Category: RPG

  • Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

    Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom

    The Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. Every GM has his or her favorite system, but in these articles we endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.

    If you are a blogger, and you’d like to participate in the Game Master’s Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com and supply the URL of your blog.

    This month’s topic comes to us courtesy of Scott Robinson, who asks, “How has your gaming and/or GMing changed over time?

    A bit of history.  Me and gaming.  In the beginning was the Red Box.  When I first played Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s I didn’t really know much about it.  At all.  We had a student teacher in our class for a couple of weeks and our class teacher picked out 4 of us to play D&D one lunchtime.  I was picked because I’d read The Hobbit and was reading “Choose Your Own Adventure” books at the time.  This was just before the first of the Jackson/Livingston “Fighting Fantasy” books hit the shelves.

    I remember the first games I ran. At best I was an OK GM. Tried too hard for alt-history with Vampire and never actually fleshed the world out properly.  Ran Al Qadim pretry much out of the box and enjoyed that (well, I enjoyed it.  I had a player throw an extreme tantrum when a Genie turned his elf into a halfling). It was alright.  Kept coming back to it week on week but never really spent as much time prepping as I should’ve done so sessions could get a bit bogged down looking up the abilities of a specific creature.

    After University, nearly 20 years passed before I sat behind the screen again – or on either side of the screen.  Or rather, not behind the screen.  It’s a barrier.  It gets in the way of the story.  If you need to keep things concealed from the players, fair enough, but find another way.

    In the beginning I thought I was confident enough to grab the books, the dice, some players, and roll with it.  Just wing the game with the bare minimum of prep.  I wasn’t, so my games were a shade chaotic and disorganised.  The intervening years have seen me raising 5 kids, so gaming time dropped away completely.  But in the last couple of years I’ve started running games again for my wife and eldest kids.  Family time is not conducive to game planning time.

    I’m not sure my GM’ing style has changed dramatically – but the games played have.  Compare and contrast the entries for a creature in the 13th Age Bestiary versus the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual.  One will tell you, in a nutshell, everything you need to know about how a creature works and what it can do.  One will make vague references to other books and need you to make sheets of notes to cover each encounter and even then you’ll miss something important that could make the difference between character survival and a TPK.  GMs these days? Don’t know they’re born.

    Turns out that my GM’ing style matches the games I want to play almost perfectly (either that or I’m subconsciously selecting games that fit this style).  The way the Backgrounds and Icon Relationship rolls can flavour pretty much any monster out of the bestiary…  Encounters, adventures, the games practically write themselves!

    Now.  Go forth and read the wisdom from the rest of the round table…

  • Instant Backstory – Just Add Imagination

    Good morning!  I am the newest member of the Game Master’s Roundtable of Doom (aka the Roundtable formerly known as the Cypher System Bloggers), it’s our duty to take a look at role-playing game system mechanics an an inter-system, cross-dimensional kind of way (well, that’s what it says on the name badge).  Specifically the main man himself, +Lex Starwalker, posed the following question:

    “What is a favorite mechanic or idea you’ve encountered in an RPG that you think would work well in other games?  Please explain the mechanic/idea, tell us a bit about the game it comes from, and give some ideas of how it could be used in other games.  You can discuss more than one mechanic or idea if you like.”

    The trick is to do this without simply holding up a copy of 13th Age and saying: “This.  Use this.”

    Traveller

    Far back in the dawn of my roleplaying time, I played Traveller.  At the time, it was the only option for science fiction roleplaying unless you wrote up your own system.  At the time it was one of the “Big Three” that dominated the gaming world – you had Advanced Dungeons and Dragons for fantasy gaming, Call of Cthulhu for horror and Traveller for SF.  There were one or two other games around, notably Runequest, but that was really about it.  But I digress.

    I had a Scout character, Sam.  Things were going well.  His UPP (Universal Personality Profile, Traveller’s stat bar) was all letters, no numbers at all!  Now in Traveller you’ve got a series of tables you roll on during character creation to see what sort of stuff your character got up to before becoming an adventurer – and one of the rolls you’ve got to make is survival.  He’d successfully made his rolls to join the Scouts, get a ship, been on a number of successful missions…  And then, rolling to see if he’s survived a routine patrol, he died.  We hadn’t even started the first adventure!  The GM, being a fairly standard-issue Traveller GM, shrugged and we started again.  I think it took us 3 attempts before we got a character to survive all the way to the start of the first adventure!

    (In later games, we house-ruled that if you died during character creation that was the point you retired.)

    So dying during character creation in Traveller isn’t exactly the best thing that could happen to you but up to that point you knew an awful lot about your character, more than you normally do.  You knew how old your character was, what he’d done between signing up and starting their adventuring career, how many times they’d been promoted, what skills they’d picked up along the way.  In short, you had a decent CV and all from a few dice rolls.  It took no longer to make a Traveller character than an AD&D or Call of Cthulhu character but you knew far more about them and you had a good range of options for the GM to link your character to the rest of the group, far more than the usual “You’re all in the tavern/spaceport/University library when…”

    And that’s the mechanic I’m looking at here:  Backstory.

    Let’s take a look at the party in the 13th Age game I’m running at home:  We’ve a Dark Elf Sorcerer, a High Elf Wizard, a Halfling Rogue, and an Elven Cleric (that’s just a standard-issue Elf, not High, Dark, Wood…).  What ties them together? Well, beyond needing to find a way to get back to the future without being turned into skeletal servants by the Undying Pharaoh.  In 13th Age we’ve got the Backgrounds and Icon Relationships.  (See? I knew this would come back to 13th Age. So many good ideas, so many wonderful little mechanics.  Just buy the damn thing!)

    escalation-edition-badge-4

    This is where 13th Age wins over AD&D (disclaimer: The last edition of AD&D I played was 2nd).  Backgrounds replace skills in 13th Age, they’re broad-brush things that not only flesh out the character they also add detail to the world.  Here we’ve an inkling as to what the characters did before they became adventurers.  The wizard studied at the hands of the Archmage, the cleric was once a landscape gardener and rabbit warren keeper (you’d be amazed how often those skills can come in handy).  So they didn’t spring into the gameworld aged… well, alright, we don’t know how old these characters are but that’s not important right now.  They didn’t just appear fully-formed like amnesiacs – they know how to cast spells, pick locks, breath poisonous gas, they just don’t know how they know.

    For those who don’t know about Icon Relationships, characters have 3 points to spend and 13 Icons – basically the movers and shakers of the world – to spend them on.  Relationships can be positive, negative, or conflicted.  A positive relationship indicates you’re on good terms with that Icon and her supporters, a negative relationship just the opposite.  Conflicted relationships are the equivalent of setting your Facebook status to “It’s Complicated”.   Looking across the 4 character sheets in front of me I can see that 2 characters share a relationship with the Archmage – one positive, one conflicted.  So we’ve a former pupil (who left under dubious circumstances – conflicted) and the star pupil from the same class (positive).  Instant backstory, very little work required.  One who hates the Orc Lord, one who has a dubious relationship – basically indicating the Thief will work for anyone prepared to pay him for his services.

    What both Backgrounds and Icon Relationships do is provide hooks to tie the PC to the world and give the players a chance to add elements in that they want to explore.  They’re suggestions for the GM to build adventure elements on.  A good group can run an entire campaign based off the ideas that are sparked from these 2 elements.

    My new favourite system, Cypher, the engine powering Numenera and The Strange, has connections to the starting adventure and the other characters baked right in to character creation as well – and they depend entirely on what descriptor and focus a player chooses.  A Charming character will have an entirely different set of options to connect to the starting adventure than a Forceful one, a character who Wears a Sheen of Ice will have different links to the other PCs than one who Works the Back Alleys.

    I know there are other games out there that do this.  One of the versions of Cyberpunk, memory fails me as to which one, had the Lifepath (actually that was an R Talsorian speciality, IIRC).  Achtung! Cthulhu gets you to play out little vignettes from your character’s past, adding in interactions with other characters – picture these as flashbacks in your favourite TV show where you find out just how 2 characters know each other and why they’re acting all hostile.

    Traveller’s tables are probably overkill, spawned from a game that needed a degree in mathematics or some serious calculator-fu to do planetary system generation or the more in-depth ship building from High Guard.  But the 13th Age Backgrounds approach can be brought to other games pretty easily…  Those high-level skills a character has.  Get them to write a 1 or 2 word note for how they picked them up.  That skill they’ve only got 5% in? Why. Why does the character have that?  What did they do that gave them “Guitar, 5%” – maybe their old music teacher is about to call them for help…

    This is one of those mechanics you don’t really need to get a game going – and for a one-shot you probably wouldn’t use it (except for the 13th Age ones.  You should always use them).  But for longer games?  Essential.

    Now. Time to send you off to read epistles from greater minds than mine.  Or at least different minds.  Other minds.  The rest of the Roundtable:

  • GumCypher? CypherShoe?

    Investigative Abilities in Cypher-System Games

    On the left, we’ve got The Strange and Numenera, two games from Monte Cook Studios focusing on exploration and adventure, with killing things and taking their stuff very much on the sidelines.

    On the right, we’ve got the GumShoe games from Pelgrane Press – Night’s Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu, Esoterrorists, Ashen Stars, Fear Itself, Timewatch.  Games focussing on solving mysteries, exploration and adventure, with killing things and taking their stuff very much on the sidelines.  The beauty of GumShoe is that, following a wildly successful Kickstarter, the mechanics of the game are available to download for free.  Grab yourself a copy of the GumShoe SRD!  GumShoe ensures the heroes get the basic clues they need to move through the story.  What the players do with the information once they’ve got it is another matter entirely.

    Firstly let’s have a look and see why you would want to combine the two.

    At their hearts, both Cypher games are about investigation and exploration.  The Strange takes things further, adding “Defend” and “Create” to it’s remit, but “Explore” is there front and centre.

    Taking The Strange as a starting point, PCs are operatives for an organisation whose remit is all things relating to The Strange.  Pretty broad remit.  Characters can be tasked with investigating potential Strange occurrences.  It’s this investigating angle that ties in with GumShoe.  Of course, certain types of characters are more likely to have these Investigative Abilities than others – a character with the Solves Mysteries focus, f’rinstance.

    The GumShoe system is written to emulate the detective genre – a genre in which the heroes are always able to get the clues they need.

    Any rating in an investigative ability indicates a high degree of professional accomplishment or impressive natural talent. If you have an ability relevant to the task at hand, you automatically succeed in discovering any information or overcoming any obstacles necessary to propel you from the current scene further into the story. (GumShoe SRD)

     

    GumShoe’s Investigative Abilities allow players to get clues from a scene without having to know the right questions to ask the specific GM.  “I’m going to spend 2 points of Forensic Science.  What do I know about the crime scene?”  “I’m going to spend a point of Architecture.  Anything significant about the building?”  Often it’s as simple as “You’ve got Anthropology, you recognise those books on the shelf – that one does not belong there…”  Players can get information simply by having skills, get more information – or create some sort of in-game effect – by spending from that skill’s pool.  Most GumShoe games have a GM’s reference sheet that allows them to keep track of which players have which Investigative Abilities like this one for Trail of Cthulhu.

    Hmm… Skill pools.  Sounds familiar…

    Skills in Cypher work a little differently.  They can be absent, Trained, or Specialised.  And they’re a lot broader than GumShoe’s.  And, come to think of it, I don’t think there’s actually a list of skills for Cypher!  So we need to work out how we can specialise, how we can pick out what a character would know.

    In Cypher skills fall under Speed, Intellect, or Might.  In GumShoe, abilities are split between General and Investigative.  No real help there, you’d perhaps group the Investigative Abilities under Intellect – but there are ways you could get benefits from just about any skill…

    So let’s see what we can do to mash these 2 systems together.

    Cypher characters who are Trained in a skill can be considered to have a point in that pool to spend on an action assuming you can justify it.  Someone who’s Specialized will have 2 points.

    e.g. Mark, a Sharp-Eyed Paradox who Solves Mysteries, is trained in Initiative and specialized in Perception.  Thanks to a few well-spent XP, he’s also trained in Firearms.  Simply by having Perception, he’s going to notice things other characters don’t.  The GM can inform him about the blood smears going under the sofa, the CDs all jumbled up on the shelf.  By spending a point of Perception he might get further details without having to ask more questions of the GM.  Further benefits might be there for a 2-point spend, they might not.

    Bigger spends can get bigger benefits…  A 2-point spend in Archaeology might get you a temporary contact at a local university – perhaps you studied with her, were her student for a class or two – work with the GM to set this up.

    Training in combat skills might give the character an advantage in fighting certain foes – reducing the difficulty to hit because you’ve an in-depth knowledge of their fighting style, or you know there’s a weak spot on a particular creature.  Or it might give you a benefit when defending against attacks because you know steel spiders always crouch back for a second before pouncing.

    Refreshing Pools

    GumShoe’s ability pools refresh as the GM and story dictate.  For a fast-paced Night’s Black Agents game emulating the spy thriller, they may refresh at the end of each game session, having the PCs back to full speed at the beginning of the next.  For a depressing, bleak, Trail of Cthulhu game they may only refresh at the end of the adventure, making your choice of when to spend those points to gain benefits particularly hard – spend now and get the information and run the risk of running out when you most need it.

    In Cypher games, similar rules can apply.  For example…

    • Advance a tier, automatically refresh all pools
    • Spend 2XP, refresh 1 pool for one ability
    • End of game session – refresh 2 pools of your choice
    • End of adventure – refresh all pools

    And Finally…

    I put the draft of this post up on the internet for comment a few days ago.  On Google+, Joey Mullins came up with this elegant and simple suggestion:

    Seems the easiest way to emulate gumshoe “clue” mechanic is to allow players to trade effort for clues, no rolling just like Gumshoe.

    In my strange game I ran the other day I had my players going to a crime scene. The “solves crimes” player had a tool set and skill. Since I set the level of all clues at three the expenditure of one effort was an auto clue.

    So for 1 effort from a particular pool, you get a clue related to a skill from that pool.  Since you’re already tracking effort, this makes perfect sense and saves having to keep track of any other values, pools, refreshes and the like.

    In Conclusion

    I hope this has given you some idea as to how the core GumShoe clue mechanic can work in Cypher system games.  Or any other game, for that matter.  Questions, comments, superb examples of this in use in your games – or how you’ve taken this and tweaked it for your games, all are welcome!