Five Ways to Improve Your Game
A few days ago, Yax wrote on article on several ways to improve a DnD game.
Remove every distraction possible. It’s universally agreed upon that distractions and disruptions in any game not only makes the game less enjoyable by itself, but also removes people from the game and causing the quality of the game to suffer for a time after the distraction/disruption ends. Turn off cell phones, shut down instant messaging clients, and hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door if needed.
Whenever any situation comes up in the game where you feel something has provoked a character, or you would like it to, ask the player to share the reaction with the group. This encourages character immersion and does a lot to set the mood by having players describe how their characters feel.
If the party splits up, if at all possible, keep everyone at the table, or at least in the same room. Making players stop playing for a time in the middle of a session breaks the flow of everything, and results in boredom. If possible, have the players stay in the room so that they can listen. You may also want to consider having a small project for them, such as having them write up notes about the game, or write a character journal entry relating to something. A small reward for the player encourages them to do this, and doesn’t remove them from the game.
Exaggerate NPC characteristics. I don’t mean you should do this to a ridiculous degree, but times where I have exaggerated NPC characteristics to make them particularly noticeable, annoying or endearing, my players have never thought I was exaggerating the characteristics. It may seem over the top when presented, but rarely when it is received - especially if you don’t happen to be an actor.
Recognize that the story being told may well be bigger than the characters which the game focuses on. By making this apparent to your players while keeping the main focus on them, you add a lot to the feeling that they are making a difference, and that what their characters do actually matters.
Game Weather
Weather in RPGs is one of the most overlooked and simplest way to add flavor and attitude to a game. Because weather rarely comes into play as far as logistics goes, it often goes ignored. In the last four years, the only time I have heard players ask about the status of weather, it was because they were wondering if they could use a storm or wind based spell that required certain weather conditions.
How do you create weather in RPGs that is realistic, interesting and doesn’t come across as repetitive? Go outside on a regular basis during different times of day and write down whatever weather patterns are presenting themselves. Learn the conditions when dew turns into a misty fog in the early morning, or whatever else you can gleam. Use these descriptions to create a scene for your players to imagine in their heads.
For instance, here is a description of adventurers waking up in the woods without weather being part of the description:
The last watch shift ends at dawn, and you begin breaking down the campsite and hiding any record of your presence lest you be tracked. Calls of wild-life emanate from within the forest.
Compare this to a description of the same scene with weather included as a factor:
The last watch shift ends at dawn, and you begin breaking down the campsite and hiding any record of your presence lest you be tracked. A low fog rolls over the ground, forcing you to go up a tree in order to scout the surrounding area and get your bearings. Looking out over the forest, many patches are filled with an obscuring mist. Calls of wild-life emanate from beyond the mists, reminding you of how little you see of what’s around you.
These scenes are essentially the same as far as any mechanics go, and there may or may not be an ambush or other peril waiting for them within the fog. The image of it, however, is quite evocative and sets a mood for the players. Encouraging them to imagine the scene allows them to create an image of it in their minds, forcing them to interact with the game and become more immersed in it.
How do you create weather scenes and descriptions?
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Changing Your Game’s Alignment
Alignment is one of those tricky substances that can make or break a game, and I have yet to meet someone who feels about and defines the alignments the same way as the next person. Here are some house rules you can implement your game to help make alignment run a bit more smoothly and feel more meaningful when it comes into.
Detecting alignment does not detect the alignment of anything that does not have the Evil/Good/Lawful/Chaotic/Whatever descriptor on it. It is, however, able to detect current intentions and thoughts, so that a person contemplating an evil act would show up to Detect Evil. This solves the problem of a lawful good society declaring it illegal to be evil and simply executing everyone who glowed red when Detect Evil was cast. Additional story lines may-be weaved in involving sleeper agents, a la the Manchurian Alignment.
Alignment detection only detects the alignment relative to the person detecting it, so that the detection will only detect evil/good/law/chaos as defined by the character. This creates more roleplaying opportunities and allows characters to be blinded by their prejudices, while simultaneously reducing the concreteness and definitiveness of alignments.
Allow players to declare no-alignment, meaning that they do not gain any alignment based DR and they are unable to overcome alignment based DR, or be the subject of any alignment based spells. Doing this causes alignment to become special again, and someone with a Good alignment or Lawful Good alignment is someone special and someone who is especially dedicated to those beliefs. An added benefit is that when doing this, sorting out the proper alignment for a character is far easier - if it is clear, then the alignment choice is easy, but if not then Null Alignment seems the best choice.
An additional benefit from implementing the two rules above is that it stops players from engaging in combat simply because of alignment, which stops a lot of mindless slaughtering and encourages actual roleplaying.
What house rules have you introduced to deal with alignment in your game?
Wednesday Links
The ChattyDM recently started a set of forums for RPG players to hang out in and discuss different games, swap advice or game stories. A nice set of forums with knowledgeable people I enjoy talking to. Highly recommended.
John Kim posted his initial thoughts on DnD Fourth Edition, discussing changes in the game and the target audience of 4e. Well-organized and highly recommended.
Deeper in the Game wrote a short article discussing the purpose of setting in an RPG.
Martin from Treasure Tables has announced he probably won’t continue with the site. Thanks for all the good content over the years!
Crunch Creating Fluff
Most gamers would likely say that fluff, the meat and content of an RPG, should be considered when making the crunch, the system and mechanics used to support the fluff. There is at least one case, however, where the opposite was done, and quite successfully.
My favorite ADnD supplement is a too often overlooked one, College of Wizardy by Bruce R. Cordell. Printed in 1997, this supplement contained information which completely changed the way magic could be viewed in DnD. For quite some time, DnD had used the fire-and-forget method of spell casting, taken from Vance’s Dying Earth series. To this point, the best explanation for fire-and-forget boiled down to “It’s magic and it works the way we say it works” or “We need it for game balance. Casters are already more powerful than Fighters.”
College of Wizardry changed this with the introduction of the Language Primeval, also known as Aleph. Sound familiar? Aleph was the first language spoken in the multiverse, spoken by those creators that came before the gods themselves. True Names were derived from Aleph, as was all magic. The raw power of Aleph, which when used in its perfect form could re-write the multiverse itself and overpower any deity, was such that it would burn holes in the minds of mortals and gods that attempted to learn it.
Once this is revealed in the book, much of Fire and Forget has a fluffy explanation. Arcane and Divine magic, both being descendants from Aleph, share similar properties with it - that of memory erasure, though on a much more precise level. This also caused non-Focus spell components to make more sense - many languages involve spoken words and physical gestures, and Aleph was apparently no exception.
Why doesn’t this happen more often? These kinds of crunchy rules that appear nonsensical only serve to force my focus out of the game by creating a break in the world’s reality. Smoothing it over not only creates a number of truly interesting story lines, many placed in the book and many more for clever Narrators to figure out, but it allows everyone who participates in the game to immerse themselves a little bit more.
What are your thoughts on crunch creating fluff? Where else have you seen it done?
Why I Do It
The past week has been spent contact people in the RPG community and offering help with various projects that they have undertaken, and during this time it occurred to me that I have never explained why I am doing any of this.
RPGs are a defining aspect of my life, and have been since I first started playing them. Much of my knowledge in diverse areas of history, religion, geography, weapons and a dozen other things has come largely from experience garnered during play. (Pun possibly intended.) Further, it was through gaming that I first began to develop any real social skills. Without exaggeration, I can say that RPGs have made me who I am today, and without them I would be an incredibly different person, to say the least, which brings me to why I do this.
I love RPGs. As I explained above, I owe the life I have to them, and because of that I can think of no nobler task than giving back to the RPG community in any way that I can. I started this blog with the hope of offering help and insight to people. I join communities with the hope of offering help and making a real connection with people who share my greatest passion.
Anything I can do to give to the community, I will do my best. If you are involved with an RPG related project or otherwise know of one, please get in touch with me. You can leave a comment on this article or send me an e-mail at Daniel (at) AlephGaming (dot) com.
Narrator’s Creed
Thanks to Greywulf and ChattyDM for this.
We, the undersigned……
- Demand a rules system that is consistent, clear and concise in all respects
- Want one book that contains character generation, the game rules and a wide and inspiring selection of opponents
- Expect regular supplements which take the game in fun, exciting and unexpected directions. Give us new monsters, new rules and new ideas, not formulaic repetition and rehashes of previous material
- Need published adventures created by the best minds in the industry that are fun to run and don’t require multiple rule books and monster manuals open at the table just to run a simple encounter. Give us all we need to run the encounter straight off the page
- Demand a system which works with (but doesn’t demand) miniatures, an internet connection or an electronic gaming aid. Let us choose how we play rather than be dictated by the financial interests of your company. Get this right and the profits will follow. Have faith in your customers, and they will have faith in you
- Want a combat system which can scale with the number of opponents, whether it’s a single foe or a thousand screaming goblins.
- Expect to be able to be able to create and customise monsters and NPCs simply, whether we be planning a scenario or sat at the table mid-game. We demand simplicity.
- Want stat blocks which take up a few lines of text, not a whole page
- Demand character generation that is as flexible and unrestricted as possible
- Expect the rules system to reflect the genre, not mould the genre into it’s image
- Want game designers who listen, not preach; improve, not re-invent; and inspire, not promote.
- Require a freely downloadable Test Drive Preview of the game with which we can run a sample adventure from start to end.
In return, we will…..
- Advocate, promote and play this game at every opportunity
- Make this game our game through customization of the classes, features and game world
- Introduce new players to the game, and thereby expand the hobby and profits of the company
- Buy the game, buy the supplements and buy the adventures, for they will be good, and worth our hard earned cash
- Have fun and be very, very happy indeed!!
Greywulf has asked that this be passed on if you agree with it, through communities or blogs. You can find the original post, by Greywulf, here.
Fluff is better than Crunch
Those Chatty Minions have gotten me thinking about the fluff/crunch debate, and I’ve realized that I believe fluff is far more important than crunch.
For those of you playing along at home, crunch consists of the rules and mechanics of the game, whereas fluff is made up of the flavor, history, and lore of a game.
So why do I think that fluff is more important than crunch? This particular bias goes back to my days in diceless RPGs, where no mechanics existed and we were left with only stories to focus on and fluff to fill the game. But how does that make fluff more important than crunch?
A game of pure fluff can exist, diceless story games like I used to play are proof enough of this. A game of pure crunch, however, cannot exist because the game mechanics are a hollow construct without fluff, and have no content to be applied to them.
Some of you may say, “Wait! BRP is a complete system for play and mechanics without any fluff. And what about RIFTs, GURPs, and HERO?” The system does indeed exist without fluff, and characters can even be generated without touching any element of fluff. Despite this, the moment the game begins, fluff attaches itself, immediately being given form by the setting and game type.
Necessity is one of the greatest markers of importance, and it is one that fluff possesses and crunch does not.
I Hate Dice
Following yesterday’s post on evaluating randomness in your game, I have a confession to make: I hate dice.
In theory, the rolls of dice should, over a long enough time line, average out. After all, everyone has the same chances of achieving the same quality roll every time they pick up the dice and throw them back down. However, most people do not play games over a long time line, most play for about five hours every weekend, if that regularly.
Worst yet, not all die rolls are equal in their importance - a d6 may be just a d6, until you’re rolling stats or health points and the outcome will affect your character for the rest of their life.
To complicate the issue further, these rolls can have long term effects on party balance. A character with 16s, 17s, and 18s for its attributes will be forever better off than one with 10s, 11s, and 12s. The same applies for health points - two characters might each roll 1d10, but if one gets a nine while another gets a one or a two there is a sudden significant and permanent difference in power levels between the two characters, for no reason other than a single die roll.
What options are there to remedy these problems?
Stats can be generated with a point-buy or array system instead of random generation, granting all the players the same range of potential.
Mechanics which require some randomization for outcome determination can throw chops, or switch to a diceless system.
A simple solution is to realize that dice and other randomizers are put into place to control the ebb and flow of a game, and to leave those elements where this is successfully applied alone. At this point, allowing dice pools or re-rolls eliminates much of the problem by taking the pressure off of a single roll, allowing results to be much more successfully averaged.
Does anyone else feel this way about dice? If so, how do you deal with it?
