the wide majority over phaser combat.  And unarmed combat’s great for plots.  People don’t get killed, so you get prisoners, further interaction, etc.  In fact, in many a movie/TV plot, people have a knock-down-drag-out fistfight and even become friends over the course of it.  Of course, in an RPG everyone assumes any combat will be to the brutal death, and thus moves to deal it out before they take it.

One fix to this is metagame.  The GM can just make it clear what is a “friendly” combat and what isn’t.    In a friendly combat, you understand that nonlethal is the way to go, consequences for losing will not be severe,  and it may be an opportunity for role-playing and not pure tactical optimization.  Alternately, you can set really strong and realistic reactions to violence in-game.  If there’s a bar fight, those just punching get off; those who shivved someone go to jail.

I ran a long term high immersion D&D campaign and had to do that at its beginning.  I clearly set out my vision for the game, but old habits die hard.  Two of the characters start asking around in a bar for information; one guy tells them to slag off; next thing you know they chase him out into a field outside town and shoot him with a crossbow.  Luckily he was still alive when the local sheriff showed up.

The sheriff collected everyone and heard them out.  Entertainingly, the PCs’ story was, “We thought he had information and he talked back to us and ran off so we shot him!”  “Is that the story you’re sticking with?”  “Yeah, why?”  One of the two saw how it was going and voluntarily paid a fine and did restitution.  The other one stuck to his guns, though, and wanted a trial.  You should have seen his face when the mayor sentenced him to three months hard labor in the mines.  Time for a new character!  It sucked, but it made the point and people considered the consequences before they drew steel thereafter.

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Genre Thought: Seduction in RPGs

Posted on May 8, 2009 | 4 comments

I just got done watching the James Bond movie Goldfinger.  What struck me the most about it is that James saving the day hinged on one critical act, one that he pulls off in each movie – that maneuver we like to call “banging ’em to the good side.”

All his spycraft, sneaking and superspy gear and all were thwarted one after the other.   Goldfinger totally had him at his mercy, wrecked his supercar, crushed his tracking device, had a squad of Koreans sitting on his ass, and the next morning nerve gas was going to kill 40,000 Americans and then a dirty bomb would put a crimp on Fort Knox.  He only had one tool to turn to, and that tool turned the icy professional evil minion Pussy Galore into a total narc in one go.

I so want to do this in an RPG.  Sadly, seduction isn’t part of most of them, or even if allowed at the table is more of a route to quick jollies or a color-only NPC relationship and not really impactful to the plot.  But what if it were?  In another sub-group of our local gaming group, they were running Curse of the Crimson Throne and one of the PCs was a priestess of the goddess of lust, and used her wiles several times to get what she wanted, but it was a bit of a pain to adjudicate; the default D&D interpersonal stuff is too simplistic.

Let’s go back to the best likely source to model this – the actual James Bond RPG!  I picked up this lovely back in the day.  Never played it with its real rules, but did use it for a Feng Shui James Bond game.  Anyway, they have a NPC attitude track very familiar to 3e/4e D&D players – Opposed, Antagonistic, Neutral, Friendly, Enamored.  They have a whole page/subsystem dedicated to persuasion, seduction, and interrogation in turn.   For Seduction, it’s what we nowadays would call a complex skill check.  They define five stages of increasingly high difficulty:

  1. The Look
  2. Opening Line
  3. Witty Conversation
  4. Beginning Intimacies
  5. When and Where?

If you succeed all the way through the path, they reroll their reaction with a large positive modifier.  There are several of Bond’s seductees that don’t hesitate to stay bad.  (Although even they seem to not be able to resist coming back for more sometimes.)

This seems totally easy to convert to d20.  Historically, seduction has been modelled by Bluff vs Sense Motive.  I don’t know that I like that.  It’s one thing if you’re telling the waitress you’re a millionaire looking for a new wife to get a hummer in the bathroom, but many seduction attempts aren’t really deceptive per se (any more than any human interaction)…  James is usually pretty direct about his intentions, though he tries to state it in a more charming way than “I’d like to bone you.”  I prefer Diplomacy.  Or Intimidate if you’re in prison I guess.  Anyway, I’d think you could use your CHA-based social skill of choice.  (Insert Animal Handling joke here.)  What’s the difficulty?  Flat DCs?  No, that’s stupid.  Sense Motive doesn’t make sense unless it’s a bluff, and resisting via Diplomacy seems odd.  Will save is generally the measure of willpower, but there you have save vs. skill scaling problems in 3e. You want to take their current attitude into account, too (though, humorously, the Bond game does not; it’s as easy to seduce an opponent – and really, if you want this to be genre appropriate you probably don’t want that as a modifier).

It’s not d20 if you don’t have some feats to modify it!  Here’s some feats James Bond might have (besides the predictable “better at this” feats):

Slave to the Booty

If you succeed in a seduction attempt against a target, they temporarily move one component on the alignment scale in a direction of your choice.

Comin’ Back For More

If you succeed in a seduction attempt against a target, they are more liable to give in to, or even initiate, additional seduction attempts.  They get a -5 penalty on rolls to resist these attempts.

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Some Thoughts On 2e and 3e’s Legacy

Posted on May 3, 2009 | 23 comments

I was following the thread on SOB about the various editions of D&D over the years, and my white-hot hatred of 4e has caused me to reflect some on the good and bad things about 3e.

I played and enjoyed a lot of 2e.  When 3e came out, I was really impressed at the improvements and uptook it.  Improved and streamlined basic mechanics, better multiclassing, more interesting monster builds, more flexibility.  With many years of retrospective, however, I do think that there are some directions it took the game that ended up with (to me) undesired and probably unintended results.  So here’s some bad things that 3e introduced or exacerbated.

Rules vs Rulings

I think there were and are two kinds of players/GMs/groups. Those who felt limited by the rules and those that didn’t.  This was true in every edition back to 1e – the “old school D&D is about rulings, not rules” statement is revisionist.  I played in plenty of “the rules as written are sacred” 1e games.  Anyway, let’s say a fighter decides he needs to throw his two-handed sword at someone.  There were definitely people in earlier eds. that would say “no, there’s no rules for that” and also people that would say “Uhhh…  -4 to hit and don’t try doing this all the time.  Roll!”  3e codified a lot of that, which for some folks was helpful.  Here’s a feat allowing you to throw a melee weapon and a standard rule for if you do it without any special ability to do so.  Which is nice.  But with all the huge amount of rules, though, they varied from this optimal formula, and you got a lot of “you can’t do this without the feat” stuff.  Or with things like skills, at higher levels (and DCs) you suck *so* bad at doing things untrained that it’s about the same thing.  So it helped the “I need rules” crowd while limiting the “I am comfortable making it up and my players don’t spend all night arguing about my calls” crowd.

Scaling

In general I don’t believe that “having rules for something is bad,” which old schoolers sometimes use to say any skill system etc. is bad (with no answer for why combat rules should not be similarly abstract – they certainly are in some games and it works there).    But the implementation has implications.  The problem with 3e skills is the same as with 3e combat – the scaling.  With the raw numbers and also the various feats and whatnot, levels mean a lot more.  It used to be that a fifth level versus a tenth level fighter wasn’t that huge of a functional gap.  You hit more, and maybe did a couple more points of damage.  Now, damage scaling is to the point where our 13th level 3.5e fighters easily dump out 100 points of damage a round.  In 1e or 2e, you’d expect more like 30.  That degree of scaling ends up requiring min-maxing so that you are competitive at a given level.

The corollary to this is the difficulty/prep in creating high level PCs or opponents, but it’s more wide reaching than that.  A small amount of randomness has huge effects. Some randomness is desirable – the people who wanted all save-or-dies removed are clearly pussies – but too much them makes people force standardization (and 4e’s the epitome of this) in order to compensate.  Hence the new slavish adherence to “appropriate CR/ELs”.  A necessary obsession with balance also spawned more focus on game-breaking and the rules as a good unto themselves in general.

Magic Items

The new approach to magic item crafting was also problematic.  It was nice to have one; the “it’s pretty much impossible – but they’re everywhere!” approach of 1e/2e damaged immersion.  The ability to fine tune your loadout instead of largely being constrained to a couple things you’ve found was a huge game changer.  This leads to the “Christmas tree syndrome” and the virtual elimination of many non-boost items from the game.

Tactical Combat

Then, of course, the minis focus was harmful.  With the maneuver/AoO rules they are pretty much necessary, and you can’t help but spend more and more time on that part of the game than the others.  I can’t help but recall the GM advice in the cinematic game Feng Shui  by Robin Laws – “Don’t use a map!  At most do a rough sketch of an area if it’s unclear but for God’s sake don’t use a tactical setup.”  And the game was mainly all about combat, not an Amber-esque RP-fest, its’ just that Laws saw correctly the effects that tactical combat have on an RPG.

2e Today

I recently had a friend want me to run her on an adventure with her old 2e character she loved.  I had done that before with a 3e-updated version, but I couldn’t find it and so just pulled the 2e stuff and ran with it.  And it was refreshing.  The lack of minis promoted face-to-face interaction.  Less rule complexity made things run faster. She innovated more in combat.

It’s funny – when we played 3e initially, with our older ed assumptions firmly in place, and before the many splatbooks offered all the abusive choices, it *was* a better system.  Our first 3e campaigns were some of the most fun we’d had.  But over time, as these effects started to manipulate our default expectation, it got worse.  I’ve noticed a tendency in our groups now to play other games “like we play 3.5e”.  Mini-heavy combat in particular, which naturally tends to damage RP (the more time you spend on one part of the game, the less you spend on others).   I’ve noticed that when our gaming group runs other games, we seem to add a lot more lame ass minis combat in than they necessarily prescribe.

Responses – 4e, Pathfinder, Old School

Ironically, 4e, which I hate, tries to address these issues while Pathfinder, which I strongly prefer, ignores them.

4e addresses the scaling with the huge hit point boost and class standardization.   Unfortunately this is the lamer “balance solution” to the problem and turns combat into slogs.  It addresses magic items semi-successfully by removing the usual boost items, but is left with really lame and underpowered items.   On the tactical combat issue – no, it embraces tactical combat and gives it tongue kisses.  And on rulings vs rules, it’s still clearly rules based.  Confused people count removing a meaningful skill system as “more ruling based because then you can make it up.”  But with the overall rules-are-God emphasis, it’ll just end up promoting the “you can’t do that” camp.  There’s other things I dislike about 4e, but on this topic at least, it makes an effort to address some of these issues.

Pathfinder pretty much ignores these four problems, which is a shame.  I’ve already played one Pathfinder campaign, and though it’s definitely a better, more fun version of 3.5, and IMO better than 4e, it does nothing about these, which are at the core of the problems with 3.5e play.

I’m not ready to go back to 2e either, 3e definitely on the balance had great innovations.  But the real Holy Grail is to keep those while fixing these four issues.  Maybe with a second version of Pathfinder they’ll feel more comfortable in deviating from the 3.5e core enough to address them.  So for my D&D fix I’m going with Pathfinder – but it’s definitely an “in the meantime” kind of thing.

I’ve played some of the old school games – like Castles & Crusades, which makes the wise decision to update the core mechanics to be more civilized than 1e’s.  But they just aren’t enough for me.  I do want some character flexibility and cool powers – sure, I can write all the backstory I want with a 1e/Basic/OD&D character but the “they’re all so damn the same” factor is still there for me.  If I want totally rules light, then I want something like Spirit of th Century where I can define my own abilities without as much constraint.  But if I’m going to hassle with classes and levels, I want some “zazz” to them.

I haven’t done much houseruling in a while – something 3.5e,. with its huge rules setup, kinda works against – but maybe I’ll take a cut at what a new ed should look like.  I like feats and skills and multiclassing and prestige classes, so this wouldn’t be a retro-clone, but there are things that if cut or significantly changed from 3e would make a big different while still retaining that “D&D feel” 4e lost for me.

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Origins Award Finalists Announced

Posted on April 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Per ICv2, the Origins Award finalists have been announced – the winners are announced at Origins in June.

As I don’t give a crap about all that stuff other than RPGs, here’ s the RPG finalists excerpted!

RPGs:

  • CthulhuTech by Catalyst Game Labs
  • D&D 4e Player’s Handbook by Retardation Studios
  • Mouse Guard RPG by Archaia Studios Press
  • Star Wars Saga Edition..  What?   I call shenanigans on this.  It was released in June 2007, even the WotC product page says so.
  • The Trail of Cthulhu, Pelgrane Press

RPG Supplements:

  • Buccaneers of Freeport by Green Ronin Publishing
  • Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, by Mary Sue Productions
  • Hero Lab, by Lone Wolf Development
  • Serenity Adventures, by Margaret Weis Productions
  • Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Wizards of the Coast

I have no vote for the RPG finalists – haven’t played any of them except 4e (sucks) and SW: Saga (good but from two years ago).  I definitely vote Buccaneers of Freeport for the supplements though.  I so love Freeport.

In fact – not only was SW: Saga from 2007, but CthulhuTech was a finalist last year as well!  What the hell?!?  Is this year’s crop of RPGs so shitty we have to pull last year’s in to make a solid spread of nominees?  Hmmm.  Well, it looks like CT was published through Mongoose initially but then switched publishers to Catalyst so it could come out as a full color hardcover…  I guess that’s enough of a change to merit resubmission.  What’s SW:Saga’s excuse?  Did Lucas issue a new version where Han doesn’t shoot first?

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Nominate Now For the Indie RPG Awards

Posted on April 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

John Kim has opened the nominations for the 2008 Indie RPG Awards.  If you enjoyed an indie game published in 2008, go nominate it.  Voting is not by the public, but by some cabal of small press and indie RPG designers.  Registration’s through May and voting is in August, and winners are announced at Gen Con!

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Hot Girl On Girl Action In Our D&D Campaign?

Posted on April 20, 2009 | 16 comments

In our last Curse of the Crimson Throne episode, my character Annata had a surprise sexual proposition from her friend Laori.  I was faced with the decision of whether or not to give in to the frenzied cries of “We want slashfic!” from my fellow party members.  I made my decision, but as I reflected on the thought process I went through to arrive at it, I started to consider the nature of that process.

For some reason, there is very little talk out there about how people actually conduct character immersion in role-playing games.  I suspect it’s the minority that do it at all; many people deliberately reject it and even those who talk about in-character play seem to equate it to things like “using funny voices” or other trivia that reveal that they don’t really understand what immersion, in my opinion, really is.  I wanted to share the method behind how I run “in character” and hopefully get some insights from others out there who do the same.

Here’s some background on the situation in the game to provide a shared context.  My character, Annata, is a priestess of Sarenrae, sun goddess of redemption.  She grew up on the streets as part of a Fagin-style child crime group.  She escaped to the church and grew up there.  She was in the big city of Korvosa and worked as a physician, so she wasn’t cloistered and isn’t ignorant of the world, but her semi-isolation in living arrangements  and total devotion to her duties kept her from “dating” per se.  And long story short, now she’s an adventurer.

Our group met an odd woman, a “Forsaken” elf (Annata’s not 100% sure what that means) named Laori, and have adventured with her on and off.  She’s a cleric of Zon-Kuthon (think the Cenobites from Hellraiser).  Normally that would be “bad,” but her and her organization’s goals align with our heroes’.  And more than that, she’s likable.  She’s a happy, peppy, and perky (if evil) S&M Gothchick.  Sarenrae’s faith is very ecumenical, and her personality is a lot like Annata’s, so they took to each other quickly and became friends.  All the guys think (from a distance) that she’s hot; here’s the somewhat anime-looking artist’s conception of Laori in her spiked chainmail catsuit:

Laori

Anyway, last session Annata and Laori were chattering away and kinda out of nowhere, she lets me know that she wouldn’t mind getting more intimate with me.  Annata does like Laori; she’s a peppy chirpy cleric too and she definitely saw her as (platonic) girl-friend material, but this was a surprise twist she didn’t see coming.

Interesting! So here’s a peek into how my thought process went. I admit it’s a mix of true immersion and metagame thinking about my character’s personality, but I find that necessary because you seldom have enough information about the fictional world to avoid the “meta” totally.

First, my immediate reaction was intuitive, a quick reaction based on my conceptualization of Annata’s personality. Is it completely out of the question?  No.  Is it a slam dunk? No.  I could see it going either way.

I made a quick roll.   I like to use dice in these kinds of situations. Some people object to this and think any kind of personality mechanic, even an informal appeal to  fate like this one, is “roll-playing” and not immersion.  But in my opinion, the only way to truly simulate real feelings in game is to add some randomization. In the real world, attraction and the like don’t follow any automatic rules. You don’t control who YOU are attracted to.  You may have a “type” but the factors that go into it are too many to be deterministic.  If she had been propositioned by some random person she didn’t know or didn’t like, then I wouldn’t make a roll. If it was some guy she was totally into, then probably I wouldn’t roll either – unless in my opinion the situation was off enough that she might react poorly. In this case, I did what I usually do – a d20 roll, higher means more positive, with vague modifiers applied mentally. Think of it as the other person making a Charisma check. She’s made a handful of checks like this over the course of the campaign, when she’s met someone and I want to know “is chemistry kicking in.” So I made the roll. My gut was “if this isn’t real high, there’s no way.”  I don’t set hard thresholds and results (too much work!  The whole intuition plus roll happens in 5 seconds total), but in this case my gut said 1-5: Disgust, rejection, breaking off friendship; 6-10: Rejection, no explicit breaking off of the friendship but she won’t trust her afterwards; 11-15: Rejection but with friendship not severely affected; 16-20 Maybe, intrigued – not “Yes,” but “She’d think about it.”

Roll result – 18. That’s pretty high. Certainly not high enough for a good girl who has always thought of herself as straight to drop trou on the spot, but enough that after politely extricating herself, she found the idea unexpectedly intriguing and churned over it in her mind afterward in traditional woman-hashing-over-a-relationship fashion.

Here’s the mental path I went through.  Annata has been pretty staunchly straight so far; she was interested in two guys back in Korvosa (Grau, who was a bit of a project for her, and Vencarlo, a sophisticated older gentleman who ended up being the local equivalent of Zorro). Now, she is in love with Vencarlo, or thinks she is (it’s her first time in love). But he hasn’t reciprocated much, and since they both blew town she’s not sure if they’ll ever meet again. And she feels emotionally vulnerable, being away from Korvosa and all.  She’s heard of such things (woman on woman) but never thought about it herself.  What would Sarenrae do?

Meta-thinking comes in here.  I’m not sure if Sarenrae is for or against that kind of thing. One of the problems with fantasy religions is that there’s usually a lot undefined in terms of expected behavior of parishioners.   Is premarital sex OK at all?  Is homosexuality?  This is hard because these should be game “facts” and not subjective, which means I have to engage in metagame thinking. I decide that Sarenrae’s faith is probably not strictly against either, though general societal conservatism that would look down on both would be present.

Back to fully in-character.  Annata has often meditated upon the beauty of the goddess as part of her religion, though (it was the beauty of a statue of the Dawnflower that drew her when she was a street urchin).  Annata has gone through several emotional states in the campaign; when the group left Korvosa for the wilderness she transitioned from her current gig as somewhat strident wound-tight freedom fighter into a bit of a depressed martyr complex, but recently their time with the Shoanti barbarians ended up being kinda “Spring Break”-ey and she got to relax and party and open her mind, so she is in an experimental and confident kind of mood generally.  Laori is clearly a little S&Mey, which isn’t something Annata conceives herself as into, but she is pretty submissive and I can see the dynamics of a top/bottom relationship working there.  And finally, Annata is worried she might be embarrassed if the other guys found out – it might diminish her stature as a spirital leader in the party, generate jealousy, or just get her razzed more.  In the end, a lot of mixed feelings that don’t call for clear action one way or the other.

She thought over it long enough that the sheer weight of the analysis took some of the edge off – she’s not going to act on it (and probably won’t mention it happened). But she took it well enough that it won’t affect her friendship with Laori, and that means she might try again, and if it does it’s got a chance of going farther. I’m pretty comfortable that this is a realistic reaction – I’ve known a couple people over time who have been tempted (sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully) by a daring and insistent gay friend.

I haven’t gone into my method for how I play female characters; that’s a big topic and only peripherally relevant.  (Nor do I feel like I need to justify it; the people who are “against” crossgender play are wrestling with deep-seated emotional problems IMO.)  But suffice it to say the thinking through the various pros and cons I go through above is my attempt at a female approach to analyzing relationship issues, as opposed to the more… elemental typical male response.  (In this case, I am guessing the other two male PCs’ reaction would be “Hell yeah!” tempered only by explicit or implict fear that Laori would be the “top”.)  I wish I could do it more completely “in character,” but I find myself having to pepper the thought process with little meta-thoughts a lot.

I’m interested in how other people work through in-character issues. (I know some of you don’t, and think this is all weird, and say D&D is just for combat-n-fun… Feel free to not respond then.)  Do you use pure immersion (“I am Annata, and I think this…”), metagame evaluation of your character’s personality (“Annata has this in her background so she’d probably react this way…”) , randomization (“I roll d20 and… Annata likes it!”), something else I haven’t thought of, or a mix of these? And if a mix, in what proportions?

Probably one missing element is metagame group dynamics. “Would the other people at the table feel weird about this?” I almost totally omit that. Either I’m a role-playing purist, or I’m just a narcissist that doesn’t give a good goddamn what other people think, but there it is. Another is the narrativist approach, determining if this would make for a good story or not and deciding on those grounds. I do keep that in the back of my mind a little I guess… If I think it would generate a shit story I’d steer away from it out of fear of “ruining the game for everyone”.   I also try to remove “What I the player think about this” as much as possible.  Do I the player think Annata-on-Laori action would be hot; do I believe homosexuality is right, etc – I deliberately firewall that away (as much as is possible) in favor of my character’s personality and beliefs.  Or worse, what someone else thinks – I have little tolerance for people who interject with “Well, a good character/cleric/woman/etc. would…”  I politely encourage folks like that to close their filthy gobs.  And lastly, “acting.”  Immersion is akin to method acting, but in my mind the more commonly defined RPG actor stance – “using voices” and dramatic turns and flourishes – have jack crap to do with real in character play.

Thus after thinking about it, I’d have to say my pet “in character” thought process mix is:

  • As much immersion as I can (50%)
  • Metagame evaluation to fill in the gaps where I can’t fully immerse (35%)
  • Randomness where I think that human feelings should not be deterministic (10%)
  • A shade of “will this derail the story” in the back of my mind (5%)

I’m really interested in hearing other people’s method for “deep IC” play!

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Dread, Spite, and Spankings

Posted on April 16, 2009 | 1 comment

Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium is a modern horror game reminiscient of Hunter: The Reckoning, Esoterrorists/Fear Itself from Pelgrane, or playing mortals in In Nomine.  It’s by Rafael Chandler of Neoplastic Press, and has been reviewed like ten times on RPG.net.  It’s pretty cool, and if you want to look into it, the entire player section (141 pages of it!) is available for free download.  The design and art is really nice and gritty demon hunting is one of the three primary gaming joys (killing zombies and Nazis being the other two).

Now he’s released Spite: The Second Book of Pandemonium.  It’s a standalone game, same system slightly refined, and this time you’re fighting angels!  Well, naughty angels, whose depredations are not much better than the demons’.  And again, you can download and read the entire 182-page player’s section!  I’ve been reading through it and it looks pretty bad ass.  The game line seems well supported with both products and free downloads.   You buy them in PDF or Lulu POD – which is a shame, I think it’s more than good enough to get into stores and all.

So check them out!

What, you want to know about the spankings too?  You dirty little monkey!

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TV for Gaming: Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire

Posted on April 15, 2009 | 4 comments

I’m catching up on my DVRing, and finally got to watch last week’s premiere of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a fantasy show satire on Comedy Central.

I was unsure if it would be decent going in, but I enjoyed it.  It wasn’t hilarious, but it was funnier than all the usual Scary Movie etc. satire movies and I got a laugh out of a lot of the dialogue; the slapstick was weaker.  The fight scenes were even better than the standard Hercules/Xena/various knockoff trash (nice effect when he sticks his flaming sword through an assassin and withdraws it!).  And the pole dance from the female lead sealed the deal.

And boy, they left no sexual stone unturned for the jokes.  Homosexuality, gangbangs, bestiality, rape…  Only necrophilia and watersports are left for the rest of the series!

I guess that’s my real concern – the premiere was good enough, but I wonder how they’re going to carry the gag for a whole series.  We’ll see – I didn’t expect the live action Tick to be any good either and I was surprised.

It was notable for its poking fun at all the generic tropes – the bad guy who kills everyone around at the drop of a hat, the hero who always jacks it up whenever he’s doing something badass, the worthless henchman.  Would it hurt to run a real game like this sometime?  Frankly, some of our campaigns sounds like an episode of Krod Mandoon at the table; we try to keep the joking “out of character” but it might be fun to play a parody from time to time.  Humor in gaming’s hard to carry out though.  Toon and Paranoia always delivered, but efforts at D&D style humor often sucked – WG7 Castle Greyhawk, I’m looking at you.

So if nothing else, it’s a good laugh for those who find themselves in similar situations to Krod frequently – you know, fighting an oppressive empire, liberating slaves, and hacking evil minions.  And don’t we all?

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Wil Wheaton on Dungeon Mastering

Posted on April 15, 2009 | 1 comment

Wil Wheaton, former Ensign Crusher and geek celeb extraordinaire, posts about his recent experiences DMing for his son and friends.

We’ll forgive him for running 4e.  He has some good observations on DMing style, including improvisation and catering to your players and having fun.  You know, all that stuff old schoolers hate.

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