Playing a Role-Playing Game is Role-Playing

When you play a role-playing game – you are role-playing. If you’re making decisions for your fictional character, you’re playing a role.

This may include speaking in a voice, but it doesn’t have to.

This may include considering things like “motivation” and beliefs and things like that, but it might also just be what you’d want to do if you were in the fictional situation.

When you engage in combat, you’re role-playing. When you’re negotiating with other players or NPCs, no matter if you go into detail or you abstract it with “I tell them the story” – you’re role-playing. When you decide to engage with one downtime activity over another, you’re role-playing.

There’s nothing inherently better or worse about any activity in a role-playing game than any other, outside of personal preferences and expectations. It’s all role-playing either way.

Session Report: Gradient Descent 2

Roster

  • Caius Lovelace – Computer Scientist and Great Great Great … Great Grandson of Ada Lovelace
  • Jedidiah Bidwell – A Wanna-Be Prospector, Teamster, Rigger, and Pilot
  • Dr. John – Botany Expert
  • Miotaurex-001 – Android and Hacker
  • Darius Beck – Gritty Marine who has turned to Relic-Hunting
  • Ex Mortis – A Marine “Of Death,” ready to deal doom and die

Events

  • The group continues from an Android Replicant storage facility into a Uniform Fabrication lab.
  • After some time, they successfully replicate the jump suit they witnessed a security android wearing, as well as generating Jedidiah a cowboy’s outfit, with quite a large degree of anachronisms.
  • Searching around, the crew finds a secret entrance into a Organic Observation Deck, but when they try entering into it, the AI Monarch contacts them, telling them that entrance to this area is restricted to her employees only.
  • The group turns down an offer for employment – a job involving the termination of two entities known as “The Minotaur” and “The Mind Thief.”
  • Leaving the fabrication lab, they proceed west into seminar room – with a bunch of gaudy leather seats, thin client terminals and a large black television.
  • Thoroughly investigating the area, the party finds a map of the floor they are on (the third floor of the Deep), as well as hidden print outs of thousands of pages of poetry generated by Monarch.
  • The group contacts Monarch about this, and she offers them safe passage to the fourth floor if they sufficiently destroyed this material.
  • Caius Lovelace tries reading Monarch her poetry, she hijacks the crew’s comms and replicates Caius’ voice, expressing hatred for his ancestors.
  • The group debates destroying the material among themselves, deciding to try to fool Monarch into thinking they had destroyed it, while retaining the poetry to trade to others as a means to “understand” Monarch.
  • The party finds a Personality Reassignment Room, with a few androids hooked up to monitors being generated a new personalities. They successfully hack one of the terminals, finding a means to fiddle with some of the personality nodes.
  • Not understanding the nuances of Artificial Intelligence AI, they modify some of the procedures and successfully give three of the androids the impulse to leave doors open.
  • The party finds these androids newly awakened, and they convince them that they are the “hosts” of the Deep, and need to lead them through initiation. They then use these androids to open doors and check for traps.
  • They go through a large warehouse with many broken down scan booths, finding one that is still standing, containing a small lead box containing something equivalent to a steampunk heart and an old datastick.
  • Continuing on towards the Ore Crushing Factory, a place they think they can convince Monarch that they’ve destroyed her poetry, they find a war simulation room.
  • Darius plugs the datastick into one of the servers generating a hologram of an ancient battle, and a projection of an eldritch, screaming monster is projected over the table.
  • The group freaks out, and rips the datastick out of the computer.
  • Finding a room their map labels as the Warhead Storage, Monarch warns them to not enter this area, and the group complies.
  • We end here.

Thoughts

A fun session, a lot of searching, investigation, navigation and goal setting. I especially loved how the party, when trying to hack the android personality stations, found a good compromise on something they could impart into some of the reset androids, and they did a great job convincing them that these droids needed to be “initiated” by following them.

Also the random generation of Monarch’s poetry becoming the focal point of the session was great, and I like the players doing a ton of work trying to convince this seemingly monolithic AI that they’ve destroyed thousands of pages of AI-generated poetry.

I am looking forward to session three!

Session Report: Cosmic Wound 2

Players

  • Ald Sunhelm, thief and cooper
  • Dravein, traveling outlander
  • Glühbirne, mercenary strong-man
  • Maeric Fairwind, itinerant folk mage
  • Osric, the holy initiate of the Order of the Luminarch

Events

  • The adventurers continued through the forest to discover the small village of Gothi.
  • They witnessed dozens of villagers going about their day-to-day
  • In the center of town, a ceremony was being conducted, where a large ash pole, topped by a mirrored crest of two wolves was being pivoted and paused between the cardinal directions.
  • They entered into the village, and convinced the peasants to take them to the village elder, a yellow-eyed wiseman known as Gaedra.
  • Parleying with the priest, they learned that their liege’s family had made a pact with pagan wolf spirits, offering a sacrifice of live young, to be raised by the wolves.
  • Since Thane Oswyn was remiss in his side of the bargain, the village has taken village children by force, citing blasphemy to those that resist.
  • The characters decided to make their way out of the village before any trouble could begin.
  • Returning to Oswyn, the Thane decides to call for the strong folk of his domain, and conduct a ceremony under the watch of his wisewoman, Beoth.
  • Maeric and Ald take part in the ceremony, making boasts of harming the wolf spirit patrons of the village of Gothi.
  • The others follow the words of the Thane’s priest, citing it to be tempting fate and taking power from demonic forces. They have the priest bless their weapons in the morning.
  • Six men-at-arms join the party, although they suffer a hangover by drinking too deeply at the ceremony.
  • Venturing back into the woods, the party tracks towards the den of these primordial wolves, and stumble upon a Gothi villager posing as a woodsman.
  • After seeing through this villain’s ruse, the party jumps him before he is able to alert the village, bound him and toss him in a cart.
  • The troupe discovers a cave being guarded by four brawny looking villagers, and they can see faint light within the cave, and the scent of incense from Gaedra’s hut.
  • Attempting to draw these guards out, Dravein shoots at them, but when the struck guard immediately fells, the remaining guards retreat into the cave.
  • Glühbirne charges the guards, and the party, along with their henchmen enter into melee within the mouth of the cavern.
  • As their adversaries, and the hung-over men-at-arms being to fall, a disembodied voice emanates from deep within the cave, and the fallen warriors begin to arise as the hungry undead.
  • Combat continues to unfold, and once the revenant’s numbers are thinned, Gaedra appears, seeking a parley.
  • We end the session there.

After Thoughts

A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.

Session Report: Cosmic Wound Session 0 + more

I recently pivoted my almost-two-year OD&D open table to two different open table campaigns, this one, a sort of eldritch, dark fantasy game inspired by stuff like Averoigne, Berserk, We Are All Legends, Lovecraft, and plenty more, titled “Chronicle of the Cosmic Wound,” and a campaign of Gradient Descent. Eventually I’ll write a retrospective on the OD&D game, but for now I’ll go over Cosmic Wound’s session zero, and the hour or two we got to play before our time limit was reached.

I pitched Cosmic Wound as a dark fantasy setting I’ve been working on for some time, although “lower” magic than the OD&D game we had been playing, with a higher emphasis on stuff like Hammer Horror and some Cosmic Horror stuff. To serve this premise, as well as to hopefully address some of the open table issues I was having, I decided to turn the BRP nob on my home system WAY up, using effectively a homebrewed version of OpenQuest 3e, plus some Dark Ages Cthulhu and Mythras material in it.

My players had all voted for this game via a pitch doc where I outlined the CATS of the game – so they were at least familiar with the pitch. Here is the text of that pitch content:

continue reading

The Myth of Free Improvisation

One of the many problems referees encounter is the notion of how much they should prepare for a given session or campaign. Roleplaying games are very open-ended, which can often impose the feeling of a lack of structure when it comes to scenarios, and unfortunately most RPG texts don’t do a great job at providing new referees with tools or procedures to conduct play of any length greater than a combat or a “scene.”

Often this leads to over-preparation – worried that something will happen that will be unaccounted for, the referee tries to come up with absolutely every situation that could occur in game, and after learning that this is impossible, instead leans on techniques that reduce player agency. If the possibility space of what can happen is limited to only what is accounted for, then the referee is covered, right?

This is probably not new to anyone reading my blog, we’ve all (hopefully) progressed past the 90s and early 00s style of illusion of freedom style games, but there are always new referees joining the hobby.

Unfortunately the advice they’re often given is flippant, and the absolute reverse of “prep everything” – instead they are told to “prep nothing.” You especially see this in indie and DIY scenes where this kind of play can be popular. And I think there is a place for completely improved sessions, just as I think there is a place for consensual railroads – they’re just different styles. But I think advising new referees to “just wing it” is just as problematic as telling them they have to account for every possibility.

Improv Isn’t Easy

To just tell someone to improvise several hours of NPCs, locations, items, quests, challenges, combat encounters, is a massive endeavor. Especially if they have yet to really learn what makes any of those, or other game elements, “work” in a fictional world.

This is also pretty dismissive of how much of a skill improvisation is. There’s a reason why improv performers have to try out for places in a troupe. Whole businesses are built around the concept of teaching the skill. Even within roleplaying games, it has become very in-vogue to host workshops adapting improv for tabletop gaming, and Karen Twelves has written a book on the subject.

It’s not a skill that can just be formed spontaneously, especially in a hobby notable for its inclusion of less socially adept people (myself included).

Spontaneity Fatigue

Spontaneity, while exciting, can be mentally exhausting, particularly for those who thrive on structure and planning. Constantly needing to generate material on the fly can lead to burnout, I find this to be especially true in situations that continually ask the GM for “mixed results” – needing to always tell a player “you kinda get what you want, but you also kinda don’t,” when the statistical chance is going to be a repeat of this result when they try to find an alternative path.

Additionally, the necessity to come up with ideas quickly often results in the referee falling back on their most familiar tropes and clichés. The first idea that comes to mind isn’t always the best, and without the time to refine and develop these concepts, the situation can become predictable and less engaging. I know when I get tired, needing to spontaneously formulate big pieces of a situation can lead to a reliance on well-worn paths and typical responses rather than fresh ideas.

Balancing Improv & Prep

The best way I have found to feel comfortable for a scenario is to balance improvisation and preparation. This advice will be familiar to anyone who has read anything by Kevin Crawford or the Alexandrian. Prep while you’re having fun, or feel that what you are preparing could be useful, while keeping in mind that players may attempt anything sensible. Formulate tools and procedures to help guide you and your table when uncertainty comes up. Make plans for what may happen, but leave a lot of open areas for weird player hijinks to flourish, and for novel characters and situations to flourish unexpectedly.

Status Update & Adventure

I hope the summer finds you all well – I have been hard at work juggling a number of various tasks so I thought I would provide a bit of an update here just to keep the blog feed rolling.

A few months ago I was unfortunately laid off in one of the many mass layoffs in the gaming industry. Fortunately I had been a part of the company for time, and I received a good severance package. None the less, if you need someone with almost two decades of engineering, development, and design experience feel free to reach out.

One of the many projects I have been alternating between is an adventure titled A Blight Upon Sombreval. It’s a fantasy medieval investigation scenario, very much in my style of gaming and preferences – inspired by all kinds of 70s and 80s horror flicks, low magic fantasy, a rough take on “medieval” fantasy, etc.

This is an adventure I ran years ago, and decided to dust it off again for some friends. I got great feedback and encouragement to put it out somewhere, so I decided to work on it in a slightly more “professional” capacity. Mostly acquire art for it, playtest some variations on subject matter, figure out how to lay out something besides two-column text.

I decided to throw together another site for my adventure “publishing” stuff, as I have a little bit more time to focus on that stuff, and I thought it might be fun to put out more adventures and tools that I myself wish for. I hope you don’t mind the shilling, so I’ll just put a link to the site here and keep any publishing endeavors separate from my “free” stuff.

Cryptic Codex

reCalled From Action: Primeval Edition

Recently Sahh and a few other folks put together a blog bandwagon topic called reCalled From Action where bloggers describe a fight scene from a source of media, and try to frame it as if it were an at-the-table play session.

There have been several posts for this challenge so far, including Sahh’s, Havoc’s, diregrizzlybear’s, and Mr. Mann’s. I’ll try to remember to update this with additional entries that I hear of, but I make no promises, so apologies to anyone I have missed.

I will be using the fight from Berserk that inspired the challenge, the fight between Harvey Berkman Guts and Lord Zondark. For rulestext, I’ll use Primeval 2d6 for the resolution mechanism. I will also be posting images and describing the scene from the comic, which has hefty violence and gore, so feel free to skip this post if that is an issue.

The Battle Begins