Aleph Fantasy Classes Update
The main site now has a new page with some additional information regarding each of the classes in Aleph Fantasy. You can find the new page here.
Evaluating Your Game: Part One
This is part one in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate your game from the ground up.
The most basic part of any game is the genre. This one choice determines more about the course of game play than any other factor, including setting. An espionage game is likely to encourage little combat, lots of role-playing, and characters designed with a wide variety of skills in mind, while a science fiction game of space fleets is going to encourage players to design characters with piloting and tactical skills in mind.
When looking at your game, ignore all other aspects of it and try to determine what kind of genre or mixture of genres your game best falls into, and what aspects of it your different players respond to the most. Armed with this knowledge, you can adjust your presentation of game elements to better match the genre your players want to see.
Setting contains all the specifics and details that genre leaves out. Everything from geographical to political, legal, and religious matters all into the setting, as well as the laws relating to physics or magic, which may well be different from that of our own world.
Is there an aspect of your setting that your players are ignoring? If so, why? Are they aware that it exists? Have they had the time or opportunity to explore that aspect of your game? If an aspect of your game is generally ignored or avoided by the players, they are either unaware of it, or unaware of why they would want to deal with it. Make a point of demonstrating why that part of your game is there and how your players can enjoy it; if they still don’t react, it may be time to remove it from your game.
Scope determines how much of the setting your players are likely to encounter, and how they are going to be interacting with it. The scope of your game is the starting point of the players, and everything they do right up to the end - there exist aspects of the setting/game world/game mechanics outside of that scope, but it does not affect the course of the game.
To determine where the scope of your game is likely to extend to you, look at how characters start off in your game. Are they lowly (or not so lowly) adventurers or mercenaries, just looking to make money? Or are they spies, stealing secrets from an enemy agency? Or are they simply ordinary people put into strange circumstances?
How the scope of your game progresses throughout it is also determined by the type of game, whether it is story, drama, or combat based. Characters can begin in a more powerful position in the former two types of games, as advancement is not the primary focus. Most combat games, however, include progression as an essential aspect, and if characters have nowhere to grow, the players may soon feel the game has no point.
The final aspect for this installment is reward. How do you reward your players? How do you reward the characters? Is the reward type appropriate to the game type? Items and equipment are seen as important in combat based games, but unless they forward the story or drama, they are far less useful in a less combat oriented game.
Bullseye Syndrome
There’s a phenomenon I’ve been encountering a lot lately in various games and other fiction, as far as I know, there is no name for this phenomenon, though I have been referring to it as the Bullseye Syndrome, named after the Marvel Anti-Hero and his ability.
In the comics, Bullseye was not a superhuman, alien, mutant, or anything else of the sort. He, like Daredevil, is simply a very fit person with enhanced senses and skills which border on the impossible. As his name implies, Bullseye has perfect aim, which he is able to use to turn anything into a lethal weapon: pencils become impaling weapons, playing cards slice people’s throats, and peanuts are launched and lodged in someone’s throat, choking them to death.
Any situation where a skill or talent is taken to the limits, to a purely theoretical level where that skill becomes, for lack of a better word, broken. This is most often encountered in superhero games, though it is not uncommon to find it in fantasy or science fiction, or any game which has dice pools which accumulate/roll over, like Sorcerer (if I remember the mechanics correctly).
In some mediums, the Bullseye Syndrome is rather appropriate, especially in the superhero, science fiction, or fantasy genres. In some instances, it can simply cause the story to break down, or it simply doesn’t fit with the themes and type of fiction that is being portrayed.
Many players love to embrace the Bullseye Syndrome because of the power that it allows their characters to wield; but more importantly to many players, because of the theoretical plausibility of that power. Ultimately, however, the question of allowing it comes down to one of scaling. If the ability exceeds the capabilities of other abilities, or is impossible to defend or counter against, then it is most likely time to remove or adjust it, regardless of its potential plausibility.
The true reason this syndrome can turn into a problem is that it changes the way the game works in a fundamental fashion. An outside example could be sniping. In many of my games, I have told my players that if they engage in sniping tactics to take out unwitting enemies safely from a distance, eventually their enemies will do the same to them, and they will die a surprising and unsatisfying death.
In my experience, these kinds of abilities, and their unblockable/uncounterable nature, encourage the breakdown of enjoying play.
How do you deal with your players and these vaguely realistic, but broken, possibilities?
Main Site Back Up
The main page, AlephGaming.com, is now back up. It’s fairly simple, but hopefully it should be expanded soon.
Wizards Lost Me At Podcast
The one thing the campaign for Fourth Edition DnD that really annoys me is the over-use of the podcast.
In the past, I’ve loved reading the blogs for Wizards. It gave me a great insight into what was coming up, and what the thinking was for different things. Lately, however, it seems as if a great deal of information is being released primarily, if not only, through their podcasts. Which is terrible for me, because I can’t stand to listen to them.
I’m not singling Wizards out here. This isn’t a comment on the quality of their podcasts or anything of the sort. I simply can’t sit through any podcast. I have ADD, and if I can’t scan the entirety of it to find what is relevant to me, what I’m interested in, and what is being offered, I can’t stand to sit through these things.
So why aren’t they offering at least transcripts of these podcasts for people like me, who want to hear this information but can’t sit through the podcast itself?
Is there something I’m missing? Am I alone here? Anyone who can point me to a place where I can find transcripts or who will type them up for me will forever be my friend.
Starting An Adventure: Part Three
In my last two articles, I discussed gathering the group and preparation time before an adventure. Today, I’ll conclude with getting the players involved.
One of the best games I’ve run, as far as role-playing encounters are concerned, was a game in which the party was returning to a town which happened to be the home town of one of the wizard. The wizard’s father, also a wizard, still lived in town, in a sizable house. Needing both a place to rest and eat as well as information, the party went to visit the wizard’s father, seeking both.
I never told them the encounter was going to be role-playing heavy, but from the moment they entered the house I only spoke as the father or the GM directed actions, describing environments, etc. When the players tried to jump ahead of the father’s questioning and being caught up, he would interrupt them firmly but nicely and continue along with what he wanted to talk about. This forced the players to role-play with him a bit.
This encounter wound up lasting nearly two hours, for the duration of it everyone being in character nearly a hundred percent of the time, simply focusing on dialogue and characterization. There was more character development in that session, and more fun role-playing all squeezed into those two hours than I could have possibly expected before the start of the session. (This encounter also had the added bonus of added impact when the father was later assassinated.)
The lesson I took from this session was that to get players involved, it must be made clear to them, either implicitly or explicitly, that it is in their interest to get involved and participate. As soon as players begin to respond and get involved, it is important to reward that behavior immediately, at least at first, to help cement that it is the proper thing to do and it will make the game more enjoyable for everyone.
Another simple way to get your group involved is to ask them directly what they and their characters want. If you are lucky enough to get usable responses, design the adventure/campaign with these responses in mind. If your players were honest and intelligible, you’ve probably built in an irresistable hook.
How do you get players involved?
Starting An Adventure: Part Two
Yesterday, in response to a question by Streetline in the StumbleUpon roleplaying forums I discussed gathering the group at the start of an adventure. Today, I’ll continue with preparation time.
Most of my campaigns are designed and run in a non-linear fashion so as to give PCs as much freedom as desired in directing the story. As a result, my preparation time is split into two categories: Campaign Preparation, and Adventure Preparation.
Campaign preparation is almost entirely comprised of becoming familiar with the rules, setting, and world that the campaign will be taking place in. Keeping things open-ended and providing the players with a lot of freedom means I need to be at least familiar with everything. While the rules and circumstances don’t need to be memorized, I need to understand them well enough that a quick scan will provide me with everything I need.
The rest of campaign preparation is spent talking to the players, and finding out what kind of campaign they want to play, and what kind of characters they’re likely to play, backgrounds they’re considering for them, and general goals/directions for the characters. This can all change later on, but it puts me on the same wavelength as my players, and helps me make better use of my prep time by focusing it on what will be relevant to the players.
Adventure preparation is what I do before every session. This is where I draw maps, roll up NPCs, prepare stats for creatures they are likely to encounter, and any other preparation that seems necessary for the upcoming session. I also make a point of reviewing any likely points that the players are likely to deviate from what I have prepared, and alternate paths that they are likely to take.
On average, I spend about one hour preparing for every four hours of gaming. This can change depending on how intense the session will be, how much is being recycled from the past, and how divergent the players have been.
I will conclude next time with getting players involved.
Starting An Adventure: Part One
Streetline from StumbleUpon recently posed a great question in the roleplaying forums: How do you start an adventure? How much prep time (if any) goes into your campaigns and plots? How do you get players involved and roleplaying?
I suggest everyone take a look at that thread, if just to read CastorQuinn’s response, which is thorough and thoughtful.
My personal favorite method of gathering PCs together in a group is the idea of a pre-existing relationship or friendship. The “He’s my brother” logic creates the kind of tight bond that is ideal for most adventuring games. Which brings me to the main issue of getting everything started.
In adventuring games, it is ideal to get the game started quickly, with a certain level of trust and cooperation in the group implied, simply for the purposes of getting things done, and making sure the group stays together for the most part, despite various forces driving them in different directions.
In some games, this kind of relationship is the exact opposite of what is desired. The Paranoia RPG, for instance, hopes to create a feeling of strain and distrust between the party members, who are encouraged to keep potentially deadly secrets from eachother, constantly expecting a betrayal.
In story driven games, a cohesive party often isn’t appropriate for the course of the game and the story. The players may not all be on one side, or they may be parts of competing sects/factions within a larger unifying force, such as many of White Wolf’s Vampire games.
One shot adventures are another story all-together. The group is only, supposedly, together for this one adventure or event, so fate or employment become much more acceptible motivations for working together.
Generally, my favored method of getting characters together at the start of a game is to let the players decide. In all but the most linear of games, or those following the patterns of Paranoia, I allow the players to discuss their concepts as much as desired prior to the game. I feed them information on the starting region and what kind of campaign they are going to participate in, and let them figure out how they belong together.
Generally, the players seem to come up with a good idea, which engages their characters quickly and provides background and/or plot hooks for me to use.
Tomorrow, I’ll discuss prep time and getting players involved.
