My name is Ogre Whiteside and I’m a fan of tabletop role playing games. I play them, facilitate them, write and design them, and generally talk about them quite a bit. Mainly I wanted a blog to write longer posts and articles free of the limitations of various social media sites.
What Do Factions Do?
Factions, more than any other background element, should create story. When it comes to worldbuilding elements like places, NPCs, cultures, and objects, there are going to be some that just inhabit a space in between stories and are there mainly to reinforce the overall feel and texture of the game world. Not every peasant laboring in the fields is going to generate a quest, though they may know something about the local story, and not every roughneck in a space station bar is going to know where a lost ship landed on some crazy dangerous planet. Not every town has a prebuilt adventure, and not every deer and crow are actually messengers from the gods. Sometimes a crow is just a crow.*
Factions, however should always generate story. As far as I’m concerned that’s what a faction in a setting is for. They’re groups of NPCs with a set of goals and objectives that create story for the players to interact with. A faction should be brimming over so full of story hooks that little bits keep spilling out all over the characters.
So, let’s talk about how to organize your factions so that you can keep their stories rolling and mixing with the player’s stories. That’s the difficult part, keeping track of what’s going on, or at least being able to simulate a bustling faction and their interactions with the world.
The way I do it is to answer a few key questions.
Who are these people? How do they know each other? Why are they together? What’s their power structure look like, and who’s in charge? Is anyone in charge at all? How do they make decisions, and how do they communicate these decisions to the other members?
A faction could fit a lot of different roles and archetypes as long as they fit the two main parameters: It’s a group, and that group all have a similar goal. Even the cliché dungeon mucking adventuring group is a faction really. They work together to achieve xp and cash. A secret society that wants to eliminate magic from the world is definitely a faction, but so is a company that wants to gain favorable trading contracts with the nations in the far north while keeping their competition from being able to do the same. Not all factions are interesting, but they all have the potential to be. The sewer workers guild is a faction, and they want to be paid fairly for their work. What would potentially make them interesting and generate some story, is when they city decides to cut their pay, or start paying non guilders for the work. Now we have a faction with an obstacle to their goal. That’s a story.
What does the faction want? A faction wants something, to achieve a goal of some kind. Those within the faction all share this goal, anyone who doesn’t is either a dupe, a traitor, or essentially another faction altogether. What is it? Is it acquiring something, some knowledge or resource, eliminating a threat, carrying out some task, or maybe protecting something? Make sure you understand the faction’s goals, even if those goals are misleading or nonsensical. An evil priest who tells his followers that his methods are a way to salvation, when they’re actually heading towards damnation is either a traitor to his own faction, or the rest of the faction are all dupes.
Regardless, as long as you know what the actual goals and objectives of the faction are, no matter if they’re as stated or not, then you’ll have a some idea of how they’ll behave while pursuing them.
How do they go about achieving this? What actions is the faction undertaking to accomplish their goals? What irons do they have in the fire? How far along are they? Where do they have power and what assets do they have? These questions will allow you to build the faction into your game world and use them as prompts to spur the characters to action, or at least interest. Once you know what a faction is doing, you can reveal their plots and intrigues to the players in whatever manner you want to.
What are they willing to do to reach their goals? Will they stop at nothing? Do they care about collateral damage? Do they have a code of rules they have to follow? Are they overzealous about certain things? Have they fallen into weird habits because that’s what worked?
Decide not only what the faction, as an institution, considers to be appropriate action in pursuit of their goals, but also what is out of bounds and would garner some sort of punishment or expulsion from the group.
Disagreements within the faction are a great way to further splinter the faction into subfactions, thus giving more story hooks for the players to grab onto.
Is there internal agreement about these methods? Not all structures are monolithic. People are individuals, even within a faction, and so will have different opinions about what is and isn’t appropriate, or even true.
What if some members of the sewer workers guild think that backing up shit into the mayors house is the answer, but others think that stopping all work completely is the way to go? What if some of them are willing to rough up the non guild workers to accomplish this? How does the leadership feel about any of this? Is this faction splintering into sub-factions, or will they abide by the decisions handed down?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can set their schemes into motion, but you’ll want to develop a way to track their machinations and progress. Some games, like Apocalypse World, Scum and Villainy, and The Sprawl, use clocks for this. A clock is a progress tracker that allows you to tick off segments back and forth as events move towards and away from completion. Another method is to use a world diary to track all of the events unfolding in the game world, perhaps with some kind of highlighting or bolding where crucial progress and events are concerned. You can make faction sheets that list all of the relevant data about the faction and add clocks or story entries to them, and keep the whole thing in a folder, either hard copy or virtual. I find this kind of thing helpful, personally. It helps me keep things moving in the game world, especially when the events unfolding are off camera.
Factions can really breathe life into a game world. If their goals align with the characters’ goals then that faction are potential allies and even resources, and if the faction’s goals are at cross purposes to the characters they can become a source of opposition that has more going on than just random singular bad guys and monsters. Even if the faction’s goals are neutral to the characters’ beliefs, they can still become a source of revenue or information if the faction recognizes the potential the characters represent for advancing their goals.
Most of all, though, a game world full of factions all working towards some kind of goal, whether it be change or maintaining the status quo, has a life of its own and creates stories both for and alongside the characters’ own stories. It makes the place more well rounded.
If you have trouble coming up with your own factions or want to add a few more to what you already have, I suggest you looking into some handy generators out there. A quick google search for “faction generator” brought up a whole array of results including a few that are very detailed. Stars Without Number and a few other games have built in faction generators, and even if those aren’t exactly what you’re looking for, you can use those methods as a template for your own. The great thing about random generators is that you can click once, get a few ideas, and scrap the rest if it doesn’t fit your needs. Sometimes getting a random result and changing the things you don’t like is a lot easier than coming up with something out of thin air.
I think making factions during downtime is fun and interesting. It’s a great bit of lonely fun. It’s also a good way to exercise those creative muscles for when you need to generate something like that on the fly and keep the game moving.
Ok, so I hope this has put a cool new tool into your toolbox, or upgraded the tools you already have. Now go have fun.
Because fun is why we do this.
*Crows would disagree.
The Interaction Between Rolling and the Narrative
For the sake of brevity here, we’re going to call it rolling, or rolling the dice. There are systems that use randomizers other than dice, and there are systems that don’t have traditional task resolution mechanics, but in the case of the first, just assume I mean “do the random” and for the second, well, those games are a little outside the scope of this article.
Also for the sake of brevity and clarity, we’ll call all of the stuff where you just make stuff up in a ttrpg “the narrative.” It’s all that fictional back and forth, whether it’s narrating for your character or as the GM, or speaking as a character or NPC.
There are two main kinds of interaction between rolling and the narrative, with a third that’s sort of in between.
The first is where the narrative describes what the character is doing and then the roll determines if it happens or doesn’t, and the second is where the player describes their intent to a certain degree and then rolls and interprets the results of that roll to inform the fiction that follows. That in between stage is where the player narrates right up to the roll, clearly describing what they would like to happen, and then the roll determines to what degree that happens or not. As you can see, it’s not quite one or the other. I’ve heard these called “story before” and “story after,” but I think those terms describe a broader set of interactions than what I’m talking about, so let’s call them “describe then roll” and “roll then describe.”
Describe then roll is something we see in a lot of second wave games, especially games we could describe as simulationist in the broadly understood meaning of the term.* In games that try to come up with a way to roll for just about any little thing, clearly describing your expectations and then rolling to see if that exact thing happens makes for a good flow of the narrative. “I want to kick them into the spikes.” Ok, roll your kick, now roll a strength check to see how far they fall back, now roll damage for the kick and I’ll roll damage for the spikes.”**
Roll then describe is something we see in a lot of more abstract games, both things like D&D, and smaller more narrative games as well. You find the thing to roll about, then roll, then make up what happens depending on the results of the roll. This kind of play is nearly mandatory for systems that give a spectrum of results between success and failure. It’s hard to describe exactly what you want to have happen when the result could be “kind of happens, but there are complications.” In the case of this style of narrative to roll interaction, it’s best to describe your intent in broad terms, instead of a laundry list of things you want to happen. “I fight him.” “Ok, the roll says you do some damage, but you take damage back. What happens?” “I swing hard as he backpedals and score a blow across his abdomen, but my swing overbalances me and he uses the opportunity to lunge back in and stab the in the shoulder.”
That third one in the middle? It works best for games that have some kind of economy of bonus points, stunts, or whatever.*** It’s a good way of tallying up all the little bits and bobs that are included in the roll. You build up your roll, including the details of the things you add, then roll and interpret. “I’m casting a sleep spell. I incant under my breath for two, while I rub the gem on my enchanted ring for two, and spend a point to activate my ‘casting under pressure’ thingy for two, because this is a hail mary play. So I’m rolling with a bonus of six.” “Ok, so you beat them by two overall, but one of them has a thingy called ‘suspicious nature’ that I’m going to spend a point on, so he’s only groggy, but the rest go night night.”
Each have their uses and each fit well into certain games, but each can cause issues if used in the wrong game. When a player has really only ever played a certain kind of game, it can be hard to wrap their heads around a new style of play. For example, when a traditional player first encounters something like, say, a PbtA game, they try to play it with describe then roll, and come up very frustrated when the results disagree with their intent. It takes a little while and some conscious thought to come to terms with making the move with a broad intent first, then describing what happens as a result. similarly, younger players who’ve grown up with games like PbtA are often bewildered by the amount of system complexity of a big simulationist system**** and can get into the rut of using one move over and over and never getting the detail they want because that description was supposed to be a part of the task, not a result of it.
Ok, so why is any of this important? Well, if you know what kind of narrative interaction with the dice the system you’re playing is looking for, and know how to use those techniques, then you can both get along with the mechanics a lot better, and also increase your fun by engaging the system in the way it was intended to be engaged with. If we’re supposed to be playing to find out what happens, and you think the game is about saying exactly what you want and seeing if it works or not, then chances are, you’ll find the whole experience frustrating and arcane. If you think that you just roll fight without setting anything else up or using any special moves or whatever and then choose from a variety of options when it’s really just pass/fail, chances are, you’re going to be bored shitless.
And now here’s a special message to all you game designers out there. Please, please, please, be clear about the style of interaction between the narrative and rolling your game is trying to achieve. I’m not kidding here. You might think you were very clear about the whole thing, but half***** of the games that people criticize as “too hard to understand” or with sentences like “I couldn’t figure out what the game wanted me to do” suffer from a lack of clearly stated intentions about how to make the fiction and rolls work together.
So be clear about what you intended, and what playstyle worked in playtesting. It doesn’t necessarily mean that people will play it right, but at least you put some words in the game for people to point to when they don’t. When a game just comes right out and tells me “Hey, you’re meant to play this in this specific way” I really appreciate it, and full bonus points if this philosophy of play section is really well highlighted and upfront.
What can we take away from this? Well, take a look at the games you’re playing, or want to play, and figure out what methods they want from you, and how much? Also figure out the level of detail the game is asking for, and if that level of detail is for you or not. Be an informed player, because when you know how to interact with a game so that you can wring the most fun out of it, then you get to have that fun.
And having fun is what we’re here for when we play ttrpgs, unless you aren’t, in which case, you do you?
*This is why I dropped out of the discourse, lots of terms where the definition was shifting.
**I know this sounds like a ridiculous example to some of you, but this is literally a series of rolls we played out last year while playing FASERIP Marvel.
***Like FATE, and Cortex.
****To be fair, a lot of players from back in the day were just as bewildered. Big complex systems are just not everyone’s cup of tea.
*****The other half suffer from things like ultra-dense poorly laid out text, lack of easy to follow procedures, and things like no index and tiny headers that don’t stand out. I won’t rant about these kinds of things here… but I really want to.
What are your White Whales?
In short, what are the games you’ve always been interested in playing, but, for whatever reason, you’ve never managed to run or play?
Back in the days when roleplaying games were pressed into clay tablets* and dice were made of mammoth bone, one of the major hurdles to playing certain games was availability. If your store didn’t carry it, you might be out of luck. Some cooler shops would special order things, but if you were at the mercy of, say, a dancewear shop that just happened to inexplicably stock some rpg books and magazines, or a mall bookshop run by a narcissistic and also disgraced former town mayor.** then you were resigned to searching out other game sellers while on vacation to other places. It was worse if you wanted Warhammer stuff, their ordering process was so arcane and unfriendly to retailers that until GW America was established, the pipeline for warhammer stuff was basically “friends going to Canada.”***
Another hurdle was cost and shared interest. A lot of us were broke kids, so if someone with the ready cash to drop on games wasn’t interested, you were out of luck, and sometimes there was just that game that sounded terrific to… well, you, just you.
Of course sometimes everything was lined up. Someone had the game, people wanted to play, someone would run it, and then some random weird crap would get in the way. Someone would move. Players would have a major falling out. The couple who hosted would break up. Someone’s religious fanatic grandfather would burn all of their game books**** in a fit of satanic panic.
Anyway, no matter the reason (and past grudges attatched), what are the games that you wanted to play but just couldn’t seem to get to the table.
Here, in no particular order) are mine:
Ars Magica
Set in a version of Medieval Europe where magic and folklore were real, Ars Magica had a really interesting structure with players trading off from adventure to adventure, each in turn playing a magi, and then someone else’s companion, a then filling in as grogs, who were servants, guards and such and not really attached to any player, and more represented a pool of resources. The GM responsibilities rotated amongst the players too, so there was a sense of shared world building. Pretty mind blowing stuff for the late 80s.
A long time ago we made characters for this, mages, companions, grogs, the whole nine yards. I was really excited about this thing called troupe play, and it looked like it would be a really interesting campaign, then the GM moved far away pretty suddenly and that was that. It sort of took the wind out of our sails about the game, and the GM was the one with the books in the first place. Ever since then, every time I bring it up, all I get is edition wars and a vague sense that that ship has sailed long ago.
My Life With Master
A game where the GM plays the Evil Master/Mistress and the players play their minions. The game explores abusive relationships, and creates some pretty intense emotional drama as the minions try to express their free will and break free of the Master/Mistresses’ emotional manipulation. Paul Czege’s ideas about the role of the GM as a central character here are a big inspiration on my own game design, even though I’ve never played it.
This is one of those games where it just seemed to be fate, I couldn’t find a copy for myself, and every time a game of it was forming, I was just a little too late to get a spot at the table. It’s not that I’ll never play. It’s just that I’ve not managed to yet. I’ll keep chasing this one.
2300AD
Hard sci fi military action in a galaxy descended from the Twilight 2000 setting? It’s like this game was written specifically for me.
Sadly, though, while it was written for me, it was distinctly not written for any of my friends at the time. That’s it. No real sob story, just no one else was interested.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd ed.
This design by FFG was a weird departure from the previous two editions and the current one. Like a lot of FFG rpgs it had a lot of physical components, a bunch of weird dice, and just a lot of a lot. It was a big beautiful game with some really neat design elements.
We made characters and played exactly one practice combat and then never managed to get back together again due to adult responsibilities. The game needs people to be at the same (big, because of all the physical elements) table, and adult responibilities have killed every attempt at giving this game a go for me. Who knows? It might even suck, but I’d sure like to find out.
Aftermath!
A very early post-apocalyptic game (1981) with a lot of flow charts and tables.
Look. I know that it wasn’t a very good game, and playing it now will probably hurt, but this tiny black and white ads for it in Dragon Magazine really took my imagination for a ride*****. They appealed to me so much more than the big full color pages advertising Gamma World. I wanted nasty and black and white post-apoc roleplaying, not full color fantasy/sci fi babes with ray guns.
Ok, well, I’m off to go find a copy of Aftermath! and have a good laugh while reading it now. Please tell me your white whales in the comments, and you know what? Track them down. See if they’re worth giving a go in the here and now. Let me know how it goes…
…and remember to have fun.
*ah, the ancient days of designing in Linear B.
**Both of those are true stories.
***Some of my friends know what Dwarven miniatures was code for too.
****And a couple of mine that were on loan, dammit.
*****What was it about those little b&w ads that was so enticing?
You’ve Heard of Roleplaying with Miniatures, but How About Narrative Wargaming?
One of several reasons I stopped wargaming* was that it was basically the same story over and over. Force A and Force B for some reason want to fight each other, and they do that until one side is beaten. Maybe there were some little objectives to think about like a marker on the board, or keeping more points worth of troops on one section of the board than the other player, but mostly those were side notes to the main thing. It’s not a very interesting story and it gets tiresome if you do it over and over. A lot of people are in it to win it, which is why the most popular wargames have things like strict rules for army composition, and structured tournament and league style play methods. I’m not really into that kind of competitive play at all, so it got pretty dull having the same fights over and over. I have no problem if that’s how someone likes to get their game on. Good luck to them, but it’s not my bag.
So, as I return to the miniatures and wargaming hobby from the painting and crafting side of things, I must admit that I have had the itch to play a few games, but not the kind of battles I used to. Then I remembered that there was this style of play that I’d been meaning to check out and try before I fell out of the hobby, narrative wargaming.
What narrative wargaming is all about is not worrying too much about strict points balance, and army composition guidelines, but more setting up a scenario where the fight has a backstory and tells more of the story in play. I’m a sucker for stories, ya know? It also often includes another thing I’m a big fan of too, hacking the rules.
Instead of “the orcs and the dwarves are about to have a fight over this battlefield” It becomes “the orcs are trying to sneak into this dwarf stronghold and steal a great big ruby that they believe is the eye of an orc god.” Wait. Sneaking? there’s no rules in this game about sneaking. Ah yeah, now we need to make up some sneaking rules.
Or it could be “these space troopers have to get from one end of the board to the other within a certain amount of turns before an orbital bombardment turns everything to gravel and fire, and there are tons of little alien jerks in their way.” Well, that’s not gonna work. As soon as they’re fired upon they’ll be pinned down and never get anywhere. Ok, looks like we’re going to have to ignore the pinning rule for this game because these space troopers are a lot more afraid of the big big bombs than of getting shot by aliens.
There’s all sorts of ideas to explore here.
Now while narrative wargaming lends itself towards skirmish games pretty easily, that doesn’t mean it can’t scale up for full battles too.** You can set more interesting objectives for the sides, add new ways of showing up on the table, put one side in a bad ambush situation, and so on. I realize that some games have rules for this already, but what I’m encouraging you to do here is go off book, stop playing like it’s a tournament, and be creative. Make the battlefield come alive with random dangerous monsters of environmental effects, have some special troops that the rest of the army needs to defend until they do their secret mission, break up the units into smaller groups and scatter them around randomly like they were tossed around by a big spell or a massive robot foot coming down or something. Get crazy with it and tell a story.
You can not only tell the story of what happened just before the battle started, and what’s happening during the battle, but you can also use the outcome of the fight to tell the story of what happens next. Fight a series of battles where the results of the last fight modify the setup of the next one. Did the rebels blow up the comms tower? Well, no reinforcements for the government forces this time around. Think they can dig in and hold out?
You can also add some roleplaying elements to the story too. Remember the space troopers making a dash for the table edge? What if their officer can’t walk, so they’re carrying them along with them. He knows he’s slowing them down, and they know it too, but no one wants to have that conversation yet. Tell that story as you play.
Another thing you can have fun with in narrative games is the structure of who’s playing. Traditionally, wargames are played by two players, or two teams of players if it’s a really big battle, and maybe a referee. In narrative games one player could be more like a referee or gm if you will. They’ve set up the baddies and are playing them, but they’re playing them less like it’s a competition and more like they’re running a scenario. Maybe the referee is running the opposition and a few players on the other side are playing different groups of the same team, taking on the roles of various commanders, or even individual troopers or squads.
There’s a couple of games where there’s a communication phase. RAFM’s Charlie Company comes to mind. The players control various units, while the referee controls the opposing force. The players aren’t allowed to talk strategy and movement to each other, except during a communication phase, and that phase is timed. It’s maybe a little silly, but it’s also fascinating watching players figure out that if they all talk at once, no one is gonna have their orders. It gets more interesting when the referee is only telling certain players certain things by using notes. that to me, is a little bit of old school rpgs making their way onto the wargaming table. it’s fascinating, and inspiring.
It’s not hard to give this a try. There’s some great free wargames out there, and you can find the out of print ones for a song everywhere. But a few bags of plastic soldiers if you don’t want to invest in a ton of minis first. See what you can come up with. Read the rules with fresh new eyes and think “yeah, that’s cool, I guess, but what if…” and then do that.
And, you know the rest. Have fun.
*Some of the others were cost, time investment, and certain toxic fan communities.
**a skirmish wargame is one where the players control a handful of individual models independently of each others, as opposed to a full battle game where players command full armies made up of units of models that work as a group.
A Representation of Your Character.
I’m a fan of repping your character through various means, from the simplistic to the downright artistic. I think it’s helpful to both yourself and your fellow characters to have something in front of you, or in your window during an online game. It shows everyone else at the game who your character is somehow. Let’s talk about the various means of representing your character during a game from the simplest to the most effort intensive.
A name tag, standy, or just changing your name in your meeting.
Something as simple as a reminder of your character name, and maybe a few details reminds people that you’re not Scott the dev, Jen the geologist, Nadia the mechanic, and Quinn the tech writer, You’re Bargas the Wizard, Urthok the Barbarian, Griffin the fighter, and Little Bo Barby, halfling acquisition specialist.
You can turn your badge around at a con and write your character name on it with sharpie, of insert a nametag in on top of your badge, you can fold a 3×5 card in half and stand it up and write your character name on the front, and you can definitely change your name in zoom and various other meeting and online gaming platforms.
Have a picture of your character.
The simplest way to do this is to search the internet for a picture that matches your idea of your character, whether that be a piece of art, or a modelling photo or whatever. Another way to achieve this is to pick an actor you feel would portray your character best. If you want to go the extra mile of doing some photoshop work to change some details, or just add the character’s name, well, cool. Of course, you could always just print it out and modify it with sharpies or colored pencils or whatever too.
Printing that character out to have in front of you is nice, or having it up on your phone to hold up as visual reference works too, but I like the instant recognition that printed out piece of paper provides. If you’re playing online you can change your avatar to that pic, and also provide it in your character sheet file.
I do this as a GM sometimes too. I’ll decide on various celebrities as having guest star roles as NPCs, especially if they’re celebrities I can do a halfway decent impression of, but that’s not necessary at all, just a stupid thing I do, or sometimes I’ll just print out some found pics. Granted, this isn’t something I do all the time, because I mostly make up stuff as I go along, but if you’re a planner of a GM, it’s a good technique to give people a visual hook to hang onto
You can draw your own picture too if you’re artistically inclined like that. Even if you aren’t, maybe give it a shot. I think we should all draw more. We did it all the when we were little, right up until the point that some well meaning adult or rude peer ruined it for us. Sorry, small rant. Anyway, draw your character, even if it isn’t great. Drawing is fun, remember?
And, of course, there are always miniatures.
Even if you aren’t playing a game with minis, sometimes it’s nice to have one that represents your character anyway. I mean, there they are in all their two inch glory, defiantly brandishing their weapons, or thoughtfully perusing their spellbook… whatever. I think it’s fun and neat to have minis for your characters, but then again I love minis to begin with, so I’m a little biased.
So where do you find a little person to represent your character, and how much work is it going to be?
Well, they come in levels of complexity and availability. There are prepainted figures out there from various manufacturers. They’re quick and easy and usually pretty cheap.*
There are also companies that make custom figures, and some of those come pre-colored too. Hero Forge has a huge range of mix and match choices,** so if you want a fox person wearing 90’s clothing and carrying a waffle iron and a flying V guitar, for example, you’re covered. Their Sculpts end up printing decently too.
But what do you do if you find a mini that’s not pre-colored or painted, but you don’t want to invest the time and materials to learn to paint it yourself? The answer is commissions. There are a lot of painters out there, and lots of them fund their hobby by painting commissions. You can look for them on Fiverr,*** or just type “commission miniature painting” into Google. You might even know some nerds that will paint your character for you for commission, trade, or just because they like you.
Lastly, of course, you can paint them yourself. Get a paint set, watch some tutorials on Youtube, become one of us. One of us.
Y’know, or you could get real weird with it.
How about hand puppets, or just finger puppets? Maybe you could use a prop or some kind of costume piece like a hat or something. For the audiophiles out there, you could always put together a small set of songs on your phone to use as entrance music, or various themes. There’s always voice acting and changes in pitch and tone. You could even wear a mask!
Ok, ask everyone first, because not a single one of those ideas doesn’t have the serious potential to be excruciatingly annoying to everyone at the table including yourself.
Mostly, though, with some effort and time you can reinforce to everyone there who you’re playing which can be helpful, and more helpful the farther your character gets from who you really are. I try to have at least a picture if I’m playing, say… a young woman, as opposed to the middle aged man I am. It’s a good reminder both to the others and myself.
Tell me yours. I wanna know how you go about it.
And have fun.
*Sadly, that quality carries over into the casting and the sculpts themselves. If you’re looking for ultra crisp details, good luck.
**I’m not sponsored by Hero Forge, or anyone else. That would be rad though. Just saying.
***Also not a sponsor. 😦
If There’s No Risk, Why Are We Doing this?
Have you ever come up against this kind of situation in a game, the characters are attacked, but because of some quirk of the rules, one or more of the party are immune to anything the bad guys can do to them? I find this particularly annoying both as a player and a GM when it declaws certain stock NPCs that are supposed to be dangerous and scary, but due to some kind of advantage or power characters have, they’re just a paper tiger.* This is (what I consider to be) a design flaw in a lot of old traditional games, but I’ve seen it in some more modern designs too.
So what do you do about this? There’s a short unpleasant answer of sorts, that being to not play those games, but it’s short sighted kind of answer and limits your options severely. However, if you’d rather either focus on the small amount of traditional games that don’t have these weird loopholes, or just abandon them altogether for more abstract story games, I understand. I did that for awhile as well, but I eventually decided that I’d prefer to play more games and especially more traditional games, warts and all. To me it’s a challenge to play the games that I once abandoned as being dysfunctional and enjoy them despite their flaws. For the most part this article is about traditional games and if you don’t play those games then it’s not really for you.
You could outlaw these kinds of abilities and powers, but that seems unfair and arbitrary. Now, there are just some things in certain games that are so broken from a design standpoint that ignoring or not using them seems the best way to deal with it, but it just seems a shame to excise a portion of a game just to make the game have some sense of risk and uncertainty. I also get the impulse to make these kinds of agreements with the players, especially in the case of groups where one or more of the players are hyperfocused on “winning” and will tailor their builds to make their characters unstoppable machines of victory.
One approach is to carefully analyze the ins and outs of the system you’re playing and find alternative methods to threaten the characters who are wrapped up in these cocoons of invulnerability. The drawback is that this is a lot of work, and it also doesn’t solve what I call the Sabretooth problem.** How do you use the hamstrung baddies in a way that makes them scary again?
You can give them a boost. If Sabretooth can’t penetrate the character’s armor or whatever with his normal, albeit razor sharp, claws, then have him steal some sort of tech thingy that makes his hands crackle with energy, or maybe some kind of magical doodad that makes his attacks do psychic damage in addition to physical.
As another example, If the stacked up armor bonuses the elf has makes him immune to goblin attacks and your campaign is all about goblins, then have the little guys hire some bigger help, or load them down with firebombs or gas attacks. Jump off the bad guy’s stock profile and add some details and bonuses that level the playing field some more. I guess what I’m saying is don’t feel that you have to use the premade bad guy profile to the letter, and don’t feel like you can’t introduce new villains with new abilities on the fly. Save a go-nowhere encounter from being go-nowhere by changing things and adapting them to fit the situation.
Why? Why make an easy encounter into a hard one? My feeling on the subject is that if an encounter presents no challenge, then why do it at all? If there’s a detail that advances the story, sure, but at that point why not just hand wave the combat? Just have the players narrate how they won and then give them the detail and xp. It’s a game, it should be fun and challenging to play. Yes, it’s already a story too, but why waste everyone’s time, including your own, rolling dice pointlessly? Make it a challenge with a real risk of failure, even if it’s a small one, or just get to the next bit without wasting the time and effort of an encounter. It’s just like the locked door problem*** and if there’s no need to roll dice, then don’t.
So, yeah, some games have these weird loopholes and broken rules, and sometimes you have to adapt to those rules and abilities accordingly. Sabretooth isn’t actually scary? Fix it. Give him an edge, rewrite the profile, give him some buddies that do have some bite so he can focus on the softer characters, or just have them kick his furry ass and move the story along. If the story you have in mind demands that Sabretooth is a scary scary boogeyman, then give him that edge, if he’s just a speedbump on the way to Magneto, then get it over with and don’t lose any sleep over it.****
There are going to be players that min/max their characters to a level way above the heads of the other players, and there are going to be weird rules things that unwittingly make a character impervious to the kind of harm that you have threatening the party. Take a minute, pull up a new baddie and add them to the fight, or create an environmental threat that requires that character’s attention right away. Fight smarter instead of just hoping for the right dice rolls. Don’t hold back.
And that’s another thing, as a longtime GM I want to give you a really important piece of advice that I learned from wargaming, not rpgs. Do not rely on the dice to come through for you. You’re not losing because the dice hate you. You’re losing because you’re forgetting the rule of overwhelming force. If a small mistake or a few bad rolls can torpedo your plans, then it’s not a good plan. Get in there with overwhelming force like you just can’t lose. It’s a lot easier to torpedo yourself when things are going well than to swing it back around when things go pear shaped.
Yeah, I did just advise you to make mistakes and bad tactical decisions on purpose when you’re doing well so that the players can’t win. I’m not saying to fudge dice, I’m saying that you can swing a fight that looks like a total party kill back to them squeaking out a win by having the bad guys fuck up. Don’t use that crucial ability for a round, move someone into a vulnerable position, have them mistake a hurt opponent for a downed one, and in their hubris switch opponents to the exact wrong person they should be fighting.
What I’m saying here is hit hard and fast and then you have the breathing room to really let the characters shine by manipulating the playing field. As far as I’m concerned, the players should win to advance the story, but it should always always always feel like it was a narrowly won thing. Always strive for drama, for interest, and for that epic win that puts a smile on everyone’s face. Put hard challenges in front of them, and they’ll appreciate the win more. Yeah, I realize that that’s corny dad advice, but I don’t have any kids, so you guys are gonna have to do.
Some bad guys are just written badly, some abilities are overpowered, but you don’t have to nerf powers with home rules and totally rewrite a stock baddie just to make it a challenge. You can modify them, team them up, place bystanders or the surroundings in danger, or even just call it a day and skip the encounter and give them the xp or whatever. Whatever you do, just make sure it’s not an unfun dud of an encounter,
because we do this to have fun. Have fun, my friends, and here’s looking at a new year where things get better and we can see each other at a table together again.
*I’m looking at you, faserip.
**again, faserip. Sabretooth, who’s meant to be just terrifying, is one of the least effective villain profiles in the entire game. Sure he has claws and teeth, but anything immune to normal matter can breathe easy knowing that he’s just not a threat no matter how intense his fighting ability is. It’s a BAD design.
***The locked door problem goes like this: would the character eventually unlock the door without any consequence of failure? If so, then open the door without a roll and let’s get on with this.
****Yeah, the Sabretooth in faserip thing really irks me, a lot.
Combat That Isn’t a Slog.
I was asked for an article about this by my friend Malcolm and boy do I feel this. I’ve never been a fan of super long form combat that basically turns into a bunch of people waiting for a chance to do something that’s hopefully cool. So, how do we make combat dynamic and engaging, and especially how do we do this without handwaving a lot of rules, or just playing something with a shortform combat system? This one sounds like a list to me.
One. Figure out what the goal is.
Not every combat has to be an attrition based slog to total annihilation. What are the opposition trying to do? for that matter, what are the characters going for, too? Is one side trying to drive another off, are they trying to take something, or go through somewhere? Are they trying to conquer a space of the geography, or is it a raid of plunder?
If you can keep a clear picture in your head of what each side is trying to achieve then you can figure out the next step.
Two. Set a victory condition.
This can be as simple as causing a certain amount of casualties, or removing a specific NPC from play. It can also involve be a more complex part of the mission or task like “the bad guys will just keep coming no matter how many you kill. You have to destroy the antenna/statue/portal/AI-interface/ammo dump, and then get out of there.” You get the idea. Sometimes the opposition will stop attacking once the party have achieved their goal, and sometimes it changes the shape of combat from “fight your way in” to “fight your way out” which can be interesting. A fighting withdrawal might be a new situation for your players. Maybe a desperate retreat is, too? Try it out and see.
This goes for the bad guys too. What are they trying to achieve? Is this a quick harassment attack, where they hit quick and then melt back into the surroundings to regroup and attack again? Is it a spirited defense of their stronghold? is it a hungry monster who rushes in to pounce on someone and then drags them away to eat them? Don’t just have them attack and stick around until everyone on one side is dead, figure out what they want and how far they’ll go to get it, which leads into the next section nicely.
Three. Set a morale condition.
Stubborn fights to the death are pretty rare, really. Most times groups, and even lone monsters will reconsider their assault when things start going poorly. Battles usually don’t go until a single figure makes a defiant last stand against overwhelming odds. Usually one side breaks and runs far before it gets that desperate. Not every monster or mob of opponents has a sense of self preservation, but most do. In fact, when you have a point of breaking for most opponents the party will encounter, then it makes the ones that don’t have one that much more intense. Why are the undead so scary? Because most of them either don’t care if they’re losing, or can’t.
Decide what that breaking point is. How many goblins out of a dozen have to go down before the others make up their minds to go do something else somewhere else? How close to all of its hit points does a dragon have to lose before it thinks “you know what? Fuck this. I’m leaving.”
If The game you’re playing has xp based on kills, treat those that ran away as counting for xp too. They won. reward them. Honestly, it’s even a good idea to award xp for a good bottling out too. If the party made the very rational decision to run away and deal with the fallout of that, I think that’s worth some experience as they’ve shown enough wisdom to stay alive regardless of what they had to give up to do so.
Four. Make sure everyone has something to do.
No, really, just as simple as that. Don’t just let the fighty bits be all for Fighty McFightperson and their sidekick, Scrappy. Make sure every character has something to do. Notice how I didn’t say “directly threaten every character and put them under the strain of attack.” You can do that, and it’s a good technique, but it is not all there is to do. That victory condition you set up? Make it something that only the non-fighty character or characters can do. If Techy and the Brain have to remain really focused on setting up the bomb (or whatever), then it makes more drama for Fighty and Scrapper to have to screen them from enemy attacks.
As a little tangent, you know how it sucks in games with netrunning how that basically becomes the game and everyone else sits around waiting for that to resolve? yeah, that sucks. So have someone kick in the door and start shooting while Techy does their hackythingy. Now those are some stakes. Sorry, ranty bit over.
Look the point here is to make everyone engaged and make sure that they all have something going on so as not to make things both drag on and on, and also to not lose the interest of the less fighty characters.
Even in games where all the types of characters have a distinct combat role there are some definite support characters in the fight. The old joke about clerics being a walking box of bandaids comes to mind, but you can pull that healer into the larger story of the combat if you either put some pressure on them, or give them a godly gadget to interact with that has some concrete impact on the larger combat happening around them.
Five. Make sure the combat is part of the story.
There’s this weird notion in a lot of the conversation about ttrpgs that when combat starts the story pauses until it’s over. I find this weird and actually irritating. If they overarching story is about achieving a goal through violent means, then the action sequences are most definitely linked to the story at hand intrinsically. Using all of the above, plus a few more techniques, you should be able to keep the more story focused players invested in the action.
Yeah, sometimes there’s random fights. Groups of hostiles blunder into each other and mix it up out of shock anger or opportunism, but how about that’s the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself. Find a why and a how to the fight and figure out what will happen when one side wins. You can decide ahead of time, or play to find out what happens, but in either case, story and drama comes from conflict over desired results and fallout from when one side doesn’t get theirs.
Not only should you find a reason for the fight to happen, but you should always be thinking about how the end of the fight will effect the story that’s happening before, during and after the fight. You can even get nasty about this. Pick on one character, but instead of putting them down, leave them with a really nasty wound or condition that requires some kind of special attention (a priest or ritual to lift a curse, immediate medivac at a location some distance away, a long slog back to civilization while unable to use a limb, etc).
Or you can turn that rare scenario where adversaries blunder into each other and it devolves into violence into a real story opportunity. The losers could run away, only to return seeking revenge with bigger badder gear or friends, or the fight itself could attract an even worse adversary or environmental effect that threatens everyone involved.
And, finally…
Just don’t make the characters grind every single hit point out of their enemies. If it’s looking really one sided, either have the enemy bottle it for somewhere safer, or just call it with an “I think we all know how this ends. Someone narrate out the ending ok?”
and just have fun with it. Do what you have to to make it fun and vibrant, because we do this to have fun.
My Tumultuous Relationship with Shadowrun.
Ok, look, I’ll admit it. I have a chip on my shoulder about this game; one outside of all its other flaws. From my very first look at it my first thought was “I’m not entirely sold on this genre mix stew of a game.” I was the only one in my gaming group that wasn’t instantly charmed by it, but I thought I’d give it a go. I immediately butted heads with the system, but whatever, it was an ok diversion. My friends didn’t feel that way at all. Suddenly it was all we played. We bought books, we played campaigns within campaigns, and we all took turns running multiple games within the larger game world, and I was resentful about the whole damn thing. I was simply not ready to stop playing Cyberpunk. I didn’t want mages and monsters, I wanted neon colored rebels in a dystopian future without elves and dwarves and dragons, man.*
So, I just deleted several paragraphs of inflammatory ranting for the sake of politeness. I make no secret of my dislike for this game. So why, then, did I play and run it so much? I didn’t like the rules, I didn’t like the setting, and I wanted to play something else. Two reasons really. The first is that my friends all wanted to play it and I just wanted to play. They were rabid about it. they knew all the lore. They argued minute points of continuity and the rules. they eagerly bought sourcebook after sourcebook, and, boy were there a lot of those. The second reason is that goddamn game was just cool enough to not totally turn me off. There was a kind of potential there, a place to tell cool stories about antisocial violent malcontents who just wanted to make it in a hostile world made of dystopian bullshit. It was the 90s and those kinds of stories were very popular with my friends and I. Remember, the 90s were all about being EXXXTREME[tm].**
There was also the definite potential for lonely fun. As a way of distracting myself from my depression and the awfulness of attending high school in a big redneck town full of idiots, I would engage in a lot of lonely fun. Making NPCs for shadowrun, while not easy, was fun, and it took up a lot of time I would have otherwise spent being bored and sad.*** I mean, you could also invent organizations and equipment if you figured out the reasoning behind the stats on them. In fact, making up NPCs, organizations, and stuff for the game really became my subversive way of flipping some of what I saw as the stupidest conventions of the setting on their head. I would invent networks of anti-corporate revolutionaries, rogue environmental scientists, and street movements more akin to the Black Panthers and much less like the gangs in the warriors. My favorite of all time was the CRF, or the Coalition for Real Food, an anarchist collective of renegade seed traders and rooftop growers, because I hated the idea of soy everything. I can only take so much dystopia before I start looking for hope.
I could go in depth into how the rules were terrible, but I don’t want this to be seventy pages long for your sake.**** In short, it’s an intensely overcomplex game full of fiddly subsystems that are full of exceptions and “like X, but with this difference that you’ll never remember, so you might as well bookmark this section.”
I know that’s some people’s jams. They love huge rulesets and they get off on rules mastery. I’m trying my best these days to not yuck other people’s yums, but it always feels like a huge part of the impetus for someone to get their joy from rules mastery is a solid core of smug doucheyness and it really irritates me both as a player and a GM.*****
Look, have a different system for different things I guess. It’s messy, but if you want a thing to work a certain way, then, there you go. Or you could have a unified system with few exceptions where the dice and mechanics work the same way for everything. Do one of those. This pile of bullshit thing that Shadowrun does where it seems like every single situation has it’s own spin on how the mechanics work is infuriating. I don’t want to have to go to the book twelve times a session and I really hate complexity for complexity’s sake. It’s obnoxious. Cue the grognards lining up to say “well, then don’t play X, because it was so much worse.” Cool. I don’t, and I probably already know.
Also, let’s talk about editions and sourcebooks. Somewhere very early on, the designers and developers of Shadowrun confused “make more of the fiction so players can use it” with “make up more rules because players want more rules.” No. Just no.
Why do so many people say they love the fiction, but hate the system? It’s because the system is bad, and every edition fails to fix the biggest problems. Why is Shadowrun for rules lawyering gribblenerds? Because it’s written by rules lawyering gribblenerds for rules lawyering gribblenerds, and there must be an awful lot of them out there because Shadowrun stays in print perpetually despite being a hodgepodge of subsystems tacked onto subsystems. OK, that’s probably not true and a bit unfair. I’ll admit it. There’s a big market of nostalgia players and people who get sucked in by the fiction out there, too, and if their group is functional at all, they use their gribblenerd as a font of information and play facilitator instead of just arguing with them. I’m trying not to piss on someone else’s campfire here, but I have DEEP scars from this game.
Hey now, I thought of another reason I liked this game. The art and design, all the way from first edition to the current iteration has always been super crisp and brimming over the top with visual interest. I’m pretty sure that a big portion of why I kept running and playing this game, despite my antagonistic relationship with the rules and chip on my shoulder about the setting, was that the art definitely followed the 90’s rule of cool in every way, shape, and form. I mean let’s face it. That stuff looked really cool and was definitely inspiring.
But, yeah, mainly the reason I played was that my friends were very enthusiastic about the game and that kind of enthusiasm was definitely contagious and did a lot to get me over my misgivings. Hey, we had good times. We played a lot of really fun games, even though we ignored the rules more and more every time we played. We’d try leaning into the rules again when a new edition came out because someone would say “Oh, it’s fixed now.”
It wasn’t.
Anyway, I played it. I was into it. I also hated it. I hated it like i was in an abusive relationship with it, and I really was.
Look, I know I’m gonna catch heat over this, but before you crack your knuckles and start typing your angry rebuttal, take a moment to pick through the incendiary invective to see what my criticisms really are: disunified messy system, too many rules, and rules that actively work against fun. Also notice that while I said I don’t care for the setting, and like it less and less as time goes on, I also didn’t go after it. I consider a taste for the setting of a game like that to be a matter of taste. You have yours and I have mine. That’s ok. That’s cool. So, just take a moment to realize that maybe, just maybe, my criticisms of the game are possibly the same that you have about it. It’s just that I’m a tad more vehement about it.******
What the hell, though. Get mad. Don’t care. Die mad about it. j/k (not really).
*The flashback scene in SLC punk where the kid playing young Bob says “these elves and dwarves and dragons, man” always cracks me up. Like, why does this movie assume that punk rock and rpgs are mutually exclusive. Still a funny line, though.
**Ugh.
***and I suppose also doing schoolwork, but I was distinctly uninterested in jumping through the hoops of the American educational system for a piece of paper. My GED got me into junior college and then university where the material was much more interesting and satisfying, thank you.
****In every single edition. Everytime someone says “oh, they fixed the rules in X edition, I take a look and still go “Ugh. These are awful.”
*****Do you ever wonder if General Motors nerds find our use of the acronym GM annoying? And, yes, of course there are General Motors nerds. There are nerds for everything.
******Where Tad=metric fuckton. Sorry about all the notes.
Our First Session of Forbidden Lands: Review/Analysis.
I’m taking a break from GMing. I’ve been running at least one thing every week for… years, so it’s time for a break. I’m taking this as an opportunity to watch, learn, analyze, and to just play.
Last night we played the first session of Marc’s Forbidden Lands game, and I found it really fun. We’d made characters the previous week so we were all set to go, and that’s always a good feeling.
Forbidden lands is an interesting system that lives mostly in the area of second wave retro gaming (2SR), but also has a few more modern concepts sprinkled in here and there.
Who is this game for?
If you like:
1. A decent amount of rules granularity without bloat and contradictory subsystems,
2. A game where things are dangerous, and the chance of death is real,
3. An interesting set of rules for making and repairing things that’s actually a useful component of the game, instead of that thing that one player latches onto, even though it’s ultimately useless,
and 4. The chance to play any combination of human, elf, half elf, dwarf, halfling, wolfkin, orc, and goblin with any of the character classes with no restrictions (Yes, you can be an orc that casts spells, and yes, you can also be a halfling fighter and both characters can be effective),
then this might be your game.
Character creation isn’t too long, but it does take some reading to know just what concepts various parts of the character support. The only real criticism of the character creation process I had was that using the pdf for it was a pain in the ass, but that’s true of any game on pdf. Using a hard copy of the book is just faster and easier. What I really liked about the chargen was that you could play any combination of Kin and profession, and that the only thing that set the kin apart is that they can put one more point into one of the four attributes, and they get a kin specific talent. the professions get a key attribute and talent too, so you can stack things up or make up for shortcomings to make any combination of kin and professions viable. Also, you’re broke, so you don’t have to worry about too much outfitting, just a few items from your profession and a meagre scattering of coins to spend on one or two things. I think, all told, that the five of us including the GM took about two hours to get everyone a functional character, and that was over Zoom. Not too bad.
As for the actual mechanics…
It’s a dice pool game, but the values are set to the extremes with only sixes and ones having any meaning. In most cases, you roll dice equal to your stat, the skill you’re using, and any tool you’re using as well as situational conditions, or bonus dice from talents. As an example, I rolled a stealth check with my unpleasant little goblin sorcerer and in the pool were my five agility dice, the two dice from my stealth skill, and one die from it being very dark outside, and one more because the people I was sneaking up on were very drunk. That’s nine dice in total, which is actually pretty high for a starting character. I rolled one six out of the whole fistful. They got to oppose the roll and also got one success. You need to beat their roll not just match it, so I got to engage with the real crux of the game system: pushing.
A push is when you pick up everything that isn’t a one or six and reroll it looking for more success. The catch is that any ones rolled with the stat or gear dice in this second roll cause damage, so pushing is risky. That damage also generates a resource called willpower, though, which is used to power spells and certain uses for talents, so I risked the push.
I got a second success, a point of damage to my agility, and a willpower for my efforts. Damage to a stat means that stat is reduced by that damage. Things can spiral down the toilet pretty quick because of this. I would put Forbidden Lands into the “Yes, you should have a replacement character ready” category. there’s something fun and charming about that. I actually like a game where the chance of losing a character is a real concern. Maybe not all the time, but I think the risk involved is interesting.
I also used that point of willpower to cast a very nasty spell that poisoned their drinks, which ultimately decided the outcome of the fight; a fight where I got stabbed down to a strength of zero and could very well have kicked it. Luckily for my little goblin death mage, I only rolled an eleven day limp on the critical chart.
Thoughts about the system so far…
I’m fond of it. I like the give and take of the dice system. I like how the days are divided up into quarters and a quarter day’s uninterrupted rest restores your stats, I like the willpower mechanic, even though you have to get hurt or break tools to gain it, and I like that there are a variety of crafting rolls you can engage with to repair damaged items and create new ones.
We engaged a little with the Journeys section, where you divide up tasks like keeping watch, making camp, exploring, gathering resources, etc. It seems to be a good resource and work management system, and I actually enjoyed using it, instead of finding it to be a chore.
What we haven’t engaged with yet is the stronghold system, where you build up some sort of fortification/community. I’m looking forward to getting into that, especially since a stronghold is a place to rest without disturbance, and generates a point of willpower by just returning to it. As a spellcaster, I think I need that. No wonder wizards have towers.
Thoughts about the campaign so far…
So far it’s been entertaining and engaging. Marc’s doing a good job of keeping the story moving, and giving us immediate threats and situations to react to. It’s also nice to just engage with the game through the lens of a single character instead of the whole game world. Hooray for actually playing sometimes.
After one session, I find that I’m having fun. And that’s why we do this, so have fun.
Planning Ahead: NPCs and Baddies.
Whether you run a game off the cuff, or plan things out, having your NPCs and various adversaries at hand when the play goes down is always a good idea.* So, here are some ideas on how organize your NPCs for the best use during game.
Find a way to keep them in front of you and easy to reference. Don’t just reference things out of the game book or your notebook or whatever. You should have some kind of reference sheet on hand that you can use at a glance. There are several methods for this. You can have individual sheets, but be wary of how much room those take up. You can also condense them all onto one or more sheets together, but be mindful to leave yourself room for notes, and also don’t fall into the pit trap of writing out one goblin and just putting (there are seven of them) or something like that next to the write up. You want them all separate so you can make individual notes and tallies. Index cards, or any kind of small, easy to lay out cards are also a good idea too. I know a few people who keep a white board for this too.
Or, in the age of technology you can have multiple entries open in various browsers and alt/tab between them. I myself like to cut and paste them into multiple documents that are editable, so that I can modify hit points, make note of spell effects, or whatever else I need to keep track of. If I’m running face to face this is really helpful and works well, but if I’m running online it gets messy, and I’m really glad I have an older chromebook to keep all my files on and my newer laptop to actually use zoom. See, the problem is that if you’re constantly alt tabbing through files, then you can’t see the other players and their adorable squidgy faces. There’s also the problem that, while a lot of online platforms are good, the more things you do, the more likely it is for you or someone else to gliiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch.**
Anyway, the point is to come up with some kind of format and method that works best for you, and allows you to make notes and adjust numbers quickly and effectively with a minimum of “hold on a second… making notes.”
Not only will things go smoother if you keep your NPCs well organized and easy to edit, but you’ll also avoid just hand waving things so you can get the damn fight over with.***
Find ways to make your NPC profiles more effective. You’ve figured out what method works for you. Good. Now let’s fine tune it.
Is there a something you need to remind yourself of in the write up that’s important, but also not 100% stuck in your mind? Maybe it’s a special ability, or some quirk or goal, something you’d like to avoid leaving out when things get going fast. If you’re using a pen an paper approach, you can use a highlighter, or even just a box drawn in around the part you want to stick out. Just something that says “Hey, this character can heal every round, how about we remember that part?”
Then there’s all those points, hit points, fate points, mana points, morale points… all sorts of points as well as ammo too. Now you can use the messy column of numbers down the side method. I usually do. But there are a lot of other ways to go and many of them are tidier and more visual to everyone at the table. You can make a track for those points and use some kind of marker to place at the current value. This method is nice for when the points are going to go both up and down, like a troll who regenerates, or someone in power armor that builds up and uses power reserves. You can also use a pool of objects like poker chips or chits, or setting dice out with the current number showing, as long as you’re on a stable surface. The good part about using some kind of token or tracker is that you aren’t marking up the NPC sheet, so you can use it again. I’ve seen lots of people who run the same scenario over and over, like people who run demos, put the sheets into plastic sleeves and use dry erase markers. When I use editable files on my laptop, I usually have two entries, one for the max/starting number, and a second where I start with that number, but edit up and down. In case you’re wondering what I use for this, it’s google docs.
If you’re using miniatures make sure to have some kind of reference point both on the write up and the mini to denote that they go together. You only need to spend one session going “er… which giant spider is that one?” to learn this lesson, but if it’s your first time running with minis, yeah, learn from my mistakes. I’ve seen a lot of people use special markers or just colored poker chips to point out what models are affected by spells and other conditions. Here’s another helpful hint. Use those markers in pairs. One marker goes under the mini and one goes on the write up. If you’re using a file on your laptop or tablet you can put the condition under the mini’s heading in the same color text as the marker too. “The bandit with the crossbow is under a frost effect, so he gets a blue poker chip under his base and he also gets ‘frosted flake’ under his entry heading in blue text.”
These conditional markers work well for theater of the mind too. Put the conditional marker down on your write up, or edit it into the text, and then you’ll remember to add that to your descriptions of that NPC so that the players can visualize it and act on that information. “Your guide is running around trying to beat the flames on his own body out with his hands.” “Oh, yeah, I forgot they were on fire. I try to tackle them and smother the flames with my cloak.”
If you’re really flying off the cuff like I do, and you’re not sure of some or all of the NPCs they’ll meet, have some blank entries on hand. If you know some, but not all of the details, then fill those in and leave the rest blank. I know I’ve talked before about having lists of useful things to choose from like names and such, and this is a good place to use that technique here. You can make random tables to roll on, or you could just make a list and grab things off of them one at a time. The characters pop into a roadhouse for a cold one while on their way to deliver antiviral drugs to Neon City? How about pulling out a few of those blank sheets and picking a few things from your lists. Maybe this place is a whole lot of trouble for someone carrying a rich cargo like that, or maybe these folks have seen the effects of the ribbon plague and will buy you folks a drink for being some of the good ones. Who knows, make a few rolls and then start filling out those sheets if you need them.
Another thing you can do if you like to run by the seat of your pants, is to make a lot of NPC write ups and just keep them in a slush pile somewhere. Granted, this technique is really for people who have spare time on their hands, and I know that’s not everyone. When I was a bouncer at a nightclub, I had a couple of my worknights a week where it was really slow, and I was able to fill notebooks up with potential NPCs,**** but not everyone has the luxury of time like that. The other thing you can do is use a random NPC or monster generator, but there might be some frantic cutting and pasting there, but if it works for you, then do that.
I’m not a terribly organized person, so I have to develop organized habits and train myself to use them. Hopefully you’re better at it than I am. Either way, I hope this advice can help you. I’d also absolutely love to hear your methods of keeping track of various hirelings, baddies, bystanders, allies, and monsters. We can always learn from each other and find new ways to effectively have fun.
And having fun, effectively or not, is why we do this.
*Is this advice for me? Am I calling myself out? Well, yeah…
**Have I mentioned before how goddamn exhausting online gaming is?
***Calling myself out again here.
****No, really. Some Monday nights were so slow that I could paint miniatures at the cashier’s desk.
Pens, Paper, Polyhedrals 