So okay, I'm a packrat. That's the character sheet (well, filecard) of my first character. "Tas the fighter" was very much playing against type, but I had fun in the first heady rush of the new hobby. He was an Empire of the Petal Throne character, and something of a stolid warrior. He made a brilliant political marriage (fueled by his movie-star looks) to the daughter of a high official in the imperial government, and wangled a post in the Omnipotent Azure Legion, something of a coup for a foreigner in xenophobic Tsolyanu.
A lot of the above is straightforward. "Eyes," in EPT, are technological artifacts that function, effectively, as magical items: the Excellent Ruby Eye places the target in indefinite stasis (barring another use), and the Eye of Indefensible Apprehension casts a fear spell. The magic dagger on the right was something like a light saber -- it would flicker out a beam of force extending its range to that of a rapier, and it was Tas' go-to weapon. The "parrah" on the lower right was a fetish of the GM's -- they're tribble-like familiars which he pretty much insisted every PC have. Mine was, by parrah standards, a tough hombre. The "bronze ingot hand" was a bronze ingot which, when palmed, turned the hand into solid, living bronze: great for hand-to-hand brawls or dangerous manipulative tasks.
I traded him out after a while for a wizard, which I preferred -- damn that random gen.
Hey, sometimes I have short rants! (No need to use ten paragraphs to say something when two will do!)
* There's a personality problem troubling your game? All too often, people kvetching to gaming forums about them want the readers to tell them how to solve them without actually having to open their mouths. In a hobby where most of a GM's job, for several hours in a row, is
communicating with the players, I'm constantly flabbergasted at how many
of them claim that they have trouble doing so. This magical thinking -- that there's some way to make evildoers just Get Better without a word being spoken -- is all too common.
There is no way, none at all, to change your players' behavior other than to have an open, adult conversation about your concerns. Any other way of "nudging" people in one direction or another does not work. Never has worked. Never will work. The clueless don't notice, the jerks don't care, and the ones waiting for the aforementioned open, adult conversation resent what they see as clumsy manipulation attempts.
* On gender and same-sex relationships: It is not my bloody job to dictate to any player the gender and sexual preference of a character. It is my job to provide – and portray – the NPCs with whom the PCs interact. These will be male or female, straight or gay, romantically interested or not, as circumstances dictate. My masculinity is unthreatened when I play a gay NPC. Or a female NPC having a relationship with a male PC. Or a female NPC having a relationship with a female PC. Whatever. Because I'm not six years old any more, and I see no reason for my reflexive 1960s prejudices to affect my grown-up life.
Screw the squick factor. If a PC wants to murder someone else, do I go all squeamish on him and tell him he can't do it? If he wants to torture someone else, do I go all squeamish on him and tell him he can't do it? Beatings, theft, torture, racism, genocide, slavery, sacrilege, arson, drug use, maiming, murder retail or wholesale, I can set the table for all of it. Torch a village, desecrate a temple, debauch virgins, kick puppies, slit throats, most of us are cool with all of that, but almost uniquely, tabletop gamers draw the line on portraying male-on-male romance?
* “You’re/He’s ruining my fun.” I stay far, far away from that turn of phrase, if I can possibly help it. For one thing, "You're ruining my fun" far too often is a code phrase for "I'm a self-absorbed solipsist, and I take failure to conform to my prejudices and whims as a personal attack." It's hauled out as a trump card perceived to end all debate, without examination of how that behavior actually might be "ruining" the speaker's fun, or whether the speaker's POV is reasonable. I see no reason why it should be used as an excuse to dictate to players what otherwise-legitimate character creation and play choices they’re permitted to pick.
My wife put in a request for some of her favorites, but I figured I'd ring in an interesting Big Bad. (Sorry, love!)
Lady Datia, third daughter of the great lord Teraeth val Linix, is tall, willowy, beautiful. She was the wife of a country squire whose holdings are a day’s ride from the capital, and had a three year old daughter. Though always careful to display the proper decorum, Datia yearned for the high life, and sought – vainly – to convince her husband to relocate to the capital for the social whirl.
The shenanigans that ensued wound up getting rolled into a plotline, and the party drew her ire when they busted up what she thought would be a permanent gig, forcing her to flee one step ahead of the authorities and leave behind her husband and daughter. Her pattern since has been to marry rich men, under a false identity, take them for what they're worth and split.
Feeling vengeful, Datia went to work and learned about the party. She supplied damaging information about the rogue's father to the rogue's mother, causing the breakup of their marriage. Her next target was the old alchemist on the corner who was a favorite of theirs, and in marrying and ditching him clipped a heap of gold and a bunch of high-powered alchemical poisons, which she used to great effect -- through cutouts -- in taking out or sickening several folks near and dear to them. On two other occasions, the trouble coming to the party was provoked by her, unbeknownst to them.
Datia's only significant magical item is a stolen religious relic of some power, much of which she can't use; the key power she can use is that it renders her immune to scrying or divinations. She's a good actress and deft at disguise. She also has some modest arcane powers, but no one outside of her estranged and embarrassed family remembers that she had a brief wizardly apprenticeship in her teens, and she never lets anyone know.
Beyond that, she’s smart and focused. She doesn't have a gang to betray her. She's very likeable, and folks trust her instinctively and talk freely in front of her. If she needs help, she'll beguile a fellow and wrap him around her fingertips, but she'll never let that fellow know where to find her, and she will always have a bolthole and a fast mount available. She won't let herself get suckered into a confrontation, direct or otherwise. She doesn't leave trademarks or mocking Ba-Ha-Ha notes. If a plan looks like it's blown, or she thinks a situation is spiraling outside her control, she'll cut her losses and bolt, and if possible has a secondary mark in hand to take the fall.
In short, she's read the Evil Overlord Rules.
RPG groups, by and large, suck at detective work. They rely heavily on their widgets and spells, and they count on the bad guys making predictable, cliched mistakes or having blatant, exploitable character flaws. They don't often do patient, and they can't often handle patient. A hundred times more of these scenarios end because the GM has placed a finite limit on them (and, of course, the PCs always win in the end, right?) or from the foregoing factors than not.
I was proud of her. It's easy for a GM to beat down a party with overwhelming force, zowie! powers like teleportation or insubstantiality, by a NPC's Epic Uberness, or by a torrent of widgets. Doing so with guile and misdirection, with a hard-keyed scenario (hey, if they had made all the right guesses and been a little lucky, she could have been nailed much sooner), that's harder.
What they never did attempt was to trap her at the only spots of vulnerability: (1) There's only a finite number of rich, single guys out there who get swept up by a beautiful, cultured woman from Somewhere Else and who loves the city life; and (2) She still had affection for her first husband and for her daughter. It took the main party nearly five real years to catch her, and in the end only because they called in some major favors and brought some immense arcane powers to bear.
ST: 9 DX: 11 IQ: 13 HT: 10 Speed: 5.25 Move: 5
Advantages: Acute Taste-Smell/1; Beautiful; Charisma/1; Comfortable wealth; Empathy; Magery (Body Control spells only)/2; Serendipity; Smooth Operator/2
Disadvantages: Callous; Greed; Minor Medical Ailment/migraines; Social Stigma: outlaw; Major Vow: Revenge!
Skills: Acting-15; Administration-13; Area Knowledge: Warwik royal demesne-15; Baseball-13; Body Language-14; Current Affairs/high society-15; Carousing-15; Connoisseur/music-13; Dancing-12; Detect Lies-14; Disguise-15; Erotic Art-14; Fast-Talk-15; Filch-13; Forgery-13; Holdout-13; Knife-12; Mimicry (human)-14; Musical Instrument / lute-11; Needlecraft-10; Observation-13; Poetry-12; Poisons-13; Savoir-Faire-16; Search-14; Sex Appeal-17; Vajikry-13
Grimoire: Arousal-13 †; Birth Control-13 †; Choke-15; Comfortable Seat-13 †; Fair Skin-14 †; Rapid Intoxication-13 †; Resist Intoxication-13 †; Resist Pain-13; Stun-15; Tears-15
Maneuvers: Ruse / w/Sex Appeal-16
Quirks: "But wealth IS power;" Attracted to "bad" men; Fashion slave; Overestimates her luck; Soft spot for animals & kids
Explanations: Serendipity means something just goes seriously right for you, once per adventure: a tree branch breaks over the head of the guy who's about to run you through, the first box you break open in the warehouse has the Ark of the Covenant, that sort of thing. Smooth Operator gives bonuses to social skills (which are figured in already) and you’re recognized as a suave person. Migraines? Make a HT roll every day. If she blows it, she’ll have about two hours worth of -2 to everything, at some point (she's taken too many alchemicals over the years, and the headaches are a side-effect). Yeah, they play baseball on my world, and it’s considered an avant-garde spectator sport in the capital. Vajikry is a game that's something of a cross between checkers and Stratego. Her Ruse maneuver basically drops a guy’s combat defenses by heavyweight vamping; letting her top fall open or off is a favorite.
I’ve invented a bunch of spells (well, a couple hundred of them); the ones marked † are the non-book ones. Comfortable Seat prevents saddlesores and jostling in carriages. Fair Skin keeps your complexion mild. The others are self-explanatory, and I’m quite narked that SJ Games saw fit to exclude a birth control spell, which you’d think would be one of the more fundamental spells in any realistic culture. If you prefer GURPS RAW, substitute others.
For further explanation of system stats, check this link.
"Special snowflake" is a term in common use on a number of gaming forums. For those of you unfamiliar, it's a slur hurled at those who stand out among us for being oddballs. Most often, it's aimed at characters who (theoretically, at least) are disruptive to the milieu.
I've always had a problem with the term, and my dislike for it -- for the syndrome, come to that -- has crystallized over time.
It's meant, considerably more often than otherwise, "someone or something that stands out in a way I don't like." Play a preteen character? "Special snowflake." Play an alignment different from ours? "Special snowflake." Turn in a two-page backstory? "Special snowflake." Fail to march in lockstep with my paradigm? "Special snowflake." Is more flamboyant than the speaker? "Special snowflake."
What especially bothers me is that this comes from this, of all hobbies. For pity's sake, we're all weird. We sit around making pretend that we're wizards and elves and cyberjackers and secret agents and barbarian warriors. We're all aware -- and in many cases, painfully aware -- that we're "special snowflakes" to most mundanes around us, playing that stupid nerd game that loser junior high school boys too scared to come within ten feet of a Gurrrlll played.
Now I can see why, in turn, we seek to find people within our own community whom we can viciously disparage and denigrate, but it doesn't make it right, and it happens quite a bit more often than the "special snowflakes" actually disrupt things.
A common slur flung around in gaming debates is “Elitist!” You take pains to design a coherent, sensible setting? Elitist! You think people ought to know the milieu they’re GMing? Elitist! Heck, you think it should be incumbent on people to bother to learn the rules of the game they’re playing? Elitist! At any level and in any aspect of gaming, anywhere someone could make some effort to improve, there’ll be people willing to jeer at you for it, especially if you're silly enough to publicly say that you think everyone can (or should) do the same.
I believe in excellence. I don’t think there’s anything ennobling about mediocrity, and I don’t find anything about mediocrity worth praising. I think, in the words of the old Army commercials (before they ditched the tagline as being, well, elitist) that we should all be the best we can be. Yes, indeed, I’m an elitist.
What’s always amused me, in this anti-intellectual society of ours, is that everyone else is too. If you’re (say) a football fan, and your team is a basement dweller, I’m sure you wouldn’t be thrilled to hear the players say that, well, they're just in it for the paychecks, so where do the fans get off on dissing their record? I doubt you’d want your doctor, or your car mechanic, or your kids’ teachers to do any less than their elitist best, or that you’d accept mediocrity and good old college tries in place of the skilled service you believe to be your due. From the kid who shovels our driveways to bank tellers to insurance adjusters to entertainers, we expect quality work in anything we care about, and we get downright frosty if all we get are people going through the motions. It’s only when quality is required from us – or if the matter under discussion is something we don’t care one way or another – that we fling “Elitist!” around like a slur.
And gaming’s immune to it? Please. There are hundreds of threads on gaming forums, and tens of thousands of posts, about no-good players and no-good GMs and poorly written game systems which somehow didn’t measure up to our expectations. A fundamental element in almost all of our games is experience, which unless you give the same amount each and every time to each and every player, means that you judge the players on their performance. And that isn’t, by any accepted standard, “elitism?” I can’t imagine how.
Do I give more experience to some players than to others? Yes, I do, when I judge their play to be superior in roleplaying, tactical acumen, getting the job done, and the obligatory extra 1 XP per session to the player who most doubles me over in laughter. Oddly enough, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either. In a chess game, someone generally does better than the other. In a poker game, some players do better than others. In a hockey game, one team does better than the other, fueled by players that perform better than others. I’d sure bust a gut laughing if someone shouted “Elitist!” at the TV showing a World Series of Poker match.
Silly is good, I find, in small doses: it breaks up the mental palate. Some time ago, I had cause to compile some of the insider slang that's been used over the course of my campaign. So ... for your psychic sorbet of the evening, here 'tis:
Melonballing: A combat strike which takes out the genitalia. It got to be enough of a cliche that my wife bought a melonballer to hand out to whomever scored the most devastating hit in any given session.
Goat! Goat! Goat!: So the party was in the worst dive on Tortage, the capital of the Pirate Isles, and the crowd was getting weird during the all-too-sexualized floor show. Goat! Goat! Goat! is now used at any time there's an unruly crowd scene or, well, when a goat makes a prominent appearance.
I pity tha fool!: Delivered Mr. T-style, this was used by a player who said, at perhaps a bad time to do it, "I pity tha fool who gives us a wandering encounter now!" I determined on the spot to do exactly that, and it was quite a hair-raising one. The phrase's meaning has morphed, consequentially, to mean a player who's about to do a very dumb thing.
Quail before the might of Larindo the Witherer!: Alright, the player had a reasonable expectation that the mooks would go knock-kneed before a necromancer in full battle array. Unfortunately, they all had stout, manly results on their reaction rolls, and the mook leader shouted, "Damn, dey got a wizard, kill 'im quick!" (Or some such: it was twenty years ago.) Current meaning: your ego is getting the better of you.
Bubble of Improbability: If a player can't make a session, the character just isn't there, and I don't bother parsing the which or the why; I say that the character has entered a "bubble of improbability." Beats the hell out of me why I settled on that turn of phrase, but it's well-understood.
Nike Ninja: Mook NPC fighters. Originally the term for one particular figure in my ninja set of minis, which out of a certain level of perversity I painted in US Army jungle camo pattern.
Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg: Bunch Of Faceless NPCs. These are four of the most common male names in my gameworld.
(steepling my fingers and touching my index fingers to my lips): This action, sometimes paired with the phrase “Is that what you’re doing?” when the room falls silent, has been a code phrase for “... and what you’re planning on doing is amazingly stupid” in my campaigns for decades. I am pitiless in dealing with those who blithely ignore the message.
Gritty!: I strive for a gritty, realistic, middling-level fantasy campaign; not quite Harnworld, but I'm not what you call cinematic or slapstick. But one of the crosses I bear is that I'm a lifelong insomniac (as witness me posting this at 4:30 AM). Sometimes I'm working on three hours sleep when the run starts, and I'm punchy from fatigue. One player would -- if things got too silly -- turn to me and say "Gritty," in a flat voice, deadpan expression. (He may have the best deadpan I've ever known.) I would nod, and respond "Gritty," and more often than otherwise would sober up.
Hrm. He was in my campaign for six years, and do you know, I never did know whether his catchword was subtle admonishment, a gentle reminder for me to get back on track, a moment of humor, or some or all of the above. I remember it fondly, nonetheless.
I’ve watched a few war-related series of late: Band of Brothers, The Pacific. My favorite is Tour of Duty, a critically-acclaimed Vietnam War series focusing on a platoon in the boonies. I never saw it in first run; my household watched China Beach, its competing ‘Nam TV show. Beyond that, we were St. Elsewhere fans, where ToD’s star – Terrence Knox – had been a scumbag. Knox’s Sgt. Zeke Anderson is anything but on ToD, and it gave me some ideas. (Okay, okay ... “Fantasy Effing Vietnam.” Sue me.)
One of my two groups is based out of the mighty elven empire, which until recently was isolated in the far northwest of the world. A few years back, they created a magical Gate on an island just off a whopping trackless jungle – and, not remotely coincidentally, smack in the middle of the world’s chief shipping lane. For a bunch of reasons, they’re colonizing that jungle, which is pierced by a honking big river and watershed. That’s where the Imperial Marines come in. The "Blue Legs" are a riverine force (the empire’s still new to the concept of a deep sea navy), and they’re the grunts on the ground patrolling the interior. They’re also a very insular, tight-knit bunch, respecting pretty much no one other than themselves ... which, considering that they’re usually unsupported in the middle of nowhere, with no more gear than they can pack on their canoes, makes good sense. Anyway, that’s where the group came in, in accompanying a squad of Marines into the heart of darkness.
The unit’s commander is Eve, who’s the equivalent of a first sergeant. She’s a hardbitten, hardcore lifer who’s seen it all, done it all, and takes no guff from anyone who hasn’t. Like any good lifer non-com, she prefers that the officers tell her what they want done and leave her to handle the details. She will rap you upside the head if you make any reference to her being stone-gorgeous, and will do the same if you insist on calling her “Dame Anevea” – she couldn’t very well decline being knighted by the Emperor, but she hates the formality, and pretty much no one much lower in rank than the Admiral of the Navy can get away with it. Like most people of elven blood, she is a latent wizard, but has only recently learned her first spell – Insect Repellent. She’s extremely experienced, extremely senior, doesn’t want to be an officer ... but the time’s approaching when it’s up or out.
Eve’s team is a deep penetration unit; they scout, they do their objective, they get out. She’s positively chary of taking casualties, and won’t do forlorn hopes or suicide missions. Her move would nominally be good, but the team carries everything on their backs, and that can slow them down. She prefers hatchets in combat, carries a brace of javelins for throwing, and is quite fond in battle of faking injuries, "accidentally" stumbling, that sort of thing. One of their quirks, widespread in the Blue Legs in general, is to use a lot of slang taken from the indigs' language.
ST: 12 DX: 13 IQ: 12 HT: 13 Per: 12 Speed: 6 Move: Likely to be 5 or less.
Advantages: Ally / Marines, Beautiful, Combat Reflexes, Damage Resistance/2, Fit, High Pain Threshold, Legal Enforcement Powers/1, Magery/0, Rank-2/Ord-Matoc, Social Regard: Respected, Status-2 / Knight of the Sapphire Rose
Perks: Armor Familiarity/1, Riverine Training, Penetrating Voice, Teamwork
Disadvantages: Code of Honor (Soldier); Compulsive Behavior/wanderlust; Extra hazardous Duty; Sense of Duty: Marines; Struggling, Workaholic
Skills: Administration-11; Axe/Mace-15; Boating-13; Brawling-15; Brawling-13; Camouflage-13; Carpentry-12; First Aid-12; Knife-13; Leadership-15; Navigation-13; Public Speaking-13; Savoir-Faire (military)-12; Shield-13; Soldier-13; Stealth-14; Survival-13; Swimming-13; Tactics-12; Tarocco-12; Thrown Weapon: Spear-15
Spells: Insect Repellent-11
Quirks: "Never tell the brass anything;" Collects interesting rocks; Doesn't want to retire; Uses Altanian jargon
By way of explanation, the Legal Enforcement Powers means, in shorthand, that she can hassle civvies, the Altanian outback being a military zone. "Ord-Matoc" is a first sergeant, more or less. Riverine Training differs from the Naval Training perk in so far that Eve doesn't really know from the deck of a ship, but she's pretty good at staying stable on a keelboat or a canoe. In GURPS terms, a Duty is what you *have* to do; a Sense of Duty is something you *want* to do. Tarocco is a card game; feel free to substitute the gambling game of your choice.
For further explanation of system stats, check this link.
