How long have I been talking about gaming? Over thirty years, at this point. I was part of the Alarums & Excursions APA from 1979 for a few years. The first online gaming forum in which I indulged was on the UMass computer system in 1983. I've been in other APAs and many an online forum.
In all those places, what we expect from our fellow gamers is a matter of constant debate. What classes they play, whether they buy into PvP or not, whether one can play evil in a good party or good in an evil party, whether people should conform their expectations or proudly dissent. "Murderhoboing," niche protection, how "paladins" or priests ought to behave, we're vitally concerned with how the other character acts, and we drone on at startling length and persistence on the subject.
We're far less concerned with how the player acts, oddly enough. But that's as much of a make-and-break as anything else, wouldn't you think? What I want from my players is ...
* Regular attendance. Someone who misses as many as a quarter of my sessions is teetering on the edge. I do not run one of those drop-in games where it's okay to blow us all off if there's a baseball game you'd rather watch on TV or you just don't feel like shaving.
* Buying in. By virtue of showing up, you're telling me you're willing to play the system I play, in the milieu and genre I'm using, in my homebrew setting, and that you intend to conform to the group you're joining.
* Good behavior. We're all adults here. If you're going to be terribly late, you call. If you can't make it, you call or e-mail. You pay attention to my game, not to your Words With Friends app on your cellphone. You leave your cigarettes and alcohol at home, and you don't jeer at my cats, kick people in the head or spit in the snacks. (These last three were not cited at random.)
* Good neighbors. Everyone brings some kind of light snack, and everyone takes turns buying/cooking a meal, since we do eight hour sessions and that's a long time to go without a bite. Chronically arriving a half hour late so you don't have to deal with the pre-game socializing is unfriendly. (That isn't cited at random either.)
* Knowledge. After a certain point, I don't want to have to keep teaching you the rules. Learn enough of them to pull your weight, or else reconcile yourself to the fact that your tactical options are going to be limited to "I attack him with my weapon." I want people invested enough in my gameworld to learn about it, and while I don't quiz people on the handouts, I see no reason why more interested players have to keep coaching the slackers on the basics. As in any other field of human endeavor, you get out of it when you put into it.
* Trust. I am not an adversarial GM. I am here to provide the setting with which you interact, not to provide an omniscient, omnipotent, malevolent force Out To Screw You. If you can't trust me to do that, to be fair, judicious and reasonable, we ought not be playing together. Whoever did you dirt in the past, I'm not that guy.
* Motivation. Shouldn't you be here to play the game, not simply be a passive spectator for my storytelling? That being said, adventures are -- usually -- about conflict. Accept this. Your backstory isn’t immune to being mined for plotlines, the people you know and meet aren’t immune to being mined for plotlines. Someone who deliberately refuses to give me any handles concedes that adventures will never be about you; only about someone else. I’m not terribly interested in that kind of player.
* Honesty. If you've got a problem or an issue, I'd like to know it. If you can't hack any of the rules above, I'd like to know that too. Passive-aggressive sullenness does not impress me; I believe that mature adults should be able to have open, honest and civil discussion of their grievances like, well, mature adults ought to do. Problems never go away on their own. And if any of the above is too much for you -- or isn’t the game you want to play -- I hope you're honest enough to give my campaign a miss and not waste anyone's time, your own included. (Don’t worry. I won’t be offended. Should I be offended if you’re not into any of the other things I’m into, from hockey to singing classical music to walking in forests to writing nautical folk songs?)
So ... I've been having private runs for my wife's powerful wizard-princess for a few years now. One of the customs of the elven empire in which she now lives is "errantry" -- in your youth, you get together with your best buds and go wandering about for a season or two, all under assumed names like "Snowviolet" or "Morningstar" or "Nightflame," and Do Worthy And Good Things, only traveling with what they can carry and accepting no pay for their deeds. While the tales have it that people on errantry are fighting dragons and battling for the rights of the downtrodden, the elven empire has secure internal borders and good government, and the authorities aren't crazed about young folk wandering across into the truly scary lands beyond them. So, for the most part, those on errantry wind up teaching schools, helping farmers bring in the crops, building barns and the like ... which is rather the true lesson behind it all.
Some folk make errantry their life, and indeed go out to take on monsters and warring against the over-mighty. As far as the rest goes ... well, sometimes the teenagers get uppity and want to go out too. So Princess Elaina, with some restless teens on her own estate, decided to do the local landowners a favor and announce that she was leading a pack of teenagers out on errantry for two summer months: who was in? Well, damn near everyone, but in the end, she set out with thirteen. And, much to their dismay, led them to the task she'd already arranged in advance -- helping a village heavily damaged by the spring flood to rebuild.
I did this cheat sheet for the pack, which is far preferable to doing up individual NPC sheets for what is, after all, a group of relatively nondescript teenagers. It summarizes their race, age, manor of residence, parental background, a couple key skills, and (teenagers being teenagers) whether they particularly Like! or Dislike! those cute kids of the opposite gender, that being in terms of GURPS Reaction Rolls (high is good, low is bad).
The three for which there's scarcely any info are from Elaina's own manor, so I didn't particularly need cheats for them. But for a pack of NPCs, for which nonetheless you need to RP them and come up with a personality trait or two, this is a good approach and doesn't take all that much work.
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.
