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.
In Media Res and interactive dialog… OH, shiny!
How can I run a good game when I’m working / drunk / whatever all the time instead?
It’s not an unheard of situation where week after week the story in your game rolls on. Then, suddenly, that project at work or school or that new video game, has taken all your time and you are half an hour away from your game and the story has no details to meaningfully move your plot along. You can cancel the game, which is a very sad option, or you can opt for a one shot. Sometimes, a single or double session of Blood Brothers is exactly what the doctor ordered. Not a bad option, that, but there’s another. Stay with your game, just take a break from your plot.
Some of the best episodes in serious TV episodes (OK, Star Trek) are the ones where the characters take a break from saving the universe, or what have you, and go get themselves into a little harmless trouble of their own.
So, Odysseus spent a fair amount of time pissing off gods, tying himself to masts, and tricking giants with simple word games. He also, however, found an island of the most beautiful girls in the world and kicked back for a few years. In every game the heroes need some downtime, playing through that can make for a good experience. While on vacation the characters can meet NPCs and get to know the commoners that they are protecting (or whatever they do to or for commoners). So, kicking back and letting the plot alone for a session or two can still enhance your game.
So, the central problem is the lack of preparation leading into your game. The best way to avoid that is through… uhh.. preparation. The magic trick here is that you didn’t prepare this week for continuing the game, but you did find some story somewhere that you liked or read through a module that had good idea in it, and prepared this ahead of time. Ter-Dah!
Kinds of Side Stories
There are a few standards used for successful side stories. Humor and Horror are both good breaks, but the important thing is to make the side story feel different to the players through things like pacing changes, out-of-ordinary goals, and expectation bating.
The Comedy
Comedy in television and movies tends to come from character interaction, which is entirely on the players, but it also comes from situations that result in unexpected outcomes. You can do this by taking NPCs that exist in the normal game and doing something out of character with them.
- Characters often deal with a stern local sheriff? Who can that sheriff turn to when his embarrassing brother comes to town? The Characters can be relied upon, or pawned off on.
- Goblins spotted in the North Wood? The characters may be surprised to find a goblin druid coven up there is actually the source of the amazing bounty of the town’s crops each year.
- Adversary threatening a political coupe? The advisor may be looking for a dupe to assume the king’s appearance, while mistaking the dupe for the real thing leaving the actual king to fend for himself.
The Horror
Horror in media relies largely on viewers knowing more than the characters, and the characters being forced to accomplish something that they almost certainly cannot. What with players tending to know the monster manual it’s tough to outsmart them, and fantasy RP doesn’t really lend itself to running away from the creature. One method of accomplishing this is the feint. Tell the players their playing a one shot, give them information about getting the magical hoozey-whazzit that does some whizzy-bang, and information about the creature that guards the labyrinth. Make sure the characters are slightly more powerful than the real characters, and send them into the labyrinth. Show them a couple of rooms with weird special powers hidden throughout the labyrinth, then murder the crap out of the characters with the scary guardian. The trick revealed, the players are in their more familiar characters, and tasked with acquiring the same hoozey-wazzit. The players now have knowledge their characters don’t, and should be sufficiently motivated to run from the guardian.
The side story can be a life-line to an unprepared GM, and can be a fun diversion for players (and characters). They can be so much fun that I’m trying to build a campaign that is entirely side stories. If you have a plot up and going there shouldn’t be too much side story going on, though a certain amount can get the characters more involved with the imaginary world.
playing with Character
How do I make stopping in town fun?
There are a few tricks to add a new dimension to the immersion of your world, the most important aspect may be fully developed NPCs. However the players have one, maybe two, personalities to develop, the rest of the world is up to you as the GM. I find a few good rules of thumb and a bit of preparation goes a long way. By doing the same yourself you can turn a standard encounter with a weapon seller into a memorable (and perhaps, XPable) event.
The first rule of thumb is to have a name that fits into the naming scheme of your culture. Was the guard’s name Sven, and the bartender’s name Olafsson? Then the apple salesman’s name probably shouldn’t be Bob. The easiest way to accomplish this is to keep a looong list of names, broken into male and female contained in cultural or thematic sections. Include common non-humans like halfling, elves, and dwarves, but also goblin, koblold, and whatever else may be interacted with in your world.
Character Archetypes is the most powerful tool for quickly creating believable and multi-faceted NPCs. That wandering dwarven merchant encountered on a lonely road is there for a reason. The retired adventuring elf set up a magic shop in a human town instead of returning home for a reason. The bartender is tending that bar instead of doing something else for a reason. Getting at that reason can really let an NPC come to life, so to speak.
Some of my favorite archetypes:
Former Adventurer
This NPC was an adventurer themselves some time ago. Whether due to success or failure determines a lot about them. A former adventurer who was successful maintains contacts with his old life, and may exhibit wealth far beyond his station. He may also occasionally entertain guests that are themselves wealthy or influential; and on rare occasions host a reunion of the old party. The former adventurer may think of the players as proteges to be taught to young upstarts to be put in their place.
The Former Adventurer who failed is another animal entirely. It may be that his party was killed and he was the sole survivor, or he stormed the kobold caves with his group but the hostages didn’t make it and he couldn’t live with the outcome. Whatever the situation this former adventurer cobbled together whatever funds he had left and bought his shop or wares. He may have kept his trusty magic sword or a bag of holding. He may think of the characters as doe-eyed optimists that need protection, or as foolhardy blowhards that need to be stopped before anyone gets hurt.
Disobedient or Runaway Child
This NPC has a parent who is somebody. Whether the daughter of the Elf King, or second son to the largest trader in the land, this NPC wants little to do with the life their parents designed for them. This might manifest to the characters as the NPC hiding something, or the NPC having more knowledge than they should about some esoteric subject. The local farmer who knows all there is to know about some newly contacted religion, but wants to keep that fact quiet, can make for a dodgy but safe encounter. Most importantly, it can be an enjoyable experience for the players. If convincing the NPC to reveal what they are hiding is very difficult or very rewarding, it should be worth some XP. Rewarding players for NPC interaction increases player interaction with NPCs. It’s a simple and rewarding formula for a GM.
Ambitious Artisan
Usually there are no economic emergencies in a town or village. As such, nothing in particular will be in very high demand. Occasionally the characters will have to interact with shopkeepers or craftsmen who don’t need the traditional fare. However, in his spare time he does enjoy a good whittle. It may be that the characters find the smith more cooperative when they ask about his hobby. Or better yet, show up on his doorstep with gifts of rare wood, or what-have-you, instead of just a handful of gold and an order to repair their armor. It might even come to pass that a particular carving of some value finds their way into the players possession for showing such support for the smiths side job.
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Off the top of my head these are some very useful archetypes that I’ve used to great effect in the past. What’s more, don’t necessarily build these into pre-crafted NPCs, they’re better off being put into ad hoc NPCs when the characters go off book and decide that it’s going to be an RP night even if you, the GM, has planned for travel and exploration.
The thing to keep in mind is that the world is open and ongoing. The characters have an important job to do, from their perspective, but from the barkeeps perspective they are just rich braggarts barely worth the extra effort for the extra gold. When the characters leave the bartenders life will go on, and conveying that sense to the players will give even the most transitory NPC an added dimension to make your games livelier and more immersive. And at the end of the day, the difference between a good RPG experience and a mini game is immersion.
The Evils of Alignment
What does one do with Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman?
OK, this may be a longer post than I promised myself, but it’s a topic with teeth.
The situation is thus: The characters are aware that there is an impostor in the cloister, a thoroughly evil chap pretending to be a member of the virtuous.
My intention as a GM: to have a couple sessions of high tension whodunnit with witty repartee and ending with an unmasking of the villain just as the cloister is losing their patience with the brash adventurers.
What happened: the paladin detected evil, grabbed the guy and hauled him off.
The problem here is one of knowledge. Alignment, if it is to be understood as an ethical predisposition, is a slippery fish. Let’s talk history before we get to Bob, the Evil Apple Salesmen.
The first role playing game was an off shoot of a mini game, so the first RPG rules were essentially a way to describe through words what was happening in a tabletop game. In that respect alignment makes perfect sense. The Good guys are invading the Evil castle, with neutral parties willing to aid the highest payer. It’s a simple, straightforward scenario. Add a few iterations to Role Playing and the rules have far outgrown the strictures of mini-games and now Bargle the Evil Wizard is trying to steal the crops from the local farmers (or something like that). The scenarios are laid out pretty straightforward with typical nefarious motivations for the bad-guys, typical princess-saving motivations for the good guys, and everyone else was neutral. (Incidentally, this was my first epoch.) From there, people started really figuring out what RP was, and the companies that published the games figured out volume was the key to profits. Archaic and bizarre rules propagated through the iterations, different versions of major games were published in parallel, and here we are 30 years later with an alignment system that seems to have been added to the game by way of malevolence alone.
So, lets talk ethics briefly. What makes something right or wrong is a debate as old as philosophy. The Euthyphro Problem, for instance, is from Plato and remains an important concept even today. Whether rightness is derived from social cohesion or is built into the universe every bit as immutable as the Laws of Motion is a difficult concept that I’m not prepared to introduce, much less solve. But it’s important to keep in mind that even seemingly clear moral decisions can be sticky things. People can be against murder, but for the death penalty; against stealing but in support of the impoverished taking what they need. There’s shades of rightness and no two individuals will agree on every hue.
So, here we are playing a game that crams the massive panoply of ethics into a small handful of descriptions and sets the world as a living stage where good and evil battle for supremacy; occasionally it defines a third viewpoint as interested in maintaining a balance between these two forces. Add to that a seemingly afterthought law v. chaos axis, which very rarely gets any stage time at all, and the alignment system seems a weird vestige in about any game. So, given that nearly all bad guys are evil, good guys are good, what do we do with background players, especially if neutral is staking a balancing ground and not non-intervention? If the rule system requires no non-aligned, then it stands to reason that some people walking past are good, some are neutral… and some are evil. So, let us return to Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman and that paladin detecting alignments.
Bob, through sheer luck, finds himself in the position of being evil. Is this the result of poor upbringing, through far reaching success of ancient devilish plans come to fruition, is it genetically unavoidable? Who knows, but what we have on our hands is an Evil Apple Salesman. What does Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman, do in his evilness? Does he poison his apples? Probably not, that would too easy to discover. Is he a rageaholic, abusing his customers and loved ones by whatever means possible? I suppose he’s not just snarky. Maybe he simply festers in impotence, wishing harm upon his city and its inhabitants, without ability to put in effect his animosity. It is conceivable, at least, that Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman has done nothing illegal, or even wrong.
What, then, about the paladin who, in executing his normal duties, casts a detect evil spell while walking the streets and stumbles across Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman? In our real world, actions condemn the actor (usually). Being mean or spiteful isn’t enough to result in arrest. Given the normal concrete description of alignment, and the rigid and unerring nature of detection spells, there is no doubt in the mind of the paladin about Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman. What to do, indeed?
We may have arrived at a paradox. The course open to the paladin is to isolate Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman, but really, is our imaginary world going to contain a legal code that can arrest people based on a (very low level) spell? I might include a legal system like that in a city where law has gone too far, but certainly not in just any society that includes paladins. I think the question is not what the paladin should do, but what should we do?
In defense of alignment:
Well, there’s a few ways to resolve some of these issues. First is to return to the old, original rules, and to define evil as the guy the good guys are fighting. That way, there is no Bob, the Evil Apple Salesman, but what that means is that there’s a point in an NPCs life whern they choose to become evil by enacting an Evil Scheme.. which is weird.
What alignment does well is give structure to character creation. Making a character with Chaotic alignment is a strong cue to background story and sends a signal to other players how best to interact with your new character. Consider also that while real life actual people are complex shades of contradictions, most RP characters fit roughly into only a handful of tropes, so the small handful of options the alignment system offers is really a pretty good guideline when making a character.
against alignment:
The problems with alignment are clear, and I don’t appreciate how weird it makes my world sometimes. Also, despite how well alignment allows for many familiar tropes, there are some that it doesn’t. I like the too-good-for-his-own-good bad guys, and the evil-to-do-good archetypes. When there’s a small box in which to put these guys the world can be restrictive, even with the devil-may-care attitude GMs like myself have for rules.
The Solution:
I like rules because they provide a framework within which one can express their imagination. I had the good fortune of attending the first GenCon following the release of D&D 4th ed. WoTC had a number of the developers on hand to discuss 4th ed choices they made. They fielded more than a few questions laden with criticism about the system providing no room for role play. The response was that having not created rules for RP meant that there was no restrictions on RP. My feeling seemed to echo that of the crowd: it wasn’t freeing, but overwhelming. Having jettisoned the crafting rules, the creators figured that being able to craft was simply a matter of backstory. It’s a commendable thought, but what really happened is that they began to remove suggestions for character creation. I don’t want to get down on 4E or anything, but I think the misstep gave me insight to how to deal with alignment.
The earliest versions of role paying games always included special caveats, the rules are there to provide a structure in which to play a game, but the moment a rule ever got in the way of imagination they were to be discarded with wild abandon. Perhaps alignment is best used only as a rule structure for character creation, and then left aside when the game starts. We get the best of both worlds, then. We get to craft a character with the familiar strictures, but then enter into a world with familiar, abstract moral problems instead of consulting a rigid definition to determine the treatment of surrendering kobolds.
As for detect alignment spells, scuttle those ASAP, the world is a better place when you work for your answers.