The Pain of Publication: How I Got to Where I Am
For those of you who don’t me, I was one of the original group that started writing for Critical-Hits, but as my life changed, my time as a DM/GM dwindled. As such, my status as a regular columnist shrunk to that of a mere guest columnist. I grew up with TheGame and Bartoneus and can even be seen grinning foolishly in a few Ennie Award pictures. My column, the Pain of Campaigning has languished and faded into obscurity, but from the ashes of that experience I would like to introduce my new column: The Pain of Publication.
If you want advice from guys that have actually been published in the gaming world, frankly, there are plenty on this site. None of my work has seen publication. My efforts are focused more on fiction writing. However, even in that regard, I have also struck out. I never tried to get the first novel I wrote published. I realized it was deeply flawed and I lacked the dedication to fix it. My second novel was better, and after a major overhaul I even had agent representation, but my agent never did get it published. Now, years later, I am nearing the completion (read: temporary stoppage in editing) of my third completed novel and seeking once again to find an agent and get published.
The Pain of Publication is a journey through this process. I emphasize, again, that this is a process. I can offer no advice on what works, because nothing has for me, but what I can do, is discuss my regular activity related to this subject. This column’s focus will range from the obvious (getting an agent), to related (how do I make my novel worth publishing), and all the way through tangential subject matters (I have not yet fathomed what those might be).This first installment is going to focus on how I found an agent. There are literally books written on this, and agents out there with information on how they find and evaluate talent. Those books and resources are more qualified to speak on things as an expert, but its my hope that my own anecdotal experiences and lessons learned will be useful to some people out there. [Read the rest of this article]
The Grass Is Always Greener Where The Drama Llama Grazes
LOL U MAD BRO?
This week, I’m going to try to write the column I thought I was writing last week about roleplaying better characters. Today’s topic, in particular, is how to avoid playing one-dimensional characters and how to breathe a little life into your PCs using simple tools you can find in your own home. Unless, of course, I realize I’m talking about something else.
Now In 3-D RoleplayVision
One of the most common problems I’ve seen with some roleplaying is that the characters are very one-dimensional. The player has a very limited idea of what the character might do in a given situation. On one end of the limited-idea spectrum, the player is frustrated and bored with their character who exists only to stab things with a pointy. On the other, the lawful, neutral, chaotic, and other miscellaneous unaligned stupids come out to play.
Let’s pause and give the players of these PCs the benefit of the doubt. A given <insert sociopathic tendency here> character may well not be that way intentionally. The character may only have one or two distinguishing features, or their backstory may describe a particularly traumatic event that led to the character’s eventual career choice. I will freely admit that if my parents were killed by orcs when I was a lad, I might hate orcs. Possibly forever. I might even devote my life to killing orcs whenever possible.
That being said, a lot of players with this PC might attack orcs on sight, no matter the circumstances. Metagaming to be a team player aside, I don’t think is (usually) a realistic way to roleplay a PC.
Am I A Good Roleplayer?
A couple of weeks ago, one of my players sends me an IM. This person started the conversation off a little sheepish and evasive, but eventually we got to it: “Am I a good roleplayer?” You have to understand, this player has provided for me some of my favorite moments of our campaign, and I’ve seen them hold together an otherwise disastrous game of Fiasco. My answer was something to the effect of “HAHALOL” or “U SO CRAZY”, and I meant every capitalized letter. I asked why they were pondering such a question, and part of it was just good old fashioned social insecurity (which I have plenty of experience having!). Some of it was from not having played D&D at a table having to consider the opinions of other people. I assured my player that they were, in fact, a good roleplayer.
Of course, such an assurance begs the question of whether or not I actually know what I am talking about. Let’s find out, shall we?
Roleplay, Defined
A “roleplaying game” in this day and age can mean a lot of things. A lot of videogames and tabletop battle simulations are classified as RPGs. Skill in tactical miniatures combat is cool (and perhaps more a more useful life skill if we are invaded by aliens who live by a code of honor that makes them wait their turn before attacking), but that’s not really what I’m talking about. Some would argue that simply playing the role of a defender/tank or leader/healer is, in fact, roleplaying. I would not disagree, but that’s not what I’m talking about either.
The “roleplaying” I am talking about happens when a player pretends to be their character and do things in-game that their character would do.
I Ruin Everything In The Name Of Justice
Roleplay is where the magic is in a D&D game for me. It’s the thing that can separate a particular character from every other character in the universe with identical stats and abilities. It can be done in any number of ways, which is probably why it’s so easy to do in a way that irritates the rest of the group.
Before being adopted by World of Warcraft as the official class of PvP win-lasers and invulnerability, the Paladin of D&D editions past has traditionally been the subject of choice for bad roleplaying cliche. Playing a paladin was the quickest way to get a player to see everything in ultra-high-contrast shades of black and white. The willingness to recklessly shed blood in the name of Goodness and Truth at the first sign of anything doing anything even remotely Notgood will live in infamy forever. It’s times like these that I’m glad 4e de-emphasized alignment. You give people a label to slap on something, and they’ll ride it all the way into the ground. This is older than time, and is known as being Lawful Stupid.
In much the same vein is Chaotic Stupid, in which a player roleplays his PC with total disregard for anyone’s safety or sanity. I wish I had a nickel for every time I committed this sin. “I just wanted to see what would happen!” is the battle-cry of the Chaotic Stupids. One could justify this behavior by declaring that their PC was simply mad. I hope one has a high AC and many hitpoints.
I don’t consider any of the above to be good roleplaying, even if it wasn’t sufficiently annoying to warrant being bludgeoned to death with a PHB. Why? Because the character in this case has been reduced to something very one-dimensional. It’s more of a schtick than anything else, and it tends to define the whole character.
I Ruin Everything In The Name Of Faithful Roleplay
OK, then. One-dimensional characters aren’t good. So what is?
In my opinion, good roleplaying comes from getting to know your character. Where they come from, what was their life like growing up, why they chose their career, things like that. I like writing a backstory for my character whether or not anyone else is going to read it, just so I can know my PC better and feel comfortable in his shoes when it’s time to be him.
This can go wrong too.
One problem I’ve always had as a player is knowing when to let someone else have the spotlight. If I’ve got a fully armed and operational PC with complete backstory and motives, I tend to want to wander around town and interact with people (and by that, I usually mean get in trouble somehow). This is a ton of fun for me, but perhaps not for people who don’t care how successful my advances are with the mayor’s daughter or if I can escape from the balcony using only my pants and Ghost Sound.
One double-edged sword with well-fleshed-out PCs is that they have motivations — ones that may conflict with the party’s goals. If you’ve got a good DM and communicate these conflicts beforehand, this can result in some really interesting and fun situations to play out. It can also result in the whole table screaming at each other when the rogue changes allegiances mid-battle and backstabs the ranger.
Ulterior Motives
I knew about 10 words into this article that I wasn’t going to end up writing about good roleplaying. I was going to write about being a good player. I’ll write more in-depth about roleplaying sometime soon. (Provided I don’t get distracted and decide to start talking about 3e’s grappling mechanic instead. OOH SHINY!)
Pretty much every problem I discussed above has a common thread: if it went bad, it was likely because of poor communication and/or selfishness. A good party acts as a team. If one person derails everything (Lawful Stupid reasons or not), there’s likely to be consequences. Fun is not likely to be one of those consequences.
That being said, it is fun to push the envelope a little bit. Grab the spotlight once in awhile. Gently shake the rails the plot is on.
This is still your story, after all. Just remember to share.
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The Smallest Kid in the Sandbox
A writing teacher of mine once said that any writing you do is more than just a story or novel or essay; the act of writing is also entering a conversation with all the other writers who have ever or will ever write something as well. If I took that statement literally, I would be too intimidated to ever put pen to paper, imagining that I was actually shooting the breeze with brilliant minds like Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Updike. However, this thought does help focus a writer—it instills the awareness that the act of writing is something worthy of taking seriously, even if the work itself is silly or irreverent in tone (or for a fantasy RPG).
The sentiment from that teacher is never far from my mind, but it struck me even more prophetic as I did more and more work in the game-design field—and in particular when that work brought me into designing within a shared-world environment. Even as the forward-thinking R&D folks at Wizards of the Coast do a little bit of public introspection on the past and future of the game of Dungeons & Dragons (and RPGs in general), and as the public interprets that introspection as a referendum on the next iteration of D&D, it strikes me how working on content for a game really is a conversation with past and future designers and developers. And, if game design is such a conversation, then designing content in settings such as the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or Greyhawk is an outright public debate, including Springer-esque, chair-throwing, clothes-ripping brawls.
When I was given the chance to work as one of the Global Administrators on the Living Forgotten Realms campaign in 2008, I had the slightest iota of experience working on projects in other shared-world settings, mostly D&D ones like Eberron or Greyhawk, but also Babylon 5. Working on projects in those arenas was a bit unnerving, but the Forgotten Realms is a whole different beast. Not only are there years of gaming material lurking behind it, but whole libraries of novels hang over a designer’s head. And that doesn’t even touch the video games and other ancillary products.
After all, it is one thing to play around with the fundamentals of a shared-world when you are doing so for a group of players in a private (which can be a tough enough job). It is another issue entirely when you are being asked to tread upon fans’ sacred grounds; it is impossible to hide your footprints in a sandbox so public and sometimes overly scrutinized. [Read the rest of this article]
Epic-Tier Anything Sucks
There’s been a lot of talk around here lately about epic tier games in 4e (and how it isn’t very much fun, and how we’d all rather have our ever-regenerating livers torn out each morning by eagles than play characters over level 20). I haven’t had any experience with epic tier play in 4e yet, but from the sound of it I cannot wait. I have, however, dabbled in the cosmos-shaking power of epic level characters in previous editions. It sucked too. Let me tell you about it.
In The Beginning
I first started regularly playing D&D when I was 13. It was a time of great fun and overwhelming stupidity. Space hamsters were hilarious, mind flayers sucking peoples brains out were hilarious,and Grease spells were ULTRA hilarious. It was a time when my friend had 2nd Edition books and I had 1st Edition books, and we decided to use them all. For a time, it was enough to roam around with low-level characters, exploring dungeons, slaughtering demihumans, and hoarding treasure. One day, one of us discovered that we could multiclass our character. My friend chose to dual-class his Fighter/Illusionist. I decided to go for broke, and go for Fighter/Cleric/Magic-User. It quickly became apparent to me that gaining levels was going to take an extraordinarily long time, as my friend’s character was far outstripping mine. I do not actually know how they were both adventuring together, as there were only two of us and I’m assuming somebody had to DM. Perhaps we got my grandmother to do it, or one of the dogs. I’m not sure.
What I do know is that we got greedy. And it was the beginning of the end. Of the beginning. [Read the rest of this article]
Redesigning the Epic Tier
Both Sly Flourish and I have talked a lot lately about the issues we’ve run into at epic levels in D&D. While there are certainly rules issues, I believe fixing them all would take up a lot more than single column. However, I do have some ideas on alternate ways to restructure how the campaign plays out to put the focus on epic in a way I find satisfying.
As I experienced in my campaign, I never felt like there was enough actual epic storylines to justify a full 10 levels. When every combatant was supposed to be earth-shattering, it drained much of the impact away from each individual one. Plus, unless you’re just going on a tour of gods to kill, the variety of monsters ends up being a bit tough to manage- one or two times fighting a balor and his epic demon minions is cool, but the third or fourth? It loses a bit of its cool factor.
So what I propose is an alternate campaign plan that doesn’t focus on trying to make all 30 levels of a game operate similarly. It breaks out the epic tier into several segments with different focuses, and even changes a bit how many D&D campaigns are run. A good part of the inspiration for this was a 2nd edition D&D campaign I played in that borrowed heavily from the D&D Immortals Boxed set. [Read the rest of this article]
Meat, Food, Snacks, Mjölnir
Last week, my preschooler son Sam came home with his very first homework assignment. The task was simple and seasonally festive: he was to sit down with me and his mom and talk about the things he was thankful for in his life, then we’d all make a poster together that involved those things. Having a child of mine respond with “meat”, “food”, and “snacks” was not a real surprise — but this nerd-papa nearly burst at the seams with pride when he said he was thankful for “thunder” and ”Mjölnir.” At the end, he summarized everything by saying, “my life is cool city“. I couldn’t disagree. It also made me take stock in what I’m thankful for. I don’t have a preschool class to turn my homework in, so I guess you guys will have to do.
So, without further ado, the stuff I am thankful for, conveniently filtered for nerd/game content only:
A Supportive Wife
My wife isn’t much of a gamer, but she understands gaming is one of the things that makes me tick. She’s cool with me having a bunch of loud and enthusiastic people venting all their pent up nerd-energy at my house every week. She doesn’t get everything I write about here, but she supports me disappearing for a night every week to go write about what I love. She even watches our son for a few days while I go running off to conventions.
I didn’t really get how important it was to have this until I met people who didn’t. I know people whose significant other is not only unsupportive, but actively hostile toward their partner’s passion for gaming. I’ve seen guys and ladies alike belittled in front of their friends. It made me very thankful that I have someone who will lift me up instead of tear me down, and it makes me want to return the favor for the stuff she enjoys.
Fact is, I couldn’t do half the stuff I do without my wife having my back. This is but one of a veritable cornucopia of reasons I love that woman. [Read the rest of this article]
If The Dungeon Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy
I’ll admit it: I’d been dreading running last week’s D&D game. It had been over a month since we played, and my trepidation was as much laziness as it was not wanting to dungeon crawl. I’d imagine it was much more my fault than the dungeon module we were running, but I’d somehow managed to suck all the fun out of the game for me. That’s the last thing you want running through the DM’s mind in any group — sooner or later things start to suck for everybody else. A few months later, the group breaks up and one of your roleplayers goes to prison for stabbing a minmaxer. I knew I had to do something. But what?
For me, running a pre-made dungeon module drove home for me the things that I like and the things that I can’t stand when it comes to D&D. The more I think about every adventure I’ve run so far, I realize that three things get me fired up about D&D: story, character development, and things that further story and character development. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to care about girls in chainmail bikinis, treasure, and monsters (in that exact order). Now, unless those three things serve a story in some way, I find them boring. I kind of wish I could go back to this, and I’d imagine my players do too sometimes.
Me Me Me Me Me Me
As I mentioned last week, I once played in a campaign where the DM’s idea of fun diverged wildly from that of the players. I felt like I was kind of in a weird inverse variant of that, where my group is having fun but I’m not. It should be said loudly here so there’s no confusion: my group kicks ass and are lots of fun to play with. Something about the game itself was bugging me. So I decided to put my tech support hat on and tinker with things a bit.
I’ve never ever liked playing in pre-made modules as long as I’ve played D&D, and I’m sure my lack of enthusiasm was affecting the game. Step one was to get the hell out of that and start doing it from scratch again. I’d dropped the PC’s into the module I was running as part of a larger overarching plot. and since the module was broken neatly into a couple of sub-adventures (the first of which we’d finished), I decided simply to take things back on a course I’d created. I know some of my more roleplay-friendly players were glad to be rid of the box text and classic dungeon-crawl, but I want to make sure the minmaxers are happy too.
One thing in particular I’ve noticed since I’ve started DMing is that I don’t get very excited about combat anymore, especially since The Great Lie was uncovered. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. As I’ve mentioned in these pages several times, emotional investment is what does it for me in D&D. As a player, it’s a lot easier — primarily because your character is frequently in mortal danger. As a DM, I started feeling like I was just setting up bowling pins for the PCs to knock down. Part of this is because I haven’t quite mastered how to balance an encounter to be challenging for the party, and they keep mowing everything down with ease. This is not a good recipe for emotional investment in a battle. In a situation where the DM has already predestined that the PCs won’t die and will intervene to save them, I can’t even see a reason to run the combat. I realize the players might not know the DM’s intentions, and a DM really good at this could pluck the players’ heartstrings to keep it exciting, but I can’t handle that.
While planning the night’s adventure, I decided I was going to kick the difficulty up a notch. Hell, I would kick the difficulty up two notches and try really hard not to intervene if people started dropping like flies. Everybody was level 8, I had 5 players (instead of my usual 7 or 8), so I decided to throw 3 solo level 10 creatures at them (some Berbalangs I reskinned as giant half-fish abominations).
I also decided to try to mix my combat peanut butter with my roleplay chocolate a little, and tried to organize a combination combat/RP encounter. The PCs would get ambushed by some orcs, and then everybody would get attacked by a superior force (the aforementioned Berbalangs). I was hoping this would add some flavor.
The Tilt
A monkey wrench got thrown into my combat plans at the start of the night when I realized I had no idea where my wet-erase battlemat was. I was about to use some Gaming Paper when I decided just to try and see what happened if I ran this combat without a mat, like we used to do back in the 3.5 days. I got some weird looks, but everybody rolled with it. Another monkey wrench got thrown in when the party’s mage nuked all the orcs on the board with a fireball. I reminded people twice that the orcs weren’t attacking them anymore, but at one point I realized it’s their story and I should just let them stomp all over my carefully planned encounters even if it ends with their dismemberment. Why is that so hard?
4e without a mat is a bit weird. So many powers involve squares and shifting and sliding that I felt like I was nerfing some of my PCs. Here’s the weird part, though: we’ve always had an awful problem with analysis paralysis in our game. My players will huddle up and spend minutes at a time figuring out the optimum place to go to trigger a power or blow up the most bad guys with a fireball. One of our group quit playing D&D because he was always stressed about what to choose in combat. Matless, there was none of this. Choices got made within 10-15 seconds. People asked me how many baddies a fireball would hit, and I made a rough estimate in my head and told them. Just like the old days. Combat got less boring and stressful for everyone, including me. That’s when it hit me.
I really, really hate using a battlemat.
Before the masses come to exterminate the heretic, I understand the good a battlemat can do. I just think it works for a style of play that I don’t care for. Combat on a battlemat is too explicit for me. I feel like everything is spelled out in the game mechanics, and it doesn’t fire up my imagination. I’m not quite sure what to do about this.
In the end, the party was victorious (though I finally did manage to at least bloody one of the PCs). Somebody covered the floor in immobilizing thorns, and the Berbalangs all took the death train to AoE-town. There’s the part of me that wants everything to be “realistic” and knows the combat would have gone much differently had we used a mat, but I’m not sure how much I care about that yet.
No One Expects The Spanish Imposition
The thing I’m not quite sure how to deal with here is that I’m all about trying to make choices that ensures everybody in the group has the maximum fun — yet here I am trying to adjust things to the way I like them. On one hand, I definitely think I should take myself into account when thinking about these things, but I’m uncomfortably aware of the slippery slope that can lead down.
Another extremely slippery slope that keeps beckoning to me is that I’m the DM, and maybe my way of running the game should carry more weight as far as the game I run goes. Not because I’m awesome, but because I need to play to my strengths. A guy whose passions are tactical combat may not be the best choice to run a story-heavy game, so it makes sense that story and roleplay would feature more prominently in the game I run.
Of course, I have no intentions of just arbitrarily throwing everything I don’t like in the trash (at least, not without consulting my group). I suspect I’ll like combat more with practice, and I’m always about trying to work on my weaknesses as a DM. At this point, though, I’m just glad to discover (and maybe even just admit) what was taking the fun out of my game. At least now I can stare it in the face, even if punching it isn’t in my group’s best interests.
Of course, working all this out with my group will be the hard part, especially considering I’m not sure what the next steps will be. Communication is much more fun when you don’t have to say anything important.
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The Harsh Lessons Of The Starfish Man
Once upon a time, back in high school, I had one of the most epic dreams of my career. In it, an evil man wearing a starfish mask and his army of dwarves had invaded my grandmother’s back yard. The dwarves were dressed like your basic garden gnome but with blue and orange cloaks. They were skinny, about 2′ tall, and had nets which they were using to ensnare and kidnap my best friend Josh‘s dad. Josh and I had been in karate for a few years together at this point, and so we set about rectifying this situation — one tiny facepunch at a time. We battled the little bastards and were making some headway toward Josh’s dad, but it seemed hopeless that we would save him in time.
….then I woke up, and found a longsword lying in the bed next to me. I looked out my bedroom window, and there was the Starfish Man and a few members of his dwarf army, creeping about my parents’ yard, sprinkling some sparkling powder everywhere. I picked up the phone to call Josh, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it to find another guy from our karate class. Things were about to get serious.
….then I woke up, this time for real. That day, I posted this dream to my BBS, and Josh nearly laughed himself into a coma. To this day, it remains one of the strange legends of our circle of friends.
The One About The Starfish Man
Ten years later, it’s a few weeks after our gaming group (with my old friend Josh as DM) had finished our first campaign together. Josh is looking for a little break from DM duties, and I want to try my luck behind the screen. I decide to draw upon the Starfish Man for inspiration. I was certain that Josh was totally going to love this and think it was hilariously awesome. I crafted an elaborate plot involving reports of mischievous dwarf-like creatures roaming the land and sprinkling something on lawns causing terrible things to emerge from the earth and ravage the countryside. Nobody really got it yet, nor was I expecting them to. This was foreshadowing, after all.
The second session, I had the Starfish man make a cameo, and during one scene I vaguely described a shadow cast on the wall with a five-pointed head. Nobody really batted an eye. I figured I’d probably better turn up the heat a little or Josh would never get it.
The third session, I had the PCs visit the ancestral home of Josh’s character, where they found his dad being kidnapped by a bunch of dwarves. I got some “what the hell is going on here”s, but no recognition as to the amazing idea that I was clearly displaying in bold neon letters.
I was frustrated. It also didn’t help that my first time behind the screen stressed me out beyond belief. I wouldn’t say I’m comfortable yet, but I was losing my mind then. It was after that third session that I told everybody I wanted to tap out, but that I’d wrap everything up and explain everything. So we played one last session with the rules very fast and loose that ended in 6′ tall anthropomorphic popcorn shock troops, my friend Tasha being polymorphed into a gorilla, and the Starfish Man wishing he’d never been born. I explained the whole connection with my old dream, and I saw the moment when the realization crossed Josh’s face and he did laugh and call me insane.
I got what I wanted, but in the end, I realize the campaign itself (and probably my sanity) suffered at the cost of telling that joke.
In-Jokes and Insider Information
I don’t know if the rest of you have had this experience, but the D&D games I’ve played in have a tendency to last over several campaigns. In only one of these campaigns have I actually been part of the whole saga — in the others, the DM brought their old campaigns.
I’ve seen the best and the worst of how this can play out. The “good” version was, in fact, the campaign before my 4-day Starfish Festival described above. Josh had adapted the game world from the campaign he and Tasha had played in during college, including making their old PCs high-ranking town officials. I didn’t become aware until much later how many of the NPCs we encountered during that campaign had appeared before, but it didn’t really matter. They had their own life in our campaign, and they didn’t usually steal the show. It was still very much our PCs’ story, and it was the campaign in which I first realized how much I love to roleplay.
The “bad” version of this came from a new person to our group, who convinced me to talk our group into letting him DM. He too brought his old game world and powered-up NPC versions of his old group’s PCs. The problem was, he always had them riding shotgun to save us from the always-far-too-overwhelming odds in a cutscene designed to elicit oohs and aahs. All our adventures revolved doing things with the NPCs or rushing us around to various locations so he could show us the world his other players loved. It was never really our campaign, and we all hated it. It was here I learned about railroading, and the dangers of being too chicken to be honest with your DM if you’re not having fun.
The Point (Of Failure)
Though I don’t do as well a job of it as I’d like (especially when I’m behind the screen), my mantra for years both as a player and DM has been “there are other people at the table”. It’s one thing to have a running joke going at the table and quite another to tell a joke that takes hours of setup and wastes everyone’s precious weekly D&D allotment designed for one person. The reward to painful stupidity ratio on this sort of endeavor has been very unfavorable in my experience. The stuff that gets the whole table rolling with laughter almost always happens unintentionally, but hanging some easy-to-pluck jokefruit isn’t against the rules if you want to do that. Humorous or not, plots that have to work like elaborate Rube Goldberg machines toward a spectacular finish have a lot of points of possible failure. Add in the fact that the very nature of RPGs means people may be running around inadvertently screwing up your plans, and getting it to work becomes a real feat. Getting it to work without everyone at your table being confused, frustrated, or bored will be an amazing feat.
I think using material from previous campaigns can be a good thing, provided that the group currently playing the game is the most important to the story. It’s awesome to have a world and NPCs and lots of previous history to draw upon, but the emotional attachment that comes with using a pre-existing and beloved game world seems to me a double-edged sword. Players who were there the first time will get references and might attach to this new adventure more easily. Don’t, however, make the mistake of thinking that it was the game world, the plot, and even the events that occurred that made the campaign you loved so much work so well. Every time I’ve had a good D&D experience, it was the table coming together and sharing in something wonderful. The plot may not have fully made sense. The rules may have been fudged somewhat. Nobody cared. It was our experience together, and the people in it are the only ones who will truly be able to understand and look back with fond memories of the glorious events that transpired that day.
Why Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Character
If you’ve ever wondered why you get eyerolls when telling people outside your group about your character’s exploits, this is why. All your PC’s rad loot and the exciting adventures they’ve lived through usually don’t mean much to anyone but you and your group. We live in a world where there are a hundred million dungeons to be pillaged and two hundred million idiot nobles to be saved from three hundred million slavering maws of living, breathing wood chippers. Every fighter has a glowing sword of Spine Destruction and every wizard can cast Pancreas To Butter.
None of this is that special. Your story is special. Your characters are special. (To you.)
My dear friend (and DM 4ever!) Josh unfortunately learned this the hard way when he moved away and started a new group. He had them time travel back to meddle with the events that took place in the campaign he played with me before. He hated it, and is worried his players did too. Our story was only special to us.
That’s not an insult. That’s how this game works. I believe it’s why tabletop RPGs still continue to exist and thrive after 30 years of technology bringing ridiculously detailed videogames with graphics that depict all the awesome-but-not-really-that-special to everyone in a form that doesn’t make us do math. You can’t beat the bond at the table, especially in a group that’s been together a long time. Even when they make cybernetic jacks to plug into our brains that completely immerse us in an experience that is so dungeony that real dungeons will quail in fear before its dungeonous dungeonosity, we’ll still want to look back 5 years later and remember fondly the time we spent together kicking ass in the name of Truth, Justice, and Whatever That Lord Guy’s Name Was (and afterward wondering how we ever lived with graphics that horrible).
Yes, I’m sure there are people out there who can write the Next Great D&D Book Series based on the adventures that took place in their campaign. Hickman and Weis did it for Dragonlance, why can’t we? You probably can, with lots of work on writing and editing and plot development and rewriting just like they did. It takes a lot of work to make something accessible and interesting to everyone, and an interesting concept and high adventure are really just the start. Only industry professionals and bloggers silly enough to open their computer-mouths on the Internets have to worry about that. You don’t need your campaign to be accessible to anybody but your group. Your audience, if you can even call it that, is small — and your material should be, whenever possible, tailored to fit the needs of the current players.
This all may seem pretty funny coming from a guy who tells everybody not to listen when anybody tells them “nobody wants to hear about your character”. I still tell people that, and I tell people about my characters all the time. But I don’t tell them every last detail for two hours, and I try to put it in a context my listener can either enjoy or ignore. Knowing your audience is a skill well worth honing, and knowing why you love something so much goes a long way toward being able to judge if it’s going to be interesting to others — whether you’re running a game or telling your wife about your elven ranger!
To Serve And Protect… Fun
I’m having one of those articles where I started to write about one thing and then I thought it was about another thing, and here we are at the thing I’m pretty sure I was actually writing about: discovering the role of the Dungeon Master in your group, and being aware of your own behaviors enough to meet your group’s needs.
People have a really wide variety of opinions as to what role a DM should serve. I’ve seen plenty of groups where it’s “the DM’s game” and they get to call all the shots, sometimes even about things out of game like where and when to play. The groups I’ve been for any length of time in have been typically more relaxed and democratic about such things, but I’m not saying it’s the Right Way.
There’s a concept called “servant leadership” that I really like to embrace when I run pretty much anything, including a D&D game. The short version of this concept is that, as a leader, your responsibility is to to the group or project and you do this by cultivating the well-being of your team. I find this concept invaluable when I’m trying to decide how to handle something in-game — I try to choose what’s going to be best for the whole table, and I try to give each player a little time to shine every session. You have to let go somewhat of what you want, but in many cases that’s not such a bad thing in a tabletop RPG setting. This also means you don’t let one more vociferous player get everything they want — that’s also not good for the group.
In this mindset, you probably aren’t going to be crafting an adventure based around a pun. You’ll keep your players at the forefront, and use your world as a tool for their excitement. Your group will be happy, you’ll be happy, the Starfish Man will lose, and no dwarves will sprinkle anything on your lawn — and that’s all anybody can really hope for when running a game.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I had a weird dream about Ben Folds turning into a monkey from Planet of the Apes that I need to adapt for this week’s D&D game. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this.
Photo Credit
Infinite Possibilities, Itty-Bitty Comfort Zone
My nerdcation to Washington DC last month opened my eyes to a lot of things. These included crab chips and secret ginger candies that stop motion sickness. Mostly, it was the exposure to open-form roleplaying games that has been taking up most of my free processor cycles. Despite being the guy in our group that would cheerfully handwave every combat in favor of having an all-roleplay session, I find myself flummoxed when faced with the infinite possibilities of a game like Fiasco. I have a lot of fun when it works, and nobody has fun when it doesn’t.
The Points Don’t Mean Anything
My first real exposure to improvisational theatre was an acting class in college. I had a case of extreme senioritis and an elective I needed to fill to graduate. The class was taught by a grad student who was the lead in the university’s production of Angels in America (a very serious and powerful play about homosexuality and HIV). One of our class assignments was to see this play and give a report. There were a couple serious and insightful discussions during that class that I barely remember. One that did stick with me was when I learned that conflict is the birthplace of drama, and that the conflict can be external or internal and still work. However, 99% of the class consisted of one activity, that being the playing of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”. I learned a lot about cognitive dissonance that semester.
I used to watch Whose Line quite a bit in those days, and the performers’ ability to instantly roll with insane scenarios never ceased to amaze me. Coming up with weird scenarios, on the other hand, was a breeze. For whatever reason, I’ve been blessed with nonsequitur lobes about twice the size of a normal human’s. This means I could dish it out, but I had trouble taking it. This trend has continued until present day. I can look behind me and see the husks of former DM-brains, charred by my besugared mind — yet a curveball thrown by my players frequently gets met with me freaking out and putting things back on the nice, safe rails.
I’ve noticed that a lot of new D&D players are a bit gun-shy when they first start the game until they start to get the rules. Then, once they start to realize they can roleplay, a secondary shyness sets in. This one is frequently worse, and I’ve heard multiple people tell me they don’t roleplay they’re afraid someone will think what they came up with is stupid. There are games considered RPGs that just let you run around and fight. The only real distinction your character has from any other is its abilities and gear. On the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Fiasco, where you get 2 sentences that describe a scenario and a couple more vague words describing relationships to other characters and you’re expected to come up with the rest.
The initial reaction I’ve seen from three separate sets of people playing Fiasco for the first time is that they understand the concept, but they have no idea where to go from there. Dave “The Game” taught us all the game in the first game of Fiasco I ever played, and I was thankful to have someone who knew what to do there. He took the first scene and gave us all some context as to how things worked. I’ve done this twice for my group (albeit somewhat poorly), and it was enough that we all picked up on it enough to get the game off the ground.
In both the games I’ve played with my group, we seem to be able to hit the ground running but by the end we find ourselves working together to determine what should happen and then the actual scene happens and it’s nowhere near as good as the narrative. On occasion somebody feels the urge to solilioquize, which makes sense in some cases, but then we start getting hung up on making sure we follow the rules (of which there are few). It’s curious to me how we gravitate toward structure when given freedom.
It occurs to me that everyone I’ve played with has had some roleplaying experience before. I’d be very curious to see how a random person off the street handles a game like Fiasco. I wonder if it would be easier or harder. D&D has given me roleplaying experience which helps with the initial awkwardness, but it also comes with a certain way of thinking that’s hard to shake at first. You know who your character is to a certain extent, and (due to your class) you probably know your basic role in the party from the second you start. It’s the difference between having context to start with and having to create your own. I remember as a kid, we didn’t usually start from nothing at all but somebody would say “HEY wanna play spacemen?” or “HEY wanna play army dudes?” or “HEYYYY WANNA PLAY REAL GHOSTBUSTERS” (the last one is me, very overexcited). We had some context, just not much — kind of like Fiasco gives you. We didn’t give a crap back then what people thought. Why do we now?
Helpful Improv Tips
One thing that helped me greatly was to draw on some of the stuff I learned in that acting/Whose Line class. I’ve found stuff like this useful in D&D for years, but they mean a lot more in something like Fiasco.
Say “yes, and..” when you’re suddenly faced with the unexpected. This is the “first rule” of improv theatre. It’s very hard for me to deal with is the loss of control when playing a more freestyle game, but this isn’t like D&D where you have one person in authority driving the narrative. This is a shared experience where everyone is creating the story equally. Yes, you will wind up with stories that don’t go the way you want them to. Somebody may even kill your character. But this is also different in that games like this require a much greater deal of trust between players. You can’t play Fiasco in a group that would kill the party’s paladin for littering.
Here’s a link to a lot more very useful tips for improv theatre. I’ve found stuff like this useful for years for D&D, but they carry a lot more importance in something like Fiasco.
Mucking About In Places We Probably Shouldn’t
All this is not to say, of course, that we haven’t been having a blast with Fiasco. We totally have, and will probably play again soon. One wrinkle in our plans is that our decision awhile back to let more people into the group (I can’t remember if we have 7 or 8 now) has impacted us in unexpected ways for Fiasco. We have 3-4 more people than Fiasco’s maximum of 5 will allow. Granted, my new arcade cabinet can certainly help this, but it does kind of suck to get left out.
My friend Dave (from my gaming group, not CH’s dark overlord) and I have been discussing trying to change things up a bit. One idea that I find interesting is playing 2 games at once and intertwining the two somehow at the Tilt (the middle part where Something Unexpected Happens That Messes Everything Up). My initial thought is to have everybody play Act 1 in two separate groups (with the two rounds of scenes as normal), and then have everyone sit together for one final megaround. I think it would be interesting if each group were a rival team of some kind, be it sports teams or news teams or (my favorite) car dealers across the street from each other. The first half of the game everyone hatches elaborate plans and in the second we set them into motion and watch everybody try to mitigate the various disasters around them.
I would also love to see what happens if a bunch of kids play a game of Fiasco, minus all the killing and sex and whatnot. Could a decent Fiasco playset suitable for kids be made? It’s all about relationships, needs, locations, and objects. Kids love all those things.
I’m pretty sure these break the whole idea and flow of Fiasco somehow, but it sounds like fun so we’ll see what happens. I just hope it doesn’t end up in a real life Fiasco. And if it does, I hope I get a crapload of white dice by the end.
