Apathy Games

Wanted: Imagination

Yesterday I wrote about my love for pre-builts, be it adventures, characters, or settings. Anything that I don’t have to generate earns some love from me. When I was writing the article however I couldn’t help but come up with a rebuttal against my own argument. After all when I started gaming it was extremely fashionable to hate on pre-built anything; the era of the OGL did ruin it for a number of people.

Stifles My Creativity

The biggest complaint is the stifling of creativity. Pre-built don’t offer the same freedom that I can have with my own adventure. It doesn’t allow any changes for player’s taste or opinion; it’s all laid out in front of me, immutable as stone. If the wrong adventure is picked, my players or I could burn out before its done burden down by the pacing of the story. I can attest that adventure burn out has happened to me in my gaming career. Designing my own games allow me to make adjustments to the overall story. I mean who wants to stick with just one adventure, when you have a whole world you could make up?

Pushing the Envelope

I’ve never run a horror game; never really been my bag. While I could reach for a one sheet or pre-built adventure to help learn the craft, I’m far more likely to reach for what I know. While I could make my players go crazy with Cthulhu, or send the back to High School with Pinebox. All are fantastic settings to tell a story in. It’s just; I’m more likely to throw a band of orcs at them; my old school D&D colors shining through. With pre-built games I’m actually less likely to try something new; I’m just not sure how to run it. I look for comfortable dungeon dives, and fantasy settings where the bad guys are well defined. Why stray far from the tree?

Makes for Lazy GMs

Let’s be entirely honest with each other, we fall into lazy patterns when running pre-built adventures. We fall back on the adventure being balanced, and that it would provide all the necessary components to be fun. We don’t try as hard and we have a tendency to railroad our players towards the goals. We fail to think outside of the box instead relying on the scripted dialogue to convey any meaning. The way most games are written we can look at our players with apathetic looks on our faces and blink at them until they do what is obvious. No thinking required. What’s the challenge in using pre-built games?

I still fall on the side of using pre-builts, my love for them is strong and while I am lazy I’ve gotten pretty good at tweaking adventures to fit my needs. I know I’ll have fully lost any respect as a GM when they come out with Choose Your Own Adventure for Savage Worlds and I run that game. Feel free to take away my blogging credentials when that happens.

So where do you fall on the debate, pre-builts, or your own worlds all the time?

Hindrances: Best Writing Prompt Ever

I have a fear of deep water. The idea of swimming in the open ocean where I can’t touch the ground freaks me out. Swimming pools give me a bit of the chills when walking by. Free Willy freaked me the hell out, and it wasn’t just the creepy whale. The ironic thing is I used to be a pretty decent swimmer.

So What Happened?

I’ve been afraid of deep water since I was young; my mother tells me it probably started when I was first taking swimming lessons. As some of you may know when your first teaching a child to swim there are two different schools of thought. The first involves basically swimming with the child letting them acclimated, blowing bubbles, and generally mucking about while they got used to the water. The other involves throwing them in and letting them figure it out. Guess which school I attended? In my mother’s defense she only threw me in after much prompting from my swim instructor. I kept going to swimming lessons for years after that, but never liked doing it. After a certain age I asked to stop because I didn’t want to go anywhere near the diving board and it was pretty much all that was left for my instructions. I haven’t really swum much since, and am quite weary of swimming pools ever since.

Oh, I think I know where you’re going with this.

During character creation take careful consideration of hindrances. Each hindrance should have a brief backstory explaining why the character has the hindrance. Was the character born blind? How did they lose their leg? Was it during the war? When did they realize they were an ace pilot? Think of every hindrance and edge as a writing prompt. Each selection should have a story that comes with it that will give character history and insights into your characters behavior.

Great, any other parting words of wisdom?

Yeah voice in my head, when did you show up? I don’t remember taking the insanity hindrance. Anyway, using hindrances as a writing prompt should allow you to quickly sketch out some background information on character generation as well as putting some insightful thought into your character’s history. This will also help you fill out our Character Wheel sheet with even more background information (as if six pages weren’t enough). Which if you haven’t yet you may want to pick up and fill out, your GM will love you for it.

So what is the story behind your hindrance? Why’d you choose it and how does it affect your character?

My Favorite Job: The Holy Man

I love playing Clerics; Paladins; anything with a bent towards the higher calling. For me it’s always added depth to characters. It gives them a more rounded depth that I can’t find in other archetypes. My rogues tend to be motivated by greed; fighters the lust for battle; wizards the collection of more power. Any Godsent archetype can be motivated to do any of these things; the only difference is they do it on behalf of someone else.

The Motivations

While I’m sure it’s different for every player I have a hard time not crafting selfish, greedy, characters. I think it’s come from my years of playing Rogues. If I don’t have a shit eating grin on my face with one hand in the party treasure and the other on the dagger hidden up my sleeve I’m just not playing the right kind of rogue. So I’ve run the opposite end of the spectrum, basing them off of Paladin’s I’ve enjoyed reading about. The key for me is to not play them overly rabid but strong simple people who believe strongly in their faith and act accordingly.

Personal Struggle

The fascination of holy men, for me is around the personal struggle with their faith. Even the strongest members of the faith have their doubts, and all of them are challenged by it. The strongest warrior is always worried about the man who will defeat him in battle; a cleric is worried about how they will fall from their faith. Even if these worries are deep rooted and something that would likely never come out into the open, everyone has a deep worry. Clerics just can have theirs openly challenged and battled, roleplaying out this deep struggle has led to some rewarding character developments.

Depth of Material

Almost any setting that has gods in them has lengths of the book describing them. Take the much touted Iron Kingdoms (a personal favorite) they have an entire chapters describing the faith and the ramifications of believing. Not just crunch either, they weave flavor text and story into the reasons, prompting character prospects and GM hooks. For me there is no other section of an RPG book that could be more interesting and more telling about the world then this section. Cultures rituals can be more telling than any history or any oral stories. Consider the act of Christian communion the small act of eating bread and wine can speak volumes about a person’s beliefs as well as indicate more about the faith the person believes in. Understanding how the gods interact with the people of the world can give you a truer insight into the author’s mind that is writing the setting.

Why is the Cleirc/Holy Man/Paladin/Chosen One your favorite class to play? What is the story of your characters calling?

Creating a Memorable NPC

When we develop worlds what do we remember most? The sprawling landscapes, the epic adventure, or the great bartender in the tavern where the adventure started? NPCs craft the adventure, give it a human aspect and make it memorable. As one of the most important pillars of gaming why is it that some GMs neglect them or fail to do more than create voices in which to give out quests? What’s needed to create a truly memorable NPC?

Play up Traits

The most fun I have when playing an NPC is playing up some of their traits. Most recently my players encountered a fat man, and I mean a morbidly obese probably needed a wheel chair to move around kind of fat. So I chose to play up the fact that the gentleman was overweight. Specifically when he would get nervous he’d eat sweets, his weight just began to imply he was a fairly nervous man. When the players eventually started grilling him for information he began to root around in his pockets to pull out a candy bar and began chewing at it while responding to questions. It made for a fairly quick trait that became easily memorable to the players, especially when he got so nervous he began smearing chocolate all over his face. Laughter definitely helps make a scene memorable.

Use Voices

I use accents and vocal traits for all of my characters, it helps me not only get into character but literally develops the characters voice. While I can do a fairly competent impression (I do a pretty good Ernie/Kermit impression) I only have a small repertoire of voices. My trick around this is to change my vocal speech patterns. While it makes it hard to repeat without notes (or recording myself) it does quickly establish the character and how they speak. So even speaking just a little higher, using a different lilt to your speech helps create a new character. Personally I tend to borrow speech patterns from shows I watch; it’s how I picked up on the northern English accent of Christopher Eccleston.

Devil is in the Details

Keep a notebook on hand to jot down the details of your NPCs. It’s something I have a terrible time remembering to do, but if you keep a running log of names, accents, and traits you’ll be able to quickly pick up where you left off. I’ve found that repetition is really what solidifies the awesomeness of any NPC. Having a one great scene with an NPC isn’t enough; you’ll need to be able to channel that character again and again in order to make them truly memorable.

What are your tips for making a memorable NPC? What do your players remember the most about some of your characters?

Sneeze Worthy Devices

Diseases, magical or otherwise are a bit of an underused device in my gaming circles. Besides the albino vampire were-tiger most of us don’t become infected with anything. To me diseases don’t offer anything terribly interesting to the game, unless it provides some interesting boon to the character or stat bonus why should I be that interested?

Disease as a Plot Device

It’s a common enough theme, pick your disease afflict random towns people adventures fix it. Almost any plot hook can be designed around the simple premise. So how can we spice it up a bit? First let’s change who it’s afflicting. Let’s make it a rich woman’s dog. It’s been having stomach problems the poor thing and she wants you to look into it. Now let’s give it an interesting diagnosing method, like you need to inspect the pet’s fecal matter to figure out which disease it is. Turns out after diagnosis it’s a rare disease that causes the organs of the inflected to fight each other to the death, and whoops turns out your players just got infected. Some simple modifications to the age old plot device have increased the interest in the events and made them more personal.

Disease as a Character Device

Quirks are a staple of most games; pick a weird quirk about your character in order to differentiate from all of the other long sword wielding fighters in the land. So what if you gave the character some functional disease? Make them a carrier of variation of influenza that only causes a mild fever and a head ache. Any person they come in contact with will likely come down with the disease. It rarely kills anyone but the character begins to notice everyone around him keeps getting sick. What measures would they take to start preventing it?

Like many hooks and devices disease is what you make of it. Either be it a character device or a plot device it can hook characters in for many stories. Either way I’ll be trying it out in my next campaign.

What is your favorite disease to use on your players?

Mandelbrot’s Simple Choices

At Apathy Games we’re big fans of complex characters. We love complicated messes of stories, background information, and luck to define our characters, but all of our characters can be defined in simple means to describe the complicated structure. What if we took a simple character and instead of making huge complicated mess for them instead made a messy complicated world?

Simple on the Outside

One character concept I’ve always wanted to explore more was the paladin archtype. I blame my fascination with the character type on Jim Butcher’s wonderful betrayal of Michael Carpenter in his Dresden novels. Michael was a man who loved God and lived simply lived to serve. He was a Knight of the Cross (Butcher’s way of saying Paladin) and functioned as the white laced straight man for Harry. While his motivations on the outside were simple the character always struck me as startlingly deep motivated by his deep seated fate. What if we were to take a simple premise such as this and stick it in a world like the World of Darkness or Ravenloft?

Messy, Complicated, Moral Choices

Of course part of those games are the moral choices that one most make and living with the horrors that come up from them. To me though, the character offers an opportunity to dive deep into the complexities of the world. I know where I stand with every moral decision; I will do everything in my power to right wrongs and try to make the world a “better place.” Of course it’s the GM’s job to screw me over in every turn. It’s the name of the game, and is only right and proper.

Simplicity thrown out the Window

After a while though the simple character eventually grows into a complicated mess, the morally gray world he exists in challenges him to the core. The simplicity of his archtype is thrown at the window as problems begin to arise and compromises are made. Are once simple character has been corrupted by outside forces; they’ve changed him down to his inner being. The Mandelbrot set seems to be exemplified in this character, the characters complicated structure arising from a simple definition; to simply serve his god.

What simple premise have you started out with that turned into a complicated deep character?

Your Mother is a Whore and Other Character Archetypes

Last Friday I issued a challenge to call comers.  The result of which I would write about anything and relate it to gaming.  I’m going to keep the comments open for a week before closing them down.  So get in and send me whatever you got!

In Sins of our Fathers I discussed the implications of our parents on our lives and specifically those on our characters.  When the challenge to write, “Your mother is a whore” came it got me thinking about characters that come from the streets or from impoverished areas and how they might become adventurers.

Common Thug

Tossed out shortly after the day they were born.  Growing up to be a bully he quickly outgrows everyone in the orphanage and shows a taste for terror.  He takes to adventuring to garner riches and become powerful so he can never feel neglected and lost again.  He shows no mercy in combat, is cross, and naturally distrustful.  He trusts no one and prefers his own company.

The Man of the Cloth

A child born of the streets his mother a common street walker, but she brought him up believing.  He took to his faith like no other.  Feeling called upon to spread the word and right the wrongs of the street.  A character with this background would likely cling to those around him, studying deep into religious texts and likely being quite scholarly in his own way.  He would be careful who they trusted but when granting the trust would do so completely.  His word is his bond.  He takes to adventuring to help people and spends his riches bettering those around him.

Hooker with a Heart of Gold

Walking in her mother’s footsteps this sex worker this girl is as innocent as they come.  She also happens to be well trained in the art of kicking butt.  Life on the streets is hard she’s done what she’s had to do to survive.  Now that she’s managed to escape she’s not going back.  This strong lass has taken to adventuring as a means of escape and no way in hell is she going back.

In each of these examples all the characters start in the same place but end up in vastly different areas.  Partly in the way their parents treat them and partly how the world has treated them.  Just because your mother is a whore doesn’t mean you can’t be an interesting character with a story to tell.

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.

Introducing a New Player: Introduce Only the Basics of the Game

There are three parts of the game that must be introduced to a new player: the setting, what the players do, and the rules. The first two have to be discussed with the new player before they make character choices. The rules, though shouldn’t be discussed until afterward. Remember, your goal is to give them what they absolutely need to know, but not overwhelm them. There is a lot to learn.

What the Players Do

This is more fundamental to the game than either the setting or the rules, but sometimes relies on the setting for context. If possible, explain what the players do first, but if you must, it can wait until after you’ve described the setting.

Make sure the new player has an idea of what the player characters are trying to accomplish in this campaign, and how they’re going about it. In some games, this is simple. For example, in Shadowrun, you are a professional criminal doing jobs for giant corporations who want to compete illegally without getting caught. You use stealth, planning, and skill to accomplish goals and try to stay alive.

In a fantasy game, you might discuss how the players have taken it upon themselves to protect a small village from an orc invasion, and are seeking out the leader to kill him before he can attack the village.

The Setting

Keep to the very basics when describing the setting. If it’s based off of something that the newcomer will we familiar with, say so first. For example, D&D is a basic sword and sorcery fantasy setting with elves and dwarves, like Lord of the Rings. Legend of the Five Rings is based on feudal Japan. Mention some movies or shows that are similar, if there are any.

After you’ve established a baseline that the new player is familiar with, mention the important differences. For example, the Iron Kingdoms, by Privateer Press, is based on a classic fantasy setting, but it’s been moved forward to the industrial revolution. Magic has been industrialized, and steam engines power mechanikal creatures called steamjacks that do heavy labor and wage war.

You can then mention any details that are of importance to the current campaign, like a necromancer raising an army, or a dragon running for president of the United States.

Lastly, The Rules

It’s best to give the new player a character first. Then show him the core mechanic of the game by using one of his character’s skills as an example. You’ll probably want to do this a few times so that they’re comfortable with this. Go through the character sheet, explaining what things are, and letting the player ask questions. Don’t go into too much detail, he doesn’t need to know all the possible modifiers. Just make sure he understands his character sheet.

You’ll probably want to go over combat. Explaining initiative, actions, attacks, damage, and the like. Give examples and have the player make rolls. Of course, if the system is simple enough, like with Savage Worlds, you can just wait until combat happens in the game to describe these rules.

Introducing a New Player: Provide Limited Character Options

Previously we’ve discussed Conversing Before the Game Starts and Being Well Prepared. Now as our series rolls on we discuss the next step.

Alright, so you’ve discussed the basics of the setting, and it’s time to create a character for the newcomer. Whatever you do, do not just open the book to the character creation rules and say, “What do you wan to play.” He doesn’t know, and he’ll feel very stupid for not knowing.

Instead, come up with a few simple character ideas, without rules or anything written down, and present them to the newcomer. This gives him some choice, without overwhelming him. When he’s made his choice, go through the character creation rules, a step at a time, but instead of having him go through the book, ask questions about what he wants his character to be good at, and make the rules decisions for him.

For things that the player has to choose, such as hindrances, edges, feats, or special qualities, don’t give him a the full list, but pick a limited selection of easy to use options to choose from. It’s okay to say that you’re doing this. He will probably understand and approve.

Let him change his character later. This may rub some gamemasters the wrong way, but it’s the only fair way to treat a new player. The last thing you want is for the newcomer to not enjoy his character after a few sessions, especially if it’s because you didn’t give him all the options.

Pre-built Characters

This is the simplest way to give a newcomer a character. Some players, if they’re familiar with RPGs, will scoff at this idea, but it can work well if you’re new player is completely new. Instead of going through character creation with the new player, give him the choice of a set of pre-built characters. Don’t include a name or gender, but you might want to give the pre-built character a one or two line description of their background and personality. Many games come with a standard set of pre-builts specificially for this purpose.

Even if you do go this way, give the player the option to change his character, or create a new one, at a later date.

Join us next Tuesday while we continue Apathy University’s series on Introducing a New Player.