Sagas RPG.com

I am an avid NPR listener. I listen for about 2-3 hours a day while taking my daughter to and from school (she is in a magnet program so we have a way to travel). Earlier last week I listened to stories concerning a world AIDS organization’s difficulty in fighting the AIDS epidemic in Africa due largely to rape. This got me thinking. This is not the first time that the issue of War Rape has been brought to my attention. Honestly, the concept is disgusting and horrific to me. The overall idea is horrible, but what is worse is the way it is handled, and must be handled, by the victims. What suddenly occur ed to me is that we have, in general, ignored it. Now, I don’t mean we should be addressing it as a subject. What I mean is that we, as gamers and game developers, may want to have horror and horrific war like themes. However, I think we, in general, gloss over the true horror of humans at war. If anything we should not be ignoring what evil truly occurs. However, there is a line between being honest and exploitative. I hope that in my next sidetrack the issue is tackled and seen honestly and with the intent I explain here, meanwhile not opening the door for people to feel alright with doing work that is exploitative.

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Chances are you are gearing up for you Halloween game that will play out this weekend. Chances also are that you will use some kind of horror theme, or even a horror game. Now, I haven’t played horror games like Call of Cthulu or much of White Wolf’s games, but I have run some very successful horror themes before. I gave on player nightmares for at least that night. The gaming group was equal parts creeped out, horrified, or afraid of what was happening in the game. However, these are GM story telling devices that I use that don’t translate well to an article. What you can do is apply some mechanics that are easy to use and fairly universal that do work very well for horror games. 

There are some basic ideas in horror. One is a sense of risk, which the character could come to harm or die. Desperation usually kicks in when risk is high and the opposition weighs heavily against the character. For instance, an injured character in a movie limps desperately to safety as a horde of slavering zombies slowly overtakes him. The desperation lies in the dwindling hope that the character will make it. They are slow, the distance not closing fast enough. In fact, the distance between him and safety is closing much more slowly than the distance from him and zombies is closing.         

Hindrance is the best way to hold a character down. If a character is hindered through  the actions or failure of the player, or that the dice just didn’t roll in his favor, the player is more willing to accept it rather than a GM who throws amazingly obscene challenges at the player. The player always has to feel like there is a chance of escape, no matter how bleak, not that the GM is there to destroy each hope.

Then there is the character point of view. Stay with me as these things will merge together. Now, you, as a player, may not feel much of a sense of fear the first time your new character sees, for the first time, some supernatural horror like a zombie. Think about it, does your character become nervous, fearful, or any natural emotion, or do you start attacking? This is a sticking point for me as our Meta knowledge sometimes overshadows our ability to play our characters properly.

Here’s how it comes together. As a GM you can add a new element to your game that reflects your character’s first impressions of a situation. Now, I am not talking about some kind of insanity check or restriction on how your characters are role-played. I am talking about a modifier that actually will change the way a player plays the character. 

Try this: the first time a character sees a new horror, such as a zombie (for this example) make them roll a Wisdom test, or a Will save or some kind of mental defense test (whatever your game requires). The difficulty is based on your world, but lets assume that zombies aren’t something that is pretty common. Lets also assume the test is high enough for all players to fail. Now, take the number that they should have rolled, and compare it to what they did roll. The difference is now a modifier to any test requiring thinking, perception, etc.

 In Sagas this changes quite a lot. It alters initiative, spell casting, tactics tests, etc. You could also affect attack rolls, suggesting that the character is more concerned with defense (i.e. protecting him as a natural instinct) to the point that finer combat ability is suffering.

Now, this seems a little rough. However, we are not trying to kill the characters. You may have to point out that your characters are afraid, and that because of this they are not themselves. The best thing for the player to do would be to play defensively, maybe even retreat if things are bad enough. Are one character’s modifiers so high that it seems safe to retreat alone than stand with the group, i.e. running in a panic?

What will begin to take shape is the characters actions. Start describing the lousy die rolls. “Your character hacks desperately at the thing before you” or “You can’t seem to focus on your spell, what are these things? What are they going to do? You’re not sure what you should do!” or “You desperately fumble to reload your weapon and drop the clip on the ground.” Describing the characters actions for the players may help them to get the picture of what is happening to their characters. Fear, desperate, confusion, all of these elements should be present in the descriptions and moods conveyed.

Now, imagine it from their point of view. The players actually start to get the picture. Their characters are in a desperate situation. They could die because they are rolling badly. They are rolling badly because they are hindered with a penalty. Their penalty is caused by fear. The characters are afraid and could die because of it. Now, the player is actually hindered by what has become an overwhelming force. Sure, the group should have been able to kill the zombies with ease. However, fear changes the environment, hindering their ability to think and act clearly. Now the player has a weaker character against a force he isn’t so sure he can beat anymore. Now the player starts looking for a way out too. 

As in every situation you usually have a character with a more level head than the others. You will likely see that character cover a retreat or come up with a plan that allows the other characters to help with easy tasks. Eventually they will get away or defeat the encounter.

If they defeat the encounter it is likely that their fears will go away. You can choose to try this again, but lower the target levels significantly to reflect the new confidence. You may have one or two characters nervous, and hinder because of it. However, the overall group should handle things much easier.

Ultimately it feels like a cheap trick. Some players may hate the new test, but it will always work better than throwing overwhelming odds (i.e. higher level monsters or much more monsters than the characters can really handle) at the characters. That message is generally received as “The GM doesn’t want us to win here so run away” rather than any kind of sense of fear.

Give it a try this weekend and let me know how it works for you. It generally works better than “Your character has suffered from dragon fear and runs away”, or even “900 zombies come at you.” These things seem like contrived mechanics and don’t offer any real sensation. However, the contrived mechanic of adding modifiers that cause a change in behavior very well could.

The DPnP system so far is developed primarily for two purposes: creating and managing campaigns, and creating and managing characters. One of the first future expansions to the suite will be to create an adventure creator. However, I have found that DPnP is still quite useful in the creation of adventures out of the box (per say as there is no real box).

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I decided to write about this as I am working on two related projects. One is some sidetracks I will be releasing after they are edited, and the other is a return to a weekly campaign I am running. The weekly campaign adventure is a bit different than writing adventures for published projects. The general approach is the same for me. However, writing for weekly adventures is much more easily handled as it can be done in weekly episodic installments rather than as a collective whole. This being said, the adventures I play, as run by a wide range of GMs, have had some glaring issues within them that are easily corrected with a rather simplified approach, while being aware that there are pitfalls within any adventure plan that should be avoided with extreme prejudice.

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So, last week’s game did not happen. However, a week has gone by and things are looking great for today. So far, the weather is good, we have 4 players and one GM (me), and the possibility of two campaigns going to be happening. So, I think that although disappointing, last week’s loss may have been helpful.

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This post is a two parter. First is a quick update on the CRM. I have to completely rewrite one of the DLL files to better handle management of data and reduce load on the system created by the current structure. This is more of a pre-emptive move as the current setup doesn’t hurt on its own, but in more complicated programs the elements created through the DLL are way too large and thus may prove to difficult to manage. It is a product of being inexperienced when I created them. Though I don’t consider myself experienced at this point, I have learned enough to know that this needs to be fixed. Therefore it is. 

What I really want to talk about is a thought that brews in my head from time to time. That is creating an official Fantasy Sagas campaign world. This is something I have toyed with for some time. However, I have had some serious dilemmas when creating it.

First of all, unlike most publishers, I am not going to release my campaign world. It isn’t one of those things wherein I just think my world is so cool that it should be published and thus it will be the next Forgotten Realms or whatever. Truth is, I don’t have a fixed campaign world I play in. I steal a lot in my private games from other companies and material. I usually play in existing campaign worlds but expand on them. This will not be a pet project wherein I release my Oh So Cool Campaign. This, if I do it, will be specifically designed.

I thought first and long about a campaign world where it is pseudo historic. I wrestled with this for a long time, thinking it would be fun. Truth is, it probably would, but they already exist. Lets face it, almost all campaign worlds are in some way pseudo historic. So eventually, I will probably create pseudo historic campaign source books, but they will not be based in a specific campaign. I know, sounds odd, but that is where I eventually landed in my thought process and I will expand on that when the time comes.

My next thought was one of my favorites, and may be developed later. The setting is low fantasy on another world entirely. It is an alien world, not a version of like most other fantasy campaigns. Firearms exist in very barbaric and primitive ways. Magic exists only in  the natural magic sense. There is no real Human race, all races fit along a specific territorial evolution. Therefore, there are races such as these mantis like creatures which live in the humid swamp like regions, and these rock flecked skinned people from the mountainous areas. There are other races as well, all fitting within a specific region. The world itself is apocalyptic, but not in the post-apocalypse. This is the actual end of days of this world that people are living through. Campaigns exist in surviving through the death of an entire world, or maybe on quest to try and save every0one from utter ruin.

Again, I like this idea, but there are too many sci-fi elements to really consider it fantasy so it is getting pushed to the corner of my desk.

Another is a near future modern setting. By near future I mean five to ten years from today. Dates are not specific for a good reason. Nothing else you will get from me on this as it is actually under production in a very small form. However, it is modern sagas material so not relevant to this article.

So that bring us to what will I do. Here are some things I notice in just about every fantasy setting.

1. There is a once mighty empire now on the decline (like Rome). It is both evil and good in varying respects and has a large, but dwindling influence on the world.
2. There is a group of wizards that are enigmatic. We don’t know if they are good or evil but they usually take the form of a villain.
3. There is a group of hero like people akin to Jedi. They are always lame but someone in the design thought they were cool. They meddle in the world either behind the scenes or openly trying to bind the world together in peace and love. However, people often resent them for whatever reason making their job more difficult.
4. There was some great cataclysm in the past (usually a few thousand years ago) that results in wastelands and ruins for your adventuring fun.
5. For some reason everyone speaks a common language. Also, though writing and libraries are few, every Jack the Farmer knows the names of heroes and villains and strikingly large specifics on things that happen thousands of years ago, even though in our modern world our history over the past few hundred years is vague and error prone to even scholars with access to huge electronic data bases and mass communication methods.
6. The near past was a silver or golden age, usually ended by the cataclysm mentioned above, now the remnants of great magical weapons and other wonders that can no longer be made are littered around the world and the current world is on the decline because said magical advances no longer xist.
7. At least two races (usually elves and dwarves) are bitter enemies because of some vague historical footnote usually having root in some war or conflict. Occasionally this actually may be something more realistic like a slight grievance like refusal of gift between kings. However, there is usually some element there so that a party can have an “interesting” dynamic with two of its members being of these opposed races and how they have to settle their differences and come together for the sake of the group.
8. Thieves guilds and assassins groups operate like medieval versions of the Mafia and so are underground crime syndicates that run everything from brothels to slave trades, even though the world is set in a period of time were slavery and prostitution were commonly legal in our own historical timeline.
9. Just about everyone can read, swing a sword, or cast a spell except the innkeeper, the local lord, or some other insignificant NPC.
10. There is monster races that are evil for the single point of being the evil race. This is a throwback from JRR Tolkien LotR so we all seem to have a race of Orks that will constantly plague the world with faceless monsters to slay without regard. They are the RPG version of Nazis in that they can and should be killed without thought or remorse, even though in our real world many German Soldiers in WWII were not Nazis and were likely conscripted again their world (the SS being the exception that proves the rule).

Content creation has become almost a full time job for me lately. Working on current projects has superseded me even getting a normal 9-5 job since I got laid off about 3 months ago. This is not a devious plan to avoid full time work, it is actually just a product of some current life issues that my family have to hash out before I start work again. The good news is that it allows me more time to work. However, the load is getting pretty heavy and I am only one guy at the moment.

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Well, now that I got this army thing cleared up I have been able to refocus back onto my projects. Things are going good. In this article I’ll be discussing two of them: Desecration and Romp.

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Last night we continued with the private testing for Desecration. As testing goes, I couldn’t have hoped for a better run than this adventure has proven. After surpassing the initial opening pitfalls, the adventure has proceeded perfectly. Each component has so far proven to meet each design goal. That is no small feat, considering the nature of RPGs, where every player hopes to get something different out of the game, and so they contribute to the story in much different ways. With the unpredictability that players always bring to an adventure, it can often surprise even myself how easily these designs, and the E-RPG system itself can handle it.

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This is cross-posted from a new sticky in the Fantasy Sagas Development Forum. (more…)