Sometime in the last few days, I had mused on Twitter that I had forgotten how much work planning a campaign was and that I’d gone “all player.” The title of the article was something that @thefreerpgblog commented to me at the time and it just seemed so apropos that I’m stealing it.

Recently, we decided to dedicate some of our ARPS development time on Tuesday nights to a second game so we could have a consistent gaming experience (to my weekend gamers: I love you guys, but you frustrate me). I volunteered to GM the game. I had a good experience recently with a “snow day” one-shot and with all my recent writing inspiration, I felt I was ready to jump back into the fray. (Some background: I’ve been gaming for 27 years or so and I spent most of that time as DM, GM, Storyteller, or whatever it was called in whatever game we were playing at the time. In the last few years, my campaign pacing and inspiration was starting to come apart at the seams so I decided to take a sabbatical from GMing.)

This time out we decided we wanted to do some more character-centric gaming rather than focus on the world-spanning, epic plots that have been the staples of our other games. These types of games not only require the players to put more effort into their character backgrounds, but also for the GM to do the same, as well. I had forgotten how much work that truly is.

Like many of you, I spent most of my gaming career GMing on the fly having learned that excessive planning fails the second the players and the plan meet. This time out, however, for gamecraft reasons on the design and writing side, I have been reading a number of books and blogs on the art of GMing and the art of adventure planning (Robins Laws, the Kobold Guides to Game Design, Chatty DM’s excellent exposition on Robin’s Laws, Open Game Table #1, etc.). This means I wanted to it “right.”

At this point, I am spending my time on the dramatis personae for the campaign and the small town that will serve as the (initial) base of operation for the PCs. Once I have all the character backgrounds, I will work with the players to weave them into the backdrop for the campaign. Then I can spend the time working on the meta-plot for the series (campaign) and break down the plot into episodes (sessions) and focus on the specific encounters and pacing for each adventure and the overall campaign.

For any of you who have never run a game, let me tell you: this is a lot of work. Learn to appreciate your GM. For any GMs out there: I’m not sure how we fit this into our (adult) lives, but we need to not only care, but have the “GMing bug” or we would never succeed. To this, I salute you all.

Sidebar: For whatever this is worth, blogging is a new thing to me. Bear with me as I figure out how to put together coherent, thematic posts. I hope this one gets me closer; if anything, this process could turn into a series of its own. Let me know what you think either way.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently regarding good writing and game development practices and I’m starting to apply this to our development efforts. At the moment, ARPS (for anyone coming late to the party, ARPS = A Role-Playing System and I’ve been working on it [read: fiddling with it since I'm never satisfied] for nigh unto 16 years or so) stands at about 300 pages of system; a number of ongoing discussion and summary documents handling bugfixes, enhancements, and ideas; and, some unknown number of written notes, most of which are long-since obsolete, but contain a lot of setting material I haven’t worked on in recent years.

Since I’ve been treating the game as more of a hobby than a real effort toward a finished product, I haven’t really put in the effort to use reasonable good practices. For the most part, I’ve been treating it as a software development project, attempting to version the “code,” keep everything in version control (Subversion, in this case), and put in appropriate feature freezes and bugfix releases of the main rules. This has worked to a point, but writing anything, especially an RPG, isn’t a software project. Still, you default to what you know.

As I said above, I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently. One of the best practices I’m planning on putting into place is finding not only a place where I can write undisturbed (with an appropriately motivating soundtrack), but also establishing writing goals in the form of (self-imposed) deadlines and/or writing goals (not necessarily word counts, but something that fulfills that requirement). A thing that’s been plaguing recent play-testing has been the lack of an updated Rulebook. Primarily, this hasn’t been done for two simple reasons: the amount of changes are rather large and the effort to roll it all in seems daunting, at best (not to mention that we’re still working on the revisions a good part of it).

Additionally, I’m looking at how I want to present the material at this stage, as well. I already know that the main Rulebook is large and will likely need to be broken up a bit (the massive tomes that are Pathfinder or HERO notwithstanding). I will also need to decide what material makes the Core Rulebook and which things will be relegated to supplements like the ARPS Grimoire or the ARPS Bestiary. My recent reading also tells me that I’m going to need to spend some time editing and cutting out a lot of cruft from the system. I’m OK with that. It’s long since overdue. Cruft-removal also means I’m going to need to spend some time with the development team to try to distill the current batch of (rule) crunch into something more accessible. Things are, right now, pretty writing- and rules-heavy and we need to trim it a bit for final presentation and streamlining.

As I’ve been dusting off old materials (for the play-test game I’m going to run Tuesday nights), I’m also starting to look at what it will take to complete my Mythgar game setting. This is a setting I’ve spent a lot of time working on and researching which means there’s a great deal of background information and detail. As a RPG setting, though, this obviously needs to be more directed and the essence of the world needs to be presented. The background information (such as linguistic relationships, cultural migrations, and ecological treatises) needs to become part of the greater tapestry and drive consistency. It cannot be the primary presentation.

Because the world is so detailed, my goal here is to split the setting down into modules (not necessarily of the adventure type, that’s not really my bag) for each kingdom or political unit, allowing each setting module to focus on one area of the world. This allows me to treat the region in enough detail to make it compelling and allow a GM or player the ability to focus on only the areas they find desirable. With the final batch of regional modules I will likely include some background modules to tie things together and do things like handle economy, equipment, the map, and other supporting things to make a game go.

Good writing practices, primarily writing goals, will make this all happen (I hope). A first step to setting goals is figuring out what the final products will be (or at least, a working list). All necessary when you’re acting as editor, producer, art director, game developer, and writer. Not a good way out of it when you’re self-publishing. Of course, I could simply take a few irons out of the fire and do something less ambitious, but what fun would that be? Reality will drop that critical hit on me eventually if it’s unsustainable.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Hear me out. Let’s look at a common situation and compare what a normal person would do and then compare what a PC would do.

Situation 1: You are in a dark alley. You have no weapons, no body armor, and you’re faced with an intimidating mugger with a gun. A normal person? He’d get mugged because he might get shot. A PC? He’d wait for an opportune moment and jump the guy, hoping that if he got shot it wouldn’t cause enough damage to kill him. OK, I can see that. A PC wants to face down danger even at the potential cost of his own life. Sure. A bullet won’t actually hurt, right?

Situation 2: You’re walking through the woods at night and are set upon by a group of brain-hungry zombies. A normal person would freeze or run screaming from the walking dead and will likely have his brains eaten, perhaps after a hair-raising chase. A PC? The PC would ignore that they’re the walking dead (Rotting, putrescent flesh? Walking corpses animated by Magic Most Foul? Bah!), back up for a better tactical advantage, lay into the nearest zombie with a punch and a roundhouse kick, and look for a large branch to use for a club. Run away? Never.

Situation 3: You’re walking along through a meadow, minding your own business when you’re overflown by a dragon the size of a Mack truck, its shadow obscuring the sun momentarily. A normal person would freeze in his tracks in utter terror and, when the dragon passed by completely in your direction of travel, would turn around and go home. It’s what the instincts buried at the back of our primate brains tell us to do. A PC would hunker down, trying not to be seen by the foul wyrm, and then, using its passing to track it back to its lair, he would ignore the mortal peril and aura of terror and to try to kill it and steal its treasure.

I’m not a student of psychology, but this sounds pretty sociopathic to me. This being said, a PC, at least mentally isn’t a normal person. This is why I don’t prescribe to this concept on a physical or skill/knowledge level either. A PC is an exception to the rule, not a representative of it. True heroes, true villains, and true major players are honestly, not common and the natural talents, abilities, and training to make them isn’t common either.

For me, at least, this is why I describe a starting character in ARPS as “about a 5th level character in D&D” (editions previous to 3rd, please). It’s also why I expect a PC to have higher-than-normal attributes, and why starting skill levels are better than what the Average Joe would likely have. Now, you can always (and easily) scale things downward, but if exceptional behavior is the expectation, I think the characters, at least, should start somewhat exceptional.

Related Post: RPG Blog II – The Lost Art of Running Away