Breaking Down a Campaign Framework

I’m always creating page after page of RPG material, but I seldom follow through far enough to create something truly publishable.  I’m always getting requests for my notes, and I always have to demure because they’re really little more than “What is necessary to run my specific game.” In a few weeks, I hope to change that record and kick out the first bit of an actual GURPS campaign framework.

That pre-amble out of the way, allow me to make a few definitions.  What the hell is a GURPS campaign framework?  It’s what I’ve decided to call books like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Action and GURPS Monster Hunters.  They provide everything you need to run a campaign except the specifics on plot, character and setting (but further provides guidelines on all three of those). Said differently, a campaign framework provides a distillation of the GURPS rules necessary for rapidly building characters, sessions and interesting gameplay for a particular genre.

This blog post will break-down what I think a campaign framework needs, but to do that, you must permit me one more definition, and to make that definition, I want to show you another definition: Philip K. Dick’s definition of science fiction:

I will define science fiction, first, by saying what science fiction is not. It cannot be defined as ‘a story set in the future,’ [nor does it require] untra-advanced technology. It must have a fictitious world, a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society… that comes out of our world, the one we know:
This world must be different from the given one in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…
There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

[In] good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must be truly new and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification, ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create…. The very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create—and enjoy doing it, [experiencing] the joy of discovery of newness.

So, to be clear, Philip K. Dick doesn’t think Star Wars is science fiction!  Does that mean that Mr. Dick is a… jerk?  No, I don’t think so.  It doesn’t mean his definition is wrong either.  It’s not prescriptive so much as descriptive of what he’s trying to do.  He’s not being a snob, he’s outlining a model that explains what he’s shooting for.  “All models are wrong, some models are useful,” as the saying goes.

With that in mind, I want to offer a definition of a role-playing game, not because I feel anything that falls outside of it is “not really roleplaying,” but because it defines what I’m trying to create: A role-playing game is a confluence between the tension created by interesting mechanical gameplay and interesting narrative choices.  To unpack that: When people say they enjoy “fluff,” they mean they enjoy the inspiration and complex choices created by an interesting narrative.  When people say they enjoy “crunch” they’re describing their enjoyment of the complex choices created by interesting gameplay mechanics.  These two sides often argue, but I think they miss the point that RPGs are designed as the wonderful peanut-butter-and-chocolate mixture of rich narrative mixed with complex gameplay.

GURPS itself provides neither.  There is no GURPS setting and there is precious little GURPS gameplay (Nothing stops me, rules-as-written, from taking telepathy and ruining all the mysteries in a police procedural).  Rather, it provides us with the tools, the “design language” to create our own settings and gameplay (Nothing stops you, rules-as-written, from creating interesting consequences to the use of telepathy, and littering the world with dangerous psychics, anti-psychics, technological mind-shields, or drug-induced nightmarish “mind-traps.” BOOM!  Interesting gameplay for a police procedural involving telepathy).  Many GURPS veterans have created rich campaigns all on their own.  But a campaign framework does a lot of that work for you.  You don’t need one, but you’re effectively creating your own, so why not build it out enough that anyone can use it?

A GURPS campaign framework defines the “fluff” of its campaign mostly in broad strokes.  The specific setting doesn’t matter as much.  Monster Hunters works as well in Los Angeles as Cairo as the hills of Kentucky. But a campaign framework does depend on some setting conceits: Monster Hunters exists in a world where magic and monsters are real, monsters and magic works in a particular (and specific) way, and things like genetically engineered super-soldiers are real (though rare or secret).  Likewise, the specifics of characters are left to players and GM, but the framework outlines the details lightly.  Dungeon Fantasy has wizards, and wizards tend to have problems like being excommunicated or feared, while Knights tend not to have any actual, defined status, and so on.  Similarly, it doesn’t really define the specifics of a plot, but you can infer what sort of plot you might have.  What a campaign framework mostly does is set up the premise.  Once the premise is established, then we can build gameplay.

And building gameplay is the primary focus of a campaign framework.  When I see people discussing these frameworks and building their own, they always start with templates.  This is a mistake.  Before you can build templates, you must understand niches.  Before you can understand niches, you must understand the pulse of gameplay.  The first framework book to write is always the second released: Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons; Action 2: Exploits; Monster Hunters 2: the Mission.

“A game is a series of interesting choices”
-Sid Meier

To understand gameplay, you must pick a focus for that gameplay.  Said differently, when the dice come out, what are the players doing?  What sort of choices do the players make?  Good gameplay creates a series of interesting, interrelated choices that creates an emergent narrative that, ideally, emulates the sort of genre we’re exploring.  A game meant to emulate a heroic shonen anime should have a variety of interesting tactical decisions that, when chosen in an optimal way, naturally result in explosive, emotion-laden power, tangled relationships and exceedingly dramatic and dynamic battles full of people flying around and blasting each other.  A game meant to emulate Game of Thrones should have interesting choices that result in betrayal and heroes bleeding out in gutters while cynical villains slip back into the shadows to win a morally-grey victory in an uncaring, medieval world.

The first step, then, is to focus on a mechanics mission statement.  What do the player characters do by default?  Kill monsters and take their stuff?  Conspire to hide magic from the world while advancing their own political and mystical power?  Seek out new life and new civilizations while boldly going where no man has gone before, followed by sleeping with new women and punching out new alien warlords?  Once you have that, the next step is to pull out additional detail in our gaming fractal.  Killing monsters and taking their stuff, obviously, involves at least two parts, the killing and the taking, and might infer a few more, like knowing which monsters to kill, or where to find the stuff.  After we pull out these elements, we can keep or discard as we please.  Taking a monster’s stuff likely involves selling it, but most players don’t associate mercantile skill or deep haggling mini-games as a serious element of Dungeon Fantasy, so we remove that.

Once we understand what our game is about, we can start building the actual nuts and bolts of gameplay.

Obstacles consist of four things: Dilemma, Choices, Consequences, and Rooting Interest.
-Robin Laws (Paraphrased)

Once we know where are gameplay is, we need to decide what it looks like.  Gameplay will generally consist of facing what Robin Laws, above, calls obstacles.  The most important elements are, to me, the last three, and starting with the last first: Rooting Interest means you must explain why the heroes care.  Dungeon Fantasy does this easily by pointing out, helpfully, that the monsters have stuff and you want stuff.  Moreover, the monsters are trying to kill you and most people are interested in not dying.  Games like GURPS Action have a harder time establishing rooting interest, and tend to require fluffier reasons for doing what they do.  Nonetheless, there should always be a benefit for success, or what some people in the biz call “Risk vs Reward.”

“Failure is boring – the credible threat of failure is very exciting.”
–Amanda Lang

Next, we need our series of interesting choices.  This ties in with consequences.  There must be multiple ways to achieve one’s goal, and they must all be equally interesting (this is what game designers mean by “game balance”), but that doesn’t mean they must all be the same.  Different tactics should involve different risks and different, long-term consequences.  Those consequences can be short-term or long-term or both, and the consequences needed necessarily be negative.  Much of chess’s gameplay choices turns on positioning: to capture your piece, I must move my piece to the captured piece’s spot.  This fundamentally changes the board, and might expose my piece to counter attack, or open up the field for further attack against you.  D&D 4e and Gumshoe use resources, which means you can expend a great deal of power to defeat a threat now, at the cost of being unable to defeat another threat later on.  Call of Cthulhu allows magic at the cost of sanity, which means the use of game-winning powers will likely result in a permanent reduction of your hero’s power.

Ideally, our choices involve several of the above, allowing the heroes to way the risks against the rewards and the potential fallout of a course of action, and those consequences shape future choices (This is the “sequence” that Sid Meier refers to).  This creates our emergent play.  As my D&D fighter rushes forward and lays down an area attack on several foes, this has the consequence that I’m no longer near the other PCs, but all of those enemies have been effectively “pinned” near mine, which keeps them from attacking my allies, but means they’re highly likely at attack me, which might be dangerous to myself.  I’ve made a choice, and gained both rewards and consequences that will affect the next turn (My position, my expenditure of a resource).  The enemy will react to my new position and my new vulnerabilities differently, which means I may be swamped by enemies, or might have them scatter.  Then, I have a new set of choices that didn’t exist before, limited by the fact that I’ve already expended some of my power (a condition that didn’t exist before).

Once we’ve defined those choices, we can determine which traits interact with them and what general paths our choices tend to guide us along.  A combat character who tends to focus on strategies of survival and focusing enemy attention on him is following a “tank” strategy.  That’s his core toolkit, the set of choices he intends to maximize.  A combat character who intends to focus on removing his opponents before they can remove him is following a “striker” or “sniper” strategy. From these strategies, we can start to derive our niches, and from those niches, we can derive our templates.  And from our templates, we can write a template book.

This works because we have determined what makes each core game mechanic interesting, and how these templates interface with them, and what traits matter and why.  Monster Hunters, for example, has two major gameplay arenas: Finding the monster and killing it.  Each template has alternate strategies for finding the monster, and each template has means by which to kill it, and these overlap.  The Crusader has just enough skill to find the monster, and then has overwhelming lethality with which to destroy the monster in a full, frontal assault.  The sage, on the other hand, prefers to linger in the research phase, trying to determine what the monster’s weakness might be and use that against him.  Both can team up to allow specialization and magnification of one another’s strengths, but this too creates new vulnerabilities, and doesn’t address additional issues and potential consequences (Remaining hidden from both the world and the monsters you hunt is a vital part of monster hunting, and requires a different strategy).

Once we’ve built our core gameplay, all that remains is to make sure it’s attached to the rooting interest of the players themselves.  Base motivations can work, but tying everything into a deeper narrative is what makes RPGs far more compelling than mere Monopoly, Parcheesi or Stratego.  But that’s an article for another time.

Organic Gaming: Thoughts and Refinements

Because Justin Aquino seems determined to continue to drive my blog with his interesting posts, I find myself compelled once again to respond to an idea he’s put forward.  Here, he’s talking about Organic Gaming, an interesting idea that sounds a lot like sandboxing to me, and I thought I’d share my own thoughts and offer some refinements on his idea.

Finished reading yet?  I’ll wait a moment.  Done now?  Ok.

First, naturally, my thoughts turned towards Metzgerburg, my setting for Slaughter City (City details here, mortals here, ghouls here, vampires here), which I think is pretty close to what Justin is talking about.  Building Metzgerburg taught me some things that Justin (and others) might find useful.  In the very least, you can use my material as inspiration for your own.

“This game takes a lot of prep.”

Yes it does.  I spend two or three months putting together Metzgerburg and I only got three sessions out of it (less because I did something wrong and more because my group self-destructed.  It was scheduling conflicts and personal issues, rather than a lack of interest in the setting or the game, that sunk it), but I still found the design fairly enlightening.

My concern, as I read Justin’s post, is that he’s putting too much work in the wrong places, or for the wrong reasons.  You can see elsewhere on his blog that he’s looking for a gaming personal assistant because the work-load of his games is so heavy (in addition to his work).  However, the point of the prep-work is to save you time.

Allow me to explain: The hardest part of running a game, in my experience, is the pre-session crunch (and getting the session started, but more on that later).  Suddenly, the next session looms large, it’s coming tomorrow (or today!) and you need to get the story done. In a normal gaming-situation, this involves cramming plans together for four hours or so, asking your players for more time and generally panicking.  In a sandbox environment, it consists of looking at your notes, looking at what the players had done previously, and then just adding a couple of ideas on top of that, and showing up.  The game’s inertia does the rest for you.

As an example: By the third session, the bloodthirsty nosferatu PC had managed to get his murderous mitts on Danny Devlin and killed him.  Given that Danny Devlin was intended as one of my major villains, this was potentially problematic under a more mainstream gaming model, but I actually found, after a moment of thinking, that I didn’t have a problem at all, and if you peruse the notes, you’ll see why (dramatic pause…).  You see, Angus Devlin has been angling to take over the family business for quite some time now (and he’s even more ruthless and better organized), and Jack Devlin, the cop, would want to know who killed his uncle and probably won’t accept the pat story that Angus is going to weave for him, which will put Jack in the sights of both Angus and the vampires, much to another PC’s consternation.  So all our muderour nosferatu really managed to do was make the Irish Mafia leaner and meaner and hand more drama to the group.

This sort of thing happens all the time in mature, well-established games (which is why a game that’s been running for a year is more popular than a game that’s been running for only a few sessions).  What you’re trying to do with all that prep-work is create that sense of maturity as quickly as possible, so that your players have a sense of stepping into a mature, complete game world as quickly as possible.

What you’re not trying to do is give yourself even more work.  The ultimate purpose of all those notes is to provide on the spot inspiration. Justin talks about managing all the NPCs all the time.  The problem with that approach, as realistic as it is, is that a single person doesn’t have that kind of processing power and the players won’t appreciate that level of realism anyway (and I’ll get into why in a bit).  I’m not saying that you can’t track what the NPCs are doing and what they want, but you do it in very broad strokes, and you only go into a great deal of detail when the game demands it.  Our nosferatu murdered Danny Devlin, so suddenly lots of drama erupts in the Devlin family, in the criminal world and among the police, but David Wang does not find out that Mei Zhi is stepping out on him and moonlighting as a prostitute.  That’s not important and that’s not where the story is going.  If we did that outside of the PCs view, we’ve removed some of the inherent drama in the game.  We can create more drama, add more hooks as time goes on, but again, the purpose of this is to save work, not create more.

What you’ll want to do is create hooks within hooks within hooks.  Every NPC has an interesting hook that might tangle a player in some local drama.  But every NPC hooks into other NPCs, so the deeper you mess with one NPC, the more you get tangled in the lives of other NPCs.  It’s like a grand maze of human emotion and relationships.  But you don’t trigger drama when players aren’t looking.  At most, I’d suggest that once every few months (say after 3-6 sessions) you do a quick update-sweep over your characters, especially the ones who haven’t changed, and adjust them to keep them up to date, or possibly improve them just in case they come up.  Other than that: Don’t track people that don’t come up.

“…characters need an in-game motivation for their character (not a meta-game like xp, cp, levels etc…)…”

That’s not really the point of those meta-game-like motivations.  What you’re trying to do here is not “punish players for bad roleplaying, reward them for good,” but rather you’re trying to simulate the inherent irrationality of the human mind and the capriciousness of fate.  In short, you’re giving people choices.

Let me give you an example: A GM sits at his desk staring at his computer.  His session is tomorrow.  He needs to plan.  But he’s just received a free copy of Skyrim!  He wants to play it.  What should he do?  The obvious answer is: Work on his session.  In the long run, that’s better for him, and Skyrim will wait.  But we know, in reality, that it’s going to require considerable strength of will to actually do that.  In real life, the character has a hard choice, and we must do our best to simulate that difficult choice for the player.

In Metzgerburg, Granya Weschler was a good representation of a meta-game element that, in fact, served as an in-character motivation.  First, allow me to explain something that isn’t clear in these notes: In my vampire games, I have a house rule to simulate the fact that vampires gain more strength from drinking from more potent vessels, and to also simulate the pickiness some vampires have: you gain “blood experience” (which can only be used to improve Disciplines and Blood Potency) for drinking from particularly savory vessels.  Thus, a virgin woman of high breeding is generally more desired among vampires than some drunk lout beggar in an alley.  Granya, due to her suicide-girl nature and her ghostly heritage, granted the maximum “blood experience” possible for drinking from her.  One of the players discovered this and nearly frenzied on her.  He was also in love with her.  Naturally, he grew possessive of her, both because he loved her and because he wanted her.  Because of all that blood XP, because she was his meal-ticket to power, he intuitively grasped why a vampire might grow territorial about a mortal, and began to panic when his sire began to show interest in her as well.

Arguably, with a really good role-player, you could just tell this all this and they’ll play their character this way, but a more visceral reward drives the point home.  Thus, you use meta-game concepts not as “punishment and reward” but as a way of aligning player motivation with character motivation.  Things like “Well, you can violate your Code of Honor, that’s ok, but you’ll lose XP if you do,” or “If you punch that guy in the face, I’ll give you a Willpower point due to your Wrath vice.”  Then the PC is given a choice: What matters more to him?  What does he need?  Is he willing to swim against the stream of his own nature, or will he succumb to his baser (or habitual) nature?  Then it becomes a choice, an interesting choice, and that improves the game.

“A special trait of the organic game is that: “The world does not revolve around you”, in fact it doesn’t revolve around anyone.”

 I talked about this a little above when I discussed prep-work and not tracking every NPC all the time: the story does, in fact, revolve around the PCs.

Now, let’s take a quick step back.  Note that Justin does not use that phrasing.  He never said “the story does not revolve around you,” just that the world does not.  This was, in fact, a key point of Slaughter City: There was the world of vampires, which rather revolved around the PCs, and the mortal world, which totally did not.  I explicitly set out to give the vampires the impression that the daylight world had dramatic things happening when they weren’t around.  Boyfriend and girlfriend would break up while the vampires slept.  Cute mechanic girls would be kidnapped during the day while the vampires could do nothing about it.  Votes were tallied and politicians elected during the day.  Vampires would sleep, wake, and find the world changed with them unable to do anything about it.  The mortal world moved on.  I even went so far as to use different sorts of descriptive elements when among mortals than when among vampires, to give the impression that players were walking from one world to another.

But the game itself must center on the players.  Ultimately, because of your human limitations, you’re weaving an illusion.  Since you can’t track everything, you’ll want to track the things the players interact with the most (or you’ll go crazy).  It’s a bit like quantum uncertainty: When the players are looking at a part of your world, you bring it into sharp focus.  When the players aren’t looking at a part of the world, it’s fuzzy, uncertain and hand-waved.

But more importantly, the players just don’t give a shit about stuff that doesn’t interest with them (I mean, it’s tautalogical).  The more attention you focus on things the players don’t care about, the less attention you’re focusing on things that they do care about.  And since your world must be large to accomodate all this sandboxing, there’s always far more stuff the players aren’t interested in than what they are interested in.  A practice where everything is given equal attention means that you’re spending more of your time dealing with things the players don’t enjoy than the things they do enjoy.

The nature of a sandbox is in its possibilities.  We create all this material because we don’t know where the players will go, and to accomodate where they might want to go.  This remains as true ten sessions in as it did in the first session, thus it is worth your while to pay SOME attention to the other elements.  In Slaughter City, nobody did shit with the Clarks, but that doesn’t mean they never would.  Thus it’s worth my time to keep them up to date and watch over them, but it would be a waste of my time to give them as much attention as I was giving the Devlins or to Granya.

Finally, a world that doesn’t give a shit about the PCs sounds a little too much like the real world, and we game to get away from the real world, not to recreate it in miniature.  Oh, sure, we value realism, but we value drama and verisimilitude more.  Thus, ultimately, you’ll want to track things not with an eye towards how it would really go, but towards an eye on how it will impact the players.  You can say “It doesn’t revolve around the players” as much as you want, but ultimately, it should.

Let me go back to Jack Devlin: His uncle has just been killed.  The DA declares it a robbery gone horribly wrong, has some guy arrested as a fall guy, the pieces don’t all fit, but the case is closed.  Jack attends the funeral and then he… what?  Realistically, he should simply appreciate the fact that the world is a safer place.  Realistically, people overlook crimes all the time.  Realistically, he has his own career to worry about, plus a budding relationship with Granya.  He could just shrug his shoulders and move on.  But he could obsess on it.  The missing pieces to the puzzle could really bother him.  His sense of family could push him to investigate what’s really going on, potentially alienating Granya and upsetting her greatly, and bringing him closer, inch by inch, to the reality of vampires.  Both are potentially realistic, but which impacts the players more?  The latter.  So we choose that.

“The purpose behind Organic Games is that there is no railroading”

This is a mistake.  Oh, well, let’s start with a good definition first: If we use “railroading” to mean “You vill follow my story, unt you vill like it!” then no, it’s not a mistake to argue against railroading, but this sort of railroading is so despised that it’s practically a strawman.  If we instead use “railroading” to mean GM-driven plot, rather than PC-driven plot (as in “Then this happens to you, then this,”), then I have to disagree.  There should be railroading, at least some.

See, players are idiots.  GMs are idiots too, but they do their homework. They’ve got gobs of notes, they know the setting and they take the time to work up material hours in advance of the session.  Players don’t.  They usually couldn’t, even if they wanted to, and generally they see it as a form of entertainment.  Frankly, you’re lucky that they remember their character sheet and dice, and you’re even luckier if you can extract a background from them.

The greatest mistake I constantly see sandboxers make is the “So what do you do?” line.  So you’re in Metzgerburg.  What do you do?

“I dunno,” replies the PC, “What can I do?”

“Anything you want!” says the GM, terribly excited, looking at all the potential in his story.

“Uh…. I watch TV?”

And then the game begins to go downhill from there.

But there’s a solution to this. Think back on most of the successful sandboxing computer games you’ve seen, like GTA or the Elder Scrolls.  They give you a whole world to play with, but they give you an introduction to the world first.  You’re on rails at the start, looking around, seeing what the GM has laid out for you, getting an idea of the world.  In Slaughter City, the players had to fight Belial’s Brood and bring a gift of a handsome young vessel to the Prince.  These two things dragged the characters along for a session or two, but as the players became more and more familiar with the world, they had more and more things they wanted to do, and at this point, the sandbox kicks in.  Then you sit back and let them do what they want to do.

“So, you just finished fighting the monster and rescuing the cute mechanic girl from its evil clutches.  Now you need to…”

“Oh, I was hoping to revisit that one guy we met the other day.”

“…Oh really?  Ok then.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure!  So, how do you want to do this?  Just walk up to his door and knock?”

“Well, actually I had this idea…”

And then we’re off!  The idea of the “rails” is something I call sparking: like striking flint and iron over tinder, you’re working again and again to light the fire of your player’s imaginations. Once you’ve got it lit, you still need to toss elements onto the fire every once in awhile to keep it going, but once they’re off, you can sit back and enjoy the ride.  However, getting their imagination lit in the first place is a lot of work, and that starts with a more traditional “mission-oriented” style of play.  Once the players begin to buck the rails… you let them because your rails accomplished all they needed to, and you can  let them rust.


“I’m pro-making mistakes. My favorite thing about RPGs is that I allowed to make mistakes without the severe consequences of the real world. In a Table-Top-RPG I get to do it in a fabulous, catastrophic, tragic, poignant and sometimes gonzo way.”

Yes.  The advantage of a sandbox game is that it’s fault-tolerant.  If the players murder your villain, well, you weren’t too invested in that storyline anyway and even if you are, you have other characters that can take his place.  Justin isn’t wrong, it’s just that his idea could use some refinement.

TL; DR:

• Sandboxing is great for all the reasons Justin outlines.
• You can and should still use scripts to get the players up and running.  After that, let them play until they run out of ideas, then go back to scripts if necessary.
• Use methods that save you work, not create more.  Don’t track anything unnecessary.
• The world may not revolve around the players, but the story does.
• Use meta-game traits to create difficult choices, not punish or reward role-playing.

My GM Merit Badges

Found a neat idea here, and I thought I’d share my own philosophy here.

My games have combat, and I reward clever play whenever I can, and I will attempt to use clever tactics against you as well.

Part of the above is a love of player wit over character capability.  I do think character stats matter, but more as a tool for the player than as an iron writ about how someone should play.

My game, my rules.  It’s very important, for the above, that the rules remain consistent, but in the heat of the moment, I’ll improvise before I look something up in the book.

Ultimately, I’m trying to create an interesting story.  I feel the tactics and the player-actions will feed into that to create something special, but they are secondary to this concern (hence why some dice fudging does happen).

Part and parcel of writing that interesting story is feeling larger than life.  After all, we RP to escape, right?  I do love some deep simulationism, but I’d rather run a game about epic romances and tragic failures than the banality of evil (though that can have its appeal at times).

Because really, at the end of the day, this is about you.  It’s about an amazing exploration of people, and how they interact with one another, how they love and how they die.  It’s not enough to fight, you need a reason to fight, and that means relationships, and relationships mean drama.

But I like really dark themes, often very disempowering themes.  I can enjoy the “walking barefoot over broken glass” phase a little too much.  I tame it as best as I can, but it’ll leak out eventually.  You can’t really get the most out of my games if you’re easily bothered by certain themes.

Wabi-Sabi

Probably one of the most neglected elements of storycraft is that of theme.  People love to talk about characters, settings and plots, but they often neglect to discuss or decide what a story is really about, or what it’s really driving at.  I’m guilty of this too: Why worry about what a story is about when I’m in love with characters or a particular setting element?  But even so, I’ve found that themes serve as a strong foundation for a game, helping to shape my characters, my plots and my sessions.

If I had to pick a single, driving theme for Cherry Blossom Rain, it would be that of wabi-sabi.  The sentiment is similar to the Western concepts of “Seize the day!” or “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” but decidedly less uninhibited or optimistic.  Wabi-sabi is noticing a wrinkle on a beautiful, young woman’s face and seeing a hint of the grandmother she is to become.  It’s watching the autumn leaves fall from a tree.  It’s noting the ding on your favorite sword and finding that it has more character now.

Part of wabi-sabi is noting the effect time has on things.  Cherry Blossom Rain has a deep background: The legendary blades aren’t just magical, but they have stories.  The clans and this war was already in motion.  Many games treat the history of a setting as a sort of eternity: The good king has always ruled the righteous kingdom, the evil empire has always threatened the freedom of the world, orcs have always rampaged at the borders.  If there is history, it happened thousands of years go.  In Cherry Blossom Rain, it happened yesterday, and it’s still in motion.  The players find themselves not in an eternally unchanging world, but in a world that was the result of heaps and heaps of small changes over time, and that’s changing still, changing around them and changing with them whether they want it or not.

But the main thing most people take away from wabi-sabi is the concept of fleeting beauty, the knowledge that you might have seen something beautiful, something worth cherishing, and now it is forever gone.  I’ve tried to steep my game with this notion: My game is not an endless parade of samey duels, but distinct moments that the players will never be able to get back.  First, wild adventures through the sinister Kamurocho and a unique opportunity to serve tea to their enemies and get to know them better.  Then, a moment of camaraderie in a hot springs.  Now, they stand on the precipice of war, frantically sharing their last moments with the ones they love, struggling to preserve what they have, knowing that tomorrow it’ll all be gone.  I’ve complained before that my game has slowed to a glacial pace, and it’s not because the players have nothing to do, but because they’re doing so much.  Part of this, I think, comes from their growing awareness of the how fleeting the moment is.  They’re grabbing onto these last few days and holding on tight, because tomorrow their beloved NPCs won’t be there.  They might not be there.  Raoul in particular feels this keenly, as he sees himself as the most likely to die on Sword Mountain. Even the name “Cherry Blossom Rain” speaks to the concept of wabi-sabi, because I’m explicitly trying to evoke the image of cherry blossoms falling from trees, a moment of beauty caught just as it ends.

I really can’t think of a better medium to show the principle of wabi-sabi than in a role-playing game.  A picture freezes the moment forever.  A recording or a video can be played over and over again.  But nobody will ever have a chance to play Cherry Blossom Rain again, not this way, not with these people, not this story.  It’s behind us and done, a stream of fleeting moments, enjoyed and now cherished, but forever gone.  I find this the most poignant element of role-playing: My art is an art that’s lost as soon as its shown.  No matter how wonderful a session, future generations will never have a chance to marvel at it the way they might marvel at one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings.  In that, a session’s beauty is even greater precisely because of its fragility, the very essence of wabi-sabi.

Historical Gaming

The inestimable Kenneth Hite has an interview wherein he discusses how to research for a historical game, and the benefits of such game.  I find he puts into words many of my own thoughts.  So if you’re interested in historical gaming, or just history in general, you can listen to it here.

Cherry Blossom Rain: Session 2 and the yips

Do you know what the yips are?  It’s when someone who’s really good at something, usually sports, suddenly loses his touch.  A perfect pitcher suddenly throws homers, a wide receiver suddenly can’t catch, and so on.  When I was in highschool, I had the yips really badly in my summer year: I went from one of the best discus throwers on my team to the guy who literally couldn’t get a throw out of the ring at a single competition.  It was terrible, and to this day, I don’t know what I was doing wrong.

I’ve found myself wondering if I’d have the yips as a GM lately.  Some of my players will look at me like I’m mad, but the truth is, I’m certain my WoD: Witchcraft game wasn’t great, and my WotG game wasn’t what I wanted it to be.  I know the techniques, and I can talk the talk, but I find myself wondering if, perhaps, I’ve lost the ability to walk the walk.  On the one hand, it might be absurdly high expectations: I want all my games to be “great” while greatness is ultimately subjective (Most people will agree when something is bad, or when it’s good, but greatness goes a little beyond that, and it’s often in the eyes of the beholder), and so when I fail to get a jump up-and-down reaction from my more experienced players, I feel like I’m doing something wrong, when I’m probably not.  So perhaps it’s in my head.

Well, if I had the yips, they’re gone now.  I hit every note I needed to in this last session, and more than that, I proved to myself that the techniques I’ve been studying have been paying off.

First, I’ve felt for some time that if you have sufficient advanced material, that prepping and planning the game itself should be relatively easy.  Now, while I had plenty of time to put this game together, I procrastinated (as I usually do when my focus is elsewhere), and ended up spending 30 minutes right writing out some thoughts I’d had the other night before I zipped off to the game.  Despite my almost complete lack of preparation, I still had a really good game.

The players started off in the Kurosawa Castle, guests of Ren and Lord Kurosawa again.  I reintroduced Sano (rudely), and then brought the characters together.  Hitting the high points:

• After seeing a doctor for his wounds, Kenta (Raoul) went to train with Yudai and then (spectacularly) lost a duel to Yoshiro, the Senshin Swordmaster.  Sakura (Maartje) also practiced with Yoshiro, but was too busy fluttering her eyelashes at him and blushing to actually fight, and lost twice.  
• Meanwhile, Yukiko (Desiree) slipped and fell while waking down the hallway and smacked her face against a wall while alone with Ren.  It totally happened! (It did!  Desiree had been cursed by the “Mud Girl” as she keeps calling her (she’s noted down in my notes as “the Witch of Jukai”), and so I made her take a “Walking down the hallway” roll, at DX +10, and then used the curse to turn her success into a failure and give her a point of damage).  Naturally, nobody believed her, so Shinji, resident Nice Guy of the Mitsurugi Dragon Guard flew to her defense and was going to challenge Ren before Kenta socked him in the face and told him not to screw up negotiations.  It’s good to be Daimyo, I suppose.
• Yamato (Hugo) negotiated an alliance with Lord Kurosawa in the face of Tsao Bei (evil Chinese diplomat!), who brought Dark Shota and the Executioner with him.  In addition to agreeing to give Lord Kurosawa some important position in the future shogunate, he also arranged to marry someone to his youngest son (Sano).
• Desiree decided to have a tea ceremony, so obviously everyone had to come.  She got to play dress up (Fashion Sense gives a +1 reaction modifier if you dress yourself or others well, and I required descriptions.  She was more than happy to oblige), and she even made Kyo look really pretty.  At the Tea Ceremony
• Someone tried to poison Yoshiro, but Ren protected him.
• Kenta agreed to marry Kyo to Sano, much to her dismay.
• Yoshiro reacted… passionately to this revelation, leading Sakura to suspect that he was in love with Kyo, must to her dismay (Sakura’s dismay, not Kyo, we don’t know how Kyo feels about that, she was too busy freaking out about being married off).
• There was much drama.
• That night, ninjas attacked!  Fortunately, Kenta, Sakura, and Senshin no Oni (!) showed up to defend him.  Senshin no Oni revealed that Tsao Bei was attempting to grievously wound the swordmaster, knowing that the Senshin would never leave him behind and it would slow down their movement.  He also revealed what he had learned while prowling the city, giving them some clues on where they might find Kimiko.
• Desiree found the carefully preserved bedroom of Akane, Ren’s older sister who was executed for treason against the emperor.  When he discovered her, he wasn’t angry, as his servants expected, merely very sad, and asked her to play her samisen for her.  She agreed.

Naturally, I’m leaving out some of the details.  A few important things came out of this session.  First, I’ve been trying to explain the importance of beauty and elegance in the setting, but this session served as an excellent demonstration of that, with a sudden focus on Desiree’s tea ceremony skills, her make-up skills, her fashion sense, and Maartje’s calligraphy, and everyone’s savoir-faire (only Kenta screwed up his roll).  Second, I wanted this game to very much be an exploration of Japanese culture, and Hugo’s demonstration of tea ceremonies for the rest of us did a good job at that. Finally, I’ve taken Walter’s sage advice to heart.  You see, I’m terribly fond of having multiple, interwoven stories and that often involves separate scenes for each character.  This can have wonderful results, but as he once said “Dan, your stories are great to watch, but they’re even more fun to interact with.”  I made a point of allowing anyone to jump in on anyone else’s scene, and the result was that you got crossover much faster while nobody lost their moment in the spotlight.  You could see the multiple threads and interact with them, which I think partially explains the success of the session.

What stuck out to me was the interaction I had with the players.  Normally, you don’t see players this invested in characters and storylines until midway through the campaign.  This campaign shows the dividends of my work to make sure that I can have “maximum impact in minimum sessions,” and I thought I had failed (it turns out that there’s a certain “minimum” players need to grasp what the hell is going on), but clearly, I hadn’t.  I can’t stuff “the feel” of a full campaign into a single session, but apparently I can reach that point in two.  Raoul argues that it’s because I have an all-star cast of players, and that’s certainly a contribution.  Raoul himself, for example, has deeply studied my setting and my characters and is highly invested in the game, and Desiree is used to falling into character for one-shot LARPs, but I’d like to think that the work I’ve put into the setting helped.

Once, during the development of 4e, a D&D designer invited his wife to sit in on a D&D playtest and watch.  He asked her opinion, and she said “It looks like 4 hours of work for 30 minutes of fun.”  I’ve been trying for a long time to improve that ratio, so players don’t feel like they have to slog through 4 hours of crap to have a little fun at the end.  After I realized that we’d played for 4 hours and I’d only had 30 minutes of prep, I commented to Bee “I had 4 hours of work that only cost me 30 minutes of work.” 🙂

I think the lessons learned here are clear: Pick your players and match them well to your game.  All the work you do in advance will save you work in the long run, and the fact that I can simply run with little to no prep means I’m not stressed before the session.  Allow PCs to interact with one another, and encourage them to stay in the vicinity of one another so that they can do so.

This is what I wanted from my sessions, and now my players can see where I’m going with it.  And it passed the “player gab” test, since people were apparently chatting about it the next day.  Cherry Blossom Rain has officially taken flight.

Just a shame that Rene and Raymond couldn’t be there to see it… on the other hand, they were sold on the game in session 0. 🙂

Subtext and the Art of Painting Without Words

Let me begin with two stories.

Recently, I turned my Arts of Rhetoric posts into actual lessons at recent Tea@Knights, which turned out to be quite popular.  Marco, in particular, enjoyed it.  He told me that he’d long had a dissatisfaction with how flat some scenes felt, and had begun (without knowing it) practicing elements I discussed, like “Show, don’t tell,” and “Active Voice,” only he called it “Painting with Words.”  Like me, he felt that showing people the world on a visceral level was a vital element of running a good game, that you had to let people see what the dungeon looked like, and that it wasn’t enough to tell them about it.

Further back, back at the Summer Weekend, returning to Desiree’s Steampunk Gypsies, I had another interesting experience, though it had little to do with Desiree herself.  I played this conservative, rugged gypsy with a horse, who (obviously) fell in love with a dancer gypsy.  Of course, he never claimed to be in love.  He worried too much about his kin to take the time to romance this beautiful girl. Instead, he taught her to ride horses, revealed his dream of rebuilding a whole herd of gypsy steeds, and worked on getting his brothers married while ignoring his own needs.  Every player could see that my character and she were madly in love, but neither of them admitted it, neither of them actually said those words.

In contrast, we had another player, and I’m not condemning his approach, merely highlighting the difference, who played a suave, sexy gypsy dancer-boy, who tried to sweep this innocent and younger girl off her feet.  After a dance, he said (and I quote), “I tell her, without sounding like some middle school kid, that I like her.”

Both of these stories touch on the truth that a story is about showing people what’s going on, rather than telling them.  In the first romance, we showed the audience everything they would see: awkward moments between two passionate people, the way a proud man refused to admit his need but still cast longing glances at the beautiful girl, or the way she tried to dance for him even while dancing with another man, or the way watching her dance with another man made him lose his concentration while playing his guitar.  In the second romance, the storyteller informs the audience “Hey, these two people are in love.”  Personally, I agree with Marco, and I prefer the former approach to the latter.  I feel it’s better to show, rather than tell.

While discussing description, Jozef touched on this very thing when he said “How to do you make something scary without saying that it’s scary?”  One of the key elements of Marco’s “Painting with Words” is that you don’t come out and say what things are.  Instead, you let the player draw his own conclusion.  When you describe a man as “Looming,” and “Dark eyed,” with a “sinister smile,” you don’t need to say “And he’s scary.”  The player is capable of deciding that for himself, and his scariness is rather obvious, if you paint the right picture.

But this applies to broader concepts as well.  When you begin to discuss situations, you can do so without saying “And this is going on.”  You can simply outline events: A boy brings a girl flowers, a bright smile on his face.  A girl laughs, covering her mouth.  The flowers end up on the ground, petals broken and drifting on the wind as the boy walks away.  The girl’s laughter fades as she watches him walk away, tears glistening in her eyes.  We don’t know what happened.  We can guess.  We might want to know more, but it’s more interesting than saying “A boy thought a girl loved him, and she did, but she feels they cannot be together and so broke his heart to chase him away.”

People like games.  People are clever.  You don’t explain the punchline of a joke to them, you let them ferret out the implications of your words.  Likewise, you don’t start the murder mystery by explaining whodunnit.  You don’t even point out the clues.  You let the reader realize what’s important and what isn’t and then put together the truth.  People don’t want to be told that two people are in love.  They want to see it, they want to guess, they want to gossip based on events.  People want to exercise their brains.  In many ways, the whole point of role-playing games is the art of turning abstract situations (“Three medieval warriors face ten ravening monsters under the ground.  What happens?”) into an immersive scenario where players lose themselves in what’s going on.

And that requires less, not more.  Sometimes, what you don’t say is more important than what you do.  Sometimes, you must paint without words.  Leave things unsaid, unspoken, and merely imply them with your silence.  Rather than show people something, refuse to talk about it and create powerful implications by describing everything around it.  Just as a tough, lone-wolf guy might never admit he’s in love, you might never actually describe the feelings involved and let the players guess (Oh, in WotG, we had one of those great, unspoken romances and the player in question was so angry when our Secret-Art-wielding Scholar tried to force them to talk about it…).  Leave gaps, and let the players fill it in with their own imagination and speculation while smiling and listening.

Real life doesn’t hand you answers.  It merely has events you witness, often without proper context.  The closer a role-playing game is to real life, the more immersive it is.  The next time you want to run a romance, I encourage you to not describe the feelings of those involved and merely imply them based on their actions.  The next time you run a horror, consider refusing the describe the monster beyond the evidence he leaves behind (the gashes in the victims, the sickly sweet smell that foreshadows his attacks).  Remember to show, rather than tell, and remember that some things you neither show nor tell, that you leave unsaid, that you merely imply with everything else.

Subtext.  Painting without words.

The Art of Storytelling Part 2: Rhetorical Techniques

We’ve already talked about what to say in our previous Art of Storytelling, but how you say it is as important as what you say.  The Art of Storytelling is essentially the same as other forms of public speaking, other forms of rhetoric.  An effective politician’s speech uses the same techniques you should to capture your audience’s attention, to hold their fascination, to carry them along with your words and bring them to a new world of your devising.  Proper storytelling is a form of physical performance.  Your players listen to you, like an audience listens to a musician, but they also watch you, the way an audience watches an actor.  Done properly, storytelling becomes a multimedia presentation that engages several of your audience’s senses at once.

Allow me to illustrate.  At a recent Tea@Knight, we had a discussion of mysteries. The presenter sat in a far corner of the room, his shoulders hunched, his head low, and his tone rushed and mumbled.  The listeners in the room sat awkwardly, looking at one another, unengaged and even whispering among themselves about other topics.  When the presenter ran out of material, he essentially called out for help and I took over.  I already sat in the center of the room, and it didn’t take much for my low, loud voice to capture the attention of the players.  Most people I know I have a lot of “presence” and “charisma,” and those quickly turned the night into a productive one.  But “presence” and “charisma” are meaningless words that refer to a skill at speech and rhetoric, an understanding of how to capture an audience’s attention.  I have no innate characteristics that help me in this regard (other than my height and the physical strength of my voice), just skill and understanding.  The fumbling presenter in question could perform just as well as I did, with practice.

Rule 1: Command Attention


You can’t tell a story if nobody is listening to you, period.  Gamers are an unruly bunch at the best of times, quoting geeky films, chatting with one another, interrupting the game with jokes and so on.  Allowed to run its course, most of these well-intentioned interruptions will ruin the game, eventually.  However, if you learn to command attention properly, the distractions will fade away until you have a table of players who fixate their attention almost exclusively on you, and they’ll become lost in your imaginary world space, which is exactly what you want.

Occupy the physical center of attention.  If you sit on the edge of the room, out of eyeshot, then people won’t know to look at you.  They’ll naturally look elsewhere.  We’ve already talked about how powerful a human’s sense of sight is.  As they say, out of mind.  Your players will find their train of thought wandering if you don’t anchor it.  I personally prefer to either sit in a unique chair (if everyone else is on the couch, I sit on the recliner), or at the head of the table, and I as well as several other GMs I know, prefer to stand when we really want to occupy the players’ attention.  Looking up at the one guy standing in the center of their field of view really holds their attention fast.  Some other GMs use alternate tricks, like flashy GM screens, artwork, or video, and these work too, but be careful that they don’t distract from you or the story you’re trying to tell.

Your posture matters.  Hunched shoulders, a stiff body and lowered head suggests that you don’t want people looking at you, so they won’t.  Sit upright or stand tall.  Lift your head and your chin slightly.  Tighten your belly and straighten your spine as though balancing a book on the top of your head.  In addition to improving your height, a tight belly and straight posture improves your breathing and the power of your voice. Also, such a stance suggests confidence, and a good GM must project a sense of leadership and confidence, because the players don’t know what’s going on and expect you to, and also because pretending to be elves in a forest is a little silly, but if the guy leading such a game doesn’t blink once at the silliness, the other players will set aside their embarrassment and play more forthrightly.

Nothing grabs someone attention like eye-contact.  Someone looking into the eyes of someone else is intense, but even looking at someone grabs their attention.  Hiding behind your GM screen, reading off a description is basically the worst thing you can do because you’re not looking at the players.  Lift your eyes, look directly at the player to whom the description is most pertinent, and you’ll find his eyes fixate on you in return.  But don’t let a few players dominate your attention (the danger of a pretty girl and a weakness of mine, I must admit).  Spread that attention around.  Every time a player realizes you’re looking at him, he’ll look back at you, and you’ll recapture his attention.

So, you’re standing tall, looking at your players, occupying their attention.  Well done!  But remember that running a game is a touch different than simply telling a story or giving a speech.  Here, your audience participates with you, so you must learn to pass that attention from yourself to other players.  Your actions bring the players into the game, setting the scene, and gathering all of their attention into a single place.  Ideally, every player should invest their attention in you.  Then, when it’s someone else’s turn, you have only to  gesture to them, passing the baton, and all the players, as one, will turn to this other player.  Your ability to gather attention becomes your ability to gather attention for someone else.  Eye contact is important here too, not just to gain the attention of another player, but to see who is bored, or (more importantly) who is particularly engaged and wants to say something.  If you’re in the midst of a description when suddenly you notice one of the players squirming in your seat, you can stop and point to them and say “What do you want to do?”

Rule 2: Pace your speech appropriately


Once you have your player’s attention, you can tell the story you want, but how you tell it shapes their perception of it.  A mumbling monotone loses your players not just because they cannot hear you properly, but because a monotone fails to engage them.  We must speak with vigor and emotion, and we must vary our tone.  Doing so will not only engage our players better, but the pace and style of our speech can give the players additional information and manipulate their mood to better suit the tone of the scene.  Music does something similar, and we’ll use music as a metaphor for how one can tone and pace ones voice for best effect.

A normal pace, the one you’d use in everyday conversation, is generally informative and neutral in tone.  Such a conversational tone tells your players that the information you give them is casual and not particularly important, such as discussing the weather or what one ate yesterday.  This doesn’t mean that it’s a poor choice or that it shouldn’t be used.  It serves as the baseline for your story and represents common situations. A description of a homey tavern or an unimportant character (or just about anything that isn’t urgent or emotionally charged) might be done in a conversational tone.

Music often uses a slow, legato (a musical term meaning flowing and without breaks, like the sort of sound one might associate with a violin) pace to emphasize tragedy or sadness.  Very emotionally charged and depressing scenes should match that pacing.  Sit back, take on a serious expression and then slowly, flowing describe the terrible, tragic events.  The time you take to explain each painful detail resembles the slow, panning shots of a camera, lingering on each element.  This pace also works very well for romantic scenes, and you’ll notice many love songs have a similar pacing and tone.

Music often uses a fast, staccato (a musical term meaning sharp and short, like the snap of a drum) pace to emphasize happiness and excitement.  The rapid patter suggests a bounciness.  It’s fun, it’s quick, la la la WHEE!  This pacing is ideal for comedy, and you’ll notice many comedians have a rapid patter punctuated with awkward pauses.  It’s also good for parties, flirtation, or anything that is enjoyably exciting without relaxing the players (as a normal, conversational tone would do).

A fast, legato pace is the bread and butter of rock-and-roll, with wailing guitars, howling singers and a very quick pace.  This is the tone of dramatic excitement, danger, epic drama.  You describe war and duels quickly and breathlessly, with few pauses and little time for the players to stop and think.  Every moment flows into the next.  This is a powerful rhetorical style, especially for role-playing games as combat tends to dominate RPGs, and the worst thing most novice GMs do for battle, in my opinion, is sitting back and letting players think.  Keeping up a rapid, fluid patter will enhance the sense of excitement, reminding the players that they battle for their lives.

A slow, staccato pace is very powerful, pronounced and majestic.  You often hear it in national anthems or other regal songs or, in a minor key, in horror movie soundtracks. Rhetorically, slow, pronounced words punctuated with pauses emphasize every word, like the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy (“Best. Example. Ever.”).  You can use it to simply emphasize what you’re saying, to suddenly grab the player’s attention, to show them something in startling clarity, but it also builds tension.  Use it when you want something to be stately or horrifying.

Real mastery comes not just from understanding these five paces, but using them in conjunction with one another to create a narrative not just with words, but with the pace of your voice.  A scene begins in a conversational tone as you describe the circumstances, casually and at a normal pace, when suddenly! Enemies attack, a battle described in a a faster, legato manner that keeps the players on their tone, words flowing together as you rapidly string them together.  But the players are winning!  You describe their victory in short bursts!  They’re happy!  They’re going to survive!  Then… horror… of… horrors!  A valued NPC… struck down… and your words slow, punctuate each moment, in a staccato manner, as though the battle itself slows… as though the players… gain clarity.  And then… you slowly blend your words together as the players bow their head to respectfully send their ally off to the great beyond, a terrible loss for everyone involved.

Likewise, using the wrong pacing for the scene can be interesting too.  An NPC who uses a clinical, conversational tone to describe a murder instantly implies to the players that he’s crazy and that he doesn’t see murder the same way he does.  Describing something utterly mudane (like button collecting) in a slow and stately manner to exaggerate its importance can suggest that someone takes something a little too seriously, and so on.

Rule 3: Gesture for emphasis

People don’t sit around, arms at their side, face rigidly forward telling their story.  Even if you do all of the above, unless you move, unless you prove to your players that you’re alive, your story will come across as stiff and unreal, just like you do.  People like motion.  We’re conditioned to react to it. It attracts our attention.  Moreover, people naturally move when they speak.  They nod, they smile, they wave their hands around.  You need to do the same.

Gestures, by and large, break down into two broad categories.  First, you have the descriptive gesture.  A descriptive gesture shows the audience what you mean.  When a guy crudely describes a shapely woman, his hands outline her figure, for example, or when someone is describing a friend’s tendency to drink too much, he might mime a drinking motion with his hand.  Of the two forms of gestures, this is the most important for role-playing.  You need to show your players how things look, or where they lie in respect to their characters by pointing our outlining.  You can also show characters how the NPCs react by imitating their expressions and actions.  A shy girl would huddle up and bring her hands to her face, so you can do the same.  A big, dumb barbarian would sprawl out with a big sloppy grin on his face, so you can do the same.  Show the players your world through your hands.

The second kind of gestures emphasizes what you say.  These are abstract gestures not meant to show the players something, but to attract their attention and add a little something to what you’re saying.  When you’re using a legato pace, keep your hands low and roll them, like you’re unspooling your speech.  When you’re using a staccato pace, point and jab to emphasize your points and drive them home.  You don’t need to constantly do this, only at the moments that matter the most, since the motion attracts your audiences attention.

Be careful that you don’t distract from what you’re saying.  If you point in a direction, players will tend to look in that direction… which might mean they’re not looking at you anymore.  You might want that if you want to emphasize the beauty of a grand scene, or if you want to draw the player’s attention away from you and towards another player.  Likewise, being excessively animated might make players wonder if you’re nervous, and they’ll begin to notice the gestures rather than focus on the words they’re meant to emphasize.  Use gestures when you need them. Don’t be afraid to neglect them during scenes or moments that demand emphasis.

Gestures should come naturally.  People use gestures when speaking with their friends.  People tend to lose them when giving speeches because they are nervous.  Stagefright is a natural response to being put on the spot, which a GM is, but you have to set it aside.  I often suggest that people plan extensively not because they need to plan, but because I know such planning tends to relieve nerves, and a relaxed GM is one that uses gestures effectively.  More than anything, focus on relaxing and growing comfortable at the front of the table, so your gestures come naturally.

If you watch me when I run a game or when I give a talk, you’ll note I use these three rules, often without noticing it.  Most skilled GMs do.  Practice them, and you’ll have the same “charisma” or “presence” that I do: the ability to keep your players’ attention and draw them into a world, not just with what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it.

The Art of Storytelling Part 1: Dynamic Description and Active Voice

Some of my fans (I have fans!) have prodded me because, after my initial burst of posting, I haven’t said anything, so perhaps its time to take some of the thoughts floating around in my head and put them to paper.  So to speak.

Different people run games differently, and I won’t complain about that fact.  Role-playing is a craft, not a science, and so multiple approaches can certainly lead to success.  However, I do think role-playing does contain within it certain, immutable gospels, certain approaches that are inherently superior to others, and proper storytelling is one of them.  When I use the term “storytelling,” I’m not using it in some pretentious manner that suggests such noxious memes as “role-play, not roll-play.”  Nor am I discussing the art of storycraft, though the art of putting together a proper plot is certainly a worthy topic. No, I mean the actual art of exposition, the art of telling the tale, communicating the scene and the world to your players.  Role-playing games lie at the nexus of social activity, wargame, and storytelling, and you need all three to succeed… but I want to note that while a good system can cover your weaknesses as a referee and wargamer, no system will cover a lack of skill in communication, in painting a picture.  So, that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

(I’m a Raven at the Knights of the Kitchen Table, one of the “mentor” gamemasters who guides other novice gamemasters and improves them.  This blog post will likely turn into a future Tea@Knight topic, so don’t be surprised if you these words later).

I know some people treat RPGs as an extension of a board-game.  They focus exclusively on mechanics in the abstract, and they roleplay by outlining basic scenarios and then stating their response.  I cannot countenance this approach.  I can understand it as a way of understanding how the mechanics work or when playtesting, but for actually playing a game, I believe a certain level of immersion is necessary.  As proof, I point to the enormous success of multi-media games over their text-based counterparts, or the success of movies and comic books over literature (and the success of vividly written literature over beige prose).  People are sensual creatures, and we can only enjoy abstract discussions so deeply before they lose their power to compel our hearts and minds.  If you disagree, then the rest of his post will do nothing for you.

I find that, in fact, most people agree with me.  When a GM lacks vivid description, it is typically not a question of philosophy, but a question of skill.  How does one go about describing things?  How does one translate the visions in one’s head into poetic words at the tabletop?

First, one must have a vision to translate.  Your output can only be as good as your input.  You must feed your creativity.  Step outside of your role-playing books for a moment and feast on the world around you.  Have you ever walked in a forest, felt the mossy texture of the ground beneath you or spelled that earthy scent, or scene the way the shadows of the canopy shifts on the forest floor?  Do you know that smell that comes in autumn, that chilly, sharp scent of coming snow?  Have you ever listened to the click of a woman’s heels, or the murmur of conversation in a bar?  Many authors spend time just sitting in public places, scribbling notes on the people they see in passing, on the sights and smells around them.  I personally recommend watching movies, anime, TV shows, and hunting for art on the internet.  I include pictures in my NPC gallery precisely to inspire people with different looks than they might normally consider.  By absorbing all this detail, all this sensual beauty, when it comes time to conjure a scene, your well-fed imagination will be up to the task.  And you’ll need to repeat this again and again.  Most writers say that if you want to write, you must read a great deal. I say that the same applies, in principle, to GMs.

So, you have an image in your mind.  You can see the character or the scene that you want to describe, but how do you translate that into something you can explain to the players in a way that will fascinate them, bring them on board with your inner fantasy world?  Let’s break a scene down, a serving girl at a tavern (a common sight in most fantasy games).

The strongest human sense is sight.  We think in color and images, and even when we tell others to imagine a scene, we say things like “Can you picture it?”  So, what sights do we see?  What colors might a tavern girl have?  Perhaps a spray of red hair, or her soft green dress, or her equally green eyes, the tan of her skin with a hint of freckles, the blush of her cheeks and the cherry-red of her lips.  What about shapes?  Perhaps she is tall, rounded in the right places, with her long skirt obscuring the outline of her legs, but her corset bring her rounded cleavage into view, and her hair curls and bounces.  What about light and shadow?  Perhaps her eyes sparkle, her lips gleam, and the perspiration on her brow glistens.  Does she cast a shadow over the players, or does her skin glow?  Remember, by the way, that light comes from someplace.  Perhaps her eyes glint in the light of the fireplaces.  Perhaps her eyes reflect the candlelight of the room.

So we have sight, but humans have four other senses, often neglected by novice game masters.  What about sound?  What does her voice sound like?  Perhaps she laughs like the tinkling of bells.  Maybe her skirt swishes around her long legs and a small set of bells jangle around her bare feet as they whisper across the sawdust floor.  What about touch?  Touch is a highly erotic sense, so most people neglect it out of fear of sounding a little dirty, but texture and temperature matter and can be dealt with delicately.  Perhaps her dress is coarse but her skin soft.  Perhaps she is warm when she brushes past a player.  Finally, we have smell and taste, which I bundle together for simplicity.  Everyone forgets these, but they matter a great deal, for smell strongly affects our sense of memory.  If you can remind someone of a scent, you bring them there more strongly than any other sense.  Thus, how might she smell?  Perhaps she has the scent of clean, feminine sweat from a hard-days work, with a hint of the kitchen’s scents clinging to her clothes, and her hair smells of soap and flowers.

Finally, importantly, we must remember that this girl is alive.  She moves, she interacts with people, and we must present the illusion of her existence convincingly.  Perhaps she wrinkles her nose as she laughs, or steps lightly and delicately as she flits across the floor, carrying a too-wide tray of drinks and dodging the grasp of lonely, drunk men.  We already know her skirts swish and that her hair bounces, but what expression might she have, or how might she cock her hips as she stands there, waiting for your order?

Once we have those details, it’s not enough to simply stitch them together into a paragraph.  You’d get something like this:

There is a tavern wench.  She has curly red hair, a green dress, green eyes, dusky skin,freckles, and she’s barefoot.  She has a corset that emphasizes her cleavage.  Her skirts make this swishing sound when she walks, and there’s this ringing sound from the bells on her ankle.  She looks warm and soft, except for her clothes, which are coarse.She move delicately, and her hair bounces and she wrinkles she nose as she laughs, which sounds like the tinkling of bells.  She’s graceful, which you can see from

how she carries the tray of drinks and avoids the unwanted touch of the drunk men.  She’s come to your table and she’s waiting for your order.

This works, and no doubt, you can picture her, but we’ve used what us Writer-types call passive voice.  She HAS red hair.  She HAS a corset, which EMPHASIZES her cleavage.  Her skirts MAKE a sound.  She LOOKS warm and soft.  She IS graceful.  While accurate, it sounds like a list, and doesn’t engage us.  This is because passive voice tells us what things ARE, not what they DO.

To grab your players, you must use active voice.  You must replace those verbs above with verbs that do something, verbs that leap off the page, grab the reader and say “Look at what’s going on.”  Remember how I said that we need to remember that the girl is alive, that she moves and lives and breathes?  Active voice does that.  It tells what she DOES, not what she IS.  Her hair BOUNCES.  Her skirts SWISH.  Her nose WRINKLES.  Her soft skin GLOWS in the firelight.

I understand: Most people don’t think this way.  Normal people do not speak this way.  Nevertheless, this lesson is vital.  Active voice separates the novice from the master.  Mastery of active voice for a storyteller is akin to mastery of salt for a chef or timing for a musician: Under appreciated, but vital.  Practice it.  Write it.  Speak it.  Excise “is” from your vocabulary as much as you can.  When you do, you get paragraphs like this:

The tavern wench sweeps into the room carrying a large tray of drinks.  Her long, green skirts swish around her bare feet as she deftly dodges the unwatched touch of drunk men, all without spilling a drop of precious beer.  Her bright green eyes sparkle in the firelight, and her curling red hair bounces around her dusky, freckled face.  She pauses for a moment by your table, her warm hip accidentally brushing your shoulder, her rounded, soft cleavage rising and falling in the confines of her corset.  With a flash of a smile, she stops and asks if anyone would like anything.

Can you see the difference?  Do you see how the latter grips the reader far better than the former?  Active voice: Live it.

But we’re still not done.  You’ll notice I left out many of the details we came up with before (How many you include in a given description is up to you.  I suggest you base it on how important the character is and the pacing of your story).  I did this on purpose.  You see, a role-playing game isn’t like a book or a movie, where you simply present details to your audience.  No, in a role-playing game, people respond to you, interact with you, and interact with the scene.  They don’t want to wait forever just to hear about this girl, however pretty she is, but more importantly, they need to be reminded constantly of who she is, what she looks like.  Books, incidentally, do this all the time.  Read any book and you’ll note that you get an info dump the first time you meet a character, but that the author also dribbles details throughout the text, constantly reminding you about the color of a girl’s hair, or the dark glower of a hero’s eyes.  We have to do that in an RPG as well, constantly reminding our players of the scene and the characters within it.

We must do this in a dynamic manner.  I have seen too many GMs simply read off a paragraph of text.  Perhaps you like my tavern wench and find yourself tempted to simply read off the paragraph above.  Don’t.  While a skilled reader might still bring it to life, the paragraph above is static and won’t address ongoing interaction with her.  Nowhere does it mention that she wrinkles her nose when she laughs, or what that laugh sounds like, or how she smells.  We might need to sprinkle these into our session, depending on what players do, or to remind them of the character.

Nowadays, I can simply hold these details in my head, but when I was younger, I wrote lists that included luscious adjectives and notes sorted by sense-type.  Our tavern wench might look like this:

• Sights: Red, curly hair; Sparkling green eyes; Green dress; Rounded cleavage; Gleaming, cherry-red lips; Dusky, freckled skin; Glistening persiperation on her brow.
• Sounds: Bright, tinkling laughter (Wrinkled nose); The swish of her skirt; The jangle of the bells at her ankle; The whisper of her bare feet on the floor.
• Touch: Warm, soft skin; Coarse dress;
• Smells/Taste: Hair smells like flowers and soap; Clothes smell like the food in the kitchen; She smells clean and feminine;

When you have a detailed list like this (which might be too much for every NPC, of course, but is certainly worth your time for a setting, such as the bar itself: Remembers, places “live” too.  Give them plenty of details), and we need to describe the character, we only need to glance at it to come up with some elements:  Her nose wrinkles as she laughs — bright, tinkling laughter — at your suggestion, or Her sparkling green eyes widen as you draw her close, her clean, feminine scent wrapping around her, mixing with the flowery scent of the curling, red hair that brushes your shoulder as she shakes her head.  At a moment’s notice, we can draw up some vivid, descriptive one-liner at the drop of  hat.  This matters.  We must create a living, constant world, with a continuous sense of sensory input, just like the real world has.  A computer game doesn’t show you a graphic of the enemy you fight once, and then turns the screen to vector depictions of spatial positioning.  Now, it constantly feeds you sound and sights.  You must do the same for your players.

I know this lesson is a great deal to take in.  It may seem simple on the outset, but, believe me, it took me some years to master.  Consider it a goal to achieve, an ideal to pursue, or a path to walk.  Hopefully, at least, I’ve given you some food for thought.  Try to make your session more vivid, try to make your world come alive.  Just remember that you’re playing with people, not telling a story AT them, and use your descriptions like spices: Enough to make things interesting, but not so much that you dominate the dish.

The Beauty of LARPs

For the life of me, I cannot find the scene, but I believe it can be found in Amadeus, where Mozart extols the virtues of Opera.  If I remember correctly, he said something to the effect of “In a play, you can only have one actor speaking at a time.  More than that, and you lose what everyone is saying.  It stops making sense. But in an Opera, every can ‘speak’ at once, all singing in harmony with one another, and what they say matters less than the music that they make.”

As I’m putting together my LARP, I find that this metaphor works very nicely.  When I reveal portions of my LARP to others, some comment that it seems “awfully complex for a one-shot” and that “I don’t need to worry about so much.”  This might be true (I lack the perspective to know for sure), but, in my view, a LARP works very differently from a table-top game.  In a table-top game, you need to pick your focus and stick to it, as ultimately, you can only explore one thread at a time, preferably with everyone together at once so nobody feels left out.  You cannot have the Princess exploring her undying love with her champion at the same time that the Knight tries to uncover the mystery of his father’s death, even though these two elements might be tied together.  In a LARP, not only can you, you must.  You cannot stop the LARP and explore the princess’s elements and then shift to the Knight.  Instead, you’ll have the Princess doing her thing, and the Knight doing his, everyone amusing one another without interfering with each other’s “attention bandwidth.”  Everything is going on at once in this grand, harmonious cacophony, and only at the end can you stop and start to see the big picture.

So why am I making everything so rich and complex?  If you actually boil down my grand stories, you only find, roughly, 4-7 threads: One per House, and then a couple that mingle characters from the various houses (for example, there’s a thread surrounding the Scallywags, as well as a thread that, for example, will occupy the Elk).  Every player has a part to play in several of these threads: A player might be a hero in this thread, and a villain in that thread, as different characters see him from different perspectives.  Because I cannot know what elements will speak to a player and which will not, we add to the complexity by giving them a lot to choose from, knowing that they’ll pick a direction, a role, and go with it.  This means that not every player will be fulfilling every “threads” role, but every thread has more than enough players in it that they can likely keep it going.  For example, the Princess of the House of the Bear wants a strong, romantic thread for her character, but she’s not aggressive, and thus I must bring players to her.  I could pick a single player as her love interest, but what if he’s more interested in other things?  In such case, I’ve directed several characters in her direction for different reasons.  Thus, if only one out of those three is actually interested, she still gets her story, while the others have a sense of choice and direction.

The result, I hope, will take advantage of the inherit chaos of a LARP.  Instead of forcing players into parts, I’m directing movements and creating possibilities and paths, designed robustly enough (hence the “complexity,” which really isn’t complexity at all, but redundancy) that even if one element should fail, the general movement of the plot should continue and, hopefully, contain enough surprises that everyone enjoys themselves thoroughly.

How fitting, to describe a Houses of the Blooded LARP as an Opera…