Player tips

One question I encounter frequently is “tips for players”, instead of tips for GMs. Typical answers then include appearing on time and knowing the rules. That’s not a high bar. That is kind of the minimal effort one would expect in a team activity. Also for any team activity, not specifically for RPGs. So if your answer is: “Come on time and do some minimal personal upkeep before”, you really are not answering the question.

In a typical RPG, if you are not the GM, you will play a PC. And you job is giving everyone else at the table a good time doing so. You read me right: You are doing a show for them, and they are your audience. Everything else follows from that.

Play a character they might like

There are some questions here. What are the other characters like, if they already exist? How can I complement that? What can I play? It doesn’t help when I pick a character I know I cannot protray or would struggle with their special rules. The more you know about what everyone else is up to, the easier this will be. So ask them.

Communicate how your character feels

I like to tell an anecdote here. I once played with a friend and she was very quiet the whole evening. That was unusual for her, so I asked her, if she was alright. She explained that she was, her character were just a rather quiet guy. To be fair, to convey that right without speaking would have required some great acting skills that most people, me included, lack. Instead you are allowed so things like: “I look at you sceptically.”

Engage the other PCs

That is, talk to them. If everyone is only talking with the GM, but the PCs are not talking to one another, the game feels flat. If improvising is hard for you, you can prepare things your character would talk about. Or you can imagine how you character would react to certain things, then do so when the time is right.

Show that you care about their contributions

You are doing your best to make their play better. Show that you appreciate their efforts too. Listen to them. Give them thumbsup. Show what you like.

The Tinkers’ Tower

Tags

Actual Play, WoD

I usually run people based adventures. People making requests, people having needs, people interfering and messing things up. For a game oneshot some time ago I wanted something different. A dungeon. Someone had requested Changeling: The Dreaming for our meetup (twas long ago afore the rona), so I thought about doing a dungeon crawl in Changeling 20. Of course, doing combat is painful under the WoD system, you really only want to it once per session max. My conclusion was that I want a puzzle dungeon. This is what we did.

The Pitch

The Tinkers’ Tower was well known in the land, appearing here and there and offering their business. Until one day, about 20 years ago, it disappeared. Now it has reappeared in that closed-down amusement park. The local monarch has assembled a team of adventurous changelings to find their parent’s crown which was given to the tower as collateral. Each of you is looking for some item or other in the tower.

OK, basic motivations and how the group comes together all done. I will not go over every event. After all I made several parts of the based on the items the players had requested. I want to discuss the principles I used in designing the tower as well as the general outline:

• Each room contains one interesting or useful item.
• There is no living soul left at the place.
• For most of the skills and knowledges (char sheet), include a place where they might be used.
• Include some things that can be done with Changeling magic.
• For all problems, include at least one key in another place that can be used Point-and-Click style, when skills or magic fail.

We started right at the gates of the amusement park. One player opted to make their own character, the for the other three I built theirs to order. They first encountered a giant chimerarical snake from mechancial parts. They opted to approach it politely and after an Etiquette check, they learned that there is “Small Hunter” stalking the place.

The Hunter is a small mechanical T-Rex the tinkers build for a mostly human customer (probably a sorcerer), used as a hunting dog. I introduced it as potential endboss, that waited at the top of the tower. I decided that it hat 10% chance of investigating when the PCs made loud noises in the tower. It didn’t happen.

Of course the Hunter was also the reason that the tower disappeared. Upon demonstration to the client, the Hunter killed most of the people present. The clients body as well as the bodies of most of the tinker is still present. The Boggans housekeeper was not been found, I decided later. Mostly as a potential open end, in case there is a continuation.

Some rooms:

• A tailor’s shop. Several rolls of textiles, a sewing a machine. A manniquin with a pumpkin head that wore a very beautiful ball dress. The investigating Pooka just had to try it on without checking it in any way, and was promptly turned into a Sidhe. (“But Sidhe abilities are totally useless in a dungeon!”) They didn’t manage to overcome the Cinderella dress’ magic. It would come off after the adventure on its own.
• A room with banged in door and mostly broken chess pieces of various sizes. Looking through it, might have gotten them an undamaged black rook, about knee high, that would have been a good boy on an Animal Ken check and some resuscitation via Glamour. Looking at the heap and recognizing it didn’t contain the items they had come for, they left it alone.
• An office. The desk, shelves and pretty much everything in it was barring the door. The characters manged to get through. On the far end one of the tinkers was apparently dead. They didn’t investigate the body, no one knowing much Medicine. They were very much interested in the documents that were all over the place, deducing there should be an inventory for the things they wanted. They got quite a few hints on fabulous Academics check. The dead could have provided an experimental magic glove they used to shift all the furniture in front of the door.
• Most of the dead were in a small theater like hall. They were apparently attacked. One had taken a trident from a weapons wrack, including various items and used it freeze himself, the trident and weapons rack in ice. The apparent intent from his posture was that he wanted to ice something else, but it apparently backfired. The trident was what our Merman looked for, so they got to work with magic. I would have expected to use some fire to melt the ice, but they rather just teleported the trident out and let the ice melt on its own. We haven’t found out whether the frozen witness could have been resuscitated.
• One of the searched items was in a library. A salamander chimera acting as librarian informed the PCs that books could only be taken out with a writ by the towers owner. I would have expected them to come back later, having forged a writ the owners magic pen, which was located in his private bedroom / study. Instead they just ignored the obnoxious chimera at first and tried to walk out with the book. Good thing it was the Troll, because that did hurt. Then they grilled the salamander and found that he could take out books for himself. He thus got taken out with the book.
• The central elevator platform in the tower was held by a giant metal hand with a ring with a big ruby on a finger. Towards the end of our session, after they had a proper tea party with a porcellaine doll, having used that elevator all the time, they finally realized the giant ring was in the fact the crown the queen sent them for.

In the end, they went to the top of the tower and did beat the Hunter, mainly becasue the picked up the icy trident before. In the end, they did use the magic pen to draw a flag and planting it, the highest ranking PC unleashing Souvereign to claim the tower for queen and country, which I never had expected.

Things that didn’t work:

• I couldn’t properly convey that the raspy voice speaking over the intercom was the dead customers ghost who would have liked a burial.
• I totally forgot that Changelings, too, would like a bathroom from time to time. But that’s a problem of dungeons everywhere I guess.
• I should have put in places where the Changelings could have engaged in their Reveries. A new rule in C20 to regain glamour based on kith.

In the end, I found the game a surprisingly good fit for this kind of adventure. The dreaming reality allowed me to just throw stuff in without much regard for background consistency. I don’t think I ever used quite so many varied skills in a WoD scenario, too. Changeling magic proved very colorful allowed for some creative applications.

Compared to 2nd edition, Changeling 20 has quite a few improvements, including more flexible rules for age, more foregiving rules for Banality, and a more narrative approach to many Kith abilities. Also the Unleashing of Arts also proved nice in the end.

Making moves

Tags

PbtA

Today I want to talk about designing moves for PbtA games. The originator himself has a very insightful series really showing what is possible under the move format. Today I will stick to the most common implementations, learning to warp before you gate and all that.

I assume you know the general setup and what a trigger is. Triggers are very useful to communicate the theme and mood of your game. When you go in guns blazing… is very different from When the bullets start flying… after all. I will mostly look at the rest, the move’s body today. So the first rule of thumb is:

Do not spell out the miss on basic moves.

I see this on many first drafts and my only reply is: Don’t do that. You see when you miss a roll and there is no specific miss entry, the GM is allowed to get creative on you. That’s good for evoking that feel of loss. You just lost your control of the situation whatever the outcome. Explicit miss entries are a good idea if you do not want to bother the GM with this thing. So mostly on supportive or setup moves that will be followed by something else or those that happen at the beginning or end of session.

So what happens on the 7-9 and 10+? First of all, moves are not necessarily success checks. Even a 10+ can be rather bad, if say your game is about kid detectives and the move is about facing monsters like the Demogorgon. The best we would expect here is damage mitigation. But that doesn’t mean it has to feel like a loss to the players. Unlike the the 6- the players should have some say about the bad things that happen on a hit.

Success at a cost

The minimal input you could have is, having the GM name a cost and condition and the player can accept it or not. This would be like Dungeon World’s Defy Danger. So there, you get what you want on 10+, but on a 7-9 the GM will throw in something. You take it or leave it. One thing you should be aware of is that you make the GM work. Just like on a miss the GM now has to come up with stuff with little guidance right now. Be sure you want to burden your GMs so.

You can of course give the player some option about the cost they want to incur. Either because you explicitely give several choices or word things so that the players can at least suggest the downsides. The moves quoted are all from my current project:

When you encourage, help or show kindness, roll +Heart. On a hit, choose 1.

• They take +1 on their roll.
• You ease their suffering.
• You guide them through a spell you have mastered. They can use it right now.

On a 7-9, also choose one of these.

• It costs you something.
• You expose yourself to a problem or danger.
• You reveal something you wish you hadn’t.

Of the potential downsides one is totally the players job. They should know what they might inadvertendly show. The problem or danger is mostly GM’s job, while the cost can be shared brainstorming. You can also defer problem to a later point. This can prevent a situation from escalating when you don’t want it so.

When you sneak after someone or go where you are not supposed to, roll +Ambition. On a hit, you learn or find something valuable. On a 10+, there are no complications on the way back.

The complications happen definitely after the juicy secrets have come out. The GM is of course tasked with coming up with those juicy things but those will hopefully be part of their preparation and do not have to be made up on the fly. Of course “success at a cost” is only one of the options to structure the 7-9 and 10+ parts. For even greater player choice you want to give them…

More or less choices

This includes the the “ask X question” types of moves as well as typically the most action oriented moves in the game, like fighting. In the latter case, often there is some good options and the option to avoid some bad thing, like not getting hurt. You can of course tailor the number of good and bad options to show how dangerous the thing is. Here are two more from my game to show the difference:

When you face an opponent, roll +Virtue. On a 7-9 choose 2, on a 10+ choose 3:

• The GM will tell you something about either your or their abilities. Take +1 forward.
• They concede something of your choice or suffer.
• You impress someone else.
• You come away clean.

When you address a problem with magic you have not mastered, make the necessary preparations and roll +Learning. On a hit, you can do it. On a 10+, choose 2. On a 7-9, choose 1.

• You don’t have to break any rules.
• There are no side-effects.
• Gain Training with this spell.

Special: If you have Training with this trick, take +1. If you do break rules, remember to raise your Scrutiny.

Comparing the 4 moves shown, the help move has the most open ended downsides, on a hit. This is intentional, because it can be used in a variety of situations and it is optional. If the players want to provide that +1 bonus or whatever, they may well pay for that. Next in line is Magic You Have Not Mastered, because, well, magic is risky. Whereas Face An Opponent is comparably predictable.

There are some other common patterns and we haven’t even touched on typical ways to make playbook moves, but I think this should serve as a baseline.

Loosing them in translation

Tags

GMing

One topic challenge for the smart guy in stories is that the party finds some texts in an ancient or otherwise rare language and need a translation. Now, you could just have them roll and give them the translation on a hit. If you want to make it a bit more complex, these are some ideas.

One word per success

This requires that you actually have a translated text in another language and show it to the players. They can try to figure it out by themselves. On a successful roll, they may ask for one word, per degree of success. If you use this method, you should have some idea what languages your group speaks. I once sat in a Cthulhu oneshot with a friend and the GM produced some Latin text. Little did he know, that we both studied Classics so could just read it. (Also if you need anything translated into Latin, just ask. By now, I’ve taught at university level for several years.)

If you want to pretty sure your players have no capabilities with the language you can grab some constructed language or do some conlanging on your own. If you want some intro, I recommend David Peterson’s youtube. He’s the guy who worked on Game of Throne and Defiance TV series.

Making translation real-ish

If you do not want to fiddle with a foreign language (or ask someone to it for you), you can exploit the truism that tranlation is hell. Something that works of fiction get wrong on in most cases. Even ad hoc translations are usually depicted as perfect in the target language, and often include knowledge someone just reading the text just cannot have.

Anyway, one constant pain is dates and measurements. They still are nowadays because some refuse to use the metric system, which kills mars probes, but that problem is much worse with olden texts. So on a hit, you could give them the translation, on a good hit, the conversions.

Similar problems occur with plants and small animals. We know that some “Blue-Fish” was pretty tasty in one Italian town, but we have know idea what species of fish they are talking about. In some cases those species might also have gone extinct, which could be a further problem for magic ingredients in RPGs.

There might also be technicalities that were clear to informed people the time, so no one spelled it out, for example rituals performed in a Greek manner. I guess some specialists may have gathered clues what that means, but I haven’t looked it up, so would probably fail that roll as an RPG character. Of course such things might be good opportunities to fail forward. If the magic circle is to be drawn in “the manner of the Lizardfolk”, you can ask a Lizardfolk mage, find some other expert or try to wing it.