ttrpgs – Slice of Beef

Game Design is Just Problem-Solving

Or can be – anyway. This is probably very obvious, but it didn’t click with me until yesterday.

I actually didn’t plan on writing adventures or designing games. I think there’s a quote on a game Discord somewhere from last year that says I didn’t want to ever try. I never actually thought I was capable of (good) game design – mostly because I’m not very “tactically”-oriented. I never know how to figure out synergy during character generation or “min-maxing” as they say when doing character “builds”. I just pick stuff that looks cool or fun or thematic and run with it. I never paid attention to how things worked, per se, or thought about why something was fun (though I do that often, now). I didn’t think I had the brain for game design – I didn’t have experience analysing games like that.

But now that I’m actually making things (I have launched a whole-ass studio), I realise that you’re just answering questions, or making mechanics that back up whatever “thesis” statement you’re trying to argue for. The problem isn’t “how do I design death mechanics?” or “what existing method should I choose?” but “how can I make death impactful?” or “how could I solve the problem of wanting characters to avoid death but still have it on the table as a possibility?”. I might not be making clear what distinction there is exactly between those things, but finding out that there is a distinction is what changed things for me. Game design is just solving a puzzle – and I like puzzles.

See, I solve puzzles all the time. I look at goals – what I want to achieve, and build backward; not only when I’m running games or writing scenario hooks, but in my job, when making art, or when I’m fixing my computer! That’s game design, too! There are some problems that benefit from an extra set of eyes, or looking at existing solutions and building off of them, but that’s still just methods of problem-solving! It’s not that you’re designing things, you’re answering questions (and asking them), and solving the overarching problem of “how do I do this and still make this fun”?

Anyway, just a short thought for now. Focusing my creative energies on other writing projects…

On Improving Game Mastery

“IS WHAT I’M MAKING EVEN GOOD?” I ask myself,

“WHERE CAN I GET UNBIASED FEEDBACK?” I continue,

“HOW DO I GET BETTER?” I finish.

Dungeons. Dungeons, dungeons, dungeons. I can read dozens of articles on dungeon design. I can take courses, and watch videos. I can look at what I think are good dungeons, and I can tell when something is a bad dungeon… but how do I know if my work, my dungeons, are actually. getting better? Why even make dungeons at all? Why dungeons?

The first part of the answer is “make more dungeons” (and compare the old ones to the new ones), but I only manage to make a couple per year, and they’re not always that thoughtful. I barely even have experience being inside dungeons as a player! I’m a baby! I’ve only played TTRPGs since late 2017, and I’ve only been running them for the last two years… I feel like I’m in a metaphysical crisis, a philosophical despair about the dungeon here.

But dungeons are just an example vehicle for general discussion here – all this is a result of my trying to put one together over the last week. The real point is, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels about game mastery and game design these days. I could run sessions 5 times a week, or write up a dozen scenario hooks, and it would probably lead to some improvement, but it’s not directed practice – my energy isn’t primarily being spent on being a better game master. Rather, I’m just going through the motions. Instead of practicing the metaphorical guitar, I’m just strumming the strings for twenty minutes – it all feels so aimless. What do I need to do, how do I focus on something specific to improve upon? How can I best bridge that gap between theory and praxis?

Even theory is tough – I used to feel quite smart during my university days. I was truly picking up knowledge and figuring out how to apply it… but lately, I can read through game design books and it’s like “what am I even picking up, here?” or “how do I actually study this?”! I’ve nearly forgotten decades of school and how to learn things! Applying it is worse – how do I know when I’ve succeeded? “Your players had fun” is an extremely low bar for me (a good one to strive for with the casual games master, but not really what I’m talking about here). I’m aiming for the intentional application of good gaming. Some sessions will just not work out – they won’t be fun. But that’s never necessarily the game master’s fault alone – it’s a myriad of factors. What I want is to figure out how to parse out those factors – and know that even if things weren’t fun, what did I do right anyway?

It isn’t exactly a self-confidence thing – I think my Cult in the Empire of Decadence was a good module. I even think the Fools’ Day dungeon I’m working on is going to be up to a decent standard. I’m still happy to run things and post my work online (when I manage the time to do the work anyway). But as a “professional” game designer (one that’s making a profit) I don’t want to put out work that’s not worth the price. I probably spent a few hundred dollars on making Cult and maybe 60-80 hours of work on it – how much is my time worth? A lot! I need to pay myself a living wage, after all. It’s not fair to pay myself less. But also – how can you expect consumers to buy something awful? I tried to price Cult fairly – it’s a good piece of work, and I’m proud of it. But I don’t want to be Wizards of the Coast charging $80 for a slim hot mess of a module that needs major re-working, that you then have to pay another $40 extra to get the digital edition of. There are fair wages, and then there’s… that.

That said, maybe the bar for good design is lower than I think it is…

“Write What You Know”

I’m sure you’ve heard it before – in the context of writer’s block and not knowing what to do, the advice often given on writer’s blogs and somesuch is to “write what you know”; this idea that you should take things you’ve experienced and put them into your work and that makes the creative process easy… This also applies to tabletop roleplaying games! And no – not just writing modules (though I’ll get to that).

Last year, I ran a campaign in Stars Without Number, a sci-fi Old-School Rennaissance system by Kevin Crawford. I wrote a bit about it, I think – it’s a great system, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sci-fi (and OSR) to check it out.

But it wasn’t for me. And it’s not because I didn’t like it – I loved it. Kevin Crawford writes good stuff. Go buy the fancy deluxe version right now. The problem was that I don’t actually know shit about sci-fi or even fantasy-based space operas, as it turns out. Running a campaign in a theme I knew very little about (comparatively) was incredibly difficult. I don’t know the tropes (let alone how to possibly subvert them), and I basically just ended up having to peer into the depths of my fantasy knowledge to pull out a generic quest and strap LED lights and chrome on top. Which… kind of is what a space opera is, right? Either way, it was a pain in the ass to prep for, as a lot of my stuff is improvised at the table, and in between sessions I just had to read short sci-fi stories to steal ideas from and it felt like a lot of unnecessary work. I wasn’t a bad game master by any means, but it felt weak.

Fantasy is much easier – I read hundreds of fantasy novels when I was a kid, and even though I do not feel like I know the genre, it’s amazing the amount of stuff and tropes I can pull when creating adventure hooks and ideas for games – just because of what I’ve been exposed to and what I know. I personally probably won’t ever run sci-fi again unless it’s a premade module. I learned my lesson from that. As for writing…

…I did try and write a serious module. I posted about it last month – published under my company, Bovidae Studios. And it was a great project – I’m really pleased with how it came out! Yet, it was still a lot of work when I had to do the serious bits. I took a lot of jokes out of it in one of the final revisions, if you can believe that. I just struggle with writing truly serious content! So I’m taking a bit of a break from my second serious OSE module and writing a comedy one-shot, for April Fools’ day, which also happens to be my birthday (my whole life was a joke, really). It will be PWYW this time (consider it a birthday gift from me), and I’ll probably discount Cult that day too in celebration (in case anyone put it on any wishlists and is hard up for cash). I am not actually very funny, so we’ll see how that goes.

Circling back to the point: I’ve seen neophyte gamemasters ask for advice on how to run games in genres they aren’t familiar with – like if one of their friends wants to play in a Star Wars or a vampire-themed game so they pick up a copy of a system, but they have no interest in it so beg on public forums for someone to quickly explain the basic premise so they can bash something together… and I won’t tell people not to do that. Do what you want – play what’s fun. And do try new things – don’t be too afraid to get out of your comfort zone! Running SWN made me a better game master, and I’m glad I ran it. I try and run a new system at least once a month. But I will say that being familiar with the media that’s influenced what you’re running does absolute wonders. Run what you know.

Or at least watch the Star Wars films first.

Back on my BS

My winter vacation is coming to a close tomorrow. I feel like I didn’t do half the things I wanted to, but I did accomplish a lot!

First and foremost: I’ve written a tabletop adventure (for OSE) under my business name, Bovidae Studios. It has been written, playtested, and the third draft has been sent to my editor for review (and removing my unnecessary verbiage – I am sure you noticed, but I am actually an extremely mediocre writer). I have a couple interior drawings to finish up, but otherwise, once I get that back and make some changes, I’ll let my spouse look it over and then send it for self-publishing via DriveThruRPG.

It’s very exciting! I put a lot of work into it! Is it good? Maybe. Who knows! It’s ~20 pages of actual content and it will cost $7.95 – it was going to be $10.00, but then someone else released something infinitely cooler, their magnum opus, for $7.95, so I decided maybe mine should be the same. There will also hopefully be a print edition (mostly I want to own it if I’m being honest) once that goes through DriveThru’s proofing process. I’m also starting work on my second adventure for release maybe in April! Both of these I will probably post to this blog when they are up, but probably won’t do any progress updates or anything (though I do post some updates aimlessly on the dice.camp Mastodon instance from time to time).

Otherwise, #Dungeon23 is a thing (thanks to Sean McCoy’s brain). It is supposed to be a year’s-long mega dungeon: one room a day, one floor per month, for a total of 365 rooms and 12 floors. As cool as this is… I don’t have the time for it. I have adventures to write, a day job that has nothing to do with tabletop, I’ve got art commissions on the side, I started working out three times per week, I’ve been doing vocal lessons and learning guitar on my own, and I’m supposed to be updating this blog… so I already fill up most of my free time!

That said, I still want to do it – so, as a compromise, I’m doing one room a week and will hopefully post my updates to this blog! The exact day of the week is uncertain – it will probably vary, but it should be interesting. I’m doing it on paper, but I’ll digitise along the way and toss it all together as a PDF at the end.

Lastly, I accidentally overwrote this blog’s WordPress theme and it messed up the navigation menu. I can’t be arsed to fix it right now, but maybe I’ll get around to it.

That’s all for now! More posts to come…

Stars Without Number Campaign I: Finale

Over the summer, I spent a fair bit of my time helping out with an annual online event, and this meant that pretty much everything else went on the backburner. I still ran sessions, but things like updating my blog became a fairly low priority! I had a backlog of session summaries for my Stars Without Number campaign to write since the last one, and I just didn’t have the time or memory to get them all in! Alas!

However – last week my SWN campaign actually came to its final conclusion! So I’ll do up a brief little bullet-point synopsis of the main events here, chaotic as they are:

The party lands on the planet Thorunn, where they investigate some Psionics shenanigans, get arrested (Blanche is released on bail and has a court date), and become higher-profile targets of the Ragni. Caitlin’s grandmother assists in their escape.
The party headed towards Teus, stopping for a few days at a nearby system to upgrade their spike drive. Here, they also ran into the rival party (Tizzy, Omen & co.) and placed a bug on their sip, to track their messages.
The party then headed to the planet Teus, to both collect the sample (at which point I made a deeply embarrassing accidental Homestuck reference) and do a job for Hermes, whose hacking prowess was requested in an anonymous email. The job involved the party delving underground into an ancient pre-tech ruin – Tizzy, from the rival party was there too, helping out his oppressed people.
The party decided they did not want to deal with whatever was going on down here, and left before the final chamber, leaving Tizzy to speak with the ancient cryogenically frozen pre-tech being who told him (and in turn, the Ragni) where the super-powerful planet-destroying weapon is. It is, in fact, the Spire itself. The party learns of this later, thanks to their information bug and strips Tizzy’s report. The Spire requires the Lion’s Lily (for some reason), and the Ragni are preparing to go get it.
The party quickly rush to Terra Purr’ma to collect the Lily before the Ragni do, collect some with the help of a friendly botanist, Nepeta (another unfortunate accidental Homestuck reference – which caused several ‘if I had a nickel’ memes to sprout up in the Discord) and manage to destroy much of the wild population and get the local government to enact protective sanctions on the rest. They’re warned of its potential misuse.
Blanche virtually attends her court date and gets off as not guilty.
Medicine Man also arrives on Terra Purr’ma, and tries to break into the botany lab, but is stopped by the players, who stabilise him, kick him in the balls, and then have local law enforcement take him away (they really don’t like killing people).
The party decide that it is not safe for Blanche’s family to stay here, and Blanche takes them to a nearby outpost (where she also remains – the player had to leave due to some scheduling changes).
Caitlin’s grandma as it turns out was kidnapped by the Ragni – Alan Ortovsky in particular, who uses her as a ransom for a large sum of money from the party. They quickly head back to their home planet, Ilnar, to rescue her.
The party tracks down Alan, takes out his bodyguards, rescues Grandma… and then lets him live, in exchange for information.
Turns out, Alan was actually in line to replace the now-dead leader of the Ragni, but since the party exposed his connections to the organisation, plans changed. There is a new leader- but who?
After some investigation (and by investigation, I mean mostly an attempted ritual with a doll of Blanche they made out of her leftover fur) the party figures out it is Rocky Brickman, Hermes’ old manager at work, who has also been promoted within the shell company he ‘works’ for. They also discover that the Spire as a WMD has been kept relatively secret, even within the organisation, and manage to interrupt a meeting, preventing the release of the knowledge of its power and secrets.
The party decides to anti-climactically poison his coffee (successfully), and get the fuck out of metaphorical Bel-Air. It was so underwhelming and perfect at the same time, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Knowing that the Spire is relatively unknown, they decide to cut their losses, and head to the nearby Paradise World, where they build up their drug enterprise, retire rich and drink cocktails, and Hermes’s player sends us this video in chat:

There would, of course, be longer-term repercussions for the things they left behind, and there are a few extra details I left out of this summary, like the newly discovered lost system… but as I wanted to wrap up before the holidays…

That’s all, folks!

Stars Without Number Campaign 1: Session V

As Blanche’s player was missing last week, I started off the session with a bit of downtime minutes to see what she had been up to after ‘falling asleep on the ship’. Content warnings for this session are death and hostage situations.

As the party returned to their ship, exhausted after a day of dancing and chasing down missing persons, they came in to find a horrible stench permeating the area. Blanche, a cat-person, had heated up some fermented fish oil tea – and much like your shitty coworker who cooks fish in the microwave, the entire ship was drenched in it. While Caitlin and Pillboi threw a fuss, Hermes got sick trying to drink some himself and ended up with food poisoning, with everyone offering different methods of treatment for most of the night, slightly getting used to the smell as they later slept.

In the morning, Corrine (the missing woman) entered their ship and immediately restarted the complaints as she brought up the smell. The conclusion she came to was that the people who are saving her are idiots. But Corrine doesn’t have a lot of options herself, so she stayed. The part opened the envelope after much debate about it potentially being a bomb (spoiler: it was not a bomb) and revealed 2.5 million credits in encrypted data chips (stolen from the casino). The party openly questioned the morality of them running off with the money, maybe taking just some of it, or perhaps loading the chips with a virus… to which Corinne rightfully pointed out “Uh, hello? What about me??? I’m going to die??”. There was just one young woman standing in the way of this group being set for the rest of their lives. The Ragni would have no idea it was them (at first, anyway) without careful investigation, and there was a good chance they could get out of the system and be gone before anyone noticed.

But, with as pure-hearted as the party is, the group opted to not mess with the envelope and instead proceed as planned. They would, of course, tip off the Interstellar Interference Navy of the stolen goods, and receive a large reward for information (10000 credits), but they did not want to risk Corinne and her sisters’ lives. Hermes, however, did investigate the Rangi-provided communications device Corinne had on her, and determined that it was also being used as a tracking device. He confirmed that the messages received were from various locations that Ragni had frequented – included that tiny old abandoned house.

However, risk her life they would anyway – Corinne, upon arriving at the starport in Shan, was immediately escorted into a dark vehicle and taken to the older part of the city – specifically the small boarded-up house that the party first found leads of her location on Halfdis. They managed to hail a cab with a very elderly (but speedy) driver, and Hermes quickly uses reverses the tracking information in Corinne’s compad to see where she’s headed. The four of them arrived just as Corinne and the bodyguard had entered the building. The party decided to ‘slash the tires’ (well, interfere with the two grav cars all ‘technologically’) so that they could prevent the men from escaping, and then spied on the package exchange from outside of the house.

Blanche went in fairly close, listening right at the door. Inside, there were three men: the guard who escorted Corinne, Alan Ortovsky (the Ragni’s ‘unassociated’ business partner and dirty-deed-doer), and Alan’s personal bodyguard – who held a gun to Corinne’s back as Alan checked the data chips for tampering and to ensure no money had been missing. The party waited. I set a timer in real life to time how long it would take to upload the data. Blanche headed back to the group and they decided to hide in the bushes behind some refuse and wait out Corinne’s exit. Two minutes pass and… they hear the single shot of a laser pistol. Alan and his two guards leave the building alone.

The party panics – it takes only a few moments for the three men to hop in their cars and to realise the Ragni’s cars aren’t starting, and they’re distracted for a moment with addressing the issue. Pillboi takes this opportunity to rush inside and attempt to use a lazarus patch on Corinne (who had been shot in the stomach). It had been about two rounds’ worth of time since she was shot, and he had a pretty hefty penalty to it. Pillboi makes his roll, and succeeds. Corinne is stabilised.

Meanwhile, Caitlin has contacted emergency services and the ambulance and local law enforcement are on their way. The Ragni do a survey of the area but the PCs have been well-hidden and are not found. As the sirens approach, the three decide to book it down the road. The party is interviewed by the law enforcement agents and provide all the information they have – including their real names in the witness statement (this will important in a future session). Wrapping up, they call Sheila, Corine’s sister, and let her know the situation. The group decides that the party will head off back to Halfdis, and leave Corinne and Sheila in the local law’s care.

En route back to Halfdis, which took a few days to fly to, the group listened to the radio and heard about Alan Ortovsky’s “unfortuante” arrest… however he was still released; he had supposedly also been kidnapped and ‘forced against his will’ to be involved in the Casino heist, as he worked on similar finance software, and is so traumatised from the experience that he has almost ‘no memory’ of the events that transpired. Of course, the party doesn’t know (well, they probably assume) that Alan is absolutely working with the Ragni and this was just his get-out-of-jail free card, and he’s right back to work.

On Halfdis, however, the party is taking a break from space mafia nonsense, and decides to enter the Spire as contracted adventurers to recover pretech artefacts for the local scientists to study. The group is told of the dangers of the Spire – and how it has claimed so many scientist lives that they’re forced to outsource its exploration to any old idiots willing to give it a try (and that if they happen to recover any id tags from the corpses of past adventures, they would also be rewarded). They figure hey, no trouble, let’s go explore, and head down one of the unmapped halls of the Spire (which is actually just ripped from Numenera‘s Jade Colossus). Immediately, they find themselves upon a room full of seven or eight (hard to tell) disfigured, mutated, irradiated human-like abominations (some with id tags around their necks), laying on the ground, seemingly murmuring some kind of prayer. The group decides to leave and try a different route, where they eventually come across a pretech artefact suspended in some sort of near-stasis field. After a bit of trial and error, they decide to tie a rope around Blanche, and launch her at the artefact, which she grabs and the group pulls her back in. They cut their losses for this trip and head back, pocketing a good 25000 credits from its sale, and then greedily plan to go back in for more next week…

Some added GM notes on the Corinne situation: Corrine’s possible death was a bit of a tricky moment for me. At one point, pre-session, I wrote in my notes that “if the girl they’re escorting goes to the meeting place, she will be threatened with death, there will be a few minutes while they verify the package she’s dropping off, and then they’re going to kill her”. The party…. decided to hang back and watch and not interfere. I felt a bit uncertain: would I be a worse DM for causing this girl’s death that they tried so hard to prevent the last session, or to stick with my guns and not pull punches? Did I not telegraph the danger of her enough? But it’s what the NPCs would do. So, Alan’s bodyguard shot her.

I don’t want to go easy on these guys. The trick going forward is now that the group is getting into higher levels, I’ve got to start making challenges harder. While I disagree with the whole ‘scale the difficulty with the party’ paradigm, I’ve been pretty soft, softer than I should be, and going with the safer option of difficulty because I do want them to actually have a chance to succeed, but I think there will be more failure/challenges in their future as I start to ramp checks up to more interesting and complex situations. Corinne was easily manipulated, but many other NPCs will just naturally be more difficult to convince. And Alan Ortovsky is not happy. If this Casino trick got found out by a passing group of idiots, he needs to be on his toes – and is formulating a way to track the group down as we speak…

On Time

Speaking of my missed session last week, and combined with some other things I have been thinking about, I would like to talk about time. Session pacing, session scheduling, spot-light sharing, in-game calendars: the works. This is sort of my typical ‘patchwork’ style of writing, so it’s a little about a lot of things without any depth. Maybe I’ll move on to writing more interesting, complex, specific articles someday? Probably not. Enjoy this for what it is, instead:

First up, session pacing. I’ve heard, on multiple occasions, that I am a “god of well-paced sessions, I wish I could run games like you”, as well as simultaneously someone who said I “could use a lot of work, it feels like the characters don’t accomplish anything”. These comments come from multiple different players from different backgrounds, all in the same month-ish timespan. So, am I good at pacing or not? The answer, unsurprisingly, comes down to it depends on the table. Both yes and no. Nobody wants to hear this, but I genuinely don’t think there’s a science to it. Maybe an ‘art’ – people have tried, bloggers have written dozens of articles about it, and while there are definitely plenty of tips that you can (and should) follow, like “bring a man with a gun through the door” when things get slow, or alternating high-intensity situations with lower-intensity downtime scenarios, and these things will help you improve your ability to control pacing… your mileage will inevitably vary, no matter what you do. I feel like even if I mastered and put all these skills to work as intended by the authors and game designers, someone, somewhere, is going to play with me and tell me it sucks anyway. Someone will also tell me I am incredible. Perhaps even two people at the same table. Maybe even the same player. My best advice, for learning how to pace sessions, then, is to set up a situation where your table has the level of trust in place that the GM is able to ask for and receive genuine feedback, where they can start tailoring to the specific group and find out what works. This is the actual trick to pacing – whatever’s fun, let the fun parts happen. Get rid of the stuff your group finds boring. Even if the fun stuff isn’t full of meaningful choices, it’s okay to still have all your shopping trips play out if the table finds it fun. Earlier this week, in session four of my Stars Without Number campaign, I spent probably far more time on the dance competition than was necessary, and I could have resolved it in a single roll…. but it was fun!

Certainly, if you were re-publishing the game as it happened into a book, perhaps you would cut out a lot of that content to make it more fun for the readers. Or perhaps if you ran a stream for a live audience, you want to keep things exciting for the majority (that’s a whole different can of worms). But in our case, the only ‘readers’ that need to enjoy the game are the people at your table. After that – you can always consult the advice blogs for your specific situation, but on their own, in a vacuum, it won’t work. That’s the trouble with GMing, there are ~~almost~~ no wrong ways to do it. I’ve had a lot of personal struggles with doing lot of GM theory-crafting and then when I put it to the table it turns into a mess. That’s a whole other subject, but yeah. Relax. My advice is to just run the game how you think feels best in play, if you find yourself spending too much time on one thing and not enough on another, check in with your players, and then try using different skills to speed it up or to slow it down. You’re always relearning everything with every new table you put together.

Putting those tables together is a whole different beast, though. You’ve heard it countless times: the greatest enemy in tabletop games is real-life scheduling. Players get married and need to take a month off for the wedding, suddenly have kids and need to work around their bed times, call in sick and can’t make it one week, or even end up leaving the table permanently for all kinds of reasons. I’ve had my heart broken several times over by a Numenera game last year that just didn’t work out – people weren’t communicating, we had different ideas on how often to play – things had changed over the past three years. I was left frustrated and upset and I don’t think there’s anything that I could have done to make it better.

Honestly, the best thing I can say here is to state your commitments, find people who are open and honest about their scheduling, communicate often, keep the overall game relatively short (i.e. only 10 weeks versus expected three years), and run regardless of attendance (one on one sessions can still be fun!). Or run an Open Table for as long as you feel like it. There’s not much to say, except it’s frustrating. The long-term things, the multi-year epics… those only complete with luck, a lot of player turnover, or a lot of money. With a lot of vetting practices (maybe I’ll do another post on how I acquire players) and good communication abilities, you absolutely can get a group that plays together and stays together, though, so don’t give up!

All these different players you do manage to get into the same timeslot, though, have other problems: Returning to the ‘fun’ talk, what happens when one player loves shopping trips and another finds it incredibly boring? The easy answer is ‘play with people who all find the same things fun’ and there’s no problem, and there are definitely some aspects of gaming that you cannot compromise on, but the likelihood of actually finding people who all love the exact same things and can bring enough fresh perspective to make the narrative interesting is probably somewhere in the 0.000000000001% range. As much as I love telling people to kick truly uncooperative players, and screaming bankuei’s everlasting great advice that you should be meeting at the game, there are always going to be situations where you have to acquiesce to the other person’s wants. So, the solution is ‘sharing the spotlight’. Make sure, at the end of the day, that most people are having fun, and get as much of a share of the ‘spotlight’ on their fun parts as they want.

Notice how I didn’t say ‘equal’ share. I could almost post an image of that ‘standing-on-boxes’ equity picture; I won’t but it’s the same idea – make sure everybody is having fun the way they want. Usually, it’s that you need to make sure everyone, including the GM, has roughly the same amount of speaking time – however, there are exceptions, such as one of my SWN players who deeply prefers to ‘spectate’ and only have small portions of personal roleplay per session. I have talked to him about this on multiple occasions; talked to that table about this, and everybody is on board with the situation of him mostly listening and putting forward his opinion when it matters. It’s all down to your table and what works for everyone, and listening to your players and adjusting as you go.

I left a game of Burning Wheel recently for this exact issue: it wasn’t the Game Master’s fault, per se (though I think I would have appreciated a more compromising response to my feedback), but it definitely wasn’t the right fit for me. We typically spent multiple hours of session time on a single player, with the expectation that ‘eventually everyone will get a solo session’ of sorts. This didn’t sit right for me, not because it’s terrible game mastery, but because it wasn’t what I found fun. I didn’t want to essentially spectate on a podcast for three hours, and I also didn’t want to ever end up in the situation where I had to narrate my own PC for two hours straight. Perish the thought. I don’t like being the main character, and though I absolutely want good sections of focus – I require a balance, and that table just didn’t have that. I spoke about it and the GM’s decision was final – this is how we’re running it. Back to bankuei – they decided to play a specific “game – for this specific rpg, this specific campaign you’ll be playing, and this particular group of people” and either the expectations earlier had some crossed wires, or I agreed to it and decided it wasn’t what I wanted. I’m not sure, but they’re having fun, and that’s what matters.

So, however you finangle your spotlight to your group, the point is keeping an eye on the clock and making sure you’re actually meeting the expectations of everyone. This shouldn’t be just the GM’s job, but the majority of the responsibility does fall on them to keep an eye on things, and it can be very easy to lose track of time if you get caught up in something the GM personally finds fun (see: my dance competition – I made sure to do a scene swap midway through to give the other players something to do that wasn’t just playing a dance minigame). However this works for you – whether that’s setting actual timers, or just making sure you have a very visible clock in your direct view, doesn’t matter, but you do need to be mindful. That’s far more important than overall pacing – making sure everyone is getting their fair share of what they want out of the game.

On a final note, despite me personally being fine with what happened in my Burning Wheel situation, I do want to point out that generally this really should be a ‘per session’ or ‘per two sessions’ basis. No one should be left out of a game’s fun for an entire session – if such a situation were to need to occur, just run a solo session or smaller group for the players it matters for and maybe give players a short summary to read. Offer them the choice to listen in or not. As mentioned when complaining about scheduling – we only have so much time in our lives. We want to spend it on things that matter, and every three to four hours of gameplay should be fun for the entire table. That is, if a particular player hates combat, it’s okay to have an hour of combat they slog through – but if the whole session is going to be four hours of combat, maybe telling that player to skip that week is better than having them there and suffering. Or, you know, don’t make sessions that are going to be four hours of combat if you know one person hates it.

Time in games is wiggly. For every real-life week, an hour could pass in the game world. Or It could be four months of content (see pacing, earlier). I actually had this article in my drafts when Adventure Forecasts by PCD was published (great article, go read it) and felt I should also add in a note about it, so here it is (if a bit awkwardly placed, it still fits the theme of the post). I’m not a very talented OSR blogger in particular, so I don’t think I have many important personal opinions to say, but here are my opinions on the above:

A living game world is a lot of work. A game where everything you do is realistic and makes sense is a lot of work. Even just writing a calendar of events is a lot of work. I can barely put my own life’s calendar together. The dream of pre-planning all these potential events is something I both want to strive towards, think this article is 100% right in recommending, and something I know is ridiculous for the average layman GM try to achieve. Maybe a professional who only goes GMing as a full-time gig could have the time and resources to spend on it. I think using the technique of having pre-scheduled, missable events in smaller doses throughout the campaign to add verisimilitude, while also keeping ‘static’ events that happen whenever the players interact with them, is a good mix that will keep your mind sane. A GM’s time in real life is just as important as time in the game itself. Don’t go burning yourself out writing potential hooks for every non-player character’s birthday in the game, or countless planet’s worth of holidays. Only do this if you genuinely have fun writing such things.

Time is the only thing we can’t get back in our lives. Spend it on things that create fun.

Stars Without Number Campaign 1: Session IV

No session last week, so the last session was two weeks ago (as one player was going to be absent, one was unwell, and I had an event I wanted to attend anyway), but we did run this Monday (I’m just a smidge late getting the summary up). Since I’m a little late in doing the write-up, this may be missing a few finer details but I think I’ve got most of it down. Content warnings for today: None! Uh, there’s a lot of dancing?

The group arrives on planet Halfdis (still in the same system), which consists primarily of poor refugees; listening in on the radio advising them of a cultural archaeological festival happening. They also hear about some recovered footage of ’employees’ being the prime suspects of the casino heists, and some blurry photographs are on the net (the party doesn’t actually look these up). Blanche (whose player is absent for this session) is exhausted from the long rushed flight and remains on the ship. The rest of the group (Pillboi, Hermes, and Caitlin) are quickly pushed in from the starport next to the festival location, and as they chatter about their plans, head into the festival area. They somehow don’t think to check the guest list for the missing woman, Corinne, despite being asked for their IDs on entry (oof) and when they arrive, look around for anyone who works for the Ragni (space mafia faction, if you recall, who supposedly kidnapped Corinne). They follow a few patrols, which I hastily decide are on a loop from the food area (hosted by Cat’s Cradle Courier company and where they have a mini docking area for the courier ships – one of which belongs to the group that raided the casino and working the festival is their current cover) and poke around.

Not much happens here – they order some food (a recurring theme, I’ll have to make up some interesting local dishes for future planets), but they do spot a suspicious ‘familiar’ figure (Omen, the cat Blanche hit over the head at the casino, though the players don’t remember him) out wandering in the closed-off courier ship dock, but choose not to pursue; instead wandering over to the giant green spire in the centre of the city after being offered a few flyers by a passing Jade Spire Protector (who seek to leave the archaeological finds of the planet alone) insisting they take action against the Heritors (who want to remove the objects, study them, and display them to the public). The group does a cute little museum tour, but sees no sign of the Ragni. A tempting poster offer looking for ‘adventurers/excavators to brave the ruin’ almost lures them away from their target, but Caitlin’s resolve in finding Corinne is firm and they head back to the food stalls area.

At this point, I figure they need some action, so I immediately pull in the grand dance competition, of which preparations had begun while the party was away. The crowd had been given pointy green cone-hats showing off their planet spirit, and all of them were jumping up and down to reach the skies and swaying to the music. Corinne (the ‘missing’ woman), conveniently, is visible up by the stage, signing up for entry. The party, of course, decides that all three of them will enter the dance competition. I then proceed to do a fun minigame dance competition, which might have stretched on just a smidge too long – next time I’ll reduce it to two rounds each, where they score points based on the number of successes gained during their performance opposed to the other. Each dancer takes a turn and picks a level of difficulty – an easy move (roll a 6 or higher), a moderately difficult move (roll a 10 or higher), or an expert fanciful move (get a 12 or higher), and scores one, two, or three points respectively if they succeed. They score 0 points if they fail. Each 1 vs 1 has three rounds, so everyone got to pick three turns. I loved running this, honestly, I think I did a pretty good job with the announcer and the group got to narrate their successful and failed dance moves as they saw fit (they were only as foolish-looking as they wanted to be).

While Hermes and Pillboi were on stage, dancing up a storm, Catilin scuffled over to Corinne and made conversation. Caitlin heard of Corinne’s current career as a ‘World of Final Fantasy 342’ illicit gold-miner, but did not believe Corinne for a second that she was “just here on vacation”, and knew something was up. Pillboi, losing to Hermes in the second round, returned just as Corinne was called up on stage to face against Hermes, the undefeated winner so far. Midway through their dance battle, however, Corrine’s compad beeped, and she hastily left the stage mid-fight. Catilin was called up next, turned to Pillboi and said “you better not let that girl out of your sight”, and strutted on stage while Pillboi dashed after her.

Pillboi tried to get her attention, but Corinne blew him off, so he kept his distance and managed to follow her to the courier port, where the two hopped the fence and Corinne knocked on one of the starship’s doors. Sliding underneath the belly of the small ship, and listening in, Pillboi overheard Corinne being given a package (the stolen credit chips from the casino) and her instructions of not opening it, not telling anyone about it, or else it would result in her death. “And that’s not my threat, that’s my boss’s threat”, one of the crew (Omen) said. Pillboi stayed under the ship and listened in on their conversation a bit longer, learning that one of them was named Taz, before snapping a sneaky photo of the interior (the back of Omen’s head, and a straight-on photo of Taz, the ship’s engineer/programmer), before sneaking back to meet up with the group.

Meanwhile, the dance competition was culminating in one final match: Caitlin versus Hermes. Catilin got a huge lead as she’s a performer at heart, and was incredibly successful, so the only way for Hermes to tie with her was to complete an expert-level move…

…Except Hermes physically cannot roll more than an 11 based on his negative modifiers. Knowing this, Hermes’ player lets the table know that his character is going to attempt the splits, and, upon obviously failing, narrates how his character’s pants rip on stage, exposing his ass to the world. A glorious way to go out. Caitlin takes the (literal) crown – the reward being 500 credits and a giant eight-foot-tall golden cone-shaped hat, which she wears throughout the rest of the session.

Back to the actually-important-bit, the crew aren’t sure what to do next with this information. They decide to check Corinne’s dataslab which they brought with them, given by her sister) and check for any information on hotels or inns Corinne might have been staying. I accidentally fucked up the timing here, but the group didn’t notice, but anyway they did find out the location of her hotel. They hung around the festival for a bit, watched some jousting and wrestling competitions, and then made their plans to sneak into the hotel at night.

Since the group had the reservation listed on the dataslab, Caitlin posed as Corinne and got a spare key card from the front desk, and then headed up to Corinne’s room, where they confronted her regarding the situation. Corinne came clean (she’s not very smart socially, and easily coerced) to the group and they offered to help her. They told her to proceed as normal, and get on the outgoing flight as per her instructions, and they would meet her at the starport on Shan and, after dropping off the package, would help her and her sister find safety. They offered a touching video call with Sheila, and the two sisters reconciled their differences over the phone. The party then gave Corinne the new key to her hotel room (Corinne was very confused why they had a key to her hotel room) and bid her goodnight.

Then the three of them stood in the hallway, argued about how stupid that was, how they could lose her, and then knocked on the door again and told Corinne to actually just fly with them instead of going to the meeting place alone. Corinne, who had gone to bed, was sort of irritated and even more confused but agreed because it was pretty late, and the four of them decided to meet at their ship tomorrow morning.

The session was fun. It was the first time I had to do multiple “two NPCs are talking together because the PCs are listening in on their conversation” which I’ve maybe actually never done before. Talking to yourself is weird, in a way. That said, it worked surprisingly well, and my voices were distinct enough and the scene short enough (a few sentences) that it was good. I liked it. I kind of wish I had prepped less ‘interesting festival activities’ and one more ‘interesting plot hook’. I had a few, and they are going to return to deal with one next week, but I still felt like I was short (even though I prepped like ten different things). Maybe more little events? a food stall vendor needs help with something that just takes a few minutes? Who knows. My player said that he thought it was just the right amount of things to flesh out the world, however, so I’ll take his word on it for now.

More on that, though: in an effort to satisfy my players’ request of ‘we want more points of interest and faster pacing’ I felt like things were far more linear than I’d like? Any moment things got slow, I brought the action to them rather than letting them seek it (good, generally!). However, my party doesn’t currently like seeking their own adventure (RIP my sandbox), so it’s what they wanted. That said, the way I executed it was a bit out of regular form for me, felt a bit like ‘this is my story idea’ (even though it truly is not, they caused this) rather than the group’s and I don’t love it. Workshopping new strategies later, but I think I’m on the right track. I did appreciate the changes though – it can be a good exercise to go out of your regular GMing comfort zone. Still didn’t quite work but I’m slowly figuring out why. One of my players has always been a quieter ‘spectator’ type so I might see how he’s feeling about a more focused session on him later, but he did do a lot of things he wanted, so he was happy. The session overall was very fun, and a lot of information got given to the party which will coalesce into something cool probably. Next week I have to prep a dungeon, iron out those loose plot threads and pull ’em back into something interesting…

…So, next session they’ve decided they’re going to deal with Corinne’s package, head to Shan with her, and sort out a way for her and her sister to escape. They, for some reason, assumed the package contained a bomb? Anyway, it’s not a bomb. I’m not sure why they didn’t want to open the package but presumably, they will open it during the flight back? Afterwards, they actually want to head back to Halfdis to explore the Spire’s ruin. I’m looking forward to it, as I literally just ripped it from Numenera’s Jade Colossus, which I was going to run last year but the game didn’t end up coming to fruition, so a lot of the material I know! It’s going to be fun – I’ll have to do a bit of combat prep which I so far haven’t done for this game. Speaking of combat pep, Corinne was going to be killed by the Ragni as soon as she met to do the package drop-off (why would they risk any witnesses?), so I’m glad the party isn’t just skulking around after her, though they won’t have a lot of time since they’re waiting until morning to leave. I don’t think it makes sense for the Ragni to have guards stationed at Sheila’s home, so she will be fine so long as the group can beat them there if they escape with Corinne… But I am uncertain how it’s all going to go down. Time will tell.

Stars Without Number Campaign 1: Session III

I’ve been recently contemplating the problem of ‘keeping things serious’ in my sessions. I advertised this particular campaign as a more personal character-driven drama segment, and I want there to be space for more serious moments that aren’t interrupted by jokes and poor comedic timing. You certainly need a fair bit of that to relieve tension (it can’t be intense all the time!) but I feel I am definitely leaning a bit too far into jokes and comedy. So, last week, I set to work on strategies to sort of maintain a more serious mood. Of course, at the end of the session, all my players agreed that it was ‘too depressing’… so… I did accomplish my goal! But from here on out, I’ll be going back to more gonzo comedy, and deflating more tense moments, I guess!

I started with the communications message log from last time: Pelkan Wales’ scandal, the news report of the casino heist, another advertisement, as well as a ‘mysterious empty signal’ that our programmer PC, Hermes, could not decipher (if he had managed it, he would have been given star coordinates to a specific location). The party will start to receive more of these as time goes on, hopefully gleaning some more information as time goes on… I haven’t quite fleshed it all out yet, but there’s some cosmic space horror nonsense that they may get up to later on…

Back to the party, the group stopped off in the Eurymem system and headed to one of two habitable planets in the system, Shan, which is a large megacorporation and heavy industry planet. The players underwent an awkward ‘routine’ cargo search and interview by the IIN (Interstellar Interference Navy) regarding the heist, restocked some supplies, looked into upgrading their spike drive (on that note, I’ve opted to let go of the Geico insurance ad thing, as they’re planning on upgrading it right away). I actually wasn’t expecting them to not only go to this hex (which I had a few adventure hooks pre-keyed), but also go to Shan (which I completely forgot to key), so most of my prep came from the early iterations of my Sectors Without Number auto generator. Woof, this was a tight session. I managed to improvise an entire mystery scenario on the fly, with a young woman (Sheila) being thrown out of the space mafia (the Ragni)’s local corporate office, and wandering off in tears into a nearby alleyway. Caitlin, our Psychic, recognising the mafia’s insignia, offered assistance, and the crew decided to try and help her find her missing sister, Corinne. I honestly had no idea where I was going with this, but I wanted to start to look into the mafia business and also maybe lead into the casino heist a bit. So, Sheila’s poor situation was born: she Is (or was) a very wealthy engineer working for a prestigious company on the planet, but lost her job recently. In order to pay for their expensive house (the two sisters didn’t think of maybe, y’know, downsizing…), Corinne started working ‘odd, late-night jobs’, disappearing for hours at a time, is gone most of the day, had a closet full of sexy lingerie, and encrypted, coded lists of locations. The group decided that she had most likely been involved in prostitution.

Normally I say to avoid red herrings in mysteries, but in this case, not only was I improvising all of this and so it’s hard to ensure the mystery stays on track, but the clues all lead to a potential ‘funny’ reveal rather than actually be red herrings for the mystery – Corrinne is not a prostitute, and is in fact just… farming gold for an MMO and converting it into cryptocurrency by heading to internet cafes and individual account holder’s addresses for access to their VR pods. This should help deflate some of the ‘too depressing’ moments I built up in this session, and don’t conflate with the actual ‘Corinne really was kidnapped and is in a bad way’ – the gold farming isn’t making a lot of money, and her emails uncovered a strange meeting place a few hours out of town (containing a lot of documents for a secret project called ‘Spice’, and a man who works for a gambling software company named Alan Ortovsky – said gambling company being a front for the Ragnis), as well as a receipt for a one-way ticket to Halfdis – the refugee-filled planet next door. Corinne has been instructed that she will receive a lot of money for flying out to Halfdis, and then arranging a flight back – unknowingly smuggling some data chips back with her after meeting Omen, the catfolk from the previous session, and his crew who were responsible for the casino heist at the behest of the mafia. Of course, the Ragnis won’t actually let her live a normal life after this, and she’ll likely be disposed of once she returns to Shan. But the Ragnis needed someone who wouldn’t be suspected by the IIN traveling. Corrine wouldn’t be searched as she has no record of being at J’Ordain casino, and has been given a careful alibi for her reasoning on heading to Halfdis (which I, uh, still need to flesh out the details on). More on this particular incident next time…

As for other feedback I received: our sessions are so short – we can’t change the time, but the group does want to up the pace a fair bit. Even this summary article is incredibly short compared to previous ones. Most of my sessions are fairly meandering and I need to fix that. I’ll be spending the next week really ramping up on some prep for the next location (they’ve let me know where they’re planning on going) and making the casino heist scenario a lot more robust, and hopefully smash in enough content to finish off the casino sort of ‘questline’ here, and then spin back to the drug peddling. We’ll see how it goes. Overall, maybe a 5/10 session – I’m proud of being able to maintain a serious tone and improvise a mystery on the fly, but it wasn’t quite the angle I should actually be going for, so it’s time to do a bit of re-routing!

System Reviews: Wendy’s Feast of Legends

I moved across provinces back in 2017. My spouse and I spent a little over a year apart, before deciding that we would both stay here in Saskatchewan long-term after my second degree. We made a few good friends when we moved here – Ben and Eric, but as they were my friends ‘first’, I wanted to give my spouse some time to get to know them without me around, so they wouldn’t just be “‘Beef’s friends’, but ‘our friends’. So, the Fast Food Aventures Trio was born! They don’t actually call themselves that, but basically the three of them would get together every few months and try weird fast-food menu items – the “Meat Mountain” secret menu addition at Arby’s, the limited edition “Double-Down” at KFC, etc. My spouse rarely eats that sort of stuff, so it was always kind of a fun event to do.

About a month ago, I discovered that Wendy’s (yes, the fast-food chain) put out a free tabletop roleplaying game a few years ago called Feast of Legends as part of a marketing scheme. I knew I had to run it, though I obviously doubted its quality -first – my name is Beef, so the fact that the world map of the game was called “Beef’s Keep” was a blatant irony I sought desperately to exploit. And second – this actually kind of lines up with my spouse’s activities and it would be a nice opportunity to bridge our interests: I figured that while my spouse wasn’t normally into tabletop, he would acquiesce in favour of combining it with ordering food from Wendy’s with Ben and Eric. So, a few weeks later we set a date, and a new legendary journey begins…

I’d like to split this review into two parts: first, the actual game mechanics, and second, the adventure campaign module that comes written along with the system. I should note that Wendy’s actually removed the game from their website a while back, but you can still find it from various internet archive sources. First, mechanics-wise, Feast of Legends is surprisingly functional. It’s a D20 system, probably a bit of a hack of D&D, and all the stats and etc. make sense. The writing is great – the ‘roll 4d4 for your stats, just like our 4 for $4 deal’ and ‘if you eat these Wendy’s items in real life, you get a bonus’ are quite clever little additions. On that note, though – the character sheets aren’t very well designed, or perhaps the food item bonuses aren’t clear, but it reads as if you add your temporary bonus to your base stat, not the modifiers, and there’s no spot to the character sheet to put these bonuses, which means you have to manually adjust your base stats and modifiers and then remember to put all the numbers back at the end of the session? Huh. A bit of an oversight that would have just been helped by an extra box. Chargen is fast at least (literally just pick your ‘class’ and roll stats), but it also weirdly doesn’t have good rules surrounding how to handle initial equipment (you may want to plan ahead what is OK and what isn’t OK for the game) – but I mean, you’re playing a TTRPG put out by a fast-food chain: Who cares if they get the ultimate fried chicken armour and wield the 1d10 damage whisk?

Spellcasting is also not really discussed – technically it’s just “you can use these skills and they function as spells”, but it feels weirdly phrased and almost like magic is ‘absent’ from the game – despite pretty much every “Order” being ability/magic-focused. A player asked me how he cast spells and I had to pause and say “I don’t know. You just… do them…?”. Welp. There’s also some terminology that got missed in editing – the actual stat is called ‘Grace’, and there are references in the Orders to not being able to use ‘graceful’ weapons, but then weapons are categorised as ‘finesse’ weapons on the actual tables – most likely they changed the name from finesse to grace and then forgot about it. But, hey – this is a free TTRPG, clearly made by like four people (there’s a bit of interjected genuine very author commentary throughout about their playtests, which I enjoy) and I forgive the company for making a few missteps here.

Whoever got this past the editors at Wendy’s, you are a star.

That said, the adventure module is objectively terrible. I was going to just run it with minimal prep (this is a ‘just for fun’ game, after all), but reading it I was immediately struck with wasted time, ‘let your players explore aimlessly until they see the fountain’, dead ends, and, worst of all, a lot of ‘they have to answer all four riddles correctly in a row or else the doors close for two hours and the party just kind of has to sit there until they reopen so they can try again even though the time punishment has no effect on the narrative’. That last one isn’t an exaggeration – it’s literally in the book:

I went ahead and went through every page and crossed out all unnecessary portions, and probably ended up with like a 2-3 session campaign that would have been significantly better than the multi-year-long adventure module in terms of actually having people play through it. The campaign itself, even, has a magical item at the end of the first area that instantly max-levels every character. So there’s no reason to keep playing for…. months after that. Just take them right to the boss for a final hoorah! Anyway. Maybe I’ll post my cut-up remix later if anybody actually wants to read it (I doubt it, but you never know). I would appreciate being able to showcase my edits in some fashion though, because, hilariously, the actual game barely happened: everyone ate their meals and then we played for 45 minutes, with one single combat, before the players had to leave. All my effort into learning and reading and running a Wendy’s TTRPG… wasted. The party literally ran into a mysterious guy, he told them to defeat the evils in the French Fry Forest, went over and fought two kobold-analogous enemies, and then went back, job done, saved the kingdom, hooray!

Overall I give it a solid 6/10 game system. Maybe 7/10 for the humour.