Dave K.'s Wild Kingdom

The number of gaming articles I will be publishing is going to be dropping off for the foreseeable future as I have had a bit of a dry spell of late.  I do have an idea for a series of articles but it requires me to watch a lot of Farscape and Gargoyles so it might be a while before those things get written.  In the mean time this article has been sitting on my USB drive for some months now.  It is something I have returned to again and again, tweaking it here and there.  While much of it is admittedly focused on nostalgia there are one or two kernels of advice locked away in there.  Somewhere.

Back in the day, before the goatee, when I possessed a glorious head of earthen hued locks, I was this guy:

Check out that dimple.  And the single chin.  Man, good times.

I  used to play Dungeons & Dragons (2^nd ed.) every Saturday with a bunch of guys.  There was Rich, Gary, Mike, John (I think.  He was a quiet guy, the nicest of the bunch, and I recall he used to wear a cap all the time) and the two Daves: Dave M and the DM, Dave K.  If you are wondering why I am not mentioning names I do not think it fair to spread ‘em around without permission from the owners.  I have mentioned Dave Zyn’s before on this site but he already has a ‘net presence.  Man, I know a lot of Daves.  I think "Dave" might be the most common name in Michigan.

Now, if I am critical of a GM's actions please do not think my motives are vindictive.  Well, okay, there was that series of Drew posts I wrote last year but I like to think that is a freak occurrence.  I do not pretend to be a better GM than others; one of the reasons I chose to write this blog was to offer advice, said advice coming from years of mistakes I made in running games. So when I discuss this incident please do not think this is me attempting to get revenge on Dave K years later. Dave was a pretty uptight guy, but to be fair when he had to spend every Saturday trying to run a game whose players acted like a herd of feral cats then in retrospect I can see where some of his attitude came from.

Players can often be appeased by munchies.

On a side note, one thing I do recall of Dave K. is that he was quite possibly the biggest Jethro Tull fan in Michigan.  What Kate Bush was to me and Heart was to Dave M., Tull was to Dave K.  Musically, that is.

I always played a fighter type in Dave K's games: Barbarians, Rangers, things of that nature.  The only character I recall is Draffa of the Bujoc because he had an 18/00 strength, rolled legally.  Well, there was some contention because I did not choose which colored die denoted the single digit but with "00" there was no other outcome.  Draffa was not the sharpest pencil in the box but I liked him.  Hell, he scored +6 damage with every hit, what was there not to like?

I knew a guy from high school, a friend named Gene, and to me he was one of the best players I knew.  He once played a half Orc with a brick/rock as a weapon proficiency ("You can always find a brick", he had once explained to me.  I found his logic sound.) and I spoke to Dave K, asking him if he could squeeze him into the game.  Dave said “Sure” and I brought Gene in.  Gene was pretty excited to get involved in an established campaign and he had an idea what he wanted to play, inspired by an article he read in Dragon Magazine.  Ah, Dragon.  If I had more of a disposable income and space I probably would have purchased every issue.  Allow me to drift off on a(nother) tangent as I think on the awesomeness that was Dragon Magazine.  Back in it's heyday you had articles regarding a wide variety of subjects related to gaming including short stories, adventures, game reviews, even comics like Wormy, Fineous Fingers and What's New with Phil and Dixie, written and illustrated by the awesome Phil Foglio (These days Phil is doing truly awesome work writing and illustrating the comic Girl Genius).

Click on image to enlarge.  Say what you will, Phil knew his target audience.

Dragon Magazine was an invaluable tool for GMs and players alike. But like most tools Dragon Magazine could be quite dangerous in the wrong hands.  In Gene's it was like giving a chainsaw to a wild chimp and Dave's campaign was the tree.

Natural twenty!

Gene was very much interested in Japanese culture, he even spent some time in Japan later on teaching English.  He was one of the first people who turned me on to anime.  So it was only natural that when he came across this article character class he was very excited.  The article?  The samurai class. Bear in mind this was before the Oriental Adventures supplement came out so this character class was fresh and new.  The most almost anyone knew about Samurai was from the Shogun television mini series.  By the way, I was on a huge James Clavell kick years back and if you are looking for some non-fantasy or science fiction to read, I highly recommend the book Shogun.  In a way it it reminiscent of some science fiction plots in that you are reading about a man trying to deal with an utterly alien culture with it's own set of values that are often opposed to his own and he must struggle to adapt to them..  It is a wonderful read.

Where was I?  Gene, Dragon Magazine, Samurai class.  Right.  Gene showed up that Saturday, Dragon Magazine in hand.  He sat down with Dave K to generate a character and he made his pitch.  When I knew Gene he often had jobs in retail selling stuff.  Gene was pretty good at his job and he was able to sell Dave on allowing him to run a Samurai.

I apologize if I seem hazy on details but I was not writing notes at the time so I am operating on memory alone, and frankly the only parts of the campaign that were memorable were the parts where Gene was involved.  If that sounds cruel where Dave K.’s campaign is concerned, it is not intentional.  The advantage of running a PBEM is everything is documented so if I so choose I can go back twelve years and search for details.  If I did not have that luxury I am certain only a fraction of my adventures would stick in the minds of my players; they have more important things to commit to memory.

That still does not mean I hope at least one or two of my adventures are memorable.

Gene was one of those guys who felt very strongly about playing in character.  No, he did not show up in costume or insist on talking in a funny accent.  But he did feel that if you were playing a thief, you lied, cheated and stole (not from fellow PCs; that is just stupid, and stupid Gene was not.).  He was once in a Shadowrun game playing a pair of bikers (We often played two characters in our group.  You know, in case one died during the adventure.  It tended to happen.  A lot.).  When the GM (me) noted a plot point about a rival biker gang riding down the street (this was the Dreamchipper module, by the way) he asked if the PCs were currently in his gang's territory.  When the answer was an affirmative his characters Iron Paw and Drunken Monkey (Gene had a talent for names) whipped out his submachine gun and went to town on the invading bikers.  Never mind the (drunken) monkey wrench thrown into my plans, those bikers were not supposed to be there and they knew it!  This is an important point so bear with me.

I forget how, exactly, Gene's character met the party or why he had decided to join our quest.  Odds are three to two that we met in a tavern.   The party reached the outskirts of a town and if I recall correctly we were searching for a network of caves where a pack of ogres were hiding.  We came across a farmer and asked him for information.  The farmer was pretty abusive to the player characters.

“Wait,” Gene said to Dave K., “The farmer said that to my character?”

“Yes,” Dave K. replied, not thinking anything was unusual about a player asking for clar-

“I kill him!” Gene said.

“…What?” Dave asked after the laughter died down.

“I kill him!” Gene repeated as he rolled his ten sided die for initiative.

“Why?” Dave asked, desperate to regain control of his game.

“Samurais don’t take crap like that from peasants,” Gene explained.  He grinned at his initiative score and said, “I have fast draw with my katana, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to stop me.”

 

Really, why did anyone want to stop Gene?  This was the most fun we had with Dave’s game in weeks.  At least, it was the most fun I had had.  Like I said earlier, I mostly played fighters and the death count was pretty high for meat shields in Dave’s games.  Back then before you had online random name generators you were stuck coming up with them on your own.  After the first four or five characters in as many months you start to get jaded and start calling them variations of your middle name or were pulling random ones out of a phone book.

Back to Gene.  The peasant did not stand a chance.  In the aftermath there were in-character arguments but in the end the good players determined that the foreigner could not be held responsible for a misunderstanding.  The fact that Gene’s samurai murder machine was likely to score initiative and had a high probability of critical hitting us had absolutely nothing to do with our decision to let the dead peasant issue lie.  Really.  Dave K quietly fumed, but really what could he do?

The cave network was found and we went in, then we discovered a host of ogres.  And that was when we discovered just how lethal Gene’s samurai was.  The Ginsu Warrior, as he was now known, had a devastating two weapon combo attack that sliced into ogres and almost guaranteed a kill each time.   We came to a fork in the cave and ogres were flooding the passageway from two angles, and I am sure Dave was thinking now was his chance to regain some semblance of sanity.  Only Dave M. or Mike, I forget which, determined the best way to handle this was to have all the meat shields charge down one passageway to fend off the ogres there, and Ginsu (by this point we forgot what Gene called his character; nick names have a way of developing lives of their own) hold the other passage while the magic users act as artillery.  While the meat shields valiantly held off the ogre assault on the right with the thieves acting as back stabbers, Ginsu was having trouble finding new targets, what with that pile of corpses forming in front of him.  I swear, I think everyone playing a fighter type at that point was seriously considering playing a samurai for all those wicked hit bonuses.  Dave K’s campaign soon came apart and he had to retreat, metaphorically speaking, to determine what to do next.  Dave K later took Gene aside and Gene agreed to retire Ginsu.  He later ran a Halfling thief named Erwal Fizwig, which really was not his real name; it was the name he cried out during torture.  We never did discover what name Gene wrote on the character record sheet.

The lessons to take away from this incident are these.  First of all, it is all well and good to want to make players happy, but do not bow before pressure if you have reservations about the character they want to play.  Each character should be looked at carefully to see if there are any potential pitfalls to avoid.  Is the character too powerful, is their background too weird or exotic? That is not to say that Gene would have walked if Dave had rejected his samurai.  Likely he would have pulled out the half orc with the brick weapon proficiency.  Which in retrospect would have been an entirely different kind of awesome.

I was talking to Dave Zyn a little while back and discussed the concept of Mary Sues and he in turn mentioned the Special Snowflake.  I had never heard of this term.  For those of you who do not know what that is, the Special Snowflake is the PC who has to be different from everyone else.  They are not necessarily a Mary Sue but they must be unique and stand out.  You see this a lot in Star Trek games; the half Betazoid/half Bajoran, or the dude from the 21^st century, or the rescued Borg.  Spock is partly to blame for this, but the real culprit is The Next Generation with their collection of Special Snowflakes: the only Klingon serving in Starfleet, the only android in Starfleet, the half human/half Betazoid, the child genius, and the blind guy with a visor that gives him super vision (And notice how you never see anyone else with disabilities in Star Trek employing devices to compensate for them?).  I am not saying Gene-the gamer gene, not Gene Roddenberry-wanted to be a Special Snowflake, but you see how the unique nature of his character really put a monkey wrench in Dave’s campaign.  And if a player threatens to quit if he does not get his way then perhaps he is not suited to your game.  A player has to look at thing from the GM’s perspective.  In this case Gene was easy going about the whole thing.  It was just a game; everyone should have a good time, DM included.

Second, a GM who does not do his homework is only asking for trouble and gets exactly what he deserves.  If a player is role playing a character from a comparatively alien or unusual culture from the other PCs then the GM should take special care in how that character is going to interact with PC and NPC alike.  Furthermore, if the player is running an unusual character class, research it thoroughly first.  Gene should have approached Dave earlier about the class but back then before scanners and e-mail (Yes, this happened that far back.) the only way he could have done that was to drive the ten or twenty miles to Dave’s house, and back then we all played at Mike’s house so hardly anyone knew where Dave K lived.   So the pair getting together before Saturday?  It would have been a pain in the ass to do.  It is hard to say what they could have done differently.  Met for dinner at McDonalds somewhere, maybe?  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Third, never assume!  It is hard to get into Gene’s head but I think he thought everyone knew Samurais were lethal swordsmen who did not take crap from peasants.  This was before the big anime boom so you had to be a pretty hardcore fan of the genre to get ahold of the good stuff and not crap that was normally dubbed and released for American consumption.  Japanese culture simply was not as widespread as it is now among geeks and the only way you really knew about this sort of thing was if you saw the aforementioned Shogun mini series, or got your hands on Shogun Assassin from the local video store (Video stores were places you went to in order to rent things called video tapes), or maybe had read Frank Miller’sRonin.  Access to the genre was still pretty thin.  Gene simply should not have assumed Dave K was prepared when the game began and Gene should have warned Dave in advance a bit more about what the Samurai was about and what he had in mind.  So while Dave K made some mistakes so did Gene.

When characters become unplayable

I read some of my earlier posts, and man do I need to edit myself more better. :/

Sometimes you might discover that there is something...wrong with your game. Something is constantly cropping up and is making it difficult to generate effective and compelling plots. Something may be causing player friction. What could it be?

Perhaps it is a character.

Your player might be a great guy. He may be a great role player. But is his character monkeying up the works and ruining your campaign? Maybe. Here are some signs that a character may be the source of your problems:

Too Powerful: This character makes the rest of your team look like scrubs and it feels as if he might be able to solve all the problems singled handedly and is only holding back to spare his team mates' feelings. Superman might have days like this. Too powerful does not necessarily mean raw might, it could also mean too versatile. Hi tech, cosmic and magical characters could both suffer from a little too much versatility where their power sets are concerned. I used to game with a guy named Nick in my Champions RPG days, he ran a character named Quantus. I inherited this character from a previous GM who allowed Nick to abuse the character creation rules to such an extent that Quantus was a nightmare. His ridiculous speed and power set meant I kept having to create more and more powerful bad guys to give him a challenge, which meant the rest of the PCs suffered as a result. In the end I gave up when Quantus single handedly stopped the main bad guy and his entire team of badass minions single handedly.

Too Weak: Are you handling a PC with kid gloves? Do villains inexplicably leave him alone during combat? Or is he/she constantly getting hurt or kidnapped and placing the other PCs in peril as a result? Maybe the character's power levels are too puny for the campaign world. Batman makes keeping up with demigods look easy, but when your writer is Grant Morrison that is only natural. Not everyone can pull off being a powerless or low powered character in a campaign world where everyone else possesses god-like might.

Genre Incompatibility: Your player approached you with a novel idea, a character that was going to be refreshingly different. Perhaps he/she is a mage in a wild west setting. Or is a steampunk scientist serving on board a Starfleet vessel. Maybe he is the only character in the Potterverse packing heat. Initially it sounded like a neat idea, only now...

Well, this neat character that would have been great in a novel is just driving you nuts. Heat packing Potterverse character just put a bullet in the head of your principle villain, or Steampunk engineer is useless on an away mission. For one reason or another the character's way-cool weirdness is making thing difficult for you.

Too contentious: Conflict in a game is not always a bad thing. Characters who get along all the time can be boring. So when a player wants to play a character who does not play nice with others that is not a bad thing. The player wants to role play and that should never be discouraged.

But maybe his style is a little too...passionate. He adheres to the letter of the law too literally, or is a casual killer in a team of law abiding heroes. He/she hates another character and cannot resist an opportunity to needle his nemesis whenever possible. One way or another, the character is harshing everyone's mellow.

So, what do you as the GM do? If you let the player run this character it is partly your own fault. That does not necessarily mean you are a bad GM. You did not want to say "no" to your player, or he/she was a great salesperson, or your blood sugar was low that night when you wrote that e-mail agreeing that yeah, Starhammer The Undying would be a great addition to your wild west campaign. Or you were desperate to fill out your ship's roster and were willing to let the guy play Anything, even that Q/Borg hybrid, to swell the ranks. Whatever the reason, you have a problem on your hands and must fix it.

If the character is too weak or too powerful, you either work with the player to adjust their power levels. You could make the power change an adventure in itself; perhaps the uber powerful character has to sacrifice a measure of his might to stop the bad guy, or the weakling adopts the weapons of his fallen enemies to augment his abilities? If the character still has potential then work with the player to keep him. If the character's idiom simply does not work in regards to your game's tone/theme/setting, then it might be time to get rid of them altogether. If a player is contentious to the point of distraction, then they need to adopt some sort of in game reason for them to start playing ball with the other characters. It could even be an amusing reason; years back in Justice League megajerk Guy Gardner was knocked out by Batman and when he awoke he hit his head. This resulted in a complete personality change.

But perhaps your player is sticking to their guns. Your player insists their character is fine the way it is and they refuse to change or retire them. They are refusing to work with you and might even go so far as to say they will quit if they cannot play their character. When that happens, it is time to either stop the game or fire the player. Remember this; you are not being paid to be a GM (If you are, please let me know how. I would love to get in on that action), you are running your game on your own time because you want to, because it gives you pleasure. If this character and his player is making the game feel like a job then it is time to reassess your relationship, game wise.

Finally, as I said in an earlier post, it is very important to hold your temper. If things get heated then take a step back, calm down, find your happy place again. You never want to say something that might damage a friendship.

More Star Trek Thoughts

I am going to try my darnedest to submit a post a month. This month I am going to touch on Star Trek pbems again. A few months back I wrote a post concerning the cliched Star Trek characters I have come across over the years. I was talking to a friend mine, Dave Zyn, and he mentioned one neat idea he never saw before was rather than the guy from the past, what about a guy from the future? He is an arrogant prick who claims the science those of the "modern" era learned at the academy is learned in grade school in his time. He is a know it all jerk and keeps people wondering whether or not he is there to fix some critical error in the timeline, is some sort of temporal fugitive or is just a highly intelligent mental case. Such a character would be interesting and would require a lot of work with the GM to insure they were on the same page, and it could conceivably create numerous interesting story lines that may or may not involve time travel. Perhaps parts of the character's memory have been wiped, for example. Or he is from an alternate timeline entirely?

How about Mirror Universe guy? In this world his counterpart is a mass murderer or some other total bastard, and he/she has wound up here through some misadventure? Imagine them having to deal with not only their own past, but the past of their infamous evil twin? Goatee optional.

Another character concept I never saw was the colonist. Just about every single human featured in Star Trek is from Earth. How boring! Why not have someone from Mars or from an even harsher world? Imagine them feeling that "Earthers" are soft and weak compared to his/her rough 'n ready upbringing? They are adventurous and self reliant and sneer at luxuries like holodecks.

The un-joined Trill. More than that, the un-joined Trill who thinks placing a slug in their chest is as creepy an idea as you can have.

Mister under achiever. This is the lieutenant Barclay type, the guy who just skates by until something/someone kicks him in the ass. Maybe the department head dies or is suddenly transferred and he is the only guy available to take his place. To quote Gregory Peck from The Guns of Navarone: "You're in it now, Mister! Right up to your neck!"

The Civilian. Not the bartender, but someone who was recruited during the Dominion war or through some other sort of circumstances and stayed on in Starfleet. I am currently playing a doctor who volunteered and decided to stick around. After a couple years at the academy she is now a lieutenant at age 40. I like to role play her as being a bit out of joint in regards to rules and regulations. This might be interesting to play an older ensign who has seen the world and who views superior officers with respect, but not necessarily walking on water.

The mustang. In the Navy, a Mustang is an Officer who has promoted up from the ranks of Navy enlisted personnel through an in-service procurement program, with no interruption of his/her active duty status. It is also understood that the Mustang Officer was a career Sailor, and normally wears one or more Good Conduct Medals.

From Navy Mustangs dot com.

Your character again would be older, possibly promoted due to an emergency or the like. Older, wiser, with their own perspectives on how a starship runs, the mustang might be viewed with mistrust or contempt by other enlisted NCOs and derision from Academy graduates.

So next time you are playing Star Trek, think of different ways to make your character stand out, not just to be different but to also provide yourself and your GM with potentially interesting subplots . Perfection is boring, so is copying something that has already been done to death.