Tag Archives: RPGs

On Immersion

Posted on December 18, 2009 | 15 comments

I firmly believe that immersion should be the primary artistic goal of a roleplaying game.  It is an eminently achievable goal which creates a rich experience that one that can rightfully claim to be more than “just a game.”  Sadly, few people even understand what immersion is, let alone try to reproduce it in their RPGs.

What Is Immersion?

Well, that’s a good question.  There’s a recent really good RPG.net column entry, “On The Nature Of Immersion,” which got me started down this train of thought, that talks about five different things one might mean by “immersion.” For purposes of this discussion, I will define immersion as the process of trying, to the degree it’s really possible of course, to holistically take on your character’s mindset, and to try to experience the game world and events through that mindset.  Metagame factors should be eliminated ruthlessly.  Back in the day (the early ’90’s) we just called this “in-character roleplay.”

Theory and History

Though I’ve seen people play “in character” since the early days of the hobby, Immersion ™ was strongly promulgated as a concept by the “Turku School” of Finnish larpers and their humorously boldly worded Manifesto, in which they delineate four types of gaming – gamist, simulationist, dramatist, and “eläytyjist”, which I will call “immersivist” from here on out because I’m on a low reindeer-meat diet. They say the point of an RPG is to immerse yourself into your character’s consciousness and interact with its surroundings, and that furthermore this is how RPGing can become art.  And this is 100% correct in my opinion.

It’s instructive to see the difference between immersion and other styles.  Some other theorists confuse immersion with “acting,” but this is actually one of the major anathematic stances to them.  The Turku School’s “Larper’s Vow of Chastity” starts with: “1. When playing a character and immersing myself in it, my foremost goal shall be to simulate what happens inside the character’s head, and how it affects his behavior. Hollow pretence I leave for the actors.”  Good stuff in general, though there’s an off undercurrent of “I lick the gamemaster’s boots!” running through it.

The Nordic LARPers later came out with an interesting clarifying paper, Autonomous Identities, which is good reading if you understand words like “diegesis” and don’t mind people quoting Aristotle.  It clarifies how in some ways simulation can be an immersion substitute – “The theory is that the immersionist experiences what the character experiences, while the simulationist only pretends to, logically deducing what the character would do next.”  Eventually  the Nordic scene stepped back from immersion a little in favor of a story/dramatist approach, as you can see in the new loosely-defined but Diana Jones award-winning Jeepform style of LARPing.

Unfortunately, all this stayed largely confined to the Nordic LARPer community, even though immersive concepts are equally (if not more) applicable to tabletop play.

In the American/British mainstream RPG theorist tradition, they pretty much ignore immersion.  The GNS/Forge “indie games” tradition recognizes only the three non-immersive types, and in general the Ron Edwards-driven FORGE group of indie RPG makers have moved from their historically more dramatist/narrativist approach to strongly favor a strange gamist/dramatist mix (We’re telling a story, but with more and more tokens and cards and miniatures and crap!)  that even the more mainstream games like D&D 4e and WFRP 3e have started to adopt in part.  Most of the indie RPG community’s theory work has become ghettoized into being dependent on Edwards and therefore has been pretty much sitting unchanged for a while.  The “Big Model,” his newest approach, might theoretically allow for immersion as part of “character exploration” but its very weakly represented, if at all, in his description of creative agendas.

Outside the FORGE, the earliest RPG “theory” book I know of, Gary Gygax’s “Role Playing Mastery,” (yes, I have a copy, I’m a freak) is unabashedly about tactical (gamist) mastery, even though it does begin by noting that role-playing is half born of the historical minis wargamers and half of “clinical and academic role assumption and role-playing exercises “.

Robin Laws’ “Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering” mentions a variety of player types including the “method actor.”  Its definition is reasonably immersivist – “The method actor bases his decisions on his understanding of his character’s psychology” – but in name and in some of the turns of phrase threatens to confuse immersive with the dramatist’s surface “actor” stance which is in reality totally opposed to real immersion.  But if one has an accurate understanding of what pure method acting is supposed to be, it’s a good term.  Immersion and method acting can use some of the same techniques, like affective memory and substitution, but immersion is arguably purer because there is no external audience to please which requires classical acting techniques to be admixed.  Many “method actors” really mix traditional acting with the more immersive method acting techniques, so for RP theory purposes I don’t like using “actor” anywhere near “immersion” because it causes confusion.

Greg Stolze’s “How To Play Roleplaying Games” at least promulgates “setting logic” (aka simulationism) and notes that role-playing “can go deeper and have a more profound impact” by confronting characters with challenging issues.  But then it goes more to the basics like “show up to the game, pay attention, and don’t be a disruptive prick.”  Sadly, and I’m not saying it’s not needed, most “how to” RPG documents tend to turn into a list of stuff you should have learned in elementary school.  I’m not criticizing Stolze on this point; my interaction with the larger RPG community through the RPGA indicates that a lot of people need that.

Anyway, clearly game theory outside the ice-bearing countries doesn’t get into immersion much, but then again it’s largely either mired in basics or enslaved to Ron Edwards.

Why Immersion Via Tabletop And Not LARP?

Some of the folks reading this may be Nordic LARPer types.  I had a discussion with a couple after the inciting RPG.net column, and they tend to feel that immersion is easier in or more relevant to LARPing than tabletop.  I actually disagree pretty strongly with that.  Let me start with a pretty brutally worded analogy.

Q: Which is more immersive, a book or a movie?

A: A movie if you’re stupid, or a book if you’re smart.

After saying “Oh, snap,” think about that for a minute and we’ll proceed.

I would say that LARPing can probably be more immersive that tabletop when:

a) It is very well done, with realistic scenery and props

b) The characters are very close to the players in physical makeup

But that’s a big “if.”  It creates a lot more jarring things that block immersion in many other cases.  Some guy carrying an orange “please don’t shoot me, cops” gun is frankly less convincing than just being at a table imagining a guy with a gun.  And if all my characters are out of shape thirtysomethings that’s great, but wandering around the Dragon*Con hotel or campsite needing to take a dump doesn’t make me feel more like a robotic killing machine from Mars.

Even if one could get to the ideal “holodeck” type solution to address a), you would still have trouble until you got “Avatar” type solutions for b)…  At the current tech level and the current level of sophistication of LARPs I personally have seen around, I strongly prefer a completely imagination-based field to promote immersion.

It’s the same reason I find books to be more immersive in many cases than movies.  Haven’t we all been disappointed with a movie adaptation of a book because “that’s not how I imagined that would look?”  Or where one really crappy CGI shot breaks you right out of the suspension of disbelief?

Furthermore, In a LARP with props, there is the promulgation of one “objective” truth of how things behave.  But there is little value to that and more value to each player’s separate subjective diegesis.  And the more you force the subjective diegeses to collide, the more likely you are to shake someone out of their immersion.  It reminds me of the GM advice in Robin Laws’ excellent game Feng Shui, to not use tactical maps.  “Revealing your map locks you into a precise conception of the area…”

Anyway, I’m not saying you can’t LARP immersively, but I am saying that there is little reason to believe immersion as a concept is inherently LARP-focused (except for the historical accident that the only folks that seem to be really into immersion are also Scandinavians who are really into LARP) and that there are good reasons to even prefer tabletop for immersion in many circumstances.

The Immersive Tabletop Game

All this isn’t just theory.  I’ve run and played in immersive games, and those groups have found them to be immensely rewarding.  I had one game that had the explicit goal of character immersion run for five years in the mid-1990s.  I’ll ping my players from that game for insights from their point of view, but for me at least it really hit the heart of what it is I wanted out of role-playing.  For many years I’d had fitful stabs at it with “normal”
casual RP games but I knew it could be so much more than that.

And it’s not really all that hard.  Though there are helpful techniques, 80% of the work is just getting a group of people to sit down and say “Yes.  In this game I am going to try to get into my character’s brain and look at the world through their eyes.”  Mainly you just need everyone to agree with that goal and for the GM to be trying to facilitate it (like any style, when different players are heading for different agendas, you end up with the least common denominator).  The players have to be emotionally unstunted enough to emote a little bit and the GM needs to keep his “in world” viewpoint going strong so that he can allow the PCs to get along with0ut making metagame decisions.  With a little practice, that’s really not very hard.  You can start out as simulationist and let things develop from there, and sim is a good fallback point that doesn’t “ruin things for everyone else” at times you can’t immerse well.

Give it a try!  I don’t have a lot of sympathy with people that have the “one way” they like to roleplay.  Maybe it’s a well kept secret, but you can play one game sim, the next gamist, the next focus on story, and the next try immersion.  Broaden your horizons.  I don’t like certain games or styles, but I play them when my gaming group wants to.

Future Topics

If anyone’s interested, I can go into:

  • How to run an immersive tabletop game
  • How to play in an immersive tabletop game
  • Simulation as a gateway to immersion
  • Isn’t immersion bad?  Aka Bleed, or “Isn’t that how that Egbert guy went nuts?  And that Elfstar bitch?”
  • But immersion makes me “uncomfortable,” aka George McFly syndrome

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Life in the Wide World – Random Encounters

Posted on December 17, 2009 | 3 comments

Last time, I explained why I like random encounter tables and feel like they add to both the “realism/simulation” factor but also add to the story by being bellwethers of the players’ interest.  Now, I’ll talk about how I create and use them.

Scope

The Pathfinder Bestiary has some generic random encounter tables in the back, but obviously in most cases you’ll want something tailored to the place you are.  The Paizo APs do a pretty good job of providing basic random encounter tables for the various cities and regions in which they take place.  You’ll want to put work into these tables proportionally to how long the PCs will be there.

More specific is always better, it’s just a matter of how much work you want to put into it.  The good part is, if you do this right the work you put into it is heavily reusable from campaign to campaign.

  1. City Random Encounter Table Template – consider putting some meta-thought into this so you can use it to build other charts easily.  “01-05, Wimpy Local Monster 1”, for example.
  2. Generic City Random Encounter Table – to use anywhere when you don’t have anything more specific on hand.  Some are provided in the Pathfinder Bestiary.
  3. Chelaxian-type City Random Encounter Table  – you can use this in a broad swath of locations – Cheliax, Magnimar, Korvosa, etc.   If you have a couple of these ready to cover the most likely sectors, you are ready for a lot.  “Port City Random Encounter Chart,” with maybe some entries that say “City Guard (lawful city)/Pirate Press Gang (pirate city)”  would cover a lot too.
  4. City of Korvosa Random Encounter Table – use in Korvosa.  Often there’ll be one of these provided in an adventure or AP you can modify for use.
  5. City of Korvosa Sewers Random Encounter Table – use in the sewers.  You might have a Generic City Sewer Random Encounter Chart that this inherits from too.   Sometimes an AP will publish tables down to this level of detail.
  6. City of Korvosa Midland District Random Encounter Table, During the Troubles – you can vary the charts by time as well.  If the city is under martial law, you’d expect the encounters to be pretty different.
  7. Gold Goblin Gaming Hall Random Encounter Table – don’t be shy about making charts that are very very specific to a small location, as long as the PCs are spending a lot of time there.  In the Second Darkness AP, it’s likely the PCs will end up running a gambling establishment and will be working in it a lot.  That might merit a very specific “who wanders in and/or causes trouble on a given night” chart just for that one building.

Scaling

There are two philosophies of encounters in D&D.  The first is to always scale encounters to the PCs.  The other is to allow for the entire range of realistically possible encounters without regard for the PCs’ abilities.  The latter, though nice from a realism/sandbox play point of view, can be a little dangerous.

I thought the Scarred Lands products from Sword & Sorcery had an elegant solution to that problem that well served both realism and scaling needs.  They assigned CRs to actual locations that reflected the average CR of encounters there.  Then PCs should, with a modicum of care, be able to find out how dangerous a region is.

  • “Foundling’s Green?  A naked virgin with a sack of gold could wander the cornfields safely there.  Someone thought they saw a goblin 5 years ago and the Count sent troops; turns out it was just a real ugly sheep.”  CR1/2.
  • “The Schwartzwald?  Well, you wouldn’t want to wander around in it alone, there’s some dangerous things in there, but groups of loggers work those woods.  One group like that went missing six months back, though.”  CR3.
  • “The Forest of Screaming Skulls?  No one has ever entered it and returned.  The Hellknight Order of the Dragon sent in a hundred knights to pacify it; none came back out, but their mothers all died of heart attacks that very day.”  CR 16.

You can vary CRs by smaller scale, of course – the Bowery has a higher CR than the Merchant District.  Of course in most normal human cities, even “rough” areas aren’t going to have super high CRs, or else people’d get wiped out.  The crime-riddled streets of Riddleport only have an average CR of 1 on their encounter table.  This advice mostly applies to hostile/monster encounters; there may be EL5 bands of city guards about, of course, or by crossing the street and going into the Collegium you can probably toss a rock and hit a CR8 wizard, but they are not (usually) eating peasants.

I’d like to give a shout out to “Wilderness & Wasteland – Scarred Lands Encounters,” a Sword & Sorcery supplement all about building encounter tables.  It’s worth picking up.

Anyway, once areas have average CRs, PCs know where they can go safely and what’s risky, and  your campaign flavor is backed by the rules.  It allows scaling by self-selection, in the same way that World of Warcraft does with its zones.

Type

Similarly, there are two philosophies on random encounter tables.  One, the “hostile encounter” theory, holds that they are only for monsters or people likely to provoke random encounters.  These consist solely of entries like “Bandits, bulette, owlbear, King’s Guards, orc warband.”

The other holds that they should also include “friendly” encounters, events, and other stuff. “Crying orphan, dead soldier, abandoned shrine, loose horse…”  These can be used as hooks or just to provide flavor – this example list communicates “war-torn countryside”, for example.

I personally prefer the latter, though the former require less work, as they’re a subset of the larger, more inclusive ones.

The main thing to keep in mind is that you want the frequency of encounters to be lower if you’re using an all-hostile encounter table; you can ramp up the frequency the more other stuff is on them.

Populating the Table

What, besides monsters, can go on a random encounter table?

  • Normal animals or plants – threatening, tasty, valuable, or entertaining
  • Natural phenomena or events like sandstorms, stampedes, marching strikers, or an overturned dung collection cart
  • Traps like bear traps or pungi stakes
  • Diseases like malaria or yellow fever
  • Largely friendly people like traveling merchants, con men, pilgrims, or prostitutes
  • Largely unfriendly people like city guards, roving berserkers, or bloodthirsty natives
  • Local features like totem poles or caves
  • Happy treats like ivory, an outcropping that contains valuable metals, or a dropped coin purse
  • Specific people the PCs know
  • Pretty much whatever else you could think of

Now, I will say that more isn’t always better.  Especially if you evolve your tables over time, you can easily get 100 different things on a given table.  But this runs the risk of cognitive sprawl – it’s hard to work up 100 encounters ahead of time and so they are more off the cuff, and it’s less likely to have anything recur – and from both a story and a game point of view, you want some recurrence.  Recurring threats help show theme more strongly than totally different ones every time and may become a plot element, and also PCs like to get better at fighting things.  The first time your party encounters a yellow musk creeper, it may take them a while to figure out there’s a plant behind all the zombie business.  So the second time, they can know what’s going on, target the plant, and feel proud in showing off what they’ve learned.

It’s easy enough to have a big long list of random encounters and cross ones off.  So if you have your big jungle encounter table, for a given trek through the Mwangi you might cross off a bunch of it and use a subset, just so  you can prep some of them a little, allow for recurrence, or even just not have to carry ten different books with monster stats in them to the game.  And if you’ve added a cool new monster or NPC it’s more likely to come up, and if there’s just monsters you feel more like running this week and ones you don’t…  If you have your table stored in Excel then it’s easy to cut, paste, and remove/alter entries to taste in very short order.

Chance of Encounter

Historically in D&D this has been a fixed rate; “x% per hour” or other time increment.  (Bizarrely, in Pathfinder they seem to not have addressed chance of encounter at all.)  I kinda prefer to make it dependent on the PCs’ skills.  Someone with a good Survival check (or, in the city, Diplomacy/Gather Information) should be able to avoid a lot of encounters with their knowledge of the ways of the wild/city.  In addition, the chance should probably be lower if the party’s staying still and higher if they’re romping through the underbrush.  It’d also be nice to take into account the scenario where the PCs want to provoke random encounters, for whatever demented reason happens to be at hand.  (You could argue PCs acting as a highly motivated city guard and looking to enforce the law could be simulated by provoking random encounters.)

Cautious: If you’re staying in one place or otherwise trying to avoid encounters, you check once every twelve hours.  You can travel overland  cautiously by moving at half speed.

Normal: If you’re moving about normally, you check once every six hours.

Aggressive: If you are looking for trouble deliberately, or otherwise moving about in an intrusive manner (searching the wilderness for a dungeon entrance, foraging, checking every inn in town for someone) you check once every three hours.

The DM may also modify the frequency of checks based on what’s going on – if there’s an active battle in the vicinity, it’s reasonable to say that the area is hot enough that there’s random encounter checks every hour.

Use skill checks to determine random encounters.  In the wilderness, use Survival, and in the city, use Diplomacy.  The DC to avoid an encounter is 10+the CR of the location.  So for example, in a CR3 location, a Survival check of 13+ avoids an encounter during that time period.  Feel free and combine this with other rolls of this skill; for example overland travel usually provokes Survival checks.  If someone’s rolling their Survival check to avoid getting lost, you can just compare that roll against the encounter DC and have it serve double duty.  You can always deliberately “pull” this check if you’re looking for trouble and “take zero,” so to speak.

Optionally, you can do a little more granular work and roll on the encounter table first and then check against the CR of the specific random encounter rolled.  Then you can let Knowledge checks be used to assist – if the encounter rolled is a bear, then PCs with Knowledge: Nature could roll to assist the Survival roll to avoid (or provoke) the encounter.    This rewards domain specific knowledge, which is always a plus.  It also allows for some discretion in “looking for trouble”.

Example

Let’s say the PCs are out looking for magical beasts to capture for some dude in town that’s paying well for them, but would like to otherwise avoid pointless fights.  The PCs decide they’re looking aggressively during the day (one check every 3 hours) but taking it easy at night (one check every 12 hours).  During the day, they decide to “take zero” and provoke an encounter on a d20 roll under 10+ the encounter EL.  If you roll an encounter with orcs, for example, which they don’t want to deal with, let them make Knowledge: Nature checks to “assist” the Survival roll in the direction they want.   Let’s say two of them have Knowledge: Nature and make their DC10 assist rolls, meaning a total d20+4 on their check to avoid the encounter.  If they might encounter an owlbear according to the chart, the same Knowledge: Nature assist rolls would let them subtract two from their roll, so if both make their assist they would roll d20-4 versus the same encounter.

Bringing It All Together

Here’s what an encounter table might look like.  Let’s say it’s this party’s first trek into the Mwangi Expanse, Golarion’s equivalent to Africa.  I have a giant jungle encounter table including all the entries in the table in the back of the Bestiary.  I decide that I want to stress the more “mundane” threats that the jungle has to offer for this first outing, so I focus on the inhabitants, animals, and diseases of the Mwangi more than supernatural or monstrous threats; on later journeys I’ll crank up those and have the mundane stuff stay there but become a  smaller piece of the pie.

They’re going to be inland only three days or so, therefore probably a dozen or so entries will allow for enough variation with some chance of recurrence.

Kaava Lands, Mwangi Expanse Random Encounter Table (CR 5)

  1. Bonecrusher Fever Fort DC 12 (CR1)
  2. Sleeping Sickness Fort DC 14 (CR2)
  3. Javelin Trap (CR2)
  4. Enteric Fever Fort DC 15 (CR3)
  5. 2d6 Mwangi Tribesmen Warrior L1 (CR3)
  6. 2d6 Jungle Elves Warrior L1 (CR3)
  7. 2d10 Aspis Consortium slavers (CR4)
  8. 1 army ant swarm (CR 5)
  9. 2d4 gorillas (CR6)
  10. 1 dire tiger (CR8)
  11. Location (roll d6):
    1-3: Mwangi village – 10 warriors, about 30 souls total, starting attitude of indifferent
    4-5: Mwangi village – burned to the ground, no survivors
    6: Mwangi sacred site – any Mwangi with the party will refuse to enter the area, causing two hours of lost time maneuvering around it, and any PC taking any of the fierce little carved masks hanging from trees in the place will get a hostile reaction from any Mwangi seeing them later on.
  12. Person (roll d4):
    1-2:  That crazy explorer they met in Bloodcove
    3-4: That hottie that works for the Aspis Consortium they’re all trying to impress

This table carries out my theme for the adventure – it’s more about discovering the area than hacking on wildlife.

Other things to put in your table besides the encounter name and CR – I would have done it above but WordPress is awful at tables, sadly – put the source and page reference, like Paizo does.  A lot of their cooler new monsters are from articles in the APs, and even now I have a dickens of a time hunting down where a monster is.  Writing it down in the table once will save you much flipping later.  Also, consider putting in starting attitudes (friendly, indifferent, hostile), especially useful for people-heavy tables.  There’s a big difference between a friendly “come join us!” merchant caravan and a “don’t come within 200 feet or we fire these crossbows” merchant caravan.

Here’s a more city-focused encounter chart that I might use in my current campaign.  It uses the Riddleport Random Encounters Table from Second Darkness: Shadow in the Sky p.79 as a base, but I’ve added specifics.  The AP says  “con artist,” I’ve come up with some specific hustles and also have some specific con men added in from random places, like Mungo and his Amazing Monkeys from a Freeport supplement.   And the table completely omits certain things that seem obvious, like Riddleport Gendarmes.   Plus, as their intrigue among the city’s inhabitants heats up, I’m adding more specific people and/or spies for specific people.  CR is less meaningful as more of these aren’t (necessarily) combat encounters.

Riddleport Wharf District Random Encounter Table (CR 1)

  • 1 monkey (Avg CR 1/6, MM p.276)
  • Con artist pretending to be a shanghaied princess (CR 1/2, see notes)
  • Con artist – Mungo and his Amazing Monkeys (CR 7, Denizens of Freeport p. 65)
  • 1 leper (Avg CR 1/2, SitS p.79)
  • 1d4+1 Gendarmes, reasonably honest (Avg CR 2, use Riddleport Thug stats)
  • 1d4+1 Gendarmes, looking for trouble and/or bribes (Avg CR 2, use Riddleport Thug stats)
  • Harlot, quickwife (CR 1/2)
  • Harlot, easyboy (CR 1/2)
  • Harlot, Selene (CR 2, Maiden Voyage p.XX)
  • Harlot, Lavender Lil in disguise (CR 7)
  • Drug dealer, connected to Avery Slyeg (CR 1/2)
  • Drug dealer, unaffiliated (CR 1/2)
  • Drug dealer, the one Sindawe likes to beat up and take drugs from (CR 1/2)
  • Homeless person from St. Casperian’s (CR 1/4)
  • 1d8 Drunken pirates Ftr1/Rog1 (Avg CR 3, see notes)
  • Street vendor, spy for Clegg Zincher (CR 1/2, see notes)
  • Splithog Pauper, in disguise (CR classified, SitS p.66)
  • 1 goblin snake (CR1, Pathfinder #1)
  • 1d4 Small monstrous centipedes (CR 1, MM p.276)
  • …

Conclusion

Random encounters can be fun and useful, and are for way more that just monsters.  Customization is your friend, and it can be done without requiring a lot of work all the time – some upfront work to make some basic tables then lets you do minimal per-session work to customize them.

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Life In The Big City – Follow The PCs

Posted on December 15, 2009 | 3 comments

In my last Life In The Big City installment, I was asked about my random encounter tables.  In that article I describe one way in which I use random encounter tables, which is that PCs going out into the city to gather information or perform other tasks can provoke them.

I am a believer in random encounters.  Some people aren’t, and only run pre-selected, or “scripted,” encounters.  While that’s fine, I have learned over some 20 years of gaming to “trust the dice”.  As a DM, you can get predictable.  Much of the time, the things that players really get into are things you didn’t intend.  That’s worth a brief aside.  So NEXT time, I’ll get to random encounters.  This time, I’m going to talk about the philosophy of mixing simulation with player interest.

Cue Off Your Players

One of the best ways to make sure your players enjoy your game is to cue off the things they like.  Throw stuff out there and see what sticks.  Sometimes, players will be proactive enough to let  you know what they like; you as the DM can also do some things to elicit that feedback.  But analysis fades before experience.

Here’s an example.  I was running a low level game where the PCs were wandering around some loosely settled farmland.  It started to rain (I also use random weather generation, because if I don’t I frankly forget to make the weather vary, unless it’s important to the plot, in which case players start to see weather as a sign of an impending screwjob…) and the PCs took cover in a nearby abandoned barn.  “Is there anywhere we can get out of the rain?”  “Uh, there’s an abandoned barn about a half mile off…”  Being PCs, they decided to search it.  Rather than say “Come on man, I’m just making this up as I go along,” I tossed out some details.  “There’s moldy hay, the ladder up to the loft is ruined, there’s a frayed rope hanging over the center beam…”  The busybodies start rooting through the hay, looking for stuff.  Thinking “You can just say we wait till the rain stops and get back underway, you know,” I said “You find an… old human skull under the hay.” Just to make something up besides “dirt, you goons!”

Well you would have thought I tasered them all in the nutsacks.  An episode of CSI: Greyhawk broke out as they frantically tried to unravel the mystery.  They determined the person must have hung themselves over the center beam.  One PC clambered up and went all over the ruined hayloft, finding an old rusty dagger stuck into the frame of the hayloft door.  I looked around at all of them and realized they were really, really into this.  Slightly creeped out, highly engaged.

When something comes up in your game, you can pretty easily determine what your reaction as a DM should be.

1.  Players not interested- worthless color, forget it.

2.  Players moderately interested – build it up into a one off.

3.  Players fascinated – it’s totally related to the overall plot, or will be once you figure out how yourself.

In this case, I led this into a mini-horror adventure I largely made up off the cuff that I ended up making central to the overall core plot of the campaign.

Random encounters, random NPCs, etc. all work this way.   If – and this is a big if – you are making your game world somewhat realistic.  If PCs believe that there may be a legitimate reason behind the way things are, then they’ll react to it as if it were, and look for the “why” behind events.  If the “why” is that the dice or the story say so, they lose interest.  Of course, it could be that the dice or story did say so, but your job as a DM is to build out behind that.

There’s a random encounter of an owlbear.  Maybe the PCs kill it and move on without a second thought.  Maybe they take an interest instead.  “Hey, we’re mighty close to that village for a roving owlbear to be attacking people, maybe we should go check in with them.”  Maybe it’s the second owlbear encounter and they go nuts.  “The evil wizard must be creating them to destabilize the region!  I take favored enemy: magical beasts with my next ranger level!”  That doesn’t have to be the actual explanation, but it is a cue to you to make the owlbears more than just two random rolls in a row.

Same deal with NPCs, or locations.  I like random NPC generators, for sure.  But the same principle holds if things aren’t randomly generated.

In my current campaign, the PCs are on the mean streets of Riddleport.  There are some NPCs the Paizo Second Darkness Adventure Path I’m using say are important, others it just mentions, and some that I’ve made up or brought in from other random adventures I’m weaving in.  There’s some that they have really taken to, and others that have been inflicted on them against their will.  You can’t turn every beggar they take an interest in into a ninja in the employ of the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy), but you can definitely add some depth to them and consider how they might play a part on the larger story.

Rumors are great for this too.  I give out bunches of them, some false.  The PCs fell in love with a false one – that there was treasure hidden below a local homeless shelter.  They went all over that place with a fine toothed comb and flushed out and killed the criminal gang hiding there before  I had actually planned on incorporating them.  Though I’m not going to put in a hidden treasure just because they went there, the PCs themselves started brainstorming.  “That’s a good rumor to plant if you want some rubes to go wipe out a rival gang!”  Hmmm… Yes.  Yes, it is.

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Paizo APG Playtest Continues

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 1 comment

In true open gaming form, Paizo has put out all six new classes that are going into their Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide for comment.  You can download them for free:

In my opinion, Paizo has knocked another one out of the park.  I was prepared to be underwhelmed – most new non-core classes in D&D 3.5e were clearly just there to be weird collections of rules and not represent meaningful iconic archetypes.  “Ooo ooo, I’ve always wanted to be a Hulking Hurler!”  “And I always wanted to be a Master of the Unseen Hand!  Or maybe a Spellwarp Sniper!”  It feels like you may as well just say “DURRRR” out loud after announcing your chosen class.

The Cavalier is the prototypical knight.  He belongs to a specific knightly order, takes oaths, challenges enemies, and has a mighty mount.  Trap avoided: making the class *too* dependent on mounted combat. Remaining weak point: the oaths are kinda lame in implementation and the knightly orders fall into that weird “made kinda generic but still hard to fit into your campaign world” area.

The Oracle is filled with divine force, but less from a specific deity and more of a powerful archetype.  Besides clerical spells, the oracle gets powers appropriate to their divine focus, and suffer from a curse like being haunted, blind, or lame – but the curse turns into powers of its own with level!  Trap avoided: when I read the class name I thought, “Ah, a lame diviner class suitable for NPCs.”  Remaining weak point: the curses are the main thing that seems different about the Oracle and her foci from a normal cleric and her domains; a focus feels just kinda like a “double strength domain.”

The Summoner is what we call a “pet class.”  He has a persistent customizable critter called an eidolon; plus he can summon monsters pretty well and toss other conjurations and enchantments off a custom spell list.  It’s the first time D&D has really been able to do the “Pokemon Master” or “WoW Warlock” thing effectively.  Trap avoided: this class already got nerfed from the playtest doc where he could cast a large number of 1 minute/level Summon Monster SLAs and could easily boost his eidolon’s AC to the 50s without breaking a sweat.  Remaining weak point: The eidolon rules are complicated and probably open to a lot of exploits.  And why the hell does he have d8 HD and decent BAB?

The Witch is the most witchy witch class in the history of D&D witch classes.  It’s brilliant.  It can cast hexes, have a cauldron, join a coven, cackle, lay the evil eye on you…  And she learns spells (off a custom spell list that has enchants, conjures, and even heals)  from her familiar.   Trap avoided: being lame.  Remaining weak point: the covens are weak and should be more interesting, but that’s a minor nit in an otherwise very nicely designed class.

The Alchemist makes potion-like extracts made from formulae, bombs, and self-transforming mutagens.  Very flavorful – taking some of the alchemist schtick (like the bomb throwing) from WoW and other computer games.  They had to cop out a little to explain the limited number of uses in a day – the concoctions are powered by the alchemist’s “magical aura,” so if you’re looking for the scientific angle here you’re out of luck.  Trap avoided: being godawful complicated like the Artificer from Eberron.  Remaining weak point: They don’t get many bombs per day and their extracts and mutagens are pretty weak otherwise – I think they’ll have trouble being useful over the adventuring day.  The mutagens do physical boosts, but it’s not going to sufficiently make up for the BAB/HD discrepancy and turn them into a useful fighter even for the limited duration.

The Inquisitor brings to mind Warhammer 40k, but upon reading it…  This class is an odd mishmash.  It has a cleric’s HD and BAB and invokes judgements upon the naughty; it has a little ranger to it in the “vampire hunter” kind of vein.  But then it gets tactical/teamwork feats.  I’m not really sure what it is trying to be – a paladin of any alignment?  A Buffy?  A marshal?  Mostly a Buffy I think.  Trap avoided:  none.  Remaining weak point: falling too close to what other classes are or can do.  I’d think you could build something like this as a cleric/ranger or pally/ranger.

Anyway, I think they’ve done a great job of taking truly iconic mythical archetypes and making them solid playable classes.  Check them out yourself!

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Life In The Big City – Gather Information

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 5 comments

Once you start running an urban campaign, you start seeing the gaps in the existing rules on a lot of points.  In our case, we had a good number of times where PCs needed to go out into the city and hunt down some piece of information or person.  When we started working through it, I realized there were a lot of gaps that needed filling to make a satisfying play experience.

The rules components you have to work with from the Pathfinder core book and the APs are:

1.  A random encounter table for a given city (with no instruction as to when to roll a random encounter). Maybe I’ve missed it in poring over the Pathfinder RPG and Bestiary, but despite there being random encounter tables, I can find no place where they assign a chance of a random encounter happening.

2.  The Diplomacy skill has replaced Gather Information from 3.5e.  Information on using the skill in this way is light, just saying it’s a variable DC to find out something about a “topic or individual.”  As is traditional, there’s an unclear overlap between this skill and Knowledge: Local when it comes to the practical work of finding a nearby fence for your stolen goods.  Furthermore, there’s no accounting for a check being opposed by someone trying to hide or conceal information.

3.  The “Urban Adventures” part of Chapter 13: Environment in the Pathfinder RPG (p.433) has some other details that may be helpful – kinda.  But not really in this case.

4.  Rumors.  Every AP has a load and every DM loves having a bunch of rumors to pass out, but their incorporation is always an adventure-specific hack.

These are the ingredients, but a recipe is lacking, especially once you hit the intrigue-laden bits of any city campaign.  I wanted to bring all these things – gathering information, random encounters, rumors – into one easy to use system.  Here’s how I put them together.

Goals

When the PCs hit the streets, they may have a variety of different goals in mind.  Sometimes they are looking for a specific fact or person.  Sometimes they just want the “word on the street” about what’s going on.  In certain cases they want something else specific to happen – to spread the word about a particular rumor themselves, maybe to provoke or mislead someone.

As a result, someone seeking a specific goal will use a different skill check depending on what they’re trying to find.  Diplomacy/Gather Information is the clear choice for traditional finding stuff out, for example, but you could use Bluff instead to spread a false rumor.  Or Perform to get the peasants all singing a catchy yet treasonous little ditty.  There’s a lot of possibilities here.  Consider rewarding relevant Craft and Profession skills by letting them be used instead when relevant; if you’re looking for someone you hear is a blacksmith, then a relevant Craft or Profession check would be a great way of tracking them down by talking to other smiths, checking at places smiths would tend to buy supplies, etc.  If you are trying to find out when the Midnight Mermaid is setting sail, Profession: Sailor would be appropriate.

In many cases you’ll want to call for a complex skill check for tasks taking more than a cursory amount of time.  Each attempt would usually reflect a half day of asking around, staking out places, fending off streetwalkers and beggars, etc.  You can reflect each success with some kind of in-game description of how they’re getting closer.  “You find someone who says they’ve seen two guys with mustaches like that hanging out around the Wharf District – you can focus your search there.”  If there’s an extenuating factor like “find them before they leave town” or “figure out the cult’s leader before they sacrifice that victim” then the check should be of the “X successes before Y failures” model.

If the goal being sought is simple – a fact or public personality – then the DM simply sets the DC, with perhaps more knowledge available at higher DCs.

“I’m looking for a high quality weaponsmith!”

  • Natural 1 – “Your mother’s a weaponsmith!  She can bang on my sword anytime!”
  • DC 5 – A random blacksmith’s name, probably makes simple weapons only.
  • DC 10 -A decent weaponsmith’s name who has a selection of martial weapons.
  • DC 15 – Otto the retired adventurer reliably makes masterwork blades.
  • DC 20 – Otto hates elves, don’t take your buddy with you if you’re going there, he’ll refuse to help you.
  • Natural 20 – “Oh, I know Otto, tell him Grey sent you and he’ll cut you a deal.”

Sometimes, however, the PCs are trying to track someone down who’s actively trying to conceal themselves.  Or, they need to lay low and thwart other people’s attempts to track them down using these rules!

If someone is just trying passively to stay hidden or hide an item, place, or bit of information, they make a check using a plausible skill to set the seekers’ DC.  If you’re hiding out, you can try Stealth or even Disguise.  If you are in a friendly ethnic enclave, you can try Diplomacy to convince people not to help snoopers.  If you’re going by a fake name, use Bluff.  The DM should see fit to add on bonuses or penalties based on the circumstances.

Keep in mind the quarry may not know specifically that anyone’s looking for them.  Many criminals or other underground figures will routinely be trying to stay somewhat off the public’s radar as part of their daily routine.

Stay flexible and use common sense.  If the PCs are trying to place a false rumor to flush someone out of hiding, their seeker checks might be opposed by the target’s Sense Motive, for example.

Random Encounters

Let’s get an important distinction out of the way first.  There are several different kinds of random encounter charts, derived from different unspoken philosophies of what an encounter should consist of.

The first, which I’ll call the “normal” encounter table, includes a bunch of stuff a PC might come across in a locale, whether it’s a “hostile monster” or not.  These kinds of charts contain everything from peasants to hookers to “Event: someone empties their chamberpot out of a second floor window as you walk by” to real threats.  The first edition AD&D DMG was a great example of this theory of random encounter design, what with the random harlot table.

The second, the “hostile” encounter table, limits itself only to likely combat situations.  A city encounter chart with only “Muggers, press gangs, stirges, and vampires” is a hostile encounter chart.  This kind of chart has become more popular over time as D&D groups who “just want to kill something” don’t want to bother with chatting up some “rich panderer”.

It should be obvious why you need to understand what kind of chart you have in hand – if it’s the former, the chance of encounter should be higher, but if it’s the latter, it should be much lower.

Traditionally in D&D, there’s a flat random chance of having a random encounter.  But there’s a reason native New Yorkers run afoul of trouble less than visiting tourists; an innate knowledge for an area leads to instinctively safer behavior.  You avoid “that street,” know to ignore certain voices calling “Hey Mister!”, et cetera.  Therefore it would seem to me that Knowledge: Local is perhaps a relevant factor. It feels about right to say the chance of encounter in a normal city is when you roll a DC 5 or less for a “hostile” table and DC 10 or less for a “normal” table.  You’d manipulate these chances for special places or times – if the city is wracked by revolution or martial law reigns, crank the DCs up.  (Consider using Survival in the same way in the wilderness.)

Pro tip – consider customizing your encounter table over time.  Have 91-100 be “someone who the party knows” and keep a list of likely people.  PCs love running across people they know, it adds to their sense of belonging in the game world.

Rumors

Rumors.  The lifeblood of any campaign.  You can always rely on the PCs to spend a bunch of time interacting with your lovingly crafted setting and NPCs if you feed them random information that they think might be amusing to follow up on.  It turns setting information from something you inflict on them using boxed text to something more akin to “treasure I found!” which is innately more motivating.

As with random encounters, there are a couple schools of thought on rumor creation, largely depending on how much work the DM wants to put into it.  Some create a small number of mostly valid and/or important rumors, or even customize them to individual PCs.  Some create a vast host of rumors of varying importance and accuracy.  In this case you want to divvy them up by DC (crappy false rumors=DC 5, etc.).

As the PCs roll their seeker checks, you can give them rumors according to your chosen DCs.  I usually do the “small number of good rumors” approach and give one out on a DC 15, plus an additional rumor for every 5 points of success.  You’d select DC 10 or DC 5 if you had a lot more rumors of varying provenance.

Make sure and hand out rumors you really want them to have first and then hand out the random stuff.

Keeping It Quiet

In some cases, the PCs want to track someone or something down without other people getting wind of it.

If you’re actively seeking but want to keep it quiet, you need choose a skill designed for misdirection to use as you ferret out information.  This could be Bluff (I tell people I’m a merchant from some other city who owes the guy money) to Stealth (I try to overhear conversations more than actually precipitate them) to whatever’s plausible given the circumstance.  Seeking “quietly” doubles the time required to make each seeker check.  The DC for the quarry to detect the seekers’ activity is set at 10+the selected skill bonus.  The seekers can deliberately take a penalty on their seeker checks and add that as a bonus to their keeping quiet check.

The quarry (or other interested third parties) can make seeker checks of their own to determine if someone’s looking for something or someone.

For example, the PCs are looking for a jumpy guy who owes them money.  They decide to take it easy and send a seeker group that has a good Bluff skill of +10 out to find him.  The seeker group searches at the rate of one check per day, and the jumpy guy asks around every other day to see if anyone’s after him – a DC 20 on his Diplomacy check would indicate yes, there’s some guys asking around after him.

Hitting the Streets

All of this boils down to a reasonably simple system for urban information warfare.  The various participants break up into teams as they desire.

1.  Setup

The DM sets the random encounter DC and chooses a random encounter chart, and decides the success DC, how many successes are required, and what those successes mean.

2.  Hide

If there’s an active opposition, the “hiders” roll their check first to set the DC for the “seekers” (if the hider’s an NPC it’s easiest to just take 10 on this check).  If there isn’t, the DM sets the DC based on the availability of the knowledge or whatever is being sought.

3. Seek

Each seeker team makes a DC 10 Knowledge: Local check, the team member with the best score leading and any others assisting.  Rolling below the random encounter DC  indicates a random encounter.  Success indicates that the seeker team has used their knowledge of the city to find a good audience or locale for whatever it is they’re trying to do.  Success gives a +2 bonus to subsequent checks, with an additional +2 for each 5 points by which the team beats the DC.  Each seeker team decides whether they are keeping the search quiet or not, and makes a relevant skill check to seek out their goal.  Time spent and successes are noted and rumors are handed out.

4.  Cover Up

The hider can take time to do their own seeker check against the DC of the seekers’ chosen mode of sneakiness if they want to know if anyone’s looking for them.

Repeat steps 3-4 as necessary.

Playtest: Guerilla Marketing

In this case, the PCs were looking to go out on the mean streets to promote an upcoming animal fight they were arranging; they weren’t specifically looking for information in the traditional sense.  No problem, these rules handle that.  They divided up into solo teams of one to cover the most ground and were not trying to be subtle in any way, confident that the crooked town guard would not care one bit about all this.  I gave them their choice of social skill to use – Diplomacy (“Come see the awesome matchup!”),  Bluff (“You’ll win big if you bet on the bear!”), or Intimidate (“You punks can’t handle carnage like you’re gonna see at this fight!”).  They disperse throughout the city and promote their fight.

Since this was a fairly diffuse goal, it doesn’t have a clear success or failure criteria.  The locals are, in general, all about a semi-legal animal fight.  Therefore I set the base DC at 10, with each increment of 5 above that indicating that more people would hear about the match and come. Each attempt would reflect a half day of work.  They could do as many checks as they wanted to spend the time on until fight night.

The encounter table I was using has both “normal” encounters and “hostile” encounters so I set the encounter DC level to 10.  If any PC rolled below the base DC of 10 while conducting their marketing, it would generate an encounter.

I had prepared a small number (7) of fairly juicy rumors, so set a base DC of 15 to get a rumor, with an extra for every 5 points above.

All the DCs were set, so each PC made their skill check.  1-9 indicated an encounter, 10-14 indicated limited success, 15-19 indicated moderate success and a rumor, 20-24 was good success and two rumors, and so on.

Because most of this group lacks meaningful social skills, they started provoking random encounters, and since they were alone, those encounters didn’t go well.  One PC, trying to drum up business outside the competition’s gambling halls, got beaten insensible by some goons and had his cash stolen.    One got bitten by a monstrous centipede as he sat down to rest outside an alley.  One had a nice chat with a friendly lady who owns a fruit stand (later destroyed by the PCs in the commission of a chase, that’ll show her).  After a day of that they decided to leave off; they got an OK crowd in at the fight night.

Playtest: Manhunt

In this scenario, the PCs had killed off a criminal gang but the leader, the Splithog Pauper, got away.  They decided to hunt him down (and by decided, I mean another crime lord made them an offer they couldn’t refuse and told them to).

The goal was pretty concrete – find him!   He was very much trying not to be found.  His main skill is Disguise at +11, which would normally mean a pretty hardcore DC of 21 for the seekers.  However, when they raided his gang’s headquarters the PCs got an encoded list of various IOUs to various petty criminals and business associates.  Since the Pauper was staying in town and trying to rebuild, this was an extremely relevant leverage point and I gave them a huge +5 bonus for having it in hand.  Also, they got a description of two thugs that may or may not have been affiliated with the Pauper (turns out they were).

The PCs learned their lesson about running around the streets solo.  They split into two teams, one of which was following up on the list of associates and the other of which was talking to various prostitutes and homeless people they associated with to track down the thugs.

They were rolling well, and since each team had several assists they stayed well out of random encounter DC territory, sad to say.  It took them a day and a half to get the five successes I figured were needed to track him down.  They had not been subtle in their inquiries, however, and he knew someone was looking for him, so when they went to the inn he was laying low in, he was disguised and had a bunch of thugs nearby ready to ambush intruders.

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Life In The Big City – Chase Rules

Posted on December 13, 2009 | 33 comments

My Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign is well underway and the PCs are all over the mean streets of Riddleport.  There’s some common scenarios that come up in urban adventures that I wanted to streamline; here’s my current efforts for your edification and comment!  They’re Pathfinder based but very easily adapted to anything d20-ish.  First, we have chase rules!

Chase Rules

Exciting chase scenes, the staple of action movies everywhere, are very hard by default in D&D because though every other part of the rules has variance built in – from stats to skills to damage – movement has always been completely static.  “30 feet a round whether you need it or not!”

I got Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder when it came out, and it has chase rules, but those rules are like a lot of chase rules I’ve seen in RPGs over time – way too complicated.  They’re 40 damn pages of specific maneuvers and all.  The entire Combat chapter in the Pathfinder RPG is only 25 pages.  I wanted something that could be run without everyone having to do homework; in my opinion if a new bolt-on special case ruleset is more than about 2 pages then “you’re doing it wrong.”

So here’s what I came up with.  It was hard to balance it out but after a couple playtest chases in the real campaign I think they are pretty light and easy to use, fair, and keep the PCs engaged.

The Movement Check

A character’s Move check is +2 per 5′ of base speed.  For an unencumbered human that moves 30′, that’s +12.  In a self-powered race like a footrace, you can add your STR bonus to this in a given round but then have to make a DC 15 Fort save to not become fatigued from the exertion.   Use this same formula for other movement types (riding, swimming) because it takes differing speeds into account well.  (as a bonus, this means you can have a chase where various participants are using different modes of movement).

The Chase Track

Rather than keeping up with specific distances, a chase has distance represented by an arbitrary condition track.  It’s defined relative to whoever’s in the lead, and has six levels –

  1. Close Contact – within melee range of leader.  Subject to all obstacles the leader has to deal with.
  2. Point Blank – close range (all those “within 30 feet” powers proc here).  Take leader’s obstacles or take an alternate path at DC 20.
  3. Short – Take leader’s obstacles or an alternate path at DC 15.  -2 on ranged attacks.
  4. Medium – From this far back, it’s usually easy to avoid obstacles.  -4 on ranged attacks.
  5. Long – -6 on ranged attacks.
  6. Lost – you done lost ’em.   If you have allies still in the chase and you can still run (not fatigued or just giving up) you can run after them sufficiently to at least arrive on the scene once it’s all over, but you can’t get back into the actual chase.

For each 5 points by which you beat the leader’s movement check,  you close by one category on the track; similarly you slip back by one for each 5 points by which you miss their check.

Chase participants start at a chase level that makes sense – if they are right there with the leader and take off after them when they take off, they can start at point blank.  If they’re a round of movement away, or pause to shoot or take another action before they get going, start them at medium range.

Obstacles

In a chase, there’s a bunch of different kinds of obstacles and complications that can come up.  Here’s a sample but not comprehensive list.  In general the checks to pass these obstacles are DC 15.  If you fail the check, you drop back one level on the chase track; if you miss by 5 you take 1d6 nonlethal damage from a collision or similar mishap.  This is an urban specific list.  In a crowded urban environment, each round has a 1 in 3 chance of bringing a mandatory obstacle, or the leader can deliberately head towards obstacles as desired.  Roll 1d8 for what type, or choose one:

  1. Simple (Acrobatics, attack an object) – barrels, gate, street vendor’s blanket, etc.
  2. Barrier (Acrobatics) – fruit cart, unexpected turn
  3. Wall (Climb) – traditional “end of alley” wall, fence
  4. Gap (Acrobatics/Jump) – ditch, open manhole, pit
  5. Traffic (Acrobatics/Overrun) – pedestrians, mule team, orc pirates
  6. Squeeze (Escape Artist) – crawlspace, hole in wall
  7. Water (Swim) – river, wharf, pool, fountain
  8. Terrain (Acrobatics) – gravel, mud bank, slick cobblestones

Chase participants farther back on the chase track can choose whether or not to hit the same obstacle.  Chasers in close contact have to negotiate the same obstacles as the leader.  Chasers in point blank can take the obstacle or make an alternate check at DC 20 to avoid it – for example, “I can’t swim, I’m going to run around the reflecting pool instead.”  Chasers at short range can take the obstacle or an alternate check at DC 15.  Chasers farther back can generally avoid routine obstacles, but the DM can require them if it’s logically necessary (the leader swam across the river, for example).

You’d choose different obstacles and skills for other kinds of chase – a horseback chase would use Ride instead of Acrobatics, and a chase in the country would have trees and hedges instead of crates and alleys.

Actions

Anyone in close contact with the leader can conduct melee attacks on them.  Whoever wins initiative gets to determine if attacks or Movement checks happen first.

A character can take a missile attack but automatically drops back one level on the chase track when they do.

If the chase goes a number of rounds equal to anyone’s CON score they have to make DC 20 Fort saves each round or become fatigued, and effectively drop out.

Chase Playtest

Our PCs ranged from halflings and humans in encumbering armor (Move +8) to barbarians and monks (Move +16).

In their first chase, they went after the Splithog Pauper, a skilled rogue.  He had a normal Move (+12) but high Acrobatics, Climb, and Escape Artist checks.

The chase was pretty long.  Everyone managed to stay in the chase; as the slower guys dropped back they benefitted from not having to negotiate as many obstacles.  The Pauper wasn’t rolling well on his movement checks and deliberately hit a lot of obstacles to try to shake the faster guys – the barbarian stayed with him, but he managed to push the rest of them back with this tactic. The cleric was the only one with a ranged attack; he shot an icicle at him a couple times but to limited effect.

There was a cool obstacle moment that everyone thought was very “parkour,” where the Pauper ran and dash vaulted through a fruit stand; one PC followed through the gap with his own leap but the next didn’t quite make it and busted, spraying fruit everywhere.  The barbarian caught up with him legitimately and was stabbing him with his boarding pike (after a pretty bad string of misses he finally was connecting); the cleric used an Infamy Point to find a shortcut to head him off and gave him a good clotheslining; at that point we dropped out of chase mode and the two PCs cut him down before he could maneuver away from them.

The next chase was interestingly different.  This was the party trying to follow a guy through the tenements, but he spotted them and ran.  He was just a level 1 expert, nothing special, but he rolled really well and lost most of the party except for the tracker (the rest of the party was staying an increment behind the tracker to avoid detection).  But the fleeing guy totally sucked at obstacles, and after a couple slowed him, the tracker got into close contact and dragged him to the ground for a good cuffing and stuffing.

In the end these rules rewarded faster Speeds and higher relevant skills without being overwhelming – in an earlier draft I was using the Acrobatics skill as the Movement check but it made that skill too much of a “whoever has it wins and whoever doesn’t loses” power.   The quarries had a good chance to get away in both situations but after a good hard run they got them.  The chases were long enough they were interesting but went quickly enough and were dynamic enough that they held interest.

These rules work well for a “one on many” chase; it’s not clear how they’d work for a complex many-on-many chase (e.g. horde of zombies vs. party of PCs).

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Outlaw Press, aka Jim Shipman, Is A Big Crook

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 26 comments

Outlaw Press is a small press outfit that publishes for Tunnels & Trolls, run by one Jim Shipman.  Late last month, a South American guy noticed that a cover for one of their products was miscredited and posted on RPG.net about it.  Innocent mistake?  Overreaction?  Well, as time wore on, actual RPG artists took note and started noticing work of theirs appearing as covers on Outlaw Press products. A huge list of artists.

In the last month, a staggering 70+ works of art have been identified as having been stolen by Outlaw Press and used in their publications, as well as a large laundry list of other kinds of IP theft.  There’s a convenient PDF someone put together showing the various copyrighted works and the products ripping them off. Much of the art isn’t even just copyrighted by a random artist, but was work for hire and actually owned by Games Workshop, Dreamworks, and Blizzard.  All their products have been yanked from RPGNow for these shenanigans, and is getting yanked from Amazon and other locations as the wronged parties hunt down everywhere these tainted products are being sold.  Apparently and incredibly, Shipman has responded to all this with vague evasions and defiant “I do what I want” declarations, continuing to sell these products despite being notified of the art theft.  In fact, Ken St. Andre and Flying Buffalo pulled his Tunnels & Trolls license over it, but that’s not stopping Jim!  “I have warehoused products to sell!” he declares.

He is still selling his wares clandestinely on eBay and other places under shifting seller names, including jimship1, Hobbit_King@yahoo.com, and actionseller99.

Do not buy anything from Jim Shipman or Outlaw Press, now or in the future!  And feel free and take whatever kind of righteous retribution you see fit upon him, his products, his Web site, and his business.  He’s flaunting the law and ripping off legitimate artists and creators trying to make their way generating content for their favorite games.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Sixth Session Summary

Posted on December 6, 2009 | 1 comment

The characters become more proactive in their criminal enterprises in the sixth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “Three Days to Kill.”  It’s based on a 3e Atlas Games adventure also called “Three Days to Kill.”

Sixth Session (14 page pdf) – One of the crime lord Clegg Zincher’s capps, Braddikar Faje, is headed out of town on the road to Roderic’s Cove to conduct some kind of sale at a villa in the hills.  Jacking up Zincher’s day is more than enough motivation for Saul to send his favorite scum off to break up the deal.

But first, Tommy heads to the local whorehouse/temple of Calistria to see his favorite gal, Lavender Lil.  He finds her hiding behind a tapestry; Captain Scarbelly and his orc pirate crew are visiting, and, as she says, “I like it a little rough, but not orc rough.” So Tommy tells her he and his comrades are headed out into the woods to try to find the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy they hear tell of, as a cover story for their real job.

It’s probably about this time I should share the rumors the PCs got from hitting the streets of Riddleport.  It may explain otherwise bizarre behavior on the part of the guys.  (The weird terminology is mostly Riddleport slang…  As you can tell they are meant to be exactly as a random Riddleporter would relate them.)

Bonfires are sometimes seen in the mountains to the northeast.  I hear a bunch of priestesses of Calistria gather there every new moon for secret all-lesbo orgiastic rituals, and they murder any man who glimpses them.  It still sounds pretty tempting to try.  Woooo!  Man, I wonder if that Pamodae sideshow goes there… Mmmmm…..

When the missionary who founded St. Casperian’s Mission died, he left behind a treasure cache of the money he defrauded from credulous citizens.  Although the building is dilapidated and overrun with grog-blossoms, there is a secret room beneath the ground where the priest hid his ill-gotten gains.  They say it’s guarded by a magical protector that has disappeared everyone that’s tried to claim it.

There are orcs wandering the streets of Riddleport!  Captain Scarbelly’s pirate ship, the Bloody Vengeance, is in town and the whole crew is orc.  People say he’s killed twenty-nine men in hand to hand combat.  He’s probably hooked up with Boss Croat, that snout-lover.  I could totally take an orc.  It’s about speed, not strength!

Gebediah Crix, keeper of the Riddleport Light, got killed by one of those devils he summons.  His parts were strewn all over the lighthouse.  The gendarmes have posted guards outside the place.  I wonder if the devil’s still around?  Hey, I recently came across some Vudran charms, guaranteed to keep evil spirits away.  Wanna buy one?

There’s some kind of gang of whiskers that operates in the Rotgut District.  I have a cousin who got robbed by a bunch of rats in an alley that suddenly turned into people.  And the gendarmes don’t do jack crap about it, say they’re low on funding.  The rats must be connected and that’s why they’re getting a pass.

Some guy, an out of town wizard, wanted to become a fancyboy, but when they wouldn’t let him in, he insulted Elias Tammerhawk, the Speaker of the Order of Cyphers.  They had a duel in Zincher’s arena.   Tammerhawk totally wasted that guy’s dumb ass in short order and magiced up a swarm of rats to eat the body.  He said that was what he got for running his rathole.  Haw haw haw!

There’s been some turf changes on the streets lately.  I hear Avery Slyeg is totally Croamarcky’s bitch now and they’re consolidating and looking to squeeze competitors out of the gambling biz.

The completely false St. Casperian rumor is what caused them to go all SWAT team on the mission last session.  Although their minds are going overtime, and they mentioned that “planting a rumor like that would be a good way to get someone to go in and kill off a rival gang…”

Anyway, they head out to the Trail’s End villa and get a lot more than they bargained for – besides Faje and his men, there’s Asmodean cultists, Marcello Marcellano (the Chelish son of Ox’s former owner from “Water Stop”), and a bunch of raiding Shoanti braves.  They actually carve through the guards OK, but when the Asmodeans start summoning freaky demons from the mirror Faje is selling them, they decide to bail (over Serpent’s objections, who really really wants to kill Faje and everyone else, despite Saul instructing them not to kill him.)

The PCs for some reason thought they had done poorly, I guess because of the default D&D expectation that the only success is found in killing everything in sight and looting it.  But Saul praised them – they killed everyone but Faje and one of his goons, who had to ride into town two to one horse.  The Asmodeans got the mirror without paying for it.  So Clegg is out like 8 guys, a bunch of horses, and the mirror with nothing to show for it, and Faje did NOT get killed and bring the wrath of Zincher and potentially other crime lords down on the Gold Goblin.  The PCs kinda wanted to murder the Asmodeans, Marcellano, and the Shoanti (which Saul couldn’t care less about) and Faje (which would have pissed him off mightily).

But before they got back…  They happened upon the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy ritual.  Or, at least, Tommy snuck up onto something that might have been it and promptly got chased off by a manticore!

I was prepared to run an actual chase scene here, with the mounted PCs fleeing from the manticore, using chase rules from Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder.  It was not to be, however, as the usual D&D group problem emerged of one guy refusing to run and that making the rest of the party stand with him.  We then had a weird start-and-stop chase as Sindawe stopped to fight.  But when the manticore dropped his horse in one shot, he thought better of that and hid in the underbrush.  But of course Wogan and Serpent had stopped to help him…  They got away by popping obscuring mist and letting the manticore eat all their horses.  Ah well, all’s well that ends well.

Once they got back, they went with the guy that they let live from the Splithog Pauper’s gang, Madrat, to hit one of Avery Slyeg’s couriers.  Of course, Madrat was a mole working for Slyeg.  So we left off with the PCs facing down a dozen crossbowmen and a crime lord in a warehouse.  Will they sleep with the fishes?  Find out next time, in Reavers on the Seas of Fate: Death in Freeport Riddleport!

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Tenth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

Posted on December 6, 2009 | 2 comments

Tenth Session (10 page pdf) – In the latest installment of The Lighthouse, we participate in a beta test of a new missile system and generally sneak around the Thuldan scientific research space station and cause problems.  A new character, Professor Pepin of the Borealins, is inflicted upon us.  He has an outrageous French accent.  And we find pod people who look like Warhammer 40k escapees!

This session was fun even through we didn’t really get much done.  The missile test goes semi-horribly wrong and we do some sleuthing to find out why.  We find clues, although not actually culprits or reasons.  Martin St. John and Taveer have a near death experience piloting a fighter near a space-singularity to try to fix it with SCIENCE!.

My favorite part of the whole thing is the commendations Captain Takashi gave the two afterwards.

The group returns to the Lighthouse, where Captain Takashi awards Martin St. John the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroic actions. Taveer isn’t a member of the Concord Military, so he can’t be awarded a medal, but he isn’t forgotten. Captain Takashi sends a recommendation through channels to the Administrator hierarchy about his valiant acts. They award him with a “STAR Award” and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of his choice. He discovers this when a Concord HR administrator shows up at his cube and drops off the certificate and a nice plaque made out to “Thomas”.

That was all my invention.  You can tell I’ve worked for corporations for too long.

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New Paizo Class Playtests Continue

Posted on November 30, 2009 | 7 comments

Today, the playtests for the new Paizo Advanced Player’s Guide classes continue with the Summoner and the Witch.  (Previously, it was the Cavalier and Oracle.)  Go get ’em, it’s a free download from all from the Paizo store.

I was really looking forward to the Summoner, since I put a lot of work into playing a good summoner in 3.5e, the Internet-famous Valgrim the Malconvoker!

Hey, the summoner is really cool.  It’s a CHA-based caster, has a custom spell list derived from both mage conjurations and also druid-type buffs (magic fang, etc.).  However… 11 pages, Jesus Christ!  This is one complicated class.  It gets a pet called an “eidolon,” which finally explains what the hell that weird LucasArts game I had back in the day was about.  Maybe.

You get to totally determine the form of your eidolon, which is neat.  It uses rules completely different from the current animal companion rules, which is a little sad – with the Cavalier and Summoner they have decided “bah” to standardization on existing rules.  But it’s pretty cool, they go up in level and toughness with you; they’re pretty buff – d10 HD and a strange nonstandard but semi-full BAB progression.  And they have an “evolution pool” you can use to mutate them – there’s a long list of 1-4 point evolutions, from claws to SR.

And besides this, and normal spells – the summoner gets Summon Monster (whatever the highest level you can cast) 3+CHA times a day!  OK, I love me a summoner, but DAMN.  Once you put even a little optimization into this, it gets really good.

It’s certainly a very interesting class.  I have to say, in general I don’t like splatbook and splatbook classes.  You either get flavorless junk or bizarre crap.  But these, even the weirder ones like the Oracle and Summoner, have a way high cool factor.

Now let’s look at the witch…  Many people have many different takes on what a “witch” should be.

Surprisingly, they’re an INT-based caster.  That’s nice, it’s good to see the flood of CHA-based casters stemmed, though I would have guessed they’d go with WIS instead for the “witchy wise woman” feel.  The class is full of the good old witch tropes – pact with otherworldly power, hexes, a cauldron, a coven…

In a very cool twist, the witch’s familiar is the one teaching them magic, so they function kinda like their spell book – they can only prepare spells their familiar knows!

The familiar list is 80% the same as the sorc/wizard one, but has weird changes for no real reason I can determine.  No weasel, but you can have a pig.  Whatever.  And the benefits by level are slightly different.  Grrr.  But then the coolness is that different familiars get different spells they can teach.  The toad gets jump, for example.  The witch spell list is a good combination of mostly enchantment, healing, and divinations.

There’s a bunch of cool but weird touches – a witch can be in a coven with hags, and a familiar can learn spells from another witch’s familiar.  The hexes are OK but not all that much to write home about.  In the end, a really good witch class, and a lot more balanced than some of these new ones.

I just wish they went a little more standard on these various critters, it’s going to be a nightmare to DM and to prepare NPCs when one familiar or animal companion is like another but different – adding new powers for a given class is fine, but like the Summoner’s companion has the same HD but different and nonstandard BAB progression than a druid one.

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Mongoose Publishing Doing Grand

Posted on November 30, 2009 | 1 comment

Mongoose Publishing has posted their 2009 “State of the Mongoose Address” and it’s great to see a RPG company doing so well!

In general, they say “you have to work hard but you can still do well in RPGs.”  They’ve grown to 14 full timers and have a huge roster of games going on.

Highlights:

  1. A bunch of new Traveller settings and supplements.  The coolest one is Reavers – Piracy in the Sea of Stars, which in title sounds a lot like my “Reavers on the Seas of Fate” pirate campaign I’m running.  Synchronicity!  And there’s Codename Veil, which sounds a lot like Delta Green.  Plus, a new 2000AD license in the vein of Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog called “ABC Warriors,” where you play warbots!
  2. A new Runequest 2, redesigned and taken back to its roots – but without a SRD.  With a  huge campaign, Glorantha book, and more.  And variant settings, including Deus Vult, where you are a Catholic demon fighter in the 12th century, and the Eternal Champion stuff.  And they’re moving Wraith Recon over to it, they say they have no plans to do any more D&D 4e stuff.
  3. The Conan license is in limbo but they’re dropping prices on the old stuff!
  4. They are trying to expand Paranoia as a line, I get the impression they feel like they’ve tapped out the life of a Troubleshooter and have tried some “out of the mold” splatbooks and are seeing how those go to determine direction.
  5. And more Earthdawn!  And Dragon Warriors!  And Cthonian Stars, a Cthulhu setting for Traveller!  And a bunch more other stuff!

Man, hats off to these guys, they are shipping some product.  And for those who remember the “old Mongoose” and the bad editorial, they’ve tried very hard to hire up and improve quality in editorial, and claim that in 2009 “in the past few months, the number of editorial issues in the many, many books we have released can be counted on one hand.”

I’m not sure why they are stepping away from openness with RQ2 though, it seems to have paid off for them enough with Traveller.  One demerit for that.  But otherwise, they are expanding heavily despite the global economy, doing so many things that the “common wisdom” says are bad – licensed games, having a bunch of different game lines…

I have some Mongoose games (Conan, Paranoia, Traveller) but don’t play any faithfully.  The lure of large game lines and rich ecosystems, especially like the Traveller one, may just bring me over however.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Fifth Session Summary

Posted on November 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

The characters decide to take the fight to the mean streets of Riddleport in the fifth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “St. Casperian’s Salvation.”

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) – Michael Vick, eat your heart out.  The PCs start off by arranging one of the Gold Goblin’s underground animal fights.  The NPC ranger, Bojask, got a diseased bear off the back of a ship somewhere, and their boss Saul wanted a championship match with the current champ, Pigsaw the boar.  Here’s the naked bear:

I based this on reality – I read a recent news article about how all the spectacled bears at this German zoo all lost their fur all over except for on their faces.  Zoo staff is baffled.

Anyway, player reaction: OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT THING.  They then spent an inordinate amount of their funds buying some drugs to knock it out so they could paint it green.  It seemed like the thing to do at the time.  They started channeling Don King and dubbed the fight “Pigsaw vs. Bearclaw.”

The PCs wandered through Riddleport separately to go spread the word and got the worst end of the deal.  It’s a rough town, and when Ox went into the gambling district run by the head crimelord and started putting up flyers, three goons quickly showed up, beat his ass senseless, and robbed him.  Others fared slightly better.

I was planning to run the 3e Atlas Games adventure “Three Days to Kill.”  I handed out some rumors, though, gleaned while beating the streets doing fight promotion, and they were fascinated by a (totally false) rumor about a haunted treasure hoard in the cellar of St. Casperian’s Mission, a local derelict flophouse where, it turns out, their old buddy Vincenz is hiding out.  I had planned to run “St. Casperian’s Salvation,” a set piece adventure set there, later, but the PCs were all over that mission like white on rice as soon as they heard a rumor of cash.  Ever prepared, I switched and ran that instead.  Basically there’s a local small street gang using the second floor as a hideout.  This was somewhat of a surprise, and it was a brutal tight quarters battle.  The gang leader, the “Splithog Pauper,” got away with the gang’s loot.

Eventually they had the fight and the bear won.  In attendance was Captain Scarbelly, the orc pirate, a clear warning to those in the know that the Freeport trilogy is almost upon us.

Next time – Three Days to Kill!  I hope.

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