Drama Moments
Drama moments are an aspect of a house rule that you’ve probably used or witnessed at least once in your gaming career, though you may not have known it.
Drama moments are those moments in a game where all the rules are thrown out or bent for a moment so that, in a moment of GM Fiat, the right thing can happen. Drama moments are often employed to match excellent role-playing, to ensure that the story continues on the right path or that the story ends on the right note and in general to ensure that the over-all enjoyment isn’t compromised.
Some examples of drama moments include:
- A character casting a spell they do not know or do not have access to
- A character taking extra actions
- A character shrugs off damage
- A character automatically accomplishes something that normally requires dice to be rolled
- A character over-comes a powerful magical effect
But why include drama moments when GM Fiat is generally considered a bad thing? Drama moments are not random or in place solely to gratify one individual - they serve the story and the communal enjoyment of the game.
If you’re not sure if a given situation is appropriate for a drama moment, ask yourself the following questions:
- If the wrong thing happens, can the game still be fun?
- Does it affect the entire group?
- Can the game/story continue if the wrong thing happens?
- Can they try again?
- If the wrong thing happens, does that prevent the right thing from happening later?
- Is the wrong thing primarily left up to chance?
If the answer to most or all of these questions is yes, then you’ve most likely encountered a drama moment where GM Fiat is acceptable.
Some things to keep in mind with drama moments:
Try not to let the player’s know it’s happening. By keeping it hidden, the players enjoy it more because it feels natural to them. If the situation would normally call for dice to be rolled, roll them behind your screen so that players cannot see them.
Make the players feel responsible. If you’re ensuring that an unlikely turn of events plays out in the game, present the players with something they can do to “improve the odds.” By doing so and having the players do this, they will not only feel more responsible for the events, but they will be more accepting of the unlikely turn of events because they “made [the events] likely.”
Have a reason handy as to how and why things worked differently. If the player accessed an unusual level of magical abilities, a new source of magical power that was tapped and run dry during the drama moment is sufficient to explain what happened. Similarly, outside intervention, luck, favor of the gods, adrenaline are all acceptable excuses.
Remember, the worst thing that can happen from a drama moment is the players trying to futilely to re-create the circumstances or accomplish the same phenomenal task.
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?
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?
Evaluating Your Game: Part Three
This is part three in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate and improve your game from the ground up. Previously, I discussed Genre, Setting, and Scope, followed by an analysis of Character Generation Methods. Today, I’m going to explore the role that randomness plays in your game.
When I talk about randomness, I mean meaningful randomness which affects the outcome of events purely through game mechanics. Rolling a die for an attack roll is a good example, where deciding what clothes a random bar patron is wearing is not.
First, what does the randomness represent in your game? Is it luck? Favor of the gods? An independent range of outcomes? A range to succeed or fail, determined by skill? While many people may be tempted to assume it is the last one, keep in mind that in many games, the range of randomness is never affected by skill, simply what is acceptable in that range to succeed. Be sure to consider this in all aspects of the game, skill use, combat, and character creation. For instance, why are hit points random?
Once you’ve determined what role randomness plays in your game, determine how big of a role it can play in the course of a game. You may be surprised.
For instance, in the d20 system you may assume that someone has a Base Attack Bonus of +10. In addition to this, their stat modifier gives them a +4 bonus to their attack roll. Further, they have managed through use of superior equipment, positioning, and tactics to acquire an additional +6 bonus to their attack roll, giving them a total of +20 to their attack. This means that thorough skill and preparation which borders on or exceeds the “realistic” human limit plays an equal role to pure, random chance.
Once you have figured out the role that chance plays, determine if it is the correct role. Does it play too big a part? Too small? Does it scale the way you want it to? (If scaling luck is of importance to you, I recommend looking into systems with dice pools.) If the answer to all these questions is no, then you need to ask yourself if your players will be happy with the role chance plays - if it plays too big a part, players may feel that chance simply dwarfs their character.
If you are investigating new systems, one thing to look at is how they present the odds of chance. Simply on a practical level, percentile is the easiest to work with, as people usually think in percentages when they think in terms of chance - it’s simply more natural than increments of 1/20th or 1/6th.
The final consideration with chance and randomness is how much you will do during play to minimize or alter it. If you are going to allow re-rolls in many instances due to clever thinking, or it simply being appropriate in the situation, this will slowly control the role that chance plays.
Evaluating Your Game: Part Two
This is part two in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate your game from the ground up.
Often, the first and most important thing that your players will encounter in your game is the process of character creation. For purposes of this discussion, I will assume that the characters being created are done so using the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 rules, though I believe the process is universal enough that it may be translated into different rulesets without difficulty.
The first step in character creation is the assigning of attribute points. The different methods used to determine attributes all have different effects on the character creation process and how players approach the game.
Random attribute generation is perhaps the most classic, and my personal least favorite method of character generation because it takes a large level of control away from me in the process of character development. While it is true that you can play anything with any stats, it can be very hard to have sufficient attributes to make a character worth playing in the presence of other party members, who’s attributes are far better. Nothing deflates the enjoyment of the game for me like having all elevens and twelves while someone else in the party has all seventeens and eighteens.
Some people, however, prefer random generation. It has the benefit of being more realistic, and forcing players to make do with statistics which may not be quite ideal for them. It can also have the benefit of encouraging people to play different concepts or class types.
The pattern I have noticed with random character generation is that more high attributes tend towards fighter characters, while single high attributes tend towards caster characters.
The second method of attribute generation is the array method. The array method works through taking a set of pre-determined numbers, usually 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18, and allowing players to place them as desired. This method has the benefit of being balanced between party members and discouraging min-maxing.
The third method of attribute generation is the point-buy method. This method works by giving each player a number of points, which are then used to purchase attributes. The purchase cost can either be flat, usually one-for-one, or the cost may increase for higher attributes, so that each modifier increase costs more. This method has the benefit of providing players the most freedom, though it can lead to min-maxing, and the process can take longer with the point-buy method than any other of the others, due to the number of choices to be made. Though the point-buy method is theoretically balanced, the fact that it can lead to min-maxing means that it can result in some unbalanced characters.
The final method of character creation is a hybrid method, combining random generation with the point-buy system. In this method, players generate their attributes randomly as normal. They are then free to use the point-buy system to shuffle points around and customize their attribute distribution. This method can lead to unbalanced characters, as the random method can, though it is rarely as crippling as with pure random generation.
What method do you use to generate characters?
Fan Service in RPGs
There is an aspect of gaming that has receieved little attention, yet I believe it can be found in the history any RPG group that has been together for any length of time. Fan service has appeared in almost every medium in one form or another, whether it was called an “easter egg,” “outside reference,” or whatever else. RPGs are no exception.
In fantasy RPGs, perhaps the most commonly encountered (and certainly the most infamous) fan services are something relating to LotR, or Monty Python. Another famous example of fan service which has cropped up more recently are the Sword-Chucks (I believe another reference was made in one of the bigger card games, but I cannot find it.)
My first personal experience with a fan service in an RPG was in a DnD game, where our party had landed on a island occupied by vampires with a striking similarity to those in the Blood Omen series. As we explored, we began meeting several characters who were obviously based on primary characters from that same series. This did nothing to enhance the story by itself, but it made everyone at the table who had any experience with that series to suddenly find the game more enjoyable, if just because of those outside ties.
When including a fan service in your game, becareful that you are not accidentally falling prey to GMPC or the Pet NPC problems - and that your players don’t think that is what’s happening either.
How have you taken advantage of fan services in your game? When’ve you seen it done well, and what pitfalls have you seen attached to it?
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?
PCs versus Players
In Wednesday’s post, I discussed my Personal Rules for Narrating, and Uncle Dark pointed out that I was making a series of distinctions between the players themselves, the characters, and the party, though these distinctions were not made clear. Today, I thought I would correct this by explaining.
The Players. The Players themselves make up the core of any game, and without them the game obviously cannot exist: solitaire without a player is just a deck of cards. When Players come to any game, they have a set of expectations, not only for what the game will be like, but also how they would like the game to play out. In RPGs, these expectations will usually take the form of goals for their characters and the setting.
The Characters. Without the Players, the Characters are little more than pieces of paper and empty concepts. Characters are as essential to an RPG as the Players themselves, as the Characters are both the vehicle of the story and the game itself. In role-playing games and games where the player is introduced to their character over a period of time, it is not uncommon to discover that the goals of the Player and the goals of the Character are not one and the same, often due to a lack of knowledge about the other.
In most games, Players have two ways of playing their Characters:
- As Their Characters. Playing as a Character means that the Player has assumed the role of that Character, and the game is played as the Character would play it out and react to situations. Playing as a Character in this fashion may be considered role-playing, even if it is unaccompanied by role-acting.
- For Their Characters. Playing for a Character means that the Player is playing the game and participating in it in while not focusing primarily on how their character would react. This type of play is often passive, and can be found while playing video games, and in the behavior of many veteran role-players who have discovered that their play experience is not enriched by further role-playing in some situations, and that the outcome of many mundane situations is not altered by constant role-playing.
How will the goals differ for a Player/Character between these two modes of play?
A Player playing as their Character focuses primarily on the goals of the Character, and during actual play place their personal goals for the Character or the game at a lower priority than any in-game goals their Character might have. The immediate rewards of this type of play are often focused on the Character, while the long-term rewards are often focused around the experience of playing itself.
A Player playing for their Character will play often with their own personal goals as a Player placed first over those of the Character in-game. The immediate rewards of this type of play are often focused around the Player, and character rewards and goals, if in existence, will most likely be identical to those of the Player.
Why are these distinctions are important? The Player who plays as their Character has placed an amount of trust in the game and, by extension in RPGs, the Narrator who runs it. The Player trusts the game to be a rewarding experience simply through play itself, and that the game will meet any additional goals the Player may have had, either for themselves as a Player, the game itself, or even another Player or Character within the game.
Everyone has goals, Player, Character, or Narrator, and meeting the goals of each, both as a whole and on an individual basis, ensures play will be a success,
