4E: Mearls on terrain effects

Mike Mearls beats me to the punch and wrote a quick thing on making the environment a fun part of your encounter.

Though he’s pointing it out for Solos, this is really how I figure -every- encounter ought to be (and pretty much how I ran things for Iron Heroes a couple years back). My additional thoughts?

1. Make sure terrain attacks target different defenses, not just AC

2. Some hazards should be ongoing- like a burning house, etc. These then become tactical elements for various push/slide manuevers.

3. Make sure all terrain attacks/hazards are placed either centrally, or in a place (like near a choke point) which is likely to force both PCs and monsters near it. It might be more “realistic” to have something way off to the side, but if you never get next to it, it never really affects the fight.

4. The Law of Jackie Chan - indoor zones can be filled with all kinds of things- furniture, clutter, tools, barrels, chandeliers, fireplaces, stairs, curtains, etc. And these are good because they give creative players a wealth of terrain attacks waiting to happen.

5. Carts! Players love carts. You can use them as moveable cover, you can ram monsters with them, you can pin things to the wall with them, and you can ride them downhill screaming. I swear. Just put carts and inclines in your game and see.

6. Static vs. Moving vs. Moveable.

Static terrain features don’t move. (”Here is a mast, you can spin it around to smack someone”).

Moving Terrain moves around, either at a specific rate and path, or perhaps a random one. (”In this storm, the crate is going to slide around on the boat randomly, doing damage and Bull Rushing whomever it hits. Look out!”)

Moveable terrain is something the players (or monsters) can move around for different effects. (”Burning Cart! Yay!”) If you use moveable terrain, make sure to have a few places it could be useful. Also, since it’ll take up actions to move it around, it better do something cool or worthwhile to make it better than an At-will Power.

7. Point out terrain features the first few times. Until your players start thinking this way, they’ll probably not use it. After all, most rpgs generally tend to punish improvised environmental attacks (”Throw a chair? That’s like -6 to hit and does 1d6 damage? Why would I do that?” “Dude, that was a different game. Here? Chairs do ranged Push when you hit. And he’s standing by the cellar stairs…”)

And breaking old habits…

So, for about a week or so, I was sliding back into my favorite D&D experience from back in 1997: The DM creates the setting and “sells” it to the players. For some reason, I was feeling super uncreative and blocked with ideas.

Then I remembered another basic indie rule- collaborate! So I emailed the players and said, “Give me 3 things you want in this campaign- airships, undead dragons, sentient swords, whatever floats your boat.” Boom, ideas come.

That old game? It was neat because the DM had a whole setting in a binder, and there was freedom to run around and engage with any part of the setting because he had all the places and major NPCs laid out. These days, we’d call it a “sandbox game”. I enjoyed the similar feel in the FF12 game for the ability to wander into places you probably weren’t up to taking, etc.

But that’s a lot of work. And if it doesn’t fly? Wasted effort. So I’m going to start with the player’s suggestions, put together about 3 possible adventure zones w/locations, toss in some random encounter options as well (which will be linked to larger scale/longer term stuff I can link in) and go from there.

Flexibility is key!

Setting is an angle

Why is it some games can give you 1-4 pages and sell you on the concept and give you enough to roll with, and other games have 200 pages of made up history that does nothing for you?

The trick to setting is that it has to be meaningful. The meaningful bits are what you load context with, that makes any given scene or event powerful instead of mundane. These are the hooks with which players build stories and meaning for play.

So like those last couple of posts where I redid Bahamut and Tiamat? I basically loaded them with values. Values are an easy way to load any setting with meaning. Groups, politics, philosophies, even the way you write the setting and the history explains an attitude about how to approach life, and players identify with them or want to twist them a bit, or express something about those values. This is a trick that White Wolf games use to the utmost with their splats and clans- the groups exist to sort players ideologically and set them against each other (or at least, provide tension in the face of larger problems).

What about places or objects? Again, it’s about detailing their history with something meaningful the players can play off of. A field of bones means little. The field of bones where most of your people were killed? The field of bones where dragons come to die? The field of bones of angels? There’s all kinds of ways to slant it and tie it specifically into your setting history and make it meaningful for players.

The other thing is to take the generic, and give it something specific. If we’re talking D&D and we have wizards? Come up with a specific order of wizards. What are the costs and prices for joining the order? What is the price if you leave the order? It’s one thing if being a wizard just means, “knowing how to do magic”, it’s another thing if being a wizard means using a magical pot full of the bones of children, or if it means having rescued a ghost, or if it means giving up half your lifespan. Maybe it means you’re automatically ocnsidered the enemy of giants and they’ll seek you out if they ever hear of you.

This context now loads the choices the players make in character creation. It provides both a cost and a challenge and gives more direction when people make those choices in play. It also loads the context when the players encounter a wizard (or whatever) in play.

The questions I ask (not necessarily in this order, but generally):

1) What is the local area/culture that the game is set around (city? nation? star system?)
2) What are the most relevant conflicts going on right now?
a) Who are the major powers in that (large factions-wise)?
b) What are their motivations?
3) What history plays a part in that?
4) Are there any kinds of slants or twists I want to take on game’s classes/clans/etc.?
a) Tie those into the above(or come up with them first maybe!)
b) Decide if this has any mechanical stuff I need to change
5) Tie the above into places and/or objects
6) Add description and color!

Sharpening up your Con game

No, not that kind of con game.

I hit up Endgame’s mini-con today, and it struck me that while the mini-con idea works well, how wide the difference in skills of GMs in dealing with convention play were.  In some cases, folks made it a brilliant gaming experience, in others, it fell flat.

Convention games exist as the opposite of the traditional rpg experience in so many ways, it’s a wonder how well the con experience happens at all.   You have 2-4 hours to get a game going, teach new rules, or at least get a feel for a new group and have a satisfying chunk of play.

1.  Prepare well

Most people think this means knowing the rules and having lots of notes for the adventure you’re going to run.  What’s more important is preparing to get the players into playing as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Prepare by printing up cheatsheets that explain the basic rules and give one to each player.  Have an example conflict or something you can do really quickly and demonstrate to the players how the game works.

You’re not prepping to have all the rules memorized, you’re prepping to explain the basics quick enough that people are comfortable with it, and can make some informed decisions about it.   You don’t want more than 10 minutes of rules explaining, and, if you can, break it up by explaining a part just as the players are getting into it.

2.  Characters, done, or mostly done. 

If you can do pre-gen characters, do it.  If you want a little more modification, do something like 80-90% done characters, and the players can customize with a few points/powers, etc.  This prevents the players bogging down into building characters instead of playing, and, also from exploiting weird system aspects you might not be ready to handle.  Also tie the characters into the situation- you don’t want to sit there trying to push people into play.

Unlike a normal campaign where you will be playing with a character for 3 months or more, players have to be willing to come to con games and accept they’re going to lose a little individual customization for the sake of play.

3.  Cutting out bits

You might want to avoid using complicated parts of the game you’re running, especially if it involves weird subsystems, or things that would be slow for a new player to learn.  This would be stuff like deckrunning in Shadowrun, magic in many game systems, etc.  If you’re pre-genning the characters, you won’t have this problem.  Again, players have to accept they’re getting an abbreviated experience for most games.

4.  Scene framing is your bestest friend/go for blood

Since this is going to be a one-shot, don’t slow the pace- push it.  Go for the throat.  The only thing you don’t want to happen is to remove the players from play until the end, which in most games depends on character death.  Other than that, get to the interesting stuff NOW.   Players aren’t going to be as attached to their characters, and probably will be more excited and more interested in taking risks, as long as you’re willing to go there with them as well.

As the GM, you’re effectively the leader-by-example in this- people will be shy, and reticient- they’re trying to feel out what kind of game you’re going to run.  If you don’t hold back, they won’t either, and you’ll get that great con experience you’re looking for.

Setting - Canon & Evocative

Over here at Story Games Christian is beginning a discussion of Canonical settings vs. Evocative Settings and Shreyas asked me what I think is good design for both. Since this ties right into what I’ve been intending to write about setting, I thought I’d just add it here.

Following the definitions from the thread- canonical settings have specifics, details about the game world while evocative setting leaves it to the group to make most of those up. (yes I think it’s a spectrum, but we’ll talk about both ends for the sake of contrast and approach). As I said before, a good setting gets everyone on the same creative page, a bad setting does the opposite.

Canonical Setting

A good canonical setting is loaded with juicy themes the players can buy into. You don’t need hundreds, you just need something like three- or perhaps stuff that can be interpreted multiple ways. For example, oWoD Mage is about self-development & enlightenment, about playing with dangerous power, or freeing the world from binding thought. Or maybe you interpret it differently, but basically the point is there’s enough there that many people can find a reason to care and want to get involved in the going-on’s of the game setting.

A good canonical setting has what I call “Context Touchpoints”. Bits of information the group can latch onto and it becomes shorthand to make for neat stuff together. “I’m a survivor of the Battle at Reflex Point”- and suddenly everyone at the table stops and looks, shocked… because it means something to them. The problem a lot of settings have is that they load up on mindless info - 20,000 years of history, the exact details of the astronomy of the fantasy world, or population numbers of cities, but not the stuff that builds stories.

Remember, history as numbers is boring- history as people, as causes, as cultures, that’s interesting. Same thing applies to setting. Details only matter as much as they make people care. While there may be a tiny subset of players out there who play roleplaying games for “realism” and care that your book has mapped the land taking into account how silt deposits on river banks- most everyone else doesn’t care- we’re playing these games to have elves, magic, spaceships and worlds where the good can triumph, or at least the invidual be empowered.

Second, a good canonical setting avoids bloat- having too much information. How much is too much? Well, some groups will tell you that they’ve all memorized most of Tolkien’s writings. Some groups read half of the classes/splats in Character generation and that’s what they got. But for the most part, I’d argue that the right amount of information is enough that a casual reader, someone who is going to put no more than 2 hours into reading your game/book, will be able to grasp the major points of the game and the setting. Maybe you can get away with more if you have outside canon like books, comics or movies which the person has already consumed and absorbed. But the main thing is not having so much that the casual folks in your group and the hardcore folks in your group start to pull away from each other in understanding the game and working together.

Third, a canonical setting needs to be clear if it has any sacred cows that the group is expected not to touch. This is moreso if the game is built on a licensed setting- “No, you can’t take over Helm’s Deep as your personal fiefdom”, etc. In general, though, I find it is best if the sacred cows are few and far between. The point of the setting is to provide something to play with, not a wall of things you can’t touch.

Ultimately, you can consider good canon info to be like different colored paints and a good game to give advice or system choices to help the group figure out how to handle those colors, which ones to focus on, which ones to drop, etc. A million colors, or bits of information mean nothing if you don’t know what to do with it.

Evocative Setting

Good evocative settings require something different than canonical settings- instead of trying to navigate and build on what is there, you need players to build from scratch a lot of things and for it to matter specifically to them. Again, you have juicy themes, but instead of the players pulling it from specific bits of context (”I was there… at Omaha Beach.”), they’re having to take those themes and build something concrete around it. It could easily be argued that an evocative setting rides on how well the group can build it- supported by good advice and/or mechanics. This is tricky- when it works right, the players get the cool stuff they want and laser precision focus on it. When it doesn’t work- no one gels into caring about the game at all.

A good evocative setting paints exciting things, that the group wants to explore and play with, just as much as the details of a canonical setting does. The evocative setting requires more economy, because you are working with less words, they have to be more efficient at getting the ideas across. Colorful bits and good artwork helps. (I’ve also noticed that good evocative settings tend to work well when the characters are well defined- there was a discussion a couple years back about how much you have to nail down to actually play- Setting, character, situation, I think it was like 2 of 3 or something?)

An easy trick that works for a lot of evocative settings is to pull from outside genre knowledge. You mention “Cowboys” and it paints pictures without you having to explain everything. Inspectres and Dust Devils are two games that work this way. This trick backfires when people aren’t familar with the genre or the source material- if you’re talking about Conan, people could be thinking of anything from R.E. Howard to Governor Arnold.

Now here’s something interesting I’ve noticed in terms of system support for evocative settings- they usually allow a lot of direct player input- Polaris, Inspectres, Stranger Things, 1001 Nights, etc. - they all provide tools for the players to build immediately on the themes and fill out the details. While you can do the same with a lot of games, the trick with these systems is that they often make it a core part of play- there’s not a lot of meandering to find meaningful stuff- players take the clay and shape it into what they want and keep reshaping it as part of play. The group has to be able to make their own context touchpoints.

The easier and more intuitive this is for players, the more consistently rewarding play. The more challenging or complicated the system is for building what you want out of the evocative setting, the harder it is for players to create and latch on to specific, interesting details and build the fiction they want. Whereas the worst canonical setting leaves you with thousands of pages of useless information and no tools to sort it or find a focus, the worst evocative setting leaves you with nothing to latch on to, and no support to build it.

Though I’ve been speaking about this from the standpoint of a designer, it also follows from the place of your everyday gamer or GM- whether you’re navigating a pre-existing setting or making one of your own, you have to figure out how to make it work with your group and pull them together, not apart. What are context touchpoints that your group buys into- what matters to them and gets them excited for play? How can you focus on those and drop the arguments about whether it makes sense for Magic City of Ozymadius to export healing potions? How can you take the map with a half note scribbled on it and have the group build a lost civilization of wonder?

Setting sells because it’s exciting and sexy, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to build.