SF and Gaming Blog

The May 2004 edition of Dreamscribe is now online. Of particular interest is Neil “Shark” Marsden’s account of one of those rare things, a multi-year online game that ran to a conclusion, Hail the King.

This week’s Game WISH is about Obnoxious Characters

How do you handle an obnoxious character who has habits that annoy other PCs? What do you do as a fellow player/GM? What has worked and not worked for you?

Obnoxious characters are a different issue from obnoxious players, although the two can be related. When it comes to obnoxious players, the worst case I’ve had to deal with was the time I had to expel a player from an online game for making unprovoked random attacks on other PCs. But that’s more an immature “Player Killer” type of player than an issue about the character; there was nothing indicating “psychopathic killer” on her character sheet. But I digress; that’s not really the question.

I don’t have much experience of dealing with obnoxious characters from ‘good’ players as a GM. My definition of a good player is one who doesn’t disrupt the game in a way that spoils things for other players. The ones that have given me problems as a GM in the past haven’t so much been those who are rude and insulting to other PCs, but the ones who’s background, goals and motivations just don’t mesh with any of the other PCs in the game. They have often ended up wandering off on their own in what effectively becomes a solo game. This increases my workload, since the ‘main game’ needs a critical mass of PCs to work, and any independent ‘solo’ PC doesn’t form part of that critical mass.

When it comes to rude and insulting characters, I find I really enjoy playing them as NPCs when I GM. I’m not sure what that says about me. A favourite example in my online game was a sarcastic racist kandar NPC called Dhymerdh, who I had endlessly taunting a group of human PCs about how useless he thought humans were; I even tempted the powerful psychokinetic by having him sit on the windowsill of an open second story window while delivering these tirades. She resisted the temptation to defenestrate him, but she did move his chair just before he sat down.

Going back to the original subject, some conflict between PCs can give rise to good roleplaying. After all, it’s a common trope in fiction to throw incompatible character types together and force them cooperate. For instance, one of the pre-generated PCs I’ve created for a GURPS convention scenario has the disadvantages Bully and Callous. One of the others (the party’s combat specialist) has Pacifism: Cannot Harm Innocents; this is a recipe for conflict within the party, something the team leader (a third PC) will have to resolve.

To sum up, the definition of what makes an obnoxious PC is very subjective; I find a disruptive PC to be a very bad thing, but obnoxious is not the same thing as disruptive

I mentioned in the previous post about running convention games using my Kalyr setting. I though I’d post the one page summary of the setting I’ve written to use as player handouts; I’m interested in hearing some feedback on this.

Races

Kandar
Physically, the kandar are a race of slender humanoids, a head taller than humans, with copper coloured skin; some individuals have a purplish or even a greenish tinge to them. Kandar are not native to Kalyr. Millennia ago they were transported to the planet by the beings known as The Guardians, who the Kandar still worship as gods to this day. At one time the Kandar had an advanced technological civilisation, but it collapsed into barbarism following war and plagues. Today’s kandar have rebuilt on the ruins of their own past, but have never managed to get anywhere near the heights of their previous civilisation, whose ruins still litter the countryside. Their present day society is highly stratified and static, and individual Kandar can be arrogant and cruel.

Humans
If the Guardians brought the Kandar to Kalyr, it was the Kandar themselves who were responsible for bringing humans to the planet, by means of a now lost technology involving some kind of dimensional portals. The first humans were kidnapped through time and space to serve as workers and slaves. Today many humans are still enslaved, working the vast farms that feed the Kandar of the cities, but many more are free men, either living as second-class citizens in the Kandar cities, or setting up new communities outside the areas of Kandar rule.

Organisations

The Academy of Knowledge
Often known by the kandar name The Karazthan, the Academy of Knowledge preserves what remains of the technology of the Kandar. They maintain workshops in every Kandar city, which are the sole source of any mechanical or electrical devices, from firearms to vehicles to electric lighting. The means of producing or repairing anything technological is a jealously guarded secret, and the organisation has no qualms about using violence to protect its monopoly power. Two other things of note about them; firstly, they make great effort to keep completely out of the constant political intrigues and disputes in Kandar cities. Secondly, they are one of the few organisations in Kalyr where Kandar and humans work together on more or less equal terms.

The Academy of the Mind
The Academy of the Mind is a powerful guild of psionics. In the past Kalyr has gone though periods of rule by psionic elites, and periods where psis were hunted and persecuted. The relationship between psis and ‘normals’ today is a sort of nervous standoff. Psis do not attempt to rule themselves, but no city ruler is without psionic advisors. They also find psis extremely useful for dirty work such as locating or interrogating criminals or awkward dissidents. In return, the rulers pledge to protect the psis from ‘the mob’. The Academy of the Mind itself is a microcosm of Kalyr as a whole; all the same political and cultural issues that divide Kalyr divide the Academy.

The Academy of Life
The Academy of Life is to bio-tech what the Academy of Knowledge is to ‘dry’ technology. It’s their genengineered crops and farm animals that keep the populations of the cities fed. Unlike the Academy of Knowledge, they’re alleged to be deeply involved in any number of political conspiracies, and there are all kinds of dark rumours concerting ongoing projects in secret research laboratories in remote locations. But people say bad things about the Karazthan too…

This week’s Game WISH asks:

Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t?

I love games with rich, detailed settings. I remember the time I first joined the RPGAMES forum on CompuServe many years ago, and reading through the background files for the various games run on the message boards. Two of the first games I joined were the two with the greatest volume of background material: Hawiian Vacation, a GURPS cyberpunk game with a very detailed future history and long lists of megacorps, and Gensalorn, a game using the Runequest rules, with an equally detailed list of cultures and history. The first proved to be one of the most memorable games I have ever played in, the second unfortunately folded not long after I joined because several other players dropped out around the same time (nothing to do with me, I have to say!).

I think the reason like detailed settings as a player is because I like my characters to be grounded in some kind of context. Unless the game is set in some variant of the real world, in which case the real world can stand in as the setting, I have difficulty coming up with character concepts unless I have a clear idea of the character’s place in the world. If so much of the world is unspecified, I then have to create bits of the world myself, which risks treading on the toes of both the GM and of other players, whose vision might be different from mine.

This isn’t to everyone’s taste, though. I know gaming groups and have heard of plenty of others that think a defined setting is an anathema, because it ‘restricts what can happen’. That is a perfectly valid style of play, especially for campaigns that lean heavily on the tropes of Hollywood action movies; it’s just not to my taste. I’ve heard such campaign styles described as “Truman Show Games” after the film, in which the PCs and the immediate plotline exist in a vacuum, and there is no wider world that either affects or is affected by events within the game.

Putting on my GM’s hat, the problem with detailed complex settings is making them accessible to new players. It’s a fact that many would-be players aren’t prepared to wade through a hundred or more pages of closely-spaced text explaining weird cultural customs and the complex interrelationships of clans, cults, guilds and megacorps.

One approach to take is for the starting player characters to have as little knowledge of the gameworld as the players themselves. This was the approach, I believe, taken by Empire of the Petal Throne, in which the initial PCs are assumed to be crass barbarians newly arrived in the empire. I’ve tried taking a similar approach when I decided to add a couple of new players to my online Kalyr game. The existing characters encountered an ancient space/time portal, and I asked the two new players to generate characters from present-day earth, who then ended up falling through this portal, to land in a strange and exotic world.

Another is to narrow the focus, an approach I’ve also used for convention style one-shots for the Kalyr setting. Don’t try to explain the whole world, just the bits necessary for the character’s backgrounds. For my Kalyr one-shots I’ve made all characters agents for the same guild. Hero Quest takes a similar approach; rather than overload players with details of all the myriad races and cultures of Glorantha, focus on just one or two of them as the settings for beginning campaigns.

The Non-Euclidian Staircase now has it’s own domain! I wondered where it had gone….

WISH 91 is about Appropriating From Fiction

How often do you appropriate bits from books, movies, comics, and other sources as a player or GM? Do you like to steal names or flavor or go more whole-hog? Is there a difference between stealing for background and stealing for in-game plot?

Please take care to file off the serial numbers first! I like game universes to at least give the appearance of being unique creations of the GM and players, and I find things lifted wholesale from works of fiction detract from this. I remember being slightly annoyed with one of my online players who introduced a lot of background elements that I didn’t realise had been lifted straight from Jack Vance’s Alastor series, names and all. On the other hand, I did allow a player in Kalyr to run a character who’s a refugee from Andre Norton’s Witch World (“The Kolder are responsible for everything!“), who wandered in through an interdimensional gateway.

I’ve never had (to my knowledge, at least) any player in my games using names from other works, and it’s not something I would allow. Names just have too much baggage associated with them. I wonder what prompted Steve, the GM of the Victorian age Vampire game at Gypsycon, to name one of the characters “Max Hastings”.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with basing a character on someone from a favourite book or film, provided you make a reasonable attempt to file off the serial numbers. I’ve done this myself, with one of my favourite characters, Karl Tolhurst, who was at least partly based on Dan Ward from Iain Banks’ “Espedair Street”.

On the third tentacle, I doubt that many of us have the imagination or the time to create complete original setting from the whole cloth. It’s also hard to sell a game concept to potential players unless you can point at some points of reference. Therefore, unless you’re playing in an established commercial or licensed setting (DnD generic fantasy counts as such in my book!), you pretty much have to borrow significant setting elements from somewhere. My own Kalyr game is a case in point. It started out as combination of some elements from Julian May’s Pliocene Exiles sage mixed with other bits from Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and Long Sun books. The overall flavour of the setting has ended up resembling more than one of Jack Vance’s planetary sagas. The theme of a static and rather hidebound society at the point where things are starting to break down is a recurring theme in Vance’s novels.

Game WISH 90 is about System Updates

What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not?

As ever, it depends on the update. I’m very much looking forward to the fourth edition of GURPS; the third edition is now sixteen years old, and the system is in danger of collapsing from the weight of accumulated cruft of additional rules from the literally hundreds of supplements SJG have published over those sixteen years. The new edition should cut through this accretion of rules to give us a new streamlined ruleset that will hopefully last another sixteen years.

On the other hand, I’m sure D&D version three-and-a-half is no more than cynical money making exercise. Was 3.0 really that broken to need a new edition that soon? Not that I’m going to buy it; I don’t play enough d20 in any form to justify purchasing. And I wonder if the upcoming sixth edition of Call of Cthulhu will have enough changes to justify my buying it.

Heroquest is an interesting one. It’s really the second edition of Hero Wars, which in turn was the new game system for Glorantha, the world for RuneQuest. Hero Wars suffered from appalling layout and editing problems, bad enough to all but cripple the game, and has to rank as one of the most disappointing releases I’ve ever bought. Heroquest has kept the same core game engine, but they’re totally rewritten the rules, so that the result now makes enough sense to be able to play the thing. The rule system bears little or no resemblance to Runequest at all, which is likely to be a turn off for many old school RQ players; it’s a much simpler and more freeform game, Dramatist rather than Simulationist.

Conversions, again depend on the system. Traveller has gone though a great many systems, some of them good, some awful (remember T4? Ick!) GURPS Traveller works at least as well as classic Traveller or Traveller: New Era. I haven’t seen the d20 version, so I can’t comment. On the other hand, d20 Cthulhu brings out the garlic and crucifixes. And as for Deadlands, any conversion has to be better than that the awful, awful original system.

Setting reboots: Who remembers Traveller: The New Era with it’s Virus? This is a textbook example of How Not To Do It. A pity in some ways, the post-holocaust Virus background was actually an interesting setting with a lot of possibility for adventure; it’s just that most fans didn’t like the way they had to blow up the Third Imperium to do it. Who can blame GURPS Traveller for setting that game in an alternate universe where the Third Imperium never fell?

Game WISH will be coming to an end after number 100. In keeping with this theme, Game WISH 89 asks:

How do you handle character death, as a player and/or GM? What makes a good death or a bad death? Have you ever had a character die? What happened?

I’m not counting all those DnD ‘Deaths’ followed by resurrections; when death is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, it’s not really death, at least in my book. I only remember a single PC death in any long-term face-to-face games, which happened very early on, and I don’t even remember my dead PC’s name. The gaming group has a general philosophy that once PCs had survived the first few sessions, they never died.

It’s a different story in convention-style one-shots. I’ve played quite a few horror games (a genre more suited to one-shots, in my opinion) with a high PC body count. One PC death that sticks in my mind was the finale of an Unknown Armies game, where two of the last three survivors thought they were being rescued by the third. Another PC had already died in the attempt, eaten alive by horrible grey dust. But instead of saving us, our would-be rescuer proceeded to shoot both of us, in order to save our souls.

PC deaths in online games tend to be the result of players dropping out of the game; I’ve had to GM several of these; sometimes with little warning. The best one was the death of Cylene in my Kalyr game. The city authorities had press-ganged another PC, Reylorna, to perform telepathic scans of everyone trying to leave the city in order to catch an assassin. On identifying a suspect who tried to make a run for it, she attempted to throw a dagger at him, only to roll a critical failure. Just at that moment Cylene appeared as an innocent bystander who got in the way of the mis-thrown weapon. That was the only time I had a retiring player write their own death scene. This had severe repercussions on the plotline of the game; Cylene was a noble from a powerful family of the ruling kandar race, while the hapless Reylorna was (and indeed still is) one of the downtrodden human underclass. She had the be smuggled out of town in a hurry just ahead of the lynch mob. The rest of the PCs caught up with her a few moves later, in an extended quest plot that’s kept the whole party out of town.

More recently we’ve had the death of Jaldaric in the same game; his was a more straightforward death in combat. At least one other PC insisted that he had a proper burial and carried his body back to civilisation. We’re just about to run his funeral scene.