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.

Horrifically late Tron related post regarding virtual worlds

I saw Tron last night...last week...a few weeks ago...all right, a while back, and I enjoyed the movie. It was a fun film with some stunning special effects, and Daft Punk's musical score was a joy to hear. And it gave me some thought on how virtual reality and related environments might be employed in your campaign.

Virtual reality can be handled in two ways. You can go the route of The Matrix and have the characters' bodies held in some suspended state while their minds roam in the alternate environment, or you follow the Tron route and have their bodies and minds both enter the new realm. It is entirely up to you and how you want to handle things. What is important is you create a set of rules for your alternate reality and adhere to them so your players do not feel as if you are deliberately pulling the rug out from under them when they seem to be getting the better of you.

Now, you might be running a fantasy campaign and might be thinking virtual worlds would not work for you. But what is a virtual world? It is an alternate state of reality, which could also describe a dream state, or actions on an alternate plane. Or perhaps you are running a gritty noir-ish game involving cops and criminals and figure virtual reality is way outside your genre. Well hang on there! Perhaps the virtual reality is a drug induced state. In the television series The Prisoner, Number Six was subjected to a combination of drugs, agents in Wild West period costumes and props in order for him to think he was a former sherriff trapped in a small town. It was through sheer will that he was able to break through the facade. Many of the elements of the story resembled a virtual reality environment. Perhaps the PCs have found themselves in the grip of a villain who wishes information from them and would trick them with his artificial scenario? Perhaps the PCs are to be delayed until the villain can accomplish his aims?

There is one twist to the virtual reality concept and that is introducing it in a way where they players are unaware they are in a virtual environment. And this is fine, this can be fun. But it can also be tricky. For example, what if the players discover early on that they are in a virtual reality? I have often found that players can be very clever and see right through to the truth of things. If this happens then you must be prepared to alter your game to suit. The players must have some method to escape otherwise they will feel trapped and helpless. The methods can be varied; perhaps there is an exit they must pass through, perhaps there is a quest they must complete. Perhaps they must die in the virtual world in order to return to the real one? However the method the players must somehow be made aware of it either through investigation or a helpful NPC.

If this option is chosen then you must handle the how of it; how did the PCs wind up helpless and at the mercy of whomever if "VRing" them? If you are running a long term campaign and have earned the players' trust and respect then they are probably going to be willing to accept the idea that somehow their characters were rendered helpless. But if the campaign is in the beginning stages, if the players are mostly new, then I would advise caution. Players do not like to be jerked around. They do not like having their characters manipulated in such a ham-fisted manner. Players love their characters and do not wish to see them abused. The only exception to this would be if this is the hook of your game, the manner in which your players have met. Giving the players an obstacle to overcome in the very beginning is a staple of role playing going back to PCs being dropped into a prison and being forced to escape together. An idea might be they are in a virtual prison and discover a glitch in the system that might be a key to their escape. I recall a TNG espiode where Will Riker was trapped in a virtual world and in some manner managed to break free (and there is The Prisoner episode mentioned above where he too broke free without outside interference). If you do go this route bear in mind players hate being rescued by NPCs. A little NPC aid is always appreciated, but outright rescue rankles.

Using virtual worlds within your worlds can be fun if handled properly, but only if you plan well in advance for player ingenuity and bear in mind the feelings of your players. If you do neither then disaster is...ah...virtually assured...

PCs, NPCs, and GMPCs

When running a PBEM, or any role playing game for that matter, NPCs (non player characters) are critical story telling tools. Good use of NPCs can entertain the players, bad use of NPCs can make a group quit en masse. So the first thing you need to figure out is, what are the NPCs there to do for your game and your players?

First of all, an NPC should never overshadow the player characters, meaning you should not often throw NPCs into the game that make the characters look weak or ineffective (the exception are villains, but I will touch on that in a later post). For example, if you are playing a DC Comics game when the players are gritty, street level vigilantes, it would not be very much fun to have Batman showing up every few weeks to remind them how much more awesome Batman is than they are. Use of Batman sparingly might prove to be interesting; he may require their help, or the heroes manage to thwart a Batman villain and earn Batman's respect, or they rescue Batman. Maybe they rescue sixties Adam West Batman. The other versions? Not likely. The point is a more powerful, more skilled or otherwise more formidable NPC can put a damper on your campaign very quickly if used incorrectly.

This is my opinion and I understand if people disagree with me on this point, but I do not think PCs should play second banana to a more powerful NPC. For example, if you are playing an Indiana Jones game, who wants to play Short Round or Sallah while the GM role plays one of the greatest characters in cinema? Even after Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull? I once saw someone (repeatedly) advertise a game on the old PBEM.com web site, where he was going to run a powerful super heroine along the lines of Wonder Woman, and he wanted players to play her supporting cast. Considering the complete lack of takers I think it spoke volumes as to what players want in a game.

Second, an NPC should not make a Player Character redundant. Say you are running that super heroic game and you are playing the team brick, only the GM has introduced a hero who also has super strength. Suddenly your character seems just a little less awesome. Or necessary. If NPCs exist on a team they should fill a void, fulfill a need. For example, when I was running my first super hero game I noticed the team had no brick, so I created one. I also noted there was no doctor, so the brick was designed to be a geneticist and surgeon. When I began my second game both roles were filled by at least one other player, so I swapped out the NPC for one more useful; there were no technical specialists so the NPC introduced was handy with gadgets. And many of the team members could not travel quickly, so she had flight powers and could create force fields to carry them.

Now, you may think that a gap in the team roster might make for more interesting role playing and I will concede that is a valid point. How does a cyberpunk team accomplish the mission without a hacker? How does GI Joe take the bunker without Bazooka on the team? A skills gap amongst the PCs can be a challenge and it is up to the GM whether he wants to make the players work it out or provide them with a skills patch. But I think that the continued gap might prove to be a pain in the ass for the players if they keep going on missions/adventures that the GM insists needs personnel/skills they are lacking. The GM could run the risk of going the opposite way, running multiple adventures that make his pet character indispensable. NPCs should be useful, but not annoyingly so.

Third, NPCs should make the game run more smoothly. I am not saying they should make the game easy, only there are situations where NPC involvement could make for a more satisfying role playing experience for the players. In cyberpunk games, for example, the hacker may sometimes enter a virtual world and do battle with security systems. The cyberscape environment can be an exciting place as the hacker combats corporate hackers, killer AIs (Artificial Intelligences. I do not think my readers are stupid, I just do not like to assume everyone knows every little bit of sci-fi/fantasy jargon I do), hunter/seeker programs. It can be very cool. Problem is, what are the rest of the PCs doing while the hacker PC is having the time of his life shutting down security for the infiltration team? A fight like that could take days, if not weeks of time as player and GM exchange e-mails. Maybe having the hacker an NPC and fast forwarding through all that stuff would make things easier?

NPCs should never take up so much space that the players feel like they just belong to the GM's fan fiction message board or mailing list. GMs should avoid constantly having NPCs talk to one another without PC input. In my Vindicators game I do have instances where there are interludes, moments where the PCs are given glimpses into what NPCs are doing elsewhere. But those interludes serve to provide a set up for future encounters and are not an end in themselves.

There is also a type of NPC called the GMPC, and these are characters the GM are so fond of they are featured in the game as much as the PCs themselves and given far more depth. GMs are often frustrated gamers, and employing GMPCs is a way to scratch that player itch. GMPCs are fine, provided the earlier rules about NPCs are adhered to; GMPCs should not make PCs feel like they are the GMPC's sidekicks, nor should they make them feel useless. One exception to this rule would be Star Trek. In Star Trek games the captain is played by the GM, and quite often the captain is portrayed as being in some ways superior to the the PCs; he is captain, after all. He achieved his rank through bad-assery and derring-do (although a captain who earned his rank through sheer nepotism might be really interesting to see). This is done to maintain game stability. Sometimes players leave and the GM has to explain their absense (Or not. I have seen games where character absense is not addressed at all, as if they never existed), cover for the gap. In a Star Trek game if someone is playing the captain and they quit that means the ship gets a new captain. Suddenly. Out of the blue. So while a ship can survive constant engineering officer turnover, repeated captaincy turnover stretches the boundaries of the players' suspension of disbelief.

NPCs who appear often should be fully realized characters. Even Alfred Pennyworth has a back story, and sometimes that story gets the Caped Crusader involved in an adventure or two. NPCs that directly affect PCs should feel more like real people. Your players will appreciate if you give their loved ones or rivals a third dimension; I am not a big Harry Potter fan but when I saw The Deathly Hollows I felt Draco Malfoy suddenly became a tremendously more engaging character when he was given depth; no longer was he simply Potter's annoying school rival, but he was now an unwilling pawn compelled to do horrible things. He became a fully realized human being with motivations and fears all his own, and I thought in that instant if there was any character who could sustain his own series in the Potterverse it would be Draco. That is sharp writing, excellent direction, and damn good acting. Now imagine if your PCs had an enemy who gradually goes from being a two dimensional baddie to someone complex. Star Trek, Deep Space Nine's Gul Dukat was a fascinating character who started off as Sisko's annoying nemesis, but over time grew into a complex character...Of course, they completely screwed that up when Dukat took the train to crazy town, but at least he was still interesting.

I will address the roles of antagonists in a later post, Depths of Villainy. For now think about what I said about NPCs; they should be useful, interesting, and almost never overshadow the PCs.