It’s been a while since I GMed a game (reasons mentioned before, but really, it was burnout), but I finally got back into the GM’s chair this past Tuesday night. I managed to build a reasonably campaign-length plot, worked up maps of the local village and various local players, worked through character backgrounds and profiles, and was pretty much set and ready to go. Possibly with the most preparation I’ve done in a long while (and I plan more as this progresses).

Now, we GM’s are our own worst critics, that’s for sure. The game started off with what I refer to as “the contrived set up” (though a mite more involved than “you meet in a bar and there’s a dwarf bartender”) but that went reasonably well with some basic role-playing as the players felt out their characters. There was a slightly tense moment when the party members almost shot each other, but they got past that without injury. Most of the adventure was tracking down these boar-beastmen who kidnapped someone important. Worked in a minor skirmish (hard to follow beastmen that have good senses of smell) that the party got through without any risk of injury. For the record, no matter how big you are, no matter how much you frenzy and ignore wounds, a couple of arrows in the head will do you in. We left the party figuring out what to do now that they found the main encampment and they’re outnumbered like twelve-to-one.

I say GM’s are our own worst critics since I’m not really sure how things went. Everything felt a touch slow and bit contrived to me and I really wasn’t able to gauge the group’s overall interest very well. I’m trying to attribute things to it being the first session and we lost the first hour to finishing up characters and other minutia.

On top of this, we rolled in a piece of the magic changes we’ve been working on. The time and cost pieces worked reasonably well, though we really haven’t given them a good test in a dire situation yet. The piece of it that turned out problematic was that the setting is intended to be a touch more “low magic” (the uneducated woodsman of the party nearly freaked when he was exposed to serious magic the first time), but the system doesn’t really allow itself to be tweaked that way very well. That being said, with some of the other changes that go with the ones we rolled out, I do think the final system will make magic somewhere between low magic and the super-high fantasy magic that games like D&D present.

Bah. Maybe I’m just being too hard on myself? We’ll see.

Been suffering through a magical imbalance in the game through recent play-tests. Thanks to a few blog posts (some of which I’ve alluded to before and the others, unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark), I’ve had some realizations about what gritty cinema means for ARPS magic.

Without getting into system details that no one’s going to follow (since it’s a closed play-test at this point), essentially the mechanics we’ve been using for some time are essentially flawed. We’ve come up with some new ways to take the power gaming out of the costs of casting and working magic and generally reduced the overall ubiquity of powerful magic in the game. Some of the changes (along with some proposed mechanics changes elsewhere) have really opened up the possibilities for magic in the game.

For the curious, we made magic slower and more in-line with the speed of bow attacks rather than melee attacks, we increased the cost of magic and made the cost variable introducing an element of risk to working magic, and we’re taking advantage of a new complex check system to handle prepared magic, complex and elaborate workings, and learning new dweomers. Among a few other things, of course.

In a quick test of the new idea we replayed a combat from our previous game session. In the session, a single vampire profane mage was able to hold off the entire party. Now, he was a match for any one party member, but not for all of us together. This is an important thing for “game balance” since the vampire’s skills were equivalent to the party’s. This means that at an equivalent level, he’s a challenge, but would need to be considerably more powerful to take on multiple opponents of equal power.

This is a huge step. We’re going to attempt to roll this into our Tuesday game (smaller group, single mage, and 75% are on the development team) and see how it works before we roll it out to our larger party where magic is considerably more prevalent among the players.

In recent play-tests, we’ve realized that in certain cases, magic remains too powerful in ARPS. For some quick background, the rest of the system has been relatively stable for a few years now other than some adjustments to recovery and combat to better accommodate grappling (every game designer’s friend). Magic, however, has been a moving target especially where “game balance” is concerned. The core of the magic system is good; but, we find ourselves needing to continually adjust the levers, switches, and knobs hoping to get the balance right.

Some of our recent changes have definitely helped. Having characters with a more narrow magical focus has brought pieces of magic under control. Restricting how magic can be modified by the characters has also helped to curtail some of the abuse. A problem (and I’ve alluded to this before) is that, simply, we have old-style dweomers vying for control against new-style dweomers that are better written and better balanced.

Interestingly, we don’t always see the problem. In our year-plus play-test (known as the Dwarf Party) we didn’t have problems even though we had one of the characters achieve arch-mage level ability. In our most recent game (known as The Apocalypse Is Nigh), we have four out of five characters with magic, two of which with elf blood which gives those particular characters an especially high level of power (balanced by their relative frailty; as the player of one of these elves I can assure you, it balances). Of course, one of the characters is learning magic in-game and only knows two cantrips at this point, but magic tends to be at the forefront of the game. In our new Tuesday game (yet to begin) we only have one magic-using character at all, so we will probably see a different balance entirely.

The difficult part is figuring out where the problem lies. Is it in GMing style? Is it in the system? Is it in the player choices? Is it the style of the campaign? Is it some combination of all of that? At this point, we can’t tell. All we know is that we see a trending problem. These types of problems are always the hardest to nail down no matter what the development project. It’s unfortunate, but that’s reality.

This, of course, dovetails in with the current efforts to scale back and trim down the system to make it less “my master’s thesis” (as a former girlfriend dubbed it) and more of a viable game system that others can play. And this ties in with our ongoing development efforts which muddy the waters a bit. In a sense, perhaps, the players deciding they’d rather play ARPS “without reactor containment” rather than a more stable system while we work through the kinks may not be helping either. Still, we plow ahead and work on it and try not to grandfather in too many changes to keep the games themselves as stable as possible.

As anyone who reads the blog regularly knows I’m planning a new campaign for Tuesday nights. Today’s topic is character development woes. To play ARPS as written (and well, I’m writing it, so I should), a player is intended to spend time working on a Background and Profile (B&P; the latter detailing the character’s personality elements) before attempting to translate the character into mechanical terms. ARPS goes so far as to provide 10 DP (Development Points) as a bonus to the player as a reward.

Our game has three players. Their initial character concepts included an Elvish druid, a human knight, and a human something vaguely conceptualized as “something like Robin Hood” (and even getting that out of him was a bit like pulling teeth). The third character was intended to fulfill the thief/rogue role to balance out against the cleric/mage and the primary fighter. Since the initial concepts were submitted and approved, I’ve received one complete B&P (our wood-elf druid of the Rowan Clan), one that I know enough about that I’m simply waiting for the write-up with all the details (the second son of an Earl whose title and lands were divested by the Crown now making a living as a knight-errant), and one B&P from our Robin Hood type.

Unfortunately, our Robin Hood profile was lacking. The background ended up vague and the profile was essentially missing other than knowing the character is scruffy-looking and right-handed. This brings me to the primary topic of today’s entry.

The Man With No Personality

When faced with a similar problem, how does a GM approach the problem? There are two main issues on the table. First, the GM needs to address the problem with the player. Second, the GM needs to compensate for the lack of information when planning his campaign.

Addressing the Problem With the Player

The first step is to simply address the problem directly with the player–talk to him. Make sure he knows what the goals for the campaign are and why we’re going through the process. Make sure he knows that he’s letting his GM and his fellow players down. And, most importantly, make sure the player is on-board with the character concept. There’s a good chance that his lack of detail or interest comes from a desire to play a different type of character.

Furthermore, if the character is suffering from a lack of detail, ask the player if there’s more information he needs about the world/setting and if he has any questions. Sometimes, detail suffers for lack of enough information to build upon.

If it turns out that the player’s on board with the ideas and concepts and is simply not delivering, it might be a good idea to lay down the law a little. In the case of ARPS, this may mean allowing the character development process to proceed anyway and hope that the technical details flesh out the rest of the character shortcomings. In this case, I’d simply withhold the bonus DP since the player didn’t do the work to gain the reward. (Especially since I’ve made it clear in my case that I wouldn’t hand the bonus out if the B&P wasn’t done this time.)

In the end, however, make sure that you aid your player toward something that not only makes him happy, but also makes you happy as a GM (read: fits well into the campaign you’re planning/designing) and fits in well with the rest of the characters in the party.

Addressing the Problem in Campaign Planning

The other problem with a lack of character detail is planning your campaign. Unfinished characters mean you don’t have the information to plan out a character-centric plot line and it delays your campaign start date. This, in turn means that your players may be expecting a game on your scheduled game day, but you may not be ready to deliver one.

An enterprising GM might take this as an opportunity to try out something different, potentially running a one-shot off-the-cuff or using a published adventure. This keeps your players engaged.

The other option is to simply delay your game and make it clear that since you haven’t received final character details you need more time to plan things. Sadly, for most of us who want to put in the appropriate effort as a GM, this is the likely scenario.

Of course, if you’re planning a sandbox campaign, are planning on using more published adventures, or are simply planning a campaign that doesn’t focus on character as much, you may be able to proceed with less detail. Only you, as GM, can gauge your players and your original plans and figure out what’s right for your group.

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.

Once again, time to revisit our favorite topic: healing magic. When we last left our heroes, we were considering a spiritual drain to balance out the physical advantage of healing. In the comments, we further explored a few other ideas, particularly related to methods of limiting healing magic over time.

Since that was written, we’ve had a few development sessions and a few play-test sessions and we’ve come to a slightly different conclusion. First, we decided that we didn’t want to put in an artificial (hard) limit into the game since it’s not really the ARPS Way. Second, we decided that we liked the latest approach we had (having the target character’s player roll Recovery).

What we did do, though is tweak things. First, we upped the Difficulty (Diff in ARPS parlance) from 10 to 15 for the check and, second, we upped the Diff of the Heal dweomer from 12 to 15 (essentially making it have a higher cost to the caster). This latter piece also changes who can learn the dweomer as a starting character, pushing the dweomer from the 2nd to 3rd degree, meaning that only primary Healers will be able to know it initially (or a more experienced character). Since the GM has full control over what dweomers  a character can learn in-game, this allows it to be more restricted, but not totally unavailable.

What prompted this update, though, was this article Hard System Limits in Scenario Design over at The Alexandrian. The analysis is specifically related to scenario-design rather than system design, but you can’t ignore the needs of scenario design in your system anyway. There, it talks about how soft vs. hard limits affect things. As a player much more entrenched in the old school mentality, I like the fact that the players can keep on going so long as they have the resources to keep it up. The soft limit, therefore, feels much more appropriate to my vision for ARPS. First, it doesn’t put in any hard limits (I try to avoid that and give the players as many options as they can; whether choosing it is a good idea is another matter) and, second, in keeping with the gritty realism idea (think Die Hard), it allows the characters to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ (as it were).

For now, at least, I think I can put this idea to bed and I feel confident I’m headed down the right path. There will likely be a bit more messing with the fiddly bits until we get it right, but it’s close.

(As a random observation, mostly since I don’t have enough to make a post on this, I’ve been noticing how much ARPS and RoleMaster seem to have in common, at least in vague philosophy. Didn’t really think about it, but RPG Blog II’s been putting up a RM retrospective, of sorts, and it occurred to me several times in reading through things there. Specifically Rolemaster Tales, which was posted today. Got me thinking of a situation we had over the weekend where our socially-oriented thief with little martial ability took out a magically-enhanced Awakened (undead) in a single hit with a dagger. Mind you, the dagger is magical, adamantine, and was temporarily enhanced with Holiness and Firebrand, but the feat was pretty astounding at the time.)

Recently, we’ve had some problems with group reliability, so we’re sacrificing every other weekly development session to another game. I recently ran a session that my players absolutely loved (which was good since it was totally off-the-cuff and should’ve been run in some version of D&D) and I’ve re-gained the GMing Bug again. I previously stepped away from that because I got burned out and wanted to spend time with ARPS as a player rather than a GM.

We did some preliminary character concepts and I’m faced with a thief-type, fighter-type, and a mage-type. Nice party balance, so that should work out well. What I was missing was a setting (ARPS is a multi-genre system). We have a house system (soon to be Wikified somewhere) that we use for our fantasy games, but I didn’t want to do that because it’s what we’re using for our other game. Since I’ve been reminiscent recently, I was thinking of going old school for the setting. We’re using Greyhawk (1e materials) for our game that’s currently on hiatus (coming back late-spring/summer; this is good since I don’t especially want to lead a dwarven army to invade the Bone March), so I didn’t want to do that. I started looking at Blackmoor and Mystara with the latter definitely leading the way. In the end, though, I decided to go with a setting I had shelved a ways back.

The setting (which had the working title of Mythgar, but it stuck) was something I originally started working on for a series of books, but I always had it in mind for a potential fantasy setting. After dusting off some old documents and e-mail archives, I realized how much time, effort, and research went into it (bearing in mind that I nearly went to grad school for Medieval Studies and have an English and anthropology background) and I just fell in love with it again. Additionally, the goal for this campaign was something more character-centric rather than our recent trend toward the epic adventure in LotR style.

So, I grabbed important documents from my e-mail archives and added them into version control properly and even grabbed a new copy of AutoREALM and generated a new JPEG map for the thing. All I need to do now is go through my two paper boxes of notes and find my written stuff that’s been collecting dust.

The only problem with all this is finding time to work on the setting, work on the game itself, and do the work to develop a campaign. Oh, and keep my day job.

On the bright side, I have the first of the more-detailed character concepts in: a divested lord who’s now making a living as a knight-errant. The other two are still pending.

A few posts back I talked about the magic development in ARPS taking a long time since it was so involved (and a bit tedious). Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped us from continuing to play-test the game because we a) are gamers and we’re not giving up our game, and b) most of the system (including the dweomers themselves) isn’t broken, just needs tweaking here and there.

I haven’t talked about this particular play-test much (only mentioned that our long-term play test, currently on hiatus, is an all-Dwarf party), but let me fill you in on what we have and why this turned out to be a problem. We’re in a fantasy setting of our own creation based mostly on a semi-realistic take on 12th century England with some tweaking to make it work with that whole magic and other races thing. Our party consists of the youngest son of an earl (our fighter), a knight-brother from a military religious order (our cleric), an investigator/mentalist (one of our mages), a social character with some rogue skills (our rouge/thief), and my character, a wood-elvish shaman, our only non-human.

When we implemented the new magic system, we created a situation where mages would end up more specialized than they would have previously (unless you went out of your way to make it that way). This allowed us to make a stronger party magically and this worked out fine. The problem was that I have a character that’s primarily centered around Shapeshifting, Ghostspeaking, and Soothsaying (with a bit of natural magic, Wildspeaking, thrown in for good measure). Those pretty much do what you expect based on the names.

The problem is that some of these magical schools are relatively new concepts in the game. While we were able to fill them in with existing dweomers, we’ve left a lot of concepts to future development. So, in the course of this particular adventure, we finally ran into a situation (or three or six or nine) that required one or more of us to have magic to handle it that doesn’t yet exist. In our standard gamer way, we attempted to tackle the problem on our own getting creative where we needed to be. In the end, this worked out and we saved the day, but without a convenient magic item being used to control the powerful fiends we needed to defeat that we were able to wrest (literally, with the Wrest dweomer) away from the head of a local madness cult, we probably would’ve had quite a different end.

So, been working steadily on new dweomer ideas since, trying to fill in the gaps so we can work on those, as well. Bite off more than I can chew? Me? Never.

Oh, and a quick update on the healing magic post I made a few back: Our solution, in the end, was to revisit all the various healing magic and make sure it was properly distributed to the right magical schools. Then, we looked at the actual Heal dweomer itself. To take a new approach to it, we flipped the check to determine how much is healed onto the target rather than the caster. Using the character’s Stamina, the character’s Recovery rate, and any Intensity added to the Heal dweomer itself, a check is made, and depending on that roll, appropriate points are restored. Worked pretty well, but we need to tweak things a bit more to find the right balance.