23 GM Questions

From Zak S's blog, my answers to 23 GM Questions:

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

I ran a MUCK (multi-user character kingdom -- similar to a MUD) throughout my teens called Larswood MUCK and spent many long Summers writing room descriptions and generally coming of age there.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

Last night, I GM'ed my Burning Wheel campaign.

3. When was the last time you played?

Erol Otus' Island Town 2 game at NTRPGCon 2012.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

A B/X hexcrawl based on Oregon Trail, with its own little subsystem involving fording rivers, blazing trails and the consequences of losing supplies.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Try to write down notes any names, details and clues that I anticipate coming up in the next bit of play-- these items are hard for me to improvise without hesitating -- and keeping up the illusion of world consistency even when winging it is something I strive for.  I love it when my players feel like they can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and do anything they could imagine their characters doing in the world of my game.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Guacamole, when I get a break from talking.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

No, I usually am energized and physically high after a game session.  It can be mentally taxing and frustrating if my improvisational tools and game prep aren't all in place, or if I can see table "fun" dwindling and don't have a clean method with which to advance the game to the next "fun" point.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Last night, our ship's captain and sorcerer Valencio Monterosa, attempted to summon a spirit of the swamp to guide the vessel through the dark swamp of a jungle island.  Failing his test, since this was Burning Wheel consequences are usually dire -- and in this case, the spirit he unleashed flew ahead and massacred everyone in an entire village.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

Nah.  I'm very explicit about the tone of whatever game it is going in, and everyone plays along nicely.  I weave a lot of bizarre, silly and monstrous into my games but verisimilitude is still very important to me.  Some games I begin with "this game is like a Saturday morning cartoon, most everyone you meet will be a caricature of their role."  And some games are "this game is about Tolkien's Middle-earth and we're going to use proper elvish and talk about heroism and bravery and friendship a lot."

10. What do you do with goblins?

In my current game they are The Bananamen -- lanky, pus-filled fruit people with gaping maws and spears that only communicate to each other by slurping in numerical combinations.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

I design synthesizer electronics for a living, so I always imagine strange monsters as moving around while emitting synthey bleeps, bloops and blurps.  Kind of like as monstrous manifestations of the sounds I love.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

When I was 14, I was GM'ing MERP for my little brothers.  I got real pissed and sent Smaug's cousin to eat them.  In MERP it's all percentile dice and critical hit tables.  My little brother fires an arrow at Smaug's cousin and rolls 100 not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES IN A ROW.  Red dragon dead in one shot, he immediately goes up something like 5 levels all at once.

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.  I got it in the mail yesterday.  The artwork is worth the price of the book alone, I'm really enjoying it.  Maybe I'll incorporate it or parts of it into my own D&D game.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

Erol Otus, duh!  I like surreal, wacky, and dark.   I like evocative black and white line art and interior illustrations best, but I think the best illustrated and designed books are Geoffrey McKinney's books published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown.  Those are the most beautiful books in my game collection.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

Yep, definitely. Survival stories are a genre favorite of mine, and I love playing into the whole we're trapped in a cave and gonna die aspect of dungeons.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

I have run James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer three times now and it's such a blast.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

After dark with moody lighting in a large room with a big table and no interruptions.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

Oldschool D&D, Burning Wheel, and Rolemaster are all things I love that are extremely different games.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

Wow, hmm.  Some non-fantasy or RPG-related things: synthesizers and electronic circuits, memories of travel and strange places, remembering things I would've thought cool when I was a kid, being a dad, experiments in musical performance art and stage antics, my love for my friends, love for cartography.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

Someone who dedicates the attention to stay immersed and would keep playing forever, if they could.   Someone who tells me when they didn't have fun and why.  Someone who is proactive and expands upon the world I've set up for them.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

I'll have to stew on that one for a while.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

Some version of D&D that satisfies all my little quirks and preferences (workin' on it.)  A rules-lite gonzo cyberpunk game that I could referee easily because I know shit about electronics, maybe.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Sure, my right hand man and assembly tech with LZX,  Jonah Lange, isn't a gamer - but I talk to him a lot about my games and everything else.  He's got great taste and always listens and has great advice on how to terrify the shit out of my players.

Relationship Sandbox: Reputation & Favor Social Mechanics

Yesterday my Sunday night Masters of Mu campaign was heading into a session involving a big party with all 18 lords and ladies of the campaign base area in attendance.  Since this was a vital opportunity for the PCs to sneak into the party, learn some secrets and further their own political goals, I wanted a more complex mini-game involving plying the lords and ladies for favor, spreading rumors, blackmail, seduction.  Also, the game has no meta-plot in place, so I wanted to present an open sandbox of diplomatic intrigue for the characters to explore however they wished. I'll present the mechanics as I used them here, but there are some refinements I would probably make.

The system is based on two scores, represented as a bipolar (positive or negative) modifier:
Reputation is a measure of your general good or bad reputation within a specific area or social circle. So, you could potentially have different reputation scores for different places.  For my game's purpose, it was just one score relating to the campaign base area (The Isle of Hardstone) as a whole.
Favor is a sort of localized reputation applying to only one individual, therefore it's tracked separately per individual.

Both Favor and Reputation are applied as stacking modifiers to Charisma checks (roll stat or under on d20) when attempting certain actions.  These actions are attempted once per turn (10 minutes) while at the party, and must target a specific lord or lady.  All 18 of the lords and ladies were statted out ahead of time.  Each was given a few personality notes, as well as a special interest/hobby and also three secrets.

Since Charisma checks you want to roll low, negative modifiers are good, positive modifiers are bad.

The Party (turns)

• turns 1-2, greetings and announcements
• turns 3-4, dinner
• turn 5-6, dancing
• turn 7, jester entertainment
• turn 8, open entertainment
• turn 9, the Count makes a toast
• turns 10+, drinking and frivolity

I gave bonuses to certain actions during different phases of the party (seduction gets easier at the end of the night, etc.)

Actions

Each action can be attempted on one lord or lady by each player once per turn.  Some actions are easier than others, so additional stacking modifiers to the Charisma check are included.  Also, actions can be attempted on another character's behalf (for example, four players all trying to increase the reputation of a single player's character.)

• Flatter/woo (-2), effect: increase Favor
• Learn interest/hobby (+0), effect: increase Favor, and learn secret interest/hobby
• Spread rumors (+0), effect: must attempt to increase or decrease a specific person's Reputation score.  For every four successes, the Reputation is increased or decreased appropriately.
• Learn secret information (+2), effect: increase Favor, and discover one of the NPC's three secrets
• Extort/blackmail (+0), effect: get what you want from the NPC, but you must have some sort of secret information to blackmail them with
• Seduce (+4), effect: increase Favor and take the character to bed.  also learn some free secret information.

Critical success (natural 1) doubles the effect of the success.  Critical failure (natural 20) gives you permanent enmity towards that NPC and no other actions are possible.

A few examples from last night's game:

• The party's thief had been given a mission by the local thieve's guild to kidnap a high ranking NPC to hold for ransom.  She immediately targeted one of the Viscounts and throughout the course of multiple rounds, used Flatter/woo to increase her Favor score with him.  Once the dance started, she went for her seduction attempt and succeeded.  Once getting him alone, he was kidnapped and taken prisoner.  
• Three of the characters decided to pretend they were the royal retinue of a foreign, exotic lord (another one of the PCs, who definitely wasn't a lord.)  They all ganged up and spent the game spreading rumors about his wealth and physical assets to great success.  He'll be well known throughout the courts of the island after this night.
• The party's fighter has been accompanying the group to raid the local caves of monsters.  He spent the evening buttering up the Count and his knights, and at the end of the night made a proposition that he should be granted a well funded expedition into the caves -- and found success.

Further thoughts:

• The system could be adapted to use the standard 2d6 reaction roll instead of a Charisma check easily enough.
• There was a natural length and time constraint to this whole scenario due to the party timeline.  In campaign mode, I'd only allow a check for reputation and favor inside these mini-scenarios or once per big event or encounter.
• In a more complex system, the defending party might get some sort of saving throw or wisdom check, but I didn't care about that for this scenario.
• I'd love to experiment with some sort of playing board/matrix setup with counters in play to visualize the whole relationship web and maneuvering at the table.

Minitaur & Minotaur

Campaign Setting: The Aquasphere

I pulled an old campaign setting out of an old GM binder this week to develop for a Burning Wheel Gold game which crept up on me.  Here's a map of an eighth of the world.

Imagine a giant, planet-sized air bubble floating around in the bottomless Elemental Plane of Water.  On the inside of this bubble, landmasses float around, creating island chains where their peaks pop out of the water into the bubble.  In the center of the bubble is The Aurum, some sort of fleshy, light-emitting mass which gives the inside of the bubble night and day, and heat.  Giant vortexes of funneled water rise from the magnetic poles of the bubbles to The Aurum.  It's a world of violent, lost jungles and fantastical swashbuckling cultures.  Strange weather conditions, and bizarre aquatic creatures.  This is the Aquasphere.

It's been fun developing some details of a campaign setting for a Burning Wheel game, since so much focus is based on player agency I've relied on all of my players to add details to the setting we're building.  I also enjoyed the first map I've drawn with my new set of Rapidograph pens, which take some getting used to.  I'm not great at mapping, but it's something I hope to be great at someday.