ars ludi

Our heroes have just come back to town after exploring the wastelands, and the GM asks Fred what his character, Skark the scavenger, is doing.

“He’s looking around to see if he can buy some more shotgun shells, then he’ll check in at the weather tower to see if they picked up any new radio signals. Oh, and he’ll get some salve for that 6 hits of burn damage he took.”

Great. Now we know what his character is doing. Informative, yes, but it doesn’t exactly draw you into the magical world of the imagination. Are you intrigued? I’m not intrigued.

The GM tries again and says, that’s great. Now tell us what it’s like to be your character, right now. What’s your character thinking, or feeling, or just what is it like to walk around behind his eyes? Fred thinks for a moment then starts talking, and everyone else sits back and listens.

“Skark is tired and dusty from his long days in the wastelands. He’s limping a little from the burns on his leg, and he’s still mad at Pog for crashing the rover. Coming back to town always feels like coming home, but Skark is too tough to ever let anyone see that. As he trudges between the shanties and he sees people planting seeds and kids playing, he doesn’t smile, but inside it makes him feel like he’s doing something that makes a real difference. Even his burns hurt a little less.”

That’s a good character monologue. Yep, now I’m digging Skark, because I get him. Now I want to see what happens to this guy. I’m interested.

A character monologue is not a monologue by the character, it’s a monologue about the character. It’s not a narrative of action, or a description of events. It’s just a window into what it’s like to be that person, in this moment, right here, right now.

It doesn’t have to be poetry or high art, just an honest and subjective experience of that character. It’s a little slice of spotlight time for a player to show us their character’s inner workings and help us understand them better.

Because there is no pressure to react to a specific situation or respond to things someone else said, the player is free to shine light on whatever corner of the character’s brain they want. Maybe there were facets of the character that the player wanted to bring up but the situation never presented itself. Now they can. You might be surprised when a player starts monologuing about how their savage barbarian hero is starting to feel his years and is sorry he never settled down and had kids.

It’s a tool for all seasons:

> Not getting a player’s character? Calling for a character monologue will help you be interested.

> Players not in the zone, not playing in the moment? Calling for character monologues forces the player to get in their own character’s head and think about what it’s like to just be that guy, right now. It brings them down from the birds-eye view and puts them back in their own boots, in the moment.

> Player characters not gelling? No love at the table? Calling for character monologues can get the players interested in each others’ characters, and give them the insider information they need to play off each others’ character. Because if you want a good game it’s just as important that the players like each others’ characters as it is that they like their own characters.

And players, don’t be shy: if you want a character monologue, just say so.

edit: Changed first example from first to third person to avoid confusion. Both examples could just as easily be in first person.

By popular demand, I’ve uploaded the other group photos I have from the Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp. Where you there? Find yourself in the crowd and be amazed how you looked 25 years ago.

I’m missing photos of one of the weeks in 82, 83, and 84. If someone out there has those, let me know so we can make the set complete.

The rest of the photo gallery has a few more gems, like the letter announcing the cancellation of the camp and the test they sent campers to gauge their knowledge of AD&D.

UPDATE Added pictures for the other sessions in 82 and 83, courtesy of fellow councilor Todd Goldman. So now the only missing photo is the other week of 84. Thanks Todd!

I just found out that Major Wesely is coming to GenCon, but he doesn’t have any sessions scheduled this year. But I have it on good authority that if people are interested, he’s willing to get together for ad hoc sessions.

Do you want a chance to play Braunstein, the grandfather of all roleplaying games? Do you want to grill him about what it was like gaming with Dave Arneson, before Blackmoor and before D&D? Do you want to hear about antiaircraft artillery in WWII or soldier’s wives in the Revolutionary War?

Speak up and let him know. He’s probably reading this thread right now, so this is your chance.

Human beings crave cause and effect. When something goes wrong, we try to understand what happened so the same thing doesn’t happen again. It’s a good survival tactic.

Taken too far, it means we look for explanations for even the most random events. We don’t want to live in a universe where bad things happen for no reason, so we look for someone to be the reason.

We look for someone to blame.

The Blame Game plugin promotes tension and hostility between characters. You can use it for deadly serious “frag the lieutenant” military scenarios or something much more light and comical. Either way the structure promotes roleplaying because it forces you to forge opinions — bad opinions — about the other characters.

This system was originally developed for project hicks aka Nuke ‘Em From Orbit, now retired. We tried this mechanic and it was super-fun, if by super-fun you mean it got the characters at each others’ throats in minutes flat.

A team runs on trust. What happens if you don’t trust your teammates? You don’t rely on them. You aren’t sure they’ll do their job, and if that could result in something that could screw you (and it always does) you’ll spend time worrying at what they are doing instead of doing _your_ job. That makes a breakdown in trust contagious: you don’t trust Sawyer, so you are glancing at his fire zone when you should be watching yours. Griff notices that you aren’t watching your zone when you should, so he stops trusting you and starts worrying about your zone too. Soon the whole thing goes to hell in a hand basket.

To rely on someone you have to trust both loyalty (”Cole would never leave me behind”) and competence (”Cole knows what he is doing, he can take care of the bugs on his end”). It doesn’t do any good to know a guy is a deadly fighting machine if he would leave you hanging out to dry to save his own skin, and your best friend since childhood will only keep you company while you’re getting eaten if he can’t figure out how to switch off the safety on his assault rifle.

When bad things happen to the team, each character is burdened with a certain amount of “blame” they must lay on someone to explain to themselves why things went wrong. The bugs got the drop on us, and I think Marcus should have been paying more attention to his zone so I lay my blame on him.

Blame can be rational and based on facts (Marcus wrecked the transport, so naturally you think he’s incompetent) or it can be totally irrational (you weren’t there when the bugs ate Luther, but Marcus wouldn’t shut up this morning about what a bad idea this mission was, so you think he jinxed it and got Luther killed). It’s totally up to the player.

Blame Is Personal — A person may be trusted differently by different people. You think Cole is a slacker, so you don’t trust him, but Sawyer thinks he’s fine. Even two people witnessing the same events may come to entirely differently conclusions of whether someone should be blamed.

Blame Is Belief — An imaginary problem does as much damage to trust as a real problem. If I think you aren’t watching your corner, it doesn’t matter how on the ball you really are, I stop trusting you. If I think you are hiding a cowardly streak or you’re about to lose it, it doesn’t matter if you would really lay down your life for me, I stop trusting you.

When something goes wrong, each member of the team acquires an equal amount of blame they need to put on someone else. The worse things go, the more blame everyone gets:

everything goes according to plan — 0 blame
something goes wrong or someone gets hurt — 1 blame
someone gets killed — 2 blame
massive failure, catastrophic defeat, lots of deaths — 3 blame or more

You can scale these values up or down based on how quickly you want things to fall apart.

Write down all the other characters’ names side by side on your sheet. When you blame someone you establish a new (worse) opinion of them — you distrust them more. For every point of blame, come up with a one or two word description of the person you are blaming, like “loser”, “slacker”, or “incompetent.” Write that description beneath the person’s name on your character sheet, putting each new description below the previous ones.

Each new description has to be worse than the previous one.

You might start off with:

KELSO
thinks too much

After a few more bad encounters and laying more blame it might read:

KELSO
thinks too much
hesitates
unreliable
coward

If some missions go well and you start to trust Kelso a little more, you may erase “coward” and just think Kelso is unreliable.

Key point: you have to blame another player character on the team. You can’t pick an NPC or “the Brass.” Maybe you blame them too, but we’re not interested in that right now.

After an action sequence results in blame, play through these steps:

1) Each player gives a brief out-of-character summary of who they want to lay their blame on and why. They may base it on things that were already established to have happened during the action, or they can put forward details that they think fit. It may also be that a character just thinks something happened in a certain way. At this point no one should revise their plans based on what anyone else says. Don’t worry too much at this point about what actually did happen — that’ll get sorted out next.

2) Roleplay the interactions. Usually this involves insults, yelling, and recriminations. The flow of conversation and counter-accusations may lead players to change who they blame. There is no rule that your character has to openly say who you are blaming or why, but even sullen resentment should be played out somehow. More is better.

3) Final decision. Players may choose to revise who they want to blame based on the roleplaying scene, then everyone writes down their final blame. No negotiation or discussion at this point — just decide, write it down and then tell everyone what you wrote.

After an ambush goes bad and a trooper gets killed, everybody gets saddled with a point of Blame. Spruce’s player declares he’s blaming Wallace for not being alert, and Taylor’s player jumps on the bandwagon to blame Wallace too. Wallace’s player decides to blame Taylor for messing up the demolitions used in the fight, even though there was nothing rolled that indicated the demolitions were a problem — maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. Truth is subjective.

Taylor: “Wallace man, you screwed up!”

Spruce: “Yeah, Wallace if you’d been watching your zone Sammy wouldn’t have gotten killed. Sammy! I’ll miss you buddy!”

Wallace: “I was watching my zone! It was Taylor who set off the mines too soon and screwed the ambush! They were all over us!”

Taylor: “Me? That detonator pack was fried! Spruce was supposed to check it this morning!”

Spruce: “That’s bullshit man! It was good when I checked it! You’re so full of crap!”

After roleplaying is over, Taylor changes his mind and blames Spruce (fucking slacker). Spruce also changes his mind and blames Taylor (the lying bastard). Wallace could still blame Taylor as he planned, but the roleplaying might sway him to blame Spruce instead.

Is any of this true? Did Spruce mess up prepping the demo packs? If it is not a detail that came out during the action we may not know.

What we do know is that if a player lays blame, they are saying their character believes that person is to blame for what happened, right or wrong.

Other players may say your character did things that you don’t think your character would ever do. My character would never fall asleep on guard duty!

If that’s what you think, say so! Have your character call bullshit on them. Another player saying something happened doesn’t make it so. On the other hand when players make accusations that do fit your character, well maybe it really did happen that way. You can still deny everything (at least to start with), but maybe your protests ring a little hollow.

With all this talk about who you trust and who you rely on, it may seem strange that there are no rules for showing that you trust someone more than usual, like that blood brother you’ve served twelve tours with and who you’d lay down your life for in a heartbeat.

If you want to show you really, really trust someone and nothing can make you doubt them, just don’t lay any Blame on them. Go ahead. Even if they obviously screw up, just blame someone else.

The full rules included things like blaming yourself, suppressing blame and potentially cracking up over it, changing your mind and shifting blame to other people, heroic catharsis, Sarge keeping a lid on things, and so on, but this is this is all you need to use it in a game.

You’re probably also wondering, what mechanical effect does all this have? Do I get negatives if I team up with someone I distrust? What’s the deal?

And the answer is: zero mechanical effect. None. Which makes it a great plugin.

It works because the secret ingredient is human nature. If I sit across the table and discuss how my character thinks your character is a coward and liar, I am pretty likely to roleplay that way even if nothing in the rules makes me do it. Likewise if I call your character a clueless screw-up, you are likely to have your character take it personally. You are going to react to the insult.

I’m a big believer in non-binding game mechanics, meaning rules that trust the players have good intentions and will play well (or at least interestingly), rather than distrusting the players and mechanically forcing them to obey. Maybe I’m so sick of your guy that I leave him behind for the bugs to munch on when the chips are down. Or maybe I say screw it and throw myself into the fire to save him because I just can’t leave a brother-in-arms behind. It’s up to the players to play their characters.

Try it out. It’s a very short hop to total team breakdown.

Nearly thirty years ago, there was a summer camp for D&D. Yes that’s right, a summer camp where instead of basket weaving and archery, you played Dungeons & Dragons. I went all five years it ran, three years as a camper and two as a councilor. And yes, it was awesome.

There is about zero information about the Shippensburg D&D camp on the internet, so I agreed to do an interview for posterity’s sake. You can read my write-up for yourself, but be warned, it is an epic tale of 80’s gaming nostalgia:

My Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp Interview

One other camp attendee has already replied to the post. Could there be more? There were about three hundred gamers who went to the camp. They have to be out there somewhere…

Remember that game five months ago, when you met that guy who got you that forged visa? Y’know, during that adventure when your ship was smuggling medical supplies past the blockade? Shifty little guy? Wore a monocle?

He wasn’t an important character, and he wasn’t the interesting part of the game, so maybe you remember and maybe you don’t. You’re more likely to remember if you were playing the character that talked to him, and you’re much more likely to remember if you were the player who said “hey, instead of blasting our way through, let’s find someone who can sell us a forged visa!”

Games only live in your memory, and memory has a nice way of tidying things up and conserving space. You remember the good (and the really, really bad). You remember the exciting parts but the boring parts fade away (except for the really, really boring parts, which may also become legendary). You remember the clever things someone said, the dramatic moments, and probably the broad arc of what happened.

Maybe everyone remembers the overall gist of the game, and then on top of that each individual also remembers the parts that were really interesting to them. I remember escaping the yeti in that Tibetan temple, because my adventurer guy was super-cool in that sequence, but a year later nobody else remembers that part because it just wasn’t that interesting (”Yeti? Uh, I think I remember something about yeti…”).

All of that is fine and natural — which is good because it’s also inevitable.

Sure we try to fight it. We write lavish game summaries to try to capture the moment in amber (And make other players jealous. And to impress teh internets.) but that becomes a thing all its own, a particular person’s perspective on the events. Even the most factual “actual play” isn’t actual play, it’s one point of view of what happened at the table, selectively edited. A creative interpretation. A biased report. It’s already one step removed from the game.

But when you’re playing and you don’t remember that guy with the visa from five months ago, well heck, it’s not the end of the world. Because so long as someone at the table does remember what happened they can remind everyone else (and let’s face it, if _no one_ remembered it wouldn’t come up in the first place — if everyone forgets it deserves to be forgotten). It can be the GM, another player, whatever. After a short refresher for the collective memory, everyone is ready to go. The necessary ingredients from the past have been encapsulated and reinjected into the present. The players can decide what to do and the game moves on.

Games are enriched by their history, but if they forget the past that’s okay, because they’re concretely in the here and now. What is your character like now? What is the situation now? What do you do now?

Not unlike the real world.

Why am I dwelling on something that is a) pretty obvious and b) pretty much inevitable anyway? Because microscope is making me.

In microscope, everything that has ever happened in the game is accessible, now. You can jump to any point in the history and start playing.

It’s all on top. It’s all fair game. There is no comfortable “oh well that happened a while back and it isn’t pertinent right now, so I don’t have to think about it.” The past is never closed.

While this is super cool (and super fun), it radically changes how you have to store game info. Instead of a nice serial stack, where the old stuff is way at the bottom somewhere and you only have to think about what just happened, a microscope game is a big flat random access platter. It’s a DVD, not a cassette tape. You can jump to anywhere.

Once you do decide where in the history you’re looking, you focus there and it does become “now” for all intents and purposes of play and excitement. When you are playing out the scene where the civilian cargo ship suicide-rams the alien dreadnought during the last attack on Earth, you are playing in the moment, live or die. But then a minute later, when the scene is done, you step back ten thousand feet, look down on all creation, and decide where to look next. Zooming in and out and then in again. Like, um, a microscope.

Building a structure for that kind of game — even thinking about it at the table — is a whole different ball game. The normal rules don’t apply, so I’m trying to figure out new ones.

(for the curious, I’m generally talking about microscope development over in the Lame Mage blog, but when it has interesting implications or broader game theory I’m putting it over here)