Adding dimensions to nonEncounters
Not every night on the trail is fraught with danger. Most are just quiet nights under the stars, huddled around a fire, often in new and unfamiliar terrain. Whereas nights of ambush feature heavily by the DM, most other nights ‘pass uneventfully’. Nights like that shouldn’t take up too much table time, but it can help immersion if ‘the night passes uneventfully’ actually includes some content. Here are a few things that I do (occasionally) in order to make the world more ‘real’.
In camp:
The dire squirrelThe characters have chosen a place to camp for the night. With a Spot {easy}, a character turns up a single, recent paw print that looks like it was left by a very large creature. An old bear, or maybe even a dire bear.
A nature DC {easy} the character misidentifies it as a fearsome creature. One that may be watching them from the shadows, even now.
A nature DC {moderate} the character recognizes the track as an unusual series of holes dug by squirrels (or woodchucks, or the like) looking for something to eat.
The Smoke Monster
The characters set up for the night. In the time after they settle down, but before heading to sleep, the characters sit around the fire telling jokes, reviewing their adventure so far or the like. Have the characters all roll a Charisma check (or some other ‘luck’ metric), the one rolling the worst is sitting such that the smoke from the fire is always blowing in their face. The smoke shifts only a few seconds after the character relocates. Any investigation of magical cause is inconclusive.
The scariest night encounter everThe characters have gone to sleep, whichever characters are left on watch roll a listen check. The highest roll can hear something suspicious in rustling in the bushes. Investigating the noise, one unlucky character comes upon an angry skunk. Do cone attacks follow? only the GM knows…
Crackling TreesThe sun rises, warming the forest after a cold night, as wood of the trees expands the trees produce a cacophony of strange popping and crackling noises from every direction.
Raccoon SwarmAt night whoever is on watch hears something moving about in the underbrush not far from camp. While investigating the sound, they hear something moving about the camp itself. Rushing back they see nothing immediately, but soon hear a noise in the brush again. Eventually the characters discover a pack slowly moving it’s way toward the woods, upon further inspection there is a raccoon dragging it away. Turns out there’s 12 or 13 of them in the woods, without fear trying to steal food from the group. Not dangerous, but they are certainly annoying. The characters may suffer some ill effects the following day. Being fatigued, or fatiguing more easily. They may also have issues if they were unable to protect their food from the raccoons.
Reality is what you make of it
My friend knows a lot of stuff about (something) and wants to see that reflected better in game, how can I do that?
Realism is a hot topic in the tabletop blogosphere right now. Posts have predictably run the gamut from ‘don’t think about it at all’ to ‘add whatever house rules you can to make it as realistic as possible’. I’m going to add the philosopher’s perspective, and say that you have no idea what reality is. Let’s take a few examples of real world reality before turning to gaming.
How many miles of shoreline does England have? If you answered with a number (like the CIA did: 12429 km or 7723 miles) then you’re wrong. This is one of the early examples used by Mandlebrot to show the importance of fractals (or at least got him on the path). The point is, the higher resolution your measuring tool, the longer the coastline. What’s worse, is that there is no real ‘right’ answer as long as your measuring tool is getting you the results you need, then you’re close enough.
Another more abstract concern is that seeing in no way means believing. We all know that our senses can be tricked. Pencils appear bent when viewed through a glass of water, wind through the trees may sound like the baying of some creature, even a scent on the wind may be deceive. If senses were totally reliable, there would be no such thing as an illusion. Weirder, illusions aren’t perceived the same way by different viewers, showing that sensory perception is a personal, subjective experience rather than a reliable tool for encountering ‘reality’. If these clear cases of unreliable sensory experience are indicative of the overall unreliability of senses, then there’s no reason we can ever be completely satisfied with any of our sensory experiences. That being so, what does it say of our certainty of the reality we experience?
So, let’s focus on gaming. There are things that we each seem to ‘know’. One member of my gaming group is a big, huge fan of physical fighting. As someone that participates, or participated, in formal fighting and MMA he is well aware of how people act during a fight, and what happens to a person the moment they get hit. This is the sort of thing that no RPG covers well, and nobody would play a game that did. As for me, I am pretty well versed in anthropology and mythology. It rankles me greatly when a society is set up in a game in such a way that isn’t at all sensible. Another gamer I know is simply baffled by the concept of Hit Points, and reinterpreting HP abstractly doesn’t seem to help. It hasn’t escaped my notice that leveling up doesn’t phase him at all.
Though it should be said, every RPG is, in some way, a model for reality. The question isn’t so much ‘how much reality we can capture in a given roll?’ as it is ‘what is the purpose of the game, and how do we capture that in a rules system?’ The d20 games are among the most sophisticated and popular RPGs on the market. This family of games captures very well the struggle of heroes against dark evils lurking in the cosmos, and those heroes growing efforts to vie against those evils. GURPS, on the other hand, is a system that lends itself very well to playing short games with a set of already powerful characters fighting some unusual opponent. In GURPS the players aren’t bent towards heroism, nor toward any particular genre. The system is pretty weak, however, when it comes to protracted games that invlove characters that grow into their situation. Other games are designed to capture their stories as well, World of Darkness captures their characters a particular way, HERO system in their own way. Each system trying to capture a reality in a particular way. In a Pathfinder game, the oddity of the kindgom next door having no agriculture may be that way because it’s unimportant to the game in which you are playing, in a Werewolf game that may be central to the plot line.
So, when people complain about realism in games, there’s probably two issues they may be hitting upon. The first is something like ‘This game doesn’t reflect something realistically.’ This could be ‘I hit that guy with a sword 12 times before he died.’ The second concern they may be relating is something like ‘This game doesn’t spend enough time accurately reflecting the one thing I know really well.’ This might be ‘I hit the guy so he should lose 1 to his AC because he’s flinching now.’ While the first concern may reveal something the GM can anticipate, or the system could change in another version or through errata, the second claim is something only the GM can contend with, but is usually best left aside.
Let’s look at a rules system that has been fiddled with since the early days: alignment. In the first days of D&D, alignment was one of three option: Chaos, Neutral, Lawful. In those days, Lawful was correlated with ‘Good’, and Chaos with ‘Evil’ (or, perhaps better, Actively Stabilizing and Destabilizing). This was perceived as deficient because it just didn’t reflect the span of motivations of different characters, so a good and evil axis was added. In the years to come, people hotly debated what each possibility meant, and whether characters could be dedicated to one axis more than the other, or two different characters with the same alignment might disagree on important issues. One of the best changes introduced by 4e D&D was the altered alignment system, specifically the ‘Unaligned’ category. Gone are the debates of whether Neutral was concerned with balance, or if they could just stay out of the conflicts entirely.
So, should a game be concerned with Realism? Of course, but not beyond the scope of the goal of the game. Our own grasp of the reality in which we live is tenuous enough, and our knowledge of that reality is paltry at best. We certainly wouldn’t want the game to determine each actual wound to placate doctors while also placating economists and geologists. What is important is that the game captures the essence of the story in the execution of the rules. As always, fun is important, rules less so.
Investing in the Future
I have a character that is an investor, how can I do that without breaking the game?
Economics of game worlds are something best not put under a microscope. Adventures blow the curve so far that they’d have trouble spending their money, luckily somewhere out there is a sweat shop filled with level 5 wizards pumping out +1 short swords and giving them to hapless commoners who generally earn about a silver a day. Given the cost of any single item and the assumed income of the shop keepers and their staff, we have to assume the profit margin they get from Magic Sword Distributions, llc are slight indeed. We should also forget the 50% markup from buying from and selling to adventurers; most of that profit margin must be rent and electricity. And as is well known, the land owners charging these exorbitant rates spend most of their money on dwarves who dig out experimental tunnels only to be abandon and occupied by the denizens of evil. And, of course, those dwarves are the type that eat gold. Surely that is a viable interpretation of the economic system.
Ok, I don’t know the origin of that tangent. As it turns out economic systems are so complex we can’t even approximate real ones very well.. we should forgive game designers that are just trying to create enjoyment for other players. To that end, we have to apply the same filter for our players. A system of investing in the economy must be at least as abstract as the economy in the game, but still have a fun, game-like feel. So, the first rule in adventurer investments is to not worry about where the funds are actually going. In large enough cities there may even be a cushion for the GM in the form of an investment firm; profits not guaranteed, of course.
So, a simple investment system might go like so:
Max investment size is dependent on the city size / population.
Class I – 100gp
Class II – 500gp
Class III -2000gp
Class IV -5000gp
Class V -10000gp
Investment risk/reward is based on economic viability.
| Level | Normal DC | Flush DC |
| Poor | 19 | 19 |
| Weak | 18 | 17 |
| Normal | 17 | 15 |
| Good | 16 | 13 |
| Strong | 15 | 11 |
A character must have invested for a full month before rolling for dividends. If they beat the economy DC, they earn 20% their investment. If they fail to beat or meet the DC, they earn 5% their total investment. If they roll a 1, their investment is lost. So, going by statistics, there is a 5% chance of losing your investment, and you earn 5% per month. That’s not a good bet, but the risk is mitigated by paydays.
So, for example we have a hamlet (Class I) that is experiencing normal economic conditions. And the character invests 50gp for one year. Using a random number generator I determined the character got these results: 6, 2, 10, 6, 10, 20, 3, 10, 12, 10, 20, 18.
There were no 1’s in the bunch, so the initial investment was not lost. 5% of 50 is 2.5, or 2g 5s. This criteria was met 9 times, so our character extracted 27 gold from normal months. The character also beat the DC of 17 3 times. What luck! that’s 3 payments of 20% of 50gp, or 30gp. So, over the course of a single year, the character has earned a total of 57gp, and still has invested their original 50gp.
That’s neither unbalancing nor insignificant, but it does lean towards insignificance. To power up the system allow the ability to invest two or three times. That means a d20 roll per month per investment. Rolling more means more 1’s, but also more successes. If that’s not good enough, then lower the DCs to every other from 19 down. Doing both of these can result in big bucks, for instance:
A character invests the max amount twice in a town (Class III) that is currently undergoing a renaissance resulting in Good economic conditions. The game is favorable to investments (two investments with doubled success rates). That’s 2 2000gp lumps put down for a 13DC. The character rolls:
- Set 1: 13, 15, 11, 17, 2, 18, 5, 16, 20, 18, 3, 18
- Set 2: 9, 7, 16, 20, 6, 6, 19, 15, 12, 4, 13, 20
Successes over DC: 14
Non-1 under success: 10
I daresay our investor beat the curve quite soundly (with DC of 13 we’d expect 9 or 10 over DCs, and I expected to see a 1, too). So, anyway, here’s our results: 5% of 2000 is 100, 20% of 2000 is 400. That means our investor earned 1000gp for not meeting the DC, and 5600 for meeting the DCs, so over the course of the year, our investor earned 6600GP, and still has the 4000 in investment. This probably isn’t game breaking since immense amount of gold comes out over the course of a game year, which is quite likely the entire game. If playing something like Kingmaker, though, this can generate a ton of gold very quickly in real-time, but if you’re playing Kingmaker, chances are your character is swimming in gold anyway.
So, this is a system that could add an interesting and fun dimension to a game, or it could generate too much cash too quickly. I would be inclined to allow the system, without thinking in the reserved version, and I’d probably be OK with it at mad money-generation level. When keeping time in a tabletop RPG, one may be forgiven for being amazed at how much real-time it can take to go from one month to another. And if it becomes unbalanced, you could always run a one-shot exacting revenge on the group of clever super thieves that stole the investors money. At the conclusion of such an adventure the character reclaims their own investment, plus perhaps other wronged investors, leading to a moral decision – but when it’s all said and done, there’s nobody in town willing to accept investments any longer.
Once upon a Game
My friends want to play for just a night, what should I run?
There’s nothing quite like a good one-shot. Whether introducing new players to the game, trying out a new GM, or telling a story that doesn’t fit with your weekly game, the one shot allows for a new feeling for the old game. There are few novelists that are renown for their short stories, and few short story awards winners become known for their novels. The reason is because the skills for one are not the same as they are for the other.
The parallels are strong between campaigns and novels, as they are between short stories and one shots. In novels, and the long campaign, non-main characters can live in different strata. There may be background characters that are merely transient ghosts serving a single function; these are your functionaries: waitresses, shopkeepers, guardsmen. They are also named people that pass through character motivations, these are uninvolved family members, lovers, their favorite barkeep. These people provide motivation and succor. The next tier of characters are actual members of the story, these are recurring individuals that help to move the plot along, though they may not dip into the story past that. These are leaders of the community that assign quests, heads of the church that inform the characters of the awakening of some ancient evil or even the characters immediate family. If the story is long enough, characters can switch roles and be very dynamic. What was once a background guard that occasionally exchanged quips with the characters may become an important character driving a part of a plot, and with enough time maybe the guard fades back into the background or develop as a character of their own.
In a short story, as the one shot, good characters serve a single, simple purpose. Some characters exist simply as passing background, necessary members of the story for only as long as they are there; guard at the door opens the door, bartender tends the bar, or shopkeeper makes change when character is making a purchase. The important thing for these characters are that they don’t get in the way. They should take up minimal time and not distract from the flow of the plot. The other characters are story participants. Often there’s a non-main character starting the plot, a few characters available to drive the plot when the characters stall out. These characters should be fairly simple and straightforward, unless they have a very good reason not to be. Each time a character that isn’t a main character is involved, they should have a very good reason to be there. Whether they have a clue, they act as a foil or they are the antagonist anybody with a name better come with a purpose.
The plot of a campaign is a slow, unfolding layered affair. The one shot is nothing of the sort. A good one shot is a straightforward job, maybe with an ending twist. Identifying the purpose of the one shot determines the sorts of scenes that make it up. A mystery or whodunnit will have a clue per scene that needs to be wheedled out of some character or discovered in the environment and that clue can be built on, or adds to the conclusion at the end. An action one shot will simply have bad guys to fight per scene, and that baddie is holding the information that leads them to the next. A political intrigue will have a lot of interaction with social skills prying clues, or trickery misleading characters. The important thing is to ensure that what links a scene to another is in the theme of the one shot. Each scene can be a self contained little challenge as long as the link between them all is logical and relevant.
Tone is an important element in any game, but it is paramount in the one shot. Pacing must be maintained to keep a game feeling correct. Distractions must be kept to a minimum (tough in my regular group). You could even try different music, different lighting, even playing in a different room. Keep the game moving, and that means being prepared. In a long term campaign the GM can often gloss over particular scenes, but for the one-shot descriptions should be prepared ahead of time. An NPC’s description and introduction can be written ahead of time, each scene should be written out before the game starts, and likely character actions can be sketched out. A word list helps here, as does NPC scripts.
There’s nothing quite as awesome as the successful completion of a long running campaign; years have been put into the game, the characters sprouted from dirty street urchins and blossomed into powerful nation shakers, Kings have been made, cosmic enemies destroyed, a couple of other enemies may have been forged in the characters wake. The game may have taken the same dedication usually reserved for a job, and there’s plenty to show for it. That’s not the only way to resolve a great game, though. It may be that friends just got together, had some drinks, and revealed the fact that Old Man Smithers was the culprit behind the Distant Farmland’s haunting. A One Shot is a great way to get together, get some gaming in, and blow off some steam. However, you can prepare a little better for it, and create an experience that will be talked about by your gamers for years to come.