ars ludi

Did you read part 1 and part 2 already? No? Go do that.

Running frequent on-demand games is a lot of work, but because the campaign was set in a fixed region there were ways I could maximize the reusability of some material I prepared.

Maps were a good example — I could pour tons of detail into wilderness maps because I knew characters would be returning to those areas frequently. Even after some players had mostly explored a region they still had to trek through it get to farther away areas. Plus since there were lots of players there was always someone going to an area for the first time. Lots of return on investment. Compare that to a normal game where the players might stroll through a region once and never look back.

Interior maps of dungeons, ruins, etc. were also a very good investment, because even if a party came through and wiped out all the creatures the floor plan did not change. Come back a season later and who knows what will have taken up residence. Wipe out the entrenched kobolds and next spring the molds and fungi that were a minor hazard before have spread into whole colonies of mushroom warriors. Drive the pirates out of the Sunken Fort and its lonely halls become the hunting ground for the fishy devils from the sea — or maybe the whole place is just empty. These “evolving dungeons” were a key feature of the West Marches.

Another massively useful tool was the venerable yet mockable wandering monster table. No, seriously. Think about it: by creating a unique wandering monster table for each wilderness area (one for the Frog Marshes, one for the Notch Fells, etc.) I could carefully sculpt the precise flavor for each region. It made me think very carefully about what each area was like, what critters lived there and what kind of terrain hazards made sense (anything from bogs to rock-slides to exposure to marsh fever). They were effectively the definition for each territory.

Most tables also had one or more results that told you to roll on the table for an adjacent region instead. If you’re in Minol Valley you might run afoul of a goblin hunting party that came over the pass from Cradle Wood. The odds were weighted based on how likely creatures were to wander between the regions.

For all encounters there was also a chance of getting two results instead of one: roll twice and come up with a situation combining the two. It might be a bear trapped in quicksand, or a bear that comes across you while you’re trapped in quicksand. Combining two wandering monsters results is surefire way to come up with an interesting encounter.

Just having these detailed wandering monster tables at my fingertips meant I was always ready when players decided to do a little “light exploring.” These tables got used over and over and over again.

Players never saw these wandering monster tables, but they got to know the land very, very well. They knew that camping on the Battle Moors was begging for trouble (particularly near the full moon), they knew that it was wise to live and let live in the Golden Hills, and they knew to keep an ear out for goblin horns in Cradle Wood. Becoming wise in the ways of the West Marches was part of their job as players and a badge of merit when they succeeded.

next up: West Marches, part 4

Players sharing information was a critical part of the West Marches design. Because there was a large pool of players, the average person was in about a third of the games — or to look it the other way, each player missed two-thirds of the games. Add in that each player was in a random combination of sessions (not even playing with a consistent subset of players) and pretty quickly each player is seeing a unique fraction of the game. No one is having the same game experience, which sounds philosophically interesting but is bad news if you want everyone to feel like they are in the same game. Sharing info was essential to keeping everyone on the same page and in the same game.

There were two main ways information got shared: game summaries and the shared map.

Players were strongly encouraged to chat about their adventures between games. Email (specifically a list devoted to the game) made between-game communication very easy, something that would have been next to impossible years earlier. This discussion theoretically mirrored chatter between characters who had made it safely back to the town. Did you stumble into the barrow mounds in Wil Wood and barely escape with your life? Warn other adventurers so they can steer clear. Did you slay wolves on the moors until the snow was red with blood? Brag about it so everyone else knows how tough you are.

What started off as humble anecdotes evolved into elaborate game summaries, detailed stories written by the players recounting each adventure (or misadventure). Instead of just sharing information and documenting discoveries (“we found ancient standing stones north of the Golden Hills”), game summaries turned into tributes to really great (and some really tragic) game sessions, and eventually became a creative outlet in their own right. Players enjoyed writing them and players enjoyed reading them, which kept players thinking about the game even when they weren’t playing.

The other major way information was shared was the table map. When the game first started the PCs heard a rumor that years ago when other adventurers had tried their luck exploring the West Marches, they had sat in the taproom of the Axe & Thistle to compare notes. While trying to describe an area of the wilds, a few thirsty patrons had scratched out a simple map on the top of the table (an X here, a line here). Over time others started adding bits, cleaning it up, and before long it had grown from some scratches to a detailed map carved into most of the surface of the table showing forests, creeks, caves, ominous warnings, etc. Where was that table now? Gone, but no one was sure where — maybe carried off as a souvenir, smashed in a brawl and used for kindling, or perhaps just thrown out after it was too scratched to rest a drink flatly.

On hearing this story the PCs immediately decided to revive the tradition (just as I hoped they would) and started to carve their own crude map on a large table in the taproom of the Axe & Thistle. As the campaign went on all the PCs would gather around it, quaff an ale, and plan adventures. In the real world it was a single sheet of graph paper with the town and the neighboring areas drawn in pretty well, and then about four or five more pieces of graph paper taped on haphazardly whenever someone wandered off the edge or explored just a little bit farther. Because the map was in a public place and any PC could get to it, I brought it to every game session for the PCs to add to or edit and kept a reasonably up-to-date scanned copy on the web for reference between games. In the end maybe half a dozen different players had put their hand to it.

Was the table map accurate? Not really, but having a common reference point, a shared sense of what they thought the region looked like kept everyone feeling like they were playing in the same world.

…

An intentional side effect of both game summaries and the shared map was that they whetted people’s appetite to play. When people heard about other players finding the Abbots’ study in a hidden room of the ruined monastery, or saw on the map that someone else had explored beyond Centaur Grove, it made them want to get out there and play too. Soon they were scheduling their own game sessions. Like other aspects of West Marches it was a careful allowance of competitiveness and even jealously to encourage more gaming.

It was also important to me as a GM that players share knowledge because otherwise I knew that no one would put the pieces together. Remember how I said there was no plot? There wasn’t. But there was history and interconnected details. Tidbits found in one place could shed light elsewhere. Instead of just being interesting detail, these clues lead to concrete discoveries if you paid attention. If you deciphered the runes in the depths of the dwarven mines, you could learn that the exiles established another hidden fortress in the valleys to the north. Now go look for it. Or maybe you’ll learn how to get past the Black Door or figure out what a “treasure beyond bearing” actually is. Put together the small clues hidden all across the map and you can uncover the big scores, the secret bonus levels.

Next up: West Marches (part 3) Recycling

West Marches was a game I ran for a little over two years. It was designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game:

1) There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.

2) There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.

3) There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.

My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.

A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.

Letting the players decide where to go was also intended to nip DM procrastination (aka my procrastination) in the bud. Normally a DM just puts off running a game until he’s 100% ready (which is sometimes never), but with this arrangement if some players wanted to raid the Sunken Fort this weekend I had to hurry up and finish it. It was gaming on-demand, so the players created deadlines for me.

The game was set in a frontier region on the edge of civilization (the eponymous West Marches). There’s a convenient fortified town that marked the farthest outpost of civilization and law, but beyond that is sketchy wilderness. All the PCs are would-be adventurers based in this town. Adventuring is not a common or safe profession, so the player characters are the only ones interested in risking their lives in the wilderness in hopes of making a fortune (NPCs adventurers are few and far between). Between sorties into the wilds PCs rest up, trade info and plan their next foray in the cheery taproom of the Axe & Thistle.

The whole territory is (by necessity) very detailed. The landscape is broken up into a variety of regions (Frog Marshes, Cradle Wood, Pike Hollow, etc.) each with its own particular tone, ecology and hazards. There are dungeons, ruins, and caves all over the place, some big and many small. Some are known landmarks (everbody knows where the Sunken Fort is), some are rumored but their exact location is unknown (the Hall of Kings is said to be somewhere in Cradle Wood) and others are completely unknown and only discovered by exploring (search the spider-infested woods and you find the Spider Mound nest).

PCs get to explore anywhere they want, the only rule being that going back east is off-limits — there are no adventures in the civilized lands, just peaceful retirement.

The environment is dangerous. Very dangerous. That’s intentional, because as the great MUD Nexus teaches us, danger unites. PCs have to work together or they are going to get creamed. They also have to think and pick their battles — since they can go anywhere, there is nothing stopping them from strolling into areas that will wipe them out. If they just strap on their swords and charge everything they see they are going to be rolling up new characters. Players learn to observe their environment and adapt — when they find owlbear tracks in the woods they give the area a wide berth (at least until they gain a few levels). When they stumble into the lair of a terrifying hydra they retreat and round up a huge posse to hunt it down.

The PCs are weak but central: they are small fish in a dangerous world that they have to explore with caution, but because they are the only adventurers they never play second fiddle. Overshadowed by looming peaks and foreboding forests yes. Overshadowed by other characters, no.

The West Marches charter is that games only happen when the players decide to do something — the players initiate all adventures and it’s their job to schedule games and organize an adventuring party once they decide where to go.

Players send emails to the list saying when they want to play and what they want to do. A normal scheduling email would be something like “I’d like to play Tuesday. I want to go back and look for that ruined monastery we heard out about past the Golden Hills. I know Mike wants to play, but we could use one or two more. Who’s interested?” Interested players chime in and negotiation ensues. Players may suggest alternate dates, different places to explore (“I’ve been to the monastery and it’s too dangerous. Let’s track down the witch in Pike Hollow instead!”), whatever — it’s a chaotic process, and the details sort themselves out accordingly. In theory this mirrors what’s going on in the tavern in the game world: adventurers are talking about their plans, finding comrades to join them, sharing info, etc.

The only hard scheduling rules are:

1) The GM has to be available that day (obviously) so this system only works if the GM is pretty flexible.

2) The players have to tell the GM where they plan on going well in advance, so he (meaning me) has at least a chance to prepare anything that’s missing. As the campaign goes on this becomes less and less of a problem, because so many areas are so fleshed out the PCs can go just about anywhere on the map and hit adventure. The GM can also veto a plan that sounds completely boring and not worth a game session.

All other decisions are up to the players — they fight it out among themselves, sometimes literally.

Continued:
West Marches (part 2), Sharing Info
West Marches (part 3), Recycling
West Marches (part 4), Death & Danger
West Marches: Running Your Own

With the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy tripod of deceit, characters may or may not have secret allegiances, and more importantly the players anticipate that the other player characters have secret allegiances. The groundwork for mistrust and treachery is nicely laid out.

The details behind these choices are fleshed out in the character backgrounds the players create — the surface Lawman is a Texas Ranger, but she is really an Outlaw because she used to run with a gang, and so on. But each secret is effectively a separate plot, and in a one shot game having each person's secrets come out is going to be tricky. Plus when treachery is the name of the game, the players are more motivated to hide their secrets than dramatically reveal them. To get those secrets surfaced, or even make them a factor in play, there has to be some weak point that threatens to expose them.

Players sent me their backgrounds before the game. Most were pretty straight forward: “he accidentally killed a lawman, so now he's on the run”, or “a gang killed his lawman brother, so now he's pretending to be an outlaw to find them and bring them down.”

All good stuff, and fine by themselves, but to up the treachery ante, I took each one and cross-linked it by just assuming that a character in each background was actually the same person referred to in another background. So the lawman player A accidentally killed just happens to be the lawman brother of player B, and the gang that player B thought killed his brother is the same gang that the female Lawman (mentioned above) used to ride with. All the backgrounds interrelate.

In some cases it meant that what the player thought happened was incorrect. One player thought his brother was killed by an outlaw gang, but the secret truth was that he was killed by a drunken doctor while pursuing that gang. Another player thought he killed a US Marshal, only to find out later that the Marshal was an impostor.

The players had no idea I was doing this, and it didn't start to come out until part way through play. Had they known, they might have metagamed and looked for possible connections, so the “tangled threads” trick might have been far less interesting.

The last ingredient to make sure things got spicy were things that were guaranteed to expose some secrets. A player who is carrying around the badge of the lawman he accidentally killed will have some explaining to do after his saddlebags are searched, and how is the Texas Ranger going to explain it when the outlaw gang rides up and gives her a big hug?

If only one person knows a secret, and they have no reason to ever give it away, you don't have material for an interesting game. If there are clues that point towards the truth or just don't fit the story they've been using, they have to start coming up with explanations. And if someone else knows their secret, they are under pressure to get that person to not spill the beans.

This is particularly important for the characters whose only goal is to hide their past. A character that wants something (“avenge my brother”) will get right into the action, but unfortunately the best tactic for the “hide my past” character is to shut up and lay low, none of which makes a good game. Weak points that might give away their secret are critical to getting them involved.

…

So our Western game now has two layers of action inducing treachery: we have the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy deception to make players distrust each from the start, and we have the deeper tangled threads so that when the players do start to find out each other's secrets even more conflict emerges.

Now we just slap on a fairly simple surface plot to get the characters involved, like the outlaw gang gearing up for a train robbery, and let the pot boil…

Our story thus far: recreating the Paranoia setting of treachery and secret allegiances in a classic Western.

Players were told to be either a Lawman, an Outlaw, or a Cowboy. These are exactly what they sound like: a Lawman enforces the law, an Outlaw is wanted by the law, and a Cowboy neither enforces the law nor is wanted by the law (aka a normal person).

This first choice was their secret “real” identity. Players then had to choose again, this time to decide what they were trying to appear to be. So a character could really be an Outlaw, but try to blend in and behave like a Cowboy, or really be a Cowboy who wanted to look tough by claiming to be a wanted Outlaw. A Lawman could go undercover and call himself an Outlaw, or an Outlaw who gunned down a sheriff could take his badge and pretend to be a Lawman, and so on.

Of course there was also the possibility that a character was exactly what he or she appeared to be: the Cowboy who really is a Cowboy, the Lawman who really is a Lawman, etc.

After choosing their secret and surface categories, the players fleshed out their characters in the normal fashion, filling in the details behind the big stereotypes. A small town doctor who mistakenly killed a U.S. Marshal and went on the lam (secret Outlaw) and who now drifts from town to town, laying low and trying to lose his sins in the bottom of a bottle (surface Cowboy). An orphaned tom boy raised in a gang of desperadoes (secret Outlaw) who grows up and tries to leave her bandit life behind by changing her name and joining the Texas Rangers (surface Lawman).

The key to the first choice is that it does not reflect the character's attitude, it reflects a real fact: how the law sees that person. A corrupt sheriff is still a Lawman until he gets caught and becomes an Outlaw. A prospector who gets framed for murder is still an Outlaw even though he didn't do it.

For an ad hoc system, the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy scheme worked remarkably well. It gave the players a starting structure to make basic decisions, and also set up the expectations that the other characters could certainly not be what they seemed, while recognizing that well, maybe they were.

The same good/bad/innocent structure could be applied to other genres as a starting point for intrigue or just keeping secrets. In an espionage game, characters could be Spies (working for the Agency), Double-Agents (working for the other side) or Bystanders (normal people caught up in the spy game). Is the so-called innocent man really an unlucky bystander, or is he working for the other side?

Want a religious persecution game? Zealot/Heretic/Flock or the witchhunt variant Hunter/Witch/Flock.

Body snatchers? Hunter/Pod Person/Bystander.

If you want distrust and suspicion among the players, it really writes itself. Even if they are all completely honest, they are primed to expect deceit because they know that's two out of three choices. We were shooting for Paranoia, right?

Next: Part 3 — Tangled Threads

Over-preparation (“one continent down, three to go, then I'll get started on that dungeon”) and trying to impress the players with your cleverness (“your characters have to all be some kind of furniture… no, I didn't say animated furniture, just furniture”) are the enemies of GM'ing, but like most GMs I am sometimes guilty of both.

To nip that in the bud, I decided to try something different for my Run Club slot: we would set a date to play, and then a week or two before hand the players would vote on a game system and a genre. I would then make a game and run whatever they chose. I reserved the right to veto game systems I didn't know or that would be too hard to crunch in time, but other than that, I was at their mercy.

The vote: a Western using the classic Paranoia game (West End Games, 1984). The Paranoia rules looked a little cumbersome to pick back up quickly, so we compromised and agreed to use the Star Frontiers rules instead. The joy of Paranoia is really more of a genre or style anyway, so it was agreed: a Western in the Paranoia style using the Star Frontiers rules.

This was Tuesday night. The game was set for Sunday afternoon. I had less than 5 days to prepare a game and adapt the Star Frontiers skills to cover riding, roping and rustling. Crap.

As one of my players put it, Paranoia is about “secrets, finger pointing, fast talking and easy death, hence the 'paranoia' of someone finding out what you're really up to.” So how was I going to keep the classic Paranoia feel with cowboys and indians?

I decided right off the bat that I wanted a classic Western, nothing whacky. It would have been easy to introduce strange conspiracies, cults, etc. to match the strange conspiracies, cults, etc. of Paranoia, but that seemed like the easy way out. The alternative was to let the players have secret allegiances (“I work for the railroad!”) like the Paranoia secret societies, but without solid examples to choose from I would be forcing each player to come up with unusual ideas in a vacuum, which usually leads back to whacky.

To keep everyone on the same page and make it easy for them to leap in and make characters, I needed finite choices that were still open-ended enough to permit interesting concepts without polluting the Western genre with weirdness.

Next: Part 2 — Tripod of Deceit

GMs run games and players play. Some people do both, but more often than not everyone stays on their side of the screen. There are a myriad of subtle social forces that encourage things to stay this way (comfortable players, GMs threatened by others usurping their position, etc.) but we're not going to worry about that right now. Instead we're going to encourage you to buck the odds and mix things up.

Both players and GMs stand to learn a lot from trading places. A lot. A whole lot. Players may come to appreciate just how hard it is to GM (whether it's preparation or just keeping things on an even keel for a whole game session), and GMs may be in for a rude wake-up call when they see their own worst behaviors in other people.

Also, starting out as a GM is hard. Far too many would-be GMs ponder some game they want to run for months or even years, but never actually bite the bullet and run the thing. Just pondering is safer, there's no risk of failure, and it's less work too. They'll concoct plausible reasons for the delay, baulking at even running a single game because they haven't prepared enough. “Well I certainly can't run a game until I finish charting the lineage of every royal family on this subcontinent. And of course I'll have to revise the entire magic system…” Procrastination is even easier if there is already another game running to fill the void, so there's no demand forcing them to actually run something.

So how do you mix things up? Start a Run Club.

…

Here's how Run Club works:

1) Every month (or two weeks, or whatever works) someone takes a turn and runs a game. One-shot, short game. No campaign. No big picture. Just a single game.

2) Everybody who plays will GM. Everybody. This is the core principle of Run Club. You cannot play if you will not GM. That's the pact.

3) When everyone has run a game, the round is finished and you can start over again.

That's it. Simple on the surface, but in that simplicity a number of complex issues are addressed.

Since the requirement is to run a single stand-alone game, planner/procrastinators are called to the carpet and made to deliver (the “good GMs run games” principle). You don't need a continent to run a single game, you need a town or single dungeon at most. Part of that procrastination is certainly fear, so now you get to confront that fear.

Another source of fear for would-be GMs is that they will offer to run a game and no one will want to play. Maybe no one likes the game concept, or worse still no one trusts that you will GM well and run a good game. Players know they are investing their time don't want to waste it. Even though it isn't a written rule, participants in Run Club have a sense that they have already signed up for the process, so there is much more willingness to play in each Run Club game even if you expect it is going to bomb. It's almost expected that many of the games will tank horribly (and they will), but everyone knows it's a learning process so the usual resistance to playing in a potentially bad game (or one in a genre you normally would not like) is diminished.

Reigning GMs are afraid new GMs will supplant them. You're the center of attention, with a crowd of loyal players, and then someone else offers to run a game and everyone is excited to play in it. Were people really bored with your game? Were you doing something wrong? Sometimes they are, and sometimes you were, or sometimes people just want a change of pace no matter how good your game is. Run Club lets other people try sitting behind the screen without threatening the status quo. The reigning GM can let others run games without feeling threatened, and players who might normally be too timid to depose their own GM get a chance.

So be brave. Get your group to start a Run Club of your own. Some games will be surprising, some games will be complete disasters, but all of them will be educational.