tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1456499868514201792024-03-10T23:23:45.169-04:00Trilemma AdventuresShort role-playing adventures, musings on the hobby, illustration, and further afield.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.comBlogger258125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-34132942995184169812024-01-19T00:06:00.004-05:002024-01-19T10:34:01.612-05:00The Allsoul's Fire<p>Unbenownst to the bards, their music and tales are no mere diversion, but the carrier signal of a great mind that spans all of humanity. Deep thoughts live in the delicate web of syllables and poems that join us.</p><p>I've heard it said that we never <i>learned</i> to sing. We sang from the beginning, maybe before. It was <i>speech</i> we found later. In this first song, we were all one. Not people carrying out the will of a great Other, but each a part of the allsoul, indistinguishable from it.</p><p>Speech came later, a fracturing of the song into tiny pieces. Dividing us. With words we say, "Give me your axe, and you may sit by my fire." In the first songs there is only the wordless joy for hewing wood, for the warmth of fire.</p><p>It's true that bards' tales are full of words, stories of people and deeds and their axes and whatnot. Still, the deeper song is there. The thread of profound, shared truth is in the sounds. The words are mere beads strung upon it.</p><p>The mind of the allsoul roils and boils, a cauldron of feelings. It's full of the screams of birth, gasps of pain, dismay of starvation, cries of ecstacy, of memory and longing. All of these wordless sounds, whenever they are shared, are part of its vast ruminations.</p><p>If the allsoul is everpresent and encompassing, it is also out of our reach. Words can't find it, and it never speaks. No shrine is built to it. It gives no visions, sends no dreams, imposes no quests, gives no gifts, and asks nothing.</p><p>But it is at war.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>At the edges of the allsoul, the song thins. There you can hear the howling of the gods.</p><p>Lesser beings, the gods live in the middle scale. They are greater than any individual, but much smaller than the allsoul's vast union. Jealous of their strange cousin, they gnaw at it.</p><p>Gods have many tricks to unweave the allsoul and claim people for themselves. New songs, new feelings, new bonds. Receive my vision. Let prayers to me fill your mind. Become great! Lead your people. Work this magic. Build my shrine, my temple. My holy city.</p><p>Disavow fear, or love! Pray for the end of hewing, for a realm with no birth or dying, no eating or rutting. Free from hunger, unhurt and unwarmed by flames. Apart. Be my vessel, my champion, my conqueror. Enact my will upon the world, upon yourselves. Become part of me.</p><p>The gods are fierce and greedy, and each rises for a while. The allsoul moves to loosen each grip, to reclaim and heal itself. Its plans are so slow that they seem like nothing at all, the workings of time.</p><p>But in time the temples fall, and grass covers the shrines. Nearby, people are gathering wood for a fire, humming. If it was once a prayer, no one remembers the words. Wizards or priests with bulging eyes and red faces shout, "We're losing the old ways!"</p><p>A captain with a stick chases a group who are sleeping in a meadow. "Think of your duty!" They scream and run away, terrified.</p><p>After, when he is gone, they gather around a fire. They sit close together, arm in arm for warmth. The struggle is over.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-20082877031881787402023-12-30T01:08:00.010-05:002023-12-30T01:08:45.700-05:00Whose Mechanic is it Anyway?<p>Here's a simple principle:</p><p><b>(1) The player who needs to <i>use</i> a quantity should be the one tracking it.</b></p><p>If you're the one who updates your rogue's hit points, the hit point score should be on a piece of paper in your hands, not somebody else's (e.g. the GMs). Pretty obvious.</p><p>I can only ever remember this principle being broken once: in an early version of Blades in the Dark, it was actually the GM who had to factor up all the player skills as part of resolution.. but the GM didn't actually have this information, the players did. We adapted by making a little GM tracking sheet for all the PC's skill levels, but this was a bunch of bookkeeping. (A later version soon smoothed out this problem.)</p><p>Here's another principle, one this article is really about:</p><p><b>(2) The player who <i>desires the outcome</i> of a mechanic should be responsible for <i>invoking</i> it.</b></p><p>If you're playing a role-playing game, and part of your fun as GM is to force the PCs to face the hazards of the Purple Steppes, it should be you, the GM, that invokes the wandering encounter table.</p><p>This is a simple enough idea, but games break it all the time. This mostly happens because tracking quantities is work, and it can easily overwhelm the GM. But the consequences of giving a mechanic to somebody who <i>doesn't want to use it</i> are often that it doesn't get used at all.</p><p>Think about things like negative character conditions: <i>wet</i>, <i>exhausted</i> or plain old arithmetic-heavy encumbrance rules. These are quantities that the players must track, but which is against the PCs' interests. Think about how often these rules get forgotten?</p><p>Struggling with adversity is an awesome part of RPGs, but it usually falls to the GM to bring the adversity. When we leave it to players to do a bookkeeping-heavy task <i>whose outcome they don't want</i>, there are subtle incentives built into the rules that will encourage the group to ignore those rules.</p><p>I tried to address this in some versions of <a href="http://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/alm">ALM</a>, where PC conditions are tracked by the GM. It's the GM who wants the PCs to feel the freezing chill after they swim through an icy river, so the GM should a) be the one tracking that information and b) be the one who invokes it.</p><p>Here's an addition to that last principle:</p><p><b>(2.b) Mechanics which produce only negative or positive outcomes are <i>especially</i> important to give to the proper player</b></p><p>If a mechanic only ever produces bad news for the PCs, or nothing, it's especially important that it's not the PCs' job to invoke this mechanic. Encumbrance is the classic example of this.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Oh Right, I Forgot About Encumbrance</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZX3vYDRckERueCyJ2hMNbdUp3AJ0BM1pxXFMundQrGpp04KQ3G1OJS1po7N1usIEBrUazGPDpgvDVqLmhnt_EMRSWZoNYR56E__nGRoq_vyHVtJbqWmxE5Kvk9kSXRoiFmsQYCJ6Y5jM2WfyX0xJNjXDIYSDqf6Q8do3KTTd4Rt0B3S4-b6FmHnD7nTUv" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="538" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZX3vYDRckERueCyJ2hMNbdUp3AJ0BM1pxXFMundQrGpp04KQ3G1OJS1po7N1usIEBrUazGPDpgvDVqLmhnt_EMRSWZoNYR56E__nGRoq_vyHVtJbqWmxE5Kvk9kSXRoiFmsQYCJ6Y5jM2WfyX0xJNjXDIYSDqf6Q8do3KTTd4Rt0B3S4-b6FmHnD7nTUv=w265-h320" width="265" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Look at all this stuff I forgot to weigh</i></div><br />Encumbrance is such a great example of these problems:<p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Encumbrance is a bunch of granular arithmetic, so it takes <b>genuine effort</b> to keep track of it.</li><li>It's is a purely <b>negative mechanic</b>. There's nothing good that happens with encumbrance, it's all downside. Either you're <i>as normal</i> or <i>penalized</i>.</li><li>The player who is inconvenienced by encumbrance is the one who has to track it</li></ul><p></p><div>All together, old B/X encumbrance seems almost <i>purpose-built</i> to be ignored. Do a bunch of math for no other reason than to inconvenience your PC? <i>Oh, we're not bothering with that in this campaign.</i></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Pairing the Good with the Bad</h3><div>The old approach we're probably all familiar with is to try to be clever about <b>reducing bookkeeping</b>. This is especially true for mechanics with negative outcomes for the PCs, which (by principle #2) properly belong with the GM. GMs are busy and can only track so much, so if you can reduce your quantity to a simple tag or a single-digit number that doesn't change very often.</div><div><br /></div><div>But a new approach I'm trying out more recently is to <b>pair positive and negative outcomes</b> in the same mechanic. Here's part of the character sheet for my Isle of Wight game:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyfzMhBgMOlykDZZffErWNzK3Suq0wfHXQ8HzaBGUpYFgeSIh8fYlY3bHr2Kha3mJyjEbwHaFy5fhbakA2MShC4n3z68zXQf5K97d2So4bc6wsJjUtut-iyz0mjjx8qvKL3Ixywbu0qHRDvL8yX4xolsQfNz_qeDqgWnywpHgoVzfbw3A0Z60a8u_DxuZY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="984" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyfzMhBgMOlykDZZffErWNzK3Suq0wfHXQ8HzaBGUpYFgeSIh8fYlY3bHr2Kha3mJyjEbwHaFy5fhbakA2MShC4n3z68zXQf5K97d2So4bc6wsJjUtut-iyz0mjjx8qvKL3Ixywbu0qHRDvL8yX4xolsQfNz_qeDqgWnywpHgoVzfbw3A0Z60a8u_DxuZY=w400-h288" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>This is an equipment list, and I've tried to make it chunky/simplistic ('reduce bookkeeping'), but the important part here is that <b>lightly loaded characters get +1 to all of their rolls</b>. This is a big deal, and a massive incentive for players to care about tracking encumbrance. Judging by the player chatter as the characters set out on forays, it's having the desired effect.</div><br /></div><div>There are other areas in adventuring where I think this approach has merit, although I haven't worked out the details:</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Lighting and Darkness</h3><div style="text-align: left;">In many dungeon crawling games, the GM is the one advocating for the penalties and dangers of darkness, but isn't the one tracking torches. Secondly, having sufficient lighting has no upside, it's basically a mechanic where you just operate normally until you run out of light, at which point it's <i>terrible</i>. Forgetting to track your torches is a great idea!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Instead of this "boring until it's deadly" approach, imagine letting players use excess lighting for bonuses. Sure, they can <i>get by</i> with that one dude's flickering torch and its 30' radius, but imagine a system where searching, movement speed, noticing monsters—all of that is easier if they're using more than the minimum of light. Even if the tracking is still a little cumbersome, players would have reasons to want to bring these rules into play.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Spell Components</h3><div style="text-align: left;">Spend money and track encumbrance so you can use your cool powers? This has <i>forget about it</i> written all over it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Instead, think about magic that works <i>okay</i> (normally) <i>without</i> components, but if you buy, find, or quest for special components it enhances the magic, or even unlock new versions or higher levels of the spell. As written, AD&D spell components just seem like a way to sop up player money, more than it is an interesting aspect of play. Why not elevate it to an interesting focal point that the players will <i>want</i> to highlight?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I think there are similar possibilities to give players incentives to invoke rules for things like:</div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Food</b> tracking: like light and darkness, instead of 'eat enough or suffer', turn eating into a benefit.</li><li>Oh right, we forgot we had those <b>hirelings</b> with us—what useful thing have they done/what trouble have they gotten into?</li><li>The behavior of pets, familiars, dogs, and pack <b>animals</b></li><li><b>Relationships</b> with allies; reconnecting might reveal you've neglected them or that your rivals have been whispering to them, but it could also bring benefits like crucial news, or perhaps even timely gifts.</li></ul><div>What other subsystems could be refined with these principles?</div></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-82172483023424477262023-11-30T16:02:00.003-05:002023-11-30T16:02:50.790-05:00The Isle of Wight: Planning the Sandbox<p>One of the defining aspects of this campaign is my choice to run this on the <i>real</i>, <i>actual</i> Isle of Wight. I had thought about filing off the serial numbers, but the more time I spent poring over Google Maps, the more tempted I was to use the real place.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhst4-6tBTmn4EpyMgER3LU-dcPl_i43J2q6CvnTIeY8GgLzzcwJmPRRry6AAWog25reIrJyowMGQhUtRPhtPnJhO9ui4UMXE_CkNXZf6ahQGcz4mxYIXgrr4HnD-VmNX506bPb3VQXGSMWwFQGKxVEQ1e5kpHep3thsNOxipBilYjXaFGWUCAs1wDONI0J" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="1200" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhst4-6tBTmn4EpyMgER3LU-dcPl_i43J2q6CvnTIeY8GgLzzcwJmPRRry6AAWog25reIrJyowMGQhUtRPhtPnJhO9ui4UMXE_CkNXZf6ahQGcz4mxYIXgrr4HnD-VmNX506bPb3VQXGSMWwFQGKxVEQ1e5kpHep3thsNOxipBilYjXaFGWUCAs1wDONI0J=w400-h205" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b>Approaching the <i>Needles Tourist Attraction</i></b></div><br /><span style="text-align: left;">The sheer amount of information here is truly overwhelming, but also like catnip to my brain. For one thing, </span><i style="text-align: left;">players can get a good map of the whole place</i><span style="text-align: left;"> that really kicks player planning up a notch.</span></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7ctjgIvFHgSe2PDud2fxvKTYlLs3XAmO9hq3IElnhQiHgTmvMt6Wk8LooZtPODR0g7EXVdsK6gO3pryBvfgQlLZjtzfcJCA_cdkX_9MngSvae3gUMIawq4KX78aKvgx8TZNZUs3D_qot3gQipAxeyqOESXgHaA-kwUfKQwpb03qk-sNWreni0MCAOdUzH" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1552" data-original-width="1568" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7ctjgIvFHgSe2PDud2fxvKTYlLs3XAmO9hq3IElnhQiHgTmvMt6Wk8LooZtPODR0g7EXVdsK6gO3pryBvfgQlLZjtzfcJCA_cdkX_9MngSvae3gUMIawq4KX78aKvgx8TZNZUs3D_qot3gQipAxeyqOESXgHaA-kwUfKQwpb03qk-sNWreni0MCAOdUzH=w400-h397" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Ordnance Survey - Needles Attraction Area</b></div><br />When the players get to a location, I can actually pull out Google street view and show what it looks like.</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVTfn-S-YrFhx5AZmxJZCVjgCx0S7J1gScsb1nLXTJO2Y1D-rNEtK-oyHtFJghSzcAJ6hL6GtKc6DBzJ6DjMr8a1mJU6fI_PSMTl_8VLQ7VIlLBHdXEYt3xSmcJ6G3yCtY87tuE9ivNveRtR8pD6ccjhH9_71PZJdKh3htSlbIjjrgvNrzkqH8ja8kR3Zv" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="1998" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVTfn-S-YrFhx5AZmxJZCVjgCx0S7J1gScsb1nLXTJO2Y1D-rNEtK-oyHtFJghSzcAJ6hL6GtKc6DBzJ6DjMr8a1mJU6fI_PSMTl_8VLQ7VIlLBHdXEYt3xSmcJ6G3yCtY87tuE9ivNveRtR8pD6ccjhH9_71PZJdKh3htSlbIjjrgvNrzkqH8ja8kR3Zv=w400-h194" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>"It looks like this, only the bus is burned"</b></div><br /></div><div>Then when you get to a location, the GM can actually pull out google street view and make it really clear what the players are dealing with, and what it feels like to be there.</div><div><br /></div><h3>Preparing a Real Place</h3><div>I forget how he put it, but Ken Hite once said that a sandbox is a load of sand your players can do anything with, but it's also great to have a bunch of <b>plastic dinosaurs</b> buried for them to find. This feels like phase 2 of my prep that I'm only now starting to enter, before this I had to figure out how to handle players going <i>anywhere</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dungeons are deliberately constraining, but I've got almost the opposite - the players have a motorboat, which means they can go to a huge number of places on the island. A circuit of the island is less than 100km, so they can pull into any cove, isolated bed and breakfast, seaside self-catered holiday cottages, and any of a number of actual towns, villages, manors, pubs, and other facilities.</div><div><br /></div><div>The only way to handle all this is to have a <b>set of tables</b>, enough to be able to roll with any location the players might visit.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Big Weather Table</h3><div>Instead of having a weather <i>table</i> to roll on, I decided to pre-roll the weather. The players are starting on a cargo ship, making day and night forays through swift tides, landing on rocky coasts or via estuaries that turn into mud beds at low tide. For this reason, I built out a fairly comprehensive weather table:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfqYYmVV_ELjNVvSY_dtTTuvlOnEqQ8WJK6R32IGk1oJJufSnoVneBXzB_1AMCo2T0lYWD_o-9xbHLrDxU-QXoGR7mbRChshWRq2BpZ-XQD7tRp7Ma2wojwwbZZAvzAj20BnXXR93QBAbPyJXDAqiwTmDBMyP5Tb2HpW9x47x4waKLImAEcGWM8_NHzrUJ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="3550" height="54" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfqYYmVV_ELjNVvSY_dtTTuvlOnEqQ8WJK6R32IGk1oJJufSnoVneBXzB_1AMCo2T0lYWD_o-9xbHLrDxU-QXoGR7mbRChshWRq2BpZ-XQD7tRp7Ma2wojwwbZZAvzAj20BnXXR93QBAbPyJXDAqiwTmDBMyP5Tb2HpW9x47x4waKLImAEcGWM8_NHzrUJ=w400-h54" width="400" /></a></div><br />I'm especially fond of the little <i>tides</i> notation:</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">↑12:00 ←14:52 ↓17:45 →20:37 ↑23:30</div><div><br /></div><div>This is <span style="text-align: center;">↑ </span>high tide at noon, peak <span style="text-align: center;">← </span>westward flow in the afternoon, <span style="text-align: center;">↓ </span>low tide at supper, eastward flow in late evening and then the second <span style="text-align: center;">↑ </span>high tide just before midnight.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>There's a similar one for the moon (which is important when the players are sneaking around at night without lights):</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"> ↑07:00 🌓13:15 ↓19:30</div><div><br /></div><div>That's a <span style="text-align: center;">🌓 </span>waxing moon that <span style="text-align: center;">↑ </span>rises at 7 AM, highest at 1:15 PM, then <span style="text-align: center;">↓ </span>setting after supper. (What's important about this is that the moon is up in the day, and will provide no light at night even if the sky is clear.)</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Making a big weather table like this does take time, but I'm now firmly in favor, for two reasons:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Handling time is much faster than randomly rolling the weather. I just switch to the Weather tab and there it is, today's weather.</li><li>I never forget to roll. There's always <i>some</i> weather (even if it's nice).</li></ol></div><div>Because of these two effects, even though the weather and tides have not yet been a meaningful bother, they're always <i>there</i> adding a little bit of texture.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Other Tables</h3><div>I won't share the actual content of the other tables so as not to reveal the man behind the curtain to my players, but here's what I've made so far:</div><div><ol><li>Day and night <b>encounter tables</b> for town streets, parks, rural areas, and coastlines.</li><li>Random situation for <b>street intersections</b>, accumulations of cars (lots, crashes, jams)</li><ul><li>Vehicle types and condition (e.g. burned, out of fuel).</li><li>Car crash damage table</li></ul><li>Random <b>infected behavior</b> tables.<br />Like Year Zero "monster combat action" tables, so far these have been really good for creating slightly chaotic encounters without me feeling on the hook for setting the danger level.</li><li><b>Site condition</b> table - what's going on in this building?<br />This one has a few dimensions, based on the location on the island (mostly, how close was it to the initial spread of the infection), and then how lucky was it?</li><li><b>Loot tables</b> for cars, service vehicles, farm buildings, clinics, restaurants, households, campsites, bakeries, shooting ranges, and aircraft.<br /></li><li><b>Survivor</b> tables: what they're doing now, their reaction, how they make decisions, where they're based, the state of the group back at the base, their larger-scale goal and anti-goal (e.g. communicate with other groups, hiding will just get us all starved), their theory about the infection, and what they know about the infected.</li></ol><div>Most of these tables were made by hand, but I do have to say that for random loot tables, ChatGPT is incredibly useful. Of course, all the obvious caveats about ChatGPT apply, but for scutwork tasks like, 'list the shit that's in a rural village medical clinic in the UK in 1989', it's very very fast.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've now got a prompt that will let me just specify a context, and it will produce output that I can just paste into my self-rolling tables sheet. It's fast enough that I can make and add a new table during play, in about the same amount of time it would have taken me to roll random treasure.</div><div><br /></div><div>Again, this works specifically because of the kind of game this is. I'd never use this for the cool treasure in the wizard's vault, but for generating the picked-over contents of a blood-spattered .. uh.. aerospace research factory, it's a godsend.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Self-Rolling Tables!</h3><div>I may write more detail about this in another post, but one of the best things I did with my tables is make them all self-rolling. They're in google sheets, and so every table has one or more die rolls to generate a series of results, and the table highlights itself to show those results.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">This is a self-rolling car damage table:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj5YUzz_hYzUqzPIaqaoF3shtIUEmknSI1wc7_mkqVh3O4QYabNCdZcXvkaEMtdG6a5yiEchtDt0N9BSmCUyfepFNAM2Q88hnRIrIkPKA6gidL1IaeKk_7vlrna05cP6-Qk8BBlgi69Y2ceETsgnrN8fa_9XYhzODzoNVDHbaEOKowT6mRFQHkZRQUumeZf" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="568" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj5YUzz_hYzUqzPIaqaoF3shtIUEmknSI1wc7_mkqVh3O4QYabNCdZcXvkaEMtdG6a5yiEchtDt0N9BSmCUyfepFNAM2Q88hnRIrIkPKA6gidL1IaeKk_7vlrna05cP6-Qk8BBlgi69Y2ceETsgnrN8fa_9XYhzODzoNVDHbaEOKowT6mRFQHkZRQUumeZf" width="243" /></a></div></div><br /></div>This result has picked out parts of the car that have been damaged depending on the car's speed. Lighter stuff is damaged at low speeds, the darkest color implies high speed damage.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like the weather table, this means the handling time is incredibly short. I just have to flip to the Loot tab and this is there for me to read off and weave into the description:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhfoyIh9xENbe6EEKzzXrRWVF2U7VXfJ6kWzF8Ad7IWO0dkaZDcGj10LE47tmHuVKBxkM9Jnlb1XRzF_lzJPXMHZfxQy7eqimhN33Dv2UuFGnYKRmnQe1OQyKTpMONHOJ7dBwKtoxP-NWrRpPLneodi2zHv5tPH8nOxGaU4Q3_EfpnKO4-I1v8IroGKVK7a" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1002" data-original-width="1594" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhfoyIh9xENbe6EEKzzXrRWVF2U7VXfJ6kWzF8Ad7IWO0dkaZDcGj10LE47tmHuVKBxkM9Jnlb1XRzF_lzJPXMHZfxQy7eqimhN33Dv2UuFGnYKRmnQe1OQyKTpMONHOJ7dBwKtoxP-NWrRpPLneodi2zHv5tPH8nOxGaU4Q3_EfpnKO4-I1v8IroGKVK7a=w400-h251" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">These loot tables are rolling on other, much larger tables and pulling out an appropriate number random finds. Pre-rolled loot is especially helpful for me because the players are moving through places that in some cases aren't picked over. When they say, "What's in the car's trunk?" it's amazing to be able to just smoothly transition to narrating them popping open trunks and peering in windows and telling them what's there .. instead of having to stop roll a bunch of dice.</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">With all this, I'm able to handle most specific locations, but there are a few situations that still give me pause, namely <i>broad vistas</i>. If the players can see a whole residential neighbourhood (because they're up on a hill), I still don't have a tool to help me generate the overall impression. So far, this has never come up because the Isle of Wight has incredibly steep coastlines in many places, so from the water you can really only see stuff just beyond the beach. But as soon as the players reach somewhere like Cowes, or drive along the Medina river inland.. hoo boy.</div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-75610590717376569332023-11-13T16:49:00.001-05:002023-11-13T16:49:21.593-05:00The Isle of Wight: Zombie Survival<p>A few weeks ago, I kicked off a zombie survival game set in the real-world Isle of Wight. It's been really delightful!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0ZbM-t-Fi0TYyCudHsJpfLMNjZh0G3lb7ymT6JHt5bdWsEQ9XL2-fOST1ESCgrYm9V8iXV8ywOUlE5HaxGRmAlcrgfnZOTYdIzAdaCCcMQQ7louIo-542ThvWl6kbxeJLKqzBjyOZvQq3_KkrPmldZcxbY-eZH84et7ghlP3YTbC-588JGMmRnF5vXXRN" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><img alt="" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="1468" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0ZbM-t-Fi0TYyCudHsJpfLMNjZh0G3lb7ymT6JHt5bdWsEQ9XL2-fOST1ESCgrYm9V8iXV8ywOUlE5HaxGRmAlcrgfnZOTYdIzAdaCCcMQQ7louIo-542ThvWl6kbxeJLKqzBjyOZvQq3_KkrPmldZcxbY-eZH84et7ghlP3YTbC-588JGMmRnF5vXXRN=w400-h233" width="400" /></a></div><p>The campaign pitch goes like this:</p><p><i>On November 4, 1988, a unexpected nuclear exchange takes place across western Europe. The cargo ship BF Fortaleza is travelling unloaded from Lisbon, Portugal to Bournemouth UK when the night horizon lights up with flashes. In the confusion, the ship runs aground on a sand bar off the coast of the Isle of Wight.</i></p><p><i>With no rescue coming, the crew of 27 shelters on the crippled container ship as winter sets in, glued to the radio for hopeful news. In December, news comes of a mysterious infection sweeping through the cities, with unbelievable reports of people taken by an intense fever and then eating each other.</i></p><p><i>In January, the UK provisional authority declares mainland cities uninhabitable, and broad-casts an instruction to stop sheltering in place and to flee to sparsely unpopulated areas by any means necessary. Signals from people become infrequent.</i></p><p><i>In February, the automated radio messages fall silent.</i></p><p><i>It is March, 1989, five weeks since the last human voice came over the radio. The ship’s supplies will last only a few weeks longer. Reluctantly, the captain asks for volunteers to explore the Isle of Wight, in the hopes of finding other people still alive and the means of long-term survival.</i></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>I'm running the game as a more-or-less <i><a href="https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/" target="_blank">West Marches</a></i> style, in the sense that it's an open sandbox with the players dropping in as they're able. There's a compelling event that gets things going (the home base is running out of food), but other than that there's</p><p>I'm trying to run with old school sandbox sensibilities. This isn't a well worn groove for me, I'm very used to trying to maneuver hard to produce a satisfying outcome for each session, avoiding duds at all costs. But I'm letting myself off that hook and instead going with a <i>what would happen</i>? refereeing style.</p><p>This can produce sessions that are just so-so, dramatically, but there's a long-term build-up that happens when the world and the events of the game <i>don't</i> conform to dramatic logic, and instead accumulate a sort of stubborn tangibility.</p><p>I've <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/2017/08/resolution-awesome-or-tangible.html">written about this before</a>, but the principles of this could be summarized as:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The GM (and/or the rules) creates an environment with <b>hard edges</b></li><li>Players respond by <b>balancing risk/reward</b>, and by <b>inventing solutions</b></li><li>Poignancy emerges over the <b>long term</b></li><li>The design challenge is to help players <b>understand the reality of the situation</b> efficiently, so they can <b>get on with responding to it</b> in the knowledge that their <b>planning effort is worth it</b></li></ol><h3 style="text-align: left;">System</h3><div>For a system, I'm using a <a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/post_assets/Isle%20of%20Wight%2020231111.pdf" target="_blank">kit-bashed homegrown system I'm just calling 'Isle of Wight'.</a> The aesthetics are deliberately old school, but it's very much a hybrid of a lot of things:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>levels and xp-for-gold, except the rewards are for survivors, medicine and food</li><li>old school saving throws to help set the mood</li><li>core resolution is a sort of PbtA-i-fied Blades in the Dark - roll 2d6, but against three grades of difficulty</li><li>The Regiment style encounter rolls (so good)</li><li>Blades-style stress meter, but powered by sleep and food</li><li>Pits & Perils-inspired inventory with super simplistic encumbrance</li><li>the <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/2016/03/a-turn-sequence.html">table-order initiative with interrupts</a> I used in ALM</li></ul></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/post_assets/Isle%20of%20Wight%2020231111.pdf" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="810" data-original-width="1050" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqa1lHD7F6OLzPGutrkOTvQVva1GopEs7CjscE408od2FGwCxlntCSwakyV_oY15s41LtAZid1NtK9jYfNclIikzDEtilG3mX_k2o54Av0TWa2Xu1GVcvMGclqnCFsBXf2RVpeAFKspl08V4FD04yuGm52ChN5gDapk8KQS7Ge0xyyt-l-KtKkPI9OGZEK=w400-h309" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">At some point soon I'll write about how I'm planning this campaign, which held some surprises for me!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-7510574351318367562023-11-11T13:16:00.003-05:002023-11-11T13:16:48.021-05:00Do Not Anger the Gods<p>When the servants of the gods fight, they use more than earthly wood and steel. Taking a blow from them can have strange consequences.</p>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>d12</td>
<td>Legendary Critical Hit</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Target knocked unconscious for d6 minutes, slammed into 3d6 years of an alternate life of quiet contemplation and service to the being they were just fighting.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>A mighty blow breaks the target's forearm. d6 musical instruments within a league of here also break. Any song or music played within sight of this spot sounds melancholy and out of tune, and brings misfortune (-1 to all rolls) to anyone hearing it for the remainder of the day.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The target's name is now a curse. Anyone who hears, reads or utters it suffers -1 to all rolls for the remainder of the day.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The attack causes a deep gash that never fully heals. Every few minutes, a drop of blood falls. As it touches the ground, it sprouts into a delicate, white flower. If the petals are boiled into a tea, whoever drinks them knows what the target was doing in the moment when the droplet fell.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Weapon impales the target. It is part of them now, as much as the bones in their body.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Eldritch strike kills the target's dream body. They may no longer sleep. If they try, their empty body rises, possessed for d4 hours. Roll d6 to determine the possessing entity. On a 1-2, a harmless and playful wisp. 3-4, a harbinger of the being that dealt the blow. 5-6, an infernal spirit that lies and taunts.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Cratering blow knocks the target flat on their back. A hole opens up in the ground, d6-1 paces from the target. Earth and stone crumble away, widening it by ten feet per year, and deepening by thirty. This continues until the target dies.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>A fearsome, life-ending blow misses the target by a hair. Even so, the psychic wake of the attack is so devastating that it symbolically kills the target. From this moment on, no one remembers anything the target says or does. To the rest of the world, it is as if they have died.<br /></td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The target is unharmed, but a distant loved one dies instantly. For the next year, any damage done to the target by any enemy doesn't harm them, but harms a friend, ally, or loved one instead.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>The blow splits the target into two halves, which live on separately. Roll d6. On a 1-2 the separate piece is the head, shoulder and one arm. On a 3-4, top and bottom half. On a 5-6, a split down the middle, from head to groin.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Astral strike alchemically inverts the target. Their clothes and armor turn to flesh: this is now the target's real body, wrapped around a body-shaped sculpture of leather, metal and wood.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Weapon strikes the target's sternum, shattering their rib cage. Knife-like bone darts shoot in every direction, causing d6 damage to all who fail a save vs. dragon breath. The target must choose: live on as a ribless human worm, or expire in a shower of innards.</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br /></p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-49517917195460201612023-11-04T17:27:00.005-04:002023-11-05T08:44:10.252-05:00A Patterned MagicHere's a mini-game for a wizard player, designed to encourage tinkering between sessions in a way that emulates downtime magical research.<div><br /><div>Imagine a sudoku board with astrological symbols, which corresponds to the pattern of the wizard's preparations and meditations.<br /><div><br /></div><div><div>Certain tetris-like shapes of specific symbols are how wizards memorize spells. e.g. Fire over Earth with a Sun on both sides of the Earth is the Smiting Fire spell. If that's placed anywhere on the pattern between sessions, Smiting Fire is memorized.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXuttrwxaUyBloV47zpoXWxIkpt3XW0Aw7M1sGI-TyBXaADgO3PVwmHyiGY-RUyggtWia0gSL7WDm043LTqMzgW_3SNVLL-t2vEn8JjX0Hc93REZyT9pmzspe4tyPAKt7o0BBO2NhZINsjQ0h33IeHtH6YLwrmkPmQ5SIyhkaOSc3XLu9BDSyRdCKMu7Z7" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="660" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXuttrwxaUyBloV47zpoXWxIkpt3XW0Aw7M1sGI-TyBXaADgO3PVwmHyiGY-RUyggtWia0gSL7WDm043LTqMzgW_3SNVLL-t2vEn8JjX0Hc93REZyT9pmzspe4tyPAKt7o0BBO2NhZINsjQ0h33IeHtH6YLwrmkPmQ5SIyhkaOSc3XLu9BDSyRdCKMu7Z7=w200-h150" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Smiting Fire</b></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Great Patterns</h3><div>The GM prepares five or so Great Patterns, completed boards which each correspond to the ultimate expression of a particular divine imprint on the world, ancient unholy covenant, or the most secret teachings of a long-lost school of magic. In addition to the memorized spells, the more of the board that matches a specific Great Pattern adds different effects. (If you unwittingly include the shape for Drenzel's Eye, orcs will always find you, etc.)</div><div><br /></div><div>There are also basic, sudoku-like rules. It's not good to have more than one of the same rune in any given 3x3 'house', for example. The the more rules you break, the higher the chance of spell failure or wacky outcome.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiezv-tiCJMw-RF5bZPxuBL92GtnHr6cFNk6KzKXwSgcw7XL5rnr1FKoGZvGLqdes2IAnPxYxJQ3oTwhWzkHMaun6wSeHOr3DGaGG3LhqYyiI-1eNPH4c-AlxxFXB_oi-x0czy2gIP03cRDlLrBDwXcPM7HpP9rbcGdVCpNox-MIPKYhFdpiMtZ8uz6VJq" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1132" data-original-width="1165" height="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiezv-tiCJMw-RF5bZPxuBL92GtnHr6cFNk6KzKXwSgcw7XL5rnr1FKoGZvGLqdes2IAnPxYxJQ3oTwhWzkHMaun6wSeHOr3DGaGG3LhqYyiI-1eNPH4c-AlxxFXB_oi-x0czy2gIP03cRDlLrBDwXcPM7HpP9rbcGdVCpNox-MIPKYhFdpiMtZ8uz6VJq=w400-h389" width="400" /></a></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>A small pattern containing 6 different spells</b></div><br /></div><div>Newer wizards can always leave large parts of the pattern blank for safety's sake, or only bear smaller patterns less than full 9x9 size. Wizards bearing patterns with more than a dozen runes radiate faint magic to those who can see; wizards with completed, full-size patterns are psychically radiant, crackling with otherworldly sparks and eddies that tumble from their hair and fingers.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Advancing</h3><div>Wizards advance in a few ways: Fragments of these boards are scattered throughout the campaign world.. a strip of runes on an altar, a 3x3 embroidered on the lich's frayed shroud, a dusty tome of mad scrawlings.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes it's a literal spell, sometimes it's just a part of a Great Pattern, or perhaps just a clue. ("The great meditation of Deel wants not for fire in the upper houses, and thrice Water.")</div><div><br /></div><div>A wizard's meditation pattern can be changed in play, but this is usually a solo activity done between sessions. (It takes a game hour of time to change one rune if it does happen in play.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Another way to advance is magical research. If a wizard has a month of downtime, they can submit a pattern of whatever level of completion to the GM. They make a research roll, modified by the money they spend, the time and the quality of their sanctum.</div><div><br /></div><div>Based on their research success, the GM will reveal one or more clues, complete spells, or matching parts of a Great Pattern in the wizard's submission. (This could be a useful discovery, or perhaps something to avoid at all costs.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Another way to learn more magic is to watch another wizard perform it. When encountering either instructive, helpful, or antagonistic wizards using magic, there is a chance for the player wizard to discern a fragment of the meditation in use.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">A Magical Minigame</h3><div>The point of all this is to give wizard players a minigame that feels a little bit like actual magical research. Bring the arcane arrangement of runes and symbols into between session play.</div><div><br /></div><div>The 'minigame' is the tinkering with the patterns, taking all the scraps and clues of what the party has learned and trying to make the best pattern they can. What if that altar was actually to Deel, and the strip of runes we saw there <i>does</i> belong in the void pattern? How do I sandwich all eleven spells I know without having all those pesky suns fry me alive every time I cast a spell? Do I fully commit to the Great Pattern of Deel, or do I try to bash in a few of those handy Sorgite curses in the bottom row?</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Some Assembly Required</h3><div>This of course only works if the GM is ready to prep a few things, giving runic patterns to all the spells, creating however many Great Patterns.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of all, it all relies on some tool to quickly enter and analyze a player-submitted pattern so the GM can immediately see everything of interest that will affect gameplay.</div><div><br /><br /></div></div></div></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-89038042562973298282023-09-30T22:44:00.001-04:002023-09-30T22:44:09.037-04:00A Downtime Calendar<p>One way to bring a setting's calendar to life is through downtime. When you spend a month cooling your heels and recovering from the road, each month has distinctive, meaty benefits.</p><p>Set the list out where the players can get it, and let them make their own choices. It doesn't even matter if players are actually able to make use of the benefits they want. If all that happens is the party lamenting, "Damn, shame we have to travel during Ferch," it's doing its work!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-in7rqdvPe39Svpyd5NgLnsS3cHrpteG8WDP81YQbEvRZmPZNkVliqL53wjM8gH5aK-2w5DPLBjwab1P-W9dLUxEVl0tQfVEMvw4m7SLXXibUIw-aXhcLPyU1YKGpGeixWd7qHFeqzJ2m0GnSDyvJboUJCC0-fCbgmQfHp1B7G87RPQfaa6OvVRjz1kS/s1185/08%20Adventurer%20Bed.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1009" data-original-width="1185" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-in7rqdvPe39Svpyd5NgLnsS3cHrpteG8WDP81YQbEvRZmPZNkVliqL53wjM8gH5aK-2w5DPLBjwab1P-W9dLUxEVl0tQfVEMvw4m7SLXXibUIw-aXhcLPyU1YKGpGeixWd7qHFeqzJ2m0GnSDyvJboUJCC0-fCbgmQfHp1B7G87RPQfaa6OvVRjz1kS/w400-h340/08%20Adventurer%20Bed.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>Here's a set of calendar downtime benefits appropriate to the sort of campaign presented in the compendium, scattered communities in a wilderness full of danger. If the party spends the full month engaged in rest or aiding the community, the benefit is theirs!</p>
<style>
.nowrap {
whitespace: nowrap;
}
</style>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>#</td>
<td nowrap="">Month </td>
<td>Benefit of a full month of downtime</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Anvial</td>
<td>Winter's stillness brings clarity. The guide you seek will find you.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Bolc</td>
<td>As the snows subside, old paths need mending. Those who do warden's work are blessed: they will not get lost on the way to their next destination.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Cindal</td>
<td>Spring dawns. Planting time means grudges must be set aside, at least for now. If you seek a favor of someone influential, ask it.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Ferch</td>
<td>Rains reveal what must be repaired. Find the old stones and new and get to stacking.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Greel</td>
<td>In the humid season, if you seek an ally with special skills, you find them. They will aid you, but summer's friend betrays in autumn.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td nowrap="">Halvilary</td>
<td>Summer's forges burn hot and true. If you are procuring gear, one item made for you this month is of remarkable sturdiness. It will never fail you.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td><br /></td>
<td>Juthon</td>
<td>Long idle days and warm summer nights are fertile ground for schemers.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>Marial</td>
<td>Summer's last light is golden. Rest in it, and all injuries to the body are cured, however severe—but scars, grief and curses are yours to keep.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Samber</td>
<td>Nothing like a month in the fields to cement a bond with the community. Whatever else has come before, you are welcomed as if you were born here.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td>
<td>Tershon</td>
<td>The last of autumn is no time to start a long journey, but those who feast well in Tershon will not grow hungry until they are home once more.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>Nollen</td>
<td>The hopeful stand watch over the roads, praying for cold winds to bring lost friends. The steadfast will not be disappointed.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>Rinth</td>
<td>In the darkness of winter, secrets slip from cold-numbed hands. Something important kept hidden by the community is revealed to you.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>(These rules are <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/mosaic">MOSAIC Strict</a>.)</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-24903211195177894172023-09-03T20:18:00.002-04:002023-09-03T20:18:38.152-04:00The Fires of Lost Tlarba<p>A dense and dusty city toils under a flickering yellow sky. None may enter, but everyone does. All may leave, but none do.</p><p>Prickly selks stand at the gates. Their halberds gleam like razors, but their eyes are dull from the heat. The crowd inches forward toward the city's mouth.</p><p>Sickly smoke rises from the burners along the high walls: a thousand fires of caylum wood, oracle grass, the narcotic feathers of the santhum bird. Travellers cover their mouths and noses, hoping to ward off the stupor that will soon take them. Others breathe it freely in the hopes they will acclimatize. None will.</p><p>The crowd moves again, and the gates loom overhead. Everyone who passes them is looking for something. Everything lost winds up in Tlarba, they say, so where better to look? This is why you came, but maybe it was a mistake.</p><p>Robed sisters push and weave through the entry line, offering marks of return. "Sixty silver and we'll fetch you out if you're in too long." Ink-black fingers tug at your skin. "Here is best," she says, jabbing at your cheek. "How long do you want? A year? Three?" She isn't joking.</p><p>The nut-seller at the side of the road laughs. "Don't waste your money, they can't get out either." He scoops roasted seeds into a folded leaf, "Buy these instead. They won't get you out, but it's best not go in wanting!"</p><p>As you reach for them, he catches your sleeve and pulls you close.</p><p>"I mean it," he hisses. The humor is gone from his face. "I went in a prince. Choose better!"</p><p>He shoves you back into the lineup, laughing once more. Stupid man. Who comes here if they have a better choice?</p><p>The crowd moves again, and you pass the gates. Pilgrims, families, warriors, nobles; their mules, horses, dogs and goats. Each enters in their own way, but the sweet smoke claims everyone who draws breath. You're still thinking of the nut-seller's words as it takes you.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>d10</td>
<td>Where You Awaken, d20 weeks later</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>A secluded garden terrace, high above the haze of the city. Succulent plants hang from rows of trellis.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>At bend in a narrow, twisting set of stairs. Fresh air somehow blows from a crack in a clay duct.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>In a large stone chamber, apparently beneath a temple. Chanting comes from above. The stone floor below you is warm to the touch.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Crazily high up, halfway up a cathedral tower. You sit on a stone ledge barely wide enough for the birds. The squares and rectangles of the city spread beneath you endlessly.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Sitting at the edge of a fountain in a wide, sunlit plaza. The sparking water cools your fingers and clears your mind.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Lying in soft earth in a walled vegetable garden. Half-eaten gourds surround you; seeds are stuck to your face.</td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>A public bath house, at the end of a long pool of oily, fragrant water. Bright morning light comes from slats in the ceiling. Smells of cooking waft in from the street outside.</td></tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>In a dark servant's passage somewhere in a grand, stone house. A thin shaft of afternoon light comes from a tiny window.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>On a luxurious bed, somewhere in the high palace. A huge silver washing basin stands on spindles of dark wood. Curtains billow in the cool night breeze. In the courtyard below, servants are lighting lamps along the edge of a dark, shallow pool.</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>You stumble on the road leading out of the city. The yawning gates are behind you. Hundreds of people queue to enter as you once did, but they pay you no attention. Roll no more, your time in the city is over. It is d4 years after you entered the city.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<table class="osr numbered"><tbody><tr><td>d10</td><td>Context</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>Exhausted revelers surround you. Some are sleeping, others quietly chatting or combing each other's hair. All are sweaty from dancing, running, or sex.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>You are pale and sickly. A friend mops the sweat from your brow. The sickest among you is now immune to poison.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>Damp, mildewed air blows from a hole in the ground. You have found a way into the labyrinth beneath the city, the streets and alleys of an earlier era, buried by time and new stone.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>Several families are preparing food, setting out tables with fresh bread, pots of stew, and hot, watery wine. Children light fill lanterns and musicians are assembling to begin the song. Adults speak in quiet tones about the business of the city.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>You and a woman you don't recognize hold opposite ends of a sheaf of scrolls, the collected notes of the high palace locksmith.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>You are covered in small cuts and bruises. At first they hurt terribly, then not at all, and rub off like actor's paint.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>A small gathering of students and poets was listening to what you had to say, and is waiting for you to continue.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>You have been running for your life. Your heart is pounding. In ten seconds, d6 strong youths will arrive to beat you for stealing from them. </td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>A guard's knife is bloody in your hands. He lies at your feet.</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td>You have found whoever or whatever you came for.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<p><br /></p><table class="osr numbered"><tbody><tr><td>d10</td><td>A bit later, you suddenly remember</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Living with a family for a time, learning their skills, working as part of the family business. When you touch your callused hands, you remember that they loved you.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Squatting in a temple for months. You learned the names of many animals who lived there. If you see them again, they will remember you.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Wading through a foul-smelling canal. A youth you had made friends with dallied, and that was the last you saw of them.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Watching a pack of feral people eating a man who had stumbled in the gutter. They tore at him while he groaned. You remember the taste of him; perhaps you joined them.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Exchanging clothes with a princeling, who then slipped away into the crowds. You still wear his ring, which marks your station in the city.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Studying with a monstrous, toad-like philosopher who swore off tools of any kind—not just hand tools, but clothes, dwellings, weapons, books. 'Convenience softens the mind,' it would croak. It is right, and its teachings have unlocked something strange and new within you.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Fighting your way through a riot in the Plaza of Jewelers. Many had fallen, and the flagstones were slippery with blood of citizens and palace guards. The shouting still rings in your ears. Many enemies were made that day; some on each side will remember you.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Plotting against an <a href="/2016/06/the-lenses-of-heaven.html">order of priests</a> who jealously protect a magical way out of the city. Your fellow conspirators plan to strike tonight, coming up through the servers. They're relying on you find an open the sewer grate in the Plaza of Tears, or they will all drown as they try to escape.</td></tr><tr><td> </td><td>Riding with the nut-seller in a royal palanquin. He was dressed like a prince, and proudly pointed out the sights as you passed. A location you sought is now known to you.</td></tr> <tr><td> </td><td>You remember an age passing, lifetimes, the end of the world—or at least, the city. An eternity of wind gnawed the stone blocks of the walls and palaces down to nothing. For aeons, you knew only blowing sand and a lifeless sky. Then, one day, a traveller came and planted his staff here. Then another. Slowly, you began to take shape again. Streets, walls, gardens, plazas, alleyways, palaces, canals, and of course: people. Seething crowds of millions, the blood of the city. Your blood.</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Whatever your circumstances when you awaken, your relief from the mind-addling haze of the city is temporary. In 2d6 hours, you succumb again.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-43962639902468843552023-07-27T16:58:00.001-04:002023-07-27T17:06:48.358-04:00Avoiding Inapt Discussion in RPGs<p>Recently, I learned about the Brindlewood Bay's approach to mysteries via <a href="https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/the-darkened-threshold/the-brindlewood-bay-mystery-system">the Darknened Threshold podcast</a>. It struck me that it's does something that Blades in the Dark also does, but in a completely different way:</p><p>It avoids inapt discussion about information the players don't have.</p><p>Brindlewood Bay has a Theorize move where players chew over the assembled clues and propose answers to the whodunnit. If their roll succeeds, then their theory becomes the real answer. This is the opposite choice that Blades in the Dark made, but for the same root reason. </p><p>Blades eliminates players interminably planning out their heists, instead letting them retcon in preparations using flashback scenes.</p><p>In a traditional game where the heist target or murder mystery is predefined, players can easily spend a lot of time planning for contingencies that will never occur.. or indulging fanciful theories disconnected from the secret truth. </p><p>"You guys are overthinking this," the GM says (or thinks, bored). True as that might be, it's unhelpful advice because the players don't know where they're on and off target, or what they've forgotten (or just plain misremembered). Their conversation is inapt. </p><p>What's neat is the differing approaches to avoid this. Blades makes planning unnecessary by making player choices retroactively malleable. The inapt conversation doesn't need to happen.</p><p>Brindlewood, on the other hand, keeps the inapt conversation but makes it into an apt one by having reality bend to meet it. The players theorize at length, but it's not a waste, it becomes the real story. </p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>What's neat about holding these up together is how it reveals other design choices that could have been made, as illustrated by two made-up games: Brindlewood Dark and Blades in the Bay.</p><p>In <b>Brindlewood Dark</b>, players solve a murder mystery by having a few conversations with the suspects, letting a bit of action unfold, then suddenly launching into an accusation. The accused protests, then the players narrate the clues they noticed, retconning the evidence. </p><p>The accused (or witless Lestrades also at the scene) attempt to recontextualize these clues by narrating flashbacks of their own. Eventually the players close the net or the accused shows their innocence (or at least blows up enough clues to walk). </p><p>Meanwhile, in <b>Blades in the Bay</b>, the players spend 45 minutes planning the heist based up on details of defenses and risks they supposedly scouted out, researched, or paid to learn.. all made up as they discuss. The higher the danger, the bigger the score. </p><p>They then enact their plan. As they do so, they roll for each threat to see if it is really as they understood it. If it is, then plan they made for that part <i>just works</i>.</p><p>If not, they're back on their heels and reacting in real time to a situation that has become unpleasantly dynamic. If they handle the chaos well, they resume the later steps of their original plan. If it blows up in their faces, they might just need to scrub the mission. </p><p>Anyways, those are made up games, but they're two different applications of these "avoid inaptness" techniques.</p><p>Now I want to overly complicate a heist plan! Blades in the Bay sounds fun! </p><div><br /></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-21379316905889656652023-03-28T08:53:00.002-04:002023-03-29T14:24:16.680-04:00The Terrible Salt<p>For a generation, the tides at Vincha stopped completely. What was once an enormous tidal flat was lost under bitter waters. Now they have returned, and the brave and curious are gathering to see what was hidden under <i>the terrible salt</i>.</p><p>This adventure features an enormous tidal flat, miles and miles wide. Adventurers who set out from Vincha have a strange and dangerous land to explore, and will need to learn its rhythms to return with anything valuable.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Terrible%20Salt%20v1.0.pdf" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="525" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Terrible%20Salt%20Thumb.png" /></a></div><br /><p>The Terrible Salt is something of an experiment in tangibility. Unlike many of my adventures, there's no wandering monster table. Instead, the tides and the crab swarm move in defined ways from their starting points.</p><p>The crab swarm is extremely dangerous. It will outnumber most parties, and unless they have good magic (or horses), it will overrun them and eat them. Avoiding notice is better than trying to flee (since the crabs never stop), but this will require that the players stay aware of their environment.</p><p>Being spotted by crabs or trapped by the tides doesn't mean certain death, but players may have to ride out an uncomfortable few days being baked by the sun and freezing at night, all without any drinkable water or means of lighting a fire.</p><p>The greatest danger in this scenario is facing both crabs and tides at once, either:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>the crab swarm comes in at the same time as the tide, and you're fighting waist-high crabs in chest-deep water</li><li>the party is fleeing the crabs, but is then forced by the tide to shelter on a rocky island before they can shake the pursuit</li></ul><p></p><p>Fortunately, the map is littered with high spots that should allow the party lots of opportunity to scout out their surroundings and avoid danger. (This scenario contains a compressed version of my take on <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/2014/07/how-far-can-you-see-on-hex-map.html">how far you can see on a hex map</a>.)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Terrible%20Salt.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="800" height="279" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Terrible%20Salt.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>As I finished the writing, the <i>coral consorts</i> became my favorite part. The implications of these srange marriages transformed the Salt Lords into something more interesting: an ethically neutral but <i>alien</i> presence in the scenario, inviting the party (or whomever) to take a terrifying step into a different world.</p><p>The coral consorts themselves make very interesting maguffins: imagine having to go and talk to a knowledgeable NPC somewhere, but learning that they <i>married the sea</i> and need to be found on the slopes of the Salt Lords' citadel. Good luck!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Crab.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="800" height="224" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/56%20Crab.png" width="320" /></a></div>As always, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/adventures">thank you to my patrons on Patreon</a>, who graciously support this project! Because of your generosity, the text and art pieces are released under CC-BY-NC 4.0, for your own non-commercial use.<br /><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>EDIT: Some additional hooks!</p><p>Wealthy relatives of the doomed expedition members want their bodies (or heirlooms) reclaimed from wherever they wound up</p><p>The players need to contact an NPC to learn something, last known to have retired to Vincha. However, she 'married the sea' and is now somewhere on the slopes of the citadel</p><p>The other end of the inland sea (beyond the citadel) is a prosperous area. If a reliable way to cross the sea (possibly with the blessing of the Salt Lords) can be found, an important trade route could open up</p><p>Crabs have been attacking Vincha; myths say that they serve the Salt Lords' will, and that when they are happy the crabs are kept at bay</p><p>From the top of the citadel, when the clouds part, you can see anywhere in the world (or so say the songs)</p><p>Every river for a thousand leagues drains into the flats. The Salt Lords know everything that happens along their lengths; they have the answers you seek.</p><p>Too long have the Salt Lords stolen the vulnerable, taking them away to marry the sea. Put an end to it.</p><p>On the south shore of the inland sea is a tower. Well, more of a ruin than a tower. It stood watch at the mouth of a pass that reaches all the way to Urchlund.</p><p>News of the tides restarting has reached Fair Riot, and it's said a Duke is coming to survey lands that he claims are his. Now, maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but a map of the flats would surely be worth good coin and a Duke's favor besides.</p><p>In my nan's time, people used to go out on the flats looking for oysters. She said there was an old well on one of the rocks with water you can drink. That would be an incredibly useful staging area for further exploration.</p><p>Oysters out on the flats would be an incredible boon to Vincha, if only it were safe. The baron has a sack of silver for whomever can lure those crabs away and deal with them for good.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-14393609640741291872023-03-26T11:47:00.000-04:002023-03-26T11:47:03.518-04:00Incident Report<p>On Monday, July 20, the Mentor™ learning service suffered an outage that lasted from 4:53AM until service was fully restored on Wednesday, July 22 at 6:11PM.</p><p>At Mentor, we don't consider this an acceptable level of service. We sincerely apologize our valued users, institutional customers, and the family and friends of Kyle H. We commit to doing better in the future. This incident report explains what happened, as part of our commitment to openness and transparency.</p><p>The roots of the incident start some three months earlier. In April, an automated A/B test of a curriculum modification was proposed by our internal TeachSmart AI. This is normal, and such tests are conducted daily to improve learning outcomes for all Mentor™ students.</p><p>Unfortunately, this modification (CT-665.9) was unusual in that it recommended that students begin their learning sessions with a prayer to 'Entity Bezaal'. At Mentor, we have several procedures to ensure that controversial or problematic curriculum modifications don't make it to the public, including random inspection of proposed modifications by our Trust & Safety team.</p><p>However, CT-665.9 was not selected for random inspection. This itself is also not unusual; M&L (mindfulness and learning mindset) modifications are inspected at a lower frequency than core curriculum modifications. As a result, CT-665.9 was rolled out to a subset of our students immediately.</p><p>CT-665.9 performed well, but not spectacularly, for some time after the test began. Apparently July 19 is a special day to Entity Bezaal (we cannot print the exact name of the celebration), and the invoking prayers suddenly achieved a much greater effect. Learning outcomes in the A group showed a 31% improvement, which is unheard of for an M&L test.</p><p>At 5:40 PM on July 19, our Trust & Safety team reviewed the content of CT-665.9 and removed it from production.</p><p>Shortly after, at 7:10 PM, a group of individuals breached the Mentor facility in Denver, Colorado, which houses both our primary data center and the offices of our Trust & Safety team.</p><p>While Mentor has a strong commitment to both electronic and physical security, our associates on-site at that time initially believed they were facing a group of costumed LARPers from another department. (We believe in a good work-life balance at Mentor, and LARPing in the office had occurred there previously.)</p><p>This misunderstanding became obvious at 7:17 PM, when the intruders' <i>greater invocation</i> (we cannot print the exact name) melted the inner wall of our production data center. Mentor employee Kyle H attempted to hold off the intruders with a fire extinguisher, allowing other staff to escape to wade through the caustic mucus and escape.</p><p>At 9:47 PM, our secondary incident response team arrived on site and attempted to regain control of our Denver facility. This was initially impossible because of the inhuman strength of the intruders, even after the arrival of Denver police. At 12:02 AM (the morning of July 20), however, this faded abruptly and by 12:50 AM July 20, all floors of the were secured.</p><p>Several members of the Northfield High School math team are now in custody (They can't be identified because of their age.)</p><p>By Wednesday, our response team had vacuumed up enough of the caustic mucus that we could resume full production operations. Regrettably, Kyle H had been magically transformed into a cone snail during the fighting, and was accidentally crushed by the secondary incident response team during this process. Our condolences go out to Kyle's family and friends; his brave actions on that day saved many lives.</p><p>Effective immediately, Mentor is putting in place several enhanced procedures to make sure we don't experience this again.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>LARPing is no longer permitted at Mentor offices or events</li><li>Basic fire extinguisher safety courses will be made available to all employees and contractors</li><li>On the recommendation of TeachAI, all employees will begin their shifts with a prayer to counter-entity Ademilos, may his tentacles surround and protect us.</li></ul><div>Again, we apologize for the interruption to our services. Our users have come to expect only the highest in educational outcomes from Mentor, and we regret any disruption this outage has caused.</div><p></p><p>All hail Ademilos!</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-67349277027854048492023-02-17T09:28:00.003-05:002023-02-25T09:27:51.002-05:00The Cyberpunk We Got<p>Taking a covid test in a car speeding through the rain at night feels very cyberpunk. International travel, backseat chemistry.. all I need is a red dot sight on me from a blacked out Mercedes. That makes up for it all.. right?</p><p>I guess you can have column A, but not without a little column B.</p><div><br /></div>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>d10</td>
<td>The future is here</td>
<td>but with..</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Implanted augmentation</td>
<td>captchas</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Smartgun</td>
<td>roaming charges</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Mirrorshades</td>
<td>ransomware</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Self-driving car</td>
<td>microtransactions</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>DIY gene mod</td>
<td>banned by moderators</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Retractable finger blade</td>
<td>unskippable ads</td></tr><tr><td> </td>
<td>Wired reflexes</td>
<td>no longer supported</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Designer social movement</td>
<td>remotely bricked</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Hacking deck</td>
<td>OS Incompatibility</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>Monofilament katana</td>
<td>supply chain problems</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-83531509051538901522023-01-30T19:37:00.001-05:002023-01-30T19:48:10.269-05:00An Era of Standard RPG Terminology<p>Now that the core of Dungeons & Dragons has been effectively open sourced, a lot of retro-clone designers are breathing a sigh of relief. You can't copyright mechanics, but that hasn't stopped numerous lawsuits in the past. Those days seem to be over!</p><p>I thought it might be nice to look at some of those now-free core mechanics that have been with the game since its very early, dungeon-centric editions.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>First up is the <b>Hit Die</b>. This is really the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. The image of this iconic, twenty-sided die is almost synonymous with the game itself. You roll the hit die every time you want to see if you hit something, which is often. After all, this is a game about hitting things!</p><p>Next we come to the classic <b>Hit Points</b>. Like many D&D terms, this has been pulled into many other games, tabletop roleplaying games, boardgames, and even video games. The <i>hit point</i> is the location on your enemy where your blow has landed, crucial for understanding if you've poked the bulette in the eye or just bounced off its thick armor yet again. Most ordinary humans have a d6 for <i>hit points</i>, but larger creatures with lots of limbs (looking at you, hydra!) often have many <i>hit points</i>.</p><p>Another immediately recognizable term is <b>Armor Class</b>. Right after determining the hit point of an attack, you will need to look up if the target is an <i>armor class</i> or not. Fighters, Paladins, and even Clerics are all <i>armor classes</i>, but Magic-Users, and Thieves are not.</p><p>Dungeons & Dragons is a game with no take-backs. If your character dies, your progress is lost! Sad as it is, this is part of the game. Savor the experience! But the game does give you one last chance: if you have a sack of gold or treasured magic weapon, you can make a <b>Saving Throw</b> to try to pass it on to another character.</p><p>If you do survive the dangers of the dungeon, ask the DM if you reached any <b>Experience Points</b>. <i>Experience points</i> are the backbone of any long term campaign, allowing the PCs to grow and evolve their abilities. Many DMs like to situate <i>experience points</i> all throughout the adventure. Some prefer to have an experience point after each major accomplishment in a campaign. Some prefer having only one, and require that you go back to town to level up. Neither is better, they're just different play styles!</p><p>These are the basics, but as time goes on, successful adventuring groups will have to pick up some clever tactics if they want to maximize their chances. Chief among these is making a good choice about who is standing where, the party's <b>Alignment</b>. Parties with <i>good</i> <i>alignment</i> have a significant advantage when dealing with surprise traps or encounters. <i>Chaotic</i> <i>alignment</i> is much riskier, but can be fun in its own way. Make sure to discuss this with your group before entering the dungeon, as mismatched <i>alignment</i> can be a total <i>party kill</i>.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Like it or not, the world's most popular role-playing game has seeded the industry with terms that affect the very thought process of game design. By embracing this, instead of constantly renaming the wheel, I look forward to a decade of games that can move past the arguments of the past and use common terminology for the benefit of all.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-50835175859212338442023-01-28T14:36:00.003-05:002023-01-28T14:36:43.718-05:00RPG Transcript Analysis: Critical Role<p>For the third post in my 'transcript analysis' series, I'm looking at a very different play style than I'm familiar with: Critical Role.</p><p>For this analysis, I picked a random Critical Role episode, "Between the Lines". Episodes are long, so I chose to do Part I of this episode, which is about 110 minutes and just over 16,000 words.</p><p>Unlike most RPG sessions, Critical Role is played for an audience. The participants are professional voice actors, and this shows in a dramatically different kind of play. The sessions are dominated by huge blocks of in-character dialogue.</p><p>In the "old school" transcript, the players spent a lot of time strategizing in a way that's not clearly in or out of character. In Critical Role, all of this clearly happens in character, even to the extent that some actions are declared by telling another character about them.</p><p>The GM style has a lot more dialogue than in old school play, but is still recognizably similar:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNR5AbpWrTPqa9biASjJVOl89Zg6TKJGpW35BxCRo5LH7Hph_XYn0mnNYbBlavuPcZ_-u93d58Ls7TXgsZTvDk81XCHIcp4bP_PIl3w43Rum-g75DkyY0wvcb6d19PdJlFfvpjkufX14c1DyExaWuOuqPPwVdSJgwvBoWAeO3pIBDuWHlFEkYnPpnK3w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="1302" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNR5AbpWrTPqa9biASjJVOl89Zg6TKJGpW35BxCRo5LH7Hph_XYn0mnNYbBlavuPcZ_-u93d58Ls7TXgsZTvDk81XCHIcp4bP_PIl3w43Rum-g75DkyY0wvcb6d19PdJlFfvpjkufX14c1DyExaWuOuqPPwVdSJgwvBoWAeO3pIBDuWHlFEkYnPpnK3w=w400-h245" width="400" /></a></div><br />The difference shows up in the player statement balance, which is dominated by in-character dialogue.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1by-05Jl6nleiDADeAZ2XgFoRdDiGvGbrG0AWT0AOowOaLdJJl7Nz1uAQlTqcAxmzsLGfKGk-BOm_LiSzD70hYbiUrah9UgvIz91nSftuW5-doxNBvHrW14b-FKIO6CCeWZnuL34CDCvQv9Vo_nue8Q6WU61HmmQmN69AJoA7KOFRMrt-6CguDy9_CQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="802" data-original-width="1312" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1by-05Jl6nleiDADeAZ2XgFoRdDiGvGbrG0AWT0AOowOaLdJJl7Nz1uAQlTqcAxmzsLGfKGk-BOm_LiSzD70hYbiUrah9UgvIz91nSftuW5-doxNBvHrW14b-FKIO6CCeWZnuL34CDCvQv9Vo_nue8Q6WU61HmmQmN69AJoA7KOFRMrt-6CguDy9_CQ=w400-h245" width="400" /></a></div>The most common action in the old school play transcript was <i>Inquiring</i> for more information - examining something, looking around. In Critical Role, checking out the environment isn't even top ten.<p></p><p>Here's the overall breakdown, players plus GM:<br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDeKi5QhAhTvlhY-8C0k6chufGScHY9PYBNnD6wrPzqHDb6DFtyYB7fGUnHUD8StoU6rGizGcDYeKaPwVjs4tqg-EpG66bHvvirmoWimKshaUwMqQleyLKJXPUEC9rAO88DtHJH8eMbKEB-mSIl4EaHsDeH4mdXbGuBSPkeITWuL6l0bXEstLob3mXvA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="1308" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDeKi5QhAhTvlhY-8C0k6chufGScHY9PYBNnD6wrPzqHDb6DFtyYB7fGUnHUD8StoU6rGizGcDYeKaPwVjs4tqg-EpG66bHvvirmoWimKshaUwMqQleyLKJXPUEC9rAO88DtHJH8eMbKEB-mSIl4EaHsDeH4mdXbGuBSPkeITWuL6l0bXEstLob3mXvA=w400-h243" width="400" /></a></div>As I was annotating, however, I realized that the play style did shift a lot. When the group was on their home turf, in-character dialogue dominated. Things changed as soon as the party decided to set out for an adventure location.<div><p></p><p>This got me curious if I could effectively show the ebb and flow of statement types over time. Here's how that looks:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVfujdHKtJNimItDHwW9-tM85D981ibbWGCpAH1jrO8eZX84c5F-ADYbxsp3083zBz-05L2sf1fF8Ao0vjmK64SA4xu0jaHms72uvqgx6CVC8DQUm_6HkGXnb93terHDbNJ9gAbETLOPWTQpAln1W3_sgrEXIJliq-yFwnDTT0RIGKwUd0GtYTuBavVw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1318" data-original-width="2694" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVfujdHKtJNimItDHwW9-tM85D981ibbWGCpAH1jrO8eZX84c5F-ADYbxsp3083zBz-05L2sf1fF8Ao0vjmK64SA4xu0jaHms72uvqgx6CVC8DQUm_6HkGXnb93terHDbNJ9gAbETLOPWTQpAln1W3_sgrEXIJliq-yFwnDTT0RIGKwUd0GtYTuBavVw=w400-h196" width="400" /></a></div><br />I broke the transcript down into roughly 1,000-word "chapters", and then rendered the distribution of statement types over time.<p></p><p>What immediately stands out is that while IC dialogue is a huge portion, it's steadily decreasing over time. The session starts off with a bit of "last time on Critical Role" (Prior Events), but reaches its peak dialogue-heavy moment in chapter 3, where it's almost pure IC dialogue with a bit of DM exposition.</p><p>That immediately slides of as the group sets out. A green band of PC Action appears ("I do x"), along with <i>Describe</i> (the GM describing things)</p><p>By Chapter 17, there's even a healthy amount of OOC Approach (statements about how to approach a situation that isn't clearly in-character dialogue)</p><p>One similarity with the old school transcript is how little discussion of mechanics there is. Most commonly, the GM simply declares, "Give me a perception check," there's a die roll, and the players are immediately into either groaning, cheering, relevant-but-out-of-character jokes, or in-character dialogue. There's essentially no rules <i>debate</i> in this at all. That's what you might expect from a short-resolution system with an extremely seasoned group.</p><p>Here's the "next statement" diagram for the top ten statement types:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg0qGkzayK_4CsBJiEB95UwN4R38zwIhlQv82BWN15oiCsYZIxZVAq1dN_p4SNLkX0eG9qBSoYwrkSbDxUw4qDfzkp6ekRVYiOZqafdCdT0rhqh3mohACq4Nab-BJ5XOpYcNJvJ4b86TtQP94DD0ssYKw-fIHcS2PxpdnSulqg7Jzd_PUVnEVhxQItkg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3448" data-original-width="1986" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg0qGkzayK_4CsBJiEB95UwN4R38zwIhlQv82BWN15oiCsYZIxZVAq1dN_p4SNLkX0eG9qBSoYwrkSbDxUw4qDfzkp6ekRVYiOZqafdCdT0rhqh3mohACq4Nab-BJ5XOpYcNJvJ4b86TtQP94DD0ssYKw-fIHcS2PxpdnSulqg7Jzd_PUVnEVhxQItkg=w368-h640" width="368" /></a></div><br />This is only top ten, and so we can only see the tip of the iceberg of PC action and how it resolves—some clarifying of the player's intent, but almost always it's simple acknowledgement from the GM. Apart from little sequences of off-topic chatter, game-related joking, or discussion of prior events, all roads lead to in-character dialogue.<p></p></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-2620233536564691012023-01-23T09:49:00.031-05:002023-01-28T13:54:58.683-05:00Further RPG Transcript Analysis: Old School<p>Recently, I wrote about a <a href="http://blog.trilemma.com/2023/01/a-taxonomy-of-roleplaying-utterances-v01.html">taxonomy for classifying the statements</a> made while playing a role-playing game. I've been looking at an 'old school' style transcript that I was given by Ara Winter.</p><p>With the whole transcript annotated, including breaking up longer statements into separate ones so they can be tagged distinctly, it looks like this in my google sheet:</p><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5gAN-U9DVqE_vuCfmzpgE-SnVr0RBu2t3f3WW_Dm_hopKNALj3PVlrC3rfwzEDc-rk3a-1yn-w2EWKZCb8bTo1h1icZ3gQJUxlLTu6HKO5xUkSmSzIr7EAch8pPMQfK13a4r4FM40WwjqZ8gOySqXl310UA79T2kWkX1nLS4kCFGPhPCu-7xAVufu-Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="1554" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5gAN-U9DVqE_vuCfmzpgE-SnVr0RBu2t3f3WW_Dm_hopKNALj3PVlrC3rfwzEDc-rk3a-1yn-w2EWKZCb8bTo1h1icZ3gQJUxlLTu6HKO5xUkSmSzIr7EAch8pPMQfK13a4r4FM40WwjqZ8gOySqXl310UA79T2kWkX1nLS4kCFGPhPCu-7xAVufu-Q=w400-h188" width="400" /></a></div><br />This lets me do a couple of fun but simple bits of analysis, such as looking at the relative proportion of various statement types, by the GM:</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgL8XAeC1j0Jozpj3iVntRsFctCChM7xYrw4U6kKn1YtzRbdFtuglgPnzX-QBTGD6z0QLs11_8UXHyOHnEgXRhoyZta5w7X4zVTxeq0wHWoaOzUpC-8f-zfNiHbWB_JgxI4ilLEz4m0oK_0VxJL9bZ9pB1bW7izs71THzqPbt_QWnmGXtIWAZP5J10Yqg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="742" data-original-width="1194" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgL8XAeC1j0Jozpj3iVntRsFctCChM7xYrw4U6kKn1YtzRbdFtuglgPnzX-QBTGD6z0QLs11_8UXHyOHnEgXRhoyZta5w7X4zVTxeq0wHWoaOzUpC-8f-zfNiHbWB_JgxI4ilLEz4m0oK_0VxJL9bZ9pB1bW7izs71THzqPbt_QWnmGXtIWAZP5J10Yqg=w400-h249" width="400" /></a></div><br />..by the players:</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_gMgNUTn9VFdKDAA8OTWqQ04ssQ9rOHdfeGk4XQxX9GVQ0pzmv_jKhd96aCYCulwDedVYpZnzqXPYxhTCCQEcc8WsiH_8479Hdfq0Y5ivLAp39Mck8oWM4skZgrYuPPJIuI0DP7TQ-nWBmuwxniB1mlWeWLk0qsw1cho4Zj5jJnxepj-x03bWX3YEHw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="732" data-original-width="1188" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_gMgNUTn9VFdKDAA8OTWqQ04ssQ9rOHdfeGk4XQxX9GVQ0pzmv_jKhd96aCYCulwDedVYpZnzqXPYxhTCCQEcc8WsiH_8479Hdfq0Y5ivLAp39Mck8oWM4skZgrYuPPJIuI0DP7TQ-nWBmuwxniB1mlWeWLk0qsw1cho4Zj5jJnxepj-x03bWX3YEHw=w400-h246" width="400" /></a></div><br />..and the group as a whole:</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgohtnD1St2_uTsKegoiAPxI30T6E9I-A5EpRd-naSEpD-_75tuV4OnHbqGooWHlwOMxXyAeSDTIT3GBYWzm2nrFQkHU2xe6nRArydiLhwzu1zfuQmzLnknLiV3_A5fx4SODduWFfu_tqbodGOq6SWaUG-VNXj-PZ8u3oGQwNOqvjuES9uzZOi4ULVyKQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="1188" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgohtnD1St2_uTsKegoiAPxI30T6E9I-A5EpRd-naSEpD-_75tuV4OnHbqGooWHlwOMxXyAeSDTIT3GBYWzm2nrFQkHU2xe6nRArydiLhwzu1zfuQmzLnknLiV3_A5fx4SODduWFfu_tqbodGOq6SWaUG-VNXj-PZ8u3oGQwNOqvjuES9uzZOi4ULVyKQ=w400-h248" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">But the coolest view for me is looking at <i>next statement types</i>. What statements tend to follow others? I crunched the transcript and it allowed me to make a sort of Markov chain out of it, showing the likelihood of a statement type following another:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhONrj3_p8gl_KOEv-WuDfOFCHXWTV1nvKKWASINDC7__rJdDtn3jBX7hcRMG5vKSQXmh80xx0FPfK1e67XiCiC6eFFax_RZeRxd-IixYIFwQZzBg5KJ3IIEJvmSN86qUqSOahmd2Qj_uqxRi1EkRqMGkBO5omQgkjcl-SbzimpZiOREB5HfB5lkx2Obw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1846" data-original-width="2336" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhONrj3_p8gl_KOEv-WuDfOFCHXWTV1nvKKWASINDC7__rJdDtn3jBX7hcRMG5vKSQXmh80xx0FPfK1e67XiCiC6eFFax_RZeRxd-IixYIFwQZzBg5KJ3IIEJvmSN86qUqSOahmd2Qj_uqxRi1EkRqMGkBO5omQgkjcl-SbzimpZiOREB5HfB5lkx2Obw=w400-h316" width="400" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">What I love about this is that you can really see the style of conversation that emerges in this session: the rapid back-and-forth of description and inquiry between players and GM. Once in a while there are little conversations about clarifying the fiction, player intent, or how to approach the situation. Joking tends to lead to more joking!</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">That was just the top ten most common statement types; here's the full diagram for the entire transcript:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjM4VbWXrzKeT-gQCJmjrHb0keShC9xYGQmh0krvKhRaE_ydMbKSG1kyHXoYStarbILTvkPmRpKNhMYnpy9AkFuC9_2IO7HDLK82QrjEMAByCbHkyZ52iEdy-HPzisFHAdu83wGaMgTX1Hh4MNrH5E3VTnZ25tv-9z1aSt7V3LB5vUXrkXw6U0qxL55_g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4534" data-original-width="5310" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjM4VbWXrzKeT-gQCJmjrHb0keShC9xYGQmh0krvKhRaE_ydMbKSG1kyHXoYStarbILTvkPmRpKNhMYnpy9AkFuC9_2IO7HDLK82QrjEMAByCbHkyZ52iEdy-HPzisFHAdu83wGaMgTX1Hh4MNrH5E3VTnZ25tv-9z1aSt7V3LB5vUXrkXw6U0qxL55_g=w400-h342" width="400" /></a></div><br />In the next post, I'll have a look at a very different play style: Critical Role.</div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-79632407834493497302023-01-22T17:52:00.005-05:002023-01-23T09:50:30.950-05:00A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v0.1<p><br /></p><p>There are lots of ways that gamers characterize play styles, many of which focus on the intentions of the play group. I won't recap those here—this post is about a different lens for looking at play style, namely, <i>what are people talking about</i>?</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">I Describe Fireball At Them</h3><p>A few years ago I watched a YouTube video where the players spent an incredible amount of time <i>describing how the actions of their characters would be experienced by others</i>. One player spends upwards of sixty seconds describing how his character sits down, unpacks a little flute, and plays it.</p><p>In another campaign, a different player would have said, "I cast Sleep."</p><p>This got me thinking about a lens to examine play focused on the type of statements that people are making, based on classifying the statements uttered at the table. With such a classification scheme, you could look at any of the thousands of hours of actual play available on the internet and annotate it.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances</h3><p>So, without further ado, here's a draft. This is a bit of a mess; it's a list of things that I've seen happen, sliced into groups based on what I thought was interesting. I present it here mostly so you could either:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>try to use it</li><li>come up with a different taxonomy</li><li>publish and link to transcripts of actual play so that others can do 1) or 2)</li></ol><p></p><p>I've put it in a hierarchy not because things down on the leaves are far apart, just to make it easier to label things "100", "200" and move on, and perhaps come back and tag it with more precision later.</p><p>A few definitions:</p><p><b>Fiction</b>: the qualitative description of the game world and everything in it: the environment, events, the characters and their feelings. </p><p><b>Quantity</b>: a characterization of the world originating in the rules that uses a number, a tag, an enumerated state of some kind.</p><p>A 6' tall ranger is a fictional element; if the ranger is Medium, that's a mechanical quantity.</p><h3>A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v0.1</h3><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>100 Fiction</li><ul><li><b>110 (GM) General descriptions</b></li><ul><li>111 Environmental description</li><li>112 Events</li><li>113 NPC actions/behavior/visible emotions</li></ul><li><b>120 Clarifying</b> (e.g. asking for more information, resolving ambiguity)</li><ul><li><b>121 Clarifying the fiction</b></li><li><b>122 Clarifying feasibility/consequences</b> of action (e.g. "is it too far to jump across?")</li></ul><li><b>130 (Player) Stating a PC action </b>(e.g. "I grab the chalice from the altar.")</li><ul><li><b>131 Descriptions of PC actions</b> (e.g. "My cloak blows in the wind as I leap onto the stone table, I'm like.. silhouetted against the sky."</li></ul><li><b>140 GM Describing PC Action</b> or its results (e.g. "Okay, you leap forward and shove the door—it swings open and bangs against the far door frame..")</li><li><b>150 Fictionalizing</b> a quantity or mechanical outcome (e.g. [Having rolled 2 damage]" The dagger leaves a long, ragged scratch on your arm.")</li><li><b>160 Dialogue</b></li><ul><li><b>161 IC Dialogue</b> (e.g. "The merchant says, 'My horse is the fastest in the land!'")</li><li><b>162 Description of dialogue </b>(e.g. "The merchant prattles on about his horse and how it's the fastest in the land." e.g. "I tell the King the whole story about the orcs at the mine.")</li></ul><li><b>170 Inner experiences</b></li><ul><li><b>171 Reactions/emotions</b> of your character (e.g. "My guy is totally taken aback, like.. I thought the Queen was an ally!")</li><li><b>172 Reactions/emotions of <i>someone else's</i> character</b> (e.g. GM: "You feel your hands trembling as you step out onto the ledge." "Haha, you're totally hot for me.")</li><li><b>173 Intentions</b> (e.g. "GM: The monster isn't trying to flee." e.g. "PC: I need to find a way to get out of this damned sewer.")</li><li><b>174 (GM) PC inferences</b> (e.g "You get the impression he's just trying to end the conversation.")</li><li><b>175 Rationale for choices</b> (e.g. "Well, I'm chaotic evil, after all. [I'm going to untie that rope.]")</li></ul><li><b>180 Exposition</b> (e.g. background information, contextualizing what PCs would know about what they see)</li></ul><li><b>200</b> <b>Engaging with Mechanics</b></li><ul><li><b>210</b> <b>Rules</b></li><ul><li><b>212</b> <b>Rules explanation</b></li><li><b>211</b> <b>Rules query</b> (e.g. "Can I do a follow-up charge against flying enemies?")</li><li><b>213</b> <b>Rules debate</b>/discussion/disagreement</li><li><b>214</b> <b>Choosing rules</b>, procedures, resolution approach (e.g. "Let's use the one-roll system for this fight.")</li><li><b>215</b> <b>Lobbying</b> for a particular mechanical interpretation (e.g. "I'm prone, but I'm prone on a giant table, shouldn't that offset the disadvantage?")</li></ul><li><b>220 Resolving</b></li><ul><li><div><b>221 Mechanical preamble</b> to actions ("because of my instinct, I'm going to..")</div></li><li><div><b>224 (GM) Stating consequences</b> (e.g. if you fail the save, you fall off the cliff)</div></li><li><b>225 Rolling dice</b>/using a randomizer (e.g. "I rolled a four.")</li><li><b>226 Applying rules/procedures</b> (e.g. "A roll of four is a severe wound, but also I mark xp. Hey, that means my skill goes up!" e.g. "Everyone roll initiative.")</li><li><b>227 Choosing mechanical options</b> (e.g. "I rolled a 3; I need to either flee or surrender. I guess I'll surrender.")</li></ul><li><b>230 Discussing quantities</b> (e.g. "I have four hit points." "My sword is +2 against golems." "I only need another 200 xp to go up a level.")</li><ul><li><b>231 Asking about a quantity</b> (e.g. "How many hit points do you have left?" "Do you have the Leap ability?")</li></ul></ul><li><b>300 Out of Character</b> (or ambiguously IC/OCC)</li><ul><li><b>301 Approach/tactics</b> discussion (e.g. "Dude, what? Use the Fireball, why are you saving it?" "Can we just ride around these guys and not fight them at all?")</li><li><b>302 Prior events</b> of the campaign (e.g. summaries of last session, reminders)</li><li><b>222 Clarifying intent</b> of a player (e.g. "Are you really just trying to push the orc back a square?")</li><li><b>303</b> <b>Cheering/lamenting</b> an outcome, pretend IC shit-talking (e.g. "You totally smoked that orc! he's just a crater! lol")</li><li><b>304 Opining</b> (e.g. "We're totally getting double-crossed here, right?")</li><li><b>305 Safety tools</b> (e.g. "Let's X-card that.")</li><li><b>306 Discussing play</b> (e.g. "I loved it when you," "My favorite moment was when..")</li></ul><li><b>400 Off topic</b></li><ul><li>404 Discussing a missing player</li></ul></ul><div><div><p>If you do actually annotate a transcript with this or any other taxonomy, please indicate what taxonomy you used <i>and its version</i>! (e.g. by linking to it).</p></div><div>Some problems and caveats</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Any taxonomy will all sorts of assumptions baked into it. For example, there are GMless games! I have no idea if this would look applied to a Microscope or Quiet Year session. All those are problems for v0.2!</li><li>Any classification scheme will have lots of edge cases where statements are hard to classify.</li></ol><h3 style="text-align: left;">An Example</h3></div></div><div>Ara Winter kindly provided me this transcript of play from a game of his, for this purpose. It's been sitting on my hard drive for years. Here's the raw transcript, without my annotations:</div><div><br /></div><div><div>DM: And there is the pond, here.</div><div>G: I care most about the area under the planks and the pond.</div><div>DM: Well, uh. The only thing you see under the planks is stale fetid water, and inside the pond, you see a giant floating frog corpse about five feet in length.</div><div>R: Is in intact?</div><div>DM: Fairly intact, yes. It's in the water? So you would have to, I don't know, either get in the water or pull it towards you in some way.</div><div>R: How far into the water?</div><div>DM: Well, the whole pond thing is maybe 25, 30 feet across, So 10-12 feet?</div><div>R: I bet we could throw, what do you call them? One of our grappling hooks.</div><div>G: Do we want. . . a frog corpse?</div><div>R: Well we might be able to figure out how the frog died.</div><div>J: Did the frog corpse have anything on his person? Or is he just a naked frog.</div><div>DM: Well, all you see is just the belly of a frog that's about five feet long. And only just parts of it, because it is kind of floating in the water.</div><div>J: And it's obviously dead?</div><div>DM: Well it doesn't look alive no. You don't normally see frogs like that, lying like that, upside down and not moving.</div><div>J: Ok, Can I use my quarterstaff?</div><div>DM: Not your quarterstaff, it's about 7' long.</div><div>R: All right, I take my grappling hook, with a rope and try and throw it out there.</div><div>DM: Ok, you can grapple the frog. It makes a thicking *plctch* sound as it hits the water and your rope goes into it. I mean it's standing water because it's separate from the river and you can hook the frog and pull it towards the shore which you do. You now have a frog corpse near the shore.</div><div>J: Is there anything on the frog corpse.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Here it is, annotated by me with Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v1:</div><div><br /></div><div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description]</b> And there is the pond, here.</div><div>G: <b>[120 - clarity]</b> I care most about the area under the planks and the pond.</div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description]</b> Well, uh. The only thing you see under the planks is stale fetid water, and inside the pond, you see a giant floating frog corpse about five feet in length.</div><div>R: <b>[120 - clarity]</b> Is in intact?</div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description]</b> Fairly intact, yes. It's in the water? <b>[122 - feasibility]</b> So you would have to, I don't know, either get in the water or pull it towards you in some way.</div><div>R: <b>[120 - clarity] </b>How far into the water?</div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description] </b>Well, the whole pond thing is maybe 25, 30 feet across, So 10-12 feet?</div><div>R: <b>[301 - approach]</b> I bet we could throw, what do you call them? One of our grappling hooks.</div><div>G: <b>[301 - approach]</b> Do we want. . . a frog corpse?</div><div>R: <b>[301 - approach]</b> Well we might be able to figure out how the frog died.</div><div>J: <b>[120 - clarity]</b> Did the frog corpse have anything on his person? Or is he just a naked frog.</div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description]</b> Well, all you see is just the belly of a frog that's about five feet long. And only just parts of it, because it is kind of floating in the water.</div><div>J: <b>[120 - clarity] </b>And it's obviously dead?</div><div>DM: <b>[110 - description]</b> Well it doesn't look alive no. <b>[180 - exposition]</b> You don't normally see frogs like that, lying like that, upside down and not moving.</div><div>J: <b>[122 - feasibility]</b> Ok, Can I use my quarterstaff?</div><div>DM: <b>[122 - feasibility]</b> Not your quarterstaff, it's about 7' long.</div><div>R: <b>[130 - player action]</b> All right, I take my grappling hook, with a rope and try and throw it out there.</div><div>DM: <b>[140 - describe outcome]</b> Ok, you can grapple the frog. It makes a thicking *plctch* sound as it hits the water and your rope goes into it. I mean it's standing water because it's separate from the river and you can hook the frog and pull it towards the shore which you do. You now have a frog corpse near the shore.</div><div>J: <b>[120 - clarity] </b>Is there anything on the frog corpse.</div></div><p></p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-69758004104413832662023-01-01T23:38:00.007-05:002023-01-02T12:00:37.813-05:00Death Star Safety Research<p>In a galaxy far, far away, safety research is a thankless job.</p><p>Final year Academy projects don't write themselves, however, and so it fell to Partho Borc to dig deep into the question that had been bugging him ever since the Battle of Yavin.</p><p><i>How on earth did firing a proton torpedo into an exhaust port lead to the destruction of a moon-sized battle station?</i></p><p>The conventional wisdom was pretty straight forward, a deliberate weakness built in by a bent Imperial weapons designer, okay. But what about the shutoffs at level 22? What about the pressure cascade blowback valves in the core sheath? What about literally dozens of mechanisms that would make that kind of catastrophic failure impossible?</p><p>Because of the Death Star's hasty construction schedule, its system designs wouldn't be novel. No, most of the major subsystems have had to be right off the rack, just upscaled versions deployed in clustered configurations. Nothing truly new. All tried and true stuff, very little innovation.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOVf2v5n8UNzz5F02EMyZMMU6fGVvrxlTxYvxqAsLy4BXHUGUBAwYezzImKneGdtMo5FhaIBQOg1DwEQPe3JzP1HalrqdUgj5X-Hx8yPDWLzr2KUAaUi4MAxJLBk7e09SwhRl-pPHFOf0PUK1m0i2iuzFXDyX9VwOHkUyaGI6nbapnubR_acLXtmz-pg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOVf2v5n8UNzz5F02EMyZMMU6fGVvrxlTxYvxqAsLy4BXHUGUBAwYezzImKneGdtMo5FhaIBQOg1DwEQPe3JzP1HalrqdUgj5X-Hx8yPDWLzr2KUAaUi4MAxJLBk7e09SwhRl-pPHFOf0PUK1m0i2iuzFXDyX9VwOHkUyaGI6nbapnubR_acLXtmz-pg" width="240" /></a></div><br />Even a team of designers working day and night to undo centuries of established safety mechanisms would have needed several years to put it all together. And all that before construction started. To say nothing of all the parallel work producing the control procedures, operating manuals, training courses—it just didn't add up.<p></p><p>One guy did all this? Forget it. There was no way the official narrative could be true, and Partho knew it. Something else had undone the Death Star.</p><p>Unfortunately, that's about all he could uncover. Safety research was a vocation with poor prospects, and he had little pull to get the information he needed to prove his theories. "Nobody cares about shielding, Parth!" his parents would nettle him. "Why don't you go into something with some upside? What about repulsorlift window cleaning?"</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Partho's break came by accident. One night in the student lounge, far drunker than he usually let himself get, he overheard some third-year xenocultural studies students use the term, "Reactor Shielding Cults."</p><p>If he'd been sober, he'd have been too shy to go over, but his inebriation led him into a conversation that changed the course of his academic career.</p><p>It turned out that xenocultural studies had its own dead-end lines of inquiry, one of those being the shielding cults: a peculiar pattern of mystical beliefs that repeated itself across the galaxy. The specifics varied quite a lot from species to species and culture to culture, but the one thread that linked them all was <i>sabotaging reactor shielding</i>.</p><p>Seventeen completely unrelated religions had holy historical figures whose most famous act was destroying a power reactor. Eleven others hadn't just wrecked reactors, but claimed various mystical powers that had allowed them to <i>do it at a distance</i>, or in the future, with their minds, with or without certain tools, or other non-tool objects.</p><p>Weird, sure, but like safety research, a total career dead end. They'd been fully chronicled and holo'ed by the Republic forty years before, what was left to even write about? You certainly couldn't get anything actually <i>published</i>.</p><p>But— but! And here's the thing. By the time of the Battle of Yavin, at least three of them had commercial ties with organizations that held Imperial contracts to service Death Star I. <i>They were there!</i></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Getting the remaining pieces took Partho years, but bit by bit it fell together.</p><p>The full picture was breathtaking: no fewer than forty seven mystical traditions were involved in the destruction of the Death Star. While Skywalker and the Jedi took most of the credit for the rebel victory, they were really just there for the showy bit.</p><p>Six other "prowess cults" had prophecies that culminated on that day, and each of them celebrated themselves as having primary responsibility. Jana, last of the Shureen, finally listened to her trainer's words and achieved yellow-grade Shur manipulation while Shur-punching the primary reactor's force-field generator through eight levels of metal flooring.</p><p>The trio of Briwew adepts who had snuck aboard the Death Star only days earlier used the power of the three-thrum to addle the brains of every clone in the Yavin system, making effective aiming impossible. How many stormtroopers or TIE pilots landed accurate shots that day? In the view of the Briwew, this brave action made rebel victory all but guaranteed. How can you lose against an enemy that can't aim?</p><p>It wasn't just the prowess cults who believed themselves to be the lynch-pins that day. Mechesoteric orders had compromised thousands of Death Star subsystems as well. A group calling itself the Veen, whose legends claimed its ascended adepts could etch integrated circuits by hand, had apparently done a number on the Death Star's internal monitoring systems. In combination with the shift schedule suddenly one-way encrypting itself, some days you could walk from one end of the Death Star to the other without ever meeting a guard.</p><p>Lights didn't work, turbolifts would stop on the wrong floor and then shut down. Turbolasers would decalibrate during target practice and blast hapless observation towers into fragments.</p><p>Worst of all, an order of psycho-netic priestesses had sabotaged the toilets, causing them to either flush at bowel-wrenching triple pressure at random times, or flip into reverse and blast an entire trash compactor's contents into the room. For weeks before the Battle of Yavin, not even the Moffs had been able to take a shit in peace. It was mayhem.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Partho was ecstatic. Looking at the entire picture, it was clear that the Death Star never stood a chance. But the real discovery was much broader than just one megaweapon! Long-standing xenocultural data showed that it took an average of nineteen years for mystical space wizard orders to produce <i>chosen ones</i> in times of need, nearly twice as long as the Death Star's construction time.</p><p>Forty seven separate mystical orders had all spontaneously begun producing chosen ones in <i>anticipation</i> of the Death Star. It was almost like an immune system built into the fabric of the universe. Build something big enough, and dangerous enough, and a hundred heroes would show up out of nowhere to <i>screw it all up</i>.</p><p>Partho could hardly contain himself. This would be the greatest discovery in safety research in.. well, ever. Not just safety research! Building a super-weapon that <i>you could actually use</i> would require whole new fields of study. Anti-prophetic architecture. Heroism dynamics. Xenocultural barometrics. Shift schedules written out by hand on whiteboards.</p><p>Finally, safety research would get the attention it truly deserved, uniting military security and system integrity planning under a single banner. Partho's hands trembled as he realized what this all meant. With this insight, you could once and for all rule the galaxy in a reign of terror that no plucky band of heroes could ever undo. Partho Borc's name would echo throughout the ages, as the man who finally made galactic empire possible.</p><p>But sadly, it was never to be. In a galaxy far, far away, safety research was a thankless job. Nobody listened.</p><p>You couldn't even get these people to install railings.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-15078399498201452792022-12-23T16:15:00.003-05:002022-12-24T11:50:00.440-05:00Legally Odd: OGL Section 9<p>Recently, Wizards of the Coast announced that they would be releasing version 1.1 of their famous Open Gaming License, the <a href="http://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/ogl">OGL</a>. What does this mean, and how does the deeply weird Section 9 affect their plans?</p><p>The OGL is a legal agreement that WOTC developed in 2000 to encourage third parties to develop content for Dungeons & Dragons. When a gaming text includes it, the open gaming content portions of that document can be republished by other parties, open source style.</p><p>Now, two decades later, on the threshold of 6th edition ("One D&D"), WOTC has announced it's overhauling the OGL to clarify their intentions.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Section 9</h3><p>As I hinted, the most fascinating thing about all of this to me is a particular clause lurking in version 1.1A of the OGL, 'section 9'. It reads as follows:</p><blockquote><p><i>9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License.</i></p></blockquote><p>To get the obvious out of the way, WOTC doesn't need anyone's permission to create a new, separate license to release new material under. Section 9 is about creating specific avenues to retroactively change the meaning of the OGL. But what?</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Permissive Interpretation</h3><p>My first, most literal interpretation of Section 9 is that if you're reading a document released under OGL version X, you can reuse the open gaming content in it under <b>any version of the OGL you like</b>.</p><p>I call this the permissive interpretation because it gives maximum choice to a downstream republisher. They're free to use the least restrictive version of the OGL, at their discretion.</p><p>The strongest evidence I have that this is WOTC's original intention for the OGL <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040307094152/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq/20040123f">is in this gem</a>, courtesy of Margaret (<a href="https://twitter.com/EtoEWanders">@EtoEWanders on Twitter</a>):</p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>Q: Can't Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn't like?</b></p><p>A: Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>This is very much in the spirit of the open source software movement, as it gives WOTC "no take backs." Even so, there's some weird edge cases with it!</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Permissive Oddities</h3><p>This permissive interpretation sounds great when you're thinking of reusing somebody's OGC, but it's pretty lousy at protecting your own. As written, it seems that when WOTC releases a new version of the OGL, suddenly everyone who is considering reusing your open content now has their pick of license versions. This means that WOTC can grant itself or your licensees new rights, just by updating the OGL. Pretty weird!</p><p>The situation is especially strange for companies that used the OGL 1.0A to release their own wholly original SRDs. They weren't republishing anything written by WOTC, they just liked the terms of the OGL.. but now WOTC can modify the terms on their behalf!</p><p>Free League, for example, released a Year Zero Engine SRD under the OGL 1.0A. Once WOTC releases OGL 1.1, anyone who wants to can suddenly elect to use the YZE SRD under those new terms, terms that Free League has never seen!</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">What WOTC Thinks</h3><div><div>In their <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1410-ogls-srds-one-d-d">Dec 21 blog post</a>, WOTC makes it clear that the whole point of the OGL update is to add new restrictions to the OGL.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>The new restrictions:</div><div><ul><li>No NFTs</li><li>OGL only covers print materials and static electronic documents</li><li>Terms must be explicitly accepted via a web portal</li><li>OGL products must display a badge</li><li>Revenue reporting for $50k+ annually</li><li>Royalties for $750k+ annually</li></ul></div></div></div><div>If WOTC believed in the Permissive interpretation, this would all be pointless: in that model, WOTC can't meaningfully add restrictions to the OGL. Anyone who wanted to make NFTs or a video game would simply take WOTC's the new OGL 1.1 content and republish it under the OGL 1.0A, then do whatever they liked.</div><div><br /></div><div>This makes me think that WOTC has a different, much scarier interpretation of section 9, the <i>Retroactive Interpretation</i>.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Retroactive Interpretation</h3><div><br /></div><div>There's another way to look at this, which I think would have an even bigger impact. In this view, the OGL is a living document that you agree the WOTC can update from time to time. When they do that, the new terms apply to everyone's use of the OGL, immediately.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this interpretation, the last half of section 9 simply means that any version of the OGL you copy into your document is an equally valid attestation that you agree to the latest version of the OGL.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, the objections to this view are several:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>O1: What's the point of a perpetual, royalty free license if they can update it to be a non-perpetual, royalties required license?</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Sadly, I think the answer is, "None. OGL 1.0A and Section 9 sucks for publishers that used it."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>O2: This is massive overreach!</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, probably—but I think it's worth thinking about who WOTC intends to target. They probably aren't hunting for sofa change from copper OBS sellers, they want a cut of the bigger operations.</div><div><br /></div><div>WOTC will be fine with the small fry having to put up with an ambiguous legal context, if that ambiguity forces the the larger third-party publishers to negotiate with them directly.</div><div><br /></div><div>Corporations are perfectly happy making everyone sign, "We can take your organs," style agreements that give them all the leverage, while saying, "Oh well, we would never take YOUR organs, we don't mean you!" in blog posts that aren't legally binding.</div><div><br /></div><div>As an example, just look at the DMs Guild agreement. If you've agreed to that, you've authorized OBS to sign legal contracts on your behalf 'to clarify their rights'. Fun!</div><p><b>O3: That's not what OGL 1.0A | Section 9 says!</b></p><p>I think that may be true.. but perhaps irrelevant. The OGL 1.0A is 22 years old—the people doing OGL 1.1 are completely different, with wholly different goals. The OGL isn't sacred to them, it's a tool, a revenue opportunity.</p><p>WOTC will be 100% fine with an ambiguous legal environment as long as they achieve those goals: making the bigger players talk to WOTC to report their income, pay up, and/or negotiate separate agreements. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Clawing History</h3><div>The permissive interpretation is weird, but the retroactive interpretation is truly bad news for third parties. It not only means that WOTC starts taking a cut of new products based on One D&D, but that it potentially can claw into the revenues of <b>existing products</b>. If that wasn't what they were thinking, why would they declare 2023 a royalty grace period? If royalties only applied to new, OGL 1.1 products, royalties could apply right away because everyone publishing under it would know the deal during planning time.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Go Carefully</h3><div>We will see how the chips fall when the OGL 1.1 is released, but I stand by my previous feelings that the OGL should be used extremely carefully, and only when you're actually <a href="http://blog.trilemma.com/2019/10/compatible-with-dungeons-dragons.html">using the specific rights it grants you</a>.</div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-80932426735475173832022-07-09T12:09:00.004-04:002022-07-10T12:25:28.743-04:00At the Hour of Death<p><i>The lost tomb of Sierk the Carver may have passed from memory, but it's nearer than anyone suspected. But be warned, wizards don't die peacefully. Great danger awaits anyone who arrives at the hour of death.</i></p><p><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/55%20Hour%20of%20Death.pdf">At the Hour of Death</a> is Trilemma Adventure #55. It's a pocket dungeon that you can locate almost anywhere underground. If an ogre misses a player and bashes a wall, a secret door in a castle hallway, a crumbling brickwork. Anywhere there's enough room for the circular tomb, below.</p><p>For ages I've wanted to do something with <i>scheduled patrols</i>, moving guards whose routes and schedule the players could learn and then anticipate. What better way to do this than let the players actually manipulate the schedule?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/55%20Hour%20of%20Death.pdf" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="525" height="420" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/55%20Hour%20of%20Death%20Thumb.png" width="525" /></a></div><div><br /></div><p>A few notes:</p><p>There's <b>more treasure</b> in this adventure than most of what I do. It's meant to be suitable for classic dungeon crawling: low-level adventurers avoiding threats to get what treasure they can before they run into trouble they can't handle.</p><p>The <b>skeletal infantry</b> are meant to be both hostile and very dangerous. They're there as a lethal "minute hand" that sweeps around the perimeter of the tomb. Make this clear with their coordinated movements, the shouting of the lamp-bearers to direct them. For gritty power levels, at least, it should be obvious that to attack them frontally means getting stabbed by a forest of spears.</p><p>Other than the skeletons, however, this adventure is meant to work with a reaction table (of the sort you get in early editions of D&D). If you don't have one handy, use this one from <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/alm">ALM</a>:</p>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr><td>Roll d6</td><td>Initial NPC Reaction</td></tr>
<tr><td></td>
<td><b>Assume the worst:</b> The NPC assumes the party is here for violence or exploitation. If weaker, the NPCs avoid, posture and prepare defenses. If they have the advantage, maybe they think it's best to deal you a blow while they can. </td></tr>
<tr><td></td>
<td><b>Wary:</b> Set boundaries (socially or physically)</td></tr>
<tr><td></td>
<td><b>Mistaken Assumption:</b> The group makes a confident, incorrect assumption about the party's purpose or identity. They've heard rumours, and your presence confirms them.</td></tr><tr><td></td><td><b>Uninterested</b>: Dour and sullen, self-absorbed, or perhaps more interested in their own problems or private discussions. Either way, they aren't making time for the party.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td>
<td><b>Curiosity:</b> You're the entertainment. Maybe that's good, maybe that's really bad, depending on their nature.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td>
<td><b>Common Cause:</b> So glad you turned up, now we can help each other!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/55%20Hour%20of%20Death.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="564" data-original-width="800" height="283" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/adventures/55%20Hour%20of%20Death.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Magical Compulsion</h3><p>This adventure holds the possibility of an NPC gaining a measure of control over a PC. The inhabitants of the dungeon have been compelled to follow the magic of the game board and don't realize their decisions have been influenced. Imposing this same fate on a PC, however, would effectively sideline the player. No fun! There are a few options that you might try:</p><p><b>Wrong Trousers</b>: The player remains in control of their character, but whatever they choose to do, they <i>also</i> walk a half move in the direction the game board pulls them. They can resist and take other actions, but it's like being in a swiftly moving stream. A variant of this is the "drunk walk"; the only effect of the compulsion is that when they try to walk, they just happen to step where the game board wants them to.</p><b>Kicking and Screaming</b>: Instead of affecting a PC's <i>will</i>, they're seized by an unseen force that drags them. This will quickly become the focus of play as the party tries to stop a fellow adventurer being dragged away.<div><b><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Lights on, Lights Off</b>: The compulsion comes in waves, only taking effect for one minute of every ten. This lowers the stakes of the compulsion. This is a decent option for a single PC party, also.<br /><div><div><br /></div><div><b>In on the Joke</b>: Some players might be happy to portray someone under the game board's influence. For this to work, they need to have worked out the effect of the game board, and the specific player needs to be down to portray someone acting against their own interests. They (of course) must also know what the game board is compelling them to do so they can run with it. Here, the fun is their interactions with the rest of the party.</div></div></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Update: Finding the Panopticon</h3><div>Brent Ellison asked me to clarify, is there really no stated way for players to figure out the mirrors? That's true! It's not at all guaranteed that a determined party would ever reach the Panopticon, especially since neither Sierk nor the Physician seems likely to tell them. Some ways it <i>might</i> happen:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The party develops a friendly relationship with the Physician (e.g. 'Common Cause' from the table, above) and he simply tells them to help them out of a scrape. This depends on whether you think the Physician knows this will kill Sierk (as that would violate his oath).</li><li>The party moves the Beetle piece to the study, and the Physician arrives through the mirror.</li><li>The Physician flees combat by taking on mantis form and fleeing through a mirror.</li></ol></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div>As always, thanks to my patrons on <a href="https://patreon.com/adventures">Patreon</a> who have graciously donated to support this little project!</div><div><br /></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-41049381898672423192022-07-04T12:23:00.000-04:002022-07-04T12:23:44.101-04:00The Athabasca Fold Network<p><i>Memorize this, but for god's sake don't act like you know it. Play dumb and ask for directions like everyone else or you'll get flagged and dumped out an airlock.</i></p><p>In the <i>post-planet</i> setting of <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/coming-apart">Coming Apart</a>, the few remaining human communities survive through secrecy. When any nickel-hulled pirate can fold in with a world-ending asteroid, the only defences are to be too small to extort, or to jealously guard your true location.</p><p>The Athabasca Fold Network is one one of the largest civilian fold networks, home to three space stations: Serengeti, Pitcairn, and Athabasca itself (a true class V).</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/post_assets/Coming%20Apart%20Athabasca%20Map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://trilemma.com/blog/post_assets/Coming%20Apart%20Athabasca%20Map.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Few visitors stay long, as berths on the stations are eye-wateringly expensive, but thousands make the trek every month to buy services from the many skilled specialists in Athabasca and Pitcairn.</p><p>The network is rich in primary resources like water, atmo, nickel and fission elements drawn from Bussard, Octavia and Youssef. Pitcairn station is known for its high quality ship modules, and exports them in large quantities. The network is not self sufficient, however, and imports huge quantities of food and biologicals from its trading partners. Relics of planetary life also fetch a premium here, in great demand among the wealthiest tier of network citizens.</p><p>Trade occurs through the public interchange, the lowest-security set of fold coordinates in the network. Here, most any ship is free to dock with the hub ships (commonly Wakatobi class), slow-folding trading posts that make a lazy loop through low-security space. Visitors swap news, sex, and services, or book passage deeper into higher-security parts of the network to broker larger trades on the stations.</p><p>While the <i>topology</i> of the network is not considered sensitive, the specific locations in space of the clearance fold points are highly classified. While visitors are welcome to travel through the loops between the stations and the public interchange as passengers, the only ships permitted to fold there known and trusted by the network. Gaining enough trust and goodwill to obtain a navigational security clearance can take years, and the number of high-security clearances is strictly limited by the civil administration.</p><p>Athabasca authorities waver between welcoming and wary. Trade visitors are essential, but spies or saboteurs are always probing for information or weaknesses. Agents of pirate gangs or rival networks have standing bounties for information that could compromise locations.</p><p>Exterior viewports are rare, as taking astronomical measurements that could be used to locate a high security fold is punishable by death. The larger stations are located in inky black, intergalactic space to make triangulation especially difficult. Visitors are carefully searched for instruments of sabotage, and only specifically licensed citizens may carry anything resembling maintenance tools.</p><p>Despite the caution, the network is a vibrant and joyful place, home to a great diversity of people.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-10832725537641819052022-02-06T17:11:00.005-05:002022-02-06T17:11:49.561-05:00Saving Throw for Evey Lockhart<p>Fans of Trilemma Adventures: one of our own needs our help. <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/evey-and-family-need-help">Evey Lockhart</a> is the writer and designer of weird, sad, queer old-school stuff that you’re probably familiar with. She was celebrated in 2015 as winner of the One Page Dungeon Contest, then took ENnie silver for her contributions to Trilemma Adventures. She’s gone on to make books like Very Pretty Paleozoic Pals and the disturbing “Wet Grandpa” with the Melsonian Arts Council.</p><p>You probably <i>don’t</i> know that most of her writing happens on an old laptop in a van: Evey and her family are homeless, and have been for a couple of years.</p><p>The pandemic has sucked for everyone, to put it mildly—but being trans, homeless, and disabled in the southern US with all this going on is an unrelenting stress. Evey’s been scraping from day to day this whole time, getting it done for her kids as best she can.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>To help out Evey with a donation, please click here: <a href="https://gofund.me/00587fd0">https://gofund.me/00587fd0</a></b></p><p>Nobody deserves to live under this kind of pressure. If, like me, you’ve been sheltered from the worst of the pandemic, you can make a huge difference in her life with a <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/evey-and-family-need-help">couple of clicks</a>. If you can only spare a few bucks, even that provides immediate relief from stressing where the money for the next meal or place to stay is coming from. If all you can do is <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/evey-and-family-need-help/share">help spread the word</a> before the algorithm eats this, that’s awesome too.</p><p>To show my gratitude for your help, I’ve been authorized to offer limited time only <b>protection from level drain</b>. Just show the DM your GoFundMe receipt and they’ll know what to do.</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-45925771139325574522022-01-23T11:24:00.003-05:002022-01-23T11:24:52.317-05:00Dead Steps<p>To some, walking is a sacred act. One foot placed in front of the other, a rhythmic homage to the first steps the gods took upon the cooling earth.</p><p>Most people just don't think about it that much, but even so: there is an undeniable exchange between land and traveller. A resistance, a partnership. Step upon the soil and it presses back—alive, tangible.</p><p>That is, except for a <i>dead step</i>.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>"Why are we stopping?" Aram asked, but his voice trailed off. Before he had even finished the sentence, he felt it. A drop in his stomach, the prickle of anxious sweat.</p><p>Behind him, one of the mules groaned as the feeling passed down the line. Someone closer to the front let out a cry.</p><p>What's happening? Aram looked up and down the line. The feeling of loss was palpable. Have we forgotten someone? He counted the party.. twelve.. thirteen forms bundled against the blowing snow. The mules. All here. He jostled his canteen. Still full.</p><p>He tried to rally himself against the feeling of dread. "All is well, all is well," but no. There, at the front, others had started to back away from Salia.</p><p>Aram's eyes darted across their faces. All were staring, mouths in silent motion: dismay, disappointment, disgust. Salia herself was motionless, staring at her right boot.</p><p>The last step she had taken had started like any other. But somehow seeing it there, planted on the ground <i>just so</i>, grief filled him.</p><p>If it's going to be like this, why did we even come?</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr><td>d6</td><td>The dead step portends..</td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>A ley line eddy</b>. Everywhere the subtle energies flow to and fro, but here they are caught.. not still but oscillating, trapped. Frantic. Cast it from your mind and leave this place! To contemplate the errors of the gods brings only doom.</td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>A border between the Powers</b>. Every place is ruled by something, but here you stand upon a boundary. Anathema, the lands on either side do not touch, and here is a seam that descends to the very roots of the earth.</td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>An end</b>. Below the ground are the remains of a hero. They set out on a quest that was the last hope of many people, and yet here they died. No great duel or mighty task laid them low, merely an accident. A wineskin left uncorked; an infected cut; a map carelessly left at camp. So great is the shame that chance could end the lives of so many, the wind itself has tried to cover their bones.</td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>A sacrifice</b>. The gods walked the young earth, completing it and setting in motion its destiny. But here, no god has ever stood. This inch of the earth is still new. You could complete it and send it on its way! A great pattern of your choosing could begin here, but at what cost? </td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>A door</b>. The joy of the land is seeping out of a crack. With the right tool it could be forced open.</td></tr><tr><td></td>
<td><b>The end of all things</b>. One day, Sorg's hunger will have claimed all of creation. The last of the luminous void will close as crags and seething forests fill all seven ways of the sky, an ocean of stone leaving no place for life. When it does, Sorg will turn upon itself. A decay will begin, an eternity of lightness, crumbling caverns until all that' left is dust and darkness. You have found the place where it begins.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-64231963797756154762022-01-17T00:08:00.000-05:002022-01-17T00:08:03.454-05:00After the Lords of Memory v0.23<p>After a very long hiatus, here's a new version of my home system, After the Lords of Memory.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://trilemma.com/blog/post_assets/ALM%20Quickstart%20v0.23.pdf">After the Lords of Memory v0.23</a></p><div><p>If you haven't <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/search/label/alm">followed along</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Like many games, probably, the impetus for writing it lies somewhere between an <i>elaborate preparation for a specific campaign</i> and a <i>laborious expression of my preferences</i>.</p></blockquote></div><div>This version is <i>massively</i> cut down from the previous version (which was nearly 80 pages). I work in expand/contract phases, and what I'd left myself was a core system smothered in a big, bloated pile of half-written subsystems.</div><p>Inspired by the wave of chopped-down, very short systems like World of Dungeons, Knave, and so on, this is me clearing the decks, keeping only what is definitely the solid core. Something small enough to share (possibly even right on game night) and clearly communicate expectations.</p><p>This is not a "complete" game. There's nothing on creatures, buying things, treasure, or moving around in the wilderness. (All that is left to the GM.) Nor is the text edited!</p><p>This version still doesn't meet all of my original design goals. As I summarized in 2019:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The core works, it's been playtested in a home game over a period of years--you can make characters, take them places, adventure, fight, advance, get injured and so on.</p><p>However, the whole point of writing this game was to enable a particular campaign style, and that hasn't emerged organically from my playtest campaign. If you read the <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/2016/03/writing-rpg.html">design goals post</a>, essentially what you get is a fairly simple, theatre-of-the-mind game where grubby villagers go forth and either die or become heroes. You don't get <i>geographic advancement</i>.</p></blockquote><p>However, this does feel like a chassis to heading towards them once more.</p><p>First up, Rituals. One of the (aspirational) sources of geographic advancement are the secret demands that players. These were just buried by complexity. In this version, hopefully, they'll operate a little more like the player-facing quest generator they were meant to.</p><p>Anyways, here we are for now!</p>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-89826425219738656742021-12-24T10:21:00.003-05:002021-12-24T10:21:33.710-05:00The Gig<p>Week 1, not so bad. Freezing my ass off in this van, putting up microphones. Weirdest job ever, hanging microphones in suburbia, but it pays.</p><div><div>Week 2, fuck this job, the heater died. The prof said the mics have to go up, though, something about holes in time series data. This JOB is a hole in time.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Week 3, apparently I'm recording dog barks. People leaving their dogs out in the cold, some SPCA thing? Ugh night shift, say hi to the gang for me.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Week 4, not SPCA. So, like, dogs bark and it makes other dogs bark, and the prof thinks it's some kind of dog internet. That's why we need so many mics, they need to see the patterns.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 5, kids stole the mic on Dane street, now there's "a hole". I'm going to be doing this until March. No dice with the heater, but I now have a coffee card. Bought long johns.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 6, got to see the map. It's pretty cool, the dogs set each other off. Everyone seemed really bummed though, something about missing resonance. There were supposed to be 'ripples'. Heater is working again!</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 7, no resonance, but there are "rays". Dogs start barking after each other, but only in long lines, then a bit later, back again. Looks neat on the map, like tree branches. Prof still bummed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 8, I fucking HATE Dane St.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 9, Juan's in town, came with me on the run bc "No holes!" Out all night, froze our asses off. Rav has taken over at the lab, he wants more data about the "rays".</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 10. Juan saw the map, noticed the rays all start at different parts of the ravine. Prof was PISSED. (She's back now.) Apparently dogs barking at raccoons doesn't get funding? No more map time for us, just mic dropoffs. Coffee card ran out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 11. Juan said 'ray 4' ends near that house on Groen where that guy got murdered, the same night it happened. Creepy! He got a picture of the map on his phone, he's working on the others. Can we talk abt something else? Ffs</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 12, Juan's lost it, he's obsessed. They ALL end in murders. Thinks it's not dogs barking at each other, but something going past and freaking them out. Smth they can hear, but we can't. What the hell is "something"? Wants to stake out the ravine. Idgaf, 2 weeks and I'm done.</div><div><br /></div><div>Week 13. DO NOT go in the ravine. I'll text later. Just stay the fuck away from it</div></div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145649986851420179.post-46984979786173128902021-12-13T17:42:00.007-05:002021-12-13T17:59:29.869-05:00Some Thoughts on Intrigue<p>This is me thinking out loud about intrigue in role-playing games, and a bit of scaffolding to make it happen. For the moment I'm thinking about this like a world builder, a would-be GM setting up a situation suitable for political intrigue.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhINLsEx7PeQW3m1xDxMwTCIsZFzxVpEYvqSuOHn-6KTswi07mVuVISMDco5w8QVuZYTDWqtUIIuP0a8LoN1M6rFSAsDiqk1s19phxJ13IQVvxkUEknSanDOVKwnC_nblt1XxBxpnwlpWQyf00pjFOiRpFFhKLSyfC8AjUMPWsuqXRIjLg3Kmbx22Xldw=s550" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="550" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhINLsEx7PeQW3m1xDxMwTCIsZFzxVpEYvqSuOHn-6KTswi07mVuVISMDco5w8QVuZYTDWqtUIIuP0a8LoN1M6rFSAsDiqk1s19phxJ13IQVvxkUEknSanDOVKwnC_nblt1XxBxpnwlpWQyf00pjFOiRpFFhKLSyfC8AjUMPWsuqXRIjLg3Kmbx22Xldw=w400-h191" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>What I've got is:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>overt violence is impractical (or extremely costly)</li><li>several (or many) factions competing for dominance in a cooperative endeavour</li><li>power is divided among the factions</li><li>factions want more than one thing</li><li>strengths and weaknesses tie the factions together</li></ul><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Costly Violence</h3><p>For intrigue to happen, you need multiple factions in a context where <b>overt violence is impractical</b> (disastrous, strongly discouraged, or incredibly expensive).</p><p>This could be the fact that <b>escalation is bad for everyone</b>. In the cold war, any direct military conflict between the superpowers could have escalated into a world-destroying nuclear exchange, so conflict had to be indirect, covert, deniable, or all three.</p><p>There may be a faction that has a monopoly on violence or overwhelming military power, but deploying it might be <b>incredibly expensive</b>. Crushing enemies might just make more enemies; troops must be paid; debts must be cashed in; the obligations of vassals might only be usable once. There may be no way to carry out violence without overwhelming retribution.</p><p>Another possible brake on escalation is when there are <b>many factions that are competing for dominance over a cooperative endeavour</b>. The realm is more prosperous when the barons are trading instead of warring. They are unequal in power and one of them will be king, but no one baron is strong enough to take the crown by force without the support of many others.</p><p>In this kind of situation, there may be <b>rules that govern the transfer or power</b>: heredity, etiquette, oaths, contracts, traditions, or rituals. The rules protect the factions from the disastrous costs of conflict. Even if there's no open violence, a winning coalition might decide that everyone who supported the losing side needs to be punished, stripped of its assets, or stamped out completely.</p><p>Therefore, <b>anyone who opposes a strong coalition publicly must resist in legitimate ways</b>. Their opposition is merely part of a system of time honoured checks and balances, challenges which are rightfully protected by tradition. Anyone who resists the eventual winner in illegitimate ways risks being branded a traitor, a rebel, a conspirator who opposes not just a contender but society itself. Anyone who does this can be legitimately stripped of their freedom, power, and wealth. Any <i>non-legitimate</i> actions must either be indirect, covert, or deniable.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Competition Within a Cooperative Endeavour</h3><p>I mentioned this above, but the cooperative endeavour could be any context that none of the factions are willing to destroy. It could be the functioning of a city, the belief in the rule of law, a planetary ecosystem that won't support them fighting.</p><p>It needs to be <b>constricting</b> enough that they can't simply go their own ways. They're stuck together in the same planet, realm, city, or lifeboat and they share its fate.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Power is Divided</h3><p>At the same time, no one faction can be so powerful that it dominates the others outright. <b>Each faction's power is incomplete</b>. Each must have only a few pieces of the puzzle, however outwardly strong they seem. If any one faction is so strong that it holds all the cards in any negotiation, this limits the options for intrigue.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Factions Want More Than One Thing</h3><p>Years ago I was listening to some tips on negotiation; it made the point that once you pin down your negotiation to everything but the price, you're fucked. Now it's just a straight tug of war, and any change in terms will have a clear winner and a clear loser.</p><div><br /></div><div>The answer was to find a meaningful trade-off, two dimensions where the parties have different preferences. In contract negotiation this could be around payment terms (a higher price is fine, but I want 90 days to pay; a lower price is fine if you pay in cash, etc.), but it could be anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can run around town intimidating people, or doing covert actions to undermine another faction's power, but for there to be political negotiation (not just flexing and cowering), factions need to want more than one thing.</div><div><br /></div><div>A nice way of illustrating this is the <i>indivisible prize</i>. You want the crown, so do all the other barons. There's no way you can get it without their support, but crowns can't be shared. Obviously you'll need to find something they want <i>that isn't the crown</i> to exchange for their support.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Splitting Up Power: Internal Cracks</h3><div><br /></div><div>I can think of a few simple ways to pull off two of these things at once, making a <b>faction's power incomplete</b> while making it <b>want multiple things</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div>One is to make its leadership divided. Sure, the ruling family of the East Barony is all in it together, but that headstrong uncle is hoping for a martial victory, while the cruel baroness mostly cares about sticking it to the Gellish. Clever negotiators might find ways to play on the power dynamic between the two.</div><div><br /></div><div>Similarly, you can always break a faction into multiple sub-factions. The baron wants the crown; the advisors think the baron's <i>son</i> has the best chance and the baron might be overplaying his hand to try for it himself. The baron's financiers want their loans repaid, and want to discourage the baron from hiring expensive mercenaries if there are soft power approaches to be taken instead.</div><div><br /></div><div>Divisions can be found at any scale. The baron's court has a doorman who resents the regular visitors; the kitchen staff are looking forward to cooking for a king and don't mind who knows it, and so on.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other mine for internal cracks is how a faction maintains its material conditions. Just surviving, growing food, the clanking and sloshing of industry is a lot of work and takes numerous people with different needs and opinions. A barony that has grown rich on wool exports might be full of internal divisions between land owners, tenant farmers, bandits, wealthy and poor.</div><div><br /></div><div>What compromises have been made to achieve the focus the leaders want? What's running out or not working well? What resentments or disagreements are starting to build up?</div><div><br /></div><div>(EDIT: At the risk of stating the obvious, you never 'negotiate with a faction', and factions don't <i>want things</i>, they're made of <i>people</i> who want things. Personifying the faction as an NPC is much more characterful than a completely unified front of interchangeable negotiators. The point of this business about finding internal cracks is not so you wind up negotiating with ever more microscopic factions, but that there is <b>always a way to find some leverage</b>.)</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Splitting Up Power: Different Strengths</h3><div><br /></div><div>Another way to make faction power incomplete and give yourself some surface area to invent multiple goals is to divide up different <i>kinds</i> of power between the factions.</div><div><br /></div><div>Consider:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Who has society's material wealth?</li><li>Who makes society's decisions?</li><li>Who controls society's ceremonies and proceedings?</li><li>Who has society's cultural biases or ideas of legitimacy in their favour?</li><li>Who is well regarded and influential?</li><li>Who knows more than the others?</li><li>Who is able to conspire and coordinate most freely?</li><li>Who is organized and able to act decisively in cohesion with their supporters?</li><li>Who has strong ties of loyalty?</li><li>Who benefits from the biases inherent in the institutions?</li></ul></div><p>Each faction might have strengths in one or more of these areas, but weaknesses in others. For example, imagine a general with a reputation as a war hero, made rich by foreign spoils and plunder. Unfortunately, she is viewed as a commoner with the least legitimate claim to the crown, and by virtue of her military rank is forbidden from even entering the Rotunda.</p><p>To play to her strengths, she wants to exaggerate external threats to the capital to give herself more latitude to operate politically. Even better, forcing other houses to have to pony up money for costly troops would stretch them thin. However, she's desperate for some kind of cultural legitimacy—perhaps by marriage or false historical record. She also sorely needs eyes and ears within the Rotunda so she can stay ahead of the senators' plans.</p><p>Don't overlook the challenges and advantages involved just in communication and alignment. Some English king or other apparently tried to <i>ban jousting tournaments</i>, because these gave his barons opportunities to get together and plot against him. Sending one-to-one messages back and forth takes time, and in politics, an advantage over the means to coordinate is a huge advantage.</p><p>Similarly, having a responsibility for administering the ceremonies and proceedings may not give you any official power. You're just supposed to <i>bless</i> the marriages. But that gives you all sorts of ways to control the amount of friction everyone experiences. You can speed things along or drag things out on technicalities. You may have complete access to venues that might otherwise be secured against intrusion. Being the only faction able to find a quiet side chamber away from prying eyes during a tense summit might make all the difference.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Random Faction Strengths</h3><p>To keep things surprising, let's use that strength/weakness list as a random table. Each major faction gets one strength and (to make sure their power is incomplete) two weaknesses.</p>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr><td>Roll d10</td><td>Strength/Weakness</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Material wealth</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Decision-making power</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Control over ceremonies, proceedings, venues</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Cultural biases and legitimacy</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Influence and reputation</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Knows more than the others</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Freedom to conspire and coordinate</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Organization, cohesion</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Ties of loyalty</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Institutional biases</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>Trying this out with a very small sub-faction, the court doorman I mentioned earlier. A strength and two weaknesses:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Strength: (2) Decision-making power. Curlis, master of the door, can choose who to admit and who is refused.</li><li>Weakness: (7) Freedom to conspire and coordinate. Curlis is always observed, and despite his strong opinions and his position of influence, has limited ability to benefit from this power (e.g. via bribes).</li><li>Weakness: (6) Knowledge. Despite directly seeing the comings and goings to the court chamber, Curlis stands outside it and has only conjecture to go on about what dealings are taking place.</li></ul><div>(That's pretty funny, an NPC with power who is dying to abuse it but can't find an opportunity that would benefit him.)</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Tying Factions Together</h3><div><br /></div><div>Each of these strengths and weaknesses can be used to tie the factions to one another. Pick one, and pick another faction, then roll to see how the power imbalance plays out in their relationship:</div><div><br /></div>
<table class="osr numbered">
<tbody>
<tr><td>Roll d6</td><td>Strength/weakness tie</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>A brutal choke hold</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>A coercive power imbalance</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>A sense of duty</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>A delicate alliance</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Repaying a debt</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Benefits shared freely out of love or loyalty</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div><br /></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Curlis's decision-making power ties him to, um, the baron out of (6) love or loyalty. He's glad to serve the baron faithfully and keep out those he thinks are bad for the court.</li><li>Curlis's inability to conspire or coordinate ties him to the court advisors, out of (3) a sense of duty. All his communications with the outside world flow through them, and he abides by this out of a solemn duty to remain impartial.</li><li>Curlis's lack of knowledge of the political landscape ties him to the baron's financiers in (1) a brutal choke hold. He is completely suborned by them, and keeps out anyone that the financiers think might influence the baron to spend any further before repaying his debts.</li></ul></div><div>This is just me experimenting; for a tiny "faction" like Curlis (or perhaps the entire palace guard) probably one is plenty. A more potent faction (like the baron's noble house) could have three or more.</div><p></p><h1>In Play</h1><div><p>So far I've been talking from a world building perspective, as if you were going to plan out all these factions ahead of time. I don't think that's necessary, and probably not even a good idea. Tim Groth put it aptly, "World building is a misnomer, it is really just set building."</p><p>The key thing players need in order to engage politically is to understand the landscape to be able to make informed choices. Where do they apply pressure? What asymmetry can they exploit?</p><p>To avoid the <i>info dump</i> problem, I'd recommend rolling all of this as late as you possibly can. If you can roll and brainstorm on the fly, great. You can also get your players to declare their goals to telegraph what they're up to, so that you can do a bit of thinking between sessions.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Achieving Political Goals</h3><p>Here's a super simplistic theory of political action, just truthy enough to structure a campaign:</p><p><b>To achieve a political goal, you must negotiate (or conduct covert action) to achieve all ten strengths.</b></p><p>Everyone wants something; you want the crown. By negotiating with everyone, you help them achieve their different, <i>disparate</i> goals in return for their help with your singular, <i>focused</i> goal.</p><p>The easiest way to put this into practice is to create a <b>patron with a political goal</b>, and to have the PCs be fixers/ambassadors/negotiators. The patron knows the 'campaign structure', and can simply present a handful of relevant facts as the starting context.</p><ol><li>(Wealth) The baron is struggling with debt. A bid for the throne is expensive, who will fund this?</li><li>(Decision-making) House Otherhouse controls the council of barons, which by tradition chooses the king in times of the line being disrupted. We have no sway with Otherhouse right now.</li><li>The church conducts the coronations and must bless the transfer. Will they? </li><li>(Coordination) The barony is large, but on the periphery of the realm. Who can be trusted to host the necessary meetings to mobilize support?</li><li>(Knowledge) What other schemes are afoot that might derail this? Who else is mobilizing supporters?</li></ol><div>And so on. Every weakness is an opportunity to negotiate with a potential supporter to shore it up. Every strength is a temporary advantage that may require defending.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">What Do Players Do?</h3><div><br /></div><div>If the players have an ambitious patron with a political goal, what should they tell the PCs to do? If it's a more player-directed campaign (e.g. perhaps the players are running a faction themselves), what are some constructive ways to <i>start doing stuff</i>?</div><div><br /></div><div>When you're just starting:</div><div><ul><li>Scope out the political landscape. Who wants what? What are the factions being public about?</li><li>Scope out a faction's strengths and weaknesses</li><li>Reinforce a strength. Can they take the status quo for granted, or are there new threats?</li><li>Figure out who might be in a position to shore up one of your weaknesses</li><li>Assess a rival's base of power</li><li>Scope out one faction's hold over another</li></ul><div>When you're digging in a little more:</div><div><ul><li>Scope out a faction's internal cracks, the sub-factions and what <i>they</i> might want.</li><li>Apply pressure on allies to commit</li><li>Negotiate, make blunt offers</li><li>Act to weaken, undermine, or delegitimize a rival's strength</li><li>Undo or undermine a relationship between your rivals</li><li>Take covert actions to learn or change what you can't reach openly</li><li>Test boundaries to learn the real limits of your influence</li></ul></div><div>When it gets to the finish line:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Offer last chances to rivals</li><li>Take bold covert actions</li><li>Make your schemes overt, bring on the final showdown and find out who really stands with you</li></ul></div><div>This is just a list of starters, and it's necessarily a bit abstract. "How to intrigue" is a big topic, this list completely ignores all the betrayals, feints, and "plans within plans" that you might get up to.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Final Thoughts</h3><div><br /></div><div>Thanks to Tim Groth and Sean Winslow for giving all this a once over and providing useful feedback.</div></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Tim makes the great point that it matters a lot whether the PCs are the ones doing the legwork or the ones pulling the strings. My gut tells me that if you're using a game that has some supports for intrigue, it's a lot easier to put the players in charge to start with.</div><div><br /></div><div>Burning Wheel has useful mechanics like Duel of Wits and (especially) Circles and Wises, which give the players lots of latitude in coming up with cool approaches to take without having mainlined a setting bible. Games like <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239692/The-Sword-The-Crown-and-The-Unspeakable-Power?src=trilemma-intrigue-post">The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power</a> have strong archetypal characters, and work almost like a pre-built play set so a group can just step into the roles of very powerful people.</div><div><br /></div><div>For games that aren't using anything like that, my sense is it might be easiest to set up the PCs as key functionaries first, until the campaign has enough miles under its belt that the players have enough information to form their own goals and strategies.</div>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04704966067758312492noreply@blogger.com1