ars ludi

[What's a game plugin? Go read the working definition. Basically it's a rules add-on that can work with any game system, so whip it out when you play D&D, Traveller, Ars Magica, Vampire, Fudge, whatever]

The Instant Rivalries game plugin establishes relationships and dramatic tension between player characters in any game system. Rivalries can be friendly competition or they can be bitter enmities — it’s up to the players and the desired tone of the game.

Brainstorming a few rivalries can jump start the character creation process and give characters solid personal connections right off the bat. Subplots write themselves.

A rivalry is defined by who the rivals are (two or more player characters), what type of rivalry it is (love, fame, wealth, etc.), the specific object or topic of the rivalry (Princess Buttercup, white crane kung-fu, the Swedish scientific community), and how important the rivalry is to each character.

Here are six types of rivalries, but you can add more or omit ones that don’t fit your game setting:

Ability - I want to be better at something than you. My kung-fu is better than your kung-fu! Your theories of the natural sciences are juvenile compared to mine!

Fame - I want to be more famous than you.

Love - I want someone to love me more than you. It could be an actual lover or a friend, parent, child or mentor.

Respect - I want people to respect me more than you.

Station - I want a better position than you or the same position you want. It might be a political post, a military promotion, or a noble rank.

Wealth - I want to be richer than you. I might want to find the ancient treasure before you do or make more money on the stock market.

The object is the target, topic or scope of the conflict — the would-be lover that both are courting, a field that both want fame in, the military order that both want a promotion in. Whereas the type is a broad concept, the object tells you exactly who or what the rivals are competing for in the game world.

Those details are the same for both rivals, but each player individually decides how important the rivalry is to their character. Rate the importance on a scale of 1-3, with 1 meaning it’s a minor concern and a 3 meaning it’s intensely important to the character. Don’t like abstract numbers? Use descriptive terms instead — minor, moderate, strong. Players should know what importance their rival is assigning, and as usual they can negotiate to make sure it works for both of them.

The difference between the values tells you a lot about the dynamic of the rivalry. If one character in a Love rivalry has a 1 and the other has a 3, it tells you that one character is thinking about it a lot while the other isn’t concerned. Does that mean one character already thinks they’ve won the person over or do they just care less? Is the high motivation character obsessed or over-protective? It’s up to the players to decide.

One (and only one) of the characters could instead have a 0 value, meaning that rivalry is actually one-sided and this character is not concerned about it at all — what we call an “unrequited rivalry”. You intensely want to prove you’re better than me and I don’t even know you exist or I’m just not willing to compete.

When you write down the rivalry always include how important it is to your rival:

Brother Wu’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 3 vs Brother Po 1 (white crane kung-fu)

Brother Po’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 1 vs Brother Wu 3 (white crane kung-fu)

“It was never about the girl! It was her fortune I was after you fool!”

A rivalry may appear to be about one thing but really be about another. It may seem like I want my kung-fu to be better than your kung-fu (an Ability rivalry) but really I’m doing it to win the affection of our teacher (Love) or to show others that I’m better than you (Respect). The value of the surface rivalry is really the value of the ulterior motive — the character is pursuing or appears to be pursuing the first to get the second.

Any player can choose to add an ulterior motive to their rivalry when it is created. You can make it public knowledge or if your group agrees you can keep ulterior motives secret until they are revealed in play.

Make sure the ulterior motive still involves the rival. It’s fine if I want to win the love of someone who might love you instead, but if I’m trying to win the love of someone completely unrelated to you there isn’t really a rivalry there.

Brother Wu’s character sheet:
Ability rivalry 3 vs Brother Po 1 (white crane kung-fu), ulterior motive Love (old Master Fong)

There are several ways you can decide on rivalries during character creation. The default “pell mell” option is to just let players figure it out — let them pair off as they prefer, and pick whatever type of rivalry they can agree on. You could also pair up player randomly, or have each player secretly choose a type of rivalry first and then look for obvious matches (”You wanted a love rivalry? Me too!”).

Because rivalries are part of character concept, it is important that players like their rivalries. If you want your character to vie for a lover’s affections but that doesn’t interest me, the rivalry is not going to work. Players need to negotiate until there is mutual agreement.

Depending on the game premise you might require all characters to have rivalries. If you have an odd number of players you can let one character have two rivalries of different types with different rivals.

If players are having a hard time agreeing on a rivalry type, encourage them to consider an Ulterior Motive. One player wants a respect rivalry but you want love, so you are only appearing to vie for respect to win someone’s love.

So what effect does my rivalry actually have? Mechanically, none. It’s a guideline for your roleplaying and an overt agreement between you and the other players (GM included) about what kind of plots and tensions exist between your characters. You chose it, so we assume it’s something you want to play.

The basic set up is one rivalry per character with one rival, but you can make things a lot more complicated:

- If you are involved in more than one rivalry, are you willing to sacrifice one to win at the other? What’s more important to me, winning the hand of the woman I love or proving I’m the finest scientific mind in Prussia? Mean GMs (aka good GMs) will inevitably set up situations that pit one rivalry against another.

- Several people could be part of the same rivalry, like three students all wishing to prove they were the true inheritors of their dead master’s kung-fu. If there can only be one winner, that means a lot more potential losers. Do you side with one rival to bring down another?

Rivalries will often change over time, erupting into serious conflict or fading into irrelevance as the game moves on. Players should always be allowed to raise or lower the importance of a rivalry by one between games or at some other reasonable interval to reflect events in the game if they want.

If a rivalry is eliminated for some reason, either by being won, resolved or put of reach by events in the game, you can let the players just drop the rivalry or they can opt to transform it into a new rivalry based on what happened. You were named the queen’s champion instead of me (completed Station rivalry) and now I bitterly want to show that I’m really the better swordsman (new Ability rivalry). The world may laugh at me, but you will know I am your better!

Player character creation is the most important step of your game. It is more important than any NPC you have prepared or any plot you have in mind. Decisions made during PC creation will determine the entire outcome of the game. I really can't stress how important it is. Good character creation stacks the deck heavily towards a good game, and bad character creation does just the opposite.

If you carefully screen PCs during the creation process, you can relax control during play. You can give the players free rein to do whatever they want because you have already set the boundaries and agreed on them.

What's the alternative? You let in characters that can do things you don't want them to do, or who have personalities that you don't like. You vaguely hope the players won't play their characters as written and wreck the game you have in mind (”sure she can speak with dead, but maybe she just won't talk to the murder victim, because that would be a short mystery”). Which is entirely unfair to the players, because when they do play effectively you are going to hold it against them instead of rewarding them. You are being dishonest in approving the characters in the first place. The player may not even realize they are wrecking the game until it is too late.

…

Common wisdom is that NPCs are the domain of the GM and that PCs are the domain of the players. The GM prepares the game, the challenges, the skeleton of a plot, and the players bring the protagonists and cope with all the stuff you came up with, boldly forging their own destiny out of the chaos.

Character creation is the first contribution players bring to the game, while the GM has probably been hard at work for days (or weeks, or months) in advance. Which should tell you something right there: the GM knows more than the players do. The GM knows what kind of a game is in store, at least in vague optimistic terms. Therefore the GM has a better sense about what kind of characters will work, and what kind of characters will take all the fun out of the game. You can reveal some of those criteria, but it's impossible to list everything that _won't_ work without revealing too much about the game (”err, ah, no you can't have protection from vampires. No reason.”).

The players start off owning nothing except their characters. There is no shared experience until play starts. This can lead to players only thinking in terms of what they want to play, not how it will work with the other PCs (which is why group character creation can be such a big help). On the other hand the GM is looking at the big picture, the group as a whole. The GM is biased towards making sure the characters fit the game, but that's good because it serves everyone's purposes.

Are you stepping on player's toes by getting involved in the character creation process? It may seem that way, but the goal is to play a game together not have players make their ideal characters — they can do that at home at their kitchen table. You could give each player everything they wanted during character creation, indulge every possible whim, and they would be happy right up until they started playing and everything was too easy or just a bad fit.

When you reject a character that is going to wreck the game you are doing your job of making sure everyone has a shot at having a good time. You are doing the other players a favor, and more often than not you're doing a favor for the player with the trouble character too. Players have to like their characters to enjoy the game, but in the end they will have more fun with a character that fits.

The first line of defense for good character creation is the player's good taste, the second is the rules, and the last is the GM.

Having players like their own characters is critical to enjoying the game. But if the party is going to click, it is just as important for the players to like each others' characters as well.

So as a GM, we want that good party, because it leads to a good game. How do we accomplish it?

Some parties gel over time. The players develop a dynamic between their characters, learn to appreciate each other's interesting quirks, etc. Parties that start off with problems can self-correct. Characters who rub the wrong way can be replaced, refined, retooled or reconceived. The fire mage is more powerful than everyone else in the party, so he gets nerfed. The psychotic droid just doesn't fit in with the other more nuanced characters, so it gets replaced with a more compatible character. Sometimes it is the players themselves who turn out to be incompatible.

This does not help us. Apply time to any group and they will either bond or break up. The parties that did not gel probably stopped playing already.

Let's assume we don't want to adopt the “wait and see” approach. We are only planning a one-shot or short series of games and don't have time for the party to bond slowly. Or we think life is just too short to have a bunch of bumpy games while the party gets settled. We want success now, an interesting but bonded party right at the start.

Note that the goal is not to have characters who like each other, but players who like each other's characters. Important distinction. Players who like each other's characters can play out internal conflict and have a good time. The thief hates the priest who scolds him about his moral failings, but the player running the thief loves that the player running the priest gives him all this good fodder for role-playing. If you want to create a bond between the characters within the game world, that's a different issue entirely.

So how do we create a party from scratch and make sure they bond? And do it reasonably quickly so you don't completely hold up the game?

Here's the procedure: at each stage in the character creation process, each player has to get approval from all the other players. If someone objects or thinks it's a bad idea, negotiation ensues. Until everyone approves each character, the process doesn't continue. It's a party by consensus, or more pessimistically a party by veto.

Players create characters for themselves that they like all the time. The idea is to extend that process and involve each player in the creation of the other players' characters.

To make this run more smoothly, break up character creation into these steps:

step 1 Concept sans Rules — Each player comes up with the fundamental idea of their character, without any mention of rules or game stats. He's an irascible wizard, she's a barnstorming biplane pilot, etc. Some terms may seem to indicate certain rules (e.g. you'd guess a wizard was a wizard in d20 class system, wouldn't you?) but it's important to agree that you are not making those decisions yet. A wizard character could turn out to have all levels in wizard, or could be a wizard/sorcerer, etc. At this point we don't know.

step 2 Basic Stats — Skeleton of how you'll make that character in the rules. In a class system this will usually be a class and level decision. In a system like M&M you could specify what your major powers were going to be. In a point-based system it might be more general still (I'm taking a high Dex and focusing my points in scholar and fencing). Either way it should just be a sentence or two, a declaration of intention rather than a finished or even started character.

step 3 Complete Stats — A mostly finished character sheet, almost all details filled in.

So at step 1, everyone sits down and says what their concept is going to be, and everyone else either agrees or disagrees with each one. Once everyone has agreed to each other's concepts, people are ready to go to step 2 and figure out what the stats would be for those characters. Then they tell each other how they are going to do it and everyone either approves or disapproves again, and so on.

Between steps 2 and 3 things will start to get more chaotic. Players may shout out every time they decide to change a stat, basically asking for approval from the other players. That's good, that's how it's supposed to work.

As a GM the odd part of this process will be how little you do. You're used to being the center of attention and approving characters at every stage, but now the players are going to do it for each other. You should still keep an eye out for wackiness, but assuming the character concepts from the first step fit your game, you'll find that the players do a remarkably good job of keeping themselves balanced power-wise. After all, none of them want any of the other characters to overshadow them or throw off the game.

Even though creation is a group process, each player is still the definitive owner of their own character, not group ownership. It isn't intended to be creation by committee, because other players are not supposed to be coming up with ideas for you, just approving what you come up with.

So now you should have a party of characters that everyone is happy with. Even if the characters happened to be identical to what the players would have made separately, the mere fact that the other players were involved in the decision making process will make them more accepting of the other characters, not to mention better informed.

Is this process quick? Of course not. It's much slower than each person just creating their own character. But at the beginning I said “reasonably” quickly and that's what I meant. The character creation process will be much longer but it pays off. As soon as you start playing you'll see it will take the players a lot less time to ramp up and start role-playing. Since they already know each other's characters quite well they can leap right in. Character creation becomes the warm-up of actual play.

Other side effects of the process:

- Because the players know what role-playing concepts are critical to each character, they are in a better position to play to those ideas.

- On a tactical level, players can make better combat decisions because they know the abilities of the other characters. It's always embarrassing to think the elf is a decent fighter and can guard your flank, and then discover he doesn't carry any weapons. A downside is that players may be more tempted to coach since they know what the other characters could do.

You’re about to run a game with a new group of characters. You’ve put a lot of work into preparing your game, which is good, but if the party isn’t good, the players aren’t going to enjoy themselves and all your preparation will be worth about the same as none — which is none.

It is essential that players like their characters. The character is the lens through which the player experiences everything in the game.

It is also essential but no so obvious that they have to like the other players’ characters as well.

An ideal party is not so much about balance as it is mutual appreciation. The members of an ideal party appreciate each others strengths and even their flaws.

Party creation is a social activity. You will have much better luck if everyone creates characters together than if you let them make characters separately and just reveal them at the table. But social interaction leads to it’s own issues. Here’s what you are in for:

Or “I want to be a speedster.” Or “I want to be a cocky star pilot.”

Players start coming up with the concepts of their characters.

At its creation a character is not a complex collection of experiences (it hasn’t experienced anything yet), it is a concept. A player gets an idea, an image, which could be a look, an attitude, a style, a detail. “He’s a pirate.” “She’s an escaped slave.” “He laughs in the face of danger.” “She carries a really big trident.” “He looks like this drawing I saw.” This is the first seed of the character. During the character creation process rules will add details, but the starting seed is very basic.

This doesn’t happen as quickly for each player. There is always someone who gets their idea before anyone else (statistically, it’s unavoidable) just as there are always those players who just can’t find something that really grabs them.

In many ways the first responder is making a critical decision for the whole party. That first character idea will inevitably influence all the other players, as they try to come up with something that is complimentary, just as interesting, and which doesn’t undermine. It sets the stage for the party as a whole.

So if you, the GM, think that the first character idea a player throws out a bad idea, or (more often the case) it’s a fine idea but it doesn’t fit with the kind of game you are trying to run, now is the time to say so. Immediately if not sooner.

The worse thing another player can do is create a character that undermines another player’s character concept. Even if it’s unintentional, which we’ll assume it is since a player would have to be a real jerk to do it intentionally, it robs the first player of the whole joy they envisioned in playing that character concept in the first place. Worse still, if they do not just ditch or change the character they will start the game feeling irritated and alienated. Disenfranchised.

There a few angles towards undermining:

I can do that too — You carry a really big trident as a token of your mysterious fish-god? That’s a pretty effective weapon, I’ll take one too. Your concept is that you are a really good tracker and huntsman? Oh yeah, I took some levels with that. I had some points left over.

not me you won’t — Your concept is that you are an obsessed avenger of the night, an impressive and intimidating figure to all who gaze upon your dark cape? My character is immune to intimidation and makes fun of people who take themselves too seriously. And I do it constantly.

The core concept has been established, but now the details need to be worked out, and suddenly so many opportunities for improvement pop up. It’s just so hard to resist them all!

Once the cold hard light of the rules is brought to bear, elegant concepts may begin to slip in favor of statistical advantage. A certain combination of classes sounded quite nice, but closer examination shows that they don’t stack very well after all. Being a martial artist is great, but maybe a bullet proof vest would be a good addition, just in case.

Tweaking for power is not necessarily about being power hungry. At this stage the players really don’t know what they are in for. They will have the urge to hedge their bets and make sure they don’t wind up with characters who are useless or underpowered in the game. It’s just caution in the face of the unknown, insurance to make sure all the time put into the game isn’t wasted by being ineffective. You can’t blame them.

On the other hand, some players really will be trying to sneak in more power than you think they should have. Them you should swat.

Some of this buffing up will also be a reaction to what they see forming on the other character sheets. “Your character is Class D with electronics? I’ve only got Class B in my skills… (scratch scratch scratch).” They are not necessarily insecure they will be too weak for the game, but that the other characters will overshadow them, particularly if the trait they are looking at is something that relates to their core character concept. No point thinking you are a master swordsman only to discover that everyone else in the party has a higher sword skill than you do.

What should you do about it? Establish the norms. Steer the players towards equitable abilities, where no one player gets too far ahead. Enforce some distinctions of quality — give them a clue how good of a swordsman a good swordsman should be, and how much weaker a more average swordsman should be. Let them know it is okay to have a few human weaknesses, or conversely that they should gear up for a merciless slugfest.

Most players are largely done making their characters, but a sad few still have no idea what they want to play. And they’re depressed about it. Probably by now everyone else has given them ten or twenty suggestions about character ideas they should play. If you’re lucky one will stick.

The trick at this point is to get that player settled with a great concept that they love. No more kidding around, it’s serious now. Eleventh hour stuff. If you don’t, they will probably still play but it is going to be hard to get them involved in the game.

You can’t just force an idea on the player. They will probably play anything at this point for the sake of the team, but they won’t enjoy it so it doesn’t solve the problem. You need to work with them. Ignore all those other players who are 90% done and are trying to get your attention to ask about some tiny detail about a skill they want to take. Establish a dialog with this one player. Questions and answers. An interrogation that will lead to a character they can get excited about playing.

Let’s be honest. It’s not that you are such a genius that you can tell what they will like even better than they can. You probably won’t. You are finding a concept that they can go along with, a concept they can believe they might like, a concept they can believe they might get excited about. They _want_ to buy in to a concept, you are just getting them to settle on one under the premise of optimism, not compromise.

It helps to know the player, but that’s such a truism that we could just plaster it was rule 1 of all GM Craft, so let’s move on.

A common problem among experienced players is “been there, done that.” They’ve played every class in the book. They’ve done all the stereotypes and the variations on those stereotypes and the subsets of the variations of the stereotypes. They can’t get excited about playing another hard-boiled detective with a drinking habit who has a secret arcane gift. If this is the problem you might relax perceived rules a little bit. Suggest something that would normally be off limits but which won’t wreck your game. Tired of half-orcs? Let them be a lizard man. Bored with superhero norms? Let them be a paroled supervillain. Just the process of bouncing unusual ideas instead of looking at “the list” of standard concepts might get their juices going.

Finally there is the “trust me” option. Set the player up with a simple character, but with the knowledge that there is something the player does not know about the character. The character may know there is something mysterious about themselves, but they definitely won’t know what it is. The player knows he’s a humble country preacher who’s troubled by strange dreams, but doesn’t know he’s really a werewolf. Or he thinks he just a hard-boiled detective with a drinking habit, only to discover later he has a secret arcane gift.

The extreme case is the blank slate, tabula rasa. The character is an amnesiac or has some other reason for knowing nothing about themselves. Frequently you’ll need to give the player some kind of basic surface stats to work with (which may prove to be wrong later on) and reveal “the big secret” as the game goes on.

The “trust me” is the court of last resort because it is risky. It is critical that players like their characters, and yet here you are giving a player a character which is an unknown. How can that work? Well until the player finds out what the mystery is, they can project whatever they want onto the character, making it oddly easier to like a mysterious character than one where everything has already been spelled out. The break point will be when the mystery is revealed — if it turns out to be something the player doesn’t like, all their interest in the character will go south. The other problem is that you have to come up with a secret that doesn’t derail or distract from the game you want to run. Take your time coming up with it, and don’t be afraid to change it part way through the game (before it is revealed that is) if you realize something else will suit the game and the player better.

Where were we?

The last minute tweak. The final adjustments. The serious concern that you have overlooked a critical rules detail and built a really bad character.

This can go on forever, but realistically the players will split between those who are “done done done” and eager nay impatient to play, and those who are still fidgeting, tweaking, second guessing.

At this stage you should be reviewing characters for final details, but if you’ve been paying attention during previous stages (mainly stage 2) you shouldn’t be surprised by anything. There will always be one or two items that someone tries to slip in at the last minute, again often out of concern they will be underpowered.

A little bit of second guessing, double checking, etc. is not a bad thing, but you really have to gauge the mood of the room here. Like all democracies, you have to protect the minority from the majority but keep everyone happy. Don’t let the impatient people rush the tweakers, but don’t let the tweakers delay the game. You want everyone to be as happy with their characters as possible, but at some point you may be stuck going forward when someone is still unhappy just to keep the rest of the players in the game.

Another facet of the last minute tweak is the player who finished their character a while ago and already got bored with it. Now they’ve come up with a whole new character concept they want to do instead. The impulse is to stop them, but you might be better off mentioning that they should stick with their original character, but letting them work on the new one to keep them busy. So long as the first character is done, this will keep them from harassing the other players to hurry up.

And now, hopefully, you have a party that is ready to game.