Apathy Games

How Valve Spins a Story

Recently the Internet has exploded about the Portal update. It got me thinking about how to keep a crowd interested in the gaming you’re creating. Valve is well known for their minimalistic story and refined style of play making for extremely enjoyable games. So what lessons can we take to our tabletop games?

Refine, Refine, Refine

I bought Orange Box when it came out and played Portal and Team Fortress 2 much like everyone else. While Portal was touted as the end all, be all, single player experience, but I found myself constantly coming back to TF2. Valve has been steadily releasing patches and class updates for the game refining the game since it came out. They’ve tweaked the classes gave them new styles of play and have kept their audience engaged in their game. As GMs we always want to tweak our games here and there. While this temptation should be allowed every once in a while pick your battles carefully. Make little changes at first and then play them out; then see where it takes you.

Go Big, just don’t tell anyone about it

One of the most intriguing things about the new Portal teaser is how quickly the fans begin to speculate. How quickly they craft the story around what they are seeing. The rumors build and build into a cascade of excitement. Use this to your advantage. Come up with an idea and tease at it in the background. Try not to give away more then you have to and let the players piece it together. If they are completely off base, run with it. It might turn into a grander tale then what you were looking to tell anyway.

Keep them Guessing

In recent play testing for our game I had a player that kept asking tons of questions about what was going on each bit more elaborate then the next. I played my cards close to my chest (we’ve seen this done before in previous testing) and let her go wild. The results were quite hysterical (they typically are). Valve does this by not answering questions about the story they are telling; it draws people in. Carefully keep your players on their toes and keep them guessing.

Who do you look to for story style inspiration?

Side Note: The Team Fortress 2 community is hilarious.  As show in this hilarious Spy & Pyro video.

How to Build a One Sheet Adventure

While I was writing Game Mastering on the Fly I started thinking about Savage Worlds One Sheets and what it would take to design one.  Most of them are written like fleshed out hooks with images and fleshed out enemies.

For example in “Feast of Famine” a Deadlands: Reloaded Savage Worlds One Sheet (really guys are you trademarking One Sheet or SW One Sheet?) the hook could have been, “After coming across an empty Saloon the posse hears rumors of ‘tall, black-suited salesman’ spreading lots of merchandise upon further inquiry it seems there is something more nefarious afoot.”  It’s a little vague but leads you with questions to expand upon and tell your story.  But how do we go from hook to fleshed out One Sheet?

Start at the End

As backwards as it may sound starting at the end gives you a clear picture of where you want to end up.  Coming up with ideas about your enemy and the end goal allows you to easily figure out how to get there.  What’s your enemies purpose, their goals?  If your looking to setup a dungeon crawl what kind of traps do you want to unleash on the PCs?  What treasure brings them to this location?  Once you’ve picked your enemy or your dungeon/treasure try to summarize the adventure in a couple of sentences, similar to developing your hook.

How do they get there?

Once the end goal is in mind come up with how they are going to get there.  Be general to the setting.  Taverns are great places to hear about unexplored dungeons full of treasure.  Futuristic/Modern/City settings may lend themselves to a bounty hunt.  Give enough description for other GM’s to know what your trying to get across without being too specific.  Naming a tavern is wonderful touch.  Naming the city, state and current king in power might be getting to be to much.  Try to lend your One Sheet to fit into any campaign where the style fits.

Flesh it all Out

Now it’s time to put the pen to paper and block out enemies name some NPCs and begin the hard work of writing.  The most amount of detail is going to be needed at the end with the stat blocks and final scenes, so start there.  That way if you end up taking an entire page (the back in this case) you know how much space you have to get the PCs where they need to be.  Once your all done writing it up PLAY TEST!

The Red Pen is Mightier

Run through the adventure a couple of times with a couple of different groups.  Keep good notes, where did you have questions?  What could be cut out and left up to other GMs?  Then edit, edit, edit.  Your goal should be to reduce your word count while still leaving things clear.  Once done hand it to another GM to play it without you around.  This step is important as you will not be around to explain to anyone else running so sit on your haunches and wait.  When the GM gets back to you, let them tell the tale once through before letting asking questions.

When they’re done, ask the following:

• Did you have fun running it?
• Did your players enjoy themselves?
• Was it easy to understand?
• Did you have any parts that didn’t make sense?
• Would you want to run it again?

Make sure to thank them for their time, absorb their feedback and make changes as appropriate.  Now, find a new GM and do it again. Continue this process until your ready to claw your eyes out.  Once your done bleeding your ready to publish! HURRAY! We’ll pause for celebration.

Tyson loves creating adventures, but sometimes wishes he could lower his standards.  He does wonder however, how much luck have you had writing a published item?  How much writing, editing and play testing did you do before you released?

Game Mastering on the Fly

I’ve previously discussed organizing your hooks but what if your new to Game Mastering and don’t really know what a hook is and don’t know why you should keep them all organized. A hook is a couple of sentences that give you a jumping off point to begin an adventure. You should keep them easily organized because it allows you to quickly start an adventure and allows you to thread in different events to your game.  Personally I keep a couple hooks handy to drop in as needed.

Picking your Hook

Obviously one of the toughest choices is picking which hook you want to employ on your characters.  Questions you might be asking is how much detail do you put into a hook?  What should a good hook do? A good hook should be vague and get you thinking about moving your PCs forward. Let’s borrow an example hook from Rocks Fall Everyone Dies which I lovingly abuse for such matters.

“One of the PCs has an admirer, a powerful one. An enchantress known across the land as having the ability to bend lesser wills to her whim at only the slightest exertion of her talents. She may have worked for a friend or foe in past, but somehow saw her chosen PC in action. If the PC is flattered and accepts her advances, she quickly proves too commanding to coexist with the PCs peacefully. Either way, after being rebuffed, she flees the city, and promises to ensnare her love’s mind as soon as he leaves the protection of civilization.”

The premise is simple and can be summed up in a couple of sentences. Its open ended, vague and allows you to fit it into any campaign. It also hooks the PCs into the action and continues from there. Imagine the awkward flirting that’s about to ensue between the GM and the lucky PC from this hook. I’m sure that’ll be worth a good story or two.

Fleshing out your Enemy

Now that you’ve either selected your hook or created your own it’s time to flesh out your enemy. Using our previously mentioned hook this would be the enchantress. This is the time to figure out her stat blocks, personality, background and motivations. Once the motivations are done you’ll know how to slot the enemy into the game.

Elaborate and Go

The only thing left to do at this point is establish a background for the game and the hook.  Using our established hook we’d ask ourselves, “Where do the PCs meet the enchantress and how are we going to introduce her now?” Once the background and introduction has been established start rolling some dice!

What’s been your favorite hook to use and what results did it lead to?

How to Keep your Campaign Personal

We can offer you all the tools in the world, but are they worth it if the game isn’t engaging? How do you make sure that your game has a personal touch and speaks to all of your players?

Don’t Plan Ahead

Focus instead on the here and now. What are the important tasks that need to be accomplished in a given session in order to drive the story forward? Now that you have that what would be the most fun way to get there? Come up with a couple of loose ideas and leave it there. Your players will chose what interests them and you’ll come up with the details from there.

Focus on the Players

If you allow them your players will always tell a more interesting story then you ever will. Paul related to me that one of his players, during play testing for our game, came up with far more interesting ideas for how things we done then we ever did. So we changed the game. By focusing on the players and allowing them to participate in the story-living we created a better campaign.

Tell Interesting Stories

While a bit of a duh it is important to make sure that all of your players are engaged. If you are focused on them and letting them the story as well this should be simple. If they need prodding check their character background, likely they’ll have a plethora of stories that can be pulled and extrapolated on. Another approach is having your players write some in-character fiction. Pull some of the characters they came up with and flesh them out as NPCs. This will keep everything nicely tied into the story as well as keeping it personal to the player.

What have you done to keep your campaigns more personal and relevant?

A Tool for Fantastical Names

Personally, I’m terrible at generating names. It’s a bit of a chore and I rarely remember the name after I’m done. While TheForge doesn’t help with remembering them it definitely makes coming up with names easy.

“Many times, users are faced with an overwhelming flood of quantity over quality. TheForge eschews this, allowing you to tailor each creation to your exacting specifications. The difference is remarkable, and as many will attest, wholly satisfying.”

The brilliance of the program is subtle at first. You’re presented with options of types of names you want to generate; fantasy names, fantasy beasts, fantasy spells, and fantasy lands. While presently limited to the fantastical TheForge is keen on adding more. Names appear in front of you, and then you start clicking the names you want to change. When you find something you like, lock it. Keep changing everything else until you find something that works. This is where the program really shines; the words all make sense together. It’s not taking two random words and mashing them together it’s artfully combined words that make sense (in a fantastical sense at least). Soon you’ll be throwing the Quartz Form Titans from King’s Crater at your players while they respond by casting Jullavierre’s Weeping Sink to bring crushing despair to their enemies.

With name generating this quick, and keeping track of them in Evernote I may remember the name of the Captain of the Guard longer than he’s present to the players.

Establishing Tone in Your Games

This is a subject I approach with trepidation. Tone is an important aspect to my games and my game mastering style, and I’ve been told that it’s something I do well. But I’ve never had a set of rules or guidelines that I use to create tone. Instead, it’s a natural inclination that paints everything I do.

But I will try to advise you anyway. Perhaps together, we can generate some habits that will help you see the way I do.

What is Tone?

In visual art, tone is a color. In music it’s a single note. In literature, it’s a particular mood of a piece. The similar theme to these is that tone is unifying and emotional. In the case of an RPG, the literature sense is the closest. The tone of your game is the pervasive emotional sense of the game. It comes through in the themes you choose, in the description you use, in the enemies, adventures, and plots. Imagine you’re looking through your game through colored sunglasses. Every aspect of your game would be painted with a particular tone.

Above All, Feel It

This is my secret, if I have one. I let myself feel whatever feelings I’m trying to convey when I’m designing an adventure or campaign. Then I try to make things match what I’m feeling.

I do this at the table too. When I’m playing an NPC, and especially when I’m describing things, I try to feel the tone I wish to convey.

I’m not going to call this a magic bullet though. There are many things I’ve done and learned over the years to help me hone this skill.

Consume Other Works

Read books. Watch movies. Listen to Music. Most importantly, consume these things at an emotional level. Let yourself feel whatever they’re trying to make you feel. This can be difficult sometimes. I tend to recoil from heavy-handed or obvious attempts to make me feel something, as if I’m being manipulated. Still, try it, and pay attention. If you’re going for a dark and gritty tone and a sense of loneliness, look for the details. A yellowing empty fridge. Clutter on the floor. Creaking wood floors. Large spaces full of things but no people.

Write Short Stories

This is where I learned to convey tone. I went to college for fiction writing. Yeah, I know. That’s cheating. There are many books on this subject that may be of value. Writer’s Digest has some very good ones written by accomplished authors. If you’re interested in more advice on writing books and resources, let me know.

But reading these isn’t good enough. You have to apply that knowledge. Write short stories. Longer works can be fun to write, but short stories (or even poetry, though I personally can’t stand the stuff) force you to be concise. Being able to convey something in a few sentences is a very handy skill at the gaming table. So write these, have people read them, ask for cruel levels of criticism, and edit until you learn what you’re doing. Sadly, this is an art. Doing it well can’t be picked up off a blog (though if you wish to try, check out this list of the top 100 writing blogs).

A Couple Quick Tips

There are a couple of handy tricks that can apply right away that will improve your games.

• Use Smell: Our sense of smell is the most directly linked with emotional states. If you want to convey tone, always consider what the character’s smell.
• Describe like you mean it: This might take some practice, but instead of describing things like an encyclopedia, talk like what you’re saying is important to you. If you want to convey a sense of jubilation, give descriptions like you’re experiencing it, and that everything you see is exciting and awesome! If you’re trying to say something of grave importance, speak like what you’re saying weights heavily on you. This is even more important for pre-written text. Also, don’t forget to look your players in the eye as you speak.
• Don’t break the tone: You don’t have to keep the same tone for a whole campaign, but when you’re in a part of an adventure that has a particular tone, don’t break that tone. Don’t throw in something off the wall. Don’t start cracking jokes. This will only pull your players out of the scene. They may do this on their own, and there isn’t much you can do about that, but don’t encourage them.

That’s about it, really. Most of the work is in your hands. But I hope that you’ve gleaned something useful. If you have any tips, or would like to share your experiences, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Gaming with Wave or Why I Hate Play-By-Posts

After gushing lovingly about the Savage Mushroom Kingdom, Theron “SlasherEpoch” Seckington of These Dice Look Funny, invited me to partake in a game over Google Wave. Not being one to pass up an opportunity to play the game with the designer himself, and looking for other ways to branch into online play, I began excitedly communicating with him about character ideas. After we began play however I’ve grown a bit of disdain towards Wave as a gaming platform. Theron has been great at corralling all of us together and providing an interesting story so far I can’t but feel a bit far removed from my normal role playing experience. Granted, we’ve only just begun and I do need to give it more time to really sink in, but I couldn’t help but thinking about my experience thus far.

Lack of OOC interaction

What I miss the most is the ability to interact with the other players. While I can have side conversations and engage them out-of-character, it lacks the social aspects of why I love gaming. Even though I do have a great common point with all of them (we all love gaming) I find myself at a loss on how to start a side conversation. The addition of any type of voice chat would definitely add to the interaction level, and facilitate the conversations.  However, getting everyone together would be tough. Granted, if I knew all of them in person and had a chance to play with them before I’m sure this wouldn’t be as big of a deal.

Slow Response Times

One of my biggest complaints with play-by-post games in general is the length it takes for people to respond. I’ve gotten so used to having an immediate response I find myself impatient for things to happen. The reasons of course are simple time, distance, and when we’re on make for slow response times. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the beast and unless we coordinated a time for all of us to be on (which I doubt could be done) there isn’t a way around it. So I stare longingly at my GWave notifier waiting for an update.

Organizational Mess

The Dice of Life has a great post on Gaming with Google Wave which gave some great organizational tips for running your game, like having a table of contents.  The platform however, is still a bit of a mess. What I need are rules of social etiquette.

When should I do an inline reply or when should we start a new wave?

Is it ever OK to edit someone else’s wavelet, or comment in the middle of it?

Most of the etiquette would need to be handled on a per group basis but some guidelines would be appreciated. While so far the game so far has been readable I can easily see it getting out of control. While I look forward to continuing the Savage Mushroom Kingdom game I don’t think I could ever switch to Wave for all of my gaming.

Have you played any games on Wave? Any luck with Savage Worlds or did you find other games worked better?

Enhance Your Games with Made-Up Words

As Tyson mentioned a couple days ago, we’ve been on sabbatical from all forms of strenuous work. This has given me time to get some reading done, and I’ve spent the past several days engulfed in Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Consumed may be an appropriate term.

Sometimes authors make up words. Shakespeare personally added 3000 words to the English language, and since we still use many of them, he’ll never be surpassed. But I still get the impression that Stephenson wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject. And it’s gotten me thinkin’.

Some of my favorite settings make up language, and use it to create a unique feel. For example:

“That razorgirl’s spurs were totally wiz, right chummer? Sure, she’s a vatjob, but I’d totally jack that node.” –Shadowrun

“You burks just popped in from the prime, and already you’ve offended a power. You look like some fair cutters, though, so let ol’ Gruff show you around the Cage.” –Planescape

Most of it’s slang, but it’s fun to say. And it’s not that tough to create, either. You just need to make up a list of common slang for you and your players to use, and start using it.

Introduce Slang Slowly

The difficult part of this is that if you simply present a long list of slang, it will never get used, because it’s too overwhelming, and because the players need to consult a list every time a new word is used. Instead, do it a little bit at a time, and start with words that will come up often.

Greetings and salutations are a great place to start, followed by honorifics like sir and madam. These words come up all the time, whenever an NPC starts talking to players. Along the same lines, words like riend come up a lot too, like the example of chummer above.

Lastly, introduce words for things that are integral to the setting. For example, Iron Kingdoms is a steampunk setting, so it has terms like mechstuff, and gearhead. Also, Arcano-Dynamic Accumulator, but you don’t need to go that far.

A last piece of advice. Try to make sure your slang is pronounceable. Words like kn’drken may look cool, but defeat the entire point. Instead, be clear, and perhaps twist real words so you can get some connotation added in there.

Until later, good blogrusing.

Tips for Getting your Game Online

Last Sunday was my first attempt into trying to bring my Savage Worlds game into the 21^st Century by moving it online.  Some of my players will be moving out of the state (and one the country) so we were looking to change our play to adapt to the new distance.  While I am big fan of internet technology and generally try to live more and more in the cloud I found the experience frustrating and bit off putting.

Set it all up your stuff a week in advance

It may seem like a bit of a duh but get all of the programs you’ll need to run your game setup well before you play.  I chose to use MapTools for our game as it was free, open source, and generally didn’t annoy me.  That being said it does have some quirks that are not apparently at first, unfortunately, these “quirks “held up the game for an hour while we tried to work them out.

1) Everyone needs to use the same version. Which was something I wasn’t aware of at first; fortunately some of my players also play in another online game and quickly pointed this out to me.  So save some time and use the same version.

2) Just because the program says it can be accessed from the internet doesn’t mean it’s not lying to you. I was never able to host the game.  While the internal tools told me I should be able to host the game no one was ever able to connect.  In the end I had another one of my player’s host the game.  I never figured out why it didn’t work, but I discovered some great port forwarding tutorials at PortForward.com.

3) Careful with maps done in Photoshop. While a minor quibble at this point it was frustrating to put in a map that had been lovingly crafted only to have it not fit the internal grid.  After getting everything is setup, make sure your maps work properly; it’ll really dampen your mood if it doesn’t.

Register all the accounts before hand

Most of my players either didn’t have Skype.  So we spent a good while getting everyone registered, futzing with mics, and generally getting us all on at the same time.  Save yourself some pain and assign some homework to everyone to get the accounts setup and registered well in advance.  Skype has a great built in tool to make sure the mic is on and that you can hear everything.  Use it.  It’ll save you time pretending to be the Verizon wireless guy.  “Can you hear me now?!”

Have you tried to make the transition to online play? What successes or failures have you had?

Establishing the End Game: Hitting the Abort Button

We’ve all been there; your epic adventure has stalled.  Your players are in love with the game and you could care less.  It’s more than just writer’s block you’re just not feeling it, so what’s a GM to do?

Talk to the Players

Players have an excellent way of revitalizing interest in a campaign.  Ask them what they want out of the adventure and what they are hoping to do.  If your players are anything like mine they’ll have had goals from the get go and would love time to expand upon them and be able to achieve those goals.  This could prove for some good material to move the campaign forward.  With this try to focus more on the characters instead of the overall storyline, it’ll keep the game moving.  Play to your strengths, and keep working on the overall plot you’ll be back on track in no time.

Switch Adventures

During a Planescape game, Paul had three to five adventures running simultaneously.   We would be doing research on one and be tracking a villain from another. While I’m sure it required some juggling on his end as players we could pick the type of adventure we were most interested in.  As he was using prebuilt adventures, he was never at a loss for material. If your current campaign is going nowhere try changing the focus of the campaign for a couple of sessions.  The brief stint away from the main goals may prove to be enough of a refresher that work may begin anew on the main plot.

Give up the Ghost

Sometimes everything you do just proves to be in vain and you need to press the abort button.  Keep in mind a couple of things when ending.

Your players are emotionally invested.  They’ve spent countless hours playing in the game and developing their characters so try to give them some closure.  Try to wrap up as many character plots as you can.

Leave the story open to continue. Just because you’re done running right now doesn’t mean you won’t want to pick up this game in the future.  Try to leave a couple of threads around to pick up later.  Some suggestions may be that the villain they’ve been tracking the entire campaign sets a trap and lays in wait, only for the players to find out that there is another more powerful villain lurking in the shadows.

Give a sense of closure. As you are leaving some threads open you won’t be able to wrap up everything.  However, it is paramount that you give some sense of closure to the current storyline.  Choose a downer or a happily ever after ending but don’t just end it out of hand.

Have you ever had a campaign that you had to abort? How’d you go about it?